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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
For almost two centuries American government, though always imperfect, was also a model for the world of limited government, having evolved a system of restraints on executive power through its constitutional arrangement of checks and balances.
Since 9/11 however, constitutional practices have been overshadowed by a series of emergency measures to fight terrorism. The latter have mushroomed in size, reach and budget, while traditional government has shrunk. As a result we have today what the journalist Dana Priest has called two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre - and its entirety…visible only to God.
1 Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little Brown, 2011), 52.
2 E.g. Marc Ambinder and D.G. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry (New York: Wiley, 2013); John Tirman, “The Quiet Coup: No, Not Egypt. Here,” Huffington Post, July 9, 2013, here.
3 Erich Lichtblau, “In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.,” New York Times, July 6, 2013.
4 In addition there are unproven allegations that the United States granted a green card to Ayman al Zawahiri, identified in the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 57) as “the most important Egyptian in bin Laden's circle” (p. 57), and since 2011 the leader of al-Qaeda (Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War On Truth: 9/11, Disinformation And The Anatomy Of Terrorism [Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005], 46). It is not contested that “Foreign trial transcripts and U.S. court records confirmed that Zawahiri had previously flown to America, once in the early 1990s, and again in 1994…. Ali Mohamed, bin-Laden's American-trained military adviser, served as Zawahiri's host during the 1994 American fundraising campaign” (Jayna Davis, The third terrorist: the Middle East connection to the Oklahoma City bombing [Nashville, TN: WND Books, 2004], 318-19).
5 Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Ben Laden: la vérité interdite (Paris : Denoël, 2001), 14.
6 Robert Baer, See No Evil: the true story of a ground soldier in the CIA's war on terrorism (New York : Crown Publishers, 2002), 243-44; discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, oil, and war: the United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 28-31; The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 170-72.
7 Cf. my enlargement of the concept of an American deep state beyond parallel government in Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 20-23; Peter Dale Scott, “The ‘Deep State’ behind U.S. democracy,” VoltaireNet, April 6, 2011, here; etc.
8 All of America's military engagements since 1950 have involved defense of the petrodollar system. See Peter Dale Scott, “The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 27, 2011, here.
9 Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI – and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him (New York: Regan/ HarperCollins, 2006), 120-25. Cf. Toronto Globe and Mail, November 22, 2001; Tim Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), 397.
10 Ali H. Soufan, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda (New York: Norton, 2011), 75-77.
11 Lance, Triple Cross, 373. Cf. J.M. Berger, “Paving the Road to 9/11,” Intelwire, here: “Ali Mohamed was the utility player who created al Qaeda's terrorist infrastructure in the United States – a series of connections, ideas, techniques and specific tools used by the [9/11] plot's hijackers and masterminds. Mohamed described teaching al Qaeda terrorists how to smuggle box cutters onto airplanes.”
12 Lance, Triple Cross, 123-24.
13 Soufan, The Black Banners, 561. The testimony of former FBI agents like Ali Soufan that Mohamed was not incarcerated has been challenged in a curious book by Special Forces veteran Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander (New York: Berkley Trade, 2010). Blaber claims to have interviewed Mohamed in a prison cell, after reading Mohamed's perceptive document on how to track down Osama bin Laden. Blaber argues strenuously that Mohamed was not a double agent, but fails to deal with any of the countervailing evidence (such as the RCMP release).
14 “D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning,” New York Times, November 8, 2009; cf. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 246-47. Cf. The Globe and Mail (Canada), May 26, 2011: “FBI thought Mumbai massacre plotter worked for them, court told.” Another much simpler domestic example of this puzzle is Richard Aoki, the FBI informant who in the 1960s supplied the Black Panthers in Oakland with arms (Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power [New York: Macmillan, 2012], 418-24, etc.).
15 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 151-60. For a summary, see Peter Dale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington's On-Going Collusion with Terrorists,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 29, 2011, here.
16 Steven Emerson, American jihad: the terrorists living among us (New York: Free Press, 2002), 57-58; Peter L. Bergen, Holy war, Inc.: inside the secret world of Osama bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 135; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al- Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 181-82. Wright gives a detailed summary of John Zent's ensuing interview with Mohamed in May 1993, but says not a word about Zent's intervention with the RCMP. To my knowledge the only privileged book to do so is Tim Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), 397: “He explained that he was working for the FBI and he offered the telephone number of his Bureau contact in San Francisco. The Canadians released Mohamed after the agent vouched for him.” Weiner's relative candor came in 2012, long after this FBI scandal had already been publicized by Peter Lance and other authors, including myself.
