All right y'all, introducing Jeremy Hammond.
He runs foreignpolicyjournal.com.
Also, his own website is jeremyrhammond.com.
Welcome to the show.
Yeah, nice to be with you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Now, very interesting article I read here the other day.
By you, newly disclosed documents shed more light on early Taliban offers, Pakistan role.
And this is about, well, let's, I guess, start from the beginning here.
You've, somebody, I guess, George Washington University National Security Archive got a release of State Department documents through the Freedom of Information Act.
So, I guess, go ahead and tell me, you know, basics.
Who wrote these?
What years?
That kind of thing.
Well, the documents that they released, they're up on the George Washington University National Security Archive website.
There are a range of documents, kind of a broad range of dates under the Bush administration, both prior to and after 9-11.
They basically just kind of outline more information about some of the negotiations that were taking place with the Taliban.
Now, is any of this stuff Clinton years or not?
Let me think.
I think it was mostly under the Bush administration.
Although, those are the documents I focused on.
There might have been some from the earlier administration, from the Clinton administration.
But the ones I focused on were under the Bush administration.
So, I'm not quite sure on that.
All right.
Now, it seems from your article that what is just written all over this thing is that the Taliban didn't want Osama bin Laden.
They would have been happy to get rid of him if only we'd given them an opportunity to get rid of him in a way they could save a little face.
Yeah, that's an assessment.
You know, Milt Bearden of the CIA, former station chief, that was kind of his assessment of the situation.
It's a quite plausible assessment.
I mean, you know, the Taliban knew that he was kind of a pain in their rear because of the threats coming from the U.S.
They had threatened the Taliban saying, you know, we will hold you responsible if al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden is responsible for any acts of terrorism.
You know, we're coming after you guys.
So, there's plenty of reason to believe that, yeah, they saw Osama bin Laden as a problem.
They wanted to get rid of him.
They wanted to deal with it.
But they needed a face-saving way out of the problem.
You know, just culturally, Osama bin Laden was a guest, so they couldn't just hand him over without evidence.
What they wanted to do was to hand him over to a third country or try him under an Islamic court within Afghanistan.
They had a number of different alternative possibilities, but basically the U.S. was just adamant, you know, you just give him to us, no negotiations.
Okay, but so, in other words here, to be specific, we're talking about the first nine months of the Bush administration.
They were not just talking with the Taliban.
Everybody knows Colin Powell was bringing the millions of dollars, that kind of thing.
But they were talking with the Taliban about giving up Osama bin Laden before the 9-11 attack.
Exactly, exactly.
And in fact, right after 9-11, Washington Post had an article revealing that there had been these ongoing negotiations for three years prior to 9-11.
So this had been going on for a long time.
And of course, at that time, Osama bin Laden was wanted for the embassy bombings in Africa.
So that's what it was about at that time, obviously before 9-11.
But then when 9-11 happened, obviously the situation had changed, and again the demands were made to turn over bin Laden.
And the Taliban said, you know, the headlines, a lot of the headlines at the time were, you know, Taliban rejects, Taliban refuses to hand over bin Laden, was basically the headlines.
But, you know, there was a caveat in all of those articles.
And yeah, they rejected, you know, they didn't want to turn him over.
But they did offer to turn him over on the condition that they were shown the evidence.
The U.S. refused to show them any evidence of his involvement.
And that's why they refused to hand him over.
Well, and I think you say even in here that they ended up saying, all right, then fine, forget the evidence, just turn him over to a third country.
But then my understanding is that that would even include Egypt or Saudi Arabia or whichever puppet government of you guys you want, but a Muslim country somewhere near here.
He'll have his trial there.
That's exactly correct.
And, you know, Pakistan was involved as kind of an intermediary between the U.S. and the Taliban.
And that was one of the offers that the Taliban had suggested to the U.S. through Pakistan.
You know, we'll hand him over to a third country.
And they dropped the demand, even dropped the demand after the bombing started.
You know, the war started on October 7th.
And after that, you know, they said, OK, fine, forget the demand for evidence, we'll turn him over.
But the U.S., you know, Bush's response to that was, you know, no negotiations, just hand him over.
By the way, again, you know, people missed the very beginning here.
We're talking about State Department documents that were released under the Freedom of Information Act that are very specific here.
They're, quote, directly saying that the Taliban are looking for a way out of the problem with bin Laden, end quote.
Right, right, right.
And that's pretty, you know, explicit language that's not open to much interpretation.
The Taliban were trying to figure out a way to get this problem out of their hair before it.
I mean, after all, all revolutionaries become conservatives once they actually take over the capital city.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
They don't want to lose everything that they'd gained.
