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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
The engineering of a series of provocations to justify military intervention is feasible and could be accomplished with the resources available. - Report of May 1963 to Joint Chiefs of Staff
On September 11, 2001, within hours of the murderous 9/11 attacks, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney had committed America to what they later called the “War on Terror.” It should more properly, I believe, be called the “Terror War,” one in which terror has been directed repeatedly against civilians by all participants, both states and non-state actors. It should also be seen as part of a larger, indeed global, process in which terror has been used against civilians in interrelated campaigns by all major powers, including China in Xinjiang and Russia in Chechnya, as well as the United States. Terror war in its global context should perhaps be seen as the latest stage of the age-long secular spread of transurban civilization into areas of mostly rural resistance – areas where conventional forms of warfare, for either geographic or cultural reasons, prove inconclusive.
1 A shorter version of this paper was presented at the International Hearings on 9/11 at Toronto, September 11, 2011. It can be seen on line at here.
2 But perhaps no single act of terror committed in the last decade, whether by Qaddafi in Libya or Assad in Syria, has surpassed or even come close to the U.S. devastation of the Iraqi city of Fallujah.
3 “Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation,” September 11, 2001, here. On September 20, 2001, Bush said in an address to a joint session of congress, “Our ‘war on terror’ begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
4 On this point see the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 66: “To date we have seen no evidence that …Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”
5 Sunday Times (London), May 1, 2005; Mark Danner, The Secret Way to War: the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's buried history (New York: New York Review Books, 2006).
6 9/11 Commission Report, 266-72 (272).
7 Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski, “Who Is Rich Blee?” 911Truth.org, September 21, 2111, here; Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski, “Insiders voice doubts about CIA's 9/11 story,” Salon, October 14, 2111, here. O’Connor and Nowosielski add corroboration from former Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke. “Clarke said he assumed that ‘there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information/ When asked who might have issued such an order, he replied, ‘I would think it would have been made by the director,” referring to Tenet — although he added that Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today “even if you waterboarded them.’
8 Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots (Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2011).
9 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352-54; Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 203.
10 Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; cf. Wright, Looming Tower, 339-44; discussion in Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 355, 388-89.
11 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 383-86.
12 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 48. Cf. Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; quoted approvingly in Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 399.
13 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95.
14 Lutz Kleverman, “The new Great Game,” Guardian (London), October 19, 2003, here.
15 Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century: A Report of the Project for the New American Century, September 2000, here, 17, 27.
16 “US Pulls out of Saudi Arabia,” BBC News,
April 29, 2003, here.
17 Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enem'ies: inside America's war on terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 31.
18 Bradley Graham, By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 290.
19 PNAC, Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, January 26, 1998, here.
20 Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004). Bacevich was speaking of a 1992 memo drafted by Wolfowitz for then Defense Secretary Cheney, calling for America to retain the power to act unilaterally. See Lewis D. Solomon, Paul D. Wolfowitz: visionary intellectual, policymaker, and strategist (New York: Praeger, 2007), 52; Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 2002), 44.
21 Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 131. Much earlier, on the afternoon of September 11, DOD official Stephen Cambone recorded notes from his conversation with Rumsfeld : “Near term target need – Go massive Sweep it all up thing related and not” (here).
22 Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), 130.
23 Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order,” New Yorker, April 1, 2002, here.
24 Rebuilding America's Defenses – Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century: A Report of the Project for the New American Century, September 2000, here, 17, 27.
25 Ahmed Rashid, Descent into chaos: the United States and the failure of nation building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008), 70, 69; citing Ahmed Rashid, “US Builds Alliances in Central Asia,” Far Eastern Economic Review, May 1, 2000: “The CIA and the Pentagon had been closely collaborating with the Uzbek army and secret services since 1997, providing training, equipment, and mentoring in the hope of using Uzbek Special Forces to snatch Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan, a fact I discovered on a trip to Washington in 2000.”
26 Peter Dale Scott, “The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 21, 2011, here.
27 Scott, The Road to 9/11: wealth, empire, and the future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 9.
28 Estimates of annual spending on Homeland Security range up to a trillion dollars. See Stephan Salisbury, “Weaponizing the Body Politic,” TomDispatch.com, March 4, 2012, here.
29 Cf. Simon Johnson, “Too Big to Jail,” Slate, February 24, 2012, here: “The main motivation behind the administration's indulgence of serious criminality evidently is fear of the consequences of taking tough action on individual bankers. And maybe officials are right to be afraid, given the massive size of the banks in question relative to the economy. In fact, those banks are bigger now than they were before the crisis, and, as James Kwak and I documented at length in our book 13 Bankers, they are much larger than they were 20 years ago.”
30 John Farmer, The Ground Truth: the untold story of America under attack on 9/11 (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), 288; quoted in Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, The Eleventh Day: the full story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden (New York: Ballantine, 2011), 147.
31 Summers, 383-84; cf. Farmer, Ground Truth, 41. Although a Democrat, Berger was subsequently protected by the Republican Bush Administration from having to testify to Congress about his behavior (a condition of his plea bargain).
32 Summers, Eleventh Day, 334.
33 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 72-79. Grewe subsequently left government to work at the Mitre Corp., a private firm doing CIA contract work with the CIA and another private firm, Ptech. Questions about Ptech and Mitre Corpus work on FAA-NORAD interoperability systems were raised in 9/11 testimony presented some years ago by Indira Singh; see Scott, Road to 9/11, 175.
34 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 78. Kirsten Wilhelm of the National Archives told Fenton,(p. 78) that “It appears Barbara Grewe conducted the interviews with ‘John’ [Wilshire] and Jane [Corsi],” another key figure. Wilhelm could find no “memorandum for the record” (MFR) for the Wilshire interview, which Fenton understandably calls “about the most important interview the Commission conducted” (p. 79). Summers, also citing correspondence with Kirsten Wilhelm, disagrees, saying that the report of Wilshire's interview exists, but “is redacted in its entirety” (Summers, Eleventh Day, 381, cf. 552). This is an important point to be focused on in future investigations.
35 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 225.
36 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 38; citing 9/11 Commission Report, 181-82.
37 Michelle has since been identified on the Internet, but so far basically by only one source.
38 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 42-45; summarizing Justice Department IG Report, 239-42; cf. Wright, Looming Tower, 311-12.
39 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 50; summarizing Justice Department IG Report, 242-43; cf. Wright, Looming Tower, 311.
40 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 45.
41 I do not know whether in fact they boarded the plane. However I am now satisfied that al- Mihdhar and al-Hazmi acted as if they intended to hijack, as evidenced by their al Qaeda contacts in Malaysia and elsewhere, their attempts to learn to fly, etc.
42 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 383-86.
43 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 48. Cf. Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; quoted approvingly in Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 399.
44 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95.
45 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 239-42, 310-22. Fenton notes that Corsi worked at FBI HQ, which coordinated “liaisons with foreign services” (Fenton, 313).
46 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 310.
47 The 9/11 Commission Report discounted the importance of al-Bayoumi (217-18); but the Report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 (173-77), even though very heavily redacted at this point, supplied corroborating information, including a report that Basnan had once hosted a party for the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdurrahman, involved in the first World Trade Center bombing of 1993.
48 At first I suspected, as have others, that the two men were Saudi double agents. Another possibility is that they were sent as designated targets, to be surveilled by the Saudis and the Americans separately or together. One of my few disagreements with Fenton is when he calls al-Mihdhar “one of [the hijackers’] 」most experienced operatives” (Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 205). My own impression is that he was either an inexperienced and incompetent spy, or else someone deliberately exposing himself to detection, in order to test American responses.
49 Summers, Eleventh Day, 396.
50 9/11 Commission Report, 184.
51 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 456-57.
52 Thomas E. Ricks and Susan B. Glasser, Washington Post, October 14, 2001, here.
53 Ricks and Susan B. Glasser, Washington Post, October 14, 2001;cf.
54 In 1957, I myself, as a junior Canadian diplomat, acquired a special access, higher- than-top-secret clearance to access intelligence from NATO, a relatively overt and straightforward liaison.
