Who Did It? We Can't Tell You
There has been widespread speculation that the September 11 attacks must have had the backing of a state intelligence agency. Said one CIA official, bin Laden "sits in a cave in Afghanistan and he's running this operation? It's so huge. He couldn't have done it alone." [New Yorker, 10/1/01] In December 2002, Senator Bob Graham, co-head of the Congressional 9/11 inquiry and privy to documents censored from the general public, said he was "surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the [9/11] terrorists in the United States. ... To me that is an extremely significant issue and most of that information is classified, I think overly-classified. I believe the American people should know the extent of the challenge that we face in terms of foreign government involvement. I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing - although that was part of it - by a sovereign foreign government and that we have been derelict in our duty to track that down ... It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now." [PBS Newshour, 12/11/02] 

Funnily enough, not only was Graham meeting with Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed when the 9/11 attacks began, his office has also acknowledged Graham was given a warning before 9/11 by a US government informant that an ISI agent named R. G. Abbas, in New York City to illegally trade heroin for Stinger missiles, pointed to the World Trade Center and said, "Those towers are coming down." This agent made other references to an attack on the World Trade Center. The informant passed these warnings on, but he claims, "The complaints were ordered sanitized by the highest levels of government." Transcripts of a resulting trial that convicted several US-based associates of Abbas were censored to eliminate all references to Pakistan. [Cox News, 8/2/02, Palm Beach Post, 10/17/02] An NBC reporter was able to easily telephone Abbas in Pakistan, but apparently the FBI isn't interested in questioning or extraditing him. [MSNBC, 8/2/02]

Disturbing Questions

One doesn't have to wait 20 or 30 years to deduce that the ISI assisted al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. The question is, why is the US government seemingly ignoring the evidence and actively discouraging the media from pursuing these ideas? Shortly after 9/11, Bush said, "From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." [Los Angeles Times, 10/13/01] What about Pakistan's support of terrorism, if not 9/11, then the other terrorist attacks on India since? Is the US afraid of Pakistan's nuclear weapons? If so, what's to prevent the ISI from planning similar future attacks with impunity, against any country? Perhaps the US has plans to deal with Pakistan eventually. In January 2003, Musharraf warned of an "impending danger" that Pakistan will become a target of war for "Western forces" after the Iraq crisis. "We will have to work on our own to stave off the danger.

~~ Saeed Sheikh, remains a great danger to Musharraf until he can be killed

Does the US ignore Pakistani complicity in 9/11 because it might be a thread that could unravel in other disturbing directions? For instance, there have been reports of secret deals between rich Saudis, the ISI, and bin Laden. [Sunday Times, 8/25/02] Saudi Arabia has supported the Taliban by paying the ISI. [UPI, 6/14/01] Before 9/11 the Asia Times reported that Crown Prince Abdullah, the defacto ruler of Saudi Arabia, is secretly a supporter of bin Laden. Furthermore, he made a secret visit in the summer of 2001 to Afghanistan with Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed to confer with the Taliban on how best to prevent bin Laden from being harmed by the US. [Asia Times, 8/22/01] Another secret meeting between Mahmood and Crown Prince Abdullah may have taken place shortly after 9/11. [Intelligence Online, 10/4/01] While such reports are very fragmentary and speculative, it is interesting to note that Senator Graham said "foreign governments" - plural, not singular - were behind 9/11. Newsweek has reported a possible connection between the Saudi government and some of the hijackers [Newsweek, 11/22/02], and has since reported that "The possibility of a Saudi link to 9-11 is growing." [Newsweek, 12/9/02]

Could the thread unravel in other directions as well? For instance, what about the suggestion that Saeed was a CIA agent? A long time regional expert with extensive CIA ties stated publicly in March 2001 that "the CIA still has close links with the ISI," and repeated the claim to CNN in February 2002. [Times of India, 3/7/01, CNN, 2/27/02] An anonymous former senior ISI official has stated, "The biggest problem we have [in Pakistan] are the rogue elements in the intelligence agencies, especially those who at some time became involved with the CIA." [Christian Science Monitor, 2/22/02] At the very least, the ISI may know very embarrassing facts about the US. For instance, they may know a thing or two about CIA involvement in drug smuggling and/or support of bin Laden in the 1980s. [Star Tribune, 9/30/01, Atlantic Monthly, 5/96, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9/23/01, UPI, 6/14/01] Unfortunately, Daniel Pearl was killed before he could investigate the connections between the US and the ISI, and no journalist seems willing to explore such dangerous subjects since his death.

What would the American public think of the motives for war in Iraq if they knew a country with much deeper ties to al-Qaeda that was also proliferating weapons of mass destruction was being so ignored?