Assembling The 9/11 Counter-Legends (or, Stacking Your Patsies)
   
 by ChaimKupferberg excerpted from:
Truth, Lies, and The Legend of 9/11




The events of September 11 gave birth to three parallel threads - or
counter-legends - pointing the way to the culpability of three
possible foreign suspects, or patsies - namely, Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan, and Israel. Of the three, the Saudis were the patsies of
choice for the mainstream "critics", who were a motley assortment of
neo-cons, FBI investigators, or "retired" national security types
opposed to the war in Iraq. The Pakistan/ISI thread to 9/11 flared
up most noticeably in the events surrounding the death of Daniel
Pearl and the alleged involvement of Omar Saeed Sheikh - events which
were used, in fact, to smother the Pakistani/ISI connection to the
9/11 money trail. As regards Israel, the most radical opponents of
the War On Terror were nursed on the twin threads of an Israeli spy
ring and a neo-con cabal supposedly at the helm of the Bush
Administration.

It was not by accident that these three countries were chosen to play
the role of second-tier patsies - for each of them contained insular
cliques of operatives which had played seminal roles in the covert
arms and drug trade - in cahoots with their more senior Anglo-
American handlers - throughout the Reagan-Bush years. Moreover,
these countries would make useful patsies for the very reason that
they were essentially outside the "established" - i.e. Euro-American -
ring of nations. In other words, if insular cliques of criminal
operatives were to be ferreted out of Germany, France, or Italy, no
one would think to brand these nations wholesale with the mark of
Cain. The same could not be said of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and
Israel, whose very security - physical, political, and economic -
would be staked to the publicized activities of their own respective
political/criminal cliques.

Moreover, much of the political and corporate elites within these
countries were integrally networked with their American counterparts -
indeed, largely subservient to them - to such a degree that they
would also serve as useful proxies in building their own counter-
legends under Anglo-Euro-American supervision. In the early stages
of the 9/11 Legend, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were employed as the
central bases for building up a terrorist home front within the
borders of Afghanistan. As for Israel - despite its aforementioned
spy ring and its supposedly allied neo-con "cabal" - its most direct
and public contribution to the 9/11 Legend in fact occurred after
9/11, with the November 2002 coordinated attack on an Israeli-owned
hotel and airliner in Kenya - an attack for which Israeli
investigators now marshaled evidence as proof of Osama bin Laden's
opening shot against the State of Israel (which was more likely
Israel's "buy-in" in return for a promised attack on the Saddam
Hussein regime).

Thus, evidence could be amassed to cast aspersions on the activities
of each of these three countries, depending on the intended
audience. On another level, political elites within these countries
could be assured that any aspersions would be relegated to
insular "rogue" cliques. In the case of Saudi Arabia, a few princes
of the Saudi royal family were thus eliminated within days of one
another in 2002. In the case of Pakistan, "rogue" elements within
the ISI were publicly purged in the months after 9/11. Yet in the
case of Israel, its apparent "buy-in" through the 2002 Kenya attack
served to strengthen, rather than weaken, the thread connecting
Israel as a possible 9/11 culprit. If, in the context of this
article, this would appear to be a short-sighted strategy by Israeli
political elites, one can only surmise that these elites were
blinded - or assured - by an apparent post-9/11 geo-strategic shift
in favor of Israeli interests (i.e. an attack on Iraq) in conjunction
with a publicly affirmed surge in influence among its supposed neo-
con allies.

With three alternative counter-legends in place to co-exist with the
Official (i.e. mainstream) 9/11 Legend, the stage was thereby set to
muddy the real trail leading to the events of September 11. With the
participation of a global network of well-connected spinmeisters -
both passive and active - each of the 9/11 threads could thus be
nurtured through a series of carefully calibrated revelations.

