Bin Laden: the doubts mount.

Summary
Bin Laden supports the attacks but this does not prove he initiated them or organised the details. The attacks took place on the eleventh anniversary of the New World Order speech of George Bush senior. This would point to the US militias. An outline scenario, illustrated by known facts, of how the militias could be in an alliance with Al Quaida.

On September 11 1990 George Bush snr delivered his New World Order speech in the build up to the war in Kuwait. Bush archives are the source, it looks solid (http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/papers/1990/90091101.html)
The right wing militias of course have made the New World Order their causus belli against the federal government, it was one of the motives for Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma bomb. The first clue that Oklahoma was not the work of arabs was when someone noticed the date corresponded to the Waco siege. It was only good luck that the FBI caught McVeigh redhanded. Suppose the Militias have linked up with elements of Bin Laden's network?

One thing is certain. As UK Labour MP Tam Dalyell has said, the details of this plan were not worked out in a cave in Afghanistan, even if the idea originated there.

And even if Bin Laden did instigate it, it does not mean he was acting alone, he could have been under orders from someone very different, he could have been in an alliance with the militias. The Israelis are expert at turning Arab militants into informers and provocateurs, there is a seamless web stretching from them through the US government agencies through to the militias.

There are more odd facts. The supposed passport of one of the hijackers was found in the ruins of the twin towers on day one, having apparently fluttered down from the plane. In the heat of the moment, until we all realised what a mammoth disaster this was, you could almost accept this was possible. But, like the famous magic bullet in Dallas 1963, (note for physicists, and the orbit of Mercury) it sort of nags. Who apparently seeded this evidence and with what motive?

Then there was the Koran and flight manuals in the car at Boston airport. At the time it seemed quite believable that people on the fast track to paradise would not bother to hide their tracks. But now it is reported that only the pilots knew the true plan, the others thought they were going to live.

What about Mohammed Atta and friends drinking session in Florida shortly before the hijackings? How does that fit into the devout Muslim scenario of the Mohammed Atta document? Talking of that document, a Muslim friend whose brother was nearly an Al Qaida recruit observes that it is peculiar for its complete lack of any evidence of a reason, analysis or motive.

We think we know who all the hijackers were, Atta's identity has been fairly clearly established, but passport evidence can be worthless. There are many countries in the world where you can buy, not even a false passport, but a genuine passport from corrupt passport officials. Any medium to high level drug dealer knows this, let alone CIA trained international terrorists like the Al Quaida group and their associates.

Al Quaida means `The Base`. It is possible that Bin Laden is nothing more than the quartermaster. He may even be a decoy, to lure American ground troops into a war they cannot win while the next serious move is planned, say, for Saudi Arabia, denying the West the oil it is addicted to.

The authorities see structures with a kingpin, but in many setups, as Howard Marks confirms, there are loose ad hoc networks and nothing more. When the heat is one one node, activity moves to another.

4. A scenario indicating how genuinely arab hijackers might have been working for someone else. This is long.

Tony Blair has pointed out that Afghan heroin finances the Taliban. He's probably right. It may also have financed the Mohajadin. The story could be close to the truth. It is based on facts. The facts are in brackets.

The scene is a secluded mountain village near Mazar-i-Sherif, Afghanistan cica 1991. The Russians have pulled out, a chapter is coming to its end, many people will soon be saying goodbye. After years of war, the male bonding is intense.

A young Saudi war organiser, Osama Bin Laden, and his American colleague are paying a rare visit to the front to discuss business with some local figures in the heroin trade. The American does not work for the CIA (since they became a household word in the seventies, they only deal with aspects of an operation that might become public). No, he works for an obscure department in US Military Intelligence. (US Military Intelligence has been associated with several drug busts in Europe over the years, including LSD and heroin).

If a US congressman investigated this department he/she would be told it was innocuously involved in something like disabled access to US bases. (A similar department in South Africa was called the Civil Co-operation Bureau) Its declared budget is tiny because most of its funds come from the supervision of the heroin trade which along with the hash trade, finances much of the holy war against the Russians.

