Noam Chomsky said something profound in a speech recently broadcast on
Democracy Now! He said one-third of Americans believe that Bush did the
attacks on 911, but they don't care, and just see those in government
as crooks and it is to be expected that Bush would kill all those
Americans. That is a revealing statement about the feeling of
powerlessness and cynicism in the United Snakes today.--Skeptic

From: stop-polabuse@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:stop-polabuse@yahoogroups.com]
On Behalf Of Michael Novick
Sent: Sunday, December 31, 2006 3:19 PM
To: EyeSpyCIA@yahoogroups.com
Cc: stop-polabuse@yahoogroups.com; laamn@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [stop-polabuse] 9-11'S TRAINER IN TERRORISM WAS AN FBI
INFORMANT--Peter Dale Scott

9-11'S TRAINER IN TERRORISM WAS AN FBI INFORMANT
_________________________________________________________________________
Special Report
http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/9-11.htm
By Peter Dale Scott
If I had an hour, I would talk to you about how the 9/11 Report failed
to
reconcile Dick Cheney's conflicting accounts, which cannot all be true,
of
what he did on the morning of 9/11 in the bunker beneath the White
House.
But that story takes two whole chapters of my forthcoming book, The
Road to
9/11. So instead I will expand on what I spoke about a month ago in
Berkeley, concerning Ali Mohamed, Washington's double agent inside
al-Qaeda, and also a chief 9/11 plotter.(1) I want to add important new

material tonight. Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian, was a close ally of Osama
bin
Laden. As he later confessed in court, he also aided the terrorist
Ayman
al-Zawahiri, a co-founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and by then an

aide to bin Laden, when he visited America to raise money.(2) It is now

generally admitted that Ali Mohamed worked for the FBI, the CIA, and
U.S.
Special Forces.
Patrick Fitzgerald, who testified to the 9/11 Commission about Ali
Mohamed,
knew him well. In 1994 he had named him as an unindicted co-conspirator
in
the New York landmarks case, yet allowed him to remain free. This was
because, as Fitzgerald knew, Ali Mohamed was an FBI informant, from at
least 1993 and maybe 1989.(3) Thus, from 1994 "until his arrest in 1998
[by
which time the 9/11 plot was well under way], Mohamed shuttled between
California, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia and at least a dozen other
countries."(4)
What I first wrote in 2004, and again in 9/11 and American Empire, has
to
my knowledge has not yet been in the US press: it is that in 1993 Ali
Mohamed had been detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in
Canada,
(when he inquired at an airport after an incoming al Qaeda terrorist
who
turned out to be carrying two forged Saudi passports). Mohamed
immediately
told the RCMP to make a phone call to the FBI in the United States, and
the
call secured his release.(5) This release enabled Ali to go on to
Kenya,
take pictures of the U.S. Embassy, and deliver them to bin Laden for
the
Embassy bombing plot.
In August 2006 there was a National Geographic Special on Ali Mohamed.
We
can take this as the new official fallback position on Ali Mohamed,
because
John Cloonan, the FBI agent who worked with Fitzgerald on Mohamed,
helped
narrate it. I didn't see the show, but here's what TV critics said
about
its contents:
Ali Mohamed manipulated the FBI, CIA and U.S. Army on behalf of Osama
bin
Laden. Mohamed trained terrorists how to hijack airliners, bomb
buildings
and assassinate rivals. [D]uring much of this time Mohamed was ... an
operative for the CIA and FBI, and a member of the U.S. Army.(6) ...
Mohamed turned up in FBI surveillance photos as early as 1989, training

radical Muslims who would go on to assassinate Jewish militant Meir
Kahane
and detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. He not only
avoided
arrest, but managed to become an FBI informant while writing most of
the al
Qaeda terrorist manual and helping plan attacks on American troops in
Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa.(7)
That Mohamed trained al Qaeda in hijacking planes and wrote most of the
al
Qaeda terrorist manual is confirmed in a new book, The Looming Tower,
by
Lawrence Wright, who has seen US Government records.(8) Let me say this

again: one of al-Qaeda's top trainers in terrorism and how to hijack
airplanes was an operative for FBI, CIA, and the Army.
But what we have heard so far is a fall-back cover-up of even worse
truths.
Peter Lance, who first wrote the script for the National Geographic
special, told about Mohamed's detention and release in Toronto. This
important detail, along with others, was cut from the program. Lance
withdrew from the project and complained on his website about these and

other cuts, such as this one:
"Within days of 9/11 Cloonan ... interviewed Ali, whom the Feds had
allowed
to slip into witness protection, and demanded to know the details of
the
plot. At that point Ali wrote it all out - including details of how
he'd
counseled would-be hijackers on how to smuggle box cutters on board
aircraft and where to sit, to effect the airline seizures."(9)
So let us sum up what we know so far about Ali Mohamed:
1. A key planner of the 9/11 plot, and trainer in hijacking, was
simultaneously an informant for the FBI.
2. This operative trained the members for all of the chief Islamist
attacks
inside the United States -- the first WTC bombing, the New York
landmarks
plot, and finally 9/11, as well as the attacks against Americans in
Somalia
and Kenya.
3. And yet for four years Mohamed was allowed to move in and out of the

country as an unindicted conspirator. Then, unlike his trainees, he was

allowed to plea-bargain. To this day he may still not have been
sentenced
for any crime, and may even be in witness protection.(10)
Peter Lance has charged that Fitzgerald had evidence before 1998 to
implicate Mohamed in the Kenya Embassy bombing, yet did nothing and let
the
bombing happen.(11) In fact, the FBI was aware back in 1990 that
Mohamed
had engaged in terrorist training on Long Island; yet it acted to
protect
Mohamed from arrest, even after one of his trainees had moved beyond
training to an actual assassination.(12)
Mohamed's trainees were all members of the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn,

which served as the main American recruiting center for the
Makhtab-al-Khidimat, the "Services Center" network that after the
Afghan
war became known as al Qaeda.(13) The Al-Kifah Center was headed in
1990 by
the blind Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who like Ali Mohamed had
been
admitted to the United States, despite being on a State Department
Watch
List.(14) As he had done earlier in Egypt, the sheikh "issued a fatwa
in
America that permitted his followers to rob banks and kill Jews."(15)
In November 1990, three of Mohamed's trainees conspired together to
kill
Meir Kahane, the racist founder of the Jewish Defense League. The
actual
killer, El Sayyid Nosair, was caught by accident almost immediately;
and by
luck the police soon found his two co-conspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima
and
Mohammed Salameh, waiting at Nosair's house. They found much more:
There
were formulas for bomb making, 1,440 rounds of ammunition, and manuals
[supplied by Ali Mohamed] from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare
Center
at Fort Bragg marked "Top Secret for Training," along with classified
documents belonging to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The police found

maps and drawings of New York City landmarks like the Statue of
Liberty,
Times Square -- and the World Trade Center. The forty-seven boxes of
evidence they collected also included the collected sermons of blind
Sheikh
Omar, in which he exhorted his followers to "destroy the edifices of
capitalism."(16)
All three had been trained by Ali Mohamed back in the late 1980s at a
rifle
range, where the FBI had photographed them, before terminating this
surveillance in the fall of 1989.(17)
The U.S. Government was thus in an excellent position to arrest,
indict,
and convict all of the terrorists involved, including Mohamed.
Yet only hours after the killing, Joseph Borelli, Chief of NYPD
detectives,
struck a familiar American note and pronounced Nosair a "lone deranged
gunman."(18) Some time later, he actually told the press that "There
was
nothing [at Nosair's house] that would stir your imagination ...
Nothing
has transpired that changes our opinion that he acted alone."(19)
Borelli was not acting alone in this matter. His position was also that
of
the FBI, who said they too believed "that Mr. Nosair had acted alone in

shooting Rabbi Kahane." "The bottom line is that we can't connect
anyone
else to the Kahane shooting," an F.B.I. agent said."(20)
In thus limiting the case, the police and FBI were in effect protecting

Nosair's two Arab co-conspirators in the murder of a U.S. citizen. Both
of
them were ultimately convicted in connection with the first WTC
bombing,
along with another Mohamed trainee, Nidal Ayyad. The 9/11 Report,
summarizing the convictions of Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima, and the
blind
Sheikh for the WTC bombing and New York landmarks plots, calls it "this

superb investigative and prosecutorial effort" (i.e. by Cloonan and
Fitzgerald).(21) It says nothing about the suppressed evidence found in

Nosair's house, including "maps and drawings of New York City
landmarks,"
which if pursued should have prevented both plots from developing.
Almost certainly, the 9/11 Commission knew more about this scandalous
situation than they let on. It cannot be just a coincidence that they
selected to write the staff reports about al Qaeda and the 9/11 plot,
and
conduct the relevant interviews, Dietrich Snell, who had been
Fitzgerald's
colleague in the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney's office.
(Thus Snell presumably drafted the praise for the superb effort by his
former colleague Patrick Fitzgerald and the FBI). Of the nine people on

Snell's team, all but one had worked for the U.S. Government, and all
but
two for either the Justice Department or the FBI.(22)
If you go to my website, www.peterdalescott.net, you will know that:
Shortly after 9/11, in October 2001, U.S. and British newspapers
briefly
alleged that the paymaster for the 9/11 attacks was a possible agent of
the
Pakistani intelligence service ISI, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. There was
even
a brief period in which it was alleged that the money had been paid at
the
direction of the then ISI Chief, Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad.(23)
Others have since argued that Saeed Sheikh worked for both America and
Britain, since "both American and British governments have studiously
avoided taking any action against Sheikh despite the fact that he is a
known terrorist who has targeted U.S. and UK citizens."(24) The claim
what
Saeed Sheikh was recruited by MI-6 in Great Britain has been made by
myself, by John Newman, and by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed; recently it has
been
pointed to in the new book by Pervez Musharraf, the President of
Pakistan.(25)
And there may have been other double agents. Last month Robert Baer, a
former CIA officer, told an Australian newspaper that "In 1996, Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed [the al-Qaeda mastermind of the 9/11 plot] was in Doha
[the
capital of Qatar], the CIA found out about it, and wanted to arrest him
and
people in Washington stopped them. That has never been answered in the
9/11
commission report, why that arrest was stopped."(26)
One week after 9/11, in a story for Pacific News Service, I wrote the
following (which is still on my website):
It is important to learn from the serious mistakes made by the United
States and CIA in the past. The usual CIA mode of undermining foreign
governments it does not like -- from Russia to Cuba to Iran -- has been
to
organize and train their opponents in criminal activities, including
sabotage and smuggling. But time and again this strategy backfires. The

problem is that as soon as the United States loses interest in its
agents'
cause, the sabotage techniques it has taught will more than likely be
turned back against it.(27)
This is what happened with al Qaeda.
When I wrote this I did not yet know about the scandal of Ali Mohamed's

tolerated terrorism. In 2004, when I did know, I reported a story in
the
London Independent (but not this country) that Mohamed was on the U.S.
payroll at the time he was training the Arab Afghans, and that the CIA,

reviewing the case five years after the first WTC bombing, concluded in
an
internal document that the CIA itself was "partly culpable" in the
World
Trade Center attack.(28)
I cannot tell you whether (as I would like to think) Mohamed and Saeed
were
examples of rogue agents out of control (in which case we have a CIA
problem), or whether they were agents not out of control (in which case
we
have of course a much worse CIA problem). One way or the other, we have
a
fundamental and on-going problem, for which we need a more serious
remedy
than just putting a Democrat in the White House. As has happened after
past
intelligence fiascoes, our intelligence agencies were strengthened as a

result of the 9/11 Commission, not brought under control, and their
budgets
were increased.
It's time to confront the reality that these agencies themselves, and
their
own sponsorship and protection of terrorist activities, have aggravated
the
greatest threats to our national security. Scott Ritter and others have

written that, at this very moment, CIA-backed bombings are being
undertaken
in Iran by the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK or MKO), an opposition group
listed
by the United States State Department as a Foreign Terrorist
Organization.(29) It appears that, as if having learned nothing, the
CIA is
still sponsoring terrorists.
I want to admit, in all fairness, that certain notable victories have
been
achieved in the narrow pursuit of al Qaeda. At the same time, after
five
years of the new broadened war on terrorism, we can say with confidence

that the net result to date is a far more dangerous world than we had
before.
Peter Dale Scott's latest book (co-edited with David Ray Griffin) is
9/11 &
American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Olive Branch Press, 2006).
His
website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.
Notes
[1] I discuss Ali Mohamed in a book I co-edited with David Ray Griffin:

David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott (eds.), 9/11 & American Empire:
Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2006),
74,
76-77.
[2] This admitted connection to al-Zawahiri has led some to identify
Mohamed (Abu Mohamed al Amriki) with the al-Amriki alleged by Yossef
Bodansky to have acted as go-between between Zawahiri and the CIA: "In
the
first half of November 1997 Ayman al-Zawahiri met a man called Abu-Umar

al-Amriki (al-Amriki means "the American") at a camp near Peshawar, on
the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border. High-level Islamist leaders insist that in

this meeting Abu-Umar al-Amriki made al-Zawahiri an offer: The United
States would not interfere with or intervene to prevent the Islamists'
rise
to power in Egypt if the Islamist mujahideen currently in
Bosnia-Herzegovina would refrain from attacking the U.S. forces there.
Moreover, Abu-Umar al-Amriki promised a donation of $50 million (from
unidentified sources) to Islamist charities in Egypt and elsewhere.
This
was not the first meeting between Abu-Umar al-Amriki and Zawahiri. Back
in
the 1980s Abu-Umar al-Amriki openly acted as an emissary for the CIA
with
various Arab Islamist militant and terrorist movements ... then
operating
under the wings of the Afghan jihad ... In the late 1980s, in one of
his
meetings with Zawahiri, Abu-Umar al-Amriki suggested that Zawahiri
would
need "$50 million to rule Egypt." At the time, Zawahiri interpreted
this
assertion as a hint that Washington would tolerate his rise to power if
he
could raise this money. The mention of the magic figure, $50 million,
by
Abu-Umar al-Amriki in the November 1997 meeting was interpreted by
Zawahiri
and the entire Islamist leadership, including Osama bin Laden, as a
reaffirmation of the discussions with the CIA in the late 1980s about
Washington's willingness to tolerate an Islamic Egypt. In 1997 the
Islamist
leaders were convinced that Abu-Umar al-Amriki was speaking for the CIA
--
that is, the uppermost echelons of the Clinton administration"
(Bodansky,
Bin Laden, 212-13). As we shall see, it is the case that Mohamed was
allowed to travel to Afghanistan even after his designation as an
unindicted co-conspirator in 1994 (San Francisco Chronicle, 10/21/01).
[3] Peter Lance, "Triple Cross: National Geographic Channel's Whitewash
of
the Ali Mohamed Story," Huffington Post, 8/29/06,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060829/ cm_huffpost/028270.
Unfortunately Lance's book on Mohamed, Triple Cross, was not yet
available
as this book went to press. Cf. Lawrence White, The Looming Tower:
Al-Qaeda
and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 181-82; Daniel Benjamin
and
Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002),
236;
Lawrence Wright, New Yorker, 9/16/02: "In 1989 -- Mohamed talked to an
F.B.I. agent in California and provided American intelligence with its
first inside look at Al Qaeda."
[4] Raleigh News & Observer, 10/21/01, http://www.knoxstudio.
com/shns/story.cfm?pk=ALIMOHAMED-10-24-01&cat=AN.
[5] Toronto Globe and Mail, 11/22/01, http://www.mail-archive.
com/hydro@topica.com/msg00224.html; Peter Dale Scott, "How to Fight
Terrorism," California Monthly, September 2004,
http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/Alumni/Cal_Monthly/September_2004/How_to_figh
t_terrorism.asp.
Mohamed's companion, Essam Marzouk, is now serving 15 years of hard
labor
in Egypt, after having been arrested in Azerbaijan. Mohamed's detention
and
release was months after the first WTC bombing in February 1993, and
after
the FBI had already rounded up two of the plotters whom they knew had
been
trained by Ali Mohamed.
[6] Dave Shiflett, Bloomberg News, 8/28/06,
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aNWwkZYujCIs&refer=home.
[7] Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald,
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/columnists/glenn_garvin/1
5310462.htm.
[8] Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
(New
York: Knopf, 2006), 181. The Report claims (56) that "Bin Ladin and his

comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they
received
little or no assistance from the United States." But Wright reports
that
Mohamed, while on a leave from the U.S. army, went to Afghanistan and
trained "the first al-Qaeda volunteers in techniques of unconventional
warfare, including kidnappings, assassinations, and hijacking planes."
This
was in 1988, one year before Mohamed left active U.S. Army service and
joined the Reserve.
[9] Peter Lance, "Triple Cross: National Geographic Channel's Whitewash
of
the Ali Mohamed Story," Huffington Post, 8/29/06,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060829/cm _huffpost/028270.
[10] According to publicity for the National Geographic special,
Mohamed is
"currently in U.S. custody," but "his whereabouts and legal status are
closely guarded secrets" (Rocky Mountain News, 8/28/06, 2D). Lance
wrote
that Mohamed was put into the witness protection program. "David Runke
[Ruhnke], a defense attorney in the African embassies bombing case,
says,
'I think the most likely thing that will happen is he'll be released,
he'll
be given a new name and a new identity, and he will pick up a life
someplace.'" (Shiflett, Bloomberg News, 8/28/06). As of November 2001,
Mohamed had not been sentenced and was still believed to be supplying
information from his prison cell.
[11] "Ali Mohamed had stayed in [El-Hage's] Kenyan home in the mid 90's
as
they plotted the bombings. Another agent in Fitzie's squad Dan Coleman,
had
searched El-Hage's home a year before the bombings and found direct
links
to Ali Mohamed and yet Fitzgerald failed to connect the dots" (Lance,
"Triple Cross," Huffington Post, 8/29/06).
[12] Peter Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge (New York: Regan Books/ Harper

Collins, 2003), 29-37.
[13] Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped
Unleash
Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2005),
278;
John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International
Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 87-88; Lance, 1000 Years for
Revenge, 29-31; Independent, 11/1/98.
[14] Rahman was issued two visas, one of them "by a CIA officer working

undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in Sudan"
(Peter
L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden
[New
York: Free Press, 2001], 67). FBI consultant Paul Williams writes that
Ali
Mohamed "settled in America on a visa program controlled by the CIA"
(Paul
L. Williams, Al Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror [[Upper Saddle River, NJ]:

Alpha/ Pearson Education, 2002], 117). Others allegedly admitted,
despite
being on the State Department watch list, were Mohamed Atta and
possibly
Ayman al-Zawahiri (Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth: 9/11,
Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism [Northampton, MA: Olive
Branch
Press, 2005], 205, 46).
[15] Wright, The Looming Tower, 177.
[16] Lance, 1000 Years, 34.
[17] Lance, 1000 Years, 31; Peter Lance, Cover Up: What the Government
Is
Still Hiding about the War on Terror (New York: Regan Books/
HarperCollins,
2004), 25.
[18] Newsday, 11/8/90; quoted in Lance, 1000 Years, 35.
[19] New York Times, 11/8/90; Robert I. Friedman, Village Voice,
3/30/93.
[20] New York Times, 12/16/90.
[21] 9/11 Report, 72.
[22] Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 273 (chapters); Lance, Cover
Up,
212-20 (reports). Snell was assisted by Douglas MacEachin, the former
CIA
deputy Director for Intelligence.
[23] Peter Dale Scott "Who Paid the 9/11 Hijackers? Al-Hawsawi? Mahmoud

Ahmad?" GlobalResearch.ca, 10/14/04,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/SCO410A.html. Cf. David Ray
Griffin,
The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton, MA:

Olive Branch Press/Interlink, 2004), 104-07; Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The
War
on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism
(Northampton,
MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), 137-44; Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The
London
Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (London: Duckworth, 2006), 169; Peter
Dale
Scott, "The CIA's Secret Powers: Afghanistan, 9/11, and America's Most
Dangerous Enemy." Critical Asian Studies, 35:2 (2003), 233-258.
[24] Ahmed, The War on Truth, 142; cf. John Newman, Remarks, Omissions
and
Errors in the Commission's Final Report, Rep. McKinney 9/11
Congressional
Briefing, 18 August 2005,
http://911readingroom.org/bib/whole_document.php?article_id=422.
[25] Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (New York: Free
Press,
2006), 225: "It is believed in some quarters that while Omar Sheikh was
at
the LSE he was recruited by the British intelligence agency MI6. It is
said
that MI6 persuaded him to take an active part in demonstrations against

Serbian aggression in Bosnia and even sent him to Kosovo to join the
jihad.
At some point he probably became a rogue or double agent."
[26] Courier Mail (Australia), 9/23/06; cf. Robert Baer, Sleeping with
the
Devil (New York: Crown, 2003), 18-19.
[27] Peter Dale Scott, "Made in the U.S.A. - How the U.S. Manufactures
Terrorists," Pacific News Service, Sep 19, 2001.
[28] Peter Dale Scott, "How to Fight Terrorism." California Monthly,
September 2004; citing Andrew Marshall, Independent, 11/1/98,
http://billstclair.com/911timeline/1990s/independent110198.html.
[29] Scott Ritter, "The US war with Iran has already begun," ZNet,
6/21/05,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?itemid=8126.: "President
Bush
has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the
aftermath
of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to
initiate
several covert offensive operations inside Iran. The most visible of
these
is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen
el-Khalq,
or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein's
dreaded
intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA's
Directorate of Operations. It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a
group
still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art
of
explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former
regime
of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq
today, to
carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush
administration
condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq." I have not yet seen Scott
Ritter,
Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change
(New
York: Avalon Publishing Group, 2006).
The text is a transcript of a Peter Dale Scott Talk in Palo Alto,
October
27, 2006.
Copyright 2006 Lobster Magazine