The “mysteries” surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks and many other momentous events in modern American history seem to be bottomless. After so many layers have been peeled, one sees that so many more remain. Many insufficiently informed people think that those who believe in “conspiracy theories” fail to explain why no insider from the US supposedly democratic government has come out to expose the lies propagated by successive administrations.

Skeptics also wonder why the surviving victims of the 9/11 attacks and their families seem to meekly accept the official version instead of challenging it, on the basis of the obvious inconsistencies and impossibilities that detractors have pointed out almost since that tragic day. Both those objections are invalid because they are wrong. Several people working inside the US Government at various levels –including military officers - have spoken out against their superiors on the truth behind those terrible events, at great personal cost and risk, and numerous relatives of 9/11 victims have joined legal and public awareness campaigns to expose the truth. Others however accepted substantial financial rewards as a price for their silence and a few have died in suspicious circumstances after being too outspoken and affirmative in their conviction that the WTC had been destroyed by controlled demolition.

No single source of information on the conspiracy of 9/11 seems to possess all the facts, as can be logically expected in view of the systematic compartmentalization of information on the “Need to Know” basis practiced by the government, especially in its clandestine agencies. We are hence forced to build a puzzle with many separate pieces and some of the most valuable and impressive ones are provided by Susan Lindauer, daughter of a Republican candidate for the Governorship of her native Alaska, a cousin of President G.W. Bush’s Chief of Staff, Andy Card, who was employed as an asset by both the CIA and the DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency) for nine years up to September 2011, and as a backchannel to Iraq and Libya following the first Gulf War.

Her account, which she had to wait ten years to publish in her book “Extreme Prejudice – The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq” (2010), reads in part like a detective thriller; it also plants one more nail into the coffin of  so-called “American democracy”.

Susan Lindauer, a former Reporter and Press Secretary and Speech writer to Senator Moseley Braun of Illinois, with an MS from the London School of Economics, reported to her CIA “handler”, a well known figure in the shadowy area where business and espionage overlap. Richard Fuisz, MD, a millionaire of Slovenian-American origin, holds the rank of Lt-Commander in the US Navy and is known to be a CIA agent. He is also rumoured to work for the Mossad as a Sayan (plant and informant) like many other high-ranking members of the American Intelligence community, and is an inventor holding some 200 patents. Among the companies he founded is Fuisz Tobacco, Fuisz Technology, Medcom, Kosmos Pharma and a Russian modeling agency (in partnership with subsequently jailed Israeli-Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, of Yukos fame). That agency, which he later sold to a larger one, specialized in bringing Russian models to America.

Fuisz actively monitored US companies on behalf of the Israeli government, tracking down those that in any way violated the stringent US laws against boycott of Israeli goods. When he sold Medcom to Baxter Pharmaceutical in 1981, he became the head of the company’s operations in Syria and at the same time reportedly the top US CIA agent in Damascus. After being recalled and “fired” by Baxter in 1985, he reported the company for violating the US legislation against companies boycotting Israel. His testimony led to Baxter being fined 6.5 million in 1993 for collaborating with Syria. Later he also accused Terex, another US firm, of selling components for Scud missiles to Iraq, a charge which could not be proven at the time.

Fuisz was allegedly put in charge of the back channel the Clinton Administration opened with Saddam Hussain’s government in 1997 when the US sanctions regime (having caused the deaths of over one million Iraqis, half of them children) was generating a growing backlash around the world. By then Baghdad had destroyed all its “weapons of mass destruction” but Washington was unwilling to lift the sanctions for reasons that will be made clearer in the course of this article; the CIA was working behind the scene to leverage the US stranglehold over Iraq into highly lucrative benefits for the American economy.

