9/11:
The BCCI Connection
by Chaim Kupferberg
Excerpted from: Truth, Lies, and The Legend of
9/11
by Chaim Kupferberg
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP311A.html
In his landmark article, Chaim Kupferberg uses
mostly mainstream sources to reconstruct the
making of the Official 9/11 Legend. Here,
Kupferberg hypothesizes a covert global
infrastructure behind the events of 9/11 - and
lifts the veil to catch the lingering scent of
BCCI.
With the above-stated hypothesis in mind, one
should perhaps cast a discerning eye toward those
manning the counter-terror posts in Los Angeles
today - for an important element in John
O'Neill's New York circle has recently relocated
to the West Coast. In particular, O'Neill's
friend, John Miller, has left a lucrative job at
ABC News in order to work under William Bratton
in the Los Angeles counter-terror office. Miller,
some might recall, was one of the very few
Americans to conduct a face-to-face interview
with bin Laden before September 11. Before he had
come aboard as a correspondent for ABC News,
Miller had worked under Bratton in the NYPD.
Bratton, through his acquaintance with O'Neill's
friend Jerry Hauer, has also had intimate
business dealings with Kroll Associates, the
World Trade Center security firm which hired
O'Neill.
It is, in fact, security firms like Kroll
Associates, Burns Security, Teg, Wackenhut, and
their ilk that should garner our interest at
least as much as the web of conservative think
tanks that have welded in place the parameters of
"mainstream" debate - for it is through
these very firms that the former stars of law
enforcement have gone through the revolving door
into the lucrative private sector. It is a world
where former military types mix with various
operatives of the CIA, FBI, DEA and any number of
alphabet soup agencies charged with the security
of our nation.
Moreover, the top people in the private
security sector have the authority, prestige,
and, most importantly, the skill to carry out -
successfully and below the radar - the kinds of
domestic operations that have been pegged as the
province of shaggy al-Qaida operatives. Who,
after all, could best ensure that 19 terrorists
would be able to make it aboard four separate
flights without any real danger of detection? And
who, after all, would be best placed to ensure a
complete and successful implosion of not just the
two Twin Towers, but the neighboring building - 7
World Trade Center - which housed a bio-warfare
"command and control bunker" under the
direction of Jerry Hauer?
With that in mind, we get a bit closer to the
"how" of 9/11 - an important
consideration in analyzing the Legend of 9/11. A
good part of the early work on that legend had
been accomplished through the offices of Michael
Cherkasky, the managing director of Kroll
Associates - in his capacity as a
prosecutor working in the New York office of
Robert Morgenthau. Cherkasky had worked on the
case arising out of the first World Trade Center
bombing in 1993, which had established Ramzi
Yousef as the terrorist mastermind behind the
attack. Cherkasky had also worked on the John
Gotti and BCCI criminal cases, two cases that
would not, at first glance, seem to be related,
much less to the events of September 11.
Yet there is a curious continuity here - one
that highlights the global infrastructure that
has made 9/11 such a successful worldwide
"op", with a legend whose global
parameters defy the perceptions of even the most
dogged investigators. As Peter Dale Scott has
argued in great and persuasive detail, the
"deep political structure" of American
society - and I would argue that this now applies
globally - is permeated by an interwoven nexus
between political/corporate elites and an
organized criminal subculture, whereby certain
political or business arrangements are made in an
extra-legal sphere, beyond the reach of sanction
or salience. Although this dual-purpose
netherworld has been with us for over a century -
and roughly parallels the rise of an American
industrial "Establishment" of which the
Bushes and Rockefellers are most representative -
for our purposes, we will date the true
globalization of this "deep political
structure" with the creation of the Bank of
Credit and Commerce International, better known
as BCCI.
The story goes that BCCI was founded by
Pakistani financier Aga Hassan Abedi.
In truth, it was mostly a British intelligence
operation using Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the
United Arab Emirates as fronts, while
C.I.A. elements allied with George H. W. Bush
used the banking network to conduct a number of
under-the-table operations throughout the '80's.
Before it went under, BCCI served as the
cardiovascular system for a global criminal
milieu, its laundered arteries servicing the
needs of various drug lords, arms dealers,
fraudsters, dictators, corrupt politicians,
terrorists, and intelligence agencies seeking
loose cash for their extra-legal activities.
In short, BCCI was Disneyworld for the New
World Order of political/corporate crime. With
ample supplies of heroin leaving Afghanistan and
heading stateside throughout the '80's, there
were ample funds left to underwrite the
activities of Osama bin Laden and his mujaheddin,
ensconced in a battle to oust the Soviet
occupation forces from their midst. And with
cocaine coming stateside by way of Colombia, a
little pocket money could be set aside to furnish
the Nicaraguan Contras with their own anti-Soviet
toys.
