William Rivers Pitt
The Silence about September 11
Mon Apr 21 17:40:18 2003
208.152.73.25

The Silence about September 11
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/042203A.shtml
Monday 21 April 2003

They call it "The fog of war" for a reason. A lot of things get lost
in the fire and the smoke that should not be forgotten, and yet they
are, spent and cast aside like depleted uranium shell casings left
to roast on a dusty desert roadside. In this relatively quiet space
between war in Iraq and whatever battle zone the Bush administration
will next come to conjure, it serves us to remember a few home facts
that should never, ever be lost.

I have been giving a lot of talks lately at colleges and for
organizations about the Iraq war. Always in my remarks I ask the
same question. "It has been almost 20 months since the attacks of
September 11. It has been over 570 days since the Towers fell. The
9/11 attacks are the principle reason, according to the Bush
administration, which justifies the war. Can anyone tell me why
those attacks happened? Has anyone in the Bush administration or the
media come forth with a reasonable explanation besides 'Evildoers
who hate our freedom?'"

Every time I get blank stares, and always a few sets of widened
eyes, as if my question caused them to suddenly realize that no such
explanation has ever been put forward.

The fact is that the Bush administration has labored mightily and
long to make sure no such answers are coming. They fought the
creation of an independent investigative body because they wanted to
be able to choose the chairman. Once they were gifted this
privilege, they abused it with the appalling nomination of Henry
Kissinger. If you want a fair and open examination of facts,
regardless of shadowy loyalties and compromising corporate
connections, you do not choose Kissinger. If you want the master of
the black bag and the black op, the undisputed heavyweight champion
of Washington insiderdom, the gold standard for cover-up and
cover-your-ass, you cannot do better than Henry. This choice told us
everything we need to know about the Bush administration's desire to
get to the bottom of 9/11.

When I ask my question at these talks, someone in the audience
always demands an answer. More often than not, I tell them about
Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Afghan Trap. In 1979, Brzezinski was
serving as Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, and he decided
the time had come to challenge the Soviet Union in their own back
yard. At this time, Afghanistan was ruled by a communist puppet
regime of the Soviets called the People's Democratic Republic of
Afghanistan, or PDPA. Brzezinski instituted a plan to train
fundamentalist Islamic mujeheddin fighters in Pakistan, and sent
those fighters to attack the PDPA. The idea was not to destroy the
PDPA, but to make the Soviets so nervous about the stability of
their puppet regime that they would invade Afghanistan to protect
it. Brzezinski wanted, at bottom, to hand the Soviet Union their own
debilitating Vietnam.

The plan worked. The Soviets invaded in 1979, and over the next ten
years spent its blood and treasure trying to defeat the Afghan
warriors who banded together to defend their country. By 1989
millions of Afghan civilians had been killed, millions more had been
internally displaced, and hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops had
been killed. In the process, the nation of Afghanistan was torn to
pieces. Worst of all, the United States – which energetically worked
to start the war, and which armed and funded the Afghan mujeheddin
once the war was underway – did absolutely nothing to aid ravaged
Afghanistan once the Soviets withdrew. Brzezinski proudly described
the Afghan Trap in an interview he gave to a French publication
called Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998:

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in
his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence
services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before
the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national
security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in
this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA
aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the
Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality,
secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was
July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for
secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And
that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained
to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet
military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action.
But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and
looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene,
but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that
they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United
States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there
was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had
the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want
me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the
border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of
giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years,
Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a
conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the
breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic
fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban
or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the
liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

How innocent we were in 1998. How gravely we misjudged the dire
ramifications of empowering the Taliban. How profoundly we
underestimated the strength of the "stirred-up Moslems" we armed and
trained with American tax dollars. What a price we have paid.

