Document:911 JFK and War

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An essay by Peter Dale Scott - 2008

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat, and then a Professor of English Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His most recent book is The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, from University of California Press (Sept. 4, 2007). His other books include the anthology, 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, co-edited with David Ray Griffin (2006), and Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

Originally posted on his web site

The essay is available for download in pdf format from the WikiSpooks site File:911 JFK and War.pdf

9/11, JFK, and War:

Recurring Patterns in America’s Deep Events

In American history there are two types of events. There are ordinary events which the information systems of the country can understand and transmit. There are also deep events, or meta-events, which the mainstream information systems of the country cannot digest. I mean by a “deep event” one in which it is clear from the outset that there are aspects which will not be dealt with in the mainstream media, and will be studied only by those so-called “conspiracy theorists” who specialize in deep history. The events I shall discuss today exhibit continuities with each other and with other deep events, notably the Iran-Contra affair of the mid 1980s and the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. But the two I shall discuss today – the JFK assassination and 9/11 – are outstanding in this respect: that while they were attributed to insignificant and very marginal people, they had momentous impact, far more than most daily events by more important people, in redirecting American history.

If history is what is recorded, then deep history is the sum of events which tend to be officially obscured or even suppressed in traditional books and media. Important recent deep events include the political assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and now 9/11. All these deep events have involved what I call the deep state, that part of the state which is not publicly accountable, and pursues its goals by means which will not be approved by a public examination. The CIA (with its on-going relationships to drug-traffickers) is an obvious aspect of the deep state, but not the only one, perhaps not even the dirtiest.

When I talk of a deep state, this term (as opposed to others, like deep politics), is not my own invention. It is a translation of the Turkish gizli devlet, or derin devlet, a term used to describe the networks revealed by the so-called Susurluk incident of 1996, when the victims traveling together in what became a deadly car crash were identified as "an MP, a police chief, a beauty queen and her lover, a top Turkish gangster and hitman called Abdullah Catli.” The giveaway was that “Catli, a heroin trafficker on Interpol's wanted list, was carrying a diplomatic passport signed by none other than the Turkish Interior Minister himself.” He was carrying narcotics with him at the time of the crash.

The study of these deep events has slowly become more respectable in the almost half-century since the JFK assassination. A major reason has been the emergence of the Internet and other forms of new media, where the same deep events tend to get far more extensive treatment. If the new media come in time to prevail over the priorities of the old, it is possible that we will see a paradigm shift with respect to what is appropriate for serious public discourse. What I have learned over the years is that it is helpful to look at all these deep events together. This is true for both external reasons (how the nation and its media handle deep history) and for internal reasons (the content of deep events themselves). What is particularly disturbing, in the case of the JFK assassination (henceforward referred to as “JFK”) and 9/11, is the number of similarities that might seem to indicate a recurring modus operandi or scenario.

While I myself am still open-minded as to how seriously we should interpret these similarities, we should also open our minds to the alternative: that it was not by chance that two major events were soon followed, first in 1965 and again in 2003, by America’s longest military involvements in the nation’s history.

JFK and 9/ll: Possibly Innocent Similarities

I will begin with three similarities which could possibly, especially in the case of the first, be marginal or irrelevant to how the events themselves unfolded.

1) Stock market speculation:

By this I am not referring to the dip and recovery that followed both events, which is common after any unsettling news. I am referring to the dealings in special stocks which suggested, in both cases, prior knowledge of what was to come. In early November 1963, David Harold (“Dry Hole”) Byrd and his investment partner, James Ling, bought $2 million worth of stock (132,600 shares) in Ling-Temco Vought (LTV), their own defense company. Then in February 1964 LTV received from the Navy the first major LBJ prime defense contract – for a fighter plane to be used in limited wars like Vietnam. I have calculated that this $2.5 million insiders’ purchase was worth $26 million by the end of 1967. Moreover the prescient purchase was about one hundred times the size of any other insider purchase in aerospace issues in the same period.

This does not prove that Byrd and Ling were directly involved in the Kennedy assassination, but it is likely that Byrd may have had inklings of what was going to happen. For Byrd owned the Texas School Book Depository building, where Oswald had been hired as an employee in October 1963. I have hypothesized that Oswald thought he was there on a surveillance assignment, to report on a fellow worker who was under investigation by the Dallas Police. Byrd may have been privy to this arrangement, and have suspected more.

This stock purchase is comparable to the notorious “put option purchases” just before 9/11 in 2001, in the stock of United Airlines and American Airlines. Here too the advance purchases suggest special knowledge, but here too the purchasers and the perpetrators need not have been the same, especially if we accept the indications that many widely scattered people and agencies had prior indications of the event about to occur.

There were scattered indications that a few people had advance knowledge of the Kennedy assassination, a fact hard to reconcile with the Warren Commission conclusion that Oswald, a disgruntled loner, acted on his own. The most significant case was that of a Southern racist and activist, Joseph Milteer, who correctly predicted to a Miami police informant, that Kennedy would be shot "from an office building with a high-powered rifle." But Milteer was not unique. There were also pre-9/11 indications and warnings, far too numerous to enumerate here, of knowledge about an impending attack using hijacked airplanes.

2) A number of senior officers were out of the country, including the Secretary of State

On November 22, 1963, six out of ten cabinet members were on their way to Japan, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and Labor Secretary W.W. Wirtz.

On September 11, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CJCS Henry Shelton were traveling outside the country, while Attorney General John Ashcroft was also traveling.Powell and Shelton were leading opponents of the Iraq War, and were eventually ousted, along with Ashcroft.

3) Commission recommendations to increase power of intelligence agencies, or deep state

It is worth pointing out that the Commission Reports prepared with respect to both JFK and 9/11 were tightly controlled and produced the same recommendation: that the surveillance powers of intelligence agencies should be increased. This was quite paradoxical in the case of the Warren Report, which concluded both that Oswald was a loner and that the CIA should have greater powers to conduct surveillance of organized groups. It was hardly less paradoxical in the case of the 9/11 Report, which concluded its survey of repeated intelligence failures and Pakistani intrigues with recommendations for increased intelligence budgets and maintenance of current aid to Pakistan. (In June 2007 Ahmed Rashid blamed the current Pakistani political crisis on the “bad deal” and “blind bargain” that Washington had made with Musharraf after 9/11.)