55 For the Ali Mohamed story, see Scott, Road to 9/11, especially 151-60.
56 Scott, Road to 9/11, 158; citing John Berger, “Unlocking 9/11: Paving the Road to 9/11” (here): ”Mohamed was one of the primary sources for the infamous Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily brief (PDB) entitled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.’” The PDB, often cited as an example of the CIA's good performance, is in my opinion more probably another example of the Bin Laden Unit salting the record in preparation for post-9/11 scrutiny. The PDB, without naming Ali Mohamed, refers to him no less than three times as a threat, despite the fact that at the time he was under USG control awaiting sentence for his role in the 1998 embassy plots. The PDB, in other words, appears to have been a performance for the record, analogous to Wilshire's performance in the same month of August at the FBI.
57 John Berger, Ali Mohamed, 20 (Cloonan); 9/11 Commission Report, 261 (PDB).
58 James Risen, New York Times, October 31, 1998; in Scott, Road to 9/11, 346-47.
59 Raleigh News and Observer, November 13, 2001; in Scott, Road to 9/11, 347. I have added the word “Army.” The HQ for USSOCOM itself is at Fort MacDill Air Force Vase in Florida.
60 Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “‘Top Secret America’ A look at the military's Joint Special Operations Command,” Washington Post, September 2, 2011, here.
61 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 168-69; Summers, Eleventh Day, 371, 550.
62 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 372.
63 Scott, American War Machine, 161; Scott, Road to 9/11, 62-63.
64 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, oil, and fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 2000), 129.
65 John Prados, Safe for Democracy, 489; discussion in Scott, American War Machine, 12-13.
66 James Risen, State of War: the secret history of the CIA and the Bush administration (New York: Free Press, 2006), 188-89.
67 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 104.
68 Summers, Eleventh Day, 397.
69 Joseph J. and Susan B. Trento, in Summers, Eleventh Day, 399. Since I presented this paper at a conference in Toronto on September 11, 2011, “Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat who served on the …9/11 Commission, [has] said in a sworn affidavit …that ‘significant questions remain unanswered’ about the role of Saudi institutions. ‘Evidence relating to the plausible involvement of possible Saudi government agents in the September 11th attacks has never been fully pursued,’ Mr. Kerrey said”（ (“Saudi Arabia May Be Tied to 9/11, 2 Ex-Senators Say,” New York Times, February 29, 2001, here).
70 Wright, Looming Tower, 161; in Summers, Eleventh Day, 216.
71 Such corruption is predictable and very widespread. In the notorious cases of Gregory Scarpa and Whitey Bulger, FBI agents in the New York and Boston offices were accused of giving their mob informants information that led to the murder of witnesses and other opponents. Agents in the New York office of the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics became so implicated in the trafficking of their informants that the FBN had to be shut down and reorganized.
72 Ralph Blumenthal, “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast,” New York Times, October 28, 1993, emphasis added. The next day, the Times published a modest correction: “Transcripts of tapes made secretly by an informant, Emad A. Salem, quote him as saying he warned the Government that a bomb was being built. But the transcripts do not make clear the extent to which the Federal authorities knew that the target was the World Trade Center.
73 Scott, Road to 9/11, 145.
74 Peter Dale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington's OnGoing Collusion with Terrorists,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 29, 2011, here. Evan Kohlmann has described how a Zagreb office in support of the Saudi-backed jihad in Bosnia received “all orders and funding directly from the main United States office of Al-Kifah on Atlantic Avenue controlled by Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman” (Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaida's Jihad in Europe, 39-41; citing Steve Coll and Steve LeVine, “Global Network Provides
Money, Haven,” Washington Post, August 3, 1993).
75 Scott, Road to 9/11, 153, 347; citing “Canada freed top al Qaeda operative,” {Toronto} Globe and Mail, November 22, 2001, here.
76 Scott, Road to 9/11, 151-59.
77 Ali Soufan, The Black Banners, 94-95, 561.
78 The corruption appears to be inevitable in superpowers - states which have accumulated power in excess of what is needed for their own defense. The pattern is less discernible in less powerful states like Canada.