Right, which is what they were facing.
I mean, they knew the credibility of the threat coming from Washington.
And, you know, they wanted to deal with the situation.
But they needed a face-saving way out, and that was the key.
And the U.S. just refused to talk to them about, you know, alternative possibilities.
All right, now, somewhere in here, you quote a guy.
Oh, boy, I don't know how well I'm going to be able to say his name.
Former Taliban Foreign Minister Waqil Ahmad Motawaki, or Awakil, said his words.
Yeah, that doesn't go down to pronunciation either.
But, yeah, the foreign minister.
Well, go ahead.
And what did he say?
Well, basically, actually, let me quickly take a glance.
I'll get the actual quote.
Basically, he was involved in negotiations.
He was talking to, I believe it was Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State.
And he had kind of said, oh, yeah, okay, this is right.
This is the guy who he had actually issued a warning to the U.S.
And he had said, you know, al-Qaeda might be planning attacks.
And he was kind of trying to say, you know, the Taliban are not involved in this.
We have nothing to do with this.
We want to warn you guys.
And the response to that, you know, was, well, the U.S. didn't actually deny that they had received a warning from the Taliban.
They didn't deny that.
Instead, they just said, well, we were hearing a lot of that kind of information.
Right, which is why they did not take it seriously.
Everybody in the world said al-Qaeda is about to attack you.
So we quit listening because we were tired of hearing that over and over again, I guess.
Right, right.
Basically a tacit acknowledgement that, yes, we did receive a warning from the Taliban, but we just didn't take it seriously.
Which is kind of, you know, it would be laughable if it wasn't such a serious issue.
Yeah, all right.
Well, and, you know, this is the kind of thing that I've heard a bit of in pieces here and there over the years.
But your article really put together here with – I hadn't heard about these newly released documents and such.
But it really shows that Mullah Omar and those guys were no dummies.
I mean, they really knew that, as you say in here, they had been warned specifically they would be held directly responsible for any deaths, for any terrorist attacks that came out of Afghanistan, which is pretty vague, right?
But close enough.
That's another important point.
You know, the U.S. kind of had a regime of – a policy of regime change in Afghanistan prior to 9-11.
And this came out in the 9-11 commission.
A lot of people who testified before the commission were saying there were plans to go into Afghanistan and put boots on the ground.
But the problem was, before 9-11, we just didn't have – there was no political – it was politically unviable, basically.
And then 9-11 happened, and then we had basically the pretext we needed to go ahead and implement plans already that were in place.
Now, in reading these documents, did you come across questions about the motivation for that?
Or was it just because they wanted to go and kill bin Laden or chase him into Pakistan so that he could be free for the rest of his life?
Obviously, bin Laden was a key motivation that was cited by the U.S., but there were other issues involved.
And some of the documents actually mentioned the pipeline deals that were taking place.
And the best source I know of that I've come across on that is Ahmed Rashid's book The Taliban, just Taliban.
And he discusses at great length the negotiations that were taking place and the politics of the pipelines that was the great game going on in Afghanistan.
Well, and I think – I have trouble always remembering the names of these different pipelines, but they talk specifically – I think you quote this up at the top of the article here, if I can page up.
You talk about the different options of whether the pipeline would run to the – God, I forget the name of the one.
But it's the one that would have gone through – from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and to the port of Karachi.
But then instead the deal was worked out that, no, it'll go through Iran, Pakistan and Iran and cut the United States out and cut Iran in.
And that was one of the things that they were fighting about all along, right?
Right, and that dispute had continued until – actually, I think it was just fairly recently that that deal was actually signed.
And I guess they're going to go ahead and build that pipeline.
Which is such a joke that anyone really would be able to – I mean, now, if the Taliban controlled the whole country and a foreign state was able to make a deal with them, maybe.
But it seems very hard to believe that any of these guys think that they could actually build and secure one of these pipelines and keep it that way under occupation without having it sabotaged every day.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I don't know if that was a consideration, what they were thinking.
But it is clear from the documentary record prior to 9-11, for example, John J. Mareska was the – I think he was the CEO or a spokesperson for Unical Corporation, which I think became Total.
But it was basically – that was the oil company that was heading up the coalition of U.S. corporations to build this pipeline.
And he testified before Congress, and he said at that point that basically wooing the Taliban had become politically unviable for them.
There was a big stink about their abuses of women's rights, and they were basically – he was basically testifying that we can't do business with these guys anymore.
We've tried.
We brought them to the U.S. We've tried to woo them to get them to sign this deal, but we can't do business with them anymore because it's just bad PR for us.
And basically he said, if this deal is to go forward, something needs to be done about the Taliban regime.