A truly independent investigation of each event could, and indeed should, have been highly embarrassing to the CIA. Even in 2007 the CIA is still in non-compliance with the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, and withholding documents with respect to an officer, George Joannides, who supervised the Cuban Revolutionary Student Directorate (DRE) which had recurring contacts with Lee Harvey Oswald. The CIA shared nothing with the Warren Commission about its contacts with the DRE (which may have involved Oswald). Nor did the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) learn anything of significance in 1978, when the CIA assigned Joannides to be its Principal Coordinating Officer working with the House Committee.

Similarly in 2001 the 9/11 Commission learned nothing about why, at the time of the 9/11 attacks, members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) were aloft in a National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP), or so-called “Doomsday Plane.” Neither in 1964 nor in 2003 was there any chance for such revelations. In 1964 the work of the Warren Commission was carefully constrained by former CIA Director Allen Dulles (who had been fired by President Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco). In 2003 the work of the 9/11 Commission, and later the writing of the 9/11 Report, were tightly controlled by Philip Zelikow, who in October 2001, prior to becoming the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, had been appointed by President George W. Bush to PFIAB. It is at least suggestive that both commission investigations were dominated and restricted by personalities with overt leadership roles in the U.S. intelligence community.

Similarities Suggestive of a Common Modus Operandi

Now we come to similarities, some of them very specific, suggesting that key stages of both events were pre-designed to a common scenario.

4) Instant Identification of the Culprits:

In the case of Oswald, within fifteen minutes of the assassination and long before Oswald was picked up in the Texas Theater, the Dallas police put out on the police radio network, and possibly other networks, a description of the killer – 5’10”, 165 pounds. This exactly matched the measurements attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald in Oswald’s FBI file, and also in CIA documents about him.

This identification did not match the actual height and weight of the Lee Harvey Oswald who was picked up in Dallas and charged, which was five foot nine and 140 pounds. The 5’10” measurement was also suspect because it was attributed to Howard Brennan, who saw allegedly someone in the sixth floor window, but only from the waist up. Brennan subsequently failed to pick out Oswald in a police line-up. One concludes that intelligence files rather than direct observation may have been responsible for the rapid decision to search for a killer with the exact measurement of 5’ 10”, 165 pounds. It appears that someone had already determined that Oswald would be the designated culprit, before there was any evidence to connect him to the crime.

Meanwhile, according to counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, on 9/11 the FBI already had a list of alleged hijackers by 9:59 am on September 11, when the south tower collapsed. 9:59 AM was at least four minutes before Flight United 93 had hit the ground.

Even before this, shortly after 9:03 AM, Clarke himself had denoted the organization that would ultimately be blamed, telling Richard Cheney in the White House that in his opinion “It’s an al Qaeda attack and they like simultaneous attacks. This may not be over.” This naming of a responsible foreign party corresponds to the press conference on November 22, 1963, arranged by the Cuban exile group contacted earlier by Lee Harvey Oswald (the Directorio Revolucionario, or DRE). This press conference reportedly combined accurate secret information about Oswald with the wild claim that he “allegedly lived [in Moscow] in home Sov[iet] foreign minister for two months.” (We shall see that, just as the identification of al Qaeda soon led to the invasion of Afghanistan, so that alleged Oswald-Soviet relationship led to talk of response against the Soviet Union. The risk of a nuclear war became Lyndon Johnson’s chief talking point in recruiting Earl Warren and others to serve on the Warren Commission.)

With respect to the FBI’s list of hijackers on 9/11, there were, even within the bureaucracy, suspicions that the FBI was drawing on pre-9/11 files for its identifications.

"I don't buy the idea that we didn't know what was coming," a former FBI official with extensive counter-terrorism experience has since said. "Within 24 hours [of the attack] the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and somebody was sitting on it."

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer of the Pentagon Able Danger had a similar reaction:

"We were amazed at how quickly the FBI produced the name and pictures of all 19 hijackers. But then again, we were surprised at how quickly they’d made the arrests after the first World Trade Center bombing. Only later did we find out that the FBI had been watching some of these people for months prior to both incidents.”

In this context of suspicion a former federal prosecutor and another former FBI agent, Warren Flagg, came forward in 2006 with an alternative explanation – that “the names of the hijackers, their assignments and their al-Qaida connections” were in the car left behind at Logan Airport in Boston by Mohamed Atta and his associates. It is of course possible that an instantaneous investigation of Atta’s effects would explain how the FBI could tell Richard Clarke that they had a list of suspected hijackers by 9:59 AM on September 11. But this would imply that the FBI had the names of all nineteen hijackers by then, including the four on Flight 93 which had not yet crashed. Flagg’s claim also drew attention to another striking similarity between JFK and 9/11. In both JFK and 9/11, we are asked to believe that the designated suspects – Oswald and the hijackers – facilitated their own detection by implausibly laying paper trails which led unambiguously to themselves.

5) Paper trails laid by the designated suspects to facilitate their identification:

Oswald is supposed in March 1963 to have purchased by mail order, using the name A. Hidell, the notorious Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that was said to have assassinated President Kennedy. This was needlessly self-incriminating, when in Dallas he could have bought a rifle anonymously by walking a few blocks to a gun shop. In August he asked to be interviewed by an FBI agent, to whom he showed a Fair Play for Cuba Committee card with the name A.J. Hidell, which he had already shown to a New Orleans police lieutenant. The information was transmitted to the local Office of Naval Intelligence and to the 112th Army Military Intelligence Group. On November 22, the name of Hidell in the 112th MIG file was instrumental, perhaps crucial, in clinching the superficial case against Oswald as an assassin.

This irrational self-incrimination via paper trail was allegedly repeated in 2001 by Mohamed Atta, the principal alleged hijacker. In 2006, “a former FBI agent [Warren Flagg] and a former federal prosecutor … told Newsday that one bag found in Boston contained far more than what the commission report cited, including the names of the hijackers, their assignments and their al-Qaida connections.” The former prosecutor added, "These guys left behind a paper trail…. They had bank accounts. They rented cars. They had to show what they were doing in the United States.” Atta’s trove of information allegedly “provided the Rosetta stone enabling FBI agents to swiftly unravel the mystery of who carried out the suicide attacks and what motivated them.”

