Time for the Truth About 9/11

by Harley Schlanger

[Print version of this transcript]

This is an edited transcription of Harley Schlanger’s podcast, “Daily Update,” from September 7, 2021, which posts Monday through Friday on the websites of both The LaRouche Organization and the Schiller Institute. Subheads and hyperlinks have been added.

Good Morning! I’m Harley Schlanger from the LaRouche Organization with your Daily Update for September 7, 2021.

Biden Issues Executive Order To Declassify FBI 9/11 Documents

After 20 years of cover-up on what happened on 9/11, President Joe Biden, on September 3rd, announced the declassification of documents related to 9/11. In his statement, he said:

As we approach the 20th anniversary of that tragic day, I am honoring the commitment I made when I ran for President. I made a commitment then to ensuring transparency regarding the declassification of documents on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America.

Today, I signed an Executive Order directing the Department of Justice and other relevant agencies to oversee a declassification review of documents related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s September 11th investigations. The Executive Order requires the Attorney General to release the declassified documents publicly over the next six months.

Now, this is a long time coming—20 years: the length of the wars that we’ve been involved in that are related to what happened on 9/11. I think it’s worth taking a moment to realize that there have been thousands, if not tens of thousands of documents that have been hidden from public view by the FBI, by the CIA, by other relevant agencies. This declassification is crucial to get at what really happened that day.

Biden, as part of his Order says:

Information shall not remain classified if there is significant doubt about the need to retain its classified status. Nor shall information remain classified in order to conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error, or to prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency.

Now this is really important to think about. Why would the FBI have covered [up] documents related to the Saudi role in 9/11? Because this is really what we’re talking about. Let’s go back to that day for a moment, to bring you some information that most of you probably don’t know.

LaRouche Interviewed 9/11/2001 on Radio

On September 11, 2001, as the planes were flying into the World Trade Center, Lyndon LaRouche was being interviewed on radio station KTKK in Salt Lake City, Utah, by Dr. Jack Stockwell on his daily morning talk show. (See EIR Vol. 48, No. 36, September 10, 2021 for a reprint of that interview.) As they were being informed that these attacks were occurring, LaRouche immediately said, “Osama bin Laden will be blamed.” He said, “This is an attempt to divert responsibility. Osama bin Laden is a ‘controlled entity,’ not an independent force.” LaRouche said that what must be investigated was, who sent, who created Osama bin Laden, and who protected him and deployed his forces.

Now, what LaRouche was referring to, as he spoke about it later on in that interview, is that the mujahideen in Afghanistan were created largely by support operations from the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community, and initially under the direction of President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

There was a July 1979 order that the U.S. would aid them to overthrow the existing government of Afghanistan, which at the time was a pro-Soviet government. It was only in December of that year—five months later—that the Russians deployed troops to protect that government. From that time forward, actually from July forward, the U.S. was providing arms and training to groups which became known later as the mujahideen, and later became al-Qaeda and Taliban.

The U.S. was working directly with the Saudis, and it was in that context that Osama bin Laden ended up in Afghanistan directing what became known as al-Qaeda, with Saudi funding and U.S. funding and training. That’s what LaRouche was referring to, and he added that there’s no way that an attack like this could happen, ordered from a cave in Afghanistan. It needed, minimally, some protection from U.S. sources, intelligence sources. He said, this is what must be investigated. “We must place the blame and responsibility where it belongs.” That is, those who were committed to the United States engaging in a long war, in endless warfare.

Interestingly, as the Afghan war has been brought to an end, and now Biden is moving to declassify these documents, who has been all over the place defending the war and demanding the war continue? None other than war criminal Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, and one of the people most responsible for building the narrative that justified not just the war in Afghanistan, but then the invasion of Iraq two years later.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair:
Truly Imbecilic

Now Blair, on September 6th, yesterday, gave a speech at the Royal United Services Institute, continuing his rant against the United States that we should not have pulled out of Afghanistan. He said Biden’s withdrawal decision was made “in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars,’” to give in to public support for the idea of ending the forever wars. In the same speech, Blair said that we need more wars, because we still face the same threat from terrorism.

Nowhere did he mention that that threat from terrorism was amplified and developed by British and U.S. support, not only in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but in Iraq after the invasion of Iraq, in Syria, in Libya with the actions there, and in the bombings in other Middle Eastern countries. That the U.S. and the British and NATO forces contributed mightily to the development of these terrorists, especially the most recent, the ISIS caliphate in Iraq and Syria, which was largely built out of U.S. prisons where we put Sunni militants after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

What did Blair say? He said we need a mix of “hard and soft power.” Hard power meaning military power: U.S. and NATO forces. Soft power? Who knows what he means by that; it often is brainwashing, pretending that you’re helping these countries. What he said especially is that we must engage in “nation making.” Now, Biden, in saying that he pulled out of Afghanistan to end these endless wars, and that we were ending the era of nation building—Blair said this demonstrates a loss of will to fight. So, from the leading war criminal, who was at the center of the wars that we’ve just ended, we have these kinds of comments coming from Tony Blair.

So, it’s in this context that it’s absolutely essential that there be an investigation of who was behind the terror attack on 9/11; how it was used to tie us up in 20 years of futile warfare. Trillions of dollars. It is now estimated that over $8 trillion were gobbled up in these wars. A massive loss of life, including U.S. and NATO allies, but especially the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, who are the victims of this effort to impose these so-called “Western values,” espoused by people like Tony Blair and Dick Cheney—“Western values,” which are really a defense of the looting mechanisms to provide an increased flow of funds into the City of London banks, the Wall Street banks, and the related financial and corporate cartels. They’re the ones—the so-called “military-industrial complex,” including the financial interests—who benefit from these wars.

Your security was not improved by these wars; it was made worse. The defense of so-called “Western values” was not improved by these wars, it was made worse, because they exposed the hypocrisy of those who argued they were defending democracy by going in and destroying poor nations. Or, in the case of Iraq and Libya, nations that were developing.

Upcoming Schiller Institute Conference on 9/11

To address this, the Schiller Institute will be having another conference this Saturday, titled “9/11, 2021: The Path Forward from September 11th—Afghanistan, and the Surveillance State.”

I would urge people to read the statement issued Sept. 5 by Helga Zepp-LaRouche titled, “Can the West Learn? What Afghanistan Needs Now!” This could be a turning point in international relations; moving away from geopolitical confrontation dictated by imperial needs, financial interests, and the military-industrial complex, into an era of diplomacy, of negotiation, of mutually beneficial economic development. That’s what’s in front of us. Pulling out of the war in Afghanistan was crucial for that, and adding to it now the declassification of 9/11 documents is another step forward. But what is necessary is to put forward the solution.

Thanks, and I’ll see you soon.

—HARLEYSCH@gmail.com