The Pakistan connection

[shraby]

There is evidence of foreign intelligence backing for the 9/11 hijackers. Why is the US government so keen to cover it up?
Omar Sheikh, a British-born Islamist militant, is waiting to be hanged in Pakistan for a murder he almost certainly didn't commit - of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. Both the US government and Pearl's wife have since acknowledged that Sheikh was not responsible. Yet the Pakistani government is refusing to try other suspects newly implicated in Pearl's kidnap and murder for fear the evidence they produce in court might acquit Sheikh and reveal too much.
Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Why not?

Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Washington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White House, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs. When Ahmed was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as having sent the money to the hijackers, he was forced to "retire" by President Pervez Musharraf. Why hasn't the US demanded that he be questioned and tried in court?

Another person who must know a great deal about what led up to 9/11 is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, allegedly arrested in Rawalpindi on March 1 2003. A joint Senate-House intelligence select committee inquiry in July 2003 stated: "KSM appears to be one of Bin Laden's most trusted lieutenants and was active in recruiting people to travel outside Afghanistan, including to the US, on behalf of Bin Laden." According to the report, the clear implication was that they would be engaged in planning terrorist-related activities.

(more)

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1266317,00.html>

[acmavm]

1. Okay, I try to pay attention to what is going on, maybe too much

attention. But this is something that I didn't know, had no clue. And this puts a whole new perspective on 911. In fact, when I think about it, it seems like everyone involved in this coverup is guilty of complicity after the fact. And you can't tell me that there aren't people in the current administration that know about it.

What about the much touted 911 commission, do they know about all this? If so, why isn't there any mention of it in their report?

Why isn't the media all over this? Don't bother to answer, because I know. The government that we're giving billions of dollars to is one of the governments that is guilty of helping to cover up what happened. But they wouldn't be successful, couldn't be successful, without the help of the bush* administration.

[htuttle]

7. This information has been out a few years now

There's even a song about it that's been out about that long:

Buddy, Buddy by Clarity

Ahmed is buddy-buddy with George Tenet,
He's buddy-buddy with Mohammed Atta(x4)
At 8:28 A.M. Flight 11 makes an unplanned 100 degree turn to the south
At 9:04 our commander & chief is told "A second plane has hit, America is under attack."
He is in an elementary school and continues to read about goats for the next 20 minutes or so meanwhile
Secret Service whisk Dick Cheney into an underground presidential bunker.
8:50 AM there is a loss of contact w/ a plane detoured off course to the capital
but it wasn't till 9:24 A.M. that American Fighters were scrambled: do the math
This is 34 MINUTES after flight control lost contact with the plane and long after two planes have already crashed: the 11th wasn't the first time a hijack ever took place in America. Never has there been this long a delay when any other flights were hijacked.
10 minutes is the maximum allowed
34 minutes is unprecedented
this is 24 minutes that made the difference in allowing an attack on the Pentagon
and who gets the blame?
Richard Myers was promoted to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
the highest military office in the country, after the worst attack on America was perpetrated under his watch. There must have been a military order(x2)
There is no other logical explanation for 34 minutes, when only 10 are legally allowed
Meanwhile,
Chairman of (Congressional) Intelligence Committees are having breakfast with
Mahmoud Ahmed, head of the Pakistani ISI who had authorized a $100,000 wire transfer to Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the 9-11 attacks
There must have been a military order...
there is no other logical explanation for 34 minutes when 10 are only legally allowed
Ahmed is buddy-buddy with George Tenet,
He's buddy-buddy with Mohammed Atta (repeat to end)

http://www.delcanton.com/cds/kaneandsalem.asp

Flash to go with song:
http://www.ericblumrich.com/buddy.html

[Media_Lies_Daily]

2. Oh, no....pay no attention to those people behind the curtain...

...they are some of our best allies in the War against TERROR!!!

Kinda makes you lean toward MIHOP, if you're not already there.

[allemand]

3. General Mahmoud Ahmed has not been charged yet

because he still has too powerful friends or is too powerful himself.

The balance of power is quite fragile in Pakistan.

Judging from his speeches, General Musharraf is really keen on reform. But, as Ahmed Rashid wrote in 2000, "Musharraf himself is heavily dependent on several neo-fundamentalist generals who helped him during the coup <...>."
http://www.aajkaynaam.org/site/campaign/arashid.htm
Also, Musharraf is not part of the traditional (Punjabi) ruling elite in Pakistan, but the child of refugees, which further weakens his position.

Islamic fundamentalism is still rampant inside the intelligence agency (ISI), of which General Mahmoud Ahmed was the director. Don't forget that Musharraf only narrowly escaped several attempts at his life, some of which were quite sophisticated and may have relied on inside knowledge.

On the streets there are millions of poor Pakistanis who went through the fundamentalist madrassa schools, because the State failed to provide them with education.

Pakistan is a nuclear power. The West simply can't afford to loose it to the fundamentalists.

So, one has to be very careful in order to strengthen the reform forces and not to tip the fragile balance of power toward the wrong side.

[Minstrel Boy]

4. Hooray for Michael Meacher!

I thought, before I clicked on the link, that he might be the author.

For those who missed the story: he's Tony Blair's former Environment Minister - indeed, the longest-serving Labour Minister - and last September he wrote a piece for The Guardian titled "This War on Terrorism is Bogus." It was a LIHOP primer. An excerpt:


Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1036571,00.html

[buycitgo]

6. minstrel boy........do you sleep?

how big is your HD?

[Minstrel Boy]

9. Surprisingly, yes. Just not well.

HD could always be bigger, but I have a dozen binders full of 9/11 material and 10 books by 9/11 skeptics on my shelf, all within reach. (It helps to work at home. Though it may not help my work.)

[buycitgo]

5. jesus........is this a breaking story? can't be, can it, I guess.

should have been paying more attention to that; didn't realize there's that ISI connection

this, of course, is a key failing of the commission, as I think they completely ignore this connection, which, if explored in any detail, would reveal the depths of complicity between who knows in our government, and those who planned the attacks

[mumon]

8. Geez, I posted this yesterday...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2045589

[Aries]

10. This may explain how the knowledge of air war games

that were planned for 9/10 and 9/11 got to the hijackers, allowing them to attack on a day which caused confusion among NORAD personnel about whether the hijackings were "real or simulated" (according to recorded conversations played on NPR this week). Since the ISI and CIA are so close, it seems plausible to think that the CIA told the ISI, from which the information got the the hijackers.

Or were the hijackers just incredibly lucky to pick a day when war games were going on for their attacks?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KAN403A.html

#1 – On the morning of September 11, 2001, NORAD was running war games involving hijacked airliners while the National Reconnaissance Offices (NRO) was running a drill for the scenario of an errant aircraft crashing into a government building at the exact same time as an identical scenario was perpetrated. The Air Force was in day two of annual drills testing all of its systems to respond to various threats.

Certainly the failure to investigate or report on this possibility is another major flaw in the 9/11 Commission's report.