The belated appearance in 2006 of the Flagg story has caused some to question it. However, official allegations point precisely to other instances of paper trails left by the hijackers. According to the 9/11 Commission Report (532n188), the FBI found an Express Mail receipt in Nawaf al-Hazmi’s car at Dulles Airport, which led to a package addressed to Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi of al-Qaeda. As if this might not be enough, Atta also is said to have left in his motel a FedEx waybill for another package; and the federal indictment of Moussaoui strongly implied that this package was also collected by al-Hawsawi. The details are given in Newsweek, November 19, 2001:

The paper trail that first led investigators into Ahmed's shadowy financial world began at the bottom of a motel trash can. On the night of Sept. 10, Atta hunkered down in room 233 at the Comfort Inn in Portland, Maine. The next morning he would take a flight to Boston's Logan airport. At the motel, Atta tore up a FedEx Air Waybill and threw it away. Days later, federal agents searching the motel found the receipt, from a package mailed in Florida, where Atta and several other hijackers had lived until days before the bombing. It was addressed to `Almohtaram,’ Arabic for `The Respected One’ -- the honorific the terrorists gave to Ahmed [al-Hawsawi]. Investigators believe they sealed the connection when they got hold of the video of Ahmed picking up the package.

Thus the paper trails laid by both Oswald and the hijackers were crucial to the first striking similarity I mentioned: the speedy identification of the alleged (or designated) culprits.

In addition to these documented pre-event paper trails, one’s attention is drawn to additional dubious evidence discovered ex post facto. In the JFK case, one can cite the forged bus manifest supplied by the Mexican secret police with Oswald’s name on it, to show how he returned to the United States (the manifest had been falsified, apparently by a member of the Mexican President’s staff). In the case of 9/11, the passport of one of the hijackers, Satam al Suqami, was reportedly discovered that day a few blocks from the World Trade Center. (There is no reference to this discovery of a passport, later said to be Mohamed Atta’s, in the 9/11 Commission Report.)

6) There were and remain problems about the identity of the designated culprits:

For years researchers have drawn attention to the existence of different weights and heights in government files on Lee Harvey Oswald (see above), and also to the fact that the FBI maintained separate files on “Lee Harvey Oswald” and “Harvey Lee Oswald.” Then in the 1990s, John Armstrong presented a 1022-page case that two different young men (“Harvey” and “Lee”) shared the identity of Lee Harvey Oswald, for the benefit of U.S. intelligence. Although not everyone will be persuaded by the whole of Armstrong’s argument, it is safe to say that both evidence and testimony have been altered to conceal the anomalies which Armstrong dealt with. Needless to say, there was no discussion of these anomalies in the Warren Report.

Within two weeks of 9/11, the identities of at least six of the hijackers identified by the FBI were unclear; men in Arab countries with the same names and histories (and in at least one case the same photograph) were protesting that they were alive and innocent. In response to these protests, FBI director Robert Mueller acknowledged on September 20, 2001, that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers was in doubt. But there is no trace of this doubt, or any discussion whatsoever of the problem, in the detailed treatment of the alleged hijackers in the 9/11 Commission Report.

7) Prior investigations of the eventual suspects were suspended or impeded:

Oswald, who had been on the FBI’s watch list since his travel to the Soviet Union in 1959, was inexplicably taken off the watch list on October 9, 1963, just after his arrest in New Orleans and his alleged trip to Mexico City would have made him a candidate for increased surveillance. October 9, the day before the CIA reported to the FBI on Oswald’s Soviet contact in Mexico City, was the day CIA HQ itself received the news. This is comparable to the obstruction by the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) at FBI Headquarters of the Minneapolis FBI’s efforts to interview the so-called twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, especially after Moussaoui’s arrest on August 15, 2001. Moussaoui knew most of the other nineteen alleged hijackers who were named in the hijackings, and an interview of him, if not impeded, could have led to the detention of the nineteen. A Minnesota Special Agent, Harry Samit, later testified that he wrote FBI headquarters about seventy memos on Moussaoui between August 16 and September 11, all to no avail.

Similarly the CIA failed to tell the FBI that two of the terrorists, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were in the United States. The blocking of the Moussaoui investigation, and the withholding of the CIA’s information, have both been blamed on Janet Reno’s so-called Wall memorandum of 1995. But the Wall memo was renewed on August 6, 2001, by Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson. Another example of such obstruction was the curtailment of the Army intelligence investigation of al-Qaeda through its Able Danger program. According to Paul Thompson’s Terror Timeline, military lawyers on three occasions forced members of Able Danger to cancel scheduled meetings with the FBI at the last minute. Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer later complained that “critical counterterrorism information [was] never passed from SOCOM [Special Operations Command] to the FBI before 9/11; this information included the original data regarding Atta and the terrorist cells in New York and the DC area.” Rep. Curt Weldon (R), who in 2005 helped bring to light the existence of the program, commented, “Obviously, if we had taken out that cell, 9/11 would not have occurred.” hits the FBI they cancel the flash on Oswald. This is an example of what I'm talking about, dimming the switches.”

Students of the John F. Kennedy assassination have speculated that Oswald’s name, with or without his knowledge and/or participation, was being used by the CIA in Mexico as part of a complex operation against Fidel Castro. If true, the removal of his name from the FBI watch list would not be absurd, but understandable, to prevent an accidental law enforcement interruption of a CIA operation. In like manner the obstructions of the FBI’s RFU would be understandable if Atta and Moussaoui or their names were being used as part of a contemporary intelligence operation. In this case what looks outwardly like senseless and incompetent behavior would actually be the result of FBI-CIA coordination.

A superficial distinction between the relevant events of 1963 and 2001 actually reinforces this possibility. Marvin Gheesling, the FBI Supervisor responsible for removing the stop on Oswald’s name, was later censured by Hoover for his action. Dave Frasca, the RFU chief who stopped the Minneapolis office from pursuing a criminal warrant against Moussaoui, was later promoted. The difference is attributable to Hoover’s personal hostility to the CIA and his irritation with members of William C. Sullivan’s Intelligence Division of FBI (which included Gheesling) who in his eyes were too cooperative with it. This situation changed with Hoover’s death.

