At first sight, the facts are indisputable. And yet, once one goes into the details, the official explanations become embarrassingly contradictory.
THE PENTAGON
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) issued a press release on September 14. Filling in the gaps of General Myers 's memory, NORAD claimed it only received warning of the hijacking at 9:24 am and assured that it had immediately ordered two F -16 fighters from the Langley Air Force base in Virginia to intercept the Boeing. But the Air Force, not knowing its exact location, believed the plane was on its way to commit a third strike against New York and sent its fighters northwards. How can we believe that the U.S. military's radar system was incapable of locating a Boeing within a zone of only a few dozen miles in radius? Or that a big jetliner could elude two fighters launched in its pursuit?
Even supposing that the Boeing managed to overcome this first obstacle, it should have been shot down while approaching the Pentagon. The security arrangements protecting the Department of Defense are of course a military secret, as are those concerning the White House nearby. It is known that the systems were revised after a series of incidents that occurred in 1994, notably the landing of a small airplane, a Cessna l 50L, on the White House lawn. We also know that these anti-aircraft defenses include five batteries of missiles installed on top of the Pentagon and fighters stationed at the Presidential airbase of Saint Andrews. Two fighter squadrons are permanently based there: the Air Force's I 13th Fighter Wing and the Navy's 321st Fighter Attack Wing. Equipped respectively with F-16's and F/A-18's, they should never have let the Boeing approach the Pentagon.
A point to remember when speaking about the destruction caused by the plane is how the Pentagon is structured. It’s in the shape of a pentagon composed of concentric rings. Meyssan writes: Despite its weight (a hundred tons) and its speed (between 250 and 440 mph), the plane only destroyed the first ring of the building. If one superimposes the plane's outline onto the satellite photo below, [photo provided for in original] it can be seen that only the nose of the Boeing entered the building. The fuselage and the wings remained outside. The plane was stopped dead, without its wings having struck the facade. There is no visible trace of any impact except that from the Boeing's nose. We should thus be able to see the wings and the fuselage outside, on the lawn in fact. While the plane's nose is made of carbon and the wings, containing the fuel, can burn, the Boeing's fuselage is aluminium and the jet engines are built out of steel. At the end of the fire, it would necessarily have left a burnt-out wreck. If you refer to the Associated Press photo (on the front cover of this book), you will clearly observe that there is no plane. So, although officials, members of Congress and military personnel all claimed to have seen the aircraft fall, no one saw the smallest piece of the plane, not even from the landing gear: there were only unidentifiable metal fragments. As for the video surveillance cameras in the Pentagon parking lot, they did not see the Boeing either, at any point of time or at any angle.
Numerous people, who were in their cars on the highway running alongside the Pentagon, heard the sound of a plane passing overhead. This sound was shrill, like that of a fighter aircraft, not a commercial air liner. Some said they saw this aircraft. They then described it as a small plane that might have contained eight to twelve persons, not a Boeing 757. Danielle O'Brien, an air traffic controller at Dulles airport, described to ABC News the behavior of this aircraft, as seen on radar. It was flying at a speed of around 500 mph and was heading at first for the protected airspace surrounding the White House and the Capitol, then veered sharply towards the Pentagon. For O'Brien and her colleagues, there was no possible doubt: given its speed and maneuverability, it could not be a commercial airliner, but only a military aircraft.
THE WORLD TRADE TOWERS
The professional pilots we talked to confirmed that few amongst themselves could envisage performing such an operation and completely ruled it out in the case of amateur pilots. There is, however, one infallible method of achieving this result: the use of radio beacons. A signal, transmitted from the target, guides the plane in automatically. Now, the existence of a beacon in the World Trade Center has been attested to by radio hams who recorded its signal. It was detected because it interfered with the transmission of television antennas placed on top of the towers. It is probable that the signal was activated at the last moment so that no one could discover it and destroy it. It is possible that the hijackers used two beacons, because one alone would scarcely have done the job, despite the alignment of the two targets. In any event, they required accomplices on the ground. And if they had them, it was not necessary to have numerous hijackers on board. A small team would have sufficed to put the plane on automatic pilot. It was not necessary in fact to have any hijackers on board at all, as there was no taking of hostages: by hacking into the planes' computers before takeoff, it would have been possible to take over the aircraft in flight, thanks to the Global Hawk technology perfected by the Department of Defense. The Boeing would have been under remote control, like a drone - a plane without a pilot.
BUIDLING 7
A journalist's scoop that appeared in the New York Times may shed some light here. The World Trade Center, which was believed to be a civilian target, also concealed a secret military one. Perhaps thousands of people perished because they served as its human shield. Tower 7 - but perhaps other buildings and basements as well - masked a CIA base. During the 1950's it served as a base for spying on foreign delegations to the United Nations, but under Bill Clinton it had illegally extended its activities to electronic espionage of Manhattan.
