American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  The first news reports expressed surprise at how little debris was visible at the crash site. The Pennsylvania state Web site even said it was hard to believe that a 757 plunged into the ground with such force that it literally disintegrated and created a still-smoldering crater in the ground. Then, five days later, CNN News reported “apparently another debris site” that had been cordoned off six to eight miles away. This, the commentator said, “raises a number of questions, why ... could it have blown that far away?”25

  The FBI immediately took over the investigation, and for a long time wouldn’t honor family members’ requests, asking if they could listen to the cockpit voice recorder. This was finally allowed on April 18, 2002, provided they’d agree not to reveal anything about what they heard. And, for some reason, the last three minutes weren’t on there. Barry Lichty, the mayor of the nearby town of Indian Lake, says he heard what sounded like a missile fire that morning. The military did admit, some years later, that it was tracking Flight 93 and a Colonel Robert Marr recalled hearing that “we will take lives in the air to preserve lives on the ground.” He then ordered the air controllers to have fighter jets intercept the plane. But supposedly, the commercial flight crashed before that could happen. “Of course we never fired upon the plane,” said Dick Cheney, “we just witnessed an act of heroism.”26

  The official story is that, for the first time in history, the black boxes were not recovered. Not from any of the four planes. For the TV pilot I did about 9/11 on truTV, we spoke to a guy who knew about the existence of three black boxes. He physically saw one, and his partner saw two more. He says they were taken away in a black government van. Another thing I find very interesting: Also for the first time in history, no attempt was made to reconstruct the planes with whatever parts they could find. They even did this with TWA Flight 800 that went down in 1996 in the Atlantic, and for that they had to dive down 1,200 feet.

  After Pearl Harbor, General Martin Short and some admirals were fired because of their alleged negligence. After 9/11, not a single employee at the FAA or NORAD got punished. In fact, all the major military men involved received promotions. They included General Richard Myers, who was named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on October 1.

  The way I see it, with all the advance warnings about a terrorist attack, a fair number of Bush’s team should have gotten the axe. Except, right up to the president himself, it was all about denial. Here was Bush in 2004: “Had I had any inkling whatsoever that the people were going to fly airplanes into buildings, we would have moved heaven and earth to save the country.” Here was Rumsfeld, testifying before the 9/11 Commission: “I knew of no intelligence during the six-plus months leading up to September 11 to indicate terrorists would hijack commercial airlines, use them as missiles to fly into the Pentagon or the World Trade Center towers.” And here was Condoleezza Rice: “This kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us.”27

  Oh really? What about the intelligence briefing Bush received on August 6, 2001, that was headed “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” and even mentioned possible hijackings.28 Or Condi Rice being warned about al-Qaeda’s plotting by then-CIA Director George Tenet on July 10, 2001, but brushing him off.29 The 9/11 Commission was aware of this, but decided to leave it out if their report. The CIA’s counterintelligence chief, J. Cofer Black, later “felt there were things the commission wanted to know about and things they didn’t want to know about.”30 Rice responded: “What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible.”31 Seems she stammered over her words a little.

  These were far from the only warnings. Israel sent two senior agents of the Mossad to Washington in August 2001 to “alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many as 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation.”32 Eight months before the attacks, French intelligence warned the U.S. in nine different reports about “Airplane Hijacking Plans by Radical Islamists” connected to bin Laden and the Taliban.33 FBI agents working out of the Minneapolis and Phoenix offices tried to alert their superiors. Dr. Parke Godfrey, an associate professor of computer science at Toronto’s York University, said under oath in a New York courtroom that a longtime associate of his, Susan Lindauer, warned him several times and as late as August 2001 “that we expected a major attack on the southern part of Manhattan, and that the attack would encompass the World Trade Center,” an attack “that would involve airplanes and possibly a nuclear weapon.” Lindauer, who says she was a CIA asset, claimed to have made an attempt to inform John Ashcroft at the Justice Department, who referred her to the Office of Counter-Terrorism.34

  Which brings us to the whole question of the 19 alleged hijackers. Did you ever wonder how our government came up with their identities so fast? Even before the last plane crashed, the FBI was telling counterterrorism official Richard Clarke they had a list of the names.35 It took two years to get indictments on the Lockerbie bombing, but not this time! Except, on September 16, one of the supposed hijackers walked into the consulate in Saudi Arabia—he was actually a pilot for Saudi Airlines. On September 22, one of the Flight 11 hijackers announced he was alive and well. Two more Saudi pilots did the same thing the next day. On September 27, CBS found hijacker Hamzi (Flight 77) working for an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia. No matter. All these guys are still on the list today as being among the perpetrators.36