8) The Role of Double Agents: Lee Harvey Oswald and Ali Mohamed

The last similarity strengthens a hypothesis that would begin to make sense of the preceding extraordinary similarities between the two cases. It is that surveillance was suspended because the designated culprits – Oswald and the hijackers – had to be protected from any law enforcement action that would impede their role in the events that would be attributed to them. There are two versions of this hypothesis. The first, less conspiratorial, is that those designated to be culprits had no relation to those in power on the two disastrous days.

A more likely and sinister version is that they were double agents being directed by those in power, even if they had no idea of the fate that had been determined for them. In this case the U.S. deep state would have a motive for limiting the investigation, to prevent disclosure of the operation with which the double agents were involved. Fifteen years ago I made the complicated case that Lee Harvey Oswald was just such a double agent. I hope to demonstrate below that the al-Qaeda trainer for the hijackings, Ali Mohamed, was also an important U.S. double agent, and that this role had already resulted in an earlier al- Qaeda conspiracy – the murder in 1990 of the Jewish racist Meir Kahane – being dismissed, familiarly, consciously, and wrongly, as the work of a “lone deranged gunman.”

In Deep Politics (written in 1992) I explored at some length the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald was a possible “double agent…trying to infiltrate the Dallas Cuban refugee group.” I went on to make observations about Oswald as a double agent, observations that I now consider applicable to 9/11:

The preceding chapter considered the possibility that Oswald was associated with anti-Kennedy Cubans in order to investigate them on behalf of a federal agency. But we saw it alleged that Oswald was a double agent collaborating with some of these groups, either (as I suspect) because he or his handlers shared their goals [that is, anti-Kennedy goals], or possibly because he or his handlers had been “turned” by those they were supposed to investigate. Such a possibility was particularly likely with targets, like Alpha 66, about which the government itself was conflicted, of two minds.

It is necessary to recall that Alpha 66 in early 1963 conducted a series of raids, not just against Cuba, but against Soviet ships in Cuba. It was obviously trying to shipwreck the US-Soviet understanding on Cuba, thus to torpedo the whole Kennedy policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Unambiguously the raids met with the total disapproval of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department (which cracked down on them and made a public announcement that they had to cease). At the same time there continued to be support for Alpha 66 from the CIA.

Double agents frequently become the stars both of the groups they penetrate and the government agencies to whom they report. Recently I have written about Ali Mohamed, who was Washington’s star double agent inside al-Qaeda, and also a chief al-Qaeda trainer for aircraft hijackings. (Mohamed “knew at least three terrorist pilots personally,” and also “knew the internal procedures of the security company that maintained two checkpoints used by hijackers at Boston’s Logan airport.”) Triple Cross, by Peter Lance, confirms that Ali Mohamed, one of al-Qaeda’s top trainers in terrorism and how to hijack airplanes, was an informant for the FBI, a one-time asset of the CIA, and for four years a member of the US Army. This special status explains why one of his protégés, El Sayyid Nosair, was able to commit the first al-Qaeda crime in America, back in 1990, be caught along with his co-conspirators, and yet be dismissed by the police and FBI as (and these are actual quotes) a “lone deranged gunman” who “acted alone.”

In fact, the FBI was aware back in 1990 that Mohamed had engaged in terrorist training on Long Island; yet it acted to protect Mohamed from arrest, even after one of his trainees had moved beyond training to an actual assassination. Three years later, in 1993, Mohamed was actually detained in Canada by the RCMP. But he gave the RCMP the telephone number of his FBI handler in San Francisco, and after a brief call the RCMP released him. This enabled Mohamed to fly later in the year to Nairobi, and begin to organize the eventual al-Qaeda attacks on the US embassies in Africa.

Mohamed’s trainees were all members of the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which served as the main American recruiting center for the Makhtab-al-Khidimat, the “Services Center” network that after the Afghan war became known as al-Qaeda. The Al-Kifah Center was headed in 1990 by the blind Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who like Ali Mohamed had been admitted to the United States, despite being on a State Department Watch List. As he had done earlier in Egypt, the sheikh “issued a fatwa in America that permitted his followers to rob banks and kill Jews.” It would be wrong to think that Ali Mohamed was training Nosair and his fellow Islamists to fight Russians in Afghanistan. Nosair’s defense attorney argued this vigorously in a second trial of Nosair, the so-called New York landmarks case of 1995. However the Soviets had totally withdrawn from Afghanistan by February 1989, and Mohamed was training Nosair in July 1989, at a time when the U.S. government, to paraphrase what was just said about 1963, was of two minds about what to do in Afghanistan.

The CIA was backing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a major heroin trafficker with his own heroin labs, as part of the ISI’s puppet alternative to the secular, anti-Islamist government in Kabul, which the Russians left behind. Meanwhile a State Department official, Edmund McWilliams, with middle-level backing in Washington, objected that “Pakistani intelligence and Hekmatyar were dangerous allies,” and that the United States was making an important mistake by endorsing ISI’s puppet Afghan government. But Ali Mohamed’s training, both in Afghanistan and later around New York, was precisely designed to strengthen the Arab Afghans in Brooklyn who were allied with Hekmatyar.

Ali Mohamed’s trainees became involved in terrorist activities in other parts of the world. One of them, Anas al-Liby, became a leader in a plot against Libyan president Mu’ammar Ghadafi. Anas al-Liby was later given political asylum in Great Britain, despite suspicions that he was a high-level al-Qaeda operative. As the French authors Brisard and Dasquié point out, Ghadafi’s Libya in 1998 was the first government to ask Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden. They argue that Osama and al-Qaeda elements were collaborating with the British MI-5 in an anti- Ghadafi assassination plot.

Another of Ali Mohamed’s trainees, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, accepted money from the Saudi Embassy in Washington to recruit Muslim warriors for Bosnia. He was also allowed to go to Fort Belvoir, where an Army major gave him a list of Muslims in the US Army whom he could recruit. Fort Belvoir was the site of the Army’s Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA), whose Information Dominance Center was “full of army intelligence `geeks’” targeting Islamic jihadists.