17 Cf. Washington Post, June 1, 2012: “Soufan's case was unusual because he never worked for the CIA. The PRB's [Publications Review Board's] authority [i.e. legal authority] is grounded in the secrecy agreements signed by agency employees that require them to submit any material prepared for public disclosure ‘either during my employment … or at anytime thereafter.’“ In other words, the CIA's PRB had no legal right to censor Soufan's book, but did so anyway - an example of the blurring of past bureaucratic distinctions in today's shadow state.
18 “Ali Mohamed Case,” Defense Human Resources Activity (DHRA), Department of Defense, here; citing the Toronto Globe and Mail.
19 Benjamin Weiner and James Risen, “The Masking of a Militant: A special report; A Soldier's Shadowy Trail In U.S. and in the Mideast,” New York Times, December 1, 1998. This embarrassing exercise in damage control cannot be found on Lexis Nexis.
20 Peter Waldman, Gerald F. Seib, Jerry Markon, Christopher Cooper, “Sergeant Served U.S. Army and bin Laden, Showing Failings in FBI's Terror Policing,” Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2001.
21 Daniel Coleman, Affidavit, Sealed Complaint, United States of America v Ali Abdelseoud Mohamed, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, September 1998 (obtained by INTELWIRE.com), p.7, here. In fact Mohamed had been an FBI informant since at least 1992 (see below).
22 I had no choice but to remove certain relevant material from The Road to 9/11. As British and American lawyers pointed out to me, my sources had already retracted statements that they had made.
23 Lance, Triple Cross, 125. Cf. Steven Emerson, “Osama bin Laden's Special Operations Man,” Journal of Counterterrorism and Security International,
September 1, 1998, here: “In a seemingly bizarre twist, while in California, Mohammed volunteered to provide information to the FBI on a smuggling operations involving Mexicans and other aliens not connected to terrorist groups. Within time, officials say, the relationship allowed Mohammed to divert the FBI's attention away from looking at his real role in terrorism into examining the information he gave them about other smuggling.” But it could not have diverted the FBI's attention for very long. By May 1993, five months later, Mohamed had described to Zent in some detail his activities with Obama and al- Qaeda (Wright, Looming Tower, 181-82; Berger, Ali Mohamed, 31-32).
24 Lance, Triple Cross, 95. Cf. Tim Weiner, Enemies, 397.
25 Lance, Triple Cross, 99. Similarly Tim Weiner writes that the FBI agents handling Mohamed “did not comprehend him” (Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI, 397).
26 “Ali Mohamed Case,” Defense Human Resources Activity (DHRA), Department of Defense, here, emphasis added.
27 U.S. vs. Omar Abdel Rahman et al., September 11, 1995; quoted in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 210; cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 48.
28 “Sergeant Served U.S. Army and bin Laden,” Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2001: “At the time, the FBI wrote them off as harmless zealots, fired up to help the mujahedeen fighting the Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan.”
29 Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 134. The al-Kifah Center (al-Kifah means “the struggle”) was “known informally as ‘the jihad office.’… There was no problem finding volunteers, who might stay in Afghanistan up to three months at a time The volunteers joined the forces of the Hezb-I-Islami (Party of Islam), led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar” (Stephen Franklin, “Slain Muslim Had Link To Radical Cleric,” Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1993, here.)
30 Mitchell D. Silber, The Al Qaeda Factor: Plots Against the West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 169-70.
31 Peter Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc., 130-31.
32 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al- Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 180; citing Boston Globe, February 3, 1995; cf. Robert Friedman, “The CIA's Jihad,” New Yorker, March 17, 1995; Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: brotherhood of terror ([Parsippany, NJ?]: Alpha, 2002), 117.
33 Lance Williams and Erik McCormick, “Al Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 4, 2001.
34 “Ali Mohamed Case,” Pentagon, here, Cf. Emerson, “Osama bin Laden's Special Operations Man:” “He had been in the United States earlier that decade, having graduated as a captain from a Special Forces Officers School at Fort Bragg in 1981 in a program for visiting military officials from foreign countries.”
35 Robert Friedman, “The CIA and the Sheik,” Village Voice, March 30, 1993; Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaida's Jihad in Europe (New York: Berg, 2004), 26.
36 John Miller, Michael Stone, Chris Mitchell, The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 44. Cf. J.M. Berger, Jihad Joe: Americans who go to war in the name of Islam, (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2011), 44: “The stash included military training manuals and documents given to Nosair by Sergeant Ali Mohamed, the jihadist mole at Fort Bragg.”
37 Newsday, November 8, 1990.
38 New York Times, November 8, 1990.
39 New York Times, December 16, 1990. As before, it is instructive to compare the Pentagon's version of the training given by Mohamed (“surveillance, weapons and explosives”) with that in the long article about Mohamed in the New York Times: “Mr. Mohamed met the local Muslims at an apartment in Jersey City, and taught them survival techniques, map reading and how to recognize tanks and other Soviet weapons, according to testimony by one of his students at Mr. Nosair's 1995 Federal trial” (Weiner and Risen, “The Masking of a Militant: A special report,” New York Times, December 01, 1998; cf. Berger, Ali Mohamed,).
40 TV journalist John Miller, a former New York deputy police commissioner who would later become the FBI's Assistant Director for Public Affairs, reported in The Cell (44) that the disputed evidence from Nosair's home was withheld from NYPD officer Edward Morris, who prepared the NYPD case against Nosair: “On the third say after the shooting, while Norris was out to lunch, the FBI removed Nosair's 16 boxes of files from Norris's squad room. Unfortunately the evidence was about to enter a black hole. The FBI now says it turned the files the evidence was about to enter a black hole. The FBI now says it turned the files over to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, after it was decided, following a series of meetings and phone calls, that the local prosecutor and the NYPD would have exclusive jurisdiction over the murder case. The Manhattan DA's office won’t comment on what was done with the files before Nosair's trail, though Norris was never informed they were available. But this much is certain: The bulk of the material remained untranslated and unread for nearly three years.” [This last sentence is hard to reconcile with the detailed description given at the time by Borelli.]
41 Friedman, “The CIA's Jihad.”
42 Lance, Triple Cross, 58-62.
43 For the list, see Lance, Triple Cross, 574-75.
44 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 Press, 2004), 251.
45 Quoted in Peter Lance, Triple Cross, 383.
46 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, 255; “Since 1989 the FBI had been running paid informants inside circles of Islamic radicals in New York and New Jersey. In 1990, the FBI carted away forty- seven boxes of documents and training manuals from the home of El Sayyid Nosair.” Cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 73-75, etc.
47 Robert Friedman, “The CIA's Jihad,” New Yorker, March 17, 1995.
48 Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: how the United States helped unleash fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 274-75; quoting Jiohn Cooley, Unholy Wars (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 31-32: “By the end of 1980, U.S. military trainers were sent to Egypt to impart the skills of the U.S. Special Forces to those Egyptians who would, in turn, pass on the training to the Egyptian volunteers flying to the aid of the mujahideen in Afghanistan.”
49 Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to terror: the rogue CIA and the legacy of America's private intelligence network (New York: Carrol and Graf, 2005), 150, 247.
50 “Ali Mohamed Case,” here.
51 Lance, Triple Cross, 194 (oath).
52 Scott, Road to 9/11, 161-62; citing Guardian (London), January 7, 1993; Evan F. Kohlmann, Al-Qaida's Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2004), 16.
53 Ferrukh Mir, Half Truth (iUniverse.com, 2011), 163-64: “In 1992, Ali Mohamed, a double agent and ex-US Special Forces officer with close ties to Al-Kifah, led a group of US militants who were all ex-US soldiers to train and fight in Bosnia. Abu Obadiah Yahiya, an exUS Marine and security chief at the Brooklyn branch, lead [sic] a second group of US militants to fight in Bosnia.” Cf. Mark Huband, Trading Secrets: spies and intelligence in an age of terror (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 112; “Mohamed - using the nom-de-guerre Abu ‘Abdallah - travelled to Bosnia as part of a team which trained and armed Muslim fighters there until June 1993, when he travelled on to Khartoum and was asked by bin Laden to set up the al-Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Kenya.”
