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THE
9/11 COMMISSION INVESTIGATION
by Joseph D.
Douglass, Jr.
March 30, 2004
The Commission members’ views expressed on various television news specials have been interesting but not particularly revealing. They do seem to be sincerely interested in getting to the truth. They are all good people who place patriotism above politics and have reputations for integrity and objectivity. But based on past experience they are unlikely to make a difference. They likely will offer many recommendations, of which few, if any, will be implemented. Two insurmountable obstacles stand in the way.
First, no important information is likely to be revealed. The government, especially the White House with the expert assistance of its intelligence side, will do its best to keep any such data well buried. Finding information that one does not know for certain exists or where it is located, is next to impossible to find, unless one has a courageous secret inside source who wants to help. A good example of how well the CIA subverts the rule of law when they want is the decision of Texas District Court Judge Lynn Hughes in the Edwin P. Wilson case. It is available on the Internet. Judge Hughes set aside Wilson’s 1982 conviction because of the corruption and duplicity of the CIA and attorneys at Department of Justice in hiding data from Wilson’s attorneys and using false documentation to “get” Wilson. It took him 20 years of fighting to get even a partial reversal of the railroad judgment against him, and he is still in jail. It is equally clear in the 2003 court decision that it is most unlikely that any of those responsible will ever be held accountable.
Second, and even more serious, the focus of the 9-11 Commission appears to be on one specific event at issue, the 9-11 attack. While its title is the “National Commission on Terrorist Attacks,” it is specifically “chartered to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.” This constricting focus on the 9-11 attacks will likely limit the Commission’s investigation The factors relevant to 9-11 and the questions “What went wrong? and Where did we fail?” have long roots that extend back many decades. In important respects, the failure was not simply a Bush Administration failure. Nor can one place a lot of the blame on the Clinton Administration, as many have tried to do. The roots will be seen as going well beyond the Commission’s purview and from a practical matter they are out of reach because there is simply no time for the members, who are all very busy, to get into them. Even more likely, many of the Commission members may not have the background that would cause them to ask questions about these roots. Still, these roots may have had determining roles and be of inestimable importance to the process of trying to understand what went wrong and to help the Commission identify the internal U.S. weaknesses that need to be remedied.
The Origins of the Terrorist Threat
A good place to start is with Antony Sutton’s book, The Best Enemy Money Can Buy. This is the story of U.S. business interests – finance and industry – in building up our enemies, including terrorist enemies. Most of the time, this was a cooperative effort, with the government providing money for loans and access to trade interests and industries providing machinery, factories, and technical advice. Anyone who has examined this U.S. largesse towards our Communist “friends” can conclude that Communism would have had a much harder task becoming the threat it became if it were not for the assistance of the White House, Commerce Department, and U.S. industry.
This is relevant to any study of terrorism because the major terrorist sponsors were and likely still are the Communist and former Communist countries, particularly Russia and China. The countries that gave birth to Middle East terrorism were the Soviet Union and China, especially the former. There is hardly a terrorist organization around that was not assisted in major ways by either the Soviet Union (Russia) or China. How can one really understand terrorism, what drives it, and why it succeeds without understanding this. The connections are still alive and active.
Part of the support that enabled Communist sponsored terrorism to grow has been and is the silence of politicians, the news media, and academia respecting the crimes of Communism. This silence began in the 1920s and has not ended. There is no state that can compare with the Soviet Union when it comes to terrorism, both at home and abroad. The product of its regimes includes around 150 million deaths of just its own citizens over the 80 years of its existence. The total costs and casualties are beyond estimating, but enormous. Yet there is a tremendous silence respecting their crimes, as pointed out in The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1999).
One highly relevant dimension of this silence has been the CIA’s reluctance to even admit the role of the Soviet Union in organizing, sponsoring, training, indoctrinating, financing, and protecting international terrorist groups, including those in the Middle East. What CIA biases and White House protection has been extended to terrorists and thus facilitated their growth, especially during the most critical formative early years of their birth? Where are the long-standing biases today that continue to promote this silence, or will we conveniently claim it no longer exists?
