The Eleventh Day by Tony Summers and Robbyn Swan

If a clear and concise report on any subject, however complicated, is needed, I would trust Tony and Robbyn Summers to research, analyze, write a report that I would believe to be as complete and accurate as any that could be produced.

They are pretty much the most thoughtful and meticulous researchers and writers I know. When that topic is bin Laden and 9/11, then what they have to say is truly important as I know they will focus on the important issues, determine what happened as best they can, answer what questions they can and point to those issues that remain outstanding.

Of course there are going to be those who claim that no planes hit the WTC or Pentagon, that it wasn’t terrorists who hijacked those planes but they were remotely controlled by the White House, an inside job to bring about wars, a national security state and decades of repression.

And all those who disagree with this perspective are government minions and disinformation agents, like me, Tony and Robbyn Summers and other reasonable people who actually have studied the events of 9/11 in more than just an offhand manner.

Perhaps there is a forum where this book can be rationally discussed by those who get to sit down and read it, but I can see the storm a comin’, and those who know that 9/11 was perpetrated by the Bush White House, MI6 and the Jews will make sure it doesn’t get a fair hearing, as they already know what really happened.

But it is getting a fair hearing in other, more reasonable quarters.

BK

Tony and Robbyn Summers' new book - The Eleventh Day - The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden will be out on July 19, and excerpted in the August issue of Vanity Fair.

Synopsis

September 11 2001 is a date no-one can forget. On that day, the largest terrorist attack the world had ever seen sent two passenger aircraft crashing into New York's famous twin towers, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth, believed to be headed for the White House, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Three thousand people lost their lives that day. And the world changed forever. The consequences of those attacks have shaped the first years of the twenty-first century. The world is a less safe place because of them. War in Afghanistan and Iraq followed. Thousands more have now died. But what exactly happened on that day ten years ago? Reports have been written and dismissed. Conspiracy theories abound. This book has been four years in the writing. Leading investigative writer, Anthony Summers has pored through thousands of documents, hundreds of hours of interviews, and examined all possible testimony and evidence to produce this definitive history of what really happened on that tragic day.

Writing with access to thousands of recently released official documents, fresh interviews, and the perspective that can come only from a decade of research and reflection, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan deliver the first panoramic, authoritative look back at 9/11.For most living Americans, September 11, 2001, is the darkest date in the nation's history. What exactly happened? Could it have been prevented? How and why did so much acrimony and bad information arise from the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a quiet field in Pennsylvania? And what remains unresolved? What is certain: Discord and dissent continue to this day.

Beginning with the first brutal actions of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, The Eleventh Day tracks the precise sequence of events and introduces the players: pilots, terrorists, the airliners' passengers, and the innocents who died on the ground. Drawing on previously classified records and raw transcripts, Summers and Swan investigate the response of President Bush and the U.S. military that day, and the failure to intercept the hijacked airliners. They document the untruths told afterward by U.S. officials and, as a counterpoint, thoroughly consider the contentions of the "9/11 truth" movement. With meticulous research, they examine the personalities of the men behind the onslaught, analyze the motives that drove them, and expose the U.S. intelligence blunders that preceded the attacks. They note how afterward—without good evidence—the Bush administration persisted in trying to link 9/11 to Iraq. And they confront, finally, the question the 9/11 Commission's report blurred: Were the terrorists backed by powerful figures in another foreign nation—one the U.S. had long viewed as a friend?

Riveting, revelatory, and unforgettable, thoroughly sourced and complete with extensive endnotes, The Eleventh Day is the essential one-volume work on a pivotal event in our history.

September 11, 2001 is the darkest date in the memory of most people alive in the West today. The day ten years on when Osama bin Laden was killed was one of jublilation in the United States, yet uncertainty about what may come in the future.

What exactly happened on 9/11? Could it have been prevented? How and why did so much acrimony and bad information arise from the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a quiet field in Pennsylvania? And what remains unresolved?

Beginning with the first brutal actions of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, The Eleventh Day tracks the precise sequence of events and follows the players: pilots, terrorists, the airliners' passengers, and the innocents who died on the gound. Drawing on previously unreleased records and raw transcripts, Anthony Summers and his co-author Robbyn Swan investigate the response of President Bush and the U.S. military that day, and the failure to intercept the hijacked airliners. They document the untruths told afterward by U.S. officials and, by counterpoint, thoroughly consider the contentions of the "9/11 Truth" movement. They analyze the motives that drove the men behind the onslaught, and expose the U.S. intelligence blunders that preceded the attacks. They note how afterward - without good evidence - the Bush administration persisted in trying to link 9/11 to Iraq. And they confront, finally, the questions the 9/11 Commission's report blurred: Were the terrorists backed by powerful figures in other foreign nations - including some that have long been treated as friends?

Riveting, revelatory, and unforgettable, thoroughly sourced and complete with extensive endnotes, The Eleventh Day is the essential one-volume work on a pivotal episode in our history.

Anthony Summers - Home

Best selling biographer and journalist Anthony Summers has covered the pivotal stories of the past hundred years, and in many cases forced a rethink.

He has reported on the conflict in the Middle East; the Vietnam War; the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations; Watergate; the rise and fall of the American Mafia; the Hiss and Profumo espionage cases. He has explored the lives and deaths of the powerful and the famous: from Tsar Nicholas II to Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. Now in 2011 he brings the sharpest focus yet to a full account of 9/11, the events that led up to it, and the troubling questions that remain.

Posted on Wed, Sep. 07, 2011
Link to 9/11 hijackers found in Sarasota
By Anthony Summers and Dan Christensen
Special to The Miami Herald

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/09/07/v-print/2395698/link-to-911-hijackers-found-in.html

Just two weeks before the 9/11 hijackers slammed into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, members of a Saudi family abruptly vacated their luxury home near Sarasota, leaving a brand new car in the driveway, a refrigerator full of food, fruit on the counter — and an open safe in a master bedroom.

In the weeks to follow, law enforcement agents not only discovered the home was visited by vehicles used by the hijackers, but phone calls were linked between the home and those who carried out the death flights — including leader Mohamed Atta — in discoveries never before revealed to the public.

Ten years after the deadliest attack of terrorism on U.S. soil, new information has emerged that shows the FBI found troubling ties between the hijackers and residents in the upscale community in southwest Florida, but the investigation wasn’t reported to Congress or mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who co-chaired the congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks, said he should have been told about the findings, saying it “opens the door to a new chapter of investigation as to the depth of the Saudi role in 9/11. ... No information relative to the named people in Sarasota was disclosed.”

The U.S. Justice Department, the lead agency that investigated the attacks, refused to comment, saying it will discuss only information already released.

The Saudi residents then living at the stylish home, Abdulazzi al-Hiijjii and his wife Anoud, could not be reached, nor could the then-owner of the house, Esam Ghazzawi, who is Anoud’s father. The house was sold in 2003, records show.

For Graham, the connections between the hijackers and residents raise questions about whether other Saudi nationals in Florida knew of the impending attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
The FBI investigation began the month after 9/11 when Larry Berberich, senior administrator and security officer of the gated community known as Prestancia, reported a bizarre event that took place two weeks before the hijackings of four passenger jets that originated in Boston, Newark and Washington.

The couple, living with their small children at the three-bedroom home at 4224 Escondito Circle, had left in a hurry in a white van, probably on Aug. 30.

They abandoned three recently registered vehicles, including a brand-new Chrysler PT Cruiser, in the garage and driveway.

After 9/11, Berberich said he had “a gut feeling” the people at the home may have had something to do with the attacks, prompting the FBI’s probe that would eventually link the hijackers to the house.

As an advisor to the Sarasota County sheriff — Berberich was with the group that received President Bush during his aborted visit to a Sarasota school on the morning of 9/11 — he alerted sheriff’s deputies. Patrick Gallagher, one of the Saudis’ neighbors, had become suspicious even earlier, and had fired off an email to the FBI on the day of the attacks.

Gallagher said law enforcement officers arrived and began an investigation, with agents swarming “all over the place, in their blue jackets,” he recalled.

Jone Weist, president of the group that managed Prestancia, confirmed the arrival of the FBI, which requested copies of the Saudis’ financial transactions involving the house.

Berberich and a senior counterterrorism agent said they were able to get into the abandoned house, ultimately finding “there was mail on the table, dirty diapers in one of the bathrooms … all the toiletries still in place … all their clothes hanging in the closet … opulent furniture, equal or greater in value than the house … the pool running, with toys in it.”