Susan Lindauer, a Non Official Cover agent (NOC) was Fuisz’ envoy and spokesperson at the Iraqi and Libyan diplomatic missions to the UN in New York; over the years she developed good personal rapport with her contacts. On behalf of the CIA she was able to secure a smorgasbord of appealing concessions from Baghdad for the US corporate sector. According to her testimony, for which there are numerous corroborations, by December 2000, Saddam Hussain’s government had agreed to give American companies almost unlimited access to the Iraqi market, especially in the priority areas of oil and gas exploration and development, telecommunications, air and road infrastructure and transportation, heavy industry, healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

Iraq was willing to commit to buy one million American cars a year for ten years, and also provide full access to the FBI on its soil to enable the USA to carry out the anti-terrorist struggle with its cooperation. Baghdad invited UN weapons inspectors to confirm that there were no more WMD stocks in the country. In a sentence, Saddam Hussain was apparently willing to become a new Saudi Arabia, a client state of Uncle Sam in the Middle East.

As one who went to Iraq several times in the mid-1990s for work-related reasons, I can confirm that Saddam’s government desperately wanted to make peace with the USA in order to have the punishing sanctions lifted, realising that Washington DC alone had the power to remove them, since other western countries were behaving as American satellites devoid of any real autonomy in the matter.

By February 2001, always monitored by Fuisz, Lindauer had a confirmation that Baghdad was ready to invite the FBI on its soil to start formal cooperation in the anti-terrorist struggle, but by then the new Republican administration of George W Bush was in place and, contrary to Clinton, who had resisted, if mainly through inertia, the pressing calls of the Neo-Conservative Faction led by Norman Podhoretz, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol and Richard Perle to attack Iraq, the new tenant of the White House had a personal grudge against Saddam Hussain, accused of having tried to kill his father. He also wanted to increase his stature by becoming a victorious war president. Hence, he was ready to listen to the “Vulcans” in his Party who were baying for blood.

Richard Fuisz appeared to Lindauer increasingly ill disposed towards Iraq, and seemingly favourable to Gaddafi’s Libya as he claimed to have proof of Libya’s innocence in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing plot and had even offered some years earlier to testify in favour of the two Libyan agents Fhima and Megrahi accused of planting the bomb on Pan Am Flight 103. For that reason, Fuisz had been placed under a permanent gag order by a US Court in 1994 with a ten year prison sentence if he broke it. The government’s concern is that he would “reveal information damaging to the national security and military interests of the United States”. Fuisz told Lindauer he could “confirm absolutely that no Libyan national was involved in planning or executing the bombing of PanAm 103” and that he “could identify who orchestrated and executed the bombing”.

Although this is another story, Fuisz’ allegation corroborates the circumstantial evidence pointing to a shadowy Palestinian terrorist cell located in Syria as probable executor of the PanAm bombing on behalf of Iran, which was seeking revenge for the destruction of its own airliner by an American missile in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war some years earlier. In the early 1990s however the Americans needed the cooperation of Syria and Iran for success in their first war against Iraq, and their Intelligence community decided to shift the blame for the bombing to Libya which had taken Saddam’s side. Another reason for the obvious US cover up is that the perpetrator was known to be a Palestinian “rogue” unit thoroughly infiltrated and controlled by the CIA and Mossad. There are thus reasons to believe that the US might have tacitly agreed to let the terrorists have their way with Flight 103 in exchange for an agreement that this would be the last retaliation for America’s own terrorist strike against Iranian civilians. 

Accordingly, in 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled that “exculpatory evidence for Megrahi had been suppressed at the trial” which was “a miscarriage of justice”. The knowledge at high levels that the Libyans were innocent of Lockerbie led the Scottish government to release him on “compassionate grounds” in 2010, reportedly in exchange for some attractive oil deals in Libya for British Petroleum. Naturally the conclusions casting doubt over the verdict were not publicized and American legislators continued to ask for Megrahi’s head after using the judgment to extract billions in compensation from the Libyan state in exchange for lifting sanctions.

The usual combination of disinformation, blackmail and corruption was used to secure all possible benefits for the western economies, while protecting the real culprits from exposure and prosecution.