Hampton-El’s recruiting for Bosnia was part of a larger operation. Numbers of Arab Afghans were trained for Bosnia, and later for the Kosovo Liberation Army, by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top associate of Osama bin Laden in al-Qaeda, and also a close ally of his fellow Egyptian, Ali Mohamed. (Ali Mohamed had sworn allegiance to al-Zawahiri in 1984 while still in Egypt, and he twice arranged for al-Zawahiri to come to stay with him in California for fund-raising purposes.) Meanwhile US intelligence veterans like Richard Secord helped bring Arab Afghans recruited by Hekmatyar to Azerbaijan, in order to consolidate a pro-western government there. And in 1998 the US began bombing Kosovo in support of the Kosovo Liberation Army, some of whose cadres were both trained and supported in the field by al-Qaeda’s “Arab Afghans.”

So Ali Mohammad’s activities intersected with US covert operations, and this fact appears to have earned him protection. Jack Blum, former special investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, commented that One of the big problems here is that many suspects in the [1993] World Trade Center bombing were associated with the Mujahedeen. And there are components of our government that are absolutely disinterested in following that path because it leads back to people we supported in the Afghan war.

What agency would have been interested in protecting Mohamed? The CIA claimed to have ceased using him as an operative back in 1984. Yet in 1988 Ali Mohamed flew from Fort Bragg to Afghanistan and fought there, while he was on the US Army payroll. His commanding officer didn’t like it, but Mohammad was apparently being directed by another agency. Ten years later, in 1998, a confidential CIA internal survey concluded that it was “partly culpable” for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, carried out by some of Ali Mohamed’s trainees. After a plea bargain, Ali Mohamed eventually pleaded guilty in 2000 to having organized the bombings of US embassies in Africa, but as of 2006 he had still not yet been sentenced.

9) The Cover-Up Modus Operandi: The Culprit “Acted Alone”

Unambiguously Mohamed’s trainees became involved, almost immediately, in terrorism on US soil. In November 1990, three of Mohamed’s trainees conspired together to kill Meir Kahane, the racist founder of the Jewish Defense League. The actual killer, El Sayyid Nosair, was caught by accident almost immediately; and by luck the police soon found his two co-conspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, waiting at Nosair’s apartment. They found much more:

There were formulas for bomb making, 1,440 rounds of ammunition, and manuals [supplied by Ali Mohamed] from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg marked “Top Secret for Training,” along with classified documents belonging to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The police found maps and drawings of New York City landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square – and the World Trade Center. The forty-seven boxes of evidence they collected also included the collected sermons of blind Sheikh Omar, in which he exhorted his followers to “destroy the edifices of capitalism.”

All three had been trained by Ali Mohamed back in July 1989 at a rifle range, where the FBI had photographed them, before terminating this surveillance later in the same month. The U.S. Government was thus in an excellent position to arrest, indict, and convict all of the terrorists involved, including Mohamed. Yet only hours after the killing, Joseph Borelli, Chief of NYPD detectives, struck a familiar American note and pronounced Nosair a “lone deranged gunman.” Some time later, he actually told the press that “There was nothing [at Nosair’s house] that would stir your imagination…..Nothing has transpired that changes our opinion that he acted alone.”

Borelli was not a lone deranged official in this matter. His position was also that of the FBI, who said they too believed “that Mr. Nosair had acted alone in shooting Rabbi Kahane.” “The bottom line is that we can't connect anyone else to the Kahane shooting," an F.B.I. agent said.”

The initial reaction of the NYPD had been that Nosair was part of a conspiracy. This impression was strengthened when a detective discovered that Borelli’s car had been moved after Nosair was arrested. As a result, according to the District Attorney prosecutor on the case, William Greenbaum, “We sensed a much bigger conspiracy, and we were sure that more than one person was involved.” How then to explain the ultimate assurances that Nosair was a lone assassin? John Miller, who went on to be the assistant director of public affairs for the FBI, blamed the culture of the NYPD: “The prevailing theory in the NYPD was, `Don’t make waves.’…So in the Nosair case, when Chief Borelli turned a blind eye to the obvious, he was merely remaining true to the culture of the NYPD.” Miller’s unlikely explanation suppressed the relevant fact that the FBI, and eventually the District Attorney’s office which prosecuted the case, turned a blind eye to the obvious as well.

In the light of those 47 boxes of incriminating evidence, it is more likely that the US law enforcement system has a standard cover-up modus operandi or MO for dealing with a suspect who is marginally attached to intelligence operations, covert operations, even controversial operations which are opposed by other elements of the US government. It is to tell the public (as they did earlier in the case of Oswald) that the suspect “acted alone.”

In thus limiting the case, the police and FBI were in effect protecting Nosair’s two Arab co-conspirators in the murder of a U.S. citizen. Both of them were ultimately convicted in connection with the first WTC bombing, along with another Mohamed trainee, Nidal Ayyad. The 9/11 Report, summarizing the convictions of Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima, and the blind Sheikh for the WTC bombing and New York landmarks plots, called it “this superb investigative and prosecutorial effort.” It said nothing about the suppressed evidence found in Nosair’s house, including “maps and drawings of New York City landmarks,” which if pursued should have prevented both plots from developing. In short the 9/11 Commission continued the pre-existing cover-up. And proper surveillance of this circle might have led investigators to the developing 9/11 plot as well. “Lance pinpoints how, in 1991, the FBI, knowing of a New Jersey mail box store with direct links to al-Qaida, failed to keep it under watch. Just six years later, two of the 9/11 hijackers got their fake IDs at the same location.” In addition, Ali Mohamed “knew at least three terrorist pilots personally.”

Summary: The Repeated Modus Operandi for Cover-up

There is a repeated cover-up MO here which is observed in both the JFK assassination and the two WTC attacks. These deep events were not properly solved, because the designated principals in them could not be properly investigated. The preselected candidates were ones about whom the truth did not emerge, because of the candidates’ controversial involvement in previous covered-up operations. This ensured that an institutional cover-up, already in place, was extended to cover the new crime, even though it was a major one. Oswald was one such pre-selected candidate. Those conspiratorially involved with Ali Mohamed and with 9/11 would also seem to fit the same description. That is what struck me most when I went back to compare the killings of Kennedy and of Meir Kahane. Both Oswald and Nosair were quickly declared “lone” assassins, to protect someone or something else.

