9/11 inquiry, why the Rice refusal

March 30 2004

Something to conceal


PV Vivekanand



THERE is indeed something disturbing about the unfolding episode in Washington where National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice is refusing to testify under oath before the independent commission investigating the Sept.11 attacks. While it is difficult to be accurate about why one feels unease about the affair, it seems clear that it has more to do with other aspects of Sept.11 than former White House aide Richard Clarke's contentions that the Bush administration had not taken seriously the perceived threat from Al Qaeda.
Whether Clarke is right is an issue of relevance more to the American sense of government responsibility to protect citizens than to any Middle Eastern worry or concern. Indeed, it could to an extent influence the re-election prospects of President George W Bush in November and thus it is indeed of concern to the rest of world.
However, there seems to be more than meets the eye and it has to do with Middle Eastern links — perceived, established, unconfirmed and otherwise — with the Sept.11 attacks. The Arabs and Muslims have paid a heavy price in the aftermath of 9/11 and hence they too have the right know the truth and whether they fell prey to a well-orchestrated operation designed to target them.
It stems from the conviction among many in this part of the world that the assaults presented the right opportunity for the Bush administration to launch efforts to realise its long-sought objectives in the Middle East: Assuming control of Arab oil resources of a size that would allow it to dictate terms in the international oil market and, in the bargain, eliminating a potent threat to the US's "strategic ally" in the Middle East, Israel, and also building a major military presence in the Gulf to facilitate armed intervention whenever it suited American interests.
Again, these "objectives" —  which, at this point in time, the US is one whisker away from fully accomplishing (and it is indeed a thick whisker at that) — are not products of Middle Eastern imagination. Some of the mainstream American media outlets that referred to the existence of decades-old plans to seize Arab oil wells as a strategic need in order to serve American strategic needs. Couple those needs with Israeli interests to see Iraq eliminated as a military power, and bingo!!
And that is why the a growing belief that Rice is more apprehensive about being forced to reveal more sinister aspects of the events before and after the Sept.11 attacks than the administration's purported shortcomings in tackling Al Qaeda before the aerial assaults in New York and Washington.
These include the Iraq angle. Obviously, Rice wants to duck questions whose answers which has the potential of definitely establishing that the Bush administration was preoccupied with its determination to wage war against Iraq and assume absolute control of that country and it could not bother much about Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden at the expense of its plans for Iraq.
It even appeared as if the pro-Israeli hawks in Washington were waiting for something like 9/11 to happen before stampeding the administration into planning the war against Iraq.
The Washington Post has reported that "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a two-and-a-half-page document marked 'top secret' that "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq."
CBS News has reported that five hours after the 9/11 attacks, "Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq."
Obviously, Rice would not want to be cornered into having to answer questions related to the Iraq angle since it would expose the reality that the Sept.11 attacks was the pretext that the neoconservatives in Washington were waiting for in order to implement their campaign against Iraq and influence the president into approving it.
Most definitely, Rice would not want to be the person whose testimony under oath exposed the real motivations behind the war against Iraq and whose interests were really served through the invasion and occupation of that country. Such revelations would seal the fate against Bush in November elections and Rice would find herself not only out of a job but out of favour with the powers that matter in Washington.
Another angle Rice would not want to touch is perhaps the perceived Israeli links to Sept.11.
The outside world knows little about the fate of the more than 120 Israeli espionage agents — most of them masquerading as arts students — who were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in six to 48 hours after the Sept.11 attacks.
The FBI detained them because many of them were observed earlier in suspicious circumstances and some of them were trying to pass off as Arab Muslims and in contact with Arab and Muslim organisations that the FBI had kept under surveillance.
It is unclear whether the FBI had realised that the Israelis were "double agents," but the agency found it fit to detain them immediately after the 9/11 strikes.
A few American newspapers did report the detentions but have maintained a studious silence about their fate since then.
Reports tucked away in the inside paged of the Israeli press indicate that all of the Israeli "suspects" detained post-Sept.11 have been released without charges after top-level government intervention.
There has been speculation that some of these Israelis had posed as Arabs and Palestinians with an axe to grind against the US for its support for Israel and "penetrated" the cells which carried out the New York and Washington attacks and even offered logistic information that helped them implement their plans.
Some of them were picked up and questioned at length by the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before 9/11.
It is not known what they had revealed and we don't know yet from where the FBI and CIA had gathered enough information to warrant pre-9/11 warnings to the White House that Al Qaeda attack could be imminent.
However, reports clearly show that the warnings might have been based on information provided by some of the Israeli agents picked up and questioned before 9/11.
In the immediate context, Rice is obviously putting up a strong effort to establish that the Bush administration remained focused on Al Qaeda, but she seems to be overdoing it by contradictions.
In May 2002, Rice said: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
But NBC Television and Los Angeles Times reported on Sept.27, 2001 that President Bush t personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama Bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane."
In July 2001, the administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles.
In May 2002, Rice at a press conference that she had called defended the administration from new revelations that the president had been explicitly warned about an Al Qaeda threat to airlines in August 2001. She "suggested that Bush had requested (a CIA) briefing because of his keen concern about elevated terrorist threat levels that summer."
But the CIA says that the briefing was its idea and it did not come from the White House, according to the Washington Post.
Above all, Rice is contradicting Bush himself. The president admitted that he "didn't feel the urgency" about terrorism before Sept.11, the Washington Post reported in January 2002. But Rice insisted last week: "The fact of the matter is (that) the administration focused on this before 9/11."
Rice's contradictions are too numerous and she would not be able to escape with broad answers when confronted by questioners who have done their homework. And she knows it too well.
Again, it is a matter to be decided by the Americans whether they should insist that their national security adviser tell them the truth under oath and be held responsible for her claims and counter-claims about the events leading up to attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 of their compatriots.
However, it is not only the Americans who need to know the truth about how 9/11 led to 20/03 — the day the US launched its invasion of Iraq — and whether 9/11 itself was the orchestration of a plot where Al Qaeda was skillfully used as the executing weapon by parties which stood to benefit as a result of the deadliest terror attack in history. The world, particularly the Arabs and Muslims, has been badly affected by Sept.11, and it too has the right to know.