  What evidence do we have then? Two days after the attacks, our government said it was clear-cut that Osama bin Laden was the man behind it all, and that the Taliban in Afghanistan would soon be handing over its proof. Ten more days went by, at which time Colin Powell said he’d soon show us the documentation. Meantime, in three separate statements, bin Laden denied any involvement. On December 13, the State Department released a video purporting to show him describing the attacks, but before long a lot of people were questioning whether it was authentic. On the day after Christmas, a Taliban official said he’d attended Osama’s funeral! But on the 27th of December came a bin Laden video praising al-Qaeda’s successful hit on us. Another couple years went by before a third tape surfaced—October 29, 2004, a few days before the presidential election (think “heightened terror alert!”)—with a blatant taking of full responsibility. However, as of June 6, 2006, the FBI said it had “no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” He’s been charged with several crimes related to terrorist attacks, but not with 9/11.37 I find that very odd. Not one shred of evidence produced in a courtroom that leads to the conclusion bin Laden spearheaded these attacks. The justice system that works for anything else is suddenly suspended over terrorism.

  We’re led to believe that a hijacker’s passport flew out of his pocket when his plane hit the tower, made it safely through 9,000 gallons of jet fuel, and landed to be found on a sidewalk a thousand feet below. Another hijacker’s ID supposedly turned up in the Pentagon wreckage, one of a few pieces that survived. Meantime, awaiting discovery in rental cars left behind at Boston Logan and Washington Dulles airports, was enough evidence to convict had they lived: an Arabic flight manual, a check made out to a Phoenix flight school, maps of Washington and New York, and more.38 Does this remind anyone else of Oswald leaving behind a paper trail to his purchase of the rifle, or James Earl Ray depositing his bundle full of incriminating evidence near the scene of the crime? Alleged hijacker Mohamed Atta was first said to have left a rented Mitsubishi at Boston Logan, but that story was later changed into a blue or silver Nissan left in Portland, Maine. Didn’t seem to matter which vehicle, because both were said to be filled with box cutters and other incriminating items.

  These guys were all made out to be fanatic, Koran-toting Muslims ready to die for Allah in a Holy War against America. Except, in their final days, according to people who knew them, they were drinking, visiting strip clubs, soliciting prostitutes, and watchi
ng porno on the tube. Atta’s girlfriend said he liked to snort cocaine. Atta seemed to be all over the place before 9/11: doing coke in Hollywood, Florida; living in Venice, Florida, near the NSA; and in Hamburg, Germany.39

  Who some of the hijackers were really working for, at least once upon a time, first came out in media tidbits. From Newsweek (September 15, 2001): “U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged hijackers of the planes that were used in the terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s.” Same day, New York Times: “The Defense Department said Mr. Atta had gone to the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama; Mr. al-Omari to the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas; and Mr. al-Ghamdi to the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio in Monterey, Calif.”

  Well, our military’s School of the Americas once helped train the Central American death squads, so our providing lethal skills to terrorists—excuse me, I mean “freedom fighters”—shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. But it gets stranger still. Two of the alleged hijackers rented an apartment from and actually lived with FBI informants. The CIA had operational interest in two of them, Nawaz al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. FBI agents believed “that the agency was protecting Midhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them,” or alternatively that “the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence” using them.40

  The CIA goes way back with these guys. They were recruited into the secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, back in the late 1980s. In fact, the term al-Qaeda is said to have been invented by the CIA to designate a database of recruits into the Mujahideen. Michael Springman was head of the visa section at our embassy in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, and he remembers granting visas to “terrorists” who’d been recruited by CIA and sent for training to America. Some of them fought in Bosnia during the ’92 to ’95 period. Springman can be seen in the documentary Zero saying that many of the hijackers he read about in the L.A. Times were once on his visa list in Jeddah. He called the FBI a number of times, who Springman says responded: “We’ll get back to you. Six years later I’m still waiting.”41

  Osama bin Laden himself started out helping the CIA in Afghanistan. In 2009, a former FBI translator named Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell. 42 The U.S., she said, had kept up “intimate relations” with bin Laden “all the way until that day of September 11”—using him sometimes for ops in central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. The process Edmonds outlined involved the use of Turkey (with assistance of “actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia”) as proxies, with those folks in turn employing bin Laden and the Taliban. The goals? Control of the huge energy supplies in Central Asia, for one. Maybe the real reason we invaded Afghanistan? Sibel Edmonds testified for three and a half hours to the 9/11 Commission, but it ended up being classified.43

  Bin Laden, like 15 of the 19 alleged hijackers, came from Saudi Arabia. Back in October 2003, an article in Vanity Fair had questioned the FBI’s letting six planes of Middle Eastern nationals—most of them members of the Saudi royal family—fly out of the U.S. soon after 9/11. The 9/11 Commission concluded that, after the Saudi government requested this out of fear for their safety, the FBI had “conducted a satisfactory screening of Saudi nationals who left the United States.” But one of those planes stopped four times at different locations around the U.S. on September 19, picking up half-siblings and other bin Laden relatives who supposedly had no connection to him. Finally, in 2007, a heavily censored FBI report said: “The plane was chartered either by the Saudi Arabian Royal Family or Osama bin Laden.”44 Osama? You mean to tell me the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks might have been chartering a plane on our soil eight days after this happened?

