Exactly 20 years ago yesterday, Mujahideen leader Ahmad Shah Masoud, popularly known as the Lion of the

Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan, was assassinated. The assassins were al-Qaeda suicide cadres who posed as journalists working for an Arab news agency. The Panjshir Valley was then the symbol of resistance against the Taliban regime in Kabul, just as it was today with Masoud’s son leading the fight against the Taliban, despite the Taliban’s claim that the valley has fallen.

The assassination of Masoud made world headlines, while the century’s biggest news was just less than two days away. On September 11, 2001, at 8:45 a.m. on a clear Tuesday morning, a passenger aircraft crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Centre in New York City. It was first believed to be a freak accident.  Some 18 minutes later, a second passenger plane was seen in the skies. It turned towards the WTC south tower, rammed into it and emerged from the other side in a ball of flame. For the first time, the world witnessed a terror attack live on television.

Some half an hour later, a third passenger plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington DC. A fourth passenger plane was shot down while it was flying over Pennsylvania.
The attacks were carried out by 19 terrorists, 15 of them were Saudi Arabians.

The Americans, shocked by the attacks, were unable to come to terms that such an attack could happen in a superpower nation that spends billions of dollars every year on intelligence gathering.
The security breach is unpardonable, they may say. But it was not security breach, if the attacks were allowed to trigger pre-planned military campaigns to enhance the US national interest.

Years, months, weeks and days before the attacks, there were warnings of an al-Qaeda plan to attack the US. The Central Intelligence Agency was not unaware of it. Besides, foreign intelligence services, including those of France, Germany, Britain, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, India and Russia had warned the US of the impending attacks.
Some reports were specific. They warned of a terrorist plan to hijack civilian aircraft and use them as missiles against US targets. According to some reports, even the Taliban had reportedly tipped off the US about the attack.  
There appears to be an eerie parallel between the 9/11 attacks and the Easter Sunday bomb attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka. In both instances, strong intelligence warnings were ignored by government leaders, who criminally and deliberately allowed the attacks to take place, probably to set in motion secret plans of a political nature.

"Years, months, weeks and days before the attacks, there were warnings of an al-Qaeda plan to attack the US. The Central Intelligence Agency was not unaware of it. Besides, foreign intelligence services, including those of France, Germany, Britain, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, India and Russia had warned the US of the impending attacks"

As the 9/11 terror anniversary is to be marked tomorrow with prayers and speeches against the backdrop of a new reality shaping up in Afghanistan with the likelihood of the so-called Jihadi Islam inspired by the Taliban victory raising its ugly head, it was worthwhile to recall the statements made by some top US security officials then, implicating the Bush administration and its neocon backers.

At the CIA’s presidential brief on August 6, 2001, the then US President George W Bush was told that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was determined to strike the US. But the President shrugged off the warning, according to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Chief Cofer Black. In interviews he said: “It was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.”

In statements to the 9/11 commission, in interviews to the media and in his book “Against All Enemies”, Richard Clarke, President Bush’s counter-terrorism chief, said the Bush administration ignored his continuous warnings about an impending al-Qaeda attack. He said whenever he raised the issue of the al-Qaeda attack, the president was pre-occupied with a plan to attack Iraq. Clarke’s claims were corroborated by award-winning journalist Bob Woodward in his book Plan of Attack. Woodward says President Bush had plans to invade Iraq from his day one in the Oval Office. His rhetoric that he would hunt down the terrorists and his Afghan war were essentially an entry point to the Iraq campaign.

In 2005, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a top US army intelligence officer, alleged that there was a cover-up in the 9/11 investigations. In interviews with the New York Times and the rightwing Fox News, he insisted that he told the 9/11 commission that months before the attacks he had informed the FBI and US Defence Department about the existence of a secret al-Qaeda plan which his intelligence unit codenamed Able Danger. But the commission report had, for reasons still unexplained, subverted his evidence, especially his account on Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers.

As if to give credence to claims that there was a cover up in the probe, Bush classified 28-pages of a Congressional investigation report. These pages were declassified in 2016 by President Barack Obama following public uproar. They contained claims that the hijackers received financial support from Saudi intelligence. But the 9/11 commission final report was written in such a way that it exonerated the Saudis of direct involvement, giving the US government an excuse to dodge calls for tough action against Saudi Arabia, a loyal friend of the US for 90 years.  Adding to the mystery are Bush’s buddy-buddy with the then Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan and a chartered plane that left the US days after 9/11, carrying 13 members of the bin Laden family, when the US airspace had been declared a no-flight zone.

Twenty years on, the 9/11 attacks which killed more than 3,000 innocent people, including a Sri Lankan Muslim pregnant woman who was in the aircraft that hit the north tower, still appear to be a hell of a deception that enabled the US to launch a series of invasions under the guise of waging a war on terror, while discarding human rights and obligations under international law.

In subsequent US military actions, millions of people, including children, were killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Yet there is no serious attempt to hold accountable for war crimes President Bush and his partners in crime, including the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, seen to be the most war hungry of them.
It looks like some in the war party kept Bush out of the al-Qaeda loop and instead diverted his attention towards Iraq.

Bin Laden, in an interview days after 9/11, denied he ordered the attack. Then who did it? Some suggest that the plan was executed by the Israeli intelligence. The US has named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 57, as the mastermind of the attack. He was captured in the Pakistani garrison city of Rawalpindi in 2003 and is awaiting trial in the US. His lawyer told the BBC this week, it may take another 20 years before the case was concluded. Probably he is a double agent who was used by those who planned the Afghan and Iraqi wars which opened the way for Big Oil and the US arms industry to make vulgar profits.
There are many more questions that will remain unanswered until kingdom come.