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Secretary of State Colin Powell
in presenting his case to the UN on February 5th identified
what he termed "The nexus of Iraq and terror." Powell
asserted that the US had learned prior to 9-11-2001
from a foreign intelligence service that " bin Laden
met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Khartoum,
and later met the director of the Iraqi intelligence
service," and that Iraq, according to other intelligence
sources, "forged ... secret, high-level intelligence
service contacts with al Qaeda." The US also learned
from its interrogation of al Qaeda sources after 9-11-2001
that Iraq offered "chemical or biological weapons training
for two al Qaeda associates beginning in December 2000."
Despite this reported collaboration
between Iraq and al-Qaeda before 9- 11, Powell did not
consider the possibility that state-sponsorship controlled
the coordinated aerial attack on targets in New York and
Washington on 9- 11. Yet until 9-11, the US government
took very seriously the role of hostile states using intelligence
services to covertly sponsor bombings and other activities
that could be attributed to free-lance terrorists. As
late as April 2001, Powell issued a report designating
seven governments— Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cuba, North
Korea, and Sudan— as "state sponsors of international
terrorism," and expressed concern "of Pakistani support
to terrorist groups and elements active in Kashmir, as
well as Pakistani support, especially military support,
to the Taliban, which continues to harbor terrorist groups,
including al-Qaeda, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, al-Gama'a
al- Islamiyya, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan."
As a specific example of state-sponsored
terrorism against the US, Powell cited reports that the
"Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) might retaliate against
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for broadcasts critical
of the Iraqi regime" in Prague. That allegation came directly
from a source in a position to know, Jabir Salim, the
Iraqi consul in the Czech Republic, who defected in December
1998. Salim reportedly revealed during his debriefings
that he had been given $150,000 in two payments by the
Iraqi intelligence service to buy untraceable explosives
and pay free-lance terrorists to detonate a truck bomb
in front of the Radio Free Europe building in downtown
Prague. The Czech government in response to Salim's disclosure
not only increased its police protection of Radio Free
Europe, it expelled Salim's replacement at the Iraqi Embassy
in April 2001 because of suspicions he was continuing
the plot.
The theory of state-sponsored terrorism,
which was the conventional wisdom during the cold war,
was based on the assumption that states sought to camouflage,
or at least create a fig leaf of plausible deniability
for the bombings and other covert actions carried out
by their intelligence services, by using free-lance terrorists
as operatives. In support, state sponsors had many options.
They could use embassy bases, in which their officers
were protected by diplomatic immunity, to conduct the
necessary surveillance. They could use unsearchable diplomatic
pouches and courier planes to transport lethal weaponry,
such as C-4, Semtex and ricin. They could counterfeit
authentic-looking travel documents and plant records in
official files to back them up. They could use state banks
to launder and transfer virtually untraceable money to
the accounts of operatives. They could use their foreign
intelligence officers to recruit operatives abroad under
false flags or use their internal security services to
threaten and compromise relatives of operatives to control
their action. Since individual terrorists rarely had such
resources, it was commonly assumed, even when the bodies
of terrorists were found at the scene of a complex attack,
that it had state sponsorship.
India, for example, assumes that
Pakistan are behind the Harkut-ul- Mujahideen that carries
out terrorist-style attacks in Kashmir even when captured
operatives traced directly back to al-Qaeda training camps
in Afghanistan. Similarly, even though local Saudi terrorists
bombed the US military residences at Khobar Towers in
Dharan, Saudi Arabia in 1996, killing 19 Americans, the
US Department of Justice assumed, because of the size
of the bomb and advanced planning, that the attack was
organized by a state: Iran. In fact, on July 22, 2001
that Attorney General Ashcroft vowed to pursue the Iranians
"who inspired, supported and supervised the attack." That
was 51 days before the aerial attack on the World Trade
Center.
Why then is not the possibility
of state participation in the 9-11 attack given consideration
under the theory of state-sponsored terrorism? After all,
the 9-11 attack was perhaps the most complex, synchronous
assault on the United States since Pearl Harbor. It involved:
1) four separate crews of trained
hijackers embarking from three separate airports;
2) intelligence that included advance
reconnaissance of numerous airports, airliners, cockpits
and flight crews;
3) weapons (or chemical sprays)
that allowed the crews to disable the pilots and for co-pilots
with such dispatch that not a single one of them was able
to inform the ground controllers over their open radio
of the attack.
4) four or more pilots capable of
flying Boeing 757s and Boeings 767s in evasive patterns,
while turning off the IFF transponders to confuse and
delay interception and navigate the planes towards pre-selected
targets;
5) documentation for at least 13
of the hijackers, including passports that were either
stolen or recycled from the passports of Arabs killed
in Chechenya or elsewhere, and forged driver licenses
and other ID;
6) funds to transport, train, arm
and quarter 19 or more operatives for many months, and
the mechanisms to deposit and transfer these funds in
such a way that they remained untraceable;
7) escape routes and new identities
for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other
operatives not aboard the four planes;
8) the communications, logistics
and agent management necessary to securely coordinate
four separate attacks on the same day.
Under the theory of state sponsored
terrorism, the intelligence service of a hostile state
would be considered as the supplier of such resources
and planning. And a prime candidate would be a hostile
state that had planned past attacks on American targets,
and had a link to al-Qaeda, such as Iraq. Consider:
1. Iraq was at war with the United
States in the no-fly zones in September 2001.
2. Iraq, according to Secretary
of State Powell's disclosures, had "secret, high-level
intelligence service contacts with al Qaeda" and offered
"chemical or biological weapons training for two al Qaeda
associates beginning in December 2000."
3. Iraq, according to an intelligence
officer who defected from Prague, had used its embassy
in Prague as a base to organize, finance and direct a
terrorist bombing aimed at an American facility in 1998:
Radio Free Europe.
4) An Iraqi officer in Prague, according
to the Czech intelligence service (BIS), met with an Arab
it identified as 9-11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, in April
2001, which resulted in the Czech Foreign Ministry expelling
the Iraqi Officer.
5) Iraq had both the means and experience
to carry out state-sponsored covert actions that used
free-lance terrorists as operatives.
6) In his 1999 book Bin Laden: The
Man Who Declared War On America,Yossef Bodansky, former
Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism
and Unconventional Warfare, states his belief that "terrorist
operations in several parts of the world now attributed
to bin Laden were actually state-sponsored operations."
He accepts that bin Laden and his followers participated
in these actions but argues that planning, intelligence
support and escape routes were provided by state intelligence
services, including those of Iran and Iraq. In Bodansky's
view, these states not only used Jihadists to carry out
their covert actions, they used them as masks to hide
behind.
Why then should not the Kean Commission
consider the possibility that 9-11 was an act of state-sponsored
terrorism? |
