MORE EVIDENCE IT WAS NOT BIN LADEN WHO MASTERMINDED 911

Aftermath of attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon CBS News Transcripts September 11, 2001 Tuesday

RATHER: We have with us at our CBS News world headquarters news desk and anchor desk in New York, Gary Sick, currently director of Middle--the Middle East Institute at world famous Columbia University here in New York, former national security council member under Presidents Ford, Reagan and Carter. Thanks for being with us, Mr. Sick.
Mr. GARY SICK (Terrorism Expert): Pleasure.
RATHER: What type of planning went into this attack?
Mr. SICK: I think this is really a key issue because the--if you simply stop and think about the magnitude of this operation, they were able to penetrate security in two major airports; get people on board, provide their own pilots because they obviously had their own pilots to do...
RATHER: Suicide pilots.
Mr. SICK: Suicide pilots, but pilots who were qualified to fly a major airplane, and I personally watched the second plane go into the trade towers and there was no flinching and no swerving; he flew right straight into it. And it was clear that no American pilot--no commercial pilot would ever have done that. And you stop and think about the amount of time--back it up--how much time was--would have been required and the money and the organization. Let's put it this way: What if you're the president in the Cold War days, and you tell the CIA that you'd like to create a little operation in Russia, which would basically hijack four airplanes, and within a period of an hour, crash them into major sites in the Soviet Union, and you had to organize that. It would have stretched our capabilities absolutely to the limit. And yet that's what happened here today.
RATHER: Reporters are always trained to follow the dollar, look for the money. Who finances an operation like this? Took a lot of money.
Mr. SICK: It took money and it took professionalism. I personally think that this had to have had a professional organization behind it. If you look at the kind of operations that Osama bin Laden and others have conducted in the past, the most sophisticated stuff they've been able to manage is a car bomb. And car bombs are dangerous and they're deadly, but they aren't like what we saw today. And this business of organizing--they had to recruit in the United States--they had to have Americans. They had to have some way of passing through the security in this country. That meant money, but it meant tremendous organization. And the fact that all of this, if you stop and think about it, it's amazing, went unreported--unnoticed by any of our systems which were watching all of these specific organizations--raises the question, were we looking in the right place?
RATHER: Well, let's pursue that question? Whom do you think may be responsible for this?
Mr. SICK: You know, I really don't want to speculate because I think--at this stage, it's a pure guess.
RATHER: But...
Mr. SICK:Everybody is speculating about Osama bin Laden, maybe so. But if so, he has moved his operations to a level that--this is the most--the largest and most successful terrorist operation in history. And he was simply not up to that. He had a bomb in a boat and he had some car bombs outside embassies.
RATHER: This is far beyond that ...(unintelligible).
Mr. SICK: This is something of an--and it's in this country.
RATHER: Well, let me ask you about...
Mr. SICK: We're not talking about East Africa.
RATHER: I know you don't want to speculate, and neither do I, but it's inevitable...
Mr. SICK: I know.
RATHER: ...these questions flow on--that if it was or was not Osama bin Laden, you said it was well financed, it was exceptionally well planned...
Mr. SICK: Right.
RATHER: ...a very sophisticated and large operation. If you--if the president asked you what are the chances, Gary Sick, that Saddam Hussein or s--one of the radical Molla groups in Iran were responsible, would you rule it out?
Mr. SICK: Saddam Hussein, today, said that this was the operation of the century, and there was great celebrations in Baghdad, not in Iran. But you know, if you had to look for a culprit, in terms of organization, structure, money, professionalism--all of the things that go with it, that's one place that you would certainly have to look. And I think that our intelligence services are going to have do a really careful--step back from the--where they've been looking and start looking under some different rocks because I think there's some things going on that we haven't really observed.
RATHER: We have only a few seconds left here, but we spend billions of dollars on intelligence. Does this or any other president have the will to zero base our to--our whole intelligence operations?
Mr. SICK: No, but--intelligence works when you're looking in the right place. And I've seen it--the Israelis in 1973 and elsewhere, had the information, but they didn't know what to do with it. They were looking in the wrong way, and they thought they knew what was going on, and they interpreted it wrongly. I think that we need to step back from it and take a hard look at our interpretation of the information that we've probably already gotten.
RATHER: Gary Sick, thank you very much.
Mr. SICK: Indeed.

HOLLOWAY'S COMMENTARY:
If the terrorist attacks of 911 would have pushed the CIA's abilities to the limits, then it was not Bin Laden. I think Gary was being disingenuous when he claimed that Iraq may have been responsible. Iraq had been destroyed by decades of war and sanctions had killed millions of their people. They were a shell of a country. The US National Security State probably already had plans to invade every former Soviet client state in the region. Because that is what happened more or less in the aftermath of 911. Sick was priming the American people for the coming invasion of Iraq.

Sick mentions Russia. He must have known it was them. This was sweet revenge on the part of Russia. The US had been running clandestine operations in the Caucasus Region of Russia, Chechnya using Afghan-Arabs i.e. Bin Laden's "Al Qaeda" with the intention further Balkanizing Russia. They wanted to break Russia in half. Chechen terrorists were masters of hijackings, buses, trucks, trains, helicopters and planes. They had tried to assassinate President Putin on numerous occasions. The 911 "hijackings" turned the tables on America. But, there were no human hijackers on those planes. This explains how they got through the security. It explains the precision attack on the Naval Operations Center and Defense Intelligence Agency offices at the Pentagon. It explains the threat on Air Force One that "Angel was next." It explains why Norman Mineta ordered the grounding of all US airliners. It explains why Bush lands at Offutt AFB. Which was essentially checkmate. America's doomsday plan had been countered. 

The humiliation of the US sponsored insurgency in Russia's Caucasus Region, the economic warfare, the abrogation of the ABM Treaty, the expansion of NATO to Russia's doorstep, the sinking of the Kursk, the multiple assassination attempts on Putin's life ultimately led to 911. Today the same storm clouds of war are stirring. This time it is the abrogation of the Open Skies, INF and START treaties. It is aggressive wargames on Russia's borders. It is SPACE FORCE. It is the murmurings of assassination attempts on Putin's life in the wake of the Soliemani assassination. Nuclear war is very much a possibility, if the worlds oligarchs cannot get it together and make nice. If they had any sense at all they would reinvigorate the United Nations. It is an institution that can facilitate and foster world peace. We just have to use it.