54 Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaida's Jihad in Europe (New York: Berg, 2004), 39-41; citing Steve Coll and Steve LeVine, “Global Network Provides Money, Haven,” Washington Post, August 3, 1993
55 Scott, Road to 9/11, 149-50; Kohlmann, Al- Qaida's Jihad in Europe, 45, 73-75.
56 Scott, Road to 9/11, 149; Kohlmann, Al- Qaida's Jihad in Europe, 73. I have been unable to identify this Prince Faisal securely. He is perhaps Prince Faisal bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who frequently visited the United States in connection with his horse breeding interests in Kentucky. In 2003 Gerald Posner claimed that Faisal's brother and business partner Ahmed bin Salman had had ties to al- Qaeda and advance knowledge of 9/11 (Gerald Posner, Why America slept: the failure to prevent 9/11 [New York: Random House, 2003]), 202. Cf. Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 405-07, 419, 563-64.
57 Friedman, “The CIA's Jihad.” About this time, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 2013 the leader of al- Qaeda, came to America without difficulty to raise funds in Silicon Valley, where he was hosted by Ali Mohamed (Lawrence Wright, New Yorker: “Zawahiri decided to look for money in the world center of venture capitalism-Silicon Valley. He had been to America once before, in 1989, when he paid a recruiting visit to the mujahideen's Services Bureau branch office in Brooklyn. According to the F.B.I., he returned in the spring of 1993, this time to Santa Clara, California, where he was greeted by Ali Mohamed, the double agent.”)
58 Bruce O. Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 43: “Osama also worked with ISI in the creation of a key Kashmiri jihadist group in the late 1980s, the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.” Cf. Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America (Rocklin, CA: Forum, 2001), 320.
59 Michael Scheuer, “Central Asia in Al-Qaeda's Vision of the Anti-American Jihad, 1979-2006,” China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly (2006), 3.
60 The Black Vault, www.theblackvault.com/documents/capturediraq/mullah.pdf
61 Ahmed Rashid, “They’re Only Sleeping: Why militant Islamicists in Central Asia aren’t going to go away,” New Yorker, January 14, 2002, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/01/14/020114fa_FACT; cf. Ahmed Rashid, Jihad (New Haven:Yale UP, 2002), 165; Svante Cornell, “Narcotics, Radicalism and Security in Central Asia: The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,” Uppsala University, December 2004, 19: “Bolot Januzakov, Head of the Kyrgyz Security Council, asserted in 2000 that the IMU controlled the majority, perhaps up to 70%, of the heroin entering Kyrgyzstan.”
62 Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (New York: Macmillan, 2009), 69, 87, 89, 132-33.
63 Peters, Seeds of Terror, 132-33.
64 9/11 Commission, “Monograph on Terrorist Financing: Staff Report to the Commission,” 7. Cf. 9/11 Commission Report, 171: “Al Qaeda has been alleged to have used a variety of illegitimate means, particularly drug trafficking and conflict diamonds, to finance itself…. While the drug trade was a source of income for the Taliban, it did not serve the same purpose for al Qaeda.” The footnote to this sentence (p. 499) adds: “No evidence indicates any such involvement in drug trafficking, and none of the detained al Qaeda operatives has indicated that this was a method of fund-raising.”
65 “Evidence Presented to the British Parliament, 4th October 2001,” Los Angeles Times, October 4, 2001. Cf. New York Times, October 4, 2001. For further documentation, see Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 32, 36.
66 New York Times, 7/20/93. Cf. J. R. de Szigethy, “Crime Scene – World Trade Center,” AmericanMafia.com, September 2004: “The murders [from the 1993 WTC bombing] were the result of a plot by members of an organized crime syndicate involved in drug trafficking.”
67 Jayna Davis, The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing (Nashville: WND Books/Thomas Nelson, 2004), 303.
68 Boston Herald, 10/17/01; cf. 9/11 Report, 175.
69 Steven Emerson, American jihad: the terrorists living among us (New York: Free Press, 2002), 28.
70 Yossef Bodansky, Terror! The Inside Story of the Terrorist Conspiracy in America (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1994), 166. Similarly Gerald Posner notes “rumors that [Mustafa] Shalabi [the head of the al-Kifah Center until he was murdered in February 1991] … might be involved in counterfeiting” (Posner, Why America slept, 8).
