Al-Muteiri was not able to join the other hijackers in time for those attacks, the date of which had been pushed forward, the group said without elaborating.

"The (Sept. 11) operation was brought forward for some circumstances that brother Mohamed Atta explained to the general leadership, through brother Ramzi Binalshibh, God free him," the statement added.

Binalshibh, suspected of coordinating the 9/11 attacks, was arrested in 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan. He was once a roommate with Atta, the leader of the September attacks and the hijacker of American Airlines Flight 11 which crashed into the World Trade Center's north tower.

In June 2004, Al-Muteiri was one of four militants killed by Saudi forces during a raid on a residential compound for foreign companies in the oil city of Khobar. The attack killed 22 civilians, including several Westerners.

In its statement, Al Qaeda said it would publish a video of that attack and described the militants as "martyrs." The group has used the Web site for posting statements in the past.

The group's Internet posting also absolved Zacarias Moussaoui of any role in the attacks, according to The Associated Press. "Brother Zacarias Moussaoui had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, as Sheik Abi Abdullah (bin Laden) mentioned in his last tape," the group's statement said, referring to a May 24 audiotape, the AP reported.
Another Saudi suspected

U.S. investigators have said they believe Mohammed al-Qahtani, another Saudi, was tapped by al Qaeda to be the 20th hijacker.

According to Time magazine, Atta was waiting for al-Qahtani outside the airport in Orlando, Florida, in August 2001, when an immigration officer detained al-Qahtani and denied him entry to the United States.

Al-Qahtani was captured in Afghanistan four months later and is being held at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Nineteen men commandeered four commercial airliners on September 11, 2001, piloting two into the World Trade Towers and one into the Pentagon. A fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

With the exception of that flight, each plane was hijacked by five men.

Some officials have speculated that al-Qahtani may have been the missing hijacker on Flight 93. Initially, Moussaoui was believed to have had that role, one which he had claimed.

Moussaoui pleaded guilty last year to terrorism conspiracy and is the only person convicted in the United States for having a role in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Last month, Moussaoui recanted the guilty plea, calling it a "complete fabrication," and explained that "solitary confinement made me hostile toward everyone, and I began taking extreme positions to fight the system." (Full story)

But the judge in the case said Moussaoui's request to set aside his guilty plea was "too late" under federal rules and must be rejected.

He was spared the death penalty but sentenced to six life sentences, to run as two consecutive life terms, in the federal supermax prison at Florence, Colorado.

Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks.

Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told "Fox News Sunday" he had not seen the autopsy results.

Meanwhile, Iran denied it helped American forces track al-Zarqawi down and kill him. The Islamic republic welcomed his death, though, because it has close ties to the Shiite parties now dominating Iraq's government, which al-Zarqawi sought to topple.

"It is natural that we, like the Iraqi people, are happy from this occurrence," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said. "This doesn't mean that we cooperated with the U.S. in getting him. We had no exchange of intelligence with the U.S. at all (on this)."

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad, said Saturday the decision to fly in forensic experts was made shortly after al-Zarqawi's death. The airstrike also killed five others, including al-Zarqawi's spiritual adviser, Sheik Abdul-Rahman.

"I think if we don't do a full autopsy then that might irresponsible on our part," Caldwell said. "I think we sort of owe that just for this reason: How did he actually die?"

He said the U.S. government thought it was important enough "that we grabbed two people in the last 48 hours and told them pack up and move to Iraq."

An Iraqi man raised questions about al-Zarqawi's death, telling AP Television News that he saw U.S. soldiers after the airstrike beating an injured man resembling the dead terrorist until blood flowed from his nose.

Casey said the claim was "baloney."

"He died while American soldiers were attempting to save his life," Casey told "Fox News Sunday." "So the idea that there were people beating him is ludicrous."

The Iraqi, identified only as Mohammed, said he lives near the house where al-Zarqawi was killed. He said residents put a bearded man in an ambulance before U.S. forces arrived.

