I will be
traveling Saturday, September 11, 2021. I will however, I’m sure,
still reflect on the day 20 years ago when the minions of Al-Qaeda hijacked four US
commercial aircraft and…., well, we all know the rest. The recent furor over US
withdrawal from Afghanistan has, for me at least, made some related issues
resurface.
First some
inarguable facts:
·
Al Qaeda was (is) partially funded by Saudi
money, specifically money from Bin Laden Construction which was allowed to get
into the hands of Osama bin Laden, who in turn was in thrall to the extreme
Wahabi sectarians in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism is an Islamic revivalist movement
that started within Sunni Islam, and it is associated with the teachings of
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahab. It has been variously described as
"orthodox", "puritan"; and as an Islamic "reform
movement" to restore "pure monotheistic worship" by devotees. (think Westboro Baptist without the burkas) Its influence in the reason the Saudi “royal” family has backslid towards conservatism
at home in an attempt to keep Wahabi support in the general populace.
Bin Laden subscribed to the idea that western involvement in The Kingdom and the middle East in general was evil. His motivation was fanned by US support of Israel. This led to his 9/11 plot.
Following the 9/11 attacks, even though he was Saudi, it is likely bin Laden realized that financial ties between the kingdom and the US, especially the Royal family’s fairly cordial relations with the Bush family, father and son, made it advisable to go elsewhere and where better than Afghanistan?·
President G.W. Bush, after making the ludicrous claim in a nationally televised speech that “They hate our freedom” (instead of our presence in their region and long- term support of Israel) demands Afghanistan turn over bin Laden to the US.
·
Bin Laden was protected by the Afghans, who
refused to release him to the US, even though there was no doubt he was the
9/11 architect.
·
October 17th, US bombing of
Afghanistan begins. The first wave of conventional ground forces arrives twelve
days later. The Bush-specified reason for US presence was to "get" bin Laden, nothing more.
·
November, the UN votes to use international “peacekeepers”
to help Afghan troops opposed to Al Qaeda and their new ally, the Taliban
·
December 2001: Bin Laden Escapes to Pakistan.
After tracking bin Laden to the Tora Bora cave complex, Afghan militias engage
in a two-week battle (December 3 to 17) with al-Qaeda militants. It results in
a few hundred deaths and the eventual escape of bin Laden, who is thought to
have left for Pakistan on horseback on December 16—just a day before Afghan
forces capture twenty of his remaining men. Despite intelligence (monitoring of
bin Laden’s unsecured radio transmissions) confirming bin Laden’s
presence in Tora Bora, the assault was carried out poorly and too late by a
ragtag Afghan contingent. Some critics
will later question why U.S. forces did not take a more assertive role in the
engagement. It will later be revealed in a report to the Senate Intelligence
committee that, then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, after consultation
with VP Cheney, ordered US commanders in the field who were eager to take out
bin Laden to “stand down so we don’t offend our allies” The great mystery
remains as to exactly which allies were being referred to. A
cynical individual such as I might think he meant the Saudis.
At this point,
the US mission in Afghanistan and our reason for being there as declared by the
President was over. US deaths beyond this point are attributable to attempts to
shore up Bush 43’s reelection efforts for 2004. Instead, Bush would, in
furtherance of his flagging “war leader” image, not only remain in Afghanistan,
but on false pretense invade Iraq and engage in the “nation building” which his
Vice President, Cheney, had warned his father, Bush 41, to avoid at all costs.
As a result,
2,372 US servicemen died in the 18 plus years we slogged through an unwinnable
war in a place known as the "Graveyard of Empires". The politics of Afghanistan
is a quagmire of religious zealotry, tribal/ethnic conflicts and resembles
central Africa more than central Asia. Add to this, the fact that the US found
itself attempting to build a consensus government out of corrupt politicians, and
in several cases, former drug lords. In one year, by actual calculation, 28% of
the Afghan GDP was lost to graft and bribery! This became more pressing when
Donald Trump contemplated inviting the Taliban to come to camp David, which
would, in the eyes of many Afghans, legitimize them. This harebrained idea, by
the way, was the last straw for Trump National Security Advisor Bolton, who
resigned in protest.
