TruthLiesMarketing

The Summer 2002 Marketing Plan: Khalid and Binalshibh In The Spotlight

Part 8 of Truth, Lies, and The Legend of 9/11: TruthLiesLegend

By June of 2002, the contents of the Moussaoui indictment could indeed be viewed as the clear signpost pointing the way to the manner in which the final loose ends of the Official 9/11 Legend would be tied up for posterity. With Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi already tied together as unindicted co-conspirators in the Moussaoui case, FBI Director Robert Mueller would, by this time, explicitly weave in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, pairing him up with Mustafa Ahmed and thereby inserting this newly-christened 9/11 mastermind into the Money Trail Story. The Associated Press' John Lumpkin would reference all three in his key June 2002 article. It is as if the powers-that-be were putting this trio of nefarious characters on notice - from here on, their fates were to be indelibly entwined.

If habitual coincidence is the mother of all conspiracy theories, then one must surely raise a discerning eyebrow at the revelation that, around this time - after more than a decade of staying hidden in the shadows - Khalid Shaikh Mohammed suddenly was stricken with an urge to conduct his very first interview, with none other than Ramzi Binalshibh at his side. The journalist chosen for this honor was the London bureau chief of Al-Jazeera, Yosri Fouda. Fouda, a former employee of the BBC Arabic Service (many of whose employees resurfaced at Al-Jazeera after the Arabic Service's demise), was taken blindfolded to Khalid's Karachi residence, where he was then given - over the course of two days - a detailed step-by-step account of the planning and execution of the 9/11 hijackings. Binalshibh, apparently concerned with his place in the official history textbooks, instructed Fouda to submit a copy of the interview to the Library of Congress.

In Binalshibh's telling (assuming the teller on Fouda's audiotape was in fact Binalshibh), the execution of September 11 was mostly the work of a Hamburg-based al-Qaida cell under the leadership of Mohammed Atta. Atta's story begins in Cairo where, as a young man working at a German-owned company, he was sponsored to come to Hamburg, where he attended the Technical University as a student of urban planning. There, he was recruited into al-Qaida - as was Binalshibh - at Hamburg's al-Quds mosque.

Atta's indoctrination and sudden "conversion" in the "Crusader" bowels of Europe has its curious parallels in the sudden conversions of Omar Saeed, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Richard Reid (a.k.a. the "shoe bomber"). In each case, we have the example of a well-educated man from a westernized background who had undergone a drastic "religious" transformation in an insular, cult-like atmosphere, leaving his former friends and family to wonder whether their loved one had perhaps been brainwashed. Certainly this was the concern of the family of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was himself indoctrinated into the cause by way of the Finsbury Park mosque in North London (which also churned out the likes of Reid and Djamel Beghal, an alleged suspect behind the aforementioned plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Paris). Presiding over the Finsbury Park recruitment drive was a one-eyed, one-handed sheikh with a metal claw who went by the name of Abu Hamza. Abu Hamza, like bin Laden, was a veteran of the C.I.A.-funded drive to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan. In the mid-eighties, Abu Hamza settled in Britain where he eventually became known as one of the key point men in laying the groundwork for Muslim fundamentalism in the United Kingdom.

As a testament to Abu Hamza's glass-eyed charisma and oratorical skills, hundreds of freshly radicalized British Muslim youths were "processed" through the Finsbury Park mosque, and then sent off to Afghanistan - the "finishing school" for the worldwide jihad. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with British authorities rounding up suspected al-Qaida operatives hither and thither, it was indeed a curious fact that Abu Hamza was given free rein to continue his indoctrination activities. On July 30, 2002, Fox News' Carl Cameron and Globe-Intel's Gordon Thomas and Yvonne Ridley reported that a combined FBI-MI5 raid on the former Dublin office of the International Mercy Relief Agency - an alleged al-Qaida front - had yielded up documents linking Moussaoui to Abu Hamza. The documents had also conveniently linked Moussaoui to Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi (roughly eight months after they were first linked together in the Moussaoui indictment). As an aside, an earlier raid on the Dublin offices of the Islamic Relief Agency had, as reported in Newsweek on November 11, 2001, yielded up the documents that had first supposedly led authorities to assume that Mustafa Ahmed was a senior al-Qaida financial operative.

As late as September 11, 2002, journalist Farukh Dhondy was raising the question as to Abu Hamza's puzzling status as a free man, given his by now obvious role as a senior - indeed, crucial - recruiter for al-Qaida: "Scotland Yard's information office refuses to answer questions as to why Abu Hamza isn't under arrest. Several leaders of the Muslim community in Britain allege that he is working for the British Secret Services - in particular MI5 - as an agent provocateur..."

Of course, raising an allegation does not make it so. Yet the very fact that mainstream Muslim leaders would level such a charge at Abu Hamza says something about Abu Hamza's place in that community. In other words, was this al-Qaida recruiter an organic outgrowth of Britain's largely immigrant Muslim community, or was he simply grafted on to serve purposes other than those of his purported constituents?

Abu Hamza's role as an Islamic fundamentalist recruiter (along with that of his counterpart in Hamburg, Mohammed Haydar Zammar - the recruiter of Atta and Binalshibh) must be judged in the light of present demographic realities. And the reality is this: with a population in excess of one billion adherents, and a geographic span that stretches from the West African Straits of Gibraltar to the far east of Asia, the Muslim World apparently was not up to the task of furnishing the most hardcore, sophisticated operative cells of al-Qaida. Contrary to popular wisdom, the inferno of 9/11 was not conceived in fetid slums like Gaza, where deprivation and bitterness has stoked inter-generational hatred of Westerners and Jews. Rather, the peculiarly sophisticated strain of Muslim terror that has been branded as al-Qaida was largely incubated among an insular network in the U.K. and the E.U., where a conveniently incriminating trail could be tracked and showcased as definitive proof of the authorship for 9/11.

In this respect, the likes of Atta, Moussaoui, Omar Saeed, and - most importantly - Osama bin Laden stood in stark contrast to the homegrown Middle Eastern suicide bombers who pathetically offer themselves up as anonymous solitary firecrackers in a nihilistic gesture of "resistance." Rather, these major players in the 9/11 Legend more closely resembled the likes of Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley - men whose sudden psychopathic "transformations" occurred in the context of curious synchronicities.

In the case of Oswald, the very organization that provided the most incriminating evidence in Oswald's background also happened to be the organization most peculiarly evident in Oswald's pre-assassination biography - for it was Oswald who, in his posting at the Atsugi military base in Japan, had access to the C.I.A.'s secretive U2 spy plane program before he defected in 1959; who was one of the very few Americans ever to defect to the Soviet Union; whose very noticeable defection would have brought him under the domain of C.I.A. counter-intelligence chief James Angleton; and finally, whose most high profile associations seemed to be with individuals intimately connected to the C.I.A.'s anti-Castro operations (a fact that was systematically overlooked at the time of the Warren Commission).