“The beds were made … fruit on the counter … the refrigerator full of food. … It was like they went grocery shopping. Like they went out to a movie ... [But] the safe was open in the master bedroom, with nothing in it, not a paper clip. ... A computer was still there. A computer plug in another room, and the line still there. Looked like they’d taken [another] computer and left the cord.”

The counterterrorism officer, who requested his name not be disclosed, said agents went on to make troubling discoveries: Phone records and the Prestancia gate records linked the house on Escondito Circle to the hijackers.

In addition, three of the four future hijackers had lived in Venice — just 10 miles from the house — for much of the year before 9/11. Atta, the leader, and his companion Marwan al-Shehhi, had been learning to fly small airplanes at Huffman Aviation, a flight school on the edge of the runway at Venice Municipal Airport.

A block away, at Florida Flight Training, accomplice Ziad Jarrah was also taking flying lessons. All three obtained their pilot licenses and afterwards, in the months that led to 9/11, spent much of their time traveling the state, including stints in Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale and Delray Beach, among other areas.

The counterterrorism agent said records of incoming and outgoing calls made at the Escondito house were obtained from the phone company under subpoena.

Agents were able to conduct a link analysis, a system of tracking calls based on dates, times and length of conversations — finding the Escondito calls dating back more than a year, “lined up with the known suspects.”

The links were not only to Atta and his hijack pilots, the agent said, but to 11 other terrorist suspects, including Walid al-Shehhri, one of the men who flew with Atta on the first plane to strike the World Trade Center.

Another was Adnan Shukrijumah, a former Miramar resident identified as having been with Atta in the spring of 2001. Shukrijumah is still at large and is on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

But it was the gate records at the Prestancia development that produced the most telltale information.

People who arrived by car had to give their names and the address they were visiting. Gate staff would sometimes ask to see a driver’s license and note the name, Berberich said. License plates were photographed.

Atta is known to have used variations of his name, but the license plate of the car he owned was on record.

The vehicle and name information on Atta and Jarrah fit that of drivers entering Prestancia on their way to visit the home at 4224 Escondito Circle, said Berberich and the counterterrorism officer.

Sarasota County property records identify the owners of the house at the time as Ghazzawi and his American-born wife Deborah, both with a post office box in al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia, and the capital, Riyadh.

Ghazzawi was described as a middle-aged financier and interior designer, the owner of many properties, including several in the United States, said the counterterrorism agent.

While Ghazzawi visited the house, the people living there were his daughter Anoud and her husband al-Hiijjii, who appeared to be in his 30s and once identified himself as a college student, said Berberich, who met the son-in-law.

The couple’s sudden departure two weeks before 9/11 was tracked in detail by the FBI after the attacks, the agent said.

First, they traveled to a Ghazzawi property in Arlington, Va., then — with Esam Ghazzawi — via Dulles airport and London’s Heathrow, to Riyadh.

The counterterrorism agent said Ghazzawi and al-Hiijjii had been on a watch list at the FBI and that a U.S. agency tracking terrorist funds was interested in both men even before 9/11.

“464 was Ghazzawi’s number,” the officer said. “I don’t remember the other man’s number.”

About a year after the family abandoned the home, the FBI made an attempt to lure the owner back.
Scott McKay, a Sarasota lawyer for the Prestancia homeowners’ association in its claim for unpaid dues, said the FBI tried to get him to bring the Saudis back for the transaction.

McKay said he tried to get the Ghazzawis to sign the necessary documents in person, but the ploy failed because the documents could legally be signed elsewhere using a notary. Records show Ghazzawi’s signature was notarized by the vice consul of the U.S. embassy in Lebanon in September 2003. Deborah Ghazzawi’s signature was notarized in Riverside County, Calif.

During an interview on Sunday, Graham said he was surprised he wasn’t told about the probe when he was co-chair of Congress’ Joint Inquiry into 9/11 — even though he was especially alert to terrorist information relating to Florida.

“At the beginning of the investigation,” he said, “each of the intelligence agencies, including the FBI, was asked to provide all information that agency possessed in relation to 9/11.”