And I think that was in 1998 that he testified this before Congress.
So there was this motivation to do something about the Taliban regime, and then we saw that kind of manifested before 9-11 in plans to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan.
Yeah, one of these – one thing these guys never seem to understand is fighting on the side of the winning side is pretty easy, like when America fought in an Afghan war in the 1980s when the communists could never have won against the mujahideen, where they were – America chipped in on the side that was destined to win no matter what.
And the same thing going on in Iraq, where they fought for the majority, backed by Iran, and so there was basically no way they could lose.
So you can call it a victory all you want or whatever, but it's not like Afghanistan itself is just really easy to conquer.
Ask the Soviets, fighting on the other side of that same battle.
Right, right.
I think there might be a good parallel there between Iraq in that obviously the claim that the Iraq war was about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism I think is just too absurd to really even go into.
It was largely about oil.
There were other motivations, but obviously oil was a big part of it.
And I really think that the planners of that war, the new conservatives, I really think that they really believed they were just going to waltz in there and put in a puppet regime that was going to be open to Western interests and sign all these contracts to have U.S. oil corporations go in there.
I think they really believed that.
I think when they talked about we were going to be met with flowers and hugs and kisses, I think they actually believed their own propaganda.
And I think that's kind of a part of it.
I think the same thing happened in Afghanistan.
I think they thought that it was going to be much easier than it turned out to be.
And they ignored warnings.
The chief of the ISI, Mahmoud Ahmed, he had said, if you guys go into Afghanistan and you remove the Taliban regime, it's going to be chaos.
It's going to be revert to warlordism.
And that turned out to be prescient because that's exactly what happened.
And the U.S. was warned.
They were told, this is what will happen if you go in there and you take out the Taliban.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I had completely forgotten this, or maybe I'd even missed this in the first place.
I'm not sure how, other than I was actually deliberately watching Fox only because I figured you might as well get the mega dose of the poison.
But apparently back, I found this in one of Justin Armando's old articles.
Colin Powell had given a statement in, I think it was just in October, the beginning of October of 2001, where he was explaining that we're actually not interested in regime changing the Taliban.
We're not really interested in who rules Kabul.
We're after Osama bin Laden and this small network.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, that was kind of the claim at the time.
But then you also had contradicting claims.
Tommy Frank had said, you know, actually, you know, Osama bin Laden was never a goal.
Capturing Osama bin Laden was never a goal of this operation.
Well, that was later on justifying let him get away.
It was a self-serving statement and it was made by others.
Well, I mean, Wolfowitz had immediately contradicted Powell and said, oh, come on, no war on terror is complete without regime changing the Taliban.
I wasn't familiar with that comment from Wolfowitz.
But, yeah, you had contradicting statements, contradictory statements coming from within our own government about what the actual goal and purpose was.
Was it regime change?
Was it just to capture bin Laden and remove al Qaeda?
Well, and that really goes to show how bad the neocons are.
When we can think back and only wish and think about how different history would be if only they'd listened to Colin Powell.
Had more blood on his hands than probably anybody else in Washington, D.C. at that point.
Right.
Right.
Kind of ironical.
Well, you know, here's one thing, too, that ties in with the the fact of bin Laden staying in Afghanistan at that time and all that.
I guess from 96 on, Eric Margulies likes to emphasize that it was actually bin Laden who talked Mullah Omar out of the deal with UNACAL and said that they ought to get an Argentinian company, Bridas, instead to build it.
And I don't know if that was a matter of which direction it should go or not.
But apparently the deal was pretty much ready to go through and bin Laden himself was the one who screwed it all up.
Yeah.
Actually, the book The Taliban that I had mentioned by Ahmed Rashid discusses that at great length in the kind of the war between Bridas and the UNACAL conglomerate.
Really?
Can you tell me more about that?
It's been a while since I read the book, but basically, and I think the book also mentions what you just said, that bin Laden might have been an influence on the Taliban to get them to go with Bridas rather than with the U.S. conglomerate.
He goes into a lot of detail about that, and I forget the ins and outs of the details, but that's basically the summary situation is that you had these two major competing conglomerates trying to both woo the Taliban.
The Taliban were brought into the U.S. They were flown in and wooed and brought into Texas.
At this time, they were trying to basically say, hey, you should sign this deal with us.
So they weren't treated as some outlaw regime at the time.
That kind of started happening later, and the first thing that happened was their treatment of women, and the women's rights issue became kind of a notable issue.
And when the Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, kind of came out and said, yeah, you know, the Taliban's treatment of women is not okay.
Well, and Christiane Amanpour on CNN would never stop.