In short, Oswald was well within arm's length of the C.I.A. during those very years in which he was laying his "officially" incriminating trail, much of which was retrospectively ferreted out by the C.I.A. And the punch-line to all this: the K.G.B. officer charged with handling Oswald's file once he defected to the Soviet Union - Yuri Nosenko - turned out to be a C.I.A. mole who later rashly fled to the Americans only a few months after the assassination, forcing James Angleton - the C.I.A.'s liaison to the Warren Commission - to stash Nosenko out of sight for three years in a C.I.A. dungeon, thus keeping this "smoking gun" out of the Warren Report. As for the attempted assassin of Ronald Reagan, John Hinckley, it turned out that his brother Scott was scheduled for a dinner date with Neil Bush on the very day that Reagan was shot (as reported by John Chancellor of NBC News). Is it any wonder that this Bush brother is studiously kept out of public view?

In a similar fashion, Mohammed Atta had a peculiar proclivity to "lay tracks" practically in the backyard of his purported pursuers. Europol's very first conference on terrorism took place in Madrid, within days of Atta's arrival. Atta and Binalshibh put the finishing touches on their 9/11 plans in July 2001, with Atta touching down one final time in Madrid - within days of John O'Neill's meeting with Europol bigwig Juan Cotino in Madrid - and then proceeding 500 miles to meet up with Binalshibh at the Spanish coastal resort of Salou, where he checked into a hotel that, only days before, had hosted John O'Neill in a counter-terror conference.

As for his choice for flight training, Atta and his comrades presciently chose to hone their skills within commuter distance of the C.I.A./military base that would later serve as Central Command for the War in Afghanistan. As posted on the CBS News site on March 5, 2003, here was Binalshibh's simple explanation to Yosri Fouda as to why Florida was chosen for its flight schools: "The prices in America were convenient and the weather was ideal for more flying hours, especially in the coastal states like Florida ... and the term of study wouldn't take long."

Perhaps Binalshibh might have added that it would also allow Atta and his comrades to lay an incriminating trail in the presence of bona fide American eyewitnesses, and all within shouting distance of the military handlers at Mac Dill Air Force Base. As an added bonus, two of Atta's fellow hijackers would also be set up with rental accommodations by the wife of the employee of a C.I.A.-founded company. Gloria Irish, the wife of the tabloid Sun editor Michael Irish, rented a Delray Beach apartment to hijackers Marwan Al-Shehhi and Saeed Alghamdi. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but the very first victim of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks also happened to be a Sun photo editor by the name of Bob Stevens. And perhaps another peculiar coincidence, as reported in the St. Petersburg Times on October 15, 2001: "Mike Irish, who, records show, is a licensed airplane pilot, several years ago was a member of the Civil Air Patrol based at a small-plane airport in Lantana, just north of Delray Beach, an official there told the Washington Post. One of the hijackers, Atta, reportedly rented a plane at that airport to practice flying for three days in August. Stevens, the Sun photo editor who died of anthrax Oct. 5, also lives in Lantana. But there is no indication whether Irish or Stevens ever crossed paths with Atta."

To anyone familiar with covert operations, the above item would perhaps set off alarm bells. In theory, if Atta and his comrades were intelligence assets, they would be handled by resident, intelligence-connected, "babysitters" whose job it would be to set up accommodations and provide support where needed. Were the Irishes "babysitters" in an intelligence operation? Again, the example of Lee Harvey Oswald provides a compelling comparative framework: Oswald's entree into the military/intelligence milieu dated from his entry, at the age of 15, into the Civil Air Patrol, which was co-founded by D.H. Byrd, the owner of the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald served under captain David Ferrie, a pilot who was later heavily involved in C.I.A. anti-Castro operations out of Florida and Louisiana (and who mysteriously died within days of being publicly outed as a possible witness in the JFK assassination probe conducted by New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison). Upon Oswald's return from the Soviet Union, his closest acquaintance was George De Mohrenschildt, a man who - according to De Mohrenschildt's own testimony - was directed by the C.I.A. Domestic Contacts Division to "babysit" Oswald. Incidentally, De Mohrenschildt was found dead on the very day that investigator Gaeton Fonzi came to interview him on behalf of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (the last official government investigation of the JFK assassination, which ruled the assassination a "probable conspiracy"). A search of De Mohrenchildt's belongings by Fonzi yielded up De Mohrenschildt's personal address book, which contained the name and former home address of then-C.I.A. Director George H. W. Bush.

It has long been a practice of the C.I.A. - and other intelligence agencies - to set up "front" companies to represent their interests as needed. With that in mind, and in keeping with the abovementioned comparative framework, perhaps it would bear fruit to review briefly the history of American Media Inc., the parent company which owns the Sun, the National Enquirer, and virtually all of the major American tabloids. American Media Inc. (AMI) was founded in 1952 by Generoso Pope, a "former" C.I.A. agent. In 1999, AMI made an aggressive grab for control of its major tabloid competitors. That year, AMI was bought by David Pecker and Evercore Partners, whose senior principal - Roger C. Altman - was a former vice-chairman of the Blackstone Group, co-founded by Peter Peterson, who is, incidentally, chairman of the influential Council On Foreign Relations (which establishes the mainstream media "consensus" on virtually all foreign policy issues). In October 2000, Blackstone purchased the mortgage on 7 World Trade Center. AIG, an insurer of the World Trade Center, announced - on July 30, 1998 - a long-term agreement with Blackstone valued at $1.35 billion. That year, AIG - which has had a long-standing strategic relationship with Blackstone - acquired a 7% non-voting interest in Blackstone.

The above background in itself would not qualify as the "smoking gun" which necessarily proves AMI complicity in the events of 9/11 - as that technique would merely be aping the specious "pattern of connections" employed by federal investigators to "prove" al-Qaida complicity for 9/11. Rather, it provides a plausible view as to how various interconnected corporate players may work in concert toward a common covert goal. Certainly, the inaugural anthrax attacks on the AMI offices would tend, at first glance, to absolve AMI of complicity - though one could argue just as easily that it would also tend to divert suspicion from AMI as an obvious propaganda/covert front company. Since September 11, AMI has done its part in the War On Terror by publishing a series of one-shot glossy magazines which reflect the Official 9/11 legend in all its full-color glory.

In addition to AMI, Mac Dill Air Force base, and the Irishes, the state of Florida is host to a number of other eyewitnesses whose background - and testimonies - deserve far greater scrutiny than they have heretofore earned. For instance, witness Bert Rodriguez had specifically trained hijacker Ziad Jarrah in martial arts and close quarter fighting with knives. Perhaps Jarrah had a premonition that, on his designated flight - United Flight 93 - he would be facing off with a small coterie of rebellious passengers, in particular, martial arts champ Jeremy Glick.

Florida is also blessed with a profusion of flight schools. Yet of this rich aeronautical menu from which to choose, most of the September 11 hijackers were drawn to two flight schools practically next door to one another, both owned by Dutch nationals who purchased their respective schools within months of one another in 1998. The two owners, Rudi Dekkers and Arne Kruithof, also shared - according to independent journalist Daniel Hopsicker - a particularly troublesome post-9/11 fate, plagued by legal troubles and a pair of matching aviation accidents that nearly took both Dekkers and Kruithof out of the picture.

