Who is the faceless coward? We still don't know. A proxy mask was placed upon it, only to be eventually dispatched. Yet the faceless one remains.
The words spoken by President Bush at Barksdale Airforce Base came immediately after Air Force One had engaged in evasive maneuvers upon receiving an encoded message that indicated the perpetrators of the events of that morning had compromised the highest level communications of the U.S. government, with the prospect that the capacity to launch nuclear missiles was within their power. Webster Tarpley offers a harrowing account of these events in Chapter IX of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: "Angel Is Next" - The Invisible Government Speaks
These were hours of great uncertainty, when the fear was palpable that the destruction just witnessed - the compromising message having been transmitted just as the second tower had fallen, and thus the destructive force of the weapons (DEW?) available to the conspirators having been demonstrated - could be only the beginning of firestorms yet to engulf entire cities. (Some indication of the utter panic at the highest levels of top secret sensitive compartmented information comes with an anecdote about a pioneer in a field relating to satellite surveillance and directed energy weapons who had communicated to a close relative a warning that "if ever I should call and say go North South East or West don't ask questions just go.")
In the months anticipating the tenth anniversary of 9/11, certain revelations concerning governmental foreknowledge of the movements of at least two of the 9/11 hi-jackers (Al Mihdhar and Al Hazmi) from sources as diverse as Richard Clarke, Ali Soufan, and Senator Bob Graham, have rendered the "keystone cops" defense as to how these hi-jackers managed to 'slip through the cracks' as laughable confabulation. Certainly the NSA was aware, and the CIA was aware (though perhaps to a lesser degree), and to a lesser degree still the FBI was aware - with those like John O'Neill, making genuine efforts to stop the plot, being kept out of the loop. So the intelligence bureaucracy's 'lack of imagination' explanation has been all but abandoned; yet still the obvious is evaded in favor of retreating confabulations: Clarke's 'the CIA was trying to turn the Al Mihdhar and Al Hazmi into double agents,' and Graham's 'the Saudi government facilitated the hi-jackers because it was fighting for its survival against Bin Laden.' These explanations are weakly offered not because Clarke and Graham truly believe them, but because they wish to soften the blow to the trusting American people who still cling to the faith that their government is able to protect them; and that it hasn't been riddled from within by treasonous moles.
But to those who can take the harder truth, beyond the op eds and the media interviews, Senator Graham tells considerably more in his novel of "informed speculation" - Keys to the Kingdom. The reader is left to guess as to which parts are "informed" and which are "speculation," but we can - based on previously disclosed details - sort at least some of this out.
Graham has indicated that he is informed by the still redacted 28 page section of the congressional investigation of 9/11 in which he participated. What is laid out in these blacked out pages is the involvement of Saudi royals - particularly Prince Bandar - in providing material support to Al Mihdhar and Al Hazmi with funds from a Riggs bank account set up through the Al Yamamah deal with British Aerospace (BAE Systems). This much has already been disclosed in the pages of Executive Intelligence Review. What has not been disclosed, however, is the participation of, in Graham's "factional" account, a private equity firm employing members of former Republican administrations (i.e. the Reagan and G.H.W. Bush administrations). There is only one company that fits the description: the Carlyle Group. Perhaps this is speculation on Graham's part, but if so, it is rather detailed in its accounting, on pgs. 164-165. A specific amount of Al Yamamah funds - 250 million pounds per month from October 1991 to October 1992 - is indicated to have migrated from Zurich-Alliance to an Anglo-Cayman account, of which 2 million per month was wired to the account of "Mahmoud al Rasheed" (the fictionalized Bandar) at the Riggs bank in Washington D.C., while the bulk of the monthly installments (248 million X 13 = 3.224 billion pounds) went to the Empire Bank of Commerce in NYC, to a numbered account belonging to the "Peninsular Group" - the fictional private equity firm that the informed reader will automatically recognize as fitting the description of the Carlyle Group.
Curiously enough, a deal that was negotiated at the time through the Carlyle Group was Saudi Prince Alwaleed's rescue of Citicorp. By the terms of the February 1991 deal, Alwaleed would buy $590 million of Citicorp stock and would have the option of converting his non-voting preferred stock to common shares beginning in October 1991. Suggestive timing. Whether this has any relation to the Al Yamamah funds is uncertain. But, Alwaleed is believed to have received financial assistance from the Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz in order to close the deal.
+++
9/11 conspiracy theorists immediately recognize Carlyle as the defense contractor which was holding its annual investors conference in Washington on September 10th and 11th, 2001, in attendance of which were none other than former president G.H.W. Bush, his former Secretary of State James Baker III, and Shafiq bin Laden, the brother of the man to be ascribed authorship of the day's events.
A simple coincidence, perhaps, yet perhaps one that leads us happenstantially to the identity of Bush the son's Oedipal accusation.
