It’s almost the fifth anniversary of 9/11 and it’s time to start to doing a few retrospectives. For today, I want to talk about the sleeper cells that carried it out. I won’t do this in any detail. Not today. I just want to look at it in general terms and, taking the 9/11 Commission Report as gospel, I want to make a few points.

The commission basically identified four cells. The first cell was based in Hamburg, Germany and consisted of the alleged pilots of Flight 11 (WTC1), Flight 175 (WTC2), and Flight 93 (Shanksville, PA). It also included Ramzi bin al-Shihb, whose visa applications were denied and who was eventually captured in Pakistan, held in a CIA prison, and recently transferred to Cuba. In addition to these, there were a few hangers-on that were prosecuted, with all kinds of complications, in the German court system.

Another cell was made up of the two San Diego hijackers, who lived for a time in the home of an FBI informant that was not allowed to testify before the Congress or the Commission. They received money, indirectly, from the wife of Bandar Bush. They also had ties to a Yemeni safe-house that was tied to the 1998 African Embassy bombings and the USS Cole bombing. They were under surveillance in Malaysia in 2000 (where 9/11 was allegedly planned). The CIA lost their trail in Thailand when the CIA station was too late in getting to the airport to meet their flight and put a tail on them. When the CIA realized they had subsequently flown to Los Angeles, they did not inform the FBI. These hijackers had ties to the fourth alleged pilot, Hani Hanjour. Hanjour had been in the United States for ten years and was one of the radicals training in Arizona flight schools that were ignored by the FBI when the Phoenix memo was generated. These folks made up the kernal of Flight 77 (Pentagon).

A third cell was made up of the so-called muscle hijackers. These were Saudis that arrived after the rest of the cells and were integrated into them over the summer of 2001. Some of their identities are identical to people that trained at or had addresses on American flight schools, and Air Force or Naval Air bases. You can check out my Hijacker’s Timelins (Excel) for more.

The fourth cell was headed by alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). He was also captured in Pakistan (under extraordinarily odd circumstances). He was waterboarded and otherwise tortured. KSM had tried to pull of 9/11 much earlier. It was called the Bojinka Plot and it pre-dates his acquaintance with Usama bin-Laden. In fact, the exact relationship between KSM and UBL is not very well established. This cell included individuals in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere that facilitated the attacks by arranging for paperwork, visas, and making wire-transfers.

No one from any of these cells has been prosecuted in the United States. Other than a poor sap in Virginia that helped them get false ID for a trip to the DMV, no one has faced any kind of justice at all.

Nineteen of them died on September 11, 2001. But they left behind records tying them, like six degrees of Kevin Bacon, to half the known world. None of those people have been prosecuted in the United States.

And many of them probably can’t be successfully prosecuted because they have been arrested on scant evidence or evidence derived from torture, or they have been tortured themselves.

And this, then, leaves us in a quandary. Are we going to set potentially dangerous people loose because George W. Bush screwed up? Are we going to let someone that was partially responsible for killing 3,000 people and causing billions in property damage walk out of detention because the evidence was tainted? Bush is daring us to argue for that. And yet, Republicans and military personnel are taking up his challenge.

Brig, Gen. James C. Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines, said that no civilized country should deny a defendant the right to see the evidence against him and that the United States “should not be the first.”

And from the Washington Post:

But virtually all Senate Democrats, and at least a few more Republicans, appear sympathetic to Warner, McCain and Graham. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said in an interview that he takes very seriously the testimony of the uniformed lawyers. He also said Bush was “unwise” to come close to threatening Congress in his Wednesday speech. “We don’t work for the president,” Hagel said.

Pentagon lawyers testified this week that we would indeed have to let a suspected terrorist go if he was acquitted due to insufficient evidence, even if the evidence was thrown out because it was obtained under torture or because it was denied to the defendant because of its classified nature.

Bush thought he could rip up the constitution, but all he succeeded in doing was creating a situation where we either betray our principles as a nation or we let potential murderers go free. That’s not leadership. That’s one of the saddest accomplishments of any President in our history.

Good luck to Congress trying to wrestle with these issues. Meanwhile, the official 9/11 Commission story has enough holes in it that we could drive a truck-bomb through it.

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