Of all the 9/11 spinmeisters, one of the most effective - and
therefore damaging - was Jean-Charles Brisard, co-author with
Guillaume Dasquie of The Forbidden Truth. Brisard burst on to the
mainstream scene shortly after September 11 as one of the
first "credible" critics of 9/11, weaving a trail of seemingly
incriminating red herrings that will, in all probability, tie up a
number of otherwise industrious conspiracy researchers for decades.
In Brisard and Dasquie's version of 9/11, the main protectors of al-
Qaida were the Saudis, who in turn were protected by greedy oil
interests which sought - through the State Department - to obstruct
any investigations that might unsettle their Saudi business
associates. To nail down the point, Brisard recounted his summer
2001 meeting with John O'Neill, in which a frustrated, scandal-ridden
O'Neill purportedly confided to Brisard that the "answer" to the al-
Qaida riddle lay in Saudi Arabia. For good measure, Brisard had the
well-timed implosion of Enron as a backdrop for his revelation,
implicating this now-dead shell of a corporation in a stubborn push
for an oil pipeline through Afghanistan (though senior Enron exec -
and CIA offspring - Frank Wisner, Jr., was, as it happens, also one
of the 17 elite "players" in the aforementioned "Dark Winter"
exercise).

Through Brisard (in addition to Pakistani Foreign Minister Niaz
Naik), we learned that the U.S. had made plans as early as June of
2001 to invade Afghanistan by October of that year. During that
summer, as Brisard chronicled it, a number of nations - including
Iran, Russia, and India - got together for a four-day conference in
Berlin, where the dispute with the Taliban was broached by U.S.
diplomats. The U.S. demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden
(in addition to negotiating for pipeline rights). Otherwise, the
Americans threatened to blanket Afghanistan with "a carpet of
bombs."

Brisard's initial theory, then, was that this threat prompted bin
Laden to launch a pre-emptive attack against the very nation that was
now placing him in imminent peril. Brisard also seemed to implicate
Bush, Sr. by way of his Carlyle Group interests. But in the end, as
Brisard essentially kept bin Laden in place as the sole 9/11 culprit,
the aspersions cast on the Bushes, the State Department, "oil
interests", et al, would not amount to much - at least from a legal
standpoint. At most, these parties could be judged as too blinded by
greed to recognize - and pre-empt - the very real threat from al-
Qaida. However you clothed Brisard's revelations, the "official"
9/11 Legend remained in place. Al-Qaida was still the defendant
(albeit with a new excuse), O'Neill was still a martyr (albeit with a
new Saudi gripe), and the Saudis were still suspicious (albeit with
possibly a new gripe against Brisard). Brisard, incidentally, also
happened to have written - for French intelligence - the first
comprehensive report on the financial structure of al-Qaida, a copy
of which was furnished to the Bush administration. Thus do national
security types and their 9/11 critics have a deeper understanding of
the 9/11 Legend courtesy of the efforts of Jean-Charles Brisard.

Brisard's co-author, Guillaume Dasquie, also comes by his own
intelligence connections, by way of his role as editor of
Intelligence Online. It was through Dasquie's efforts that
Intelligence Online, in March 2002, announced that it had come into
possession of a 61-page "secret" DEA report on a large Israeli spy
ring of "art students" who were casing federal buildings several
months before September 11. The "leaking" of this document, in
conjunction with Carl Cameron's December 2001 Fox News report on the
spy ring, ignited an online firestorm among 9/11 critics - pointing
the way, for some, to the Israelis as the main operative agents
behind September 11.

Yet, as we shall see, in the campaign to paint Israel as the main
suspect, here was a case of mostly right wing sources doling out the
goods for largely left wing consumption (with the obvious exception
of Justin Raimondo, a political supporter of, and former speechwriter
for, Pat Buchanan). Thus, while the likes of Stephen Emerson, Daniel
Pipes, and John Loftus were doing the lecture circuit at Jewish
Community Centers across North America, regaling this influential
community with insinuations of possible Saudi and/or Iraqi
involvement in 9/11, a more covert - and subtle - plan was afoot to
plant the seeds of a new Jewish neocon/Zionist conspiracy among the
left wing (i.e. the traditional foothold of the bulk of the American
Jewish community).