Kruithof also played a major part in one other crucial aspect of the 9/11 Legend. As FBI Director Mueller had taken pains to point out, Binalshibh was originally slated to be the "twentieth hijacker." Yet when his visa requests were repeatedly turned down, a decision was made to replace him with Moussaoui - at least according to the "authorized" version - and Binalshibh would thereafter play his part as the overall 9/11 coordinator in partnership with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. As for Kruithof's part in all this, I reference a portion of the following exchange between Fouda and Abdallah Schleifer of the Kamal Adham Center For Journalism (where Fouda was a fellow):

Fouda: "...I also interviewed the owner of the flight school, Arne Kruithof, where Ziad Al-Jarrah (who flew the United Airlines plane which crashed in Pennsylvania) learned how to fly. And Kruithof confirmed that he had twice tried to get Ramzi [Binalshibh] an entry visa upon Ziad's urging ... When Ziad asked Kruithof why the visa requests were turned down, the flight school owner said he didn't know. But American officials subsequently made no secret of it. They said Ramzi was turned down because he was implicated in the [October 2000] USS Cole attack."

Schleifer: "Your sources are presumably American intelligence sources?"

Fouda: "Yes."

Schleifer: "Now if I understand you correctly, American intelligence sources be it within the INS or some other agency the INS checked him out with, knew at the time they turned Ramzi down that he was implicated in the Cole attack. That's rather odd, because if they knew that and turned him down for that reason, you'd think they would have wondered who else was at that flight school and why?"

Why, indeed. In Fouda's account, Kruithof "didn't know" at the time why the visa requests were turned down. Yet an October 24, 2001 Los Angeles Times article by Eric Lichtblau and Carol J. Williams apparently offers an alternative account:

"...FBI agents told officials of the Florida flight school that Binalshibh was rejected because of unspecified involvement 'with the bombing of the USS Cole,' according to Arne Kruithof, president of the school."

In other words, Kruithof here admits - only six weeks after 9/11 - that he was personally informed as to the reason for Binalshibh's visa rejection. What the Times article does not make clear is whether Kruithof came by this knowledge at the time of Binalshibh's last reported visa rejection - May 2001 - or after September 11. It is a crucial question, for it goes to the heart of Kruithof's - and Fouda's - credibility. In Fouda's account, Fouda had to glean the reason for Binalshibh's visa rejection through "American intelligence sources," though Fouda at the time could have easily learned of this from Kruithof, who had known this at least as early as October 24, 2001. In Fouda's account, his interview with Kruithof came after his historic interview with Binalshibh and Khalid - that is, far into 2002. And thus do we come to the Complicity v. Complacency debate of 9/11. In Schleifer's exchange with Fouda concerning the above episode, Schleifer opines:

"Or, even more to the point they should have issued him [Binalshibh] a visa just to get him in to the United States and grabbed him for the Cole attack. If that's the case it fits right into a list of intelligence blunders by both the FBI and the CIA that have already surfaced in the press and in Congressional hearings."

Not so fast. Lost amid all this is the crucial fact that Kruithof was making the visa request at the urging of 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah. Assuming that Kruithof was informed of the reason for the last visa rejection at the time he received the rejection, then logic dictates that Kruithof would have felt compelled to report who urged him to make that request. In other words, there would be no wiggle room here for a "complacency" explanation. Unfortunately, the open-ended phrasing of the above-mentioned Los Angeles Times article does leave room for a lawyerly caveat that the FBI agents confided in Kruithof after 9/11.

Even so, the reason for Binalshibh's rejection remains as a corroborated fact. Thus, if even this fact gets disputed, either Fouda and Kruithof were telling fibs or the FBI and "American intelligence sources" were feeding Fouda and Kruithof a load. If Fouda's credibility is at question, then so, too, is his crucial interview with Binalshibh and Khalid. On the other hand, if the FBI and "American intelligence sources" were feeding both Fouda and Kruithof the same erroneous factoid, then it raises the obvious question as to whether the powers-that-be have fabricated an Official 9/11 Legend - the overall premise of this article. As regards Kruithof, a number of questions are raised by this episode. First, if he did in fact learn of the reason behind Binalshibh's visa rejection before 9/11, then one may only conclude that Kruithof was subsequently protecting his student, Ziad Jarrah, from exposure. On the other hand, if he learned of it after, then it raises the question as to why a major news organization (the Los Angeles Times) would have to come by this official information by way of a lowly flight school president. Either way, someone - Fouda, Kruithof, or the authorities - comes out blackened by this episode, and the standard fig leaf of complaceny will not cover the naked thatch of complicity.

As we will see later in this article - in the aforementioned exchange with Schleifer - Fouda's credibility takes a substantial body blow as regards the reported timeframe for his interview with Binalshibh and Khalid. Moreover, the discrepancy arises out of the controversy surrounding Binalshibh's sudden capture on September 11, 2002. But before we get to Binalshibh's well-timed capture, we first must chronicle the attempt to further publicly elaborate the Binalshibh legend in the couple months leading up to his apprehension. As we have seen, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's publicized legend received a substantial upgrade in the first week of June 2002, while Coleen Rowley played counterpoint with the Moussaoui Tale in the background. At the same time, Robert Mueller took the opportunity to incorporate Khalid into the Money Trail Story by way of the now "official" paymaster, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi, who previously had made his own most indelible public impression as a fellow "unindicted co-conspirator" with Ramzi Binalshibh in the holy Moussaoui indictment.

Little more than a month later, on July 15, 2002, the original - now unauthorized - paymaster, Omar Saeed Sheikh, received a sentence of death in a Pakistani court for the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl. Thus was Omar Saeed disposed of for the time being. Only one day before Omar Saeed's fate was sealed, Ramzi Binalshibh received his own upgrade in the finely calibrated telling of the Official 9/11 Legend. Binalshibh had made his public post-9/11 debut as early as September 15, 2001, when John Hooper of the Guardian reported that landlord Thorsten Albrecht had rented out a flat in Hamburg to Binalshibh, Atta, and Said Bahaji. Six days later, on September 21, chief German federal prosecutor Kay Nehm had issued a warrant for Binalshibh's arrest in relation to 9/11. Next, on November 14, 2001, Robert Mueller had announced to federal prosecutors that Binalshibh originally had been designated to be the twentieth hijacker. At the same time, Mueller had gone on record as discounting any link between Moussaoui and the 9/11 hijackers, thus seemingly contradicting the contents of the Moussaoui indictment that would be unsealed only one month later.

Mueller, in this instance, was employing the classic "hedge" strategy that he first used in raising uncertainty as to the hijackers' true identities, followed by his hedge on the January 2002 Calcutta incident involving Aftab Ansari, and followed thereafter by his disingenuous "no paper trail" declaration in April 2002. In all these instances, Mueller was giving the impression of a carefully considered investigation with no preconceived notions and coordinated set-ups. In short, he provided the official, obfuscating smokescreen for what was, in reality, a prefabricated, fully choreographed elaboration of the Legend of 9/11. If the whole Moussaoui episode seemed a little too pat on closer inspection, then the well-publicized Phoenix memo, the Rowley episode, and Mueller's various hedges worked to provide the necessary diversions, while serving the added purpose of marketing the need for a more efficient police state by way of the Patriot Act and the Office of Homeland Security.