I mean, CNN just had to all vilify the Taliban all the time thing, not that she had an idea for who might be a better government for that country or how to install it.
Yeah, but it was around that time that the UNICAO kind of turned around and said, well, we kind of have given up trying to negotiate this contract with the Taliban just because it's politically unviable at this point.
So by 1998, that was kind of where it was.
Yeah, and, you know, it's interesting that, well, just for its own sake, government getting in the way of a private deal that could have helped forge the path of peace and ended up leading us into war.
I mean, after all, if the Taliban had seen it in their interest that they definitely wanted to go with UNICAO, then bin Laden would have been an even bigger pain in their neck.
And the pressure on him to either not do an attack or the pressure on the Taliban to go ahead and give him up first would have been a whole different dynamic.
And we don't know what could have been.
But yeah, absolutely.
It also seems from your article when you cite in the State Department documents that they were working with, or at least talking with, the Russians, the Indians, and the Iranians about regime change in Pakistan.
Pardon me, in Afghanistan, and how clearly, I guess everybody already knows that the Iranians hated the Taliban with a vengeance and that they had almost invaded in 1998 themselves when the Taliban executed, I think, 13 Iranian government ambassadors and their smitherses.
But so what was surprising to me was working with Russia on that.
And also, though, what was surprising to me was that it seemed like it betrayed the idea that they knew that you couldn't install the Northern Alliance and call that a government and that if you were going to actually overthrow the Taliban, you would need to do so in some kind of multinational effort to divide the country up and dominate it and occupy it with foreign power rather than through quizzling.
Through quizzlings like General Dostum, who could never actually have natural power in that country, no matter how many people he kills.
Right.
I mean, Dostum was one of the guys, I mean, he's one of the breed of warlords that when the Taliban first came to power, they were welcomed as liberators for freeing the countryside of the rule of these warlords.
Right.
Dostum was one of those guys.
Yeah, I mean, the Taliban were brutal, but they outlawed any other crime.
I mean, they were serious about their monopoly on force.
Rapists, for example, were severely punished.
People like Dostum, that was his specialty.
They were also quite effective at almost eradicating the poppy crop and the opium production.
Which, I don't know how many answers you have to this, but that certainly is another question about the motivation for the continued occupation of that country, isn't it?
When we've had nothing but record poppy crops year after year for more than nine now?
Right, and I've written about that actually too.
One of the big propaganda lines, it's kind of slowed down in recent years, but I wrote an article in 2008 based on a New York Times headline.
Basically, the theme of the article is, and that and many other articles, was that the Taliban was virtually dominating the poppy trade.
That was kind of a characterization from the media.
I looked into that.
I went through the UNODC reports, the UN Office of Drugs and Crime.
They have a yearly report on the opium in Afghanistan.
They also have an additional world drug trade report.
I went through all the documentation, documents from the World Bank and other groups that study this issue.
They claim that the Taliban controlled the opium production and trafficking.
It's just baseless.
There was, at the time, in 2008, basically where they did profit from the trade.
The profits were mostly from a tax, a 10% tax on all agriculture.
That included poppies, but it wasn't specific to poppies.
It was a tax on all agriculture in areas that they controlled.
Even if you want to look at that cynically and say that maybe the Taliban were just trying to drive up the price by limiting production for their own benefit at the expense of others in the market or whatever.
Still, look at the opposite of that.
The opposite of that is a world market flooded with heroin addiction.
You can make that argument.
I've seen that argument made, and I think it's an incredible argument.
The poppies, I think, that were still grown under their regime were grown in their own areas.
I think there is a case to be made that that was part of their motivation.
It was their own self-interest and their own profit and greed.
But the fact remains, they were very effective at eradicating the problem.
They also do say in detail in here, don't they, that Massoud and the Northern Alliance were cooked, that that whole deal was over, that the civil war was virtually won by then.
Yeah, I think so.
The Taliban had ruled an enormous part of the country.
I think it was, again, the ISI chief, Mahmoud Ahmad, had told the U.S.
If it wasn't for external support, these guys would be done in a matter of days.
And if it wasn't for the U.S. backing of the Northern Alliance, and probably Iran was supporting the Northern Alliance, and if it wasn't for this external support, the Taliban would just wipe these guys right out.
So they were pretty much done, just like you said.
Well, you know, I don't know, Jeremy.
It seems to me like all this is really just a lesson in shame, shame, and told you so.
And it didn't have to be this way.
You know, you think about just the first decade of the 20th century, or the first decade of the 21st century here, without this bogus terror war, without all this madness, you know, how things could have been if they had just said, you know what, look, here's, you know, an indictment from 1998.
Give him up to the Saudis.
They'll cut his head off, because that's okay when it's an allied state of ours that does that.
And then whatever.
Then that would have been that, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, like Mill Bearden at the CIA station chief, you know, it was a missed opportunity.
You know, like you said, we'll never know what could have been.
But, you know, other possibilities were there.
Other alternative courses of action were there.
Yeah, and that's, I mean, the point is this is something that the media, you know, the government has kind of tried to say, you know, well, this was a last resort.
We had to go to war.
You know, this was the best option.
And, you know, you see kind of the deception in, you know, even after 9-11 and after the war had begun, and the Taliban even then had said, okay, fine, we'll drop, you know, the demand for evidence.
Let us turn them over to a third country.
And the response to that was actually before that when they were still saying, well, show us the evidence.
You know, how come, why didn't you show us the evidence?
Their response from the U.S. was, well, just turn on the TV and you'll see bin Laden claiming responsibility.
It was an absolute lie.
At that time, bin Laden had given several interviews where he denied responsibility.
He had never claimed responsibility.
Now, in fact, go ahead and elaborate about that a little bit, although first let me say that I had thought that there was really only one or two of those and that they were actually questionable in origin.
One of them seemed to have been just a Taliban spokesman talking to a Pakistani newspaper and sort of speaking on behalf of bin Laden and saying, no, I didn't do that.
But you seem to have, you know, called a few more denials than that.
But then again, I've seen video from Al Jazeera that purports to be from I think February 2002 with bin Laden and Zawahiri sitting on a log.
And bin Laden's not saying anything, but Zawahiri's going on and on about the whole thing.
And so I wonder what you think about those denials in the first place, whether you think maybe he hadn't been in on it with the guys who did it.
Or secondly, you know, was it, I don't know, what do you think maybe it was just the politics of he was trying to lay low right then because he kind of reaped the whirlwind, but later he saw something that was good PR.
You know, I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know either.
It's a good question.
You know, I think obviously a denial from Osama bin Laden should be taken with a grain of salt and it doesn't have a whole lot of credibility.
Yeah, the guy's already a murderer many times over.
Right.
But the point is that, you know, the point is that it's still untrue to say that he had admitted responsibility at that time.
Oh no, yeah, that's a separate point.
Yeah, I was kind of going off on a tangent there.
But then the first, you know, with some of these tapes that have come out since, this one came out, the Pentagon put it out in December.
And I guess they had said, well, we found this when we went in and we found it in November.
And it was a tape, you know, allegedly showing bin Laden, you know, sitting there talking with his buddies about, you know, how they had planned to fly the planes into the towers and how they planned to, that the structural weakening and the jet fuel fires would cause the buildings to collapse and stuff.
But if you look at that video, I mean, you don't need facial recognition software to know that's not Osama bin Laden.
Actually, that was always the one that I was the most skeptical of.
But there was a BBC show, which obviously the point of the show was to debunk conspiracy theories.
But at the same time, I think they were doing an honest job of taking them into account and really trying to examine them.
And I think that's the video where the aspect ratio is actually just squished so they can put text at the bottom.
And there's even, in part of the video, you see it actually go from regular aspect ratio and then squish as, you know, the bottom comes up and the image is squished so they can make room for the text at the bottom.
You take part of the clip where it's stretched out to its proper ratio and it looks just like him from 1998 or whatever.
I don't know.
I'd have to see that argument.
Yeah, yeah.
BBC did a pretty good piece on whether he's still alive or not.
That was the question of the show.
And I think that they at least kind of found ways to dissolve the grains of salt a little bit.
Not that they proved he's still alive.
It was still an open question.
But all the reasons to doubt it seem to kind of evaporate.
My reaction to that is that even if the frame was stretched, just his facial features were not the same.
So it's not just a matter of it being widened.
I mean, he had a different nose.
He had different cheekbones, a different forehead.
Well, it certainly could have been faked.
I mean, they make Jabba the Hutt come to life, so why not?
Right, right.
You're right.
I think later in several other videos and audiotapes and things, there were some other examples where Bin Laden allegedly claimed responsibility.
But a lot of those have been called into question, and I don't know one way or the other the legitimacy of those.
One more thing about the one where they're sitting in the room was that those other guys are real people, and actual journalists have talked to them before and since and what have you, and they actually exist, and that really happened, and that was externally verified or whatever.
So that was one thing where I see all these people in the room with him.
I don't know who they are, but apparently there were some journalists who were in a position to ask around, and in that BBC thing they talked about who some of those guys were, I believe.
Yeah, yeah.
In my own view, I personally don't have any doubts that he was involved somehow.