This relatively recent campaign to subvert the left with visions of a
Jewish neocon/Zionist conspiracy dovetailed nicely with a more
longstanding covert campaign - dating back more than thirty years -
to build up a small but powerful right wing contingent of Jews to
wean the rest from their knee-jerk liberalism (and thereby sap the
strength and vigor of the traditional Democrat wing). The species of
the Jewish "neo" conservative is best represented by Irving Kristol,
a self-admitted former Trotskyite who had been a member of the "left-
wing" Congress of Cultural Freedom (later exposed as a CIA front)
before making a "sudden" right turn in the late sixties, bringing
along with him a few other like-minded "disillusioned" Jews from CIA-
funded "leftist" groups. The typical neo-conservative was "neo" in
the sense that he would continue to hold liberal social values while
espousing hard right (i.e. pro-corporate) economic views and a
hawkish foreign policy - pretty much the course that American society
has taken in the thirty-odd years since Kristol made his
ideological "shift."

Though the history is far more complex and detailed than indicated
above, the crux of the point is this: in order to neutralize the
influential American Jewish community on the subject of civil rights
and domestic dissent (where they historically predominated), it was
not sufficient only to wean the Jews from the left, but to turn the
left against the Jews by now slurring them as right wing,
Zionist "imperialists" (best exemplified by Richard Perle, who is
actually more a product of the national security community than of
the Jewish community).

In concert with this strategy was a plan - also dating back more than
thirty years - to wean the South from the Democrats by promoting a
fundamentalist Christianity that grew in counter-point to the overall
loosening social values. The typical fundamentalist Christian
Republican would hold conservative social views while espousing hard
right (i.e. pro-corporate) economic views and a hawkish foreign
policy (best exemplified by John Ashcroft, who is actually more a
product of a deeply cynical political community than of the community
of belief).

With that background in mind, we may now touch upon the national
security/conservative clique which has furnished most of the
information concerning Israeli perfidy and 9/11. For our purposes,
the story begins on May 7, 1997, when Nora Boustany of The Washington
Post first broached the existence of Mega, a suspected code name for
a suspected Israeli mole within the upper echelons of the Clinton
government. As reported by Boustany, the National Security Agency
had intercepted a request from a Mossad operative to view a
diplomatic letter from Yasser Arafat. When the operative was heard
to ask his superior for the assistance of someone or something
called Mega, he received the reply, "We don't use Mega for this."

The story, in fact, broke on the very day when South Korean spy
Robert C. Kim was scheduled to deliver a guilty plea after a plea
bargain - a similar bargain that was, in fact, dishonored in the case
of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in the mid-80's. Kim, like
Pollard, had worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence, though
Pollard had worked in the counter-terrorism section. A week before
the Mega story broke - on April 30, 1997 - Pollard had petitioned the
Israeli High Court to compel the Israeli government to reveal what it
knew about his case. If a battle was brewing between Pollard
supporters (Likud/ neocon elements) and opponents (the Bush/ Baker
clique/ Woolsey/the national intelligence apparatus), the May 7 Mega
leak by way of the National Security Agency seemed to head it off,
publicly raising the specter of yet another Israeli mole. And then
the story ultimately went cold, with no official resolution and -
most crucially - no hard details by which to flesh out this possible
mole hunt.

Yet Jeffrey Steinberg of Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence
Review has attempted to draw a line between this morsel of an item
and a Mega Group that was mentioned by Lisa Miller in the Wall Street
Journal on May 4, 1998. In Steinberg's telling, the Mega Group is,
in fact, the shadowy Mega from the Boustany article. As Steinberg
put it, the Mega Group - a select group of Jewish billionaires
including Bronfman, Steinhardt, Spielberg, Tisch, and others - had
come together to influence U.S. security policy toward Israel. Yet
that was a disingenous - and I dare say, dishonest - reading of the
Miller article. In other words - and this was very clear from the
Miller article - their main concern was assimilation and
philanthropy, not Israeli national security issues, as Steinberg had
reported. But Steinberg's technique was all too typical -
mischievously weaving two totally disconnected items so as to give
the impression that he was uncovering bona fide evidence of a fully
known Jewish/Israeli conspiracy.