By December 2001, Binalshibh had then received his first crucial public boost as one of two unindicted co-conspirators in the Moussaoui indictment, wherein it was alleged that Binalshibh served as paymaster to Moussaoui. Around that time, another "pole" of the legend was circulating that hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nayaf al-Hazmi had been photographed at a meeting in Malaysia back in January 2000, accompanied by Tawfiq bin Atash, a man linked by authorities to the U.S.S. Cole attack of October 2000. Recall that, according to Arne Kruithof's testimony in the October 24, 2001 Times article, Binalshibh was by this time already being explicitly linked to the Cole attack, yet no further details had been supplied in relation to that alleged fact.

Thus, in the lead-up to Binalshibh's further July 14, 2002 promotion, there remained the question of linking the "Malaysian faction" represented by al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi with the all-important "Hamburg cell" represented by Atta, Binalshibh, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah - also, as it happens, the very individuals who tended to outstrip most of their remaining fellow hijackers in the matter of laying incriminating trails. If, as the story goes, the remaining hijackers were merely "muscle" flown in from Saudi Arabia, then for the purposes of the Official 9/11 Legend, they were pretty much "filler." In other words, no need to stretch one's resources in setting up a full-bodied legend for the bit players when a stolen passport or two can pretty much do the job.

By July 14, 2002, the Washington Post linked the "Malaysian faction" up with the "Hamburg cell" by way of Ramzi Binalshibh. From start to finish, here's the story: after the failure of the planned millennium bombing, a terrorist "summit" was convened in Malaysia in January 2000, where the go-ahead was given for what would become the September 11 attack. A final meeting took place in Spain in July 2001, where the plan was finalized and ready to go. What follows is Washington Post reporter Peter Finn's unveiling of that next installment in the unfolding 9/11 Legend:

"Investigators said they believe that planning for the Sept. 11 attacks was punctuated at either end of the plot's trajectory by the two critical meetings. Binalshibh, who is believed to be alive, is the only person known to have attended both meetings, making him a key potential source of answers to the enduring questions about the plot, Western intelligence officials said."

Sure enough, those officials would get their answers a mere eight weeks later, once Binalshibh would fall into their hands. In the meantime, Binalshibh's legend was being built up for the big score. Now, with Binalshibh officially placed at the crucial January 2000 Malaysian "summit", it turned out that the authorities also had photographs of him at the summit - in other words, from the same batch that had first garnered hijackers al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi their historic place in the Malaysian "pole" of this tale. Why it took authorities several months later to reveal Binalshibh's presence in that batch remains a mystery - unless one goes with the hypothesis of a pre-fabricated, finely calibrated 9/11 Legend. Moreover, Finn likewise was raising the allegation of Binalshibh's link to the U.S.S. Cole attack. However, in Finn's version of Binalshibh's visa rejection, there could be absolutely no possibility that Binalshibh was rejected by reason of the Cole attack, which occurred in October 2000. Finn reports: "After the meeting in Malaysia, Binalshibh planned to participate directly in the attacks as a pilot. Between May and October 2000, however, he failed four times in Germany and Yemen to obtain a U.S. visa. 'It was only by luck, really, he wasn't given a visa,' said one official. 'Otherwise, he'd have been on one of those planes that went down.' "

Perhaps it was also luck that, in this latest version, Binalshibh's last visa request would occur before the Cole bombing and not as late as May 2001, as reported earlier in the Los Angeles Times by Lichtblau and Williams. In other words, Finn's version of the visa request directly contradicts both the Times version and Fouda's version. Moreover, the official version by this time was that Binalshibh tried "four times" to get an entry visa, whereas in Fouda's account with Schleifer, Fouda was quite explicit that only two attempts were made, citing Binalshibh and Kruithof's own words as support for this proposition: Fouda:"He [Binalshibh] originally wanted to join the other 19 hijackers. But he was turned down twice when he tried to get an entry visa. When he failed I think he just focused on his role as a coordinator."

Schleifer: "This was by his own admission, that he tried twice and failed, or is this something you uncovered on your own?"

Fouda: "Yes, he mentioned it and I had that confirmed from other sources...And Kruithof confirmed that he had twice tried to get Ramzi an entry visa upon Ziad's urging..."

If a possible "smoking gun" of complicity or complacency could be ferreted out from Fouda and Kruithof, Finn's key installment here functioned to smother that contingency. Only weeks before his July 15, 2002 article on Binalshibh, Finn had played his part in structuring the news regarding the man who had allegedly recruited Binalshibh and other members of the "Hamburg cell" into the ranks of Islamic fundamentalism - Mohammed Haydar Zammar. On June 12, 2002 - that is, just a week after Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was introduced as the new 9/11 mastermind - Finn introduced Zammar as the "charismatic advocate" who had cast his spell over Atta, Binalshibh, and their Hamburg-based colleagues - in much the same way that Abu Hamza had worked his magic on his British charges.

And, like Abu Hamza, Zammar was likewise allowed to carry on freely in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 while the German and British authorities were rounding up suspects by the dozens. According to Der Speigel, German intelligence agents had approached Zammar in 1996, offering to recruit him as an informer. Zammar reportedly declined the offer, and then - as reported by Finn - "around 1997, Atta and others in the Hamburg-based group, who already had anti-Western views, fell under Zammar's influence."

The $64,000 question, however, is whether Zammar - and British recruiter Abu Hamza - did in fact fall under the influence of any intelligence service. Put simply, if one were to look for the fingerprints of a covert service lurking behind the "Hamburg cell", the most fruitful place to look would be in the vicinity of the man who supposedly forged this insular clique. However, the Der Speigel item had perhaps the unintended effect of casting a thin veil of plausible deniability over this crucial question - for in the event that someone might eventually blow the whistle on an intelligence contact with Zammar, so what? One could always employ the Der Speigel item to concede that fact and then "spin" it as a failed approach. And if it became known that an intelligence presence was found in the vicinity of Atta and Binalshibh's apartment? - they were conducting surveillance, naturally. Why no action, then? - an oversight, a blunder, complacency. In two words - plausible deniability.

In the first few months after September 11, the general public was given the impression that the September 11 attack was a hugely choreographed al-Qaida operation, with literally thousands of possible conspirators spread out from the Philippines, to Malaysia, to Afghanistan, to Saudi Arabia, and throughout the continent of Europe. Yet in the few months between Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's public promotion and the capture of Ramzi Binalshibh, it became quite clear that September 11 was in fact a closely compartmentalized operation essentially involving a small clique in Hamburg coordinated by the Lennon-Mc Cartney talents of Khalid and Binalshibh. In close support, the indoctrinated products of Abu Hamza's Finsbury Park mosque provided the Moussaouis and the shoe bombers who would later shore up the case against al-Qaida. To complete the picture, a mixed bag of Muslim militants would be rounded up - in Spain, Italy, Belgium, Canada, Morocco, etc. - and branded with the all-purpose al-Qaida trademark.

