edited 14 February 2008
Franklin Freeman
copyright © the author 2002-8
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Calendar of Events, 2001
January: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hugh Shelton, is briefed about "Able Danger" operation — Bush administration begins; embarks on formulating plan to "eliminate al-Qaeda".
March: Admiral Wilson, boss of the DIA, present at briefing which includes "Able Danger" information; work begins on the adminstration's Qaeda plan.
4 March: Fox TV screens pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, in which "foreign terrorists" — in fact an intra-government group — try to crash an airliner into the WTC.
April: Joint Chiefs of Staff "reject" proposed exercise of crash of hijacked airliner into Pentagon. (But medical exercises with similar scenarios in May and August.)
(24 April: A Global Hawk — the US's largest drone — becomes the first pilotless aircraft to cross the Pacific nonstop.)
29 May: CIA and NSA Rice consult on al Qaeda.
May-June: CIA carries out war games for Predator drone; conducts live tests of armed Predator.
21 June: CIA chief Tenet goes to Israel. "Tenet peace plan".
July: Richard Perle becomes chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board.
July: CIA creates "strategic assessments branch" for al-Qaeda (chief reports for duty, Sept. 10)
12 July: Alleged meeting between bin Laden and CIA local representative Larry Mitchell in Dubai.
mid-July: Taleban regime "warned by US" it will be attacked if it doesn't hand over bin Laden.
31 Aug: Saudi intelligence chief Faisal "ends his role" as intermediary between CIA and bin Laden. (Resigns, 2 Sept.)
4 Sept: Robert Mueller takes up his post as FBI director — Pakistani ISI chief Ahmad arrives in US (consults with CIA, DIA, Pentagon and State Dept. in following week) — Bush administration "completes plan for dealing with al-Qaeda" — CIA boss Tenet orders resumption of Predator flights, the drones now to be weapons-capable — Tenet orders withdrawal of all CIA agents from Palestine and Israel — MI6 man John Scarlett promoted to chairmanship of British Joint Intelligence Committee.
6-10 Sept: Huge numbers of stock sell-options bought ...
(9 Sept: Afghan resistance leader Massoud assassinated.)
10 Sept: Plan "to deal with Afghan Taliban" agreed — chief of CIA's new Qaeda strategic assessments branch starts his job — NORAD begins week of air exercises, "Vigilant Guardian" etc — Bin Laden "admitted to Rawalpindi hospital".
11 Sept: Breakfast "security meeting" on Capitol Hill between Porter Goss, ISI chief Mahmoud Ahmad et al.
The idea of a catalytic massive terrorist attack had been floating about in the ranks of the neocon radical right during the year 2000. In the summer Paul Bremer (a hardliner later appointed Iraqi "proconsul") suggested "the possibility of an extremely destructive terrorist attack on the United States, comparable with ... Pearl Harbour". Bremer was at this time chairman of a congressional counter-terrorism committee, and was of course "warning against the danger". (See May 2003 diary, under 6 May.)
In September 2000 a document called "Rebuilding America's Defenses", was published by the neocon think-tank Project For The New American Century. It lamented the post Cold-War decline of the US armed forces, and pushed for a revitalisation in order to cement America's position as the dominant world power. But "the process of transformation," the paper said, was "likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor". (My emphasis.)
"Rebuilding America's Defenses", a blueprint for American global domination, was drawn up for Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bush's younger brother Jeb. These men, together with Richard Perle and others, were the founders of the think-tank. (Two critical reviews of the paper are "Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' ...", Sunday Herald, Sept. 2002; and John Pilger, "Two years ago a project set up ...", pilger.carlton.com, 12 Dec. 2002.)
The aspiration was echoed by the Commission to Assess US National Security Space Management and Organization. Chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, who became Bush's Defense Secretary in 2001, the "Rumsfeld Commission's" final Report recommended the subordination of US armed forces and intelligence agencies to the Space Force. Recognizing that such a drastic reorganization would normally evoke great resistance, the Report asked
whether the US will be wise enough to act responsibly and soon enough to reduce US space vulnerability. Or whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people — a "Space Pearl Harbor" — will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the US government to act.The Report was released on 11 January 2001, nine exactly months before 9/11.
(Report of the Commission to Assess US National Security Space Management and Organization , quoted in David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor (Arris, 2nd edn, 2004), p.99)
And on 9/11 itself we find John Fulton, the former director of the "National Security Space Master Plan for the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence Space Communities", directing an airplane-into-building "exercise" at the National Reconnaissance Office. This is four miles from Foster Dulles Airport, from which American Airlines Flight 77 took off, and began within five minutes of the plane deviating from its scheduled flightpath, to return and hit the Pentagon. (See "On 9/11, CIA Was Running Simulation ...".)