The similarity between the cover-up of Oswald in 1963 and Nosair in 1990 is striking. In both cases the truth about the predesignated culprit was unpursuable, because he was part of an operation too embarrassing to disclose. In the case of the Ali Mohamed trainees, this is a major scandal. These people could have been stopped back in 1990, before they attacked the World Trade Center. And they weren’t. I should make clear that with respect to 9/11, I have certain knowledge of only one fact: that there has been and continues to be a massive cover-up. I have not yet properly integrated the earlier cover-up in 1990 of Mosair’s associates, including Ali Mohamed, into my theory of what happened in 2001. I do however believe that the earlier cover-up is relevant to the later one, as exemplified by the strange treatment of the first WTC attack in the 9/11 Commission Report. I conclude from this that it is a matter of paramount importance to learn more about these meta-events and their cover-ups. Because when we can understand what has happened before, we will be more able to deal with such a meta-event when it happens again. As I have said so many times, to understand any of these events in real depth, you have to look at what is on-going in all of them. The traditional media seem determined, predictably, not to help in this matter. In November 2006, six weeks after Lance’s Triple Cross was released, Lexis Nexis recorded only one post-publication reference to it or to Ali Mohamed -- the Toronto Sun of 11/19/06. But there is no lack of interest on the Internet, where at the same time there were 43,600 hits on Triple Cross.) The gravity of the Ali Mohamed matter is compounded by the context of the drug traffic. To get to the level where we can cope and deal with these recurring problems in our country, we will have to understand the continuity, and deal with it every time it surfaces. Some of the similarities noted here are probably extrinsic to the events described. But others point to a strong common denominator between JFK and 9/11. We can mention in particular the following features of a common modus operandi:

1. The prior designation of a suspect or suspects. These had a past intelligence involvement, which obstructed proper investigation of them, and of the deep events attributed to them. In both cases the suspects either were or involved double agents, with life stories or legends on two different levels.
2. The laying of a paper trail. This was strong enough to ensure that investigation would lead promptly to the designated suspects.
3. The immediate attribution of the deep event to the designated suspects.
4. The announcement that the suspect or suspects acted alone, even when there was clear evidence to show this was not true.
5. Both deep events involved experienced criminals, drawn from the world of organized drug trafficking, as I show below.

10) Drug-Traffickers and Deep Events, from the JFK Assassination to 9/11

Pulling back now and looking at all four biggest “deep events” of the last four decades – the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-ins, Contragate, and now 9/11 – we see that their common denominator is drug-trafficking. Why is this? In the first three the deep state worked with assets or proxies outside civil society and beyond the rule of law. This raises the possibility that in 9/11 the same thing happened again, extending the instances of U.S.-Al-Qaeda collaboration which occurred in the 1990s. The pattern moreover is that exhibited by the gizli devlet or deep state in Turkey, where a Parliamentary Investigation into the Susurluk Report concluded that the deep state had used the drug-trafficking Grey Wolves and fomented conflicts in the 1970s between the Turkish right and left. The alliance between the deep state and drug traffickers has surfaced in other countries as well, including France, Italy, Mexico, Panama, Pakistan, Taiwan, and Japan.

Let me stress that, at the time, the drug connections to JFK and 9/11 were vigorously suppressed and denied. But they have since become clear. I will give a few examples. The Warren Report argued that Jack Ruby “was not involved with Chicago’s criminal element.” But in 1979 the House Assassinations Committee assembled a report of over 1000 pages on his organized crime connections in Chicago and elsewhere. It heard from a close Ruby associate, Lewis McWillie, that in 1959 he and Ruby had visited the Trescornia camp in Cuba, and the “primary reason” for the visit was to meet Giuseppe deGeorge. DeGeorge was (though McWillie did not say this) one of the two top heroin couriers between Europe and Cuba.

In Deep Politics, and especially my recently reissued book Deep Politics II, I discuss the importance of the drug traffic, as a unifying factor in the JFK case. It is a key, I have argued, to Jack Ruby’s special status with the Dallas Police Department. When we look at those who in Mexico manipulated false Oswald stories -- to suggest that Oswald had been talking about assassination there -- we again run into people with drug backgrounds. A key example is Gilberto Alvarado, a Nicaraguan, whose story about Oswald and assassination was so serious that we know FBI Director Hoover discussed it on November 29 with Lyndon Johnson. We now know that Alvarado, the source, reported "directly to General Gustavo Montiel, Chief of the intelligence Service of the Nicaraguan Army." Montiel was later denounced as a principal in a "massive car theft ring" run by Norwin Meneses, described in other CIA cables as "the kingpin of narcotics traffickers in Nicaragua." (Stolen cars and drugs, like arms and drugs, are a good fit in illicit trafficking: one commodity pays for the other, and both directions of a trip are utilized.)

There are similar indications that the Watergate burglars assembled by Howard Hunt, all but one Cubans, included at least two men with drug connections, and that they were being used under White House direction to restructure the drug traffic by eliminating, possibly even assassinating, old-time drug-traffickers who formed part of the so-called “French connection.” According to Edward J. Epstein, Hunt contacted a number of Cuban exiles and explained “that he had been authorized by the White House to recruit Cuban exiles into `hit teams’ which would be used ostensibly to assassinate narcotics dealers.” Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, after his arrest, said that in 1971 he too had joined Hunt in investigating the drug traffic that was entering the U.S. from Mexico, Paraguay, and Panama. Sturgis claimed “that he undertook several missions for Hunt involving tracking narcotics, and he assumed that this was the nucleus of a new supranational police force that would be expanded after Nixon’s reelection.”