PRE-ATTACK WARNINGS
Despite appearances, the attacks did not aim to produce the maximum possible deaths. On the contrary, prior intervention was required to ensure that numerous persons, at least those working on the top floors, were absent from their offices at the critical hour. Thus, the Israeli daily, Ha'aretz revealed that Odigo, a leading firm in electronic communications, received anonymous messages warning of the New York attacks, two hours before they occurred. These facts were confirmed by Micha Macover, the firm's director. Warnings of various types could have addressed to the occupants of north tower, even if all of them were not taken seriously in the same way. One re-encounters here a pattern similar to that of the attack perpetrated in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995. That day, a large portion of the civil servants working in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building were given a half-day off work so that the car bomb explosion only killed 168 persons. This was an attack we now know was carried out by military personnel belonging to an extreme right-wing organization which itself had been infiltrated by the FBJ. In Oklahoma City, the FBI had thus let an attack go ahead about which it had been informed in advance, but had limited its scope.
THE HIJACKERS
The day after the attacks, the FBI had already managed to establish the modus operandi of the terrorists. Agents of the bin Laden networks had entered American territory legally. Once inside the country, they had taken accelerated pilot training courses. Regrouped into four teams of five kamikazes each, they hijacked the airliners with the mission of crashing them into major objectives. On 14 September, the FBI published a list naming nineteen presumed plane hijackers. In criminal proceedings involving facts as complicated as these, the police should have constructed a number of hypotheses and followed each trail to the end, without neglecting any of them. The hypothesis of domestic terrorism was rejected in principle, without ever being studied. Instead, the finger was already being pointed at Osama bin Laden by "sources close to the investigation", a few hours after the attacks.
The FBI presented Mohammed Atta as the leader of the operation. In ten years, this 33 year old was said to have stayed in Salou (Spain), then Zurich (Switzerland) where, according to investigators, he paid by credit card for Swiss knives destined to be used in the plane hijackings - and finally Hamburg (Germany). Along with two other terrorists, he took courses there in electronics, without causing comment about himself or letting his extremist convictions become known. Upon arriving in the United States, he joined his accomplices in Florida, took pilot courses in the town of Venice and even paid for several hours on a flight simulator in Miami. Anxious to disguise his fundamentalism, Mohammed Atta went as far as to frequent the Olympic Garden in Las Vegas, the biggest topless cabaret in the world. This peerless agent was believed to reached Boston on 11 September by a domestic flight. Given the short time between the two flights, he appears to have lost his baggage in transit. In searching them, the FBI found training videos on piloting Boeing aircraft, a book of Islamic prayers and an old letter in which he announces his intention to die as a martyr. Atta was identified as the head of the commando team by a steward who made a call with his cellular telephone during the hijacking and indicated the leader's seat number: 8D. Should we take such information seriously? One would have to accept that Mohammed Atta spent ten years carefully hiding his real intentions and that he must have adhered to strict procedures in communicating with his accomplices to escape the attention of the intelligence services. Nevertheless, at the last moment he left behind a bagful of clues. Even more ridiculous, the FBI claims to have dis covered Mohammed Atta's passport intact in the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center!
The international press commented at length on the profiles of the nineteen terrorists designated by the FBI. The only problem with these identikit portraits is that they are based on a list which itself is subject to dispute. The Saudi embassy in Washington has confirmed that Abdulaziz Al-Omari, Mohand Al-Shehri, Salem Al Hazmi and Saeed Al-Ghamdi are all alive and well, and living in their own country. Waleed M. Al-Shehri, who lives at present in Casablanca and works as a pilot for Royal Air Maroc, gave an interview to the Arab-language daily, Al-Qods al-Arabi, based in London. Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the Saudi Foreign Minister, declared to the press that, "It has been proven that five of the persons named in the FBI's list had no connection with what hap pened." And Prince Nayef, the Saudi Minister of the Interior, declared to an official American delegation, "Until now, we have no evidence that assures us that they are related to September 11. We have not received any thing in this regard from the United States."
INSIDER TRADING
"Who profits from the crime?" Concerning that precise subject, in the period following the attacks it was found that maneuvers characteristic of "insider trading" had taken place in the six days preceding September 11. The stock of United Airlines (owner of the planes that crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center and near Pittsburgh) fell artificially by 42%. In the case of American Airlines (owner of the plan that crashed into the north tower of the WTC and of the one that was said to have crashed into the Pentagon), its stock fell by 39%. No other airline companies in the world were the object of comparable maneuvers, with the exception of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. From this, one can deduce that a plane belong to the Dutch company may have been chosen as the target for a fifth hijacking.
Investigations were coordinated by the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO). On 15 October, it held a video-conference where the national authorities presented their interim reports. It appeared that the illicit gains added up to several hundred million dollars, constituting the "biggest case of insider trading ever committed". Osama bin Laden, whose bank accounts have been blocked since 1998, does not dispose of the money needed for this speculative operation.