From what I know, it seems like he certainly had knowledge of the plot.
So I don't really doubt that.
Yeah, you know, journalists advertise him very tightly to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed bragged about it to Yusuf Fauda at Al Jazeera in 2002 before he was kidnapped.
Right.
So I don't really doubt his involvement or at least his knowledge of the plot, and I'm sure he was in contact with KFM and others involved.
And like you said, I think there's been some videos where he's sitting around with some of the guys, even some of the terrorists, I think.
Yeah, Mohammed Atta, including.
Oh, is that right?
Okay.
And I think Marwan al-Shayyih or whatever.
It's been a while, but yeah.
There is video of them in Afghanistan with him.
But, you know, where I'm coming from is basically, first of all, why did the U.S. not provide the evidence?
Secondly, you know, this tape that to me is an obvious fake.
I'd like to see that BBC special you're talking about, but to me it's an obvious fake.
And, you know, assuming that that is a fake, why did the Pentagon fabricate this videotape to show Osama bin Laden claiming responsibility?
That just begs the question.
Even if we do assume he was responsible, the question remains, why did they feel it necessary to have to, number one, to not offer any evidence at the time and, two, to fabricate evidence?
Well, you know, the thing is, I think the explanation for that is actually a very important point on its own, and that is that it cuts to the idea that we all sort of just know, without necessarily even thinking it through, that terrorism is a crime and that what ought to happen in a case like this is a grand jury ought to be impaneled and the meanest prosecutor in New York ought to get that grand jury to hand down some indictments and then the cops ought to grab the guys and then give them a fair trial and then lock them away.
That's how it's supposed to work.
And instead, David Addington and Dick Cheney said, no, no, no.
See, that's why we got attacked.
We treated it like a crime.
From now on, we're going to have wars wherever we feel like.
This is an important point.
In fact, yeah, we need to stress that.
Because, you know, if you go to the, you know, people can go right now to the FBI's website and look at Osama bin Laden's wanted poster.
9-11 is not listed as one of the crimes for which he's wanted.
The reason for that is because the Justice Department does not have enough hard evidence of his involvement to be able to indict him in a court of law.
No, no, no.
That's the thing.
It's because David Addington and Dick Cheney decided that day they weren't going to convene a grand jury.
They weren't going to treat this as a law enforcement matter at all.
They were going to call up the third, whatever the hell division, to go in there and blast things.
And that was, that's the point that I'm making is that they didn't bother indicting him for 9-11 because they said we're not treating this as a criminal act.
We're treating it as an act of war.
Which can be, you know, the purpose of that was to give them unlimited power.
You know, I'm not saying it was because, you know, of a legitimate reason or whatever.
But I'm saying I think that's the, I think it's, that's, in the case of this question of why he's not on that most wanted list and why they didn't indict him, this is the answer.
This other horrible thing.
They wanted the power to torture people.
They wanted the power to declare an umbrella war that they could include other nation states as smaller parts of and all these things.
You know, Yemen and Somalia and who knows where next.
Pakistan?
Sure, I mean, that could be a secondary motivation.
Even if we do assume that they did have the evidence.
But, you know, like...
Well, I'm saying they didn't even bother trying because they didn't even go that direction.
You know what I mean?
They could have made something up if they had to and it wasn't true.
They do that every day.
Hey, they did that today.
They arrested some guy on some entrapped nonsense, you know?
Right, right, yeah.
There was obviously plans within the administration to try to create these presidential powers.
So, yeah, that's a good point.
I never really considered that.
Yeah, that's the thing.
David Addington, man.
That's your enemy.
That's the guy.
Dick Cheney's lawyer.
Really mean son of a bitch.
There's footage of him testifying on C-SPAN that might be fun to watch sometime.
You know, I don't usually talk about 9-11 on here just because it drives the crazies crazy.
But whatever, I quit reading the comment section anymore anyway, so I'm over it.
And I'm happy to bring it up and talk about it because I think that, you know, obviously there are a lot of questions of how is it that...
You know, like we talked about earlier, when the Taliban warned, they said, yeah, but people tell us that every day or whatever.
Yeah, well, you know...
We were hearing a lot of that kind of stuff, I think, was the exact quote.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
You know, my take on 9-11 has always been that everyone from at least Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, and the heads of all the relevant agencies, FBI, CIA, NSA, all those people should have been indicted on 3,000 counts of criminally negligent homicide.
And then if they wanted to turn state's witness and say it was all Dick Cheney's fault, let's hear it.
But otherwise, they were responsible.
It happened on their watch, and their heads should have rolled for that.
And I don't think anybody really disagrees with that except some loyal Republican.