71 Berger, Jihad Joe, 37; citing USA v. Rahman, S5 93 Cr. 181, court transcript, April 3, 1995.
72 Scheuer, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, 151.
73 Emerson, American jihad, 28.
74 Bin Laden's and al-Qaeda's proximity to Khattab is both asserted and disputed at high levels. See Robert W. Schaefer, The insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: from gazavat to jihad (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2011), 165-66.
75 Thomas Hegghammer. Jihad in Saudi Arabia : violence and pan-Islamism since 1979 (Cambridge, UK; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2010), 56.
76 Soufan, Black Banners, 62. Jeremy Scahill also writes of Special Operations veterans in Blackwater with previous “experience in Chechnya” (Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield [New York: Nation Books, 2013], 408.).
77 Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine (New York: Anchor, 2008).
78 Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 179-82, 195-99.
79 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 Press, 2004), 155. For Azzam's and OBL's Muslim Brotherhood memberships, see Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: an Arabian family in the American century (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 148, 253.
80 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 131. Cf. Steven A. Yetiv, The Petroleum Triangle: Oil, Globalization, and Terror (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 65.
81 Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: messianic terrorism, tribal conflicts, and the failures of great powers (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 198.
82 Scott, Road to 9/11, 171; citing Rajeev Sharma, Pak Proxy War (New Delhi: Kaveri Books, 2002), 145-46.
83 Cf. John J. Loftus, “What Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9/11,” May 2003, here: “The … block order, in force since the 1980's, was against any investigation that would embarrass the Saudi Royal family. Originally, it was designed to conceal Saudi support for Muslim extremists fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Chechnya, but it went too far. Oliver North noted in his autobiography, that every time he tried to do something about terrorism links in the Middle East, he was told to stop because it might embarrass the Saudis. This block remains in place.”
84 Scott, Road to 9/11, 172; citing Greg Palast and David Pallister, “Intelligence: FBI Claims Bin Laden Inquiry Was Frustrated,” Guardian, November 7, 2001, here.
85 Coleman affidavit, 2; in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 26.
86 Coll, The Bin Ladens, 399-401.
87 For a summary of some of the conflicting accounts, see Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 215-16.
88 Coll, Ghost Wars, 231. In 2001 Peter Bergen had claimed that bin Laden “used his family connections with King Fahd to convince the [Saudi] government that he needed to leave the country to sort out some business matters in Pakistan. Arriving there in April 1991, he then sent a letter to his family telling them that he would not be able to return home. After some months in Afghanistan he arrived in Sudan” (Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc., 81-82).
89 9/1 1 Commission Report, 57. In the December 2004 paperback edition of Ghost Wars (231-32), Coll adjusted his account to reconcile with the 9/11 Report. He replaced his sentence, “The escort put bin Laden on a plane out of Saudi Arabia,” with two new ones: “Two associates of bin Laden later offered a different version while under interrogation. They said a dissident member of the royal family helped him leave the country by arranging for bin Laden to attend an Islamic conference in Pakistan during the spring of 1991.” (Wright, Looming Tower, 161; Roy Gutman. How We Missed the Story: Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan [Washington DC: Endowment of the United States Institute of Peace, 2008], 34).
90 Steve Coll also suggests that the “interior ministry” (headed by Prince) supplied bin Laden with “a one-time exit visa to travel to Pakistan to liquidate investments there” (Coll, The Bin Ladens, 381). Both motives may have been present in bin Laden's mind, but his capacity to serve as a mediator may have been more influential in persuading the Saudis to arrange for his departure.
91 Wright, Looming Tower, 161. For Naif (or Nayef) as anti-American, see Coll, Ghost Wars, 399; Coll, The Bin Ladens, 437, 626n.
92 Tomsen, Wars of Afghanistan, 485: “Al- Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood extremists, and Prince Turki's General Intelligence Directorate supported the ISI's extremist-centered Afghan strategy.”
93 “A Biography of Osama bin Laden,” Frontline, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/bio2.html.
94 Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Through our enemies’ eyes: Osama bin Laden, radical Islam, and the future of America (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006), 131.