25 January 2001, and the Bush administration comes to power. The neocons will turn out to be strongly influential, some as back-seat drivers in "second-rank" and advisory positions. National Security Adviser (NSA) Condoleezza Rice, having received briefings from Clinton administration security officials (Berger, Clarke, et al), asks for a policy review on terrorism and al-Qaeda. The new administration begins to develop an ambitious plan "to eliminate al-Qaeda". The "plan" is in the hands of the neocon radicals ...
("Administration defends lengthy review ...", USA Today, 5 Aug. 2002; "Bush team defends handling ...", CNN.com, 5 Aug. 2002)
Also in January, and again in March, "Able Danger" officer Anthony Shaffer briefs Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff Chairman Gen. Shelton on the intelligence operation which had discovered the names of some of the leading future 9/11 hijackers in the winter of 1999-2000. ("Press Conference of Rep. Curt Weldon ...", Center for Research on Globalization, 17 Sept. 2005)
Meanwhile, the priority of Cofer Black, head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center (CTC), and "Richard", in charge of the Bin Laden unit within it, was to
accelerate Air Force testing of an armed version of the Predator [the remote-controlled reconnaissance drone], which the CIA could then use to fly over Afghanistan and shoot at bin Laden and his top aides. ... Black pressed the Air Force to certify that a Hellfire[-missile]-armed, laser-aimed Predator could kill bin Laden if he spent the night at his Tarnak farm residence [south of Kandahar]. ... With CIA assistance an Air Force team built in Nevada a mockup of the Tarnak residence ...And[Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin, 2005 edition), pp.548-9]
In [an] early Spring 2001 briefing to the DCI [i.e. CIA chief George Tenet], CTC requested hiring a small group of contractors not involved in day-to-day [terrorism] crises to digest vast quantities of information and develop targeting strategies.This presumably is the conception of the "strategic assessments branch" of the CTC. (See below, July and 10 Sept.)
(Congressional Joint Inquiry, Final Report, p.387)
In March 2001, work began on the National Security Presidential Directive on Qaeda. In April
the administration's "deputies," including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Deputy NSA Stephen Hadley, [met] to discuss U.S. policy against al Qaeda, approve "immediate actions" against al Qaeda and review the draft of the security directive.Also in April, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) ran a war game in which the Pentagon HQ was to become incapacitated. A NORAD planner proposed the simulated crash of a hijacked foreign commercial airliner into the Pentagon. But the Joints Chiefs of Staff "rejected" the scenario as "too unrealistic" and liable to consume the whole exercise. (Charles Aldinger, "Pentagon crash scenario rejected before Sept. 2001", Reuters, 14 April 2004. It is interesting to compare this "rejected" suggestion with the CIA aircrash "simulation" of 9/11, which was perhaps part of a concurrent NORAD exercise (see "On 9/11, CIA Was Running Simulation ...").) (In May, the Defense Department's medical personnel did carry out an exercise in which a hijacked Boeing 757 airliner crashed into the Pentagon — as actually happened on 9/11. A similar exercise was held in August. [Matthew Everett, "Exclusive Report: Did Military Exercises Facilitate the 9/11 Pentagon Attack?", 911Truth.org, July 2006])["Timeline of counterterrorism planning", CNN.com, 5 Aug. 2002]
On May 29, at Tenet's request, Rice and Tenet converted their usual weekly [presidential] meeting into a broader discussion on al Qaeda; participants included Clarke, CTC chief Cofer Black, and "Richard", a group chief with authority over the Bin Ladin unit. ...During May to July, the administration's deputies committee developed a strategy to "deal with" the Qaeda-Taliban nexus. ("Timeline of counterterrorism planning", CNN.com, 5 Aug. 2002)The CIA official, "Richard", [subsequently] told [the 9/11 Commission] that Rice ... agreed with his conclusions about what needed to be done. Clarke and Black were asked to develop a range of options for tackling Bin Ladin's organization from the least to the most ambitious.
Rice and [her deputy] Hadley asked Clarke and his staff to draw up the new presidential directive. On June 7, Hadley circulated the first draft ...
[9/11 Commission Report, chapter 6, p.204 (HTML version)]
The presidential policy document that would recast government-wide strategy against al Qaeda moved slowly through White House channels. When the first integrated plan ... was ready for the full Cabinet to consider, it took almost two months to find a meeting date that was convenient for everyone who wanted to attend.Coincidentally, the date of the kamikaze airliner attacks was twice postponed, because "the teams weren't ready", from May and again from July. (9/11 Commission Report, chapter 7, p.250 [HTML version]; based on "intelligence reports", post-9/11 interrogations of "9/11 coordinator" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other, unnamed, detainees. For the eventual Cabinet-level Principals Committee meeting on 4 September, see below.).
[Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (Penguin, 2005 edn), p.567]
By May 2001 the armed Predator was ready to be tested. According to CIA chief Tenet,
During the summer, [the] CIA led an interagency effort to fully develop the capabilities of the armed Predator and to explore the questions inherent in its use. ...And, in the first week of June, the Predator was successfully tested on the Nevada replica of bin Laden's Tarnak residence:As part of this interagency effort, two exercises were conducted in May and June 2001 to walk through the spectrum of operational and policy questions. These questions included: What are the capabilities of the system? How do we set up the communications architecture? What criteria would we use to shoot? Who authorises weapons firing? What are the implications of a successful firing and an unsuccessful firing?
[Testimony by DCI George Tenet to the 9/11 Commission, 24 March 2004, p.16]
From a Predator drone flying two miles high and four miles away, Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency ground controllers loosed a missile. It carried true with a prototype warhead, one of about 100 made, for killing men inside buildings. According to people briefed on the experiment, careful analysis after the missile pierced the villa wall showed blast effects that would have slain anyone in the target room.[Barton Gellman, "A Strategy's Cautious Evolution", Washington Post, 20 Jan. 2002, p.A01]
Summer 2001. Tenet's "peace plan" for Israel/Palestine was ... (21 June). Tenet's plan was distinguished by its singular lack of success — ... "The Tenet war plan", Arafat later called it in what could only have been an intentional "slip of the tongue". Also at this time, various "anti-terrorist" plans are put forward by the US military ... And in July, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center created a special "strategic assessments branch" for al-Qaeda. (But, due to "staff shortages", the head of the branch only took up his job on 10 September.) (chapter 11, p.342 [HTML version])
On 12 July (with three months to go) came the alleged meeting between Osama bin Laden and CIA regional head Larry Mitchell at the American Hospital in Dubai. This story was reported by French newspaper Le Figaro, and supplemented by Radio France Internationale. What was this meeting about, assuming it took place? The CIA and American Hospital denied it occurred. But what motive would the conservative Le Figaro have for lying? National rivalry? But the explicit deep divisions of 2002-3 were as yet a thing of the future. (Cf. Tenet's statement that, "During the week of July 2, 2001, reacting to a rash of intelligence reports, I contacted by phone a dozen of my foreign liaison counterparts to urge them to redouble their efforts against al-Qa`ida. The chief of the [CIA's] Counterterrorist Center [Cofer Black], the chief of [CIA] Near East Division, and others made additional urgent calls. ..." Testimony of CIA boss Tenet to the 9/11 Commission, 24 March 2004, p.10.) Immediately after the "bin Laden" meeting, the US administration issued its threat to attack the Taleban regime in Afghanistan if they didn't hand over bin Laden. (!) ("US 'planned attack on Taleban'", BBC News online, 18 Sept. 2001; "Threat of US strikes passed to Taleban ...", The Guardian, 22 Sept. 2001) An agenda was already on the table.
In July Bush picked conservative-Republican Robert Mueller, a protégé of Attorney General Ashcroft, to run the FBI and clear up the "culture of corruption" there. Within the next year, the upper echelons of the FBI were to be extensively purged. (See "The Purge of the FBI")
On 14 August, the "deputies' committee" presented their draft security directive to NSA Rice, Vice-President Cheney "and other national security principals". ("Timeline of counterterrorism planning", CNN.com, 5 Aug. 2002)
On 31 August, Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal "ended his role" as intemediary between the CIA and al-Qaeda. (According to Arielle Thedrel, "Dangerous connections of Ben Laden and the CIA" [in French], Le Figaro, 1 Nov. 2001, p.2. See "Dollars For Terror" for more on Faisal's alleged go-between role.) On 2 September Faisal, who had been head of intelligence since 1977, resigned. (He became Saudi ambassador to the UK, and later to the US.)
