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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?

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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 grants permission to post the above mentioned article in its entirety, or any portions thereof, so long as the URL and source are indicated, a copyright note is displayed, and, where excerpts are posted, the excerpt(s) is (are) indicated as such, and a link is provided to the full body of the text at  http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP310A.html from which the excerpt(s) was taken. For publication of this article in print or other forms contact:  editor@globalresearch.ca .