With all the billowing smoke and reflecting mirrors, the stage would then be set to obscure the dirt trail leading to Hamburg. Put simply, that all-important Hamburg recruiter, Zammar, needed to be dealt with cleanly and cautiously. If Zammar were in German custody, the spotlight - and the inevitable questions - would thereby fall on this absolutely crucial operative. The German authorities, however, would be able to avoid that headache if Zammar were simply to disappear right under their noses - as he did. As reported by Finn in his June 12 2002 Washington Post article:

"After the Sept. 11 attacks, Zammar was questioned and released by German police who kept him under surveillance. German officials said they did not have enough evidence to charge Zammar, and he left Germany freely on Oct. 27, ostensibly to obtain a divorce from a Moroccan woman ...German officials said they have confirmed that Zammar reached Morocco, but he subsequently disappeared."

Thus, Zammar was no longer a German problem. As reported by Finn, "Zammar's partner and six children", who were still in Hamburg, "filed an official missing persons report with German authorities." Finn also offers another reason why Zammar was - and should be regarded as - one of the more key operatives in the September 11 plot:

" At some point, probably in 1998 or early 1999, the Hamburg group decided to 'offer themselves' to al Qaeda, [a] U.S. counterterrorism official said, describing Zammar as a central player in that process."

One could, of course, put a different spin on it - that Zammar, on the direction of his intelligence handlers, had placed his compartmentalized cell at the disposal of the larger al-Qaida network, which was in fact little more than a loosely affiliated collection of various Muslim militant cells acting independently of one another, with some genuine militant groupings mixed in with the pre-fabricated ones. As with all well-conceived legends, 90% of the true facts would eventually be put out in the open so as to inoculate against any unforeseen discoveries, thereby rendering the missing - and potentially most toxic - 10% as an implausible, conspiratorial view of the "facts."

So where was Zammar? Here was the probable set-up: Finn's June 12, 2002 item had raised the "speculative" prospect that Zammar was perhaps apprehended by U.S. authorities in Morocco, and secretly taken elsewhere for interrogation. Five days later, the Associated Press revealed that, yes, Zammar had been apprehended in Morocco, and was duly handed over to Syrian custody (as Zammar was Syrian-born). Two days later, Finn wrote a follow-up article in the Washington Post, speculating that it was, in fact, his own June 12 article that had prompted this long overdue and sudden announcement concerning Zammar's fate. Zammar was found - and Finn had set it all in motion. In any case, we now knew he was in Syria - being "interrogated" by American officials, one assumed - which was pretty much the equivalent of being in a black hole, as far as the public and press were concerned. Case closed on Zammar.

Returning to the other elements in Finn's pivotal June 12, 2002 opus, Finn referred to the Malaysia meeting as the "jumping off" point for the September 11 plot, in particular singling out hijacker al-Mihdhar as the attendee. As to the other bookend of the plot - that final July 2001 meeting in Spain - Finn quoted the ever-anonymous "U.S. counterterrorism official":

"The U.S. counterterrorism official said investigators believe that a trusted al Qaeda operative flew to Spain to meet Atta to discuss the operation and subsequently left. But he said investigators have not

identified whom Atta met."

As we would conveniently learn from Finn later on July 14, Atta's mystery contact was Binalshibh. In retrospect, it is as if Finn's June 12 2002 article was meant solely to be read as a preparatory companion piece for his July 14 sequel. As a bit of foreshadowing for what one could expect from him on July 14, Finn made sure to include the following comment from an anonymous "Saudi analyst" in his June 12 piece:

"A Saudi analyst said the Saudis have confirmed a family tie between Binalshibh and one of the key hijackers, Khalid Al Mihdhar..."

Just based on Finn's June 12 item, one could quite effectively draw the following logical syllogism: al-Mihdhar = Malaysia meeting ; Binalshibh = al-Mihdhar; therefore, Binalshibh = Malaysia meeting. The only mystery equation in Finn's June 12 piece would be: Atta + X = Spain meeting. On July 14, he would provide the mystery variable: X = Binalshibh. Set-up and payoff. Nicely done. In his concise, efficient work of June 12, Finn had done an admirable job in relaying the unfolding tale of Binalshibh and his recruiter, Zammar, setting them up for their subsequent chapter installments in the 9/11 Serial. Never was an information campaign more artfully produced - with due acknowledgment, of course, to all those nameless "counterterrorism officials" and "analysts."

Several weeks later, on September 9, 2002, the die was cast. Al-Jazeera was broadcasting Part I of Fouda's historic interview with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh. For the first time, millions would hear - from the planners themselves - exactly how the September 11 plot was put in motion. It was al-Jazeera's version of VH1's Behind The Music, featuring guest commentaries from Vincent Cannistraro and Lyndon La Rouche. Unfortunately, viewers would only get the audio feed of Khalid and Binalshibh, as Binalshibh and Khalid purportedly had confiscated from Fouda his videotape of the proceedings before he had taken leave of them back in June.

In more ways than one, September 9 was an ideal launch date for the interview broadcast. By then, the mainstream media had the whole summer to feed the public - and themselves - with various leaks, revelations, and "official" comments concerning Khalid and Binalshibh's newfound place in the 9/11 pantheon. Set-up and payoff. Moreover, the interview was now being broadcast in the immediate lead-up to the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, thereby further raising the profile of this historic broadcast. And indeed, there was something in it for everyone. For the mainstream folks, there was of course the first-person, blow-by-blow, account of the September 11 preparations, which pretty much served to corroborate practically every single factoid offered over the past year by an army of nameless, faceless counterterror officials and experts. For the headline writers, there was the throwaway nugget concerning one of the hijacked planes that was headed for Congress (perhaps a veiled warning of future mischief to be directed against our submissive lawmakers in the unlikely event they might sprout some vertebrae). And for the more conspiracy-minded, one could reference La Rouche's take on the widely marketed neo-con "cabal", as well as Cannistraro's sly references to those cheering Israelis atop the white van.

It was practically a seamless propaganda extravaganza, except for one small detail - Fouda had gone on record as dating the interview to June of 2002, thereby raising the prospect of two plausible scenarios. Scenario One: Khalid and Binalshibh's respective roles in the plot were first discovered solely due to Fouda's contact with them; or Scenario Two: The decision to send Fouda on his interview errand was made at the same time that a decision was made to market Khalid as the new 9/11 mastermind. Of the two scenarios, the first one was far more palatable - from a propaganda perspective - as at least it could be kept within the borders of plausible deniability, and only Fouda would get burned by it. The second scenario, however, would raise the prospect of one of those uncomfortable coincidences that could conceivably expose the 9/11 Legend as a pre-fabricated set-up.

Only two days after the initial broadcast of Fouda's interview with Khalid and Binalshibh - on the first anniversary commemorating the 9/11 attacks - Pakistani forces, accompanied by FBI agents, raided an apartment complex in Karachi. After a "four hour" gun battle involving "hundreds" of Pakistani soldiers and policemen, the authorities captured, among a few others, Ramzi Binalshibh himself. Their original target, however, had been Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom they had been tracking for months throughout Karachi. While Khalid had just barely slipped away only a few hours before Pakistani forces had arrived at his door, the authorities were reportedly "surprised" to discover that they had netted Binalshibh in the process. At least that is now the official version of the day's events. As revealed by Syed Saleem Shahzad in an Asia Times Online article dated October 30, 2002, the shootout ended with the deaths of two al-Qaida fighters, one of them identified as Khalid. Here was Shahzad's report of the events: "The FBI, still keen to take [Khalid] Shaikh Mohammed alive, teargassed the area, and a number of people were captured. However, despite instructions to the contrary, a few Pakistani Rangers entered the flat, where they found [Khalid] Shaikh Mohammed and another man, allegedly with their hands up. The Rangers nevertheless opened fire on the pair.

