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9-11 AND THE SMOKING GUN
Part 2: A real smoking gun
By Pepe Escobar 

Part 1: 'Independent' commission

If the 9-11 Commission is really looking for a smoking gun, it should
look no further than at Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad, the director
of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) at the time.

In early October 2001, Indian intelligence learned that Mahmoud had
ordered flamboyant Saeed Sheikh - the convicted mastermind of the
kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl -
to wire US$100,000 from Dubai to one of hijacker Mohamed Atta's two
bank accounts in Florida.

A juicy direct connection was also established between Mahmoud and
Republican Congressman Porter Gross and Democratic Senator Bob Graham.
They were all in Washington together discussing Osama bin Laden over
breakfast when the attacks of September 11, 2001,�happened.

Mahmoud's involvement in September 11 might be dismissed as only
Indian propaganda. But Indian intelligence swears by it, and the US
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has confirmed the whole story:
Indian intelligence even supplied Saeed's cellular-phone numbers.
Nobody has bothered to check what really happened. The 9-11 Commission
should pose very specific questions about it to FBI director Robert
Mueller when he testifies this month.

In December 2002, Graham said he was "surprised at the evidence that
there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities
of at least some of the [September 11] terrorists in the United States
... It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the
archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now." He could not but be
referring to Pakistan and Mahmoud. If Mahmoud was really involved in
September 11, this means the Pakistani ISI -"the state within the
state" - knew all about it. And if the intelligence elite in Pakistan
knew it, an intelligence elite in Saudi Arabia knew it, as well as an
intelligence elite in the US.

Get Osama bin Laden
On August 22, 2001, Asia Times Online reported Get Osama! Now! Or else
...
 
http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/CH30Df01.html

A few days later, on September 4, Mahmoud was in Washington. The date
was extraordinary: according to the book of former chief US
counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies (page
237), this was the day the "meeting on al-Qaeda that I had called for
'urgently' on January 25" finally happened. Before the meeting, Clarke
had e-mailed National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice urging her�"to
put herself in her own shoes when in the very near future al-Qaeda had
killed hundreds of Americans". Exactly a week later, the�September 11
attacks�happened.

On September 9, the legendary "Lion of the Panjshir", Ahmed Shah
Masoud, the key Northern Alliance commander, was assassinated by two
suicide bombers posing as journalists in his base in northern
Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance tells Washington that the ISI may
be involved. Masoud himself had told this correspondent, two weeks
before he was killed, of the incestuous link between bin Laden and
al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the ISI. A 2002 Asia Times Online
investigation would later establish that Masoud was killed as a gift
from al-Qaeda to the Taliban, with heavy involvement by Abdul Sayyaf,
an Afghan mujahideen commander very close to the ISI and the Saudis.
From Washington's perspective, this was also a gift. Masoud was the
crucial Afghan nationalist leader, supported by Russia and Iran; after
the Taliban being smashed he would never have accepted a feeble,
US-sponsored, Hamid Karzai-style government.

On September 10, the Pakistani daily The News reported that the
Mahmoud visit to the United States "triggered speculation about the
agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National
Security Council". If he'd been to the National Security Council, he
had certainly met Rice. Mahmoud did meet with his counterpart, Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet. Tenet and Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage had been in Islamabad in May, when
Tenet had "unusually long" meetings with Musharraf. Armitage for his
part has countless friends in the Pakistani military and the ISI.
Mahmoud also met a number of high officials at the White House and the
Pentagon and had a crucial meeting with Marc Grossman, the under
secretary of state for political affairs. Rice maintains she did not
meet Mahmoud then.

On the morning of September 11, Mahmoud was having a breakfast meeting
at the Capitol with Graham and Goss. Goss spent as many as 10 years
working on numerous CIA clandestine operations. He is very close to
Vice President Dick Cheney. It's interesting to note that two weeks
ago Goss suggested to the Justice Department to bring perjury charges
against the new Cheney nemesis, Clarke. As it is widely known, Graham
and Goss were co-heads of the joint House-Senate investigation�that
proclaimed there was "no smoking gun" as far as President George W
Bush having any advance knowledge of September 11.

According to the Washington Post, and also to sources in Islamabad,
the Mahmoud-Graham-Goss meeting lasted until the second plane hit
Tower 2 of the World Trade Center. Graham later said they were talking
about terrorism coming from Afghanistan, which means they were talking
about bin Laden.

Pakistani intelligence sources told Asia Times Online that on the
afternoon of September 11 itself, as well as on September 12 and 13,
Armitage met with Mahmoud with a stark choice: either Pakistan would
help the US against al-Qaeda, or it would be bombed back to the Stone
Age. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented an ultimatum in the
form of seven US demands. Pakistan accepted all of them. One of the
demands was for Musharraf to send Mahmoud to Kandahar again and force
the Taliban to extradite bin Laden. Mahmoud knew in advance Mullah
Omar would refuse. But when he went to Kandahar the Taliban leader
said he would accept, as long as the Americans proved bin Laden was
responsible for September 11. There was no proof, and Afghanistan was
bombed anyway, a policy already decided well in advance.