You see, the Afghan Trap led to the incredibly vicious civil war in
Afghanistan that came once the Soviets withdrew. By 1996, the
Taliban – made up of our secret allies in the Soviet war - had won
the civil war and controlled the nation. The Afghan Trap likewise
gave birth to a man named Osama bin Laden, who became a demigod to
the Taliban and the Afghan people for his service in the war against
the Soviets we started in the first place. The combination of our
efforts to begin that war, the social annihilation in Afghanistan
caused by that war, the Taliban's rise, and the succor they gave bin
Laden, led like an arrow to the attacks of September 11 and the dire
estate we currently endure.

How ironic that Brzezinski's desire to end one Cold War gave birth
to another. Actions, I tell the listeners at these talks, have
consequences. You stir up a hornet's nest, best you expect to get
stung. Boy, did we ever get stung.

The actions of a Carter administration official in 1979 can hardly
be laid at the feet of George W. Bush and his administration, of
course. It is telling, however, that no one in that administration
has made an effort to put 9/11 into the historical context to which
it belongs. Why such an oversight? Perhaps the folks in the
administration believe Americans too dull-witted to comprehend the
complex Cold War motivations that gave birth to Osama bin Laden and
the Taliban. Perhaps they are afraid to speak of such things,
because it suggests that we inadvertently bought the trouble that
came two Septembers ago to find us.

Then again, perhaps the administration was engaged in similar
gamesmanship before 9/11. Perhaps they are afraid to address the
issue at all. The nomination of Kissinger to the 9/11 committee
certainly suggests a desire on the administration's part to never,
ever, ever have the facts of that attack come fully to light. They
do not want people to know that Brzezinski's actions in 1979, and
the naiveté regarding the potential blowback from his decisions he
displayed in 1998, was compounded by the actions of the Bush
administration in 2001. Brzezinski asked in his interview what was
more important in 1979: Ending the Cold War or creating the Taliban?
In the early days of the Bush administration, a similar question was
certainly asked - what is more important in 2001: Gaining access to
an incredibly lucrative energy supply, or the dangers of threatening
the Taliban?

A pipeline project, aimed at exploiting massive natural gas reserves
along the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan, was revived by the Bush
administration when it arrived in Washington in January of 2001. The
pipeline project, which sought to bring oil and natural gas from
Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to a warm water port, had been the
brainchild of American petroleum giant Unocal for much of the 1990s.
After the destruction of two American embassies in Africa in 1998 by
Osama bin Laden, the Clinton administration forbade any American
companies from doing business with the Taliban, which had been
sheltering bin Laden in Afghanistan. Unocal's pipeline project was
frozen.

After the Bush administration came to power, reinvigorating the
pipeline project became a high-priority matter of policy. Assistant
Secretary of State Christina Rocca was dispatched to Pakistan to
discuss the pipeline with Taliban officials in August of 2001.
Rocca, a career officer with the CIA, had been deeply involved in
Agency activities within Afghanistan. A Pakistani foreign minister
was present at the meeting, and witnessed the exchange.

How does this pipeline relate to September 11th? The main obstacle
to the completion of the pipeline was the fact that it had to pass
through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The project would receive no
international support unless the Afghan government somehow became
legitimized. In bargaining for the pipeline, the Bush administration
demanded that the Taliban reinstate deposed King Mohammad Zahir Shah
as ruler of Afghanistan, and demanded that the Taliban hand over
Osama bin Laden for arrest. In return, the Taliban would reap untold
billions in profit from the pipeline. A central part of the Bush
administration's bargaining tactics involved threats of war if these
conditions for the legitimization of Afghanistan were not met.

The BBC of London reported on September 18th, 2001 of the existence
of war plans on Bush's desk aimed at Afghanistan. Niaz Naik, a
former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, stated that the war plans were
slated for October of 2001. Conditions set by the Bush
administration to avoid war involved the Taliban's handing over of
bin Laden and the acceptance of King Zahir Shah. Naik went so far as
to doubt that America would hold off on war even if these conditions
were met.

