American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [95]
The CIA goes way back with these guys. They were recruited into the secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, back in the late 1980s. In fact, the term al-Qaeda is said to have been invented by the CIA to designate a database of recruits into the Mujahideen. Michael Springman was head of the visa section at our embassy in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, and he remembers granting visas to “terrorists” who’d been recruited by CIA and sent for training to America. Some of them fought in Bosnia during the ’92 to ’95 period. Springman can be seen in the documentary Zero saying that many of the hijackers he read about in the L.A. Times were once on his visa list in Jeddah. He called the FBI a number of times, who Springman says responded: “We’ll get back to you. Six years later I’m still waiting.”41
Osama bin Laden himself started out helping the CIA in Afghanistan. In 2009, a former FBI translator named Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell. 42 The U.S., she said, had kept up “intimate relations” with bin Laden “all the way until that day of September 11”—using him sometimes for ops in central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. The process Edmonds outlined involved the use of Turkey (with assistance of “actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia”) as proxies, with those folks in turn employing bin Laden and the Taliban. The goals? Control of the huge energy supplies in Central Asia, for one. Maybe the real reason we invaded Afghanistan? Sibel Edmonds testified for three and a half hours to the 9/11 Commission, but it ended up being classified.43
Bin Laden, like 15 of the 19 alleged hijackers, came from Saudi Arabia. Back in October 2003, an article in Vanity Fair had questioned the FBI’s letting six planes of Middle Eastern nationals—most of them members of the Saudi royal family—fly out of the U.S. soon after 9/11. The 9/11 Commission concluded that, after the Saudi government requested this out of fear for their safety, the FBI had “conducted a satisfactory screening of Saudi nationals who left the United States.” But one of those planes stopped four times at different locations around the U.S. on September 19, picking up half-siblings and other bin Laden relatives who supposedly had no connection to him. Finally, in 2007, a heavily censored FBI report said: “The plane was chartered either by the Saudi Arabian Royal Family or Osama bin Laden.”44 Osama? You mean to tell me the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks might have been chartering a plane on our soil eight days after this happened?
It just gets curiouser and curiouser, in the words of Lewis Carroll from Alice in Wonderland. FBI Director Robert Mueller testified about how the terrorists managed to finance themselves, saying that they’d had all their money wired in small amounts to avoid being detected. Except, it came out that General Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, had ordered one of his agents to wire transfer $100,000 to Mohamed Atta. The ISI and the CIA’s relationship dates back to the 1980s when the Mujahideen got set up. Ahmad, as it happened, had come to Washington a week before the attacks for a meeting with CIA chief George Tenet and some people from Bush’s National Security Council.45,46 When the story came out about the wire transfer to Atta, Ahmad abruptly retired from the ISI.
The families of many 9/11 victims have gone to court seeking evidence of the Saudi royal family’s bankrolling of al-Qaeda. Senator Bob Graham wrote a book that discussed the 28-page section about Saudi Arabia that the CIA, FBI, and NSA had blacked out of his committee’s report. In the book, Graham noted ties between the hijackers and the Saudis and flatly stated that “the White House was directing the cover-up” to protect “America’s relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”47
Ever heard of an army project called Able Danger? It was established in 1999 as part of the Defense Department’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM). According to Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a leading member of the team with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA):