Knowing our enemies

There’s a significance to the Sept. 11 attack date I have yet to see explored by anyone else. So, I guess it’s up to me.

Some have suggested it is linked with President Carter’s Camp David Accords. Final agreement was reached Sept. 12, 1978. That might, indeed, be part of the story. But there’s more that is not being reported widely.

In September of 1970, Arab terrorists linked with Yasser Arafat hijacked four airliners in one day. Sound familiar? I bet you thought it had never been done before. They moved three of the jets to an airfield in Jordan, where they were blown up after releasing hostages.

The incident was the culmination of deteriorating relations between Arafat’s many terrorist cells and Jordan’s King Hussein, who embarked on a brutal, ruthless and absolutely necessary campaign to expel Arafat’s guerrillas from his country. So terrible was Hussein’s one-day campaign, many Palestinian guerrillas crossed the Jordan River and surrendered to Israelis rather than face certain death at the hands of the Jordanian army, which killed more than 3,000.

The date of that one-day campaign? Sept. 12, 1970.

A faction of Arafat’s terrorists took on the name Black September in remembrance of this mini-war. Later, Black September guerrillas became well-known for their murderous campaign at the Munich Olympics (in September of 1972) and for the kidnapping of U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel and Charge d’ Affairs George Curtis in Khartoum, Sudan, and their subsequent murders in 1973.

Why isn’t anyone mentioning this apparent connection to Black September? Are they afraid it leads directly back to Yasser Arafat? Does the West have too much invested in Arafat as a partner for peace?

We do hear about Osama bin Laden. But what we hear and read reported seems to be selective coverage. As only WorldNetDaily reminded readers last week, just prior to the Black Tuesday attack, there were international news reports out of Europe, Moscow and elsewhere that bin Laden had actually been named as commander in chief of the Taliban’s armed forces. The Taliban Party rules Afghanistan, and, as would be expected, denied the appointment. How could such a direct connection between the terrorist and the nation-state of Afghanistan be overlooked or soft-pedaled?

There’s more. The Bush administration took the strange position of asking China to help the U.S. in its campaign against terrorism. Why was that request strange?

John Pomfret of the Washington Post reported on page 27 of his paper two days after Black Tuesday that China signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the Taliban, giving Beijing the “closest relationship with the isolated Kabul regime of any non-Muslim country,” according to a senior Western diplomat.

When was that extraordinary agreement announced? Sept. 11, 2001 – Black Tuesday.

I don’t know about you, but my head is spinning from these connections – from these buried facts, from these too-coincidental links, from this widening web of intrigue.

It was almost laughable when Bill Clinton returned to New York last week and was confronted by a reporter asking why and how his administration had failed to capture or kill bin Laden, the most-wanted terrorist on earth for the last eight years.

Clinton said he almost got him in 1998, when he bombed Afghanistan. Here are the facts about Osama bin Laden and that raid, as I explained at the time.

Bin Laden’s family is one of the richest of the rich – worth an estimated $5 billion. Osama himself is said to command a fortune worth at least $300 million. The family does millions of dollars of business with the U.S. government, having built an Air Force base for us in Saudi Arabia after bin Laden was blamed for blowing up the Khobar Towers in 1996.

So let’s get this straight. Osama blows up our facilities, and his family gets the contract for rebuilding them. Do you get the feeling there is more going on here than meets the eye?

About Clinton’s raid on Afghanistan? Bin Laden survived the attacks, having, apparently, been tipped off in advance. With such connections and resources, it hardly seems surprising.

Do we really know our enemies? Does the United States really want to understand them? With so much focus on bin Laden, at the expense of Afghanistan, China, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya and Saudi Arabia, you have to wonder just how serious Washington is about this war on terrorism.