The fact that the FBI did not tell the Inquiry about the Florida discoveries, Graham says, is similar to the agency’s failure to provide information linking members of the 9/11 terrorist team to other Saudis in California until congressional investigators discovered it themselves.

The Inquiry did nevertheless accumulate a “very large” file on the hijackers in the United States, and later turned it over to the 9/11 Commission. “They did very little with it,” Graham said, “and their reference to Saudi Arabia is almost cryptic sometimes. … I never got a good answer as to why they did not pursue that.”

The final 28-page section of the Inquiry’s report, which deals with “sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers,” was entirely blanked out. It was kept secret from the public on the orders of former President George W. Bush and is still withheld to this day, Graham said.
This in spite of the fact that Graham and his Republican counterpart, U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, both concluded the release of the pages would not endanger national security.

The grounds for suppressing the material, Graham believes, were “protection of the Saudis from embarrassment, protection of the administration from political embarrassment … some of the unknowns, some of the secrets of 9/11.”

Anthony Summers is co-author of The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 & Osama bin Laden. Dan Christensen is the editor of the Broward Bulldog, a not-for-profit online only newspaper created to provide local reporting in the public interest. www.BrowardBulldog.org

The Disappeared

Photographs of detainees rescued from a secret-police building in Benhazi. Matar’s father’s fate remains unknown. Photo: T. Dworzak/Magnum.

BK Notes: Truth is stranger than fiction, as this novelist illustrates.

The Disappeared

Hisham Matar’s new novel takes on a very personal subject: a father’s abduction by a brutal regime and a son’s unsettling sense of loss.

As Hisham Matar was finishing his latest novel, about a young man so grief-stricken by a father’s absence that he stalks his lovers and wears his suits, word reached Matar that his own father might still be alive. Jaballa Matar was a leading Libyan dissident who vanished without trial in 1990 into Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s dungeons. Over 20 years, the family received only two letters from him, smuggled out of his cell. They feared he was among more than 1,000 political detainees shot dead in a prison riot in the mid-’90s. Then came this sliver of hope, that he had been seen alive in a jail in the capital, Tripoli.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/08/14/hisham-matar-s-anatomy-of-a-disappearance.html

For his son, a successful writer living in England, the vague message was “tremendous but unsettling. I felt I’d provoked it, by spending three years on a book taking me into dark places of the soul,” he told NEWSWEEK in his West London apartment. The unverifiable news was “like a voice in my head. Writing this book took me a little too close to the flame.”

Anatomy of a Disappearance is out in the U.S. on Aug. 23. By coincidence, it came out in London on the heels of the Libyan uprising in February that could yet bring a resolution to the author’s torturous uncertainty. On Feb. 3, when Gaddafi still hoped to head off protests, two of Matar’s uncles and two cousins were released after 21 years of wrongful imprisonment, along with eight other political prisoners. His father was not among them.

Matar, 40, with ink-black curls, has a gentle air of detachment and a haunting past. He was born in New York, where his father was a U.N. diplomat, the year after Gaddafi’s bloodless coup. He was raised in Tripoli until he was 9, when his family fled to Egypt. At boarding school in England, he lived under a false identity as “Bob,” a Christian from Cairo, because Libyan agents were picking off political exiles and their families. He was 19, an architecture student in London, when his father was abducted from their Cairo home by Hosni Mubarak’s security forces. They handed him over to be tortured in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison.

Matar’s 2006 debut, In the Country of Men, revealed a Libya of public executions and private betrayals through the eyes of a boy in the late ’70s whose dissident father is incarcerated by the “Guide.” After that novel, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, Matar campaigned openly for his father. Desmond Tutu and Salman Rushdie were among his supporters.

The brutal disappearance of a loved one lacks the finality of bereavement. Matar finds it devastating that “their experience continues at the expense of your intimacy. If my father is alive, he’s formed strong friendships in another place. There’s a jealousy.”
Anatomy of a Disappearance moves between Egypt, Switzerland, and London to trace a corrosive love triangle. After fleeing an unnamed dictatorship, 12-year-old Nuri and his widowed father become rivals for a young Egyptian-English woman. When the father is brutally abducted from the bed of a Swiss woman, Nuri’s guilt grows at having lost the father he once wished to banish. It is a haunting tale of a man suspended in the past, his identity fixed by loss.

