Since we seem to put a premium in our foreign policy on preventing terrorists from setting up training camps in failed or poorly administered states, don’t you think we should consider how crucial such training was to the success of the 9/11 plot?
The most important training for the 9/11 attacks took place in Florida flight schools. I suppose some of the hijackers received some valuable hand-to-hand combat training in Afghanistan that they used to subdue the flight attendants, pilots, and a few potentially troublesome passengers. I think the more important training they received in Afghanistan was something more akin to brainwashing. Yet, a lot of that brainwashing took place in German mosques. I just don’t think the Afghan-haven was all that crucial to the success of the plot. And, insofar as the Afghan-haven played an important role, I don’t think eliminating that haven does a whole lot to prevent future attacks.
I do think it is important to prevent Islamic radicals from recreating a pipeline of new recruits trained in explosives, etc., but that’s mainly to prevent them from being thrown into battle in Kashmir or other trouble spots around the globe. I think it is a valid foreign policy to work with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan to eliminate ‘terrorist-training camps’. And the same goes for other poorly governed areas like Somalia and Eritrea, not to mention Sudan. But I don’t think we need to occupy Afghanistan or constantly bomb people in Pakistan to carry out such a policy. We should consider a continuing effort in Afghanistan because we don’t want to see the country fall back into a state of chaos and civil war. But we shouldn’t stay there just to prevent terrorists from plotting against us.
The 9/11 plot could have been hatched from anywhere. The same holds true for the next plot.
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I cannot agree with your premise, some 70,000 men have been trained in camps in Afghanistan. Large numbers are presently being trained throughout the muslim world: Pakistan, Kashmir, Central Asia, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Indonesia and Philipines. The sleeper cell is the last stage before carrying out their suicidal terror mission. Training and brain washing [religious schools] are the basics for terrorists.
(MSNBC) – Images of Sept. 11 hijackers Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah delivering what is apparently their last will and testament in Afghanistan on Jan. 18, 2000, as well as images of a rogue’s gallery of other terrorists and senior al-Qaida leaders listening to a speech days earlier by Osama bin Laden at his Tarnak Farms compound, near Kandahar in Afghanistan on Jan. 8, 2000.
Some simply say: “Don’t grant terrorists visas and we’ll be ok.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I’m not clear on which part you are disagreeing about.
Hmmm, are you claiming they learned how to fly airliners in Afghanistan? No, obviously not.
Are you claiming that suicide mission indoctrination can only happen in large isolated training camps? No, obviously not, else we wouldn’t see suicide bombers in the P/I conflict.
-Jay-
The man who owned the flight school owned a plane that was busted with 43 pounds of heroin at the Orlando Airport around the time that Atta and his buddies went to school there. Curiously, no one was charged in the crime. The pilot walked away.
What should that suggest to anyone with an IQ above room temperature?
I don’t think you are right that the pilot walked away. The plane’s owner walked, but he was leasing it out. Are you shocked that Florida aviation schools are involved in drug trafficking?
Actually, the guy who owned the plane, Wally Hilliard, who’s involved with lots of shady things that touch Florida Republicans (I believe he used to fly around Kathleen Harris, maybe Jeb, but I can’t swear to it) lost his plane to the DEA. The pilot according to the Orlando Sentinel, walked away. No evidence other than the 43 pounds of heroin onboard.
Considering the number of flights of Hilliard planes from Carribean points of departure to small airports in Florida you’d think that there would have been a lot of attention given to Hilliard and his various businesses, at least after this bust. Alas. Just imagine if it turned out that the same flight school that taught the 9/11 terrorists was also involved in drug-smuggling. Oh boy, would that be news! Except if the drug smuggling were done by extraordinary patriots. That’s probably why the 9/11 investigation didn’t go down that rabbit hole.
This wouldn’t be the first time that an aerial terrorist attack was in the vicinity of what appeared to be a drug smuggling ring with intelligence connections. Initially, the suitcase with the bomb in it was identified by INTERFOR, an insurance investigator’s company run by ex-Mossad agents and working for Pan Am, as having been switched in Frankfort by PFLP-GC people in the baggage handling area. The man whose suitcase was switched was ID’ed as a drug courier for Monzer al-Kassar, who himself was simultaneously running guns in the Iran-contra scam and moving heroin into the U.S. There were various articles about parts of this, in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine and in Barron’s, but all of this was buried along with the presence of the McKee Team (a U.S. intelligence unit coming back against orders from Beruit) on 103, when the Libyan version was floated.
Just saying.
That’s very interesting about Pan Am 103 – can you point to any sources on all this? I’m curious to read more…
The best I can do is point you in the direction. Barron’s, an investment paper, had a big article on it. I don’t even know if Barron’s is still in business. I’m sure you can google “Interfor Report” and something will come up. I wrote a couple of articles for the old Portland Free Press on this, but they’ve been out of business for probably a decade and a half and I don’t think their stuff is on the net.
You should probably look for stories on the crash early on. There was a book on Pan Am 103 by a guy named David Johnston, it was one of those rush jobs that came out quickly after the crash; a lot of things that were eventually filtered out of the news when the blame was shifted to the Libyans were included in his book. I don’t think it’s available at the usual places anymore but it’s worth looking for.
