By Susan Lindauer, 9/11 Whistleblower and author of "Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq,"

Dedicated to TJ Bronco and Eddie Sengola—Semper fi

When I recall the summer of 2001 and our last days of innocence before the 9/11 attack, I often think of Guy Clark's old song, "Like Desperadoes Waiting for a Train."

I remember the heartbreak of it vividly. That's because our team gave advance warnings about the 9/11 attack in precision detail. On command of my CIA handler, I also delivered threats to Iraqi diplomats at the United Nations of the consequence of War should Baghdad withhold actionable intelligence about the 9/11 conspiracy.

Throughout that hot summer, we understood exactly how 9/11 would play out— with airplane hijackings and a strike on the World Trade Center. We had a good idea of the timing. And we projected the use of a miniature thermo-nuclear device. Yet for all that we tried, we could not stop it. Forces had been set in motion. Responsive actions to our urgent appeals for help— which should have been automatic—got ignored.

Above all, we could not fathom that another competing team would sneak in and wire explosives to bring down the Towers—And that's exactly what happened.

We shouted from the rooftops. We joked in phone conversations that "the NSA should wake up and pick up the phones. You guys at NSA have been tapping our phones for years, so you could catch this call. Don't sleep through it now. Hello NSA. Pick up the phone!" When new neighbors showed up with a moving van that July, I joked they might go back where they came from, if they heard our conversation about this World Trade Center attack.

After 9/11, I wept for those conversations. By August, our team was so anxious about the "imminent" timing of the attack that my CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz instructed me to go the extra mile to notify the Justice Department and the White House, so both sides of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement could mobilize together to block it.

Our actions that August will be outlined in my next article. It put our team—including Dr. Richard Fuisz and Paul Hoven— at the eye of the storm that would become the 9/11 cover up. Our efforts robbed the Bush Administration of deniability, making us a serious threat to the story they desired to sell on the FOX News Channel and the Sunday morning talk shows. Notoriously, I would get slapped with the Patriot Act and locked in prison on Carswell Air Force Base in Texas. When incarceration failed to break my spirit or frighten me out of speaking, they threatened me with forcible drugging with Haldol, Ativan and Prozac to chemically lobotomize me into silence.

Because truth does matter. So much of America's national security and terrorism policy has been predicated on mistaken assumptions about that day. Ignorance has inflicted a terrible cost on America's foreign policy, pushing the United States into two catastrophic Wars, and drowning our Middle Class in red ink and deficit spending to beef up profit margins for defense contractors.

Once Americans understand 9/11 as a collision of special interests, our country should be able to sweep away the false construct that has become the War on Terrorism. We should be freed to create a more effective strategy for protecting our nation's security, without exaggerating threats and manufacturing fresh hostilities against us.
Because there was no external enemy threatening our country on that terrible day. Just Us. It was always Us.

Argumentum Ad Numeram

That's not what the corporate media wants America to think. The official 9/11 story relies on a principle called "argumentum ad numeram--" the notion that an idea becomes truthful because large numbers of people believe it. I have choked to hear the babbling of the media describe 9/11 with post-it sticker smiley faces. It's glib and trite and inaccurate.

The Corporate Media guessed wrong in the first hours and days after the attack. Over the years the media discredited itself further by protecting those mistakes, rather than confess that pundits had no idea what they were talking about in the first place.

Americans aren't fooled. They know the official story is bunk. People want to know what really happened. And they have a right to know.

Citizens 9/11 Commission Campaign

For those reasons, I wholeheartedly endorse the new Citizens 9/11 Commission Campaign http://www.911cc.org. Organizers intend to file ballot propositions in Oregon, Massachusetts and other states. When passed, the ballot initiative would create a powerful, independent 9/11 Commission vested with subpoena authority and the ability to collect testimony under oath. Largely free of governmental interference, the Citizens 9/11 Commission would be headquartered in the first state to pass the ballot measure.

"We believe we have a winning approach: the method of direct democracy—" says former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel and President of the Democracy Foundation, which has launched the 9/11 Campaign. Gravel is best known for his Senate filibuster that ended the draft after Vietnam, and for reading the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record.

"The 9/11 movement’s successful decade of citizen education can now give way to an actionable citizen’s plan for change that will create a new investigation!”

For myself, an opportunity to testify before a 9/11 Citizens Commission—no holds barred— would be a huge relief. These articles scratch the surface. There's much more depth that could be related under oath.

Hijackings or Demolitions?

An effective 9/11 Citizens Commission would do more than demolish the official 9/11 story. It would also shatter the false constraints imposed by the 9/11 Community on itself.

The trouble is that Americans are inclined to trust a limited range of options. Either they believe airplane hijackings alone brought down the towers— or they insist that only a controlled demolition of the Towers using explosives accomplished the deed— as if the two must have been mutually exclusive events.

Both are mistaken. The World Trade Center suffered BOTH hijackings AND a controlled demolition.

Fire fighters and building maintenance crews reported explosions popping through the Towers like fireworks. And they weren't shy about reporting it. However for reasons that are incomprehensible and grossly irresponsible, the corporate media took the government bait, and oversimplified the 9/11 conspiracy to erase nagging inconsistencies from human consensus. 9/11 was groupthink at its most refined.

Once you understand how competing events collided during that sweltering month of August, 2001, you will understand how and why.