To return to the Iraqi case, in April 2001, Fuisz turned outspokenly abusive about Iraq and Lindauer herself whom he accused, in a private meeting, of being too polite and friendly to the Iraqis. He ordered her in unusually rude terms to threaten them with the greatest penalty, namely all out bombing and invasion, if they did not offer all actionable intelligence they had on an expected terrorist attack on the USA, specifically on New York’s World Trade Centre with hijacked civilian aircraft.

Lindauer was understandably rattled and puzzled by this outburst at a time when Saddam’s government was being increasingly cooperative. She informed her Iraqi contacts that unless they shared all the information they were believed to have on the rumored attacks they would suffer the gravest consequences after those attacks had taken place, if they did, and that “their country would be destroyed” as no other state had been  so far.

She was not surprised to hear from the worried Iraqi representatives that they knew nothing about such a future attack on New York and were only hearing those forecasts from American sources themselves. Yet, Lindauer, in keeping with her instructions, had to intimate that the threat against their country came not from the top of the CIA or State Department but from the highest level of the Government. Neither she nor her listeners could fail to realize that this cryptic reference meant that the President, the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defence were personally issuing that warning.

Lindauer could not fail to notice the discrepancy between the mission she had been pursuing for the last several years and the new policy, at the very moment when she had achieved all her CIA superiors had bargained for. The sudden rejection of the Iraqi offers and the resulting enormous economic opportunities was puzzling to say the least, because it was contrary to American economic and strategic interests.

Someone higher up had decided that cannons were better than butter, to refer to an old German metaphor. She observes that in the bonanza Iraq was opening up for US corporations, the Military Industrial sector was largely forgotten and therefore had more to gain from war than from peace. However, it is hard to believe that such a martial regime as Saddam’s could ignore the military dimension of a relationship with the US and he would obviously have been too happy to purchase whatever weaponry the superpower agreed to sell. Hence the Pentagon and its contractors may have looked forward to a new war, but they could have done well in peace too.

The opponent to any accommodation with Baghdad was elsewhere, and although most were and are still afraid to mention him, he is not difficult to identify as will become apparent.

From May, the prospects became bleaker for Iraq. The CIA continued to insist Baghdad had to “come clean” on imminent attacks on American soil and provide “all actionable intelligence”. During June and July, worried discussions took place in various government agencies about the growing threat although it was not clear where those rumours originated. When Lindauer in Washington offered to go to New York to meet with her Iraqi counterparts to seek clarifications again, Fuisz discouraged her by claiming that the attack could take place any day and that he expected a “miniature atom bomb” to be detonated in New York, which would make the entire city uninhabitable.

Lindauer’s brother John confirmed to the Media that his sister had warned him about massive attacks on New York during the summer of 2001. She had predicted that “lower Manhattan would be destroyed”. It is worth noting that she was regularly dropping confidential letters to the house of her cousin, Andrew Card (“Andy”), about her talks with the Iraqis and Libyans (now on the Internet).

On August 2, the Senate held a hearing on the confirmation of Robert Mueller as the new FBI director. Susan Lindauer had been in contact with him earlier and had a very unfavorable opinion of him; she him of having aborted and blocked investigations into sensitive terrorist cases like Lockerbie and the Oklahoma City bombing, which have not been fully explored so far. She remembers Fuisz saying it would be tragic if the FBI did not have a director when the attacks began. She realized he expected them to occur anytime.

On August 6, following several meetings in the White House during June and July, the famous memorandum about an “imminent threat” reached George Bush’s desk and shortly afterwards the CIA asked Attorney General John Ashcroft for an “emergency broadcast” to seek information from among any and all government agencies about possible terrorist suspects and plots they might have uncovered. Though there is evidence that Ashcroft took the information seriously, he denied the request for reasons never explained. 