Regarding Monzer al-Kassar, there was a Congressional report that came out (under Chuck Schumer when he was in the House) that has a lot of dirt on his operations. Al-Kassar’s long run of good luck ran out recently when he was arrested, not unlike that Russian fellow Bout who was flying weapons into and heroin out of Afghanistan who also was shut down within the last year.
When Pan Am 103 was bombed, Reagan was on his way out of office, GHW Bush was on his way in, and Iran-contra was supposed to have ended, but apparently hadn’t, or there was a second operation, “CIA-1” I recall it was called, that ran al-Kassar. The worst thing in the Interfor Report was that the BND had observed the luggage switch in Frankfurt, reported to “CIA-1”, which told the BND to “let it go.”
Steven Emerson, the “official” terrorism expert of the day, believes the Interfor Report is bull but he actually reported an curious detail (at least in the early edition of his book on the subject): the son of Oliver “Buck” Revell, the FBI counter-terrorist chief, was on that flight but got off minutes before it took off from London. Emerson writes it off to fate and luck, others believe someone high up got him off because they knew what was about to happen.
It’s a very interesting story. Charles McKee had reportedly been in on a meeting the senior Bush had had in Israel a few years earlier, and a Mossad agent also at the meeting died in a small plane crash in Mexico within days of the Pan Am 103 crash.
Now I want to go into the attic and look for my articles.
Try to find the Allan Francovich documentary, “The Maltese Double Cross.”
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Only in a totalitarian system would the executive power interfere in court proceedings and order the withholding of evidence and/or replace defense lawyers by MI-approved lawyers (which I hope will not happen in the present case).
A commentary on the Lockerbie trial and conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Circumstance of a DEA sting operation infiltrated?
Drug Enforcement Administration’s Alleged Connection to the Pan Am Flight 103 Disaster
Or truth to be found in Tehran …
PFLP-GC Terror Job paid for by Iranian Government
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Puttering around, it seems it was the BKA, not the BND. I get those German agencies confused.
Also, Pik Botha and a group of South African muckity mucks got off 103 in London too. There were a number of people warned off it before it happened. “Let it go.” Fascinating story.
I’ve become convinced that a continuing miltary presence in Afghanistan (and maybe Iraq, for that matter) may be doing more harm than good. Especially an overextended military presence that relies too much on unmanned drones and scattergun tactics.
For every Taliban you kill, you make 200 more.
I don’t think you can win anything with an equation like that. Our death from afar tactics in the tribal areas are the best recruiting program al Qaeda and the Taliban have. We need to be building things, not blowing shit up.
Good post. The implication is that the Afghanistan adventure was a mistake to start with – I agree that the West has little real reason to be there other than to prevent or rescue a failed state. But given that we have failed to intervene in far more serious situations of humanitarian crisis, you can say that the West’s priorities are wrong and the whole thing is a mistake.
Think of the concept: “Let’s invade a country where terrorists trained. The leader of the terrorists leaves but we’ll stay for another decade because…”
There is also another fundamental problem with vengeance based retaliation for 9-11 other than geography. The fact of the matter is that the prime culprits are dead and have been dead since the event.
Supporters and sponsors can not substitute for the prime criminals, and that is why suicide attacks are so difficult to deal with. These guys were not following orders.
Eminently sensible. The reason terrorist attacks don’t happen every day is because not that many people are both inhuman enough to murder scads of people while being simultaneously knowledgeable and intelligent enough to carry it out.
One of my mental exercises — and don’t worry, I’m not inclined to harm people — is to think about all the opportunities that exist to carry out terrorist attacks using nothing more than what is readily available. And there’s no way to make us “safe” from such things through security measures which, arguably, actually do nothing more than create more opportunities for mayhem.
Let’s take airport security for example. It has made it a little more difficult to hijack a plane, though only a little. But it has created a huge knot of people during peak hours waiting outside of the gates. All a would-be terrorist has to do is strap on a bomb vest and walk into that waiting crowd which is, almost by definition, outside of the security perimeter. Add more security? You just create another bottleneck where potential victims are concentrated. And anyone who has ever worked in construction can tell you how easy it is to obtain explosives in this country, though it probably helps a bit if you don’t “look Arab” these days. In any event, making improvised explosives is easy enough, and the risk of blowing oneself up in the process doesn’t matter as much to a terrorist as it would to most sane people.
A busy gas station in an urban area makes an incredibly easy target. The combination of gas tanker trucks and your choice of commonly available rifles and tracer rounds gives you a wider choice of places to create a conflagration. Oh, and those liquid propane tanker cars that frequently come in strings of six or seven on trains? There was a case some years back where the accidental detonation of a bunch of those essentially erased the small town they were passing through.
I could go on and on and on. What prevents terrorism is essentially our common recognition of each other’s humanity and basic human compassion. It’s worth bearing in mind, then, that one of the best ways to dehumanize and brutalize people is to plunge them into war. No military action we undertake anywhere is going to reduce the number of people who are screwed up enough to engage in suicide attacks. That’s not to say that we don’t have other worthwhile goals to achieve in Afghanistan, but fighting terrorism is not a goal we will achieve with violence. We can certainly foment more of it that way, but we cannot reduce it.