Bin Laden – The Forbidden Truth
Three reviews of Ben Laden : La vérité interdite French-only book (not yet published in English and for this fact alone many people smell conspiracy).
John Emerson’s review is the best of the bunch, critical and aloof:
While there is no real evidence in this book for specific Bush foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, we can be sure th
at they were not as big a surprise as is claimed. Combined with other information about a hands-off FBI policy on domestic terrorism and the return of the entire bin Laden family to Saudi Arabia (without being questioned) at a time when most US airports were locked down, it still can reasonably be suspected that the Bush administration knew that it had something to hide, that it knew that some kind of attack was in t
he works, and that it was waiting for a pretext to go to war.
This review, and this one, both zero in prominently on John O’Neill, a former director of anti-terrorism for the FBI (tragically slain during the WTC attack). Apparently he’d earlier resigned his post in protest against some hands-off-Bin-Laden-and-the-Saudis directives from the incoming Bush Administration. His sad death has now made him a straw man around which every possible conspiracy theory can accrete. Lots of noise, little signal.
Serendipityés review, however, does remind us that:
The first state to officially prosecute bin Laden was Libya, on charges of terrorism. Bin Laden wanted to settle in Libya in the early 1990s, but was hindered by the government of Muammar Gaddafi … Enraged by Libya’s refusal, bin Laden organized attacks inside Libya, including assassination attempts against Gaddafi … Gaddafi even demanded Western police institutions, such as Interpol, pursue … bin Laden, but never obtained cooperation.
The book also examines the role of Laila Helms, neice of the former CIA director and former US
Ambassador to Tehran, Richard Helms, who as recently as summer 2001, served as the public relations hub of a ragtag network of amateur Taliban advocates to foster relations between the Taliban and the State Department, with two goals: an oil pipeline and the handover of Bin Laden. The latter priority usually played second fiddle to the former because State Dept wonks thought they could ‘decouple’ Osama bin Laden from the Taliban … What they did not understand was that without bin Laden, the Taliban regime wouldn’t have existed … By dispatching Francesc Vendrell to see the exiled King Zaher Shah in Rome and raising the threat of military action, Washington “backed the Taliban into a corner”.
The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place in August, five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington, the analysts maintain. On that occasion, Christina Rocca, in charge of Central Asian affairs for the U.S. government, met the Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan [Abdul Salam Zaeef] in Islamabad.
The Forbidden Truth’s authors claim to repeat a direct quote given to the Taliban representatives during the course of the secretive pipeline negotiations. They were to accept the US offer of “a carpet of gold or you’ll get a carpet of bombs.”
If this is true, it’s good to know that US negotiators were at least honest with the Taliban, if not with the general US population.