95 Coll, Ghost Wars, 207.
96 Barnett R. Rubin, Afghanistan from the Cold War Through the War on Terror (New York: Oxford UP, 2013), 86.
97 Coll, The Bin Ladens, 403-05.
98 Summers, The Eleventh Day, 393: “Citing a U.S. intelligence source, the author Simon Reeve reported as much in 1999 - well before it became an issue after 9/11.” It is not contested that when bin Laden exited Sudan in 1996, his plane stopped in Qatar. “At the airport in Doha, Qatar's capital, government officials boarded the plane and greeted bin Laden warmly” (Coll, Ghost Wars, 325).
99 Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: messianic terrorism, tribal conflicts, and the failures of great powers (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 337.
100 Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 406-07.
101 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 Press, 2004), 225.
102 Scott, American War Machine, 94-105; Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 98-103.
103 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 145.
104 Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter's Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War- Torn, Post-Soviet Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 272-75. Cf. Mark Irkali, Tengiz Kodrarian and Cali Ruchala, “God Save the Shah,” Sobaka Magazine, May 22, 2003, http://www.diacritica.com/sobaka/2003/shah2.html. A fourth operative in MEGA Oil, Gary Best, was also a veteran of North's Contra support effort. For more on General Secord's and Major Aderholt's role as part of Ted Shackley's team of off-loaded CIA assets and capabilities, see Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 26-30, 36-42, 197-98.
105 It was also a time when Congress, under pressure from Armenian voters, had banned all military aid to Azerbaijan (under Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act). This ban, reminiscent of the Congressional ban on aid to the Contras in the 1980s, ended after 9/11. “In the interest of national security, and to help in ‘enhancing global energy security’ during this War on Terror, Congress granted President Bush the right to waive Section 907 in the aftermath of September 11th. It was necessary, Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress, to ‘enable Azerbaijan to counter terrorist organizations’“ (Irkali, Kodrarian and Ruchala, “God Save the Shah,” Sobaka Magazine, May 22, 2003).
106 Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, 272-75; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 7. As part of the airline operation, Azeri pilots were trained in Texas. Dearborn had previously helped Secord advise and train the fledgling Contra air force (Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 197). These important developments were barely noticed in the U.S. press, but a Washington Post article did belatedly note that a group of American men who wore “big cowboy hats and big cowboy boots” had arrived in Azerbaijan as military trainers for its army, followed in 1993 by “more than 1,000 guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan's radical prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.” (Washington Post, 4/21/94) Richard Secord was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms, with the assistance of Israeli agent David Kimche, another associate of Oliver North. See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 8, 20. Whether the Americans were aware of it or not, the al Qaeda presence in Baku soon expanded to include assistance for moving jihadis onwards into Dagestan and Chechnya.
107 Cooley, Unholy Wars, 180; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7. These important developments were barely noticed in the U.S. press, but a Washington Post article did belatedly note that a group of American men who wore “big cowboy hats and big cowboy boots” had arrived in Azerbaijan as military trainers for its army, followed in 1993 by “more than 1,000 guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan's radical prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.” (Washington Post, April 21, 1994). The Azeri “Afghan Brigade” was formally dissolved in 1994, after which it focused more on sabotage and terrorism (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 181),
108 As the 9/11Commission Report notes (58), the bin Laden organization established an NGO in Baku, which became a base for terrorism elsewhere. It also became a transshipment point for Afghan heroin to the Chechen mafia, whose branches “extended not only to the London arms market, but also throughout continental Europe and North America (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 176).
109 Rubin, Afghanistan from the Cold War, 86.
110 Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: inside the secret world of Osama bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 67. Cf. Ali Soufan, Black Banners, 565 (murder of Anwar Sadat, watch list); Berger, Jihad Joe, 24 (watch list).
111 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al- Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 180; cf. Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: brotherhood of terror ([Parsippany, NJ?]: Alpha, 2002), 117.
112 “A Soldier's Shadowy Trail In U.S. and in the Mideast,” New York Times, December 1, 1998, here.
113 Phil Karber, Fear and faith in paradise: exploring conflict and religion in the Middle East (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), ZZ; cf. Wright, Looming Tower, 164-65.
114 Summers, The Eleventh Day, 393: “Citing a U.S. intelligence source, the author Simon Reeve reported as much in 1999 - well before it became an issue after 9/11.”