(I met an Afghan Mojahadeen in 1985 who had been caught with over a kilo of pure heroin in Frankfurt airport. He was a lightly built guy with a permanent smile. He was proud of friends who skinned Russian soldiers alive back at home. Historians record that the British never left the wounded alive in Afghanistan)

(In his autobiography, Mr Nice, Howard Marks describes how he worked with people linked to US military intelligence to smuggle tonnes of dope stamped Smoke the Russians out of Afghanistan. He was tipped off before his final bust by US Military Inteligence but ignored the warning)

In this world it's unwise to ask who you work for, you won't be told the truth and if you were it might be unhealthy to know. With US withdrawal imminent. it is however being touched upon now, the warlords might have to find new channels to get the smack onto the streets of the West.

(Most human beings put personal friendship and even money before political ideology, but they like to cobble together a shared reality if they can. This process is helped by shared drug taking, be it alcohol or hash. When your business is secret this reality doesn't come under much scrutiny and does not have to be particularly logical.)

Bin Laden and the American disagree about religion but not about much else. They know they might end up on opposite sides in the future but life's like that in their world. The shared reality these comrades are cooking up is this. The world up to now has been ruled by a duopoly. One half, the Soviet Union is defeated, but President Bush himself has just given the game away by declaring the New World Order in 1991. The US yankees, who began by cruelly destroying the confederacy and then much of the South in the US civil war, have now gone on to build a hypocritical world wide liberal empire, against the interests of ordinary God-fearing people everywhere.

(In spite of current propaganda militant Islam and even Bin Laden have not declared a war against Americans because they are infidels but because they are aiding and abetting supposed crimes outside the US. Right wing Libertarians believe all drugs should be made legal for adults to take if they so choose. It is therefore hardly a major crime to supply them especially if the money is going to a good cause).
 
With the Afghan war apparently over, why stop the heroin trade which, like Oliver North's cocaine trade via Central America a few years before (he was under indictment for this in Costa Rica, lifted only after massive US pressure), has run so smoothly and profitably.

The warlords are getting the reassurance they wanted. With only their goals altered, the US organiser and Bin Laden will guarantee the payments indefinitely, the money will be invested in legitimate businesses in Pakistan and the US...
Now the American goes home and disappears from the author's sight, until 1995 when Libertarian terrorists have their most publicised success with the Oklahoma bomb.

(Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma bomb killed 300 people, although reports said it was a mysterious second detonation which did the damage. Mostly they were US government employees in the Mid West. At first it was blamed on Islamic extremists, nobody could believe Americans could commit such a crime against fellow Americans. It was sheer good luck that the FBI intercepted McVeigh, who like a good soldier went to his execution refusing to say who had helped him).

After their narrow escape in 1995 the controllers of Timothy McVeigh have learnt the same lesson as the controllers of Lee Harvey Oswald. Even the best laid plans can come to grief. (In the case of Lee Harvey Oswald it was the famous Zapruder movie, suppressed for several years after the assassination, which proved by the timing between individual frames that Oswald could not have been acting alone).

The lesson is that the controllers need to be two steps away from the operator, not one. So for the next attack on the hated Yankee Union they get back in touch with Osama Bin Laden, by now totally committed to a surprisingly similar struggle against the New World Order, and make a deal. He provides the operatives, they plan the details, make sure it's going to work and help with the backup and cover-up.

Are the conspirators, as the West but not the Muslim world currently believes, privileged members of the Saudi elite?  They are certainly deeply embedded somewhere in the global oligarchy. In this scenario, even Osama Bin Laden himself would not know for sure who the true conspirators are.
 
Are they traditional US right wingers, pursuing a strategy of tension to provoke a clampdown on civil liberties? (It emerged some time after the events that in Italy the Red Brigades, assassins of Aldo Moro, who successfully aborted the grand design for a Christian Democrat/communist coalition, the Historic Compromise, were, unknown to the operatives, controlled by elements within the secret police)

Or were they Christian fundamentalists intent on setting off the Third World War?
Or were they Jewish fundamentalists desperate to escalate world tension and abort a Middle East peace settlement? Or were they pursuing some half baked plan that has no publicly known adherents at all?

The point of the story is that terrorists and drug dealers don't think like academic analysts and that in this world of secrecy and intrigue only the naive would claim to be certain of what is going on.