Matar’s imagination was awakened by his family’s need for subterfuge. When he was 8, his father was listed for interrogation and hid in Europe. His mother, desperate to join him, lied to the authorities that he had abandoned her to start another family. Curious more than upset, Matar pictured a blond half-sibling, and his father with a Swiss wife. When his mother weakened and telephoned her husband, he told her never to call again, and hung up. “It was difficult for both of them,” Matar says. “They had to pretend they were divorced, so they could be together.”

The novel’s dictatorship is 1950s Iraq, not Libya. But Matar, who will teach the fiction of “estrangement and exile” at Barnard College in New York in the fall, knows political exile to be a common Arab predicament. He writes of fathers and sons, but also about history: “My father’s generation were the audacious radicals, drunk on idealism and republican revolutions. My generation is one of disappointment. Exile has made us pessimists.”

Before the Arab Spring, he feared his father’s sacrifice had been futile. Now, seeing Libyan protesters carry pictures of Jaballa Matar and early dissidents who were killed, he believes such people “carved with their bare hands the first steps to this revolution.” When the uprising began, Matar and his wife, Diana, a California-born photographer, channeled information to the media from a makeshift “newsroom” in their London home, making up to 100 calls a day to Libya.

Speaking to his freed uncles gave him joy. “I realized how much you can take from a man, but you can only take so much. My uncle missed 21 years—his children are fully grown—but he still has his humor, intelligence, and resistance.” With Benghazi secured, Matar’s elder brother, Ziad, went searching, “but it yielded nothing. I would be surprised if my father’s alive, but there’s a very reasonable possibility. When the regime falls, we’ll have access to the prisons.”

He views it as scandalous that Western powers were “laughing at Gaddafi privately while doing business” with him and prolonging the regime. Though he is certain it will fall, he worries more about what comes next. After six months of fighting, the rebel coalition “risks being fractured. It’s Gaddafi’s last legacy—to leave us armed and fraught. How will the different factions construct something together where no one is asking for a louder voice or privileges because of how hard they fought or how much they lost?”

Loss has left Matar thirsty for justice, not revenge. The “robust and fair trials” he craves could also yield clues to end his personal anguish.

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Jaggi is an award-winning cultural journalist and critic in London who writes for British national newspapers and contributes to BBC radio.

Tony & Robby on Clarke's Controversy

A CIA 9/11 Cover-Up?

Did the CIA keep mum about two 9/11 hijackers because it tried and failed to recruit them? Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, authors of 'The Eleventh Day,' on whether there’s any truth behind ex-Bush official Richard Clarke’s claim.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/12/richard-clarke-9-11-interview-was-there-a-cia-coverup.html

By Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan

Former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke has reignited controversy by speculating, in an interview cited in Thursday’s Daily Beast, that the CIA intentionally withheld advance knowledge of two of the 9/11 hijackers from the White House and the FBI, in an attempt to cover up the agency’s failed effort to recruit the two men as assets.

Clarke’s comments—and immediate, emphatic denials from former CIA director George Tenet and two senior CIA officials involved—go to the core of one of the enduring enigmas about 9/11.

Things began to unravel for the CIA on the day of the attacks, just four hours after the Qaeda strikes, according to research we conducted for our new book,The Eleventh Day. Soon after 1 p.m. that day, at agency headquarters in Langley, an aide handed Director Tenet the passenger manifests for the four downed airliners. “Two names,” he said, placing a page on the table where the director could see it, “these two we know.”

Tenet looked, then breathed, “There it is. Confirmation. Oh, Jesus ...”

There on the manifest for Flight 77, listed as traveling in first class, were the names of Nawaf al-Hazmi and his brother, Salem. Also on the manifest, near the front of the coach section, was passenger Khalid al-Mihdhar.

The names Hazmi and Mihdhar were instantly familiar, Tenet has said, because his people had learned only weeks earlier that both men might be in the United States. According to the director’s version of events, the CIA had known of Mihdhar since as early as 1999, identified him as a terrorist suspect by December that year, had him followed, learned he had a valid multiple-entry visa for the United States, and placed him and comrades—including Hazmi—under surveillance for a few days in Southeast Asia. Later, in the spring of 2000, the agency had learned that Hazmi, who also had a multiple-entry visa, had arrived in California.