But who's a loyal Republican anymore?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and, you know, another point is that the Bush administration tried to avoid having an investigation.
I mean, they tried hard to fight against an investigation.
Yeah, Dick Cheney called the Democrats in the Senate and said, you're not going to have one, understood?
All right.
The only reason we even had the 9-11 commission was because the 9-11 families pushed so hard for it.
But that's the only reason we even had the 9-11 commission, which itself is, you know, in my view, a whitewashed situation.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's clear, too, that the indictments should have gone back.
I mean, assuming there was a rule of law at all or whatever, the indictments should have gone all the way back to the Clinton years and Sandy Berger and Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and the 10 different, maybe 13 different chances that they had to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden that they refused to take when they were handed to them on a silver platter by the CIA and the military.
And then there's other questions directly about 9-11, like why did the CIA allow willfully and deliberately allow two of the hijackers into the country?
Khalid al-Midar and the, I forget the other hijacker's name, but the two guys who were at the Malaysia summit.
Right.
They were non-Al Qaeda operatives.
The CIA had copies of their passports.
They had visas to the U.S.
So, you know, the CIA obviously knew they had plans to travel into the states.
Well, and FBI documents say that it was one of their informants who picked them up at the airport.
They had originally fudged that in the 9-11 commission and said that they landed in L.A., but then two weeks later they went to San Diego and then they met this guy.
But, no, it turns out they went straight to San Diego.
He was their ride from LAX.
Right, and the 9-11 commission didn't even interview the FBI's informant.
You know, he's the guy who had rented an apartment to the hijackers.
See, I think that's one of my problems, too, though, is I was already so cynical about all this that I never even paid any attention to the 9-11 commission, because I just figured its only purpose was to justify the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
They said that on the first day.
So I never even bothered reading their report, because it couldn't possibly be right anyway, and whatever.
So I have trouble being outraged at what they didn't do, because I never expected anything from them.
But you're right that I should have a point of view that would start with the trust I should have been able to have in a commission on a subject like that, and was not able to have.
Yeah, right, right.
I was cynical before I had read the report, too, but I did read the report.
It begs more questions than it answers.
And it doesn't really answer any of the hard questions.
There were reports.
The ISI chief who I've been mentioning, Mahmood Ahmed, there were reports.
The Press Trust of India reported.
It was picked up by Pakistan's Dawn newspaper.
I think the Guardian has reported it.
It was not mentioned in the U.S. media hardly at all.
There was one blog on the Wall Street Journal's opinion page that mentioned the fact that it was reported that he had authorized the transfer of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta.
Well, and supposedly it was the guy Omar Saeed Shaikh, or is that right?
Omar Saeed Shaikh, that's right, yeah.
His smithers that sent the money is the guy that killed Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter that was after who sent the money.
Right, right.
Yeah, he's the guy who was wrapped up in that case, which I'm not as familiar with, but you're right.
He was involved in the Daniel Pearl murder.
That was Omar Saeed Shaikh, and he was kind of the money man.
Yeah, and by the way, I don't know if I can show or prove that that's what Daniel Pearl was after.
I think I heard that somewhere.
I believe that.
I'm not sure if I know that, so I should carry it out there.
Yeah, there's stories.
I think the official story is he was trying to investigate the Richard Reed, the shoe bomber.
Isn't that what his name was, Richard Reed?
He was going into Pakistan to investigate that, supposedly.
But others have come out.
I think Robert Baer was a friend of his.
I could be wrong on this, but I think Robert Baer came out and said, well, actually what he was doing was kind of investigating Omar Saeed Shaikh, this kind of angle.
So, yeah, I don't really know either way on that, either.
So it's kind of still an open question about that.
But he was the guy.
He was kind of the guy that the media up until that time had pinpointed, this is the money man.
This is the money man behind the 9-11 attacks.
And then as soon as it was reported that the ISI chief had authorized this guy to send this money, that whole line of inquiry just stopped.
I mean, the media just stopped reporting about it altogether.
And in the 9-11 commission report, get this, the 9-11 commission report, they don't look, they don't even touch that question.
They dismiss it, and they say, and they actually say this.
This is hard to believe, but they actually say this, that the question of who financed the 9-11 attacks is of little practical significance.
Right.
Well, you know what my problem is with that one, too, is, well, there's two things.
The first one is I think the story that it was General Mahmood Ahmed that authorized that started in the Times of India, which makes me think, yeah, right.
And then there was further reporting on it, but here's where I'm hung up, is that I can't remember for the life of me where or what, and I'm the master of the Google search terms and finding that thing I'm looking for from back in my memory somewhere.