79 “America's Afghanistan: The National Security and a Heroin-Ravaged State,” Asia- Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, #20, 2009, May 18, 2009, here. Cf. “U.S. looks into Afghan air force drug allegations,” CNN, March 8, 2012, here: “The United States is investigating allegations that some members of the Afghan air force have used their planes to transport drugs, a U.S. military spokesman said Thursday. Investigators want to know whether the drug-running allegations, first reported in the Wall Street Journal, are linked to the shooting deaths last year of eight U.S. Air Force officers at the airport in the Afghan capital, Kabul. ‘The allegations of improper use of AAF aircraft is being looked into’, said Lt. Col. Tim Stauffer, referring to the allegations that Afghan air force equipment has been used to illegally ferry drugs and arms.”
80 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 310.
81 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95.
82 Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” in Scott, American War Machine, 196.
83 Washington Post, September 30, 2001; in Summers, Eleventh Day, 293; cf. 9/11 Commission Report, 221-22.
84 See Scott, American War Machine, 199-203.
85 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 360-61, 385. There was also apparent withholding of information at a high level in the US Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM): “One official who attended the DO5 [a USJFCOM intelligence unit assigned to watch terrorism against the US] briefing was Vice Adm. Martin J. Meyer, the deputy commander in chief (DCINC), USJFCOM “…But despite the red flags raised during the briefing, Meyer reportedly told Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, the commander of the Continental United States NORAD Region (CONR), and other high-level CONR staffers two weeks before the 9/11 attacks that ‘their concern about Osama bin Laden as a possible threat to America was unfounded and that, to repeat, “If everyone would just turn off CNN, there wouldn't be a threat from Osama bin Laden”’“ (Jeffery Kaye and Jason Leopold, “EXCLUSIVE: New Documents Claim Intelligence on Bin Laden, al Qaeda Targets Withheld From Congress’ 9/11 Probe,” Truthout, June 13, 2011, here).
86 Scott, American War Machine, 201.
87 Scott, American War Machine, 200-02.
88 Clarke, Against All Enemies, 30-33; Summers, Eleventh Day, 175-76; James Bamford, A Pretext for War, 287.
89 Mark Selden has described the pattern of “arousing nationalist passions as a result of attacks out of the blue” as one which has “undergirded the American way of war since 1898” (Mark Selden, “The American Archipelago of Bases, Military Colonization and Pacific Empire: Prelude to the Permanent Warfare State,” forthcoming, 2012, International Journal of Okinawan Studies).
90 Thomas E. Ricks and Susan B. Glasser, Washington Post, October 14, 2001, here. Significantly, the proposal for a joint attack force with Massouďs Northern Alliance was
also resisted by Massoud himself (Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 597-98, 796n25). The problem of Massouďs resistance to an American troop presence vanished when he was assassinated on September 9, 2011, two days before 9/11.
91 Coll, Ghost Wars, 467-69.
92 Coll, Ghost Wars, 513, 534-36, 553.
93 Coll, Ghost Wars, 558.
94 Coll, Ghost Wars, 573-74.
95 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 108.
96 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 110-14.
97 George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: my years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 255.
98 Jeremy Scahill, “Shhhhhh! JSOC is Hiring Interrogators and Covert Operatives for ‘Special Access Programs/” Nation, August 25, 2010, here.
99 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 127-30; Summers, Eleventh Day, 387-88.
100 Jason Vest, “Implausible Denial II,” Nation, May 31, 2004, here.
101 Peter Dale Scott, “Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society,” November 28, 2010, here.
102 Scott, Road to 9/11, 216-18.
103 Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 1, 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 21,here; discussion in Scott, American War Machine, 193, 196.
104 Scott, American War Machine, 195-205; Northwoods document, Joint Chiefs of Staff Central Files 1962-63, p. 178, NARA Record # 2024000240104.
105 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 283-355; Scott, War Conspiracy, 341-96.
106 Jason Ditz, “Report: CIA Drones Killed Over 2,000, Mostly Civilians in Pakistan Since 2006,” AntiWar.com, January 2, 2011, here. Cf. Karen DeYoung, “Secrecy defines Obama's drone war,” Washington Post, December 19, 2011, here (“hundreds of strikes over three years — resulting in an estimated 1,350 to 2, 250 deaths in Pak).
107 Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt, 2004), 135-36; citing R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. Leads Peacekeeping Drill in Kazakhstan,” Washington Post, September 15, 1997. CF. Kenley Butler, “U.S. Military Cooperation with the Central Asian States,” September 17, 2001, here.
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