Later, the Pakistani press carried pictures of a message scrawled in blood on the wall of the flat, proclaiming the Muslim refrain of Kalma, in Arabic:

"There is no God except Allah, Mohammed is his messenger". An official who was present in the flat at the time of the shooting has told Asia Times Online that the message was written by Shaikh Mohammed with his own blood as his life drained away from him... ...But now it emerges that an Arab woman and a child were taken to an ISI safe house, where they identified the Shaikh Mohammed's body as their husband and father... ... The widow subsequently underwent exhaustive interrogation in the custody of FBI officials..."

According to Shahzad, Khalid's wife and child remained in FBI custody as of the date of the report - that is, six weeks after the raid. It is fair game, though, to question the authenticity of his information, though his sources were "close to Pakistani intelligence agents." Yet, as we shall see, authorities eventually did confirm one crucial portion in Shahzad's account: Khalid's wife and two young sons - aged 9 and 7 - were apprehended in the raid, and immediately handed over (in the later, official version) to Pakistani custody. Yet this information officially would not be revealed until one week after Khalid's later "official" capture on March 1, 2003. In the meantime, other reports were circulating that Khalid had, in fact, been captured alive in the September 11, 2002 raid. According to a Fox News report on September 16, 2002:

"[U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleeza] Rice could not confirm speculation that another Al Qaeda suspect arrested last week was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, one of Usama bin Laden's chief lieutenants.

'I wouldn't rule anything out here, but I think that we'll just wait and see how this unfolds,' she said."

Whatever the truth of the matter, something strange, indeed, was unfolding just below the surface of the "official" events. A week before the Sept. 11 2002 raid, this author had first posted an article entitled Daniel Pearl and The Paymaster of 9/11, an analysis of the controversy surrounding the 9/11 paymaster role and its essential connection with the Pearl kidnapping. Days earlier, researcher Thompson,Paul of the Center For Cooperative Research had posted his own analysis of this anomaly. Now, within a week after the raid, the Pearl killing was being woven anew into the 9/11 Legend. As reported in the same September 16 Fox News item:

"Earlier Monday, another government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said police were investigating whether suspects arrested with Binalshibh were involved in the murder of American reporter Daniel Pearl. If a link were established, it would be the first evidence that Al Qaeda may have been involved in Pearl's abduction and killing."

The evidence of an al-Qaida connection with the Pearl killing - as exhaustively documented by this author and Thompson - was all over the place, as, unfortunately, was the evidence of a massively choreographed disinformation campaign. Now, within weeks of Binalshibh's Sept. 11, 2002 arrest, the disinformation apparatus was revisiting the Daniel Pearl thread of the 9/11 Legend, this time with a bombshell UPI exclusive from Richard Sale and Anwar Iqbal, dated September 30, 2002:

"Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was investigating the man who allegedly planned the Sept. 11 airplane hijackings and attacks on New York and Washington when he was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan, according to two Central Intelligence Agency officials.

Bob Baer, a former case officer in the agency's Directorate of Operations, said he provided Pearl with unpublished information about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed... ...'I was working with Pearl,' said Baer, who had written a book about his time as a CIA official and has acted as a consultant and source for numerous media outlets. 'We had a joint project. Mohammed was the story he was working on, not Richard Reid.' "

There appeared to be a strategy underlying Baer's timely admission, conveyed several months after he published his best-selling book, See No Evil, which made him the media "go-to guy" concerning CIA weaknesses and blind spots leading up to 9/11. To confirm Baer's stunning admission about Pearl, UPI had conferred with the spokesman of Pakistan's military government, as well as "Pakistani intelligence sources," all of whom who were likewise suggesting that Pearl was more likely tracking down Khalid.

Then what of Omar Saeed Sheikh, the supposed official mastermind of the Pearl kidnapping (and unofficial 9/11 paymaster), now facing a sentence of death? As revealed in the same September 30, 2002 UPI article:

"... there were reports that four other men had also been arrested by Pakistani police in connection with the [Pearl] murder. But Pakistani security officials told UPI that in order for the new suspects to be put on trial, the four convicted men would also have to be tried again, because evidence against the new suspects undermined the case against Omar and his accomplices."

It wasn't hard to guess what was going on here. Quite simply, Omar Saeed - after having been definitively edged out of the 9/11 paymaster role by way of the possibly fictitious Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi - was now being edged out of the less incendiary Pearl kidnap mastermind role by way of al-Hisawi's alleged money trail accomplice, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. In other words, Omar Saeed was well on his way to becoming an obscure historical footnote in both of these instances, disappearing down the black hole of the Pakistani justice system as others were being set up to take his place in the spotlight "for the record." More significantly, the official record was now effectively muddying Omar Saeed's prior roles by conflating a new "paymaster" (al-Hisawi) with the new "9/11 mastermind" (Khalid), who was now also explicitly tagged as the mastermind behind the Pearl killing. Thus, a new 9/11/Paymaster/Pearl thread could be officially generated without any noticeable mention of Omar Saeed.

On September 26, 2002 , only days before Baer's bombshell admission, John Lumpkin of the Associated Press presented his update on the 9/11 paymaster role. Recall that it was Lumpkin who had written, back in early June 2002, the definitive article introducing Khalid as the 9/11 mastermind, including references to the now-official paymaster Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi (a.k.a. Shaikh Saiid al-Sharif) and Ramzi Binalshibh. Now, Lumpkin was reporting the contents of Robert Mueller's formerly secret testimony before the Joint Senate-House Committee, made back in early June 2002, around the time of Lumpkin's key article on Khalid. Referencing Mueller's information, Lumpkin was now naming three official 9/11 paymasters: Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi (still a.k.a. Shaikh Saiid al-Sharif), a new character named Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Ramzi Binalshibh. In this latest version, Mohammed Atta was demoted from his formerly well-publicized role as the hijackers' purse-holder: "Among the hijackers, Marwan Al-Shehhi has emerged as the moneyman, [Mueller] said." Omar Saeed, the $100,000 transaction, and Atta's Florida bank account were now distant memories, obscured by a profusion of money trails leading any number of ways to their respective paymasters.

Lumpkin also took the opportunity now to publicly link up Omar Saeed's replacement, al-Hisawi, with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed by way of Mueller's June 2002 secret testimony, revealing that al-Hisawi's bank accounts in the UAE connected him to an alias used by Khalid. And, as if to lay the groundwork for Khalid and al-Hisawi's eventual simultaneous capture, Lumpkin wrote, "Both al-Hisawi and Mohammed are at large and are among the most wanted al-Qaida figures remaining." He might also have mentioned Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, but then that wasn't the point of the article. As I have argued, the time was fast approaching for al-Hisawi, Binalshibh, and Khalid (in conjunction with the Moussaoui indictment) to wrap up this segment of the 9/11 Legend and to take their indelible places in the official history books.