115 Coll, The Bin Ladens, 399-401. Cf. Geoffrey Wawro, Quicksand: America's pursuit of power in the Middle East (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), ZZ: “Osama mixed business and religion. He committed to build an airport at Port Sudan;” Karber, Fear and faith in paradise, ZZ: “Bin Laden promised the people of Sudan an airport at Port Sudan.”
116 Wright, Looming Tower, 165.
117 The text of the State Department paper of August 14, 1996, “State Department Issues Factsheet on Bin Ladin,” is reproduced in Brisard and Dasquié, Ben Laden: la vérité interdite, 257-58.
118 Dreyfuss, Devil's Game, 180-81.
119 Jane's Intelligence Review, August 1, 2001; quoted in Scott, Road to 9/11, 356.
120 John Crewdson, “Swiss Officials Freeze Bank Accounts Linked to Supporters of Terrorist Groups.” Chicago Tribune, November 3, 2001, here. Cf. Ahmed, War on Truth, 98; Financial Times, November 29 2001, here: “A US State Department report in 1996 and a French investigation into the bank separately concur that bin Laden invested $50m in the bank on his arrival in Sudan in 1991, an allegation Mr Ismail [of the bank] denies.” Cf. also Brisard, Ben Laden: La Verité Interdite, 119-21, 308-10, etc.
121 Coll, The Bin Ladens, 413. There is a brief reference to the State Department White Paper in Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc. (2001), 83: “Bin Laden…sank $50 million of his own money into the Al-Shamal Islamic Bank in Khartoum” (cf. 264n). The controversial author Yossef Bodansky links both the Faisal Islamic Bank and the Al-Shamal Bank to significant jihad activities, as well as possible drug trafficking (Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: the man who declared war on America (Rocklin, CA: Forum, 2001), 42-43.
122 Lance, Triple Cross, 157-59, citing State Department Cable 1994STATE335575.
123 Steve A. Yetiv, The petroleum triangle: oil, globalization, and terror (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2011), 114-15.
124 Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 108. At ease in Saudi Arabia, Khalifa became a misleading source, rather than a topic of inquiry, in privileged bin Laden books like Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower (112-13, 450).
125 Lance, Triple Cross, 161, citing personal interview.
126 Lance, Triple Cross, 162.
127 Lance, Triple Cross, 157-58.
128 Khalifa also “headed the Muslim World League office in Peshawar in the 1980s. In 1988, he moved to Manila and opened a branch office of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth [an allied royal creation]” (Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 198).
129 Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (New York: Crown, 2003), 167, 140.
130 Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 179-82, 195-99.
131 Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia, 93.
132 Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, 69; Aaron Mannes, Profiles In Terror: The Guide To Middle East Terrorist Organizations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 41.
133 Kumar Ramakrishna (ed.), After Bali: The Threat of Terrorism in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, 2003), 139.
134 Wesley J. L. Anderson, Disrupting Threat Finances: Utilization of Financial Information to Disrupt Terrorist Organizations in the Twenty-First Century (S.l.: BiblioScholar, 2012), 14.
135 Girma Yohannes Iyassu Menelik, Europe: The future Battleground of Islamic Terrorism, 95.
136 Kohlmann, Al-Qaida's Jihad in Europe, 41-42. Before being captured in Pakistan, Ramzi Yousuf was being sheltered by his maternal uncle Zahid al-Shaikh, a principal with Mercy International (Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge, 189). Mercy International was another Islamic NGO involved in recruiting “international volunteers” for the war in Bosnia (Richard Labévière, Dollars For Terror: The United States and Islam (New York: Algora, 2000), 151.
137 Larry Niksch, Abu Sayyaf: Target of Philippine-U. S. Anti-Terrorism Cooperation (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 2007), CRS-4.
138 Peter L. Bergen, The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda's Leader (New York: Free Press, 2006), 444.
139 9/11 Commission Report, 73; citing Joint Inquiry Report (classified version), 324-28. Cf. pp. 146, 148: “In 1992, KSM… moved his family to Qatar at the suggestion of the former minister of Islamic affairs of Qatar, Sheikh Abdallah., In January 1996, well aware that U.S. authorities were chasing him, he left Qatar for good.”