Then in the 1980s we encounter the involvement in drug-trafficking of some of the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, and more importantly of those who were supplying them with arms. This was emphatically denied at the time, and the two AP reporters who first broke the story both lost their jobs. But after two full-length books on the topic (Cocaine Politics, by myself and Jonathan Marshall, and Dark Alliance, by Gary Webb), the CIA Inspector-General was commissioned to investigate the matter. As the House Intelligence Committee later reported, “Volume II of the CIA IG report explains in detail the knowledge the CIA had that some contras had been, were alleged to be or were in fact involved or somehow associated with drug trafficking or drug traffickers.” We need to stand back and consider the implications of this recurring phenomenon. In deep events the drug connection is at first vociferously denied; then it is belatedly admitted, but only after reporting journalists like Gary Webb have been driven from their profession. As a result, the role of drug-trafficking in deep events is like the elephant in the American political living room, rarely captured on film, and even more rarely discussed in polite discourse. If the parallels with previous deep events hold true, then 9/11 will prove to be a collaboration between elements in the deep state and outside drug traffickers – in this case elements of al-Qaeda. Such a thought is unthinkable if we know only what is in the mainstream media. It looks less unlikely when we look at past U.S. alliances with al-Qaeda-trained Islamists in Azerbaijan and Kosovo. Symptomatic of such collaboration is the strange and gratuitous denial by the 9/11 Commission Report of al-Qaeda’s drug connections:

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. Most sources disagree. The British Parliament was told on October 4, 2001, that “al-Qaeda’s activity includes substantial exploitation of the drug trade from Afghanistan.”

Only two weeks after the release of the 9/11 Report, on August 2, 2004, Time magazine ran a major story about Haji Juma Khan …the kingpin of a heroin-trafficking enterprise that is a principal source of funding for the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists. According to a Western anti-narcotics official, since slipping out of Afghanistan after U.S. forces released him, Khan has helped al-Qaeda establish a smuggling network that is peddling Afghan heroin to buyers across the Middle East, Asia and Europe, and in turn is using the drug revenues to purchase weapons and explosives.

This was after US Central Command reported that in December 2003 a dhow (an Arab sailing vessel) was intercepted near the Strait of Hormuz, carrying almost two tons of hashish valued at up to $10 million. There were "clear ties" between the shipment and al-Qaeda, the Centcom statement said.” A few days later, on New Year's Eve, a U.S. Navy vessel in the Arabian Sea “stopped a small fishing boat that was carrying no fish. After a search, [said] a Western antinarcotics official, `they found several al-Qaeda guys sitting on a bale of drugs.’”

11.) JFK and 9/11 as Gateways to Already-Intended Wars

As I prepared this list of similarities for a June 2007 lecture in Vancouver, I had to recognize in myself a profound resistance to acknowledging this pattern. I didn’t want to believe that there might be a hidden force intervening to affect our history so profoundly at least twice over a forty-year period.

So after the lecture I laid this paper to one side. I shared it only with a few intimate correspondents for their opinions, hoping that they would persuade me to discount the pattern. And then, six weeks later, it struck me that I had suppressed, even to myself, what should have been for me the most obvious and relevant similarities of all between JFK and 9/11: Both events opened the path to major wars (Vietnam in 1964-65, Afghanistan in 2001, followed by Iraq in 2003), upon which a small but powerful group were already intent.

In The War Conspiracy I suggested that “the Kennedy assassination was itself an important, perhaps a crucial, event in the history of the Indochina war conspiracy.” My argument looked in part at the difference between Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263 of October 1963, which encapsulated Kennedy’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam, and Johnson’s NSAM 273 of November 26, 1963, which authorized planning to begin for graduated offensive operations against North Vietnam. A preliminary draft of this plan, later known as OPLAN 34A, had been approved by General Maxwell Taylor of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and at a Pentagon conference on November 20 in Honolulu. But it had never been seen by Kennedy, and according to James Galbraith, “it had not been shown to McNamara.” But with the Tonkin Gulf incidents, the 34A Operations led in August 1964 to the first bombing of North Vietnam with U.S. planes, something which “President Kennedy for two and one half years had resisted.”

Today I believe there is consensus that Kennedy did order a public announcement of his plans to withdraw the bulk of US troops from Vietnam by 1965, and that these plans were overridden by quite different plans for a wider war of which he was ignorant. There is still major resistance to the idea, made popular by Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK,” that the Kennedy’s assassination had more than accidental relevance to Vietnam. But I think James Galbraith has correctly linked one suppressed issue – how Kennedy’s death was followed immediately by presidential authorization for planning operations against North Vietnam – to another suppressed issue – the desire in 1963 of some in the Pentagon to use nuclear weapons in a first strike against the Soviet Union:

The United States held an overwhelming nuclear advantage in late 1963. Accordingly, our nuclear plans were not actually about deterrence. Rather, then as evidently again now, they envisioned preventive war fought over a pretext. There were those who were dedicated to carrying out those plans at the appropriate moment. In July 1961, the nuclear planners had specified that the optimal moment for such an attack would come at the end of 1963. And yet, standing against them (as Daniel Ellsberg was told at the time), the civilian leaders of the United States were determined never, under any circumstances, to allow U.S. nuclear weapons to be used first—not in Laos or Vietnam, nor against China, not over Cuba or Berlin, nor against the Soviet Union. For political reasons, at a moment when Americans had been propagandized into thinking of the atomic bomb as their best defense, this was the deepest secret of the time. Was it also a deadly secret? Did LBJ have reason to fear, on the day he took office, that he was facing a nuclear coup d’etat? Similar questions have engendered scorn for 40 years. But they are not illegitimate—no more so, let me venture, than the idea that Kennedy really had decided to quit Vietnam.

Kennedy’s advisers, including civilian as well as military, had urged upon him the possible use of nuclear weapons from the first year of his presidency, in response to the crises in Berlin and Laos. As is well known, Kennedy’s negotiated settlement to the Cuban missile crisis was bitterly opposed by Admiral George Anderson and particularly General Curtis LeMay, who called it "the greatest defeat in our history." Daniel Ellsberg, consulting with Air Force generals at the time, recalled their “fury” at the settlement: “There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles.”