It's important to remember than on September 13 Islamabad airport was
shut down - allegedly because of threats against Pakistan's strategic
assets. On September 14, Islamabad declared total support for the US:
the airport was immediately reopened. Mahmoud remained in Washington
until September 16 - when the war on Afghanistan was more than
programmed, and Pakistan was firmly in the "with us" and not the
"against us" column.

Million-dollar questions remain. Did Mahmoud know when and how the
attacks of September 11 would happen? Did Musharraf know? Could the
Bush administration have prevented September 11? It's hard to believe
high echelons of the CIA and FBI were not aware of the direct link
between the ISI and alleged chief hijacker Mohammed Atta.

On October 7, Mahmoud was demoted from the ISI. By that time,
Washington obviously knew of the connection between Mahmoud, Saeed
Sheikh and Mohamed Atta: the FBI knew it. The official version is that
Mahmoud was sacrificed because he was too close to the Taliban -
which, it is never enough to remind, are a cherished creature of the
ISI. Two other ISI big shots, Lieutenant-General Mohammed Aziz Khan
and Chief of General Staff Mohammed Yousouf, are also demoted along
with Mahmoud. Saeed Sheikh was under orders to Khan.

The fact remains that even with this Musharraf-conducted purge of the
ISI elite, the bulk of ISI officers remained, and still are,
pro-Taliban. Other former ISI directors living in Pakistan,�such as
the colorful, outspoken Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, did not
"disappear" and always renew their support for the Taliban. But as
Asia Times Online has reported, Mahmoud did disappear. He lives in
near seclusion in Rawalpindi. And he is definitely not talking. Graham
and Goss may not be interested in talking to him either. Because he
may be the ultimate September 11 smoking gun.

Conclusion
The Karl Rove-designed campaign to re-elect Bush is in�essence
anchored on September 11. The Republican convention in New York will
happen in the first week of September. Bush's speech will be on
September 2 - to force the connection with the three-year
commemoration of September 11.

This whole affair is not about whether Clarke committed "perjury";
whether Rice was really up to her job; or whether George W Bush knew
something and then "forgot" about it. The families of September 11
victims,�US public opinion, the demonized Islamic world, the whole
world for that matter, all everybody wants to know is what really
happened on September 11. The only party that does not seem interested
in getting to the bottom of it is the Bush administration. The
official fable of 19 kamikaze Arabs turning Boeings into missiles with
military precision, armed only with box cutters and a few flight
lessons and directed from an Afghan cave by a satellite phone-shy bin
Laden simply does not hold. The commission is not asking the really
hard questions. Here are just a few - and they are far from being the
most embarrassing.

1) The "stand down" order: Why, despite�more than�an hour's warning
that an attack was happening, were no F-16s protecting�US airspace?
Documents easily available online reveal why the Pentagon could not
act: because of bureaucracy. Why did the North American Aerospace
Defense Command�(NORAD) claim it took 25 minutes after the transponder
was shut down to learn that Flight 11 - which hit World Trade Center
Tower 1 - was hijacked? Why did fighters not take off from Andrews Air
Force base just outside Washington to protect the Pentagon?

2) The pre-September 11 suspicious stock option trades in American
Airlines and United Airlines were never fully investigated. Who
profited?

3) What happened to the FBI investigation into flight schools - when
it was proved that at least five of the 19 hijackers were trained in
US military schools?

4) Why did Bush keep reading a pet-goat story for�more than�half an
hour after the first WTC hit, and 15 minutes after Chief of Staff
Andrew Card told him there had been an attack?

5) What really happened to Flight 93? An Associated Press story last
August quoting a congressional report said the FBI suspected the plane
was crashed on purpose. The FBI has a flight-simulation video of what
happened: the video - as well as the black box - remain top secret.
And as far as four "indestructible" black boxes are concerned, how
come none were found, unlike Mohammed Atta's intact passport lying in
the WTC rubble?

6) Why have no scientific experts examined the physical and
mathematical evidence that a Boeing 757 could not have possibly
"disappeared" without a trace after hitting the Pentagon? For the most
exhaustive and practically incontrovertible analysis available on the
net, see this� report.

http://www.thewebfairy.com/911/holmgren/index.html

7) What remains of the very tight 1980s bin Laden-ISI-CIA connection?
How much did the CIA know about what the ISI was up to? And how much
did the ISI know about what al-Qaeda was up to?

8) What does Rice really know about the very close relations between
Mahmoud and the top echelons of the Bush administration?

The genie - the crucial information - is still in the bottle. 

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Part ONE:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FD07Aa01.html