German Intelligence Expert Refutes Bush Version of 9-11
by Christopher Bollyn
January 9, 2002
A former German intelligence chief refutes the official version of what happened
on Sept. 11, questioning why Congress hasn't called for a special inquiry to
investigate what really occurred on that terrible day.
The German newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel, recently interviewed Andreas von Bülow,
the former head of the parliamentary commission that oversees the German secret
services, about the terror attacks of Sept. 11. Von Bülow, who I interviewed in
early December, said the provocative Tagesspiegel interview published on Jan.
13, was the first time the German press had asked him about the problems
surrounding the attacks.
"The planning of the attacks was technically and organizationally a master
achievement—to hijack four huge airplanes within a few minutes and within one
hour, to drive them into their targets, with complicated flight maneuvers," said
von Bülow. "This is unthinkable, without years of support from state
intelligence services."
This led the interviewer to call von Bülow "a conspiracy theorist."
"Yeah, yeah, that's the ridicule from those who prefer to follow the official,
politically correct line," von Bülow responded. "Even investigative journalists
are fed propaganda and disinformation. Anyone who doubts the official line is
called crazy."
Despite the controversial content of von Bülow's recent comments, "there has
been no response in the German press," von Bülow told me. "The media has to ask
the questions," he said, "Ashcroft and Bush—they are the officials who have to
answer the questions." Since Sept. 11, "public opinion is being forced into a
direction that I consider wrong," von Bülow said. "I wonder why so many
questions have not been asked. Normally, with such a terrible event, various
leads and trails appear and are discussed by the investigators, the media and
the government: 'Is there something here or not? Are the explanations
plausible?' In this case, that is not happening at all."
Before a government goes to war, it must first establish who the enemy is, von
Bülow said. "It has a duty to provide evidence. According to its own admission,
it has not been able to present any evidence that would hold up in court."
Concerning the video evidence, von Bülow said: "When one is dealing with
intelligence services, one can imagine manipulations of the highest quality.
Hollywood could provide these techniques. I consider the videos inappropriate as
evidence."
Von Bülow, who controlled the budgets of German intelligence from 1969 to 1994,
cannot understand why Congress has not opened a formal investigation into the
attacks and the failure of American intelligence agencies to prevent them.
"There are 26 intelligence services in the U.S.A. with a budget of $30 billion,
which were not able to prevent the attacks," von Bülow said. "Officially, there
is nothing." he said. "They say that they didn't have any idea that this would
happen." While four planes had been hijacked "for more than 60 decisive
minutes, the military and intelligence agencies kept the fighter planes on the
ground," von Bülow said. "However, 48 hours later, the FBI presented a list of
suicide attackers. Within 10 days, it emerged that seven of them were still
alive.
"Why has the director of the FBI not taken a position regarding these
contradictions? Where did the list come from, why it was false? If I were the
chief investigator in such a case, I would go before the public on a regular
basis, and provide information on which leads are valid and which are not," he
said, "and what about the obscure stock transactions? In the week prior to the
attacks, the amount of transactions in stocks in American Airlines, United
Airlines, and insurance companies, increased 1,200 percent. It was for a value
of $15 billion. Some people must have known something. Who?"
ISRAEL KNEW?
Although von Bülow told me in December 2001 that he believes that the Israeli
intelligence service, Mossad, is behind the Sept. 11 attacks, he said such
political discussion is beyond the pale in German journalism. When asked by
Tagesspiegel who might have known about the attacks, von Bülow's comments about
apparent Israeli culpability and the agenda of Israel's Ariel Sharon were
deleted. Israel is protected in the German media, in which any criticism of the
Jewish state is stifled. This is because of "the special relationship" between
the two states. However, the Israeli agenda has advanced as a result of the
Sept. 11 attacks.
"Don't believe the Arabs—they are foes," is the message behind the
"brainwashing" being done by the U.S. government and the unquestioning mass
media, said von Bülow. "With the help of the horrifying attacks, the Western
mass democracies are being subjected to brainwashing. The enemy image of
anti-communism doesn't work anymore; it is to be replaced by peoples of Islamic
belief. They are accused of having given birth to suicidal terrorism."
The image of the new enemy comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington,
two policy-makers of American intelligence and foreign policy, von Bülow said.
"Already in the middle of the 1990s, Huntington believed, people in Europe and
the U.S. needed someone they could hate—this would strengthen their
identification with their own society. And Brzezinski, the mad dog, as adviser
to President Jimmy Carter, campaigned for the exclusive right of the U.S. to
seize all the raw materials of the world, especially oil and gas. "In his
analysis of political processes," von Bülow said, "a global map of civil wars
and conflicts coincides with the locations of these strategic minerals. The
same is the case with the third map: nodal points of the drug trade," he said.
The huge raw material reserves of the former Soviet Union, as well as the
pipeline routes, are now at the disposal of the United States and Britain. The
fact that the events of Sept. 11 "fit perfectly in the concept of the armaments
industry, the intelligence agencies, the whole military-industrial-academic
complex," von Bülow says, is "conspicuous."
"What has gone on, and goes on, in the name of intelligence services, are true
crimes," von Bülow said. He is the author of Im Namen des Staates, a book which
documents some of the criminal activities of the CIA and the German intelligence
services.
Von Bülow, told me that "95 percent of the work of intelligence agencies around
the world is deception and disinformation," and pointed to the false leads that
were apparently planted to incriminate Arab terrorists in the attacks. These
leads, he said, were like tracks left behind by "a herd of stampeding
elephants." The abundance of such obvious clues, such as Mohammed Atta's
passport, which mysteriously survived the crash and explosion that allegedly
destroyed the shock- and fire-proof cockpit recorders, were like the German
children's' game Schnitzeljagd, or Schnitzel Hunt, in which small bits of paper
are left behind as clues for the children, von Bülow said. Atta's passport,
which he had reported as having been stolen long before Sept. 11, amazingly
reappeared unburned and intact on top of a pile of rubble near the World Trade
Center, according to Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Atta, the suspected leader, allegedly left Portland for Boston on the morning of
Sept. 11, in order to board the plane that later hit the World Trade Center.
"If this Atta was the decisive man in the operation, it's really strange that he
took such a risk of taking a plane that would reach Boston such a short time
before the connecting flight. Had his flight been a few minutes late, he would
not have been on the plane that was hijacked. Why should a sophisticated
terrorist do this?" von Bülow said.
"They made payments with credit cards with their own names; they reported to
their flight instructors with their own names. They left behind a rented car
with flight manuals in Arabic for jumbo jets. They took with them, on their
suicide trip, wills and farewell letters, which fell into the hands of the FBI,
because they were stored in the wrong place and wrongly addressed." Clues were
left behind, like in Schnitzeljagd, which "were meant to be followed," he said.
Von Bülow compared Sept. 11 with first attack on the World Trade Center in
1993. "In the middle was the bomb maker, a former Egyptian officer," von Bülow
said. "He had pulled together some Muslims for the attack. They were sneaked
into the country by the CIA, despite a State Department ban on their entry. At
the same time, the leader of the band was an FBI informant. And he made a deal
with the authorities: At the last minute, the dangerous explosive material would
be replaced by a harmless powder. The FBI did not stick to the deal. The bomb
exploded, so to speak, with the knowledge of the FBI. The official story of the
crime was quickly found—the criminals were evil Muslims," von Bülow said.
When asked what he would do, von Bülow said: "My task is concluded by saying it
could not have happened that way. Search for the truth."