At his end, the Bush Administration’s Counter-Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke has since publicly voiced his anger against three high ranking CIA officials, the then-Director George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, then in charge of the so-called Alec Station, a special department tasked with watching Osama Ben Laden and Al Qaida members. Clarke states he was kept in the dark about details of the ongoing terrorist plot although his “friend” Tenet called him every morning at 7.30 am to brief him on the Intelligence gathered the day before.

In a report dated August 11, 2011 Jason Leopold details Clarke’s accusations against the three men, charged with purposely hiding information about the presence on US soil of two reported lieutenants of Ben Laden who were later mentioned on the list of the 19 alleged hijackers. It has been established that the CIA had no less than 60 of its staff “in the loop” on this; yet not one of them reported the information relating to those two suspected terrorists for the entire year preceding 9/11. Further, a Military Intelligence Unit (DIA) was ordered by an unspecified higher authority (Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz, his deputy?) to stop tracking the Al Qaida leader and his associates during the summer of 2001. “Someone” wanted to monopolise the information on those men, keeping all other services out of the loop. An inescapable conclusion is that this “someone” wanted the suspected terrorists to act without impediment.

There is so much evidence regarding the allegations of a CIA cover up originating at the top that the agency is now suing to prevent publication of a new book by former FBI agent Ali Soufan on the case. Soufan confirms that the CIA withheld information on the hijackers until after the 9/11 attacks and the Agency wants the incriminating passages removed, on grounds that they endanger national security…

Lindauer realized later that her insistence on finding out what might be known in higher circles upset people at the top because it deprived them of “plausible deniability”, i.e. being able to claim that they suspected no terrorist attack of that magnitude before September 11,   as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice repeatedly affirmed later. At that point, she became a target, as she found out subsequently.

Much later, Susan was told in confidence by a high unnamed source within the Intelligence community that some extensive and mysterious preparations had been taking place at the World Trade Center for ten days between August 23 and September 3 approximately. Each night, after 3 am, after the departure of the janitorial trucks, a few unmarked vans drove into the basement of the towers and left before 6 am. No official record of any kind has been found regarding the origin, mission and ownership of those vans, but there are concordant testimonies, including some video footage “leaked” from the officially vanished surveillance camera tapes of 9/11, about their presence, likely authorized by Securacom, the company in charge of security at the WTC and also at Dulles and United Airlines. It may not be a coincidence that Securacom directors included Marvin Bush, brother of the president.

William “Willy” Rodriguez is a highly acclaimed survivor of September 11. A maintenance worker for the World Trade Center North Tower, in charge of stairwells, Rodriguez was the last person to come out alive of that tower after returning three times inside, despite orders from the police not to do so, in order to rescue and wounded survivors. He managed to save fifteen persons from certain death. For his heroism he was awarded by George W Bush at a White House ceremony. But nobody in the Bush Administration wanted to hear his story about huge explosions that had thrown him and some co-workers down in the basement a few seconds before the tower was hit by the plane. He distinctly remembers that the blasts came from the Level 2 (“mechanical floor”) and then spread to the upper stories. Other witnesses - including John Mongello - recalled massive explosions also taking place in the South Tower minutes before it was hit by the second plane.

Even more interestingly, Rodriguez testified to having seen “in the weeks before September 11^th”, some unidentified workers clad in white HazMat overalls and carrying heavy equipment. He was particularly mystified by noises of very heavy loads (“like huge metal dumpsters on wheels”) being rolled about on floor 34 which had been unoccupied for long and was locked. Some highly credible professional eye witnesses bear out Lindauer’s report but Rodriguez’s sworn testimony before the 9/11 official commission was omitted from the latter’s report, and even after censored material left out of that report was finally released under strong public pressure in 2009, Rodriguez’s statement remains “restricted” to this day and hence unavailable for perusal. His RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisation Act) lawsuit of 2004 against George W Bush and 155 co-accused in his administration was similarly dismissed on technical grounds by the Court.

(To be continued…)

The author is Convener, Editorial Board, World Affairs Journal