Yet taking the thread of a burgeoning Israeli spy conspiracy further,
in May 2000, J. Michael Waller and Paul M. Rodriguez of Insight
magazine (the sister publication of the ultra-right wing Washington
Times, which is in turn owned by the Moonies) broke the story that
the Israelis had possibly compromised U.S. government phone lines,
giving them access to sensitive information. Carl Cameron of Fox
News followed this up on May 5, 2000 by reporting on the
investigation into the Israeli-founded company AMDOCS, describing "an
alleged penetration of U.S. government phone systems."

This thread was also taken up by Gordon Thomas, the MI5 (British
intelligence) connected editor of the website Globe-Intel. Thomas,
in his book, Gideon's Spies, broached the subject of the Israeli
infiltration of the Clinton White House by way of the Mega mole. He
also had alleged that the Mossad had a possible role in the death of
Princess Diana; that the Mossad tapped Monica Lewinsky's phone in
order to pick up her conversations with President Clinton; and that
the Israelis stole the sophisticated PROMIS software, which
eventually ended up in the possession of Osama bin Laden.
Incidentally, Gordon Thomas holds himself out as a friend and
intimate confidant of Mossad insiders. We shall return to Thomas
shortly, for he - like Brisard and Dasquie - has also played a
significant part in lining up new alternate 9/11 suspects (most
recently China, in his book Seeds of Fire).

Picking up the thread, in March 2001 - significantly, several months
before September 11 - the U.S. National Counterintelligence Center
sent out an advisory for federal employees to be aware that a number
of young Israelis were approaching federal agents at their offices
and at their residences throughout the country, passing themselves
off as art students looking to sell their work - but more peculiarly,
identifying themselves as Israeli art students, thereby "red-
flagging" themselves for the benefit of the National
Counterintelligence Center. A few months after September 11, Carl
Cameron - in December of 2001 - once more visited the issue of
Israeli penetration, this time naming a second Israeli company,
Comverse Infosys, as having access to nearly all wiretaps placed by
U.S. law enforcement. As part of a four-part series for Fox News,
Cameron also cited a "secret" DEA report that chronicled the actions
of the aforementioned Israeli "art student" spy ring. Soon after a
transcript of Cameron's report was uploaded on the Fox News website,
it was taken offline and purged from the archives - a presumed cover-
up that actually raised far more suspicions over Israeli/Jewish
influence than the report itself.

Perhaps that was the intended effect - as the purpose would be
to "red flag" this item for an "alternative" online audience, not for
the mainstream couch potatoes who were wedded to the Official 9/11
Legend in any case. Was Cameron simply a dedicated journalist who
was muzzled by his conservative, pro-Israeli, employers at Fox? Or
was he rather a passive disinformation asset, coyly nursing the
Israeli thread when told to do so? On May 13, 2002, with government
warnings of a follow-up terrorist attack seeding the media zeitgeist,
Cameron red-flagged the Israelis once more, this time reporting that
a rental truck with traces of TNT was pulled over near an army base
in the State of Washington. Once again, suspicious Israelis were
discovered as occupants, and once again, the news suspiciously
disappeared from the airwaves.

There was a curious parallel to the manner by which various Israelis
tended to be "pulled over" in the Israeli/9/11 Counter-Legend as
opposed to the manner by which various al-Qaida operatives tended to
incriminate themselves through those fortuitous cell phone and
email "intercepts" in the al-Qaida/9/11 Legend. On June 23, 2002,
ABC News picked up the earlier story of five "suspicious" Israelis
celebrating on the roof of their van in the wake of September 11.
When the police had pulled them over and searched the contents of the
van, sure enough, they found...box cutters. And just as sure enough,
this story also "suspiciously" vanished without a follow-up. It is
also a curious fact that former CIA counterterror chief/ABC News
consultant Vincent Cannistraro lent his own spin on that report. As
I had pointed out in The Propaganda Preparation For 9/11, and as I
will show further in this article, Cannistraro has "spun" a great
deal of information on the 9/11 Legend.

While the spy ring story has been neglected by much of the mainstream
media, it nevertheless remains in the background, ready to
be "mainstreamed" if or when the "official" 9/11 Legend begins to
show cracks (or if the resident Israeli government proves to be
troublesome). As I have pointed out, much of the first-hand
revelations of Israeli penetrations have come not from alternative
sources, but from well-established, "credible" conservative sources
highly placed within the intelligence apparatus. While Daniel Pipes
(CFR member and former Defense Department employee) made a
disingenuous attempt at discrediting the spy ring story, the actual
DEA report that was acquired by Dasquie's Intelligence Online was
confirmed as authentic on February 25, 2002 by Will Glaspy of the
DEA's public affairs bureau. Moreover, according to a May 5, 2002
report in Le Monde, Cameron's four-part Fox broadcast was shown and
cleared with the CIA, FBI, and NSA before its airing. Clearly,
somebody high up wants this out in the ether.

Yet it is a curious fact that some of this information comes from
sources which are traditionally known to be friendly to Israeli
interests. For instance, J. Michael Waller, who wrote the Insight
piece with Paul M. Rodriguez, is a member of the right wing, pro-
Israel Center For Security Policy, which, according to the Center's
own site, includes an "extraordinary number of members of the
Center's National Security Advisory Council" in the top echelons of
the Bush Administration. Waller, incidentally, also wrote an Insight
piece entitled "Preparing For The Next Pearl Harbor Attack" - just a
few months before 9/11 - in which he described the plan for a
Homeland Security Agency, as recommended by the Hart-Rudman
Commission report (yes, they had the "homeland security" blueprint in
place several months before 9/11).

As for Waller's associate, Paul M. Rodriguez - the managing editor of
Insight - has had a history of printing incriminating items that
don't quite circulate yet get the point across all the same. One
particularly creepy example concerns an Insight piece that Rodriguez
wrote in 1989, reporting on a pedophile ring in the nation's capital,
linking one of its participants to Donald Gregg, a senior aide to
President Bush. Since then, Gregg has served as Ambassador to South
Korea and as head of the Korea Society. This might have something to
do with the fact that the Moonies, owner of Insight, have been
rumored to be a front for the South Korean CIA. Incidentally, since
President George H.W. Bush has left office, he has put in a
considerable number of appearances at Moonie functions.

As for Gordon Thomas of Globe-Intel, it turns out that he has been a
major contributor to the Israel/9/11/ Counter-Legend in addition to
his other contributions to Israeli legends. Perchance he had come by
this good fortune through his father-in-law, a former MI5 British
intelligence operative who had introduced Thomas to so many of his
intelligence contacts. Adding his own "insider" gloss to the spy
ring tale, Thomas is a source for the claim that Israel sent out
spies to infiltrate al-Qaida in the U.S., writing that Israel sent
warnings about the impending attacks to the Bush administration
through French and German intelligence.

In his May 21, 2002 article for Globe-Intel, Thomas - in a
Mossad "insider" scoop - revealed that Israeli Prime Minister Sharon
in fact authorized a "leak" of documents showing that Bush was warned
by Israel of the approaching al-Qaida threat by virtue of Israel's
comprehensive infiltration of al-Qaida cells on American soil. In
other words, Sharon wanted to prove to Bush (and to Globe-Intel
readers?) that his Mossad agents - art students, perhaps? - had
learned of 9/11 over coffee with Mohammed Atta. As Thomas put
it: "Sharon's reaction is a calculated response to growing claims
that Mossad has been running spy operations in the United States..."
A calculated response? Either Thomas is serving us up some fairly
heavy British intelligence disinformation (false-flagged as a Mossad
scoop), or he's implying that Sharon was on some pretty serious weed
at the time - for insisting with documented proof that, yes, his own
agents did in fact illegally spy on U.S. territory, and what's more,
did lunch with the 9/11 hijackers. Yet given Thomas' record of
pinning likely British intelligence "hits" on the Mossad - Princess
Diana, Robert Maxwell, etc. - I'm willing to bet that the former is
the case.

In that context, it is perhaps curious that Thomas - like Brisard -
has chosen to use John O'Neill, this time in order to weave a counter-
legend of Israel at the center of a global criminal network. In his
latest book on Robert Maxwell, Thomas alleges that Maxwell was an
Israeli "super-spy" who, in the words of John O'Neill, "was at the
heart of the global criminal network." Thomas writes that O'Neill's
contribution to the book was "enormous" - which is indeed
interesting, as the book covers much of the corruption wrought
through the British/C.I.A./BCCI networks, though Thomas employs
O'Neill to "spin" the global corruption instead as the joint work of
Israel (via Maxwell) and Russian criminal gangs.

Thomas' fellow Globe-Intel editors are also an interesting bunch.
One fellow editor, the British Sunday Express correspondent Yvonne
Ridley, had made her own entry into the 9/11 Legend as a high-profile
captive of the Taliban. Ridley, who claimed that the British
government were inciting the Taliban to kill her by implying that she
was their covert agent, was fortunately released by her captors on
October 8, 2001, just one day after the invasion of Afghanistan had
begun. Given such a grave accusation, one wonders why she would
subsequently take up office space with an MI5 "groupie" (Thomas) -
unless, of course, she had now established her bona fides as
a "credible" source of disinformation.

Rounding out the Globe-Intel editorial group is terrorism expert
Martin Dillon, who wrote a well-circulated tribute to his friend John
O'Neill, substantiating the official legend that O'Neill
was "frustrated" by State Department efforts to block his pursuit of
bin Laden.

In reading the detailed revelations of Brisard, Dasquie, and Thomas,
one enters the proverbial hall of mirrors, where subtle truths
reflect back upon themselves as half-lies, and perceptions splinter
amid a cascade of contradictions. Such is the world of the
disinformation operative. As a first defense, all you need to know
is when you're in it, not particularly what's in it.

Still, a more curious case is that of John Loftus, a long-standing
Catholic friend of the Jews who had served in the Justice
Department's Nazi-hunting unit, where he had discovered - through CIA
archives - the depth of the CIA program to smuggle in Nazi war
criminals through "ratlines" to the United States after the Second
World War. In his book, The Secret War Against The Jews, Loftus
documented in painful detail the anti-Semitic history of the powerful
Anglo-American "Establishment", the Wasp clique which, through their
oil and industrial holdings, has had a stranglehold on American
foreign - and military - policy for close to a century. Loftus,
clearly intimate with a great many operatives in the intelligence
community - whom he refers to as the "old spies" - had posited that
the Jews were repeatedly used as pawns and scapegoats in the grand
match played out by these men on the geopolitical chessboard.
Loftus' reading of this Establishment - which encompasses the likes
of the Rockefellers, the Dulles brothers, the Bakers, and the Bushes -
dovetails nicely with the writings of scholars like Peter Dale
Scott (whose personal integrity and research skills are beyond
question). In other words, Loftus knows who is the real power behind
the throne.

Yet in the light of 9/11, it appears that Loftus has put on his
blinders, going out on the lecture circuit and offering the warmed-
over neo-conservative view that September 11 was essentially the work
of wicked Saudis intent on destabilizing the West by priming the
terror pumps with their oil wealth. More ominously, Loftus was
offering his audiences a neocon bird's eye view into the near future
(courtesy of his military contacts out of MacDill Air Force Base in
Tampa) - a future in which a liberated Iraq would be turned over to a
compliant Hashemite monarchy (now resident in Jordan), and then on to
Saudi Arabia, where the Saudis would be booted and replaced by
compliant Hashemite monarchs in a new Hashemite Arabia. And as for
the West Bank Palestinians - well, they would be handed over to the
custody of the compliant Jordanian Hashemites. As for Loftus, he was
making his own contribution by heading up a class action lawsuit on
behalf of the families of 9/11 against those ruthless Saudi
financiers. And, as an aside, he was assuring his mostly Jewish
audience that George W. Bush is, at root, a decent fellow.

In short, Loftus was propagandizing his audience toward a highly
selective reading of 9/11. Gone were the ominous shadows of BCCI
and Iran-Contra, casting their pall over the credibility of those
powerful politicians feeding us their take on a new world order.
More than anyone (this writer included), Loftus should have been able
to detect a high-level disinformation campaign to set up "the Jews"
and "the Zionists" as the main evil conspirators behind 9/11. Yet
ironically, here was Loftus casting his lot in with those very neo-
conservatives who will one day serve as the showcase exhibits for
what is sure to be the latest entry in an updated blood libel. From
the Crucifixion, to the Rothschilds, and on to the Twin Towers, the
Jews were being set up once more to play their historical role as
punch toys to smokescreen a powerful oligarchy.

The set-up was on two fronts - foreign and domestic. On the domestic
front, the neo-conservatives headed by Dick Cheney and Richard Perle -
widely dubbed by the mainstream press as the "hawks" - were being
marketed as the true ideological powers behind the Bush
administration. Their patchwork of inter-connected think tanks -
Center for Security Policy, Project for A New American Century
(PNAC), Center For Strategic and International Studies (CSIS),
American Enterprise Institute (AEI) - were deeply involved in sending
out various "experts" to explain the War On Terrorism in a mainstream
forum, thereby setting out the parameters of debate (in addition to
the parameters of the perceived threat).

But did these neo-conservatives constitute a mere "rogue element" -
an insular "cabal" of pro-Zionist conservatives holding a largely
naive President Bush in their sway (as Lyndon LaRouche and the folks
at Executive Intelligence Review would have us believe)? Or rather,
were they just a group "cut-out" for other, more powerful interests -
in other words, the public face that would skew the ultimate
responsibility, letting the true masterminds off the hook while
the "cut-out" proxies would double as potential patsies?

It had certainly been the case during the Clinton era, when Richard
Mellon Scaife's organization took center stage as the most vociferous
entity in attacking the integrity of President Clinton. Thus, while
Scaife's cronies made sure that all eyes were focused on Whitewater,
Lewinsky, Foster, et al, the mainstream focus was kept far from the
infinitely more nefarious, and damaging, scandal that was known by
the four-letter word Mena, the crucial transit point in Arkansas
which, under Governor Clinton, had served to sustain the arms/drug
dealing operations that were fed through Iran-Contra and laundered
through BCCI. Thus, with Whitewater as the Scaife-funded public face
of the Starr inquiry into Clinton, those Clinton associates who could
really provide the dirt on the Clinton/Mena connection were
being "purged" in plain sight - through various prosecutions,
accidents, murders, or well-timed heart attacks (in the case of Jim
MacDougall). Meanwhile, all eyes were directed to the curious stain
on the blue dress. Once Clinton was safely out of office (and a
leash presumably was no longer needed), Scaife disappeared from
public view as suddenly as he entered it - to be replaced by Dick
Cheney, Richard Perle, and their coalition of fundamentalist
Christian/Jewish Zionists.

On the foreign front, journalists like Globe-Intel's Thomas laid the
groundwork for a future expose of Israeli complicity. An example of
the subtlety of this effort: in his May 21, 2002 piece on the
Israeli spy ring, Thomas mentioned that the Mossad sent its agents
trailing the hijackers to New York, Florida, and - very
significantly - the Netherlands (in particular, to the Schipol
Airport). Whether Thomas here was a witting or unwitting agent of
disinformation cannot be ascertained, but clearly somebody knew the
crucial importance of including the Netherlands on the Mossad
infiltration itinerary - for it was an Israeli-founded company, ICTS,
which, through its subsidiary, Huntleigh, handled passenger screening
for one of the airliners out of Boston's Logan Airport on September
11. And, as it so happened, ICTS was based out of the Netherlands.
As we shall see, the security companies would theoretically be the
ideal operative agents for ensuring that the September 11 "op" would
go off without a hitch. Thus, an Israeli connection on this front
would be a key factor in a counter-legend placing the State of
Israel - as opposed to individual Jews and/or Israeli operatives -
front and center as the main perpetrator of 9/11.