If Galbraith is right to place the JFK assassination in the context of the Pentagon’s nuclear ambitions, then the assassination in 1963 can be seen as eerily similar to the critical moment of 9/11 in 2001. In contemporary language, both crises occurred at a time when an inside group were determined to establish and maintain unilateral U.S. military dominance in the world. The phrase “preventive war fought over a pretext” is uncannily apt with respect to Iraq in 2003. A big difference is that in 2001 the unilateralist drive came from the White House, not the military. In Galbraith’s scenario, 1963 was the reverse: LBJ was not at all the co-conspirator that Stone’s movie made him out to be, but a nervous president reluctantly acceding to a land war in Vietnam, to head off the Joint Chiefs’ push for a nuclear alternative. It is relevant that, in what I have called “Phase One” of the JFK assassination investigation, false evidence surfaced linking Lee Harvey Oswald to both Cuba and the Soviet KGB. LBJ responded by creating the Warren Commission to market the Phase Two alternative, that Lee Harvey Oswald “acted alone.” As he said in persuading Senator Richard Russell to serve on the Commission, “We've got to be taking this out of the arena where they're testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour...".

In the case of Vietnam, so-called OPLAN 34A plans for gradually escalating the war against North Vietnam were already approved at a DOD/CIA Conference in Honolulu on November 20, 1963, even though Kennedy had never seen these plans and would in all probability (I believe) not have approved them. (The 34A Operations led in August 1964 to the first bombing of North Vietnam with U.S. planes, something which “President Kennedy for two and one-half years had resisted.” In October 1963 Kennedy was moving in a very different direction, having set in motion plans to withdraw the bulk of U.S troops from Vietnam by late 1965. McNamara’s plans to do this were authorized by NSAM 263 of October 11, 1963.)

Right after 9/11, a former Pakistani diplomat, Niaz Naik, told the BBC that senior American officials had told him in mid-July 2001 that military action against Afghanistan was likely to go ahead “before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.”

If this fundamental similarity is recognized, two more follow:

12) Both wars were followed by explosive increases in opium and heroin production.

Thanks in large part to CIA assistance in the 1950s and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, opium production in the Golden Triangle was boosted from about 80 tons in the early 1950s, to a peak of 3,300 tons a year by 1989. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, accomplished with the aid of professional drug traffickers, has seen an increase in Afghan opium production from 3,276 metric tonnes of opium in 2000, and 185 tonnes in 2001 (the year of the Taliban prohibition) to a new record high of 6,610 metric tonnes in 2006, a 43 percent increase over 2005. As a result Afghanistan’s share of global opium production increased from 70 percent in 2000 to 82 percent in 2006. U.N. figures to be released in September 2007 are expected to show that Afghanistan now accounts for 95 percent of the world's crop.

13) Both wars served the interests of international oil companies, and prior to the relevant deep events had been actively lobbied for by them.

In 1963 William Henderson, an adviser to the Socony Mobil oil company, made a public appeal for a “final commitment” to Southeast Asia, meaning “that we must be prepared to fight . . . at a minimum.” In other words he called for the kind of overt U.S. intervention in Vietnam affairs that began a year later, after the assassinations of Ngo Dinh Diem and John F. Kennedy.

According to Taliban Foreign Minister Niaz Naik, the U.S. delivered threats to the Taliban before 9/11, in support of Unocal’s desire to build oil and gas pipelines through the country from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. As Chalmers Johnson has commented, “Support for this enterprise [the dual oil and gas pipelines] appears to have been a major consideration in the Bush administration’s decision to attack Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.” Political commentator Kevin Phillips has agreed that “plans were discussed in the spring and summer of 2001—well before the events of September—for hamstringing Iraq and convincing the Taliban in Afghanistan to accept construction of an American (Unocal) pipeline from Turkmenistan through Kabul to Karachi, Pakistan.”

Elsewhere I have looked at these recurring overlapping patterns of drugs, oil, and war, in a book of the same name. It is a tribute to the force of psychological denial that, even having written about them previously, I so long repressed their relevance to the subject now being discussed: why certain aspects of the assassination of John F. Kennedy replicated themselves in the events of 9/11.

Conclusion: The Permanent War Lobby

But as we have already seen, oil was not the only common denominator in the forces behind both events. Perhaps even more important was the continuous drive through the years of some figures, both civilian and military, for the doctrine of (to use the language of a 2000 Pentagon blueprint) “full-spectrum dominance.” For thoseengaged in what Richard Falk has called the American “global domination project,” the wars in Vietnam and Iraq were not just ends in themselves; they were also steppingstones to higher and higher levels of mobilization for a world-wide U.S. military presence. “Full-spectrum dominance” is now a U.S. military reality, however fatal it may be in the long run to preserving America’s competitive civilian economy and constitutional form of government.

The forces lobbying permanently for increased militarization are too many to be enumerated. Perhaps the grandfather of them all is the American Security Council, which in various manifestations has lobbied aggressively for every U.S. military offensive action and preparation from Vietnam in the 1960s to Iraq in the 2000s, and now Iran. Its continuous lobbying activity is only one symptom of the incessant drumbeat for military mobilization over the last half-century. Other related groups include the American Society for Industrial Security, representing the security industry in which Ali Mohamed was certainly employed, and possibly Lee Harvey Oswald also.

The difference between 1963 and 2001 was in the White House. Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson successfully contained the desires of their hawks to defeat and destroy the Soviet Union. But Bush and Cheney have maneuvered America into a war on terrorism. That war threatens to become a permanent justification for curtailing the U.S. constitution’s elaborate checks and balances, and its guarantees of America’s traditional liberties.

Dilip Hiro observed in 2002 that America’s unilateralist war on terror is nothing less than a formula for permanent mobilization for permanent war:

Now, by continuing to turn a deaf ear to the plea of the Arab and Muslim leaders, starting with President Mubarak, a loyal ally of Washington, and ending with the ICO [Islamic Conference Organization, an institution for cooperation between Muslim states, headquartered in Saudi Arabia] in April 2001, to convene an international conference under the UN auspices to formulate “a joint organized response of the international community to terrorism in all its forms and manifestations,” the Bush administration is failing to live up to the expectations of people around the world that America, the sole superpower, would spearhead a multilateral campaign against the scourge of terrorism based upon a commonly agreed platform, and stop indulging in unilateralist interpretations and actions to fight terror, which would set it on an inexorable course of war without end.

This course seems likely to endure, until America’s approach to terrorism is radically redefined by popular demand. And the surest way to liberate ourselves from the siege mentality underlying it will be to finally understand the conspiracies that have brought us here.