Internal U.S. Security
During the testimony this past week, CIA director, George Tenet, voiced his frustration with the problems of internal U.S. security. To correct this problem, he pointed out the recent creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Creating a new department will not solve the problem at all and it ignores how internal vulnerabilities arose in the first place, almost in sync with the expanding growth of international terrorism.
The demise of U.S. internal security is attributable neither to the current Bush Administration nor its predecessor Clinton Administration, as the media focus would seem to suggest. Rather, in my opinion, it began in 1965 with Congressional hearings that led to the Privacy Act. This act was strengthened in 1974 and given bigger teeth. The problem with this act is it required the government to trash all files that contained the names of U.S. citizens. This would, of course, include all intelligence files on extremists and subversives.
The first major order respecting destruction came early in the Nixon Administration. It was a major blow to the ability of U.S. intelligence to check backgrounds on individuals for any connections to radical and revolutionary organizations. As a result of this and the Freedom of Information Act, the number of FBI active case files dropped from near 50,000 to around 20,000 almost overnight. This was followed by the (U.S. Attorney General appointed by President Ford) Levi guidelines in the Ford Administration that directed the FBI not to conduct surveillance on anyone that was not known to have committed a crime or about to commit a crime. Following the promulgation of these guidelines, the number of subversives and extremists (including terrorists) under surveillance dropped from 20,000 to under 15!
Other actions that were taken in the mid-1970s include the demise of Congressional committees concerned with U.S. internal security, the end of the list of known Communist organizations that were consulted as a part of background investigations, and the end of background investigations for the majority of security clearances. By the middle of the Carter Administration there was no longer any serious internal U.S. security. Crooks, spies, and intelligence agents of all stripes began flooding into the United States. By the mid-1980s the estimated number of Communist intelligence agents in the United States exceeded 30,000.
Thus, to the extent one is concerned about destruction of U.S. internal security, the ground work was laid during the Johnson Administration. The main damage was done during the Nixon and Ford Administrations. Additional damage was added during the Carter Administration. By the Reagan Administration, there was little internal security left. The United States had become a rest and recreation area for intelligence agents and terrorists alike. There was a small effort to redress this problem during the Reagan Administration and even less during the Bush I and Clinton Administrations.
This destruction cannot be fixed by the mere addition of the Department of Homeland Security, which is just a reorganization of pre-existing bureaucrats. Creating a Homeland Security Department does not fix the vacuum left by the service provided by the Congressional organizations that were focused on internal security and not under the administration thumbs and hence able to help raise issues that are verboten within the government’s executive branch. A reorganization cannot fix the immense history destroyed during the Nixon years and that will take decades to replace, if even that is possible, which I do not believe to be the case. Nor will reorganization redress the problems posed by the open door immigration policies that also go back to 1965 and, thanks to the politicians, have placed us in a position of having somewhere between 7 and 15 million illegal aliens now residing within our borders. These security inconsistencies make it extremely difficult to reestablish the whole spirit of internal security and need to stay alert that was destroyed in the 1970s.
The Terrorist Financing Problem
One of the major targets identified by President Bush when he first declared our war on terrorism is the terrorist financial support networks. To date, we have seized or frozen about $150 million in supporting assets. Is this good news, or bad? The revenues attributed to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, circa 9-11, were variously estimated to be in the $2 to $4 billion range, much from drug trafficking. They are not the only enemy. The war on terrorism includes all terrorists, including those in the Middle East, which have traditionally used drug trafficking as a source of their support. Even more important are terrorists close at hand in, for example, Colombia and other Latin American countries where there are terrorist organizations, such as Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, and Mexico. The two major terrorist groups in Colombia alone could have drug trafficking revenues in the billions of dollars, given the amount of cocaine, heroin, and other drugs that come out of or through that region.