But I cannot find it for the life of me or even remember what it was.
But I remember reading what I thought was a pretty compelling debunking of that accusation.
But then I never found anything that addressed that, and now I can't even find that anymore.
So I really would like to see, and there very well may be solid journalism on that, but I don't know if I've seen it yet.
Yeah, but it's an allegation, and we don't know.
I mean, that's the point, though, is that we don't know, and it should have been investigated.
And why didn't the 9-11 Commission discuss it, even to debunk it when they should have discussed it, even for that reason?
But basically it was first reported at the Press Trust of India, which was just kind of like Reuters.
The New York Times will print AP and Reuters articles.
The PTI, there was an article in the Times of India.
And then Pakistan's own newspaper, Dawn, picked it up.
And then there was a Guardian article that mentioned it, and that Guardian article added a new piece of information, and it said that an FBI spokesman had confirmed that this evidence existed, which I'm not sure about.
I mean, that's another thing that needs more investigation.
And we don't know.
We don't know whether this occurred, whether this is a bogus claim, or whether Pakistan's intelligence really was involved.
My point is that it should have been thoroughly investigated, and we should know the answer to that by now.
And we don't.
Except that right now you've got a bunch of goofballs in D.C. with an itchy trigger finger for Pakistan, and they don't make any excuse to start carpet bombing that place.
The last thing we need now is proof that some of them were in on it.
At this point, such an investigation would probably be counterproductive.
But we should have had it, and the 9-11 Commission report should have at least addressed that issue.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Well, and look, I mean, the thing is now, too, the most important point is that there is a war raging in that country right now.
People are dying right now in this war based on this whole set of circumstances.
And, I mean, really, if there was accountability at all, we know their names.
And the way things would have worked is instead of a 90 percent approval rating, Bush and Rice and Cheney, Tenet and Colin Powell and that whole crew would have all had to at least, at least immediately resign in disgrace for that attack.
Robert Mueller, too.
Well, no, he was the new guy.
I guess the last guy had just been forced out.
But anyway, the rest of them, they should have all had to resign in disgrace over that thing happening on their watch.
And, you know, many people should have been put on trial for their criminal negligence, like the FBI supervisor who wouldn't let Colleen Rowley and them in Minneapolis search the rest of Moussaoui's belongings, which could have tied him to Mohammed Attah and his friends in Florida.
Right, or the CIA, you know, guy who had basically said, well, we're not going to notify the FBI or the State Department or the Department of Immigration that these two terrorists are coming into the country.
Why didn't his head roll?
Have you read Bamford's book, The Shadow Factory, about the NSA and 9-11?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, boy, that one will mess you up.
And the NSA, here's one for the 9-11 commission scorecard.
The NSA is not mentioned in there at all, never mind what they knew about anything or what they would or wouldn't share with anybody.
It's not even brought up in there at all.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, they used to say it was called no such agency.
They wouldn't even admit the thing existed until the 1970s or something.
Anyway, all right, well, I think we're flogging the dead horse here, but I appreciate your time, Jeremy, and I appreciate your journalism here.
I'm new to it, actually, foreignpolicyjournal.com.
Can you tell me a little bit about it?
Yeah, well, it's just a website I started in 2008.
I wanted to kind of have an alternative.
I wanted to create a site that I could publish my own work and get some other contributors in and just challenge the propaganda that we read all the time in our mainstream media.
And so now I've got some contributors, regular contributors, include Paul Craig-Roberts, Ramsey Baroud from the editor of the Palestine Chronicle, and I've got a lot of great guys who contribute articles.
And my most recent piece there is doing quite well.
It's called The Myth of the UN Creation of Israel.
I saw that link here.
I think I might have already opened it in a new tab.
No, not quite yet, but I was going to look at that.
Yeah, check that out.
Yeah, and check out the site, and it's just another addition to the alternative media out there.
Hopefully, I'd like to think I'm doing good work with it and getting some real good information out, and trying to weed through the lies and the truth here and get to the bottom of some things.
My own writing focuses mostly on the war on terrorism, and I write a lot about Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
So the Foreign Policy Journal itself does focus a lot on that issue.
So for people who want to know more about that issue, I think it's a pretty good source.
Well, it's, I think, pretty obvious to everyone that we need as many informed voices like yours as we can get out here in this alternative media, especially as the old giants fall.
We need good replacements.
So it's great to see that you're doing what you're doing, and I enjoyed the article and your time on the show.
So thanks very much.
Yeah, it's an honor to be on with you.
Thanks again.
Everybody, that's Jeremy R. Hammond.
The website is ForeignPolicyJournal.com, and you can also check out his own site at JeremyRHammond.com.