Motive and Opportunity

Any police officer will tell you a crime requires two things: motive and opportunity. That's been missing from the 9/11 debate until now. Advance knowledge about the hijacking conspiracy created "opportunity" for taking 9/11 to the next level of absolute destruction. Iraq upped the ante, and created motivation to guarantee maximum destruction—a competing agenda that collided with efforts to stop the attack.

Most importantly, the decision to go on a War footing against Iraq, in response to the hijacking attack, was made before 9/11 occurred, not after. That's critical to understanding why Cabinet level officers of the White House took no action to deploy NORAD or post an anti-aircraft battery on top of the Twin Towers, which would have been very easy to do. Advance knowledge of the consequence of War with Iraq created an overwhelming provocation for an orphan team to wire the building with explosives. Likewise, knowledge of the timing of the attack, its method of operation—and the low sophistication of the hijackers' flying skills (watched by foreign intelligence)— had been identified far enough in advance that it was relatively easy to prepare the explosives. It was easy enough to anticipate that a dramatic collapse of the buildings would maximize the media impact, which could be exploited to stampede Americans into War with Iraq.

Yes, that's despicable. And it's exactly what they did.

U.S. Threats to Iraq

The dynamic building into 9/11 started in April, 2001. I was summoned to my CIA handler's office in Great Falls, Virginia to receive a message for Iraqi diplomats—exactly what my back channel existed for. The message demanded that Baghdad hand over any fragment of intelligence involving airplane hijackings, or face military retribution if the U.S. discovered Baghdad had possessed that knowledge and took no action to warn us.

At that very moment, two special things were happening: 1) international loathing was pushing an end to U.N. sanctions on Iraq, which had caused the deaths of 1.7 million Iraqis, including 1 million children under the age of 5, according to World Health statistics. And 2) unbeknownst to Americans or the international community, the U.S. and Baghdad were engaged in highly productive back channel talks for a comprehensive peace framework that would have achieved all U.S. objectives, including preferential contracts for U.S. corporations after sanctions in oil, telecommunications, hospital equipment and pharmaceuticals, transportation and non-dual use factory equipment.

In April, my first instinct was to soft pedal the U.S. threat. No need to upset diplomatic advances, right? As it happened, in February, 2001 Baghdad had already invited the FBI to send an Anti-Terrorism Task Force into Iraq—seven months before the 9/11 strike. So when I requested intelligence on the 9/11 Conspiracy in April, the Iraqis responded enthusiastically. They welcomed the United States to go ahead and send the FBI right away, so the U.S. could get what we wanted. (The original 9/11 Commission never got to hear about Iraq's welcome to the FBI, either).

When I reported back on my trip to New York, I was quite pleased. However Dr. Fuisz stormed his office yelling that I had not sufficiently conveyed the force of the U.S. threat. I was to go back to the Iraqi Embassy forthwith, and inform Baghdad that "Iraq would be bombed back to the Stone Age, worse than anything they had suffered before if it was discovered they had concealed any fragment of intelligence involving airplane hijackings."

Dr. Fuisz instructed me to warn Baghdad those "threats of War did not come from him or anyone at the CIA. Threats of War originated at the highest levels of government far above the CIA Director and the Secretary of State."

Only three men fit the bill: President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Of course I did as instructed. Observing his fury, I understood with a jolt that the hijacking threat was considered "highly credible" and "validated." In June and July, weekly meetings with Dr. Fuisz got more agitated. We talked about 9/11 practically every week. We regarded the terrorist scenario as inevitable, if intervention failed. I began to tell civilian friends with ties to New York that the CIA expected a major attack on southern Manhattan involving airplane hijackings and a strike on the World Trade Center.

Dr. Parke Godfrey, a professor of computer science at York University in Toronto, would later testify in the Federal Courthouse for the Southern District of New York--- 1,000 yards from where the Twin Towers had once graced the skyline—that several times over the spring and summer I told him that we expected "airplane hijackings and a reprise of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center that would finish the cycle." I told him the attack was expected in "late summer, early autumn." And I told him we expected "mass casualties" and speculated about the "possible use of a miniature thermo-nuclear device."

On August 2, 2001, the Senate held confirmation hearings for Robert Mueller to head the FBI. Dr Fuisz suggested that perhaps the FBI Director's chair would be vacant when the 9/11 attack occurred.

That's when Dr. Fuisz and I mapped out a path of action that would undercut the entire 9/11 mythology, and paint a bulls eye on my back for the 9/11 Cover Up.

Alas, no good deed goes unpunished in Washington. Somebody would have to pay for knowing about 9/11, and it would turn out to be me.

As luck would have it, the Feds didn't count on one thing that would scotch the government's plan to imprison me indefinitely for up to 10 years with forcible drugging to boot— and torpedo the official 9/11 story out of the water:
When Dr. Fuisz told me in August that the 9/11 attack was considered "imminent," I called my friend, Parke Godfrey, whose family lived in the wealthy suburbs of Connecticut.

I warned him to stay the hell out of Manhattan.

Next in this series: August, 2001—

Organizers of the Citizens 9/11 Commission Campaign have asked me to lay out evidence, but not draw conclusions. They argue, quite reasonably, that the Citizens 9/11 Commission should be the appropriate body to draw conclusions once all evidence and testimony have been taken from every possible source.

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Susan Lindauer is the author of "Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq," which describes her work as an Asset covering Iraq and Libya, and her arrest on the Patriot Act shortly after requesting to testify before Congress about the CIA's advance warnings about 9/11 and a peace option in Iraq. | Audio interview | Book review