So what’s wrong? Why have we seized only $150 million? Perhaps there is another issue here worthy of the Commission’s scrutiny. The flow of the terrorist support money is not just important because of its operational need but equally well because of what the flow tells us about terrorist organizations and people. Changes in the flow can signal upcoming events. Odds are that the 9-11 Commission will not address the lack of progress in tracking down terrorist financial supports and participating banks and other financial institutions and networks. This network and our evident ability to trap only $150 million is a significant and continuing failure. Its importance to waging war and anticipating additional attacks is why it was singled out for special effort when the war on terrorism began.
Intelligence “Problems”
Poor George Tenet. He made all of us cry a tear or two following his anguished testimony on how hard intelligence is, and if we had only had one good source or that one piece of information that could have warned us that an attack was coming out of a major Northeast airport(s) on the morning of 9-11. I am surprised that he did not bemoan the fact that no one told them the airlines and flight numbers.
Why was our intelligence so bad (assuming it was an intelligence failure), especially in the Middle East? The Middle East has been a focus of U.S. interest for over fifty years. It has been a hotbed of unrest and terrorist organizations and training sites. Why have we had next to no agents in place? If anyone wants to dig into this problem, there were several articles both before and after 9-11 written by former CIA agents (for example Robert Baer and Ruel Marc Gerecht) with Middle East expertise. We had no language capability to speak of and those that were trained to be agents were told not to worry about the culture. Knowing the culture really was not all that important for their jobs! How can the Commission investigate our preparedness without taking a very hard look at the CIA’s long history of lousy overseas human intelligence.
Consider further the CIA’s record in recruiting spies. In the aftermath of the Aldrich Ames case and following the acquisition of a batch of East German Stasi intelligence files, an examination of these and related information led to the conclusion that all of the Cubans the CIA had recruited were bad – that is, double agents telling us what Castro wanted us told. The same was true of the East Germans we had recruited, or thought we had recruited. Of all the Communists we recruited, 90 percent were considered suspect. How could the CIA possibly be that bad? They would have done better judging the reliability or “bona fides” of their recruited spies by throwing darts blindfolded.
It is also a fact that they had a dislike for defectors, even top level ones, and tried harder to prevent them from talking than they did to debrief them! One especially poignant example of this was the top-level defector, Gen. Jan Sejna, the only member of the Communist decision-making hierarchy ever to defect to the West. The CIA never debriefed him on anything of strategic importance and tried to kill the interest others might have by discrediting him behind his back. This is described in two books I wrote that present examples of his depth of knowledge: Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and the West (Edward Harle, 1999) and Betrayed (1stbooks.com, 2002). This is highly relevant because Sejna knew more than anyone else in the West about Soviet sponsored international terrorism. He was personally involved in it. Yet the CIA showed no interest in what he knew – because, I believe, what he had to say ran contrary to the CIA institutional position and because they dislike people who in what they say reveal strident errors in CIA beliefs or U.S. policy.
To make matters worse, just at the time the mode of terrorist support was changing (in part, because people were beginning to recognize the strategic role being played by the Russians), the Soviet Union began its self-organized demise and rebirth of Russia. At precisely this critical time, President Bush I directed a cessation of intelligence collection against Russia and Afghanistan because we would not want to target our “friends.” Bad as our intelligence was at this time, it got even worse. Indeed, it went to near zero. Everyone in government, including the stalwart conservatives were too busy patting themselves on the back for winning the Cold War to take a few minutes and ask why the Soviet Union had decided to self-destruct? What bureaucracy has ever self-destructed? Needless to say, none of the government Soviet experts stopped to ask what the Soviet plan and their objectives were in deciding to self-destruct. This is critical because the Soviets never did anything without a plan.
Central to their planning was their objectives: Had they changed their objectives? According to Gorbachev, there was no change, but no one wanted, or still wants, to listen. In the turmoil, who came out on top? Simple, the Russian intelligence services, the GRU (military) and KGB (civilian), who were the people who ran the international terrorist support operations and many other operations such as international narcotics trafficking and international organized crime. Indications are that business as usual has continued, except with some changes in tactics and operations. The Commission is most unlikely to explore the continued Russian intelligence contacts with al-Qaeda, finance for example, that were still on-going in the late 1990s.