As for Baer, it was a bit difficult - though not impossible - to reconcile his version of the Pearl story with Fox News analyst (and counterterror expert) Mansoor Ijaz's version. Recall that Ijaz had personally claimed that he was the one who had set up Pearl with his leads and appointments. In Ijaz's account - referenced by Robert Sam Anson in the August 2002 issue of Vanity Fair - there was no sign of Baer. As reported by Anson, Pearl's Indian intelligence contacts directed him to Ijaz, who then proceeded to set up Pearl's leads in Pakistan. In Baer's version, it was Baer himself who had initiated contact with Pearl, calling him up with a "hot story on terrorism." Baer's "hot story" begins in December 1997, when, after having "officially" left the C.I.A. to become a terrorism consultant, he met a former Qatari police chief. The ex-police chief informed Baer that, some time in 1996, the FBI had learned that Khalid and an accomplice were hiding out in Qatar. I quote the abovementioned Sept. 30 2002 UPI article as to what happened next:

"While pretending to help, elements in the Qatari government stalled U.S. agents and supplied the two suspects, [Khalid Shaikh] Mohammed and [Shawqui] Islambuli with passports in fake names and spirited them out of the country."

Nice story. Did it happen? As of Baer's admission, it apparently is now part of Khalid's "official" legend, taking its place alongside the factoid detailing Khalid's "secret" indictment in 1996. In Baer's book, See No Evil, Khalid is mentioned briefly as an expert in hijacking planes, but precious little detail is offered. One must be extremely cautious in assimilating any "official" details about Khalid offered after June 2002, as one cannot be sure as to which biographical details were fabricated solely to buttress Khalid's early June 2002 legend as the 9/11 mastermind. Interestingly, while Baer's brief reference to Khalid in his book is one of the very few public characterizations of him offered between September 2001 and June 2002, one must wonder why Baer chose to wait a good eight months after the Pearl kidnapping before revealing this new chapter about Khalid. Even more so, one must wonder why, back in June 2002, when Khalid was making the headlines as the newly marketed 9/11 mastermind - and at a time when the red-hot Baer was doing the post-9/11 media circuit - he apparently did not find it newsworthy to reveal the Khalid angle to the Pearl story. Or perhaps he had forgotten it altogether, and it had taken as long as three weeks after the Binalshibh arrest to jog his memory.

But with his memory now firmly jogged, apparently he would set out to discover what happened to his "joint project" partner, Daniel Pearl. Perhaps to his horror, he discovered that Pearl might have been disposed of by their joint research subject. "I have heard from (intelligence) people who follow this closely that it was people close to [Khalid Shaikh] Mohammed that killed him [Pearl], if it wasn't Mohammed himself," Baer revealed to UPI.

Backing up Baer's contention was Yosef Bodansky, the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, who "told UPI emphatically, '[Khalid Shaikh] Mohammed was Pearl's killer.'"

In case there was any further doubt as to Baer's credibility, UPI informed its readers that "another former 30-year veteran of CIA confirmed Baer's account. He asked that his name not be used but he endorsed Baer: 'I'm surprised Baer is on the record, but he really knows his stuff on this.' " Under the circumstances, would it be a stretch to surmise that this anonymous "former" C.I.A. veteran might possibly be Vincent Cannistraro? Certainly, it is more than likely that they would know one another, as both Baer and Cannistraro had worked on the Pan Am 103 investigation in Lockerbie, Scotland. Moreover, the UPI writer of the September 30 article, Richard Sale, would later go on to cite both Baer and Cannistraro (on record here) for their views of the neo-con clique in Washington - the one that was widely marketed as pushing for war in Iraq. Sale's February 11, 2003 UPI article quoted Cannistraro thusly: " 'Clearly Iraq is not the last phase of what the administration tends to do in the Middle East.' According to the neo-con theory, [Cannistraro] said, 'Syria is to be the next target.' He concurred with another view in Washington that holds that part of the Bush plan was to 'wean the Jewish lobby away from the Democrats' and that 'it's already pretty much happened.' "

As for Baer's own assessment of the neo-cons:

"Former CIA official Robert Baer, when asked about the master plan for the Middle East, told UPI last fall that Bush's team allegedly wanted 'to divide up Syria, give part of Iraq to Turkey, overthrow the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, [and] restore the Hashemites to the Hijaz,' a very center of Saudi Arabian culture. 'The underlying motivation' for this, Baer said, 'is Israel...' "

Recall that previously I had argued that both the "Jewish" neo-cons and the state of Israel were to be set up as second tier proxy/patsies for the events of 9/11. And while 9/11 was not at issue in the above-referenced article, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that the article was meant to be read on two levels. On the "mainstream" level, Baer and Cannistraro were pushing the view that the approaching war in Iraq was a project of an insular group of neo-cons acting on behalf of the state of Israel, allied with the Jewish lobby. No indication here of a 9/11 conspiracy. Elsewhere, Cannistraro and Baer had repeatedly gone on record as adhering to the main contours of the Official 9/11 Legend - that al-Qaida was the key perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks, perhaps with a bit of help from Saudi elements. On the "alternative", more "conspiracy-minded" level, Cannistraro and Baer were reinforcing suspicions that this powerful neo-con clique was perhaps responsible for plots more sinister than a push toward Iraq. In this respect, perhaps it was not just a matter of happenstance that Yosri Fouda had chosen to pair Cannistraro's commentary about the cheering Israelis on the white van with Lyndon La Rouche's well-circulated theory of a "rogue", self-contained, "cabal" of largely Jewish neo-cons behind 9/11. Again, something for everyone.

Cannistraro and Baer - who both have gone on record as criticizing the neo-cons and their spurious evidentiary claims of an Iraqi connection to 9/11 - also share a common journalistic connection with Seymour Hersh, the investigative journalist who has played his own part in discrediting the neo-cons and the state of Israel. Hersh, in fact, wrote the foreword to Baer's See No Evil - a recommended book for those wedded to the complacency theory of 9/11, to be read in conjunction with Brisard and Dasquie's The Forbidden Truth and Coleen Rowley's congressional testimony.

Hersh, a classic "access" reporter who first made his reputation in an expose of the Mai Lai Massacre in Vietnam, was playing the neo-con angle for all it was worth. In the Spring of 2003, in the midst of global hysteria over Iraq, Hersh raised allegations that arch-neo-con Richard Perle had peddled his influence with the Defense Policy Board for financial gain, thereby forcing Perle to resign his position as Chairman. Thereafter, Hersh revealed - in a May 12, 2003 article in The New Yorker - the intellectual influence behind the scheming, insular neo-cons: the late Leo Strauss, a professor at the University of Chicago. In Hersh's telling, the Bush Administration was in the grip of the influential Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon, dominated by the neo-cons, who were now branded as "Straussians." In nailing down his point, Hersh quoted Cannistraro, who claimed to have intimate knowledge of this Straussian clique: "The group's members, Cannistraro said, 'reinforce each other because they're the only friends they have, and they all work together. This has been going on since the nineteen-eighties, but they've never been able to coalesce as they have now. September 11th gave them the opportunity, and now they're in heaven."