Fourth of September 2001, exactly one week before 9/11. A big day. Robert Mueller (whose appointment had now been ratified by Congress) took up his post as FBI director. Soon he was to produce that list of "19 9/11 hijackers", the improbable band of kamikaze pilots so easily discovered after the fact. At the same time the "plan to eliminate al-Qaeda", now completed, was ratified by Rice and the Bush cabinet. ("Administration defends lenghty review ...", USA Today, 5 Aug. 2002; "Bush team defends handling ...", CNN.com, 5 Aug. 2002; "Timeline of counterterrorism planning", CNN.com, 5 Aug. 2002) Cofer Black urged his CIA boss, Tenet, to seek "a timely decision" at the meeting on the use of an armed Predator drone against bin Laden. (9/11 Commission Report, chapter 6, p.213 [HTML version]) The cabinet meeting "focused on the Predator, not the presidential directive." (Ibid., Notes, p.513, note 252 [HTML version]) "The armed Predator", notes Coll, "was by now a CIA project, virtually an agency invention." (Ghost Wars (Penguin, 2005 edn), p.581) The meeting concluded that an armed Predator was needed, but was not yet ready. Immediately afterwards, Tenet conferred with his staff, then directed the CIA to press ahead with flights of the reconnaissance version of the drone. But the agency was authorized to deploy "weapons-capable" drones. (9/11 Commission Report, chapter 6, p.214 [HTML version]; Tenet statement to the 9/11 Commission, March 24, 2004, p.16.)
Also on 4 September, the chief of Pakistani intelligence (the ISI), Mahmoud Ahmad, arrived in the USA; during the ensuing week he was to consult with the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Pentagon and State Department, on "security issues". (Michel Chossudovsky, "Cover-up or Complicity of the Bush Administration?", 2 Nov. 2001. Coincidentally, a Qaeda facilitator of the "hijackers", Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, had applied to enter the US on 4 September "for one week", after asking "9/11 plot coordinator" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for clearance to join the "martyrdom operation", but had been turned down by US immigration on suspicion he was an economic migrant. Ali was Mohammed's nephew. 9/11 Commission Report, chapter 7, pp.236, 220 [HTML version]; and ibid, Notes, p.527, note 112 [HTML version)]); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (Pengiun, 2005 edn), p.581.) (On the morning of 9/11, Ahmad was to meet with Porter Goss and other Congressional security personnel on Capitol Hill. ["9/11 Breakfast Meeting ..."])
Also on the same day, CIA chief Tenet ordered the withdrawal of all agents from Israel and Palestine; what was this about? (www.oocities.org/northstarzone/WAR.html) And in Britain MI6 director John Scarlett was promoted to chairmanship of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). As such he now provided the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, with a weekly intelligence assessment. (Profile: John Scarlett, BBC News online, 26 Aug. 2003; Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, 10 Downing Street online) Britain became the US junta's faithful poodle in its empire-building campaigns.
Tenth of September, 2001. The eve. The "plan to eliminate al-Qaeda" had just arrived on Rice's desk. Simultaneously a "three-stage plan" to deal with Bin Laden's "hosts", the Afghan Taliban, was agreed. It was later called a three-year process; but it would be executed in three weeks. Deputy NSA Hadley
instructed DCI Tenet to have the CIA prepare new draft legal authorities for the "broad covert action program" envisioned by the draft presidential directive. Hadley also directed Tenet to prepare a separate section "authorizing a broad range of other covert activities, including authority to capture or use lethal force against al Qaeda command-and-control elements".The chief of the Counterterrorist Center's "strategic assessments branch" for al-Qaeda (formally set up in July) finally reported for duty. And on this day (a Monday) the North American Air Defense Command, NORAD, began a week of exercises, called "Vigilant Guardian". ...
In the week before 9/11, the Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of abnormally-large numbers of "put options" (in effect, bets that the price of a stock will fall by a certain date) on the stocks of companies which were to be seriously adversely affected by 9/11. Such options were bought on United Airlines and in American Airlines, the two companies whose aircraft were used in the 9/11 strikes. (There were apparently no abnormal purchases for other airlines.) United Airlines stocks fell 42% in the aftermath of 9/11, and American Airlines 39%, representing total profits of almost $5 million and about $4 million respectively for the buyers of these options. Finace companies Morgan Stanley (whose HQ was in the World Trade Center) and Merrill Lynch also saw large-scale "put" purchases. Subsequent stock falls in these companies would have represented profits of $1.2m and $5.5m respectively. These activities indicate foreknowledge of the attacks by the ultimate purchasers of the options.At least one of these trades — representing $2.5 million profits on United Airlines options — was placed through the investment bank Alex. Brown. (The "prize" was left unclaimed after the attacks.) Alex. Brown was co-managed, until 1998, by A B ("Buzzy") Krongard, who joined the CIA in 1998 and became its Executive Director (the no. 2 man) in 2001. (Krongard's partner, Mayo Shattuck, resigned the day after 9/11.)
(See "9/11 Insider Trading", and the references given there.)