It is equally unlikely that the Commission will focus attention on a whole host of other CIA cultural characteristics that contributed to their surprise on the morning of 9-11. According to inside sources, the CIA did go to a heightened alert state on 9-10, late afternoon. This was reportedly increased around 11:00 pm and raised to the maximum level around 6:00 am on 9-11. Has the Commission examined the watch center logs for this critical time? On this same note, Nearly everyone was surprised about the collapse of the Soviet Union. This was another major intelligence surprise. Did anything change after this “surprise”?
As a further example, there is another case of terrorist surprise that seems to have dropped out of sight. This is the anthrax letter attacks that began three weeks after 9-11. These attacks should be considered as part of the 9-11 attacks, yet, all we hear is silence. Chances are that this will not be seriously investigated by the 9-11 Commission, although it should be. Here is a case of surprise that must be viewed as part of 9-11. Our intelligence services have not been unable to come up with even one viable suspect. This is logically far more important than 9-11 because it has not been solved (why?) and because the potential for damage from a biological warfare agent attack far exceeds the damage of another airplane bombing or even a nuclear terrorist event.
Added understanding here might require looking into U.S. intelligence and White House practices in sweeping the chemical and biological problem under the rug since 1969. In 1992, a top Russian scientist in the biological warfare field defected. His new name is Ken Alibek. He wrote a book on his experiences, Biohazard, that was published in the late 1990s. Two items in this book are relevant to the problem of national security preparedness, which is certainly in the 9-11 Commission’s charter.
First, he describes his surprise at the lack of interest within the U.S. intelligence community in his expert knowledge about Russian accomplishments in advanced biological warfare. “Throughout my career,” he wrote, “I had worried that American scientists would surpass us. Now I found myself struggling to persuade them how far the science of germ warfare had come.” The “Americans believed Russia’s biological weaponry no longer constituted a significant threat” and had come to that conclusion without even knowing the nature of the threat or where it was headed.
Second, in trying to explain to top officials that the Russians were still working hard in the area (which he was able to determine from his readings of the Russian scientific literature), he again could find no interest. The advice he was given by U.S. officials is chilling: “I was cautioned by government officials against speaking out too bluntly against Russia. Even if I was right, they argued, there was no point in pushing Moscow further than it was willing or able to go…Perhaps there are questionable activities going on, but for the moment, diplomacy requires us to keep silent.”
Nor is the Commission likely to examine the terrorist support activities of China during the decade prior to 9-11 to better understand the present day terrorist network. China has been more or less “protected” since it became a major trading partner, much the same way the Russians were protected during the Cold War (yes, protected). Today, given the amount of U.S. securities that China holds, they are probably even more protected.
Other questions the Commission might address are which of our allies and newly discovered friends knew or suspected something was about to happen in advance of 9-11? What did they tell us? Are these questions that are being asked, or is the focus on what we knew, and hence not on what others may have known?
Why Just Terrorist Attacks?
If the Commission were really serious about our preparedness to defend against terrorist attacks, it would certainly have to broaden its investigation to include the problems of international drug trafficking and international organized crime. Both are intertwined with international terrorism. Unless these connections are understood, recommendations with respect to U.S. defenses against another terrorist attack, which I assume is the Commission’s real interest, not just trying to learn who knew what and when with respect to 9-11 before the attack, will be ill considered.
Defense preparedness can not be evaluated without going deeply into the war on drugs and why it has failed. Drug traffickers are mostly terrorists and they trade favors with terrorists. Terrorist materials can be smuggled in as easily as drugs and if we have a hard time stopping drug traffickers and money launderers, how can we expect to stop traffickers. Incidentally, the Soviet and East European drug trafficking networks (which were the origin of most of the Latin American trafficking networks) were originally set up to double as terrorist/sabotage supply lines. The establishment of these networks and their use in supporting terrorist/sabotage operations is described in Red Cocaine.