To end the
bleeding, President Biden made a decision which, unlike Trump or Bush, was based
on doing the right thing, not the popular one. Only Afghans can alter the
course of their nation, and whatever that course becomes, it needs to be
determined by those who must live with it, not an alien (in so many ways)
foreign interloper.
9/11 commission
The 9/11 Commission was established by Congress to “Prepare
a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the
attacks.” While that verbiage sounds reasonable, we must reflect that a
Republican controlled Congress was establishing a process which could possibly
(and as we now know, should) have resulted in some negative opinions
of Republican Presidential actions before and after the attacks. Members were
appointed by President George W. Bush and the United States Congress, which led
to the criticism that the Commission was not independent. The Commission stated
in its report that their "aim has not been to assign individual
blame", a judgment which some critics believed would obscure the facts of
the matter in a nod to consensus politics. Bulleted below are brief details of
some concerns and why we didn’t hear them:
·
Members of the Commission, as well as its
executive director Philip Zelikow, had conflicts of interest. There are
numerous claims in print that Zelikow had far closer ties with the White House
than he publicly disclosed and that he tried to influence the final report in
ways that limited the Bush administration’s responsibility and furthering its
anti-Iraq agenda.
·
Although he pledged to have no contact with
either National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice or White House political
director Karl Rove, his phone log revealed that Zelikow had at least four
private conversations with Rice and appears to have had many frequent telephone
conversations with people in the White House.
·
One Book on the subject reports that some panel
staffers believed Zelikow stopped them from submitting a report depicting
Rice's and Bush's performance as "amounting to incompetence or something
not far from it".
· While President Bush and Vice President Cheney did ultimately agree to testify, they did so only under several conditions, including being allowed to testify jointly, not under oath, no recording of any kind would be saved, and notes would never be made public, all these of course lead to “keep the stories straight and lie if you wish.”
·
NORAD had
maintained that that US air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been
scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were
prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington,
D.C., but in truth, audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other
evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked
airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft—American
Airlines Flight 11—long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center. Maj.
Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun
tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the
airliner was not even hijacked until 12 minutes later. According to later
testimony, the military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed
in Pennsylvania.
· Finally, The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, consisting of former FBI, NSA and other federal intelligence experts, claim the 9/11 Commission report was fundamentally flawed because the Commission refused to hear, ignored, or censored testimony about the many pre–September 11 warnings given to the FBI and US intelligence agencies. At the heart of a laundry list of claims was the continuing allegations by various senior military intelligence officers that a clandestine, highly classified cross-service, military program which we now know was called Able Danger (came out during commission testimony) presented warnings of Al Qaeda cells in the US and named some names including Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11 attacks. They alerted the CIA as early as January 2000, but were rebuffed by the CIA’s apparent concern that the military would “steal their thunder.”
·
Operation Dark Heart by Anthony A.
Shaffer, released in September 2010, includes memories of his time reporting to
the 9/11 commission about Able Danger's findings. The 10,000 copies of the
books have not been released yet. The DOD's Defense Intelligence Agency
reviewers identified more than 200 passages suspected of containing classified
information. "Specifically, the DIA wanted references to a meeting between
Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, the book's author, and the executive director of the 9/11
Commission, Philip Zelikow, removed". DOD took the highly unusual step of
purchasing all available copies of Shaffer's book at a cost of $47,000 and
destroying them to deny the public the ability to read the book.
So, here we are, coming up on 20 years later. The fog of history has masked to great extent the Bush 43 administration’s failure to react to warnings including a Clinton Security brief to the Bush incoming department heads, largely ignored by Ms. Rice and her Boss, warning of a new threat – Al Qaeda. Ms. Rice has diametrically contradicted herself in later years as to who knew what and what did they know? It isn’t pretty. The list of Q & A responses Ms. Rice gave the commission, which she later controverted is too long for this essay, but can be read here:
It is a veritable litany of Bush Administration
incompetence. Are we safer now than 20
years ago? One can only hope.