The director said after 9/11, though, that—in spite of having gained such dynamite information—the CIA had done absolutely nothing about it. The agency had not asked the State Department to place the two terrorists on watch lists at border points, nor asked the FBI to track them down if they were in the United States—not until 19 days before 9/11. The omission, according to the CIA, was simply the result of multiple mistakes.

Historical puzzles are as often explained by screw-ups as by darker truths. What is known of the evidence on Hazmi and Mihdhar, however, makes the screw-up version hard to swallow. Not least because the CIA version of events suggests its officials blew chances to grab the two future hijackers time and time and time again.

At the heart of the suggestion that the agency intentionally withheld information was the discovery by the Justice Department’s inspector-general of a draft cable—one that was prepared but never sent—by an FBI agent on attachment to the CIA’s bin Laden unit.

In January 2000, having had sight of a CIA cable noting that Mihdhar possessed a U.S. visa, agent Doug Miller had swiftly drafted a memo on the matter addressed to the bureau’s own bin Laden unit and its New York field office. Had that memo been sent, the FBI would have learned right then of Mihdhar’s entry visa. The report was blocked, however, on the order of then-deputy chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, Tom Wilshire.

Why did he block it? Could it be that the CIA concealed what it knew about Mihdhar and Hazmi because officials feared that precipitate action by the FBI would blow a unique lead? Did the CIA want to monitor the pair’s activity itself, even though its mandate does not allow it to run operations in the United States? Or did it, as some bureau agents suspected—and Clarke has surmised—even hope to turn the two terrorists, to recruit them as informants?

Clarke’s speculation may not be idle. A heavily redacted congressional document shows that in early December 1999, before Mihdhar’s U.S. visa came to light, top CIA officials had debated the lamentable fact that the agency had as yet not penetrated Al Qaeda:

Winnipge Free Press Review of Eleventh Day

FYI
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/fyi/a-convincing-argument--4-127648388.html

Conspiracies and catastrophe
British co-authors contend that Bush administration incompetence and cover-ups, combined with America's illogical Middle East position, lit the fuse for 9/11 attacks

Reviewed by: Michael Dudley
Posted: 08/13/2011 1:00 AM
The Eleventh Day

The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden
By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan

Ballantine, 624 pages, $34

For those readers who find it difficult to believe that Bush administration insiders could have engineered the 9/11 attacks -- and more important, for those who don't -- this ambitious book would have you consider what its authors believe is a more plausible and politically charged set of 9/11 conspiracies.

With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 almost upon us, The Eleventh Day forges a coherent narrative out of this horrific, momentous yet poorly understood tragedy, and emerges as a cogent portrait of governmental incompetence, intransigence and deception.

British investigative journalists Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan are the husband and wife co-authors of previous books on Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover, while Summers previously wrote on the conspiracy to assassinate JFK, the murder of the Romanovs and the arrogant will to power of Richard Nixon.

Here they offer what they claim is the "full" account of 9/11, from the origins of Osama bin Laden's radicalism right up to his assassination by the Obama administration this past spring.

In what must have been a painstaking effort over five years, the authors sifted through conflicting testimonies and competing versions of events (including tens of thousands of documents released by the 9/11 Commission) to piece together the catastrophe and the history that preceded it. The result is meticulous, gripping journalism, told with moral conviction.

The book begins with a harrowing retelling of the attack, followed by the authors' assessment of efforts to understand it through popular speculation and official investigations. In the second half, Summers and Swan reconstruct their own thorough account of the plot led by bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the misbegotten efforts to track bin Laden through the '90s and beyond.

They demonstrate convincingly that, even as preparations for the attack escalated and warnings grew more frantic from both foreign intelligence agencies and George W. Bush's own counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, the U.S. president's administration assiduously ignored the threat and, indeed, became impatient with any attempt to raise it.

According to Summers and Swan, Bush and his administration not only covered up their own blinkered inattention to al-Qaida prior to the attacks -- and incompetence and dysfunction on the day itself -- but stonewalled investigations into the attack to downplay the hijackers' real motivations and protect the foreign government that funded them.

