Memo by British Adviser Says
Published: March 27, 2006 New York Times
“A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.”
“The following document is an instructional guide on assassination found among the CIA's training files for "Operation PB Success" -- the agency's covert 1954 operation that overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in June 1954. The CIA released it to the public on May 23, 1997, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
“Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations. It should be assumed that it will never be ordered or authorized by any U.S. Headquarters, though the latter may in rare instances agree to its execution by members of an associated foreign service. This reticence is partly due to the necessity for committing communications to paper. No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded. Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place. Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons. Ideally, only one person will be involved. No report may be made, but usually the act will be properly covered by normal news services, whose output is available to all concerned.”
The Institute for Counter-Terrorism at The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel, is affiliated with the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy. They post a list of Al Qa'ida Attacks from 1988 to the present (actually it runs from 1994 to 2002) Among 15 citations two are questionable.
http://www.ict.org.il/inter_ter/orgattack.cfm?orgid=74 Two days before September 11, 2001, on September 9, Ahmed Shah Massood, the leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, was fatally injured by two men posing as reporters. The I.T.C. attributes the assassination to Al-Qa'ida, saying, There has been speculation that the timing of the assassination--two days before the catastrophic terror attacks in New York and Washington--was no accident. Shah's death considerably weakened the Northern Alliance at a time when the Taliban was facing the prospect of American retaliatory strikes. The assassination of the Alliance's best military mind thus helped to "level the playing field" between the two sides.
Other then yes, the surface fact is a playing field was leveled by this act, the synopsis makes no sense in attributing motive or benefit—the “no accident” part. The Taliban had been warring with Massood for years, so “anytime,” is the “right” time to off your enemy’s #1 leader. You don’t wait until company’s coming to redo the bathroom, do you?. Working under an assumption that the only ones who know a major event will soon unfold is Al Qa'ida, does the I.T.C. logic seem to imply that 9-11 was undertaken as prospecting for retaliatory strikes? Which, I submit is true, but in reverse.
I’d like to offer up a suggestion that the CIA assassinated Massood with a definite agenda in mind, but you’ll also have to go along for a moment with the hypothesis that the Bush Administration aided and abetted the hijackers as silent co-conspirators, to co-opt, and "Pearl Harborize," a legitimate, but lame, Al Qa'ida terrorist plot, one which would have fizzled without a stand down, and the interjection of American IED's. Together and separately, Bush and bin Laden created the most transcendent piece of performance art in the history of mankind, which simultaneously altered consciousnesses in nearly all six billion of us; a result due primarily, it must be said, to the radiant glory that comes from preplanting explosives throughout the Twin Towers, as well as in Building 7, in the days before 9-11, allowing for a computer-orchestrated demolition culminating in dual mushroom clouds that chased people down the streets.
"There is no end to what men can accomplish, if they're willing to give others the credit."
Who could have ever thunk it?
The following from “The Assassination of Ahmad Shah Massood,” by Paul Wolf, 9/14/03
Used Without Explicit Permission
“At the time of Massood’s death, the Taliban were being supported by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence service (ISI), an instrument of American influence since the campaign against the Soviets in the 1980s. (The ISI has often been described as a free-wheeling, rogue agency, yet it has maintained a close relationship with American intelligence and Pakistan has remained a close American ally -- before, during and after President Musharraf's military coup.)
“Although Massood had cast his lot with Russia and Iran, he was no stranger to the US State Department. According to United Front veterans I interviewed,[6] Massood met on several occasions with Robin Rafael, the American Deputy Foreign Minister for the East, between 1996 and 1998. Apparently, Commander Massood was extremely angry after his final meeting with Rafael, who'd suggested in the meeting that his best option might be to surrender to the Taliban. At the time, Massood’s forces had retreated into the rugged Panjshir valley, and the Taliban controlled some 95% of Afghanistan. According to the story, Massood threw his pakul -- a distinctive Afghan hat -- onto the table and pointed at it, announcing that as long as he controlled a territory that big, he would never surrender. Considered arrogant by his enemies, supporters describe Massood as an independent Afghan nationalist incapable of taking orders from foreigners. Massood would never have allowed foreign bases on Afghan soil, according to them [Emphasis Mine]
“Bob Woodward, in his insider account of White House deliberations following September 11th, writes that on September 13th, 2001, CIA Director George Tenet advised the President and the National Security Council that Massood’s assassination had severely fractured the United Front, "but with the CIA [paramilitary] teams and tons of money, the Alliance could be brought together into a cohesive fighting force." "All right," the President said. "Let's go. That's war. That's what we're here to win." 7
"Tenet was right: by the time the US invaded in October, most of Massood’s former commanders and allies were on the CIA payroll. Massood and the SCO “What makes all of this so interesting is that it provides an undeniable motive for the United States to have launched its own "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan: to establish military dominance in the region in the face of an embryonic Sino-Russian military alliance.
“The United Front veterans I met were certain that Ahmad Shah Massood attended at least one of the early "Shanghai Five" meetings, held in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in June of 2000. He might have attended others, they said, but were certain he attended that meeting at least. Whatever Commander Massood said in the meeting is not known -- the meetings were held behind closed doors -- but his attendance speaks for itself.
"All of the above is meant to explain why the United States attacked Afghanistan. Was oil a motive? Probably so, there's no debating the importance of oil in the region. But I would argue that the larger issue was the possibility of Sino-Russian control over it. What about the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the attack on the USS Cole? Also reasons to attack bin Laden's organization in Afghanistan, no doubt. But none of this is really related to the attacks in New York and Washington used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan. As far as I know, there is no evidence linking bin Laden or the Taliban to those attacks. The Taliban were disliked for other reasons, including their repression of Afghan women.
“The "Sino-Russian" alliance, barely mentioned in the western press, must have been taken seriously by the US government, though. To me it seems to have been, and still is, the most serious threat to American influence in Central Asia since the fall of the Soviets. Enough to justify our taking the initiative and launching a pre-emptive war on terrorism ourselves? No doubt. Enough to assassinate the legendary mujajadeen leader."
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/ASMassoud.html#fn6
The painful conclusion I come to is Massood’s was a CIA-sponsored assassination of a charismatic national leader, necessarily linked to a planned covert black hijacking of a “hijacking," which mandated an enhanced “Shock and Awe” outcome far beyond the dreams of its instigators.
A little bit of proof is contained in, what is in my opinion the single piece of legitimate evidence ever offered to America by President Bush--even though it has been stupidly doctored by Karen Hughes--what Bush calls “the smoking gun;” the bin Laden tape released by the Pentagon on December 13, 2001, where bin Laden says he anticipated only the tops of the towers to come down.
To me this tape shouts out truth with the sound of a clarion trumpet making all the other fabricated bin Laden materials look sophomoric. It does implicate Bin Laden with plotting 9-11, in just the way Tom Clancy plots out a spy thriller. He is guilty of conspiracy, even if he had been put out to pasture as an eminence grise long before. He says he was “notified” the event would unfold five days earlier, and the translation puts me in mind of carrier pigeons.
Another piece of corroborating evidence for my theory is also on the tape. It is a reference the unnamed sheik makes about Mohammad Atta, describing him as very devout. It was at this point I could imagine the final double-cross taking place. Atta had become a double agent working for the C.I.A. months before, and he was stringing the conspirators along. He spent his last nights out carousing in stripper bars, drinking alcohol and eating pork, imagining he would be undergoing a hangover the next morning, not martyrdom.
He had been spoiled and corrupted the American way: with an 8-ball of cocaine and a $1000 hooker, the flip side to the sexual humiliation of Abu Ghraib. But the double-agent got double-crossed. If scheduled flights were flown into the twin towers on September 11, and that’s the simplest scenario, they were flown there on auto-pilot. I was always curious about a reference someone in the administration made early on after 9-11, denying that all of the hi-jackers knew it was a suicide mission. At the time, I took it as a way of discrediting a startling group commitment, and the 12-11-01 tape references that everybody knew it was a "martyrdom operation." Everybody but Atta, that is.
In a September 13, 2001 CNN interview, Dr. Raven Farhadi, the Northern Alliance permanent ambassador to the United Nations, replied “we have grave doubts,” when he was asked to judge the credibility of promises of aid and support for the United States made by Pakistan’s military ruler, President General Pervez Musharraf. Farhadi said that the military intelligence—not the government of Musharraf—controls the policy of Pakistan toward Afghanistan.
I note that if such power is vested in covert-intelligence operatives in shadow-government cells, co-existing within a military dictatorship, I imagine the reins of power aren’t any more tightly held in our constitutional democracy, and our foreign policy must be similarly driven by ungovernable impulses.
Weren’t we just beginning a new debate about reinstating the C.I.A.’s “right” to use the “tool” of assassination? Isn’t blithely discussing the assassination of the leader of a sovereign nation with a different leader, a possible article of impeachment? Which leads to still larger, yet even more painful conclusions…
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