The result was total disaster. The Bush administration fundamentally
misunderstood the Taliban regime, much the way Brzezinski did in
1998. To bring back the King and hand bin Laden over to the West
would have been tantamount to suicide for the Taliban. The arrival
of Shah would shove them out of power, and handing bin Laden over to
the West would have been seen as a high crime to the Islamic world.
Instead of acquiescing to the hard-sell tactics of the Bush
administration, the Taliban unleashed Osama bin Laden upon America.
They were going to lose everything, and chose to attack first in the
hope that all-out war would break out in Central Asia and rally
other Muslim nations to their cause.

Actions do indeed have consequences. The motivations behind 20
months of silence regarding the cause of 9/11, along with the
appalling nomination of Kissinger as chief investigator, become far
more clear.

The families of those slain on 9/11 have not taken all of this lying
down. They have sued the government of Saudi Arabia for civil
damages totaling $1 trillion, accusing them of harboring and aiding
the terrorists who took down the Towers. There is profound merit to
their claim, as 15 of the 19 terrorists who flew the planes on 9/11
came from Saudi Arabia, as does Osama bin Laden and the Wahabbi sect
of Islam that motivates their jihad. The suit seems logical and
reasonable. It is disturbing, then, to consider the legal team hired
by the Saudi government to defend against the charges. Prince Sultan
bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi defense minister, is being represented in
court by the prestigious Houston law firm Baker Botts.

The 'Baker' in Baker Botts is James Baker III, Secretary of State to
George Bush Sr. and prime fighter for Bush Jr. in the Florida
election brawl. Baker also shares another employer with Bush Sr.:
Massive multinational corporation The Carlyle Group, owner of the
arms manufacturer United Defense, which is making a gold-plated mint
off the war in Iraq.

I'd be gratified if someone could explain all this away. I could
sleep at night.

The war we have waged against Iraq was justified to the American
people as being a necessary response to September 11. We were told
Iraq had terrible weapons that could kill us all, that Iraq was a
major threat, and that the country will be safer once the Hussein
regime was fired. The fact that we have found exactly zero weapons
of mass destruction, and the relative ease with which we destroyed
Iraq's army, proves they were no threat whatsoever. We went anyway,
however, to make the world safer at the point of our incredibly
sharp sword.

Albert Einstein, arguably the most brilliant human being ever to
draw breath on planet Earth, defined insanity as "doing the same
thing over and over again expecting different results." America
instigated a horrible war in Afghanistan 24 years ago to make the
world safer. We have attacked and destroyed another Muslim nation
purportedly for the same purpose. One of these days we are going to
realize that such actions never serve the cause of peace, but only
serve to perpetuate and augment the horrors of this terrifying
world. We will learn, for all time, that actions have consequences.

In the meantime, though, we have silence about September. We have
evildoers who hate our freedom, and we have war after war after war,
instigated by an administration that has so very much to answer for.
I tell the people at my talks about all this, and they leave the
room quivering with rage. They have the answers, as do I, and God
help the administration because of it. Secrets love to whisper.

-------

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times best-selling author of two
books - "War On Iraq" available now from Context Books, and "The
Greatest Sedition is Silence," now available at from Pluto Press. He
teaches high school in Boston, MA. Scott Lowery contributed
research to this report.





(*Editors Note | From day one the families of those killed on
September 11th. have questioned the events leading up the attacks on
the World Trade Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.
They have sought a just, fair and thorough investigation, they have
been denied at every turn. Moreover the entire issue has been
utterly ignored by the US commercial press and likewise by the
American people. -- ma.)

Go To Original

Statement of Mindy Kleinberg to the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States t r u t h o u t |
Statement

March 31, 2003

My name is Mindy Kleinberg. My husband Alan Kleinberg, 39 yrs old,
was killed in the WTC on September 11, 2001. As I testify here today
about the 9/11 attacks, I will begin by saying that my thoughts are
very much with the men and women who are involved in armed conflict
overseas and their families who wait patiently for them to return.

This war is being fought on two fronts, overseas as well as here on
our shores; this means that we

• RE: 9/11 - Statement of Mindy Kleinberg — Mindy Kleinberg, Mon Apr 21 17:47
• relating to the September 11th attacks, — APFN, Mon Apr 21 17:58