After the explosions that destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam had done their work, the first soldiers on the scene were special units of the Israeli armed forces and high level agents of the Mossad, Israel's "intelligence" agency.
The Pentagon was quick to declare that it would take months of sifting through the debris and of intelligence work to determine the authorship of the bombings.
Within two weeks, U.S. rulers launched a combined assault upon Afghanistan and Sudan. The Tomahawk cruise missile weighs 2,650 pounds and carries 1,000-pound warheads. Seventy-five of them, carrying 80 warheads, struck Khartoum from the Red Sea and four warships and a submarine launched multiples of this arsenal against Afghanistan from the Arabian Sea, according to the San Francisco Chronicle (Aug. 21).
The pretext for these attacks was the claim that a terrorist organization masterminded by Saudi dissident Osama Bin Laden had not only bombed the two U.S. embassies but had imminent plans to attack targets in the United States and around the world.
Secretary of Defense William Cohen, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Congressperson Lee Hamilton orchestrated these claims with the ominous assertion that the United States had launched the first strike in a protracted war and they declared, as cited in The Washington Post (Aug. 21) that Osama Bin Laden "was linked to the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing and to [a] plot to blow up New York City landmarks."
The New York Times detailed in a feature article one month ago that Osama Bin Laden had been trained, financed and under the direction of the CIA for a period of years and was brought to Afghanistan by the CIA after intensive instruction in armed attack, assassination, and the setting up of front organizations for U.S. intelligence operations.
At the time of the bombing of the World Trade Center, James Fox, assistant FBI director, declared within moments of the explosion that the person who planted the explosives was Mohammed A. Salameh, who used a yellow Ford Econoline van for the purpose. His biography was widely distributed, and the New York Times declared him a "Suspect Tied to Islamic Fundamentalist Sect."
What has emerged, however, is that the telephone number and apartment listed on the rental agreement for the van carrying the explosives belonged to Guzie Hadas -long established as a Mossad operative. (International Herald Tribune, March 8, 1993)
It was further disclosed that the man who proposed the bombing to followers of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman was Emad Ali Salem "a high level Egyptian intelligence officer and informant of the FBI who provided the FBI with taped conversations and all other evidence." (Muslim World Monitor, July 4, 1993)
Not only that. "Salem was the source of plans to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the United Nations, other targets and assassinations. He played the role of agent provocateur!" (Ibid.)
The FBI agent and Egyptian intelligence officer "provided the safe houses in which the bombs were manufactured, helped purchase the firearms and materials to be used in the attacks." (Ibid.)
All the documents concerning the plans to blow up the World Trade Center and all the documents concerning plans for the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and other targets were in the hands of the FBI since 1990. Fifty storage boxes of documents concerning plans to blow up the World Trade Center with full detail "sat" in police and FBI hands, as confirmed by the Los Angeles Times (July 4, 1993). The FBI had advance plans and full documentation. In every meeting with the recruits for these operations, Salem was "wired" and the FBI was informed that Salem himself had made the proposals.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Fundamentalist group in Afghanistan led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who worked with 0sama Bin Laden, received $3.3 billion in official U.S. funds from the CIA.
The U.S. missile attack upon a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum was claimed to have destroyed "precursors" for VX nerve gas and biochemical weapons.
The largest producer of biological weapons in the world is the Pentagon. A remarkable book, "Clouds of Secrecy," by Leonard Cole, with a foreword by former Senator Alan Cranston, cites how the Pentagon secretly tested biological agents in 239 sites in the United States over a period of 20 years. Trillions of bacteria were released affecting over 10 million people. The army used seratin marcensens in the Bay Area, causing a ten-fold increase in meningitis.
Biological agents were used in the New York subway system, the school systems of Minneapolis and St. Louis. The Black population was targeted. Trillions of bacilli have been involved "exposing the young, the old and the medically compromised to infections at 239 sites around the country." (New York Times Book Review)
The missile attacks upon the civilian population of Khartoum and of Afghanistan are part of a vast campaign of official state terror which includes the terrorizing of the American people with operations planned and executed by U.S. rulers.
Vast military budgets - $9 trillion in 40 years - sustain the profits of the ruthless oligarchy who rules America through a network of clandestine agencies at the service of banking and corporate capital.
There is a clear and present danger to these rulers: the financial and economic crisis leapfrogging from Asia and Russia to the heartland of corporate capital in the United States.
The repressive measures now being touted by our rulers require the pretext of sinister forces targeting the American people. The authors of the reign of terror are the U.S. rulers themselves, and the working poor of every country are their permanent victims.
There is a protracted war - a class war between the vast majority of suffering humanity and the 2% who own 90% of the wealth in America and use the power of the state to maintain their rule through ever-increasing repression and the massive armed force which comprises the most concentrated manifestation of state terror the world has even seen.
The Democratic and Republican parties and all their elected officials join hands in celebrating the state terror which rains destruction on the peoples of the world.
In every country we must build a political movement independent of the political servants of finance capital. The struggle against war, hunger, social decay, and human suffering requires that we unite across frontiers.
Let us build together the political movements and parties capable of removing from power the criminal few whose brutality can never be appeased and upon whose defeat rests the very survival of humanity.
Ralph Schoenman is an editorial board member of The Organizer newspaper. If you like this article and would like to find out more about The Organizer, send in for a subsription for $12 by writing to T.O., 4104 - 24th St. #440, San Francisco, CA 94114.
(Original file at http://www.igc.apc.org/workers/to/terror.htm)