"When the Americans arrived they took him out of the ambulance, they beat him on his stomach and wrapped his head with his dishdasha, then they stomped on his stomach and his chest until he died and blood came out of his nose," Mohammed said, without saying how he knew the man was dead.

A dishdasha is a traditional Arab robe.

A similar account in The Washington Post identified the man as Ahmed Mohammed.

No other witnesses have come forward to corroborate the account. U.S. officials have only said al-Zarqawi mumbled and tried to roll off a stretcher before dying.

In announcing al-Zarqawi's death, the U.S. military said Thursday he was killed outright when two 500-pound bombs were dropped on his hideout. On Friday, the military said al-Zarqawi survived the bombing, which ripped a crater in the date-palm forest surrounding the house just outside Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

"It's not going to be 100 percent accurate all the time, but the first reports are going to be a little confused. There are going to be some conflicting stories," Caldwell said, adding that the military should have an accurate chronology ready by Monday.

He said Iraqi police reached the scene first and found the 39-year-old al-Zarqawi alive.

"The coalition forces arrived on the scene. The Iraqi police were there. They in fact saw a person on a stretcher. They moved to that person immediately. A medical person started immediately applying first aid to that person. Another person was trying to talk to that person, to try to identify who this was. They were trying to talk to him and ask him who he was," Caldwell said.

The airstrike killed two other men, two women and girl between the ages of 5 and 7 who were in the house.

AP footage of the scene showed a wide swath of destruction.

Debris--shoes, sandals, a woman's slip--was scattered over concrete blocks and twisted metal. Trees were ripped from their roots. Charred dresses, torn blankets, thin sponge mattresses and pillows were in the crater blasted by the bombs. A cooling unit and part of a washing machine also were in the area.

Lt. Col. Thomas Fisher of the 1st Battalion, 68th Armored Cavalry said his men showed up at the site about five minutes after the blast and cordoned it off. He said a patrol was in the area already.

"We didn't know it was Zarqawi, we just knew it was a time-sensitive target," he said at the scene early Saturday. "We suspected who it was."

Contributing: AP reporter Ryan Lenz.

Copyright 2006 Associated Press.

In a two-page report, The Observer said that although there was no corroboration of the claims that the badly-injured Zarqawi was beaten to death, revelations of revenge killings by US troops "means it cannot be discounted".

It quoted one man as saying US soldiers pulled a man resembling Zarqawi from an ambulance where locals had placed him, wrapped his traditional Arab robe, the dishdasha, around his head and "battered him severely till he died".

But General Casey said, "We've already gone back and looked at it. Our soldiers who came on the scene found him being put in an ambulance by Iraqi police, they took him off, rendered first aid, and only then expired."

The US is prepared for retaliation by Al Qaeda, in Iraq about Internet threats from the group following last week's assassination of Zarqawi.

The Internet message attributed to Al Qaeda in Iraq threatened "great operations to shake the enemy" following Zarqawi's death.

Jordan's parliament and families of victims, killed in last year's Amman hotel bombings claimed by Zarqawi yesterday condemned four Islamist MPs for presenting their condolences to his family in Jordan.

"We strongly denounce and condemn MPs Ibrahim Mashukhi, Mohammed Abu Fares, Ali Abu Sukkar and Jaafar Horani... for presenting their condolences for the so-called martyr," the families said in a statement.

The parliament also blasted the Islamist deputies "for presenting condolences to a terrorist." It said they were "very angry ... and cannot forgive or be silent".

Iran is "happy" over the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda leader in Iraq, the foreign ministry said yesterday.

"Zarqawi's death sparked joy among Iraqis, which shows he was hated by the Iraqi people. We are also happy about what happened," ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said.

Asefi also emphasised that Iran "had no cooperation with the Americans in providing intelligence on Zarqawi."

Meanwhile, strike on Zarqawi yielded a treasure trove of vital intelligence information, Iraq's national