140 Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, 18-19, 194-96. Baer heard from another member of the al-Thani family, former police chief Hamad bin Jasim bin Hamad al-Thani, that when KSM came from the Philippines, Abdallah bin Khalid gave him 20 blank Qatari passports. Later, “As soon as the FBI showed up in Doha” in 1996, the emir ordered Abdallah to move KSM out of his apartment to his beach estate, and eventually out of the country (pp. 195-96).
141 Brian Ross and David Scott, “Al Qaeda Ally? Member of Qatari Royal Family Helped Senior Al Qaeda Official Get Away,” ABCNEWS.com, February 7, 2003, here.
142 Lance, Triple Cross, 253; emphasis in original. Lance does discuss the role of Qatar's Sheikh Abdullah in helping KSM to escape the FBI (Cover up: what the government is still hiding about the war on terror [New York: Regan Books, 2004], 168-69).
143 Lance, Triple Cross, 342.
144 Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 410-15, 559-62; Former Senator Bob Graham, Keys to the Kingdom, 131-32; cf. David B Ottaway, The king's messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America's tangled relationship with Saudi Arabia (New York: Walker & Company, 2008), 198-99.
145 9/11 Commission Report, 266-72 (272).
146 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.’
147 Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots (Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2011). According to Fenton (pp. 72-79), the post-9/11 cover-up of Wilshire's behavior was principally the work of one person, Barbara Grewe, who worked first on the Justice Department Inspector General's investigation of Wilshire's behavior, then was transferred to two successive positions with the 9/11 Commission's staff.
148 9/1 1 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.
149 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, 355, 388-89.
150 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 383-86.
151 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.
152 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95.
153 Quoted in Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars, 21.
154 Tom Wilshire, July 23, 2001, in “United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui (No. 01-455), Substitution for the Testimony of ‘John.’“ U.S. Court for the District of Alexandria, July 31, 2006; quoted in Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 274, 401.
155 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 276.
156 Berger, Ali Mohamed, 17; citing Wayne Parry, “Mysterious pair in custody perplexes federal investigators,” Associated Press, November 11, 2001; Falasten M. Abdeljabbar, “Neighborhood tired of suspicions and fear,” The Jersey Journal, December 18, 2001.
157 Robert Hanley and Jonathan Miller, “4 Transcripts Are Released in Case Tied to 9/11 Hijackers,” New York Times, June 25, 2003.
158 Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18; citing John Kifner, “Kahane Suspect Is a Muslim With a Series of Addresses,” New York Times, November 7, 1990; Transcript, Sealed Bail Hearing, US v. El- Atriss, November 19, 2002. The transcripts were unsealed after a lawsuit by several organizations including the New York Times and the Washington Post.
159 Wayne Parry, “September 11 Fake ID Suspect Flees U.S.,” Associated Press, July 31, 2003, here.
160 Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18; citing Robert Hanley and Jonathan Miller, “4 Transcripts Are Released In Case Tied to 9/11 Hijackers,” New York Times, June 25, 2003; Wayne Parry, “Judge releases transcripts in Sept. 11 fake IDs case,” Associated Press, June 24, 2003. The New York Times story is worth quoting further: “*Mr. Atriss was a co-founder of a Jersey City check-cashing company, Sphinx Trading Company, that had bank accounts with millions of dollars and had as a co-owner Waleed Abouel Nour, whom the F.B.I. had identified as a terrorist. That business was at the same location, on Kennedy Boulevard, used as a mailing address by several of the hijackers and earlier by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, whose followers were convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.”
161 Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 53. Cf. David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), x: “In 1974 [Treasury Secretary William] Simon negotiated a secret deal so the Saudi central bank could buy U.S. Treasury securities outside of the normal auction. A few years later, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal cut a secret deal with the Saudis so that OPEC would continue to price oil in dollars. These deals were secret because the United States had promised other industrialized democracies that it would not pursue such unilateral policies.
162 See e.g. Michael Quint, “Saudi Prince Becomes Citicorp's Top Stockholder.” New York Times, February 22, 1991.
163 Andrew Scott Cooper, The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 275, etc.; Scott, Road to 9/11, 33-34.
164 F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 173; Andrew Gavin Marshall, “The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda. The CIA's Drug-Running Terrorists and the ‘Arc of Crisis.’“ GlobalResearch, September 4, 2010, here. Cf. Scott, Road to 9/11, 86-89.
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