In this effort Bush was aided in no small way by the phenomenally widespread but often science-fictional claims of the so-called "9/11 Truth Movement," which, in the authors' view, drew attention away from actual official omissions, distortions and malfeasance. Where Summers' earlier work on JFK articulated the case for conspiracy, here he and Swan find no merit in the arguments of the Truthers, which the authors methodically demolish.

In contrast with most mainstream efforts to debunk 9/11 skepticism (such as Toronto journalist Jonathan Kay's recentAmong the Truthers, which lumped 9/11 conspirators in with all manner of paranoid beliefs) Summers and Swan do not rely on ad hominem characterizations to debunk these ideas.

Instead they consider each major theory in light of the available evidence. They find that the unconventional collapses of the Twin Towers have been convincingly explained as the result of the laws of physics rather than of planted demolition charges, and the notion that no plane hit the Pentagon is simply offensive, given the personal and emotionally wrenching testimony they provide of those who had to sift through the wreckage there.

The real cover-up, they argue, concerned not just the actions of the government, the FBI and the CIA in advance of the attacks, but more significantly the financial and material support provided by the Saudi royal family for the 19 hijackers.

Steeped in fundamentalist Wahhabism -- a severely austere, rigid and conservative branch of Islam -- elite Saudi society including the royal family sympathized with bin Laden's ideology, particularly with regards to his desire to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation and punish the U.S. for its support of the Jewish state.

Very little of this information would be revealed by the 9/11 Commission. Between misleading the commission, redacting key documents implicating Saudi Arabia and selling the American public on the completely fabricated role of Iraq in the attacks, the Bush administration managed to divert public attention away from the political realities that underlay 9/11.

Ultimately, argue Summers and Swan, it was America's untenable position in the Middle East -- dependence on Saudi oil while incurring Saudi hostility over its unwavering support for Israel - that doomed nearly 2,800 people on that day, as well as more than 100,000 Afghans and Iraqis killed in wars cynically justified by 9/11.

Committed Truthers and partisans of the former president alike will probably object to a great deal of the authors' analysis, but open-minded readers will find The Eleventh Daya thoughtful and sobering reassessment of the most pivotal event of our times.

Michael Dudley is a research associate and library co-ordinator in the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 13, 2011 J5

Tony Summers on Charlie Rose TV

Tony Summers was interviewed on the Charlie Rose show on PBS TV.

Anthony Summers – Charlie Rose -
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11800
with Anthony Summers in Current Affairs, Books, History
Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Charlie Rose: This fall marks the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The recent killing of Osama Bin Laden marked the defining moment in the fight against al Qaeda. Conspiracy theories still linger about the events of September 11th.

A new book by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan explores some of the questions. An excerpt exploring the connection between Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 hijackers, appears in this months Vanity Fair Magazine. The Kingdom and the Towers

Here’s the book’s co-author Anthony Summers. I’m pleased to have you back. He’s an old friend from a long time ago, welcome. Robby is your coauthor and your wife.

Summers: Both. For twenty years wife.

CR: And five years working together on this project. You began to realize all these conspiracy theories had to do with 9/11, and so you wanted to what?

Summers: When I came to see my publisher at Random House in New York, I found my own publisher, a very senior publisher herself, didn’t believe all the conspiracy theories but felt that in some way the public has been cheated, and there was some secret there.

CR: So your publisher put you on the trail as you say, “there is a lingering sense the nation and the world had been let down.”

Summers: And the other tenant of the conspiracy theories - the Skeptics as they prefer to be called, thought in some way the Bush administration had either had some warning or knew something was coming but allowed it to happen to further their plans to invade the Middle East – as it turned out in Iraq. Or at the extreme ends of conspiracy theories in which they actually provoked the attacks themselves. Here and now it seems daft, but there were enough straws in the wind to say - go look at this.

CR: So now you have a book. So what is it you think happened that we don’t know?

Summers: I hope to successfully dispatch, for a sane America, most of the conspiracy theory ideas.

CR: Send them away.

Summers: Exactly, but I think what happened is those ideas and the lingering thoughts about them have distorted the facts and blurred the things that one should really be concerned about, and there are a lot of things one should still be concerned about this puzzle…

CR: And they are?