Thus the Commission simply cannot just investigate 9-11 failures with an eye toward fixing the problem without looking deeply into international narcotics trafficking and organized crime. Organizations involved in one are involved in the others. The financial structure that supports one supports the others. The overworld that protects one has to be aware of the others if for no other reason than protecting its own interests.
But, is this possible? The more embarrassing question is, if it is not possible, then how is it possible to be truly useful in investigating 9-11? How can one plan to defend our country when we cannot stop the massive flow of drugs across our borders? More specifically, why and what can be done? Should not a Commission interested in the problem of terrorism and domestic security be intensely interested in this question?
Face it, 9-11 was an embarrassment to the political forces in Washington, but the damage done cannot begin to compare with the damage done each year by narcotics trafficking, which constitutes about 30% of organized crime. The damage done by 9-11 was 3,000+ lives and maybe $100 billion in damages. Compare this with the damage to the United States by international narcotics trafficking each year: 55,000 deaths, over 300,000 casualties, over $300 billion in monetary costs, and inestimable damage to the nation, our institutions, culture, families, and cities by the tremendous compromise and corruption that accompanies the vast amounts of illegal money (over $200 billion each year). How many politicians, lawyers, bankers, and intelligence/police officials can you buy with that kind of money? Maybe that is why the war on drugs has been such a farce since it was first invented by President Nixon a short 50 years ago (for political purposes, not to stop the flow of drugs, as pointed out by Ed Epstein in Agency of Fear).
If these assertions start your blood pressure rising, good. If not, let me suggest a short reading list: The Boys on the Tracks by Mara Leveritt, Barry and the Boys by Dan Hopsicker, Dark Alliance by Gary Webb, Big White Lie by Michael Levine, Bluegrass Conspiracy by Sally Denton, Drug Politics by David Jordan, and Red Cocaine by the author.
The international narcotics trafficking problem is an order of magnitude more important that international terrorism. Also, it is a direct attack on the United States by hostile nations operating covertly through their foreign intelligence services as explained and documented in detail in Red Cocaine. Is this any different from the international terrorist threat? Moreover, international organized crime, which is closely connected with both drug trafficking and terrorism, is even worse with its annual revenues in the $3 trillion plus range and capital reserves in the $30 to $50 trillion range. This could not be possible without the assistance of the big banks, the big law firms that help organize the money laundering, and payoffs to the politicians, courts, and intelligence/po! lice investigating agencies. As explained by Professor Jordan in his book Drug Politics, the drug trade and organized crime flourish because they are politically protected. Is there anyone that really thinks the criminal overworld – all of whom are very powerful and respected people – are not in touch with people on the Commission? Their interests (and similar ones that exist at high levels throughout the U.S. government, from the White House to Congress to the CIA and Department of Justice) are served best if the Commission’s charter is as narrowly focused as possible, where it can do no harm.
The Commission’s raison d’êtra
Perhaps the answer is to be found in the mission of such Commissions. Is their mission to search out the truth, as we are led to believe, or to create the illusion that while problems exist, the government is fundamentally on our side and doing its best to protect the citizenry? Is not their unstated mission, as too often has seemed to be the case in the past, to solve a political problem that concerns both political parties by getting beyond the current uproar without surfacing the systemic problems seething beneath the surface? If so, then that is quite likely what will happen.
For the time being, however, the Commission hearings have been most refreshing. Over the past two and a half years, there has been a noticeable truth vacuum in Washington D.C. How refreshing it was to hear Clarke say, “Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed.”
© 2004 Joseph D. Douglass, Jr.
Editorial Archive
Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., Ph.D., is a defense analyst, author of The Soviet Theater Nuclear Offensive and co-author of CBW: The Poor Man’s Atomic Bomb and America the Vulnerable: The Threat of Chemical and Biological Warfare. His most recent books are Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and Betrayed: The Story of America’s Missing POWs.
