On the morning of September 11, 2001, during a live interview on KTKK-AM in Salt Lake City, minutes after the attack on the World Trade Center, Lyndon LaRouche predicted, "First of all, the first suspicion that’s going to be on this is Osama bin Laden. That name is going to come up prominently…" LaRouche went on to explain, "Osama bin Laden is a controlled entity. Osama bin Laden is not an independent force."

Readers of Executive Intelligence Review might recall an expose written over six years earlier, in which LaRouche warned, "A new wave of international terrorism is stalking the world. It is led by a horde of mujahideen mercenaries: human flotsam, like the 1920s "rootless" veterans of WWI, cast upon the world in the wake of the 1980s Afghan war. This is the worst terrorism yet; it is much worse than that of the 1970s. It is coordinated from the capital of a former U.S. ally, London; worse yet, it was created with complicity of former U.S. Vice President (and, later, President) George Bush. It threatens you, and your family: perhaps directly, perhaps indirectly. We must mobilize to fight it, and defeat it."

History has shown that LaRouche did not exaggerate. The events of September 11, once again, show that LaRouche was right. Here are the facts:

Less than one month after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security advisor, stood at the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan, and was photographed pointing a rifle across the border into Afghan territory. Brzezinski was in Pakistan to deliver a commitment from President Carter that the United States was ready to provide the government of Pakistan with massive military aid to help build up the Afghan mujahideen resistance to the Soviet invaders. Brzezinski’s policy, as revealed in Time magazine, Jan. 15, 1979, was to use Islamic fundamentalism as a "geo-strategic" card to destabilize the Soviet Union all across South Asia. Brzezinski, meanwhile, was the protégé of Bernard Lewis, a senior British-Intelligence, Oxford trained Arabist who maintained a 200-year-old British strategy of playing what Rudyard Kipling had dubbed the "Great Game" across the steppes of Central Asia. The Great Game was played to maintain British imperial control of the region’s population and resources, and to keep rivals out, particularly Russia.

The covert apparatus established to support the Afghan mujahideen was directed from London, through senior British intelligence figures such as Privy Council head, Lord Cranbourne, and from Wall Street, through such figures as anglophile banker John Train, creator of the "Afghan Relief Committee" (ARC), in 1980. The ARC interfaced with the Peshawar, Pakistan based International Rescue Committee (IRC), headed by Leo Cherne, who became vice-chairman of President Reagan’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Cherne coordinated his activities with Vice President George Bush I, who was placed in charge of the U.S. government side of the operation under National Security Decision Directive-3, signed by President Reagan in 1982. Cherne’s IRC offices, meanwhile, were staffed mostly by members of Gulbuddin Hekmatyr’s Hezb-i-Islami (Party of Islam), which controlled the largest share of opium and heroin production in Afghanistan. Gulbuddin Hekmatyr, moreover, was a long-time member of the freemasonic Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful and shadowy British intelligence controlled entity that included such figures as the late Ayatollah Khomeini. In fact, the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company directly financed the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in early 20th century Egypt.

Funds generated from Hekmatyr’s massively expanded drug production were managed at the Bank for Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which was built up during the 1980s to manage covert finance pouring into the war in Afghanistan, as well as other covert operations, including the infamous Iran-Contra operation. For example, Lt. Colonel Oliver North and British arms dealer Leslie Aspin opened four joint bank accounts in BCCIs Paris branch.

Alongside Cherne’s IRC in Peshawar, was Afghan Aid U.K. (AAUK), which was sponsored and funded by the above-mentioned Lord Cranbourne. AAUK activities, which were key in the mujahideen war effort, were coordinated with Radio Free Kabul, which was established at the beginning of the war by Lord Nicholas Bethell, and run out of Coutts and Co., the private banker to Queen Elizabeth II.

Throughout the 1979-1989 war in Afghanistan, the elite, British Strategic Air Services (SAS) was on the ground in Pakistan, leading the training of mujahideen mercenaries recruited from around the Arab world to fight the Soviet Union. The now infamous Osama bin Laden was, in fact, a middle level operative in this international web of covert British, U.S., and Israeli operations which went far beyond the Afghani theatre. Bin Laden was recruited from Saudi Arabia, and functioned as a paymaster to various mujahideen groups and individuals.

Recently, much has been made of the alleged discovery of a tape—widely regarded as a fraud—of someone who is allegedly Osama bin Laden discussing his alleged masterminding of the September 11, 2001 attack. The transcript, as provided by the Pentagon, includes the following quotes. [UBL stands for "Usama" bin Laden, an alternate spelling].

Even if these quotes are genuine, and the tape is not a fraud, a careful reading of them does not prove Osama bin Laden masterminded the attack. What is most puzzling is the quote, "We had notification since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day." It would seem that Osama bin Laden, if in fact these were his words, knew about the attack only six days in advance. If you, dear reader, were judge and jury in any responsible court of law, would you have enough evidence to convict Osama bin Laden as the mastermind of the September 11 attack?

While much of the media’s attention has been given to Osama bin Laden, little has been given to the Dec.12, Fox News report that, "Some 60 Israeli’s, who federal investigators have said are part of a long-running effort to spy on American government officials, are among the hundreds of foreigners detained since the Sept. 11 attacks." This report echoes a Dec. 4, 2001 Executive Intelligence Review report, that, "A well-placed Washington source has alerted {EIR} that there is a growing suspicion among U.S. government law enforcement and intelligence agencies that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has dispatched special operations teams to into North America. The warning came in the context of a discussion about the recent deportation of five Israelis who were detained on September 11 for suspicious behavior. The five were [celebrating] on a rooftop in Hoboken, N.J., looking across the Hudson River as the World Trade center was going up in flames, and police were alerted." Later, it was revealed that these five Israelis were Mossad Agents.

Readers of EIR have known since June 23, 2000, of related Israeli espionage. On that date, EIR published a story entitled, "What is the Israeli Blackmail on Clinton?" The story detailed the suspicion that Israeli intelligence had tapped President Clinton's phone conversations, and had used them for blackmail. In brief, it is now known, as reported in part by Fox News and Insight Magazine, that Israeli spies have had access to sophisticated software and equipment capable of tapping secure phonelines and grabbing virtually every phone call dialed in the U.S. Moreover, it is suspected that some of these spies had prior knowledge of the September 11 attack. In fact, when EIR correspondent Bill Jones asked Secretary of State Colin Powell about these suspicions at a December 13, 2001 press conference Powell answered, "I will defer to the Department of Justice and the FBI to answer that."

If the Department of Justice and the FBI do their job well, they may soon discover that the September 11 attack was, as Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly emphasized, an attempted coup conducted primarily from inside the United States. It was a highly sophisticated, covert intelligence operation utilizing rogue elements of the United States, British, and Israeli military, ex-military, and related, "off the reservation" capabilities, possibly including mujahideen mercenary assets. If that is too much to believe, and one would prefer to believe that Osama bin Laden masterminded and conducted the September 11 attack from a cave in remote Afghanistan, then one must be prepared for who knows what.