Summers: The first of them I think is what US Intelligence actually knew and what it did about it in advance. The first two terrorists who arrived on US soil had been identified by the CIA, they knew that they were al Qaeda, they knew their names, they knew they had US visas, and in once case they learned quite quickly one had arrived in the United States, and yet they did not tell the FBI.

CR: What do you believe was the relationship between the Saudi government or the leading figures in Saudi Arabia and the men who were on those planes on 9/11?

Summers: There are two areas. The first of the areas, in the period - in the years leading up to 9/11 there is good evidence - and we name two of the princes involved in the book Prince Naef, who had been for a long time the head of the interior, the internal intelligence, and Prince Sultan, who was the defense chief in Saudi Arabia, and is now second highest to the throne, it is said - as recorded in the Wall Street Journal, that they raised a lot of money over the years to pay off Bin Laden not to attack Saudi Arabia. He was outside he was in Afghanistan - not to attack Saudi Arabia. In this country if you and I were talking about the Mafia, we would call it protection money. That is one area, and the people who investigated 9/11 and earlier at the CIA, concluded that the Saudis had been paid protection money for a long time.

The second area that I think is especially interesting, that both the joint inquires – and 9/11 Commission delved into it. When the men on the ground in California arrived, they arrived, and the evidence suggests than an Imam, the religious man at the Saudi consulate first gave them a tour of the area in Los Angeles. And that then after that the two of them connected with another Saudi, who was paid from official sources but apparently not for doing any known work, and had been thought of for a long time as a Saudi agent, they connected with him in a meeting that was odd. He said he heard Arabic being talked in a restaurant and the meeting was by pure chance, it doesn’t sound like it. In fact it sounds like a vary bad spy novel; it doesn’t sound like pure chance. He then dropped a newspaper and talked to them as they picked it up. He then gave them help….They didn’t speak English, they were pretty much lost in California, and they were pioneers if you will of the 9/11operation, the guys who arrived first. There were other Saudis who helped them one way or another, - all either left immediately on 9/11 or had left two or three weeks before.

CR: We have the distinguished investigative reporter from Ireland , who I used to know from the BBC, what is it did he discover that ought to draw our attention, and what should be the consequences of that discovery is what I’m asking?

Summers: Back to the beginning of our conversation and you asked me why I was doing the book and I said I wanted to look at the conspiracy stuff, which certainly had elements of it that convinced huge numbers of Americans and equally important huge numbers of people around the world. The last poll I saw suggests that 46% of people abroad, which is what the poll was mostly referring to - people in the middle east, believe that someone other than al Qaeda were responsible. Rubbish, of course al Qaeda was behind it. I wanted to deal with the conspiracy theories but get as close as possible to that elusive thing we call the truth and then……

CR: Of all those conspiracies, which one do you think has merit?

Summers: If you are referring to conspiracy theories, I don’t think any of them have merit.

CR: Okay, so none of the conspiracy theories have any merit, good.

Summers: No. I don’t think so. At the same time, I think that with this book we hope to get closer to clarity to the issues that do seem to matter, and one of the big ones is - were elements of a foreign government involved? And I think we are closer to the idea that elements of the Saudi government were involved.

CR: And the nature of their involvement was what?

Summers: Collaboration with Bin Lade through protection money.

CR: (Did they have) knowledge of what Bin Laden was doing?

Summers: Well, we do have first confirmation, from a former serving CIA officer who was involved in the capture of a bin Laden aide called Abu Zubaydah. And he says that he learned afterwards that when Abu Zubaydah was being questioned, he was intensely questioned over weeks, that at one point he was conned into thinking he was being transferred to Saudi custody, with the idea that he would be terrified to tell what he knew because the Saudis are famous for torture and worse - killing prisoners and so on. And far from that, he instead said, well, let me give you the name and a phone number, which he knew from memory, of a Saudi Prince, not one of the senior ministers, and said he’ll know, and he said tell him I’m here and he’ll know what do to. And he subsequently named two other Saudi princes. All three of those Saudi Princes, and this is a fact, all died within a week of each other shortly thereafter. There is the thought, and of course all things can be explained by chance, but it is extremely interesting and full of implications that all three of them died by chance within a week of each other, and the thought is that maybe it was time to shut them up.

CR: The book is called The Eleventh Day, the True Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, written by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.