  It just gets curiouser and curiouser, in the words of Lewis Carroll from Alice in Wonderland. FBI Director Robert Mueller testified about how the terrorists managed to finance themselves, saying that they’d had all their money wired in small amounts to avoid being detected. Except, it came out that General Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, had ordered one of his agents to wire transfer $100,000 to Mohamed Atta. The ISI and the CIA’s relationship dates back to the 1980s when the Mujahideen got set up. Ahmad, as it happened, had come to Washington a week before the attacks for a meeting with CIA chief George Tenet and some people from Bush’s National Security Council.45,46 When the story came out about the wire transfer to Atta, Ahmad abruptly retired from the ISI.

  The families of many 9/11 victims have gone to court seeking evidence of the Saudi royal family’s bankrolling of al-Qaeda. Senator Bob Graham wrote a book that discussed the 28-page section about Saudi Arabia that the CIA, FBI, and NSA had blacked out of his committee’s report. In the book, Graham noted ties between the hijackers and the Saudis and flatly stated that “the White House was directing the cover-up” to protect “America’s relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”47

  Ever heard of an army project called Able Danger? It was established in 1999 as part of the Defense Department’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM). According to Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a leading member of the team with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA): “Able Danger was an offensive counter-terrorism project which was designed to take and kill—the military term is reduce—senior al-Qaeda leadership.”48 It wasn’t long before the Able Danger squad uncovered al-Qaeda cells in the New York City area, one of whose members was Mohamed Atta. At least six witnesses later recalled seeing Atta’s picture on a chart they’d drawn up back in January 2000. Turns out three more of the alleged hijackers had been ID’ed by Able Danger before 9/11, as well.49

  Colonel Shaffer worked closely with navy captain Scott Phillpott, and says he attempted to set up a meeting between Phillpott’s superior officer and FBI counterterrorism agents in D.C., so they could work together on following these cells. But three times the SOCOM lawyers kept a meeting from happening. Soon after that, Shaffer got transferred to a DIA project in Latin America.50

  Then, after 9/11, he and Phillpott tried to bring the story forward to Congress and the 9/11 Commission. In June 2005, a reporter for a small-town Pennsylvania paper wrote a piece that opened with: “Two years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, US intelligence officials linked Mohamed Atta to al-Qaida, and discovered he and two others were in Brooklyn.” You might think the national media would have jumped all over that, but they didn’t. Eventually, the New York Times did a few stories. But when the 9/11 Commission came up with reasons for leaving Able Danger out of its report, the media nodded off again. Chairman Thomas Keen went so far as to say that “the recollections of the intelligence officers cannot be verified by any document.” Hence, it didn’t happen. And the Pentagon wouldn’t let Shaffer or anyone else testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.51

  We talked to Shaffer while putting together this chapter. In his opinion, both the Clinton and Bush administrations were covering up their incompetence. “The Department of Defense does not want to get blamed for making bad decisions, which resulted in information not being passed to the FBI, and therefore being a material factor in why 9/11 happened,” he told us. “That’s why you had DOD coming after me because I blew the whistle. DOD has admitted there are 10,000-plus Able Danger documents, but they won’t release a single one. To me that’s bizarre, because most of the targeting information was done on the open Internet and completely unclassified. It does cause you to wonder.”

  9/11 expert David Ray Griffin concluded that the commission and the Pentagon were “covering up dangerous information—information that suggested Atta was being protected. When we combine this observation with other things we have learned about the alleged hijackers—including the money reportedly sent to Atta by the CIA-created [Pakistani] ISI—the Able Danger evidence provides additional reason to suspect that the ‘hijackers’ were really paid assets.”52

  A think tank called the Project for the New American Century, composed mainly of right
-wing ideologues, wrote a report pre-9/11 titled Building America’s Defenses. The document contains this line: “The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

  We all know the results of 9/11: two unending wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964? We were told that American ships were attacked by the North Vietnamese. Now we know that the incident was manufactured by the Pentagon in order to gain support for escalating the Vietnam War. If the United States government was prepared to stage such a gargantuan event in leading our nation to war then, why would they refrain from doing so again today? Might we look at this as a trend, going into these wars under false pretenses?

  Richard A. Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism at the time, wrote in 2009 that Iraq was “a move that many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.... While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad.... Despite being repeatedly told that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney could not abandon the idea.”53

  The 9/11 Commission Report states that “the Bush Administration had repeatedly tied the Iraq War to September 11th.... The panel finds no al-Qaeda-Iraq tie.” Bush then did some backpedaling, saying: “This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam [Hussein] and al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts....” Meetings, it turned out, between bin Laden and Iraqi Intelligence that took place in Sudan back in the mid-1990s! But one prisoner, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, was tortured in 2002 until he’d agree to say that al-Qaeda was linked to Saddam (he died suddenly after being transferred from Egypt to another prison in Libya).