Could it, then, perhaps have been nothing more
than a coincidence that a brother-in-law of Osama
bin Laden, Khalid bin Mahfouz, was reported in
the early 90's to own a 20% stake in BCCI - and
that bin Mahfouz, as reported by the Houston
Chronicle on June 4, 1992, had intimate business
dealings with James Bath, the personal
representative of bin Laden brother Salim who had
invested $50,000 in George W. Bush's company,
Arbusto? Bin Mahfouz, incidentally, had taken
over Salim bin Laden's interest in the Houston
Gulf Airport after Salim met his demise in an
airplane crash over Houston in 1988 (the same
year that Iran-Contra witness, and Israeli
counter-terror coordinator, Amiram Nir met his
own fortuitous demise by airplane over Mexico,
thus denying Congress one witness who could
testify to Vice-President Bush's personal
involvement in the scandal).
In the decadent 80's, Bush friend and C.I.A.
asset Manuel Noriega served as a critical conduit
for the drug transit through Panama. Meanwhile,
C.I. A. asset Saddam Hussein played the essential
role of wearing down the Iranian Revolution by
throwing waves of Iraqi young men at waves of
Iranian young men, costing over a million lives,
though earning billions for a voracious world
arms industry. As for John Gotti, on June 21,
1991, former C.I.A. agent Richard Brenneke gave a
sworn deposition before Congressman William
Alexander, fingering Gotti as an active detergent
in "laundering" the C.I.A. drug
shipments coming into the Mena Airport in
Arkansas.
As history has shown, being a friend and/or
C.I.A. asset of George H. W. Bush can be an
uncertain proposition. One by one, once these
psychopathic proxies had served their purpose,
they were "taken out". In the case of
Noriega and Gotti, they were silenced through the
capable tools of the American justice system. And
overseeing the prosecutions - Noriega, Gotti, and
BCCI - happened to be a man who would, years
later, be entrusted with overseeing the
investigation into the causes of 9/11 - Robert S.
Mueller III.
In the case of BCCI, Mueller had steered the
case along the manageable "official"
contours, away from the seamier aspects of
American foreign policy, ensuring that the
domestic aspect of this worldwide fraud would
only singe the toes of two well-connected,
designated patsies - Clark Clifford and Robert
Altman. And while Morgenthau's New York office
had indeed pushed the envelope in investigating
BCCI, as always, the essential integrity - the
goodness - of the American political/intelligence
apparatus was left intact.
The real scandal of BCCI, however, was not
simply that it was a worldwide Ponzi scheme
defrauding its investors of billions - for that
is the "limited", official version -
but that, in the context of 9/11, it provides a
glaring spotlight on the very networks most
intimately connected with the corruption. BCCI,
the brainchild of British intelligence, was the
ideal tool by which a supra-national network of
compromised politicians and corrupt officials
would "play ball", fattened up with a
stream of capital furnished through the fruits of
drugs, arms, and terrorism.
As Oliver North had pioneered the use of the
counter-terrorism office in dealing with
narco-terrorists like Monzer al-Kassar (connected
to the Pan Am explosion over Lockerbie), would it
be such a stretch to posit that the
counter-terror apparatus - this time under
Richard Clarke and John O'Neill - was once again
being employed to "work" the corrupt
networks wrought by BCCI? Can it be a mere
coincidence that the arteries of the bin Laden
strain of terrorism were fed not by Iran or Syria
- the "traditional" sponsors of the
more low-key types of terrorism in the '80's -
but rather by those very countries that have long
served as agents and proxies of their
American-Anglo cohorts in crime: Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates (i.e. the
principal countries fronting for BCCI)? Could it
be that the mutually corrupt global relationships
wrought by BCCI persist to this day, with a bevy
of compromised political officials standing ready
to make their contribution to the New World Order
- and perhaps scam some extra pocket change on
the side?
As they say - follow the money. And where are
the big movers and shakers of 9/11 - those who
are interpreting the threat for you - putting
their money? In vaccines, pharmaceuticals,
bio-tech, utilities, security consulting, and
surveillance technologies. In other words, they
are shifting their money toward those burgeoning
industries where they can simply legislate the
market need - the favored modus operandi of the
"Establishment" captains of industry
who had formerly used their clout in the
political sector to secure their all-important
interests in the oil and banking sectors.
And what of FBI Director Robert Mueller? Was
it a coincidence that he was consistently chosen
to oversee cases in which the whole bloody mess -
Gotti, BCCI, Noriega et al - had threatened to
spill over the "officially" designated
sides? Was it a result of happenstance that
Mueller officially had taken up his job as FBI
Director only one week before September 11? Is it
Mueller's job to cover the paper trails - or just
cover them up?
End of excerpt.
For the complete text of this article, please
go to
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP310A.html
Chaim Kupferberg is a freelance researcher,
writer and frequent CRG contributor. + Copyright
Chaim Kupferberg 2003. The Centre for Research on
Globalization (CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca
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DIARYChaim
Kupferberg
9/11: The BCCI Connection
Wed Nov 5 15:44:09 2003
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?disc=149495;article=46279;title=APFN