Again, Cannistraro here can be - and probably was intended to be - read on two levels. On the "mainstream" level, the charge consists of nothing more sinister than that of an "opportunistic" post-9/11 grab at the foreign policy agenda. Yet on the "alternative" level, Cannistraro was providing a powerful ready-made quote for use by the "9/11 conspiracy crowd." Indeed, the Lyndon La Rouche apparatus at Executive Intelligence Review was once more playing counterpoint to Cannistraro's melody - for, whether coincidental or otherwise, La Rouche's unveiling of Leo Strauss as the intellectual godfather of the neo-cons (whom he dubbed as the Children of Satan) had in fact just preceded Hersh's more "mainstream" take on the neo-con Strauss crowd. And now that Cannistraro had furnished his "smoking gun" quote, the LaRouchites at Executive Intelligence Review were subsequently quoting Cannistraro in order to burnish their contention that 9/11 was likely the work of the insular neo-con "Perle/Wolfowitz cabal".

Meanwhile, both Baer and Cannistraro were lending their growing reputations as critics of the War on Iraq in order to bolster the legitimacy of the case for the War on Terror. At least that was the inevitable effect. Like Brisard and Dasquie, Baer and Cannistraro seemed to be informational Zeligs, showing up all over the media map, structuring perceptions in a very definite direction, offering legends and counter-legends intended for various audiences, both mainstream and alternative. On the broadest level, Cannistraro and, especially, Baer were advocating the complacency theory behind 9/11, posing as mainstream "critics" of their "former" CIA employers while at the same time keeping the general contours of the Official 9/11 Legend in place. In lockstep with the neo-cons, they were also raising suspicions of possible Saudi perfidy, primarily for the Saudi role as financial and political enablers of al-Qaida. A sub-set of the Saudi thread also connected with the Cheney/ Halliburton / Enron /Big Oil theory behind 9/11. This theory had a dual use - one, for an opportunistic complacency theory behind 9/11, and the other for an opportunistic complicity theory. In any case, the ailing Cheney had already been pre-packaged as a self-contained, potentially "rogueish", power behind the Bush throne, while the dead husk of Enron was marketed as the self-contained, rogue manifestation of "Big Oil". If "Big Oil" and Cheney seemed to be taking a large dose of bad publicity in the first several months following 9/11 and the War in Afghanistan, the storyline - and the villain role - gradually shifted over to the Perle/Wolfowitz neo-cons in the year-long lead-up to the War In Iraq. And here, too, a dual use was made of the neo-cons - one, to raise suspicions of premeditated complicity, and alternatively, to raise the allegation of post-facto opportunism.

As for Iraq, Cannistraro seemed to be playing it both ways - casting aspersions on the Iraqis for the Oklahoma bombing, yet giving them a clean bill of health with regard to the alleged evidence linking them to 9/11. And, as stated before, Cannistraro and Baer's criticisms of the War In Iraq only served to bolster the credibility of their opinions concerning the War On Terror - and, by extension, to lend credibility to the Official 9/11 Legend. If, during the whole War In Iraq episode, the Bush and Blair regimes' sputtering efforts at propaganda and disinformation were being repeatedly exposed as amateurish and ill-considered, then surely - the reasoning goes - any attempts at information management concerning 9/11 would likewise have been exposed as fraudulent.

Yet it is a curious fact that, in the aftermath of the War In Iraq - at a time when more Americans do not trust CNN - the structural pivots of the Official 9/11 Legend appear more sturdy and unassailable than ever before. For surely if all those British and American intelligence operatives were heaping scorn on the "evidence" linking Iraq to 9/11, then why not repose our trust in them when they tell us exactly who was behind September 11? And surely if the German and French governments were so diametrically opposed to the geopolitical designs of the Americans (or their neo-con controllers), then why would they support an imperialistic American foreign policy when conducted under the cover of a specious "war" on "terror?" Quite simply, they wouldn't - unless, as I have argued, this War On Terror is being spearheaded by, and on behalf of, a global political and corporate elite with mutual financial interests and perhaps a psychopathological bent toward corruption and bribery.

In this context - and in light of the foregoing evidence - it would be reasonable to surmise that some of the now-official C.I.A. "outsider" critics like Cannistraro and Baer were in fact deeply inside the loop, while the widely marketed "insiders" like Perle and Wolfowitz could now be looked upon as useful idiots, in the same manner that Richard Mellon Scaife had played the useful idiot in keeping Bill Clinton on a very short leash. Here, too, even a consummate insider like George W. Bush himself would have a leash placed around his neck - just in case. As I stated before, one way to pull off a tightly compartmentalized conspiracy is to ensure that all key parties are potentially open to blackmail, thereby ensuring that no one individual player may grab the upper hand by unilaterally incriminating the others. In this respect, we may see that BinLaden was set up to play his headliner role in the Official 9/11 Legend precisely due to his family connections with the Bushes and the Saudi royal family. Recall that, similarly, the Bushes had family connections with the Hinckleys. Thus, if Vice-President Bush had ascended to the Presidency in the aftermath of a Reagan assassination, he, too, would have been kept on a very short leash - by reason of his obvious connection with the lone gunman, if for no other.

Perhaps, then, it is not so surprising that one of the major Democrat contenders for the 2004 Presidential election was (until recently) Senator - and former Florida Governor - Bob Graham, the congressional 9/11 Inquiry co-chair who just happens to be one of the most potentially compromised post-9/11 politicians by virtue of his well-timed September 11 breakfast meeting with Omar Saeed's reported "handler," ISI General Mahmud Ahmad. Curiously, it was Graham who made waves over the past year by publicly "fighting" to declassify several pages of his 9/11 congressional inquiry report, cryptically suggesting that a "foreign power" was involved. Was he alluding to Pakistan by way of the ISI? Or Israel by way of its art student ring? As it turned out, Graham was playing the Saudi thread, and - like Cannistraro and Baer - was doing double duty as a critic of the War In Iraq while posing as a champion of the War On Terror. But more significantly, Graham's red herring crusade for the declassification of a couple dozen pages also served to cast an imprimatur of "independence" on the remaining 400+ pages in a report that covered all the nooks and crannies of the Official 9/11 Legend.

As of this writing, the key Democrat candidate for the 2004 Presidential election is retired General Wesley Clark, a so-called "spurned" former Republican who has been marketed as a critic of the War In Iraq - though only months after he first gained mass notice as a CNN commentator helping to "spin" that very war by "walking" viewers through the battlefield scenarios concocted by the U.S. General Staff in Iraq. General Clark had left a lucrative position as a managing director of the Stephens Group in order to take up his duties at CNN. Incidentally, the founding principal of the Arkansas-based Stephens Group, Jackson Stephens, was a major financial benefactor of both George W. Bush and William J. Clinton. Stephens - once a roommate of former President Jimmy Carter - also reportedly had played a key role as a go-between and broker for BCCI's aborted venture into American banking.

Judging by the record of the past thirty years, it is a safe bet to say that whoever is on the menu as a leading Presidential contender for 2004 (particularly if he is a Democrat), he will meet with the approval of the Stephens camp - and its affiliated cliques.

Next: End Game: Arresting The Paymaster(s) TruthLiesEndgame

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