It has been possible to establish that the greater part of the transactions were "handled" by the Deutsche Bank and its American investment subsidiary, Alex. Brown. This company was directed until 1998 by a colorful figure, A.B. Krongard. A former captain in the Marines and an enthusiast of firearms and martial arts, this banker became an advisor to the director of the CIA, and since March 26, 2001, the official number three in the hierarchy of the American intelligence agency. Given the importance of the investigation and the influence of A.B. Krongard, one would have thought that Alex. Brown would have cooperated readily with the authorities to facilitate the identification of inside traders. But this was not the case. Strangely indeed, the FBI gave up on exploring this line of inquiry and IOSCO closed its investigation without resolving the affair. It would nevertheless be easy to trace the capital movements because all of the bank-to-bank transactions are archived with two clearing organizations. One could accept that, given the importance of what was at stake, that it would be possible to break banking secrecy and determine just who the happy beneficiaries of the 11 September attacks actually were. But nothing came of all this.
OSAMA BIN LADEN
Osama bin Laden is one of fifty-four children of Sheikh Mohammed bin Laden, founder in 1931 of the Saudi Binladen Group (SBG). This holding, the most important in Saudi Arabia, derives about half of its revenues from construction and public works, and the other half from engineering, real estate, distribution, telecommunications and publishing. It formed a Swiss investment firm, the Saudi Investment Company (SICO), which created several companies in partnership with subsidiaries of the Saudi National Commercial Bank. The SBG has important holdings in General Electric, Nortel Networks and Cadbury Schweppes. It is represented in the United States by Adnan Kashoggi (the ex-brother-in-law of Mohammed Al-Fayed), while its financial assets are managed by the Carlyle Group. Up until 1996, the setting-up of the SBG's subsidiaries were prepared in Lausanne by its councilor, the Nazi banker Francois Genoud, executor of Dr. Goebbels's will and a donor of funds to the terrorist Carlos. The SBG is indissolubly linked to the Wahhabite regime in Saudi Arabia, to the point of having been for a long time the one and only contractor for the construction and management of the kingdom's holy places, Medina and Mecca. Similarly, it won the majority of building contracts for U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia and for the reconstruction of Kuwait after the Gulf War.
Born in 1957, Osama, reputed to be a prudent businessman, was approached in December 1979 by his tutor, Prince Turki Al-Faisal Al-Saud (director of the Saudi secret services from 1977 to August 2001), to financially manage the CIA's secret operations in Afghanistan. Over a period of ten years, the CIA invested two billion dollars in Afghanistan to hold the Soviets in check, making these the most expensive operations in the agency's history. The Saudi and United States services recruited Islamic militants, trained them, armed them, and manipulated them in jihad (holy war) to combat and defeat the Soviets for them. Osama bin Laden managed the needs of this irregular milieu on a computer file called "Al-Qaeda" (literally, the "base", as in data base). After the defeat of the USSR, the USA completely lost interest in the fate of Afghanistan, which they left in the hands of warlords and the mujahiddin they had recruited from throughout the Muslim world to fight the Red Anny. Osama bin Laden supposedly then ceased to work for the CIA and recovered these fighters for his own purposes.
But did bin Laden really break with the CIA and become an enemy of America? From 1987 to 1998, the training of Al-Qaeda's fighters was supervised by Ali Mohammed, an Egyptian officer incorporated into the United States military. At the same time, Mohammed also taught at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, where he trained members of the most secret network of US influence, the "stay-behind', as well as officers of the US Special Forces. In light of the security regulations of the American secret services, which call for constant surveillance of its agents, can one believe for a single instant that Ali Mohammed could alternate between a military base in the USA and Al-Qaeda camps in Sudan and Afghanistan without being immediately unmasked? The widely publicized arrest of Ali Mohammed at the end of 1998 does not suffice to hide the fact that this "stay-behind' agent trained Al-Qaeda's fighters and t..hat therefore Osama bin Laden continued to work for the CIA at least until 1998 ! How can one not see that Osama bin Laden legend is a cover story fabricated out of whole cloth by the CIA?
The links between the CIA and bin Laden were not severed in 1998. Seriously ill, he went for treatment from 4 to 14 July 2001 at the American Hospital in Dubai (United Arab Emirates). "During his hospitalization [he] received visits from several members of his family and other important persons from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. During this same stay, the local representative of the CIA, who is a well-known figure in Dubai, was seen taking the main elevator to visit “Osama’s room" the French newspaper Le Figaro revealed.
Since the Cold War era, Washington has deliberately supported Osama bin Laden, while placing him on the FBI's most wanted list. While mujahiddin are implicated in armed insurrections on behalf of the United States in the Balkans and the former USSR, the FBI has the mission to bring him to the US and to carry out a war on terrorism. By all appearances, it's not only a matter of contradictory actions, but a policy of lying to citizens, because since the USSR-Afghanistan war the CIA has supported international terrorism through its secret operations" writes Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa.