by: Gareth Porter,
Truthout | Report
Behind
a mysterious December 22 Associated Press story about “finding of fact” by a District judge in
Manhattan Friday that Iran assisted al Qaeda in the planning of the 9/11
attacks is a tapestry of recycled fabrications and distortions of fact from a
bizarre cast of characters.
The
AP story offers no indication of the nature of the evidence in the case except
that former members of the 9/11 Commission and three Iranian defectors provided
testimony. What it didn’t say was that at least two of the Iranian defectors
have long been dismissed by US intelligence as “fabricators” and that the two
“expert witnesses” who were supposed to determine the credibility of those
defectors’ claims are both avowed advocates of crackpot conspiracy theories
about Muslims and Shariah law who believe the United States is at war with
Islam.
The
ostensible purpose of the case brought by families of 9/11 terror attack
victims was to win damages from those responsible for 9/11. Dozens of such
cases involving different terrorist attacks have been brought to US courts over
the years, in which “default judgments” have been made against Iran over various attacks in which Iran
was allegedly involved, but there is no chance of getting any money for the
families.
The
only real effect of the case is to promote right-wing political myths about Iran.
One of the peculiarities of such cases is that the witnesses are not subject to
cross examination in court. The witnesses have every incentive, therefore to
indulge in false testimony, knowing that there will be no one to challenge
them.
“A Fabricator of Monumental Proportions”
The
lawyers and the “expert witnesses” behind the accusation of Iran in regard to
9/11 hoped to sell the press and public on recycled claims first made by
Iranian “defectors” several years ago that they had personal knowledge of
Iranian participation in the 9/11 plot. The lawyers produced videotaped affidavits
by three such defectors who were identified, with a dramatic flourish, as
Witnesses “X,” “Y” and “Z.”
In
the one public hearing held on the case, the lawyers revealed the identity of
purported former Iranian intelligence official Abolghasem Mesbahi – probably a
pseudonym – and described his testimony that he had received a series of “coded messages”
from a former colleague in the Iranian government in the late summer and early
fall of 2001 warning that a terrorist attack against the United States was
being planned, and that it was a plan that had been concocted by Tehran in the
late 1980s.
Although
the judge and the public were being led to believe that this is somehow new
information going beyond what was known by the 9/11 Commission report, it is,
in fact, very old information and has long been completely discredited.
Mesbahi’s story doesn’t hold up, for several reasons, and the most obvious is
that, despite his claim that he was warned nearly a month before the 9/11
attacks that civilian airliners would be crashed into buildings in major US
cities, including Washington and New York on September 11, he never conveyed
that information to the US government before that date.
In
October 2001, Mesbahi claimed to right-wing journalist Kenneth R. Timmerman, as
reported in Timmerman’s 2005 book that he had tried calling the legal attaché at the US
Embassy in Berlin,
but was “unsuccessful in several attempts.” But he did not claim any other
attempt to reach a US
consulate or the US Embassy in Germany
by fax, e-mail or letter before September 11, nor did he go to the US Embassy in
person to convey this warning. He told Timmerman that he called an Iranian
dissident contact in the United States
who, he believed, had contacts with US intelligence agencies only some hours after the attacks on New York and Washington.
It
wasn’t the first time Mesbahi had claimed inside information about Iranian
involvement in a terrorist attack only after the attack had taken place. He had
told
investigators working on the December 1988 terror bombing of Pan Am Flight 103
that Iran had asked Libya and Abu
Nidal to carry out the attack on the personal orders of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Unfortunately for his credibility, however, he had not come forward with the
allegation until after the bombing had happened.
He
had also provided affidavits to Argentine investigators in the case of the 1994
AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires,
claiming
his well-informed friends in Iranian intelligence had tipped him off that the
decision to bomb the Jewish Community Center had been made at a meeting
attended by top Iranian officials in August 1993.
But
in fact, by his own admission Mesbahi had not worked for Argentine intelligence
since 1988, and the FBI’s Hezbollah Office’s James Bernazzani, who had helped
the Argentine intelligence service with the investigation in 1997, told me in a
November 2006 interview that American intelligence officials had concluded
Mesbahi did not have the continued high-level access to Iranian intelligence
officials throughout the 1990s and beyond that he was claiming. They regarded
him as someone who was desperate for money and ready to “provide testimony to
any country on any case involving Iran,” according to Bernazzani.
Mesbahi
wasn’t even consistent in the story he told about the alleged “coded messages.”
In an interview
with Timmerman, Mesbahi stated that he had gotten two messages from his
contact, one on September 1, 2001 and a second three days later. And Timmerman
wrote that his alleged contact had “phoned him again” on September 4,
indicating that Mesbahi had made no reference to an elaborate scheme to send
coded messages through articles in Iranian newspapers.
But
in his affidavit to the 9/11 court case, he said he had gotten three messages –
on July 23, August 13 and August 27 – and that the coded messages were placed
in newspaper articles. Timmerman, who referred the lawyers to Mesbahi,
discretely avoided pointing out the huge discrepancy between the two stories,
which clearly indicates that Mesbahi fabricated the tale of messages in
newspaper articles to make it more dramatic and convincing.
The
second defector, Hamid Reza Zakeri, claimed he had been an officer of Iran’s Ministry of Information and Security and
had provided security for a meeting at an airbase near Tehran on May 4, 2001 attended by supreme
leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Hashemi Rafsanjani and Osama bin
Laden’s son Saad bin Laden. He also claimed to have seen replicas of the twin
towers, the White House, the Pentagon and Camp David in the entry hall to the
main headquarters of the MOIS with a missile suspended above the targets, and
“Death to America” written in Arabic (rather than Farsi) on the side.
Like
Mesbahi, Zakeri also first told his tale to Timmerman, who recounts it in his
2005 book.
Zakeri, who apparently defected from Iran
in late July 2001, claimed he had told the US Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan
on July 26, 2001 about the alleged meeting and replicas, warning them that he
believed the Iranians and al Qaeda were planning an attack on those targets
that would occur September 11. But CIA officials denied categorically to
Timmerman that Zakeri had given any such warning to the Embassy and called
Zakeri “a fabricator of monumental proportions” and “a serial
fabricator.” Zakeri failed an FBI polygraph test in 2003, according to Timmerman.
Crackpot Hate-Islam Extremists as “Expert Witnesses”
Significantly,
no reputable retired intelligence analyst on Iran was asked to help judge the
testimony of the Iranian defectors. Instead, Clare M. Lopez and Bruce Tefft,
both former CIA covert operations case officers, were invited to be “expert
witnesses,” in large part to view the videotaped testimony of the three Iranian
defectors and assess their credibility.
Based
on the record of their public statements, however, they were selected for that
role because they could be counted upon to endorse the defectors’ allegations
of Iranian involvement in planning the 9/11 attacks and any other assertion, no
matter how outlandish, that suggested Iranian guilt.
Lopez
has been linked with the neoconservative faction of the Bush administration and
the pro-Likud Party extreme right ever since she became Executive Director of
the Iran
Policy Committee in 2005. Through a series of policy papers issued that year, the Committee sought to
support from outside the push by a group of pro-Likud officials within the
administration for a policy of regime change in Iran.
In
particular, the Committee called for using the Mujahedin-E-Khalq or MEK, the
armed opposition group listed by the US State Department as a terrorist group
because of its assassinations of US officials during the regime of the Shah and
bombings of large civilian events in Iran. The MEK had long enjoyed
close working relations with Israel, but not with the United States, and the
State Department had continued to oppose delisting and alliance with the MEK
against Tehran, as proposed by the Defense Department and the Vice-President’s
office.
Since
2009, Lopez has been a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy founded and headed by notorious
Islam-hating extremist Frank
J. Gaffney. One of Lopez’s projects has been to stir up public fear over an
alleged threat to America
– not from al Qaeda attacks, but from subversion by Muslim-Americans. She is
one of a number of authors of a book published by Gaffney’s Center in October
2010 called “Shariah: the Threat to America,” which declares, “The
United States is under attack by foes who are openly animated by what is known
as Shariah (Islamic Law).”
Revealing
the project’s anti-Islam paranoia, the book asserts, “Shariah dictates that
non-Muslims be given three choices: convert to Islam and conform to Shariah;
submit as second class citizens (dhimmis), or be killed.”
In
a videotaped talk she gave on February 23, 2011, Lopez said Muslims,
“believe they should be in charge of the world.” The main threat from Islam,
she said, is “stealth Jihad” waged by Muslims who “hide behind a moderate
image,” but whose “purpose is still the same” as that of al Qaeda.
A
second aspect of Lopez’s work for Gaffney has been to intimidate opponents of
the hard-line policies toward Iran
– and especially the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) – by accusing them of being covert lobbyists for Iran.
Tefft,
who retired from the CIA’s Operations Division in 1995, is even more explicit
in arguing that there is a worldwide war against Islam. “We are fighting a
14-century war against Islam and its adherents, Muslims,” he declared in an interview with the right-wing website FrontPage in October
2007. “And it is a war that they have declared on all non-Muslims….” Islamic
ideology requires Muslims to “make the world Islamic under the Caliphate, and
to convert, kill or enslave all non-Muslims….” When the interviewer suggested
that there are “moderate Muslims,” Tefft responded, “I don’t think so….” he
said. “Were there ‘good’ or ‘moderate’ Nazis?”
Tefft
referred to the way “the West” had “prevailed” over Islam with the “defeat of
the marauding armies of Islam at the Gates of Vienna in 1529″ and added, “We
need to recall that period…and again contain Islam to its existing borders.”
When
asked by this writer in a phone interview last week if he had been aware of the
advocacy of Islamophobe arguments by Lopez and Tefft, Thomas Mellon, Jr., one
of two lead lawyers in the case, did not answer directly, but said, “To the
extent that you are accurate, we would say, fine, take them out.” He insisted
that the lawyers for the case had not relied on any one of the ten “expert
witnesses” listed on the case.
Also
playing a central role in weaving the tale of Iranian complicity in the 9/11
attacks for the court case was the right-wing author and anti-Iran activist
Kenneth R. Timmerman. According to the lawyers’ brief on the case, it was
Timmerman who sought out one of the attorneys, Timothy B. Fleming, and brought
to his attention the three Iranian “defectors” who claimed personal knowledge
that Iran was involved in the planning of 9/11.
Like
Lopez, Timmerman has been linked
with hardline pro-Likud organizations and involved in efforts to overthrow the
regime in Tehran.
Along with Joshua Muravchik, and a group of Iranian exile foes of the Islamic
regime, he established the “Foundation for Democracy in Iran” in 1995.
Timmerman
has also expressed views sympathetic to the Hate-Islam movement. His 2003 book,
“Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War against America,”
portrays the United States
and Israel
as innocent victims of a vicious campaign against the West by whole Islamic
societies that refuse to accept the US-Israeli narrative on terrorism. And his
new novel, “St. Peter’s Bones,” has been praised
by notorious Islam-hater Robert Spencer for revealing the “long-hidden origins
of Islam.”
The “Material Support” and “Save Haven” Ploys
The
most egregious allegations of Iranian complicity in 9/11 come from three former
staff members of the 9/11 Commission – Daniel Byman, Dietrich Snell and Janice
Kephart. They had all worked on the section of the 2004 report that had given
heavy emphasis to the fact that Iran had not stamped the passports of Saudis
who had later become hijackers in the 9/11 attacks when they entered
Iran. The section had suggested that this and other evidence could
indicate Iranian complicity in the plot, even if it could not yet be proven.
In
their affidavits
to the court, those three former staffers, two of whom (Snell and Kephart) are
lawyers, argue that Iran’s failure to stamp the passports of the al Qaeda
operatives constituted provision of “material support” to al Qaeda in executing
the 9/11 attacks. US
anti-terrorist law specifies that the provision of “material
support” to terrorists includes any “service” to terrorists if the provider is
“knowing or intending that they are to be used in preparation for, or in
carrying out” a terrorist action.
However,
a key piece of information in a different chapter of the 9/11
Commission report shows that Iran’s failure to stamp passports
was not intended to aid al Qaeda. On page 169, the report says that, in order
to avoid the confiscation by Saudi authorities of passports bearing a Pakistani
stamp, the Saudi al Qaeda operatives, “either erased the Pakistani visa from
their passport or traveled through Iran, which did not stamp visas
directly into passports.” In other words, the Iranian practice of not stamping
visas directly into passports applied to everyone. And since, as the Commission
report acknowledged, there was no evidence of Iranian foreknowledge of the 9/11
attacks, the existence of that policy did not support the thesis of Iranian “material
support” for the al Qaeda plot.
The
Commission staff went back to the two senior planners of the attacks, Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, in July 2004, to ask them specifically
about the Iranian failure to stamp the passports of the hijackers, but,
strangely, the Commission report gives no indication of what they said about
whether the Iranian practice was intended to assist al Qaeda. Either the staff
never asked the question, or the answer was ignored because it contradicted the
line that those staff members were pushing in 2004 and are still pushing today.
The
former Commission staffers also joined right-wing activists in highlighting the
intelligence Commission report statements that “an associate of a senior
Hizbullah operative” was on the same mid-November flight from Beirut to Tehran
as a group of future hijackers, and that Hezbollah officials in Beirut and Iran
had been “expecting the arrival of a group [from Saudi Arabia] during the same
time period.” The former staffers insist that these could not have been
coincidences and that they had to mean that Iran was involved in the al Qaeda
plot.
The
argument that the presence of an “associate” of a top Hezbollah official on the
same flight as future al Qaeda hijackers could not have been a coincidence is
absurd. There were obviously many “associates” of top Hezbollah officials, most
whom would have had occasion to travel to Iran frequently. The statistical
likelihood that one of them would be on the same flight as the future hijackers
would not be so small as to merit suspicion.
And
the very same section of the Commission report provides a clear explanation of
the anticipation of a group traveling from Saudi
Arabia to Iran
that reveals the conspiratorial interpretation as dishonest. It says that a
senior Hezbollah operative – said to have been Imad Mugniyeh – visited Saudi
Arabia in October 2000 to “coordinate activities” there, that he planned to
assist a group traveling to Iran in November, and that intelligence reports
showed the planned visit to Iran involved a “top Hezbollah commander” and
“Saudi Hezbollah contacts.”
But
that didn’t stop the lawyers for the case from twisting the Commission report to fit the desired
narrative: “The ‘activities’ that Mughniyah went to coordinate,” clearly
revolved around the hijackers’ travel, their obtaining new Saudi passports
and/or US visas for the 9/11 operation, as several of them did, as well as the
hijackers’ security, and the operation’s security.”
Paul
Pillar, who was the CIA’s senior intelligence officer on the Middle East and
South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and had previously been the senior analyst at the
agency’s Counterterrorism
Center, was categorical
about the matter when I interviewed him in 2006. The facts detailed in the
Commission Report about passports, travel of the hijackers through Iran,
and the presence of a Hezbollah official on one of the flights “don’t show
Iranian collusion with al Qaeda,” he told me.
The
lawyers’ brief refers to “the existence of a secret network
of travel routes and safehouses” worked out from the mid-1990s onward as being
“confirmed by al Qaeda military chief Saef al Adel in a May 2005 interview.”
That implies that secret arrangements on such “travel routes and safehouses”
were made between al Qaeda and the Iranian government. But al-Adel said nothing
of the sort. He made it clear in his interview with a Saudi journalist that the
Iranians who helped them with housing and logistics were not connected with the
Iranian regime.
The
“expert witnesses” and the lawyers carefully skirt the fact that in the latter
half of the 1990s – at a time when the United States was officially still
“neutral” on the civil war in Afghanistan – Iran was providing funding, arms
and other support to the Northern Alliance, the non-Pashtun forces seeking to
overthrow the Taliban regime which bin Laden and al Qaeda were helping to keep
in power.
That
Iranian support for the Northern Alliance was
still ongoing when the organization’s chief, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was assassinated
September 10, 2001 by two Arabs posing as journalists. The leader of the CIA’s
post-9/11 covert paramilitary team in Afghanistan,
Gary Schroen, reported that there were two IRGC Colonels attached to the
Commander of the Northern Alliance, Bismullah
Khan, when the CIA team arrived. Nevertheless, Lopez
and Tefft as well as Israeli journalist Ronan
Bergman, a former intelligence officer in the Israeli Defense Forces who
boasts of his “close personal contacts” with senior Israel intelligence and
military officials, cite reports supposedly originating with German
intelligence that Iran helped al Qaeda operatives carry out the Massoud
assassination.
All
the “expert witnesses” insist vehemently that Iran
continued to provide “safe haven” for al Qaeda operatives who fled from Afghanistan to Iran
after 9/11, allowing them to direct terrorist activities against Saudi Arabia
in particular. But that accusation merely recycles the claim
first made in early 2002 by Bush administration officials seeking to
prevent negotiations between the United States
and Iran and push for the
adoption of a regime change strategy in Iran.
The
central pretense of the neoconservative “safe haven” ploy was that, if any al
Qaeda operatives were able to function in Iran,
Iran
must have deliberately permitted it. But the United
States has been unable to shut down al Qaeda’s operation
in Pakistan
after a decade of trying, despite the cooperation of the Pakistani intelligence
service and the drone coverage of the tribal areas. If the same criteria
applied to Iran were to be
applied to the Bush administration and the government of Germany, they could be accused of
having provided “safe haven” for al Qaeda operatives prior to 9/11.
In
fact, after US complaints about al Qaeda presence in Iran
in late 2001, Tehran
detained nearly 300 al Qaeda operatives, and gave a dossier with their names, passport pictures and
fingerprints to the United Nations. Iran
also repatriated at least 200 of those detainees to the newly
formed government of Afghanistan.
US
Ambassador Ryan Crocker revealed last year that, in late 2001, the Iranians had
been willing to discuss possible surrender of the senior al Qaeda officials it
was detaining to the United States
and share any intelligence they had gained from their investigations as part of
a wider understanding with Washington.
But the neoconservative faction in the administration rejected
that offer, demanding that Iran
give them the al Qaeda detainees without getting anything in return.
Iran’s crackdown on al Qaeda continued in
2002-03 and netted a number of top officials. One of the senior al Qaeda
detainees apparently detained by Iran
during that period, Saif al-Adel, later told a Jordanian journalist that Iran’s operations against al Qaeda
had “confused us and aborted 75 percent of our plan.” The arrests included “up
to 80 percent” of Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s group, he said, and those who had not
been swept up were forced to leave for Iraq.
In
further negotiations with the Bush administration in May 2003, Iran again offered to turn over the senior al Qaeda detainees to the United States in return for the MEK
captured by US forces in Iraq.
The Bush administration again refused the offer.
By
2005, a “senior US
intelligence official” was publicly admitting that 20 to 25 top al Qaeda leaders were
in detention in Iran
and that they were “not able to do much of anything.”
In
2008, one US official told ABC news that administration officials had not been
raising the al Qaeda issue publicly, because “they believe Iran has
largely kept the al Qaeda operatives under control since 2003, limiting their
ability to travel and communicate.”
But
in the world of the right-wing Islam-hating extremists and others pushing for
confrontation with Iran,
reality is no obstacle to spinning tales of secret Iranian assistance to al
Qaeda.
____________________________________________________________
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and
journalist specialising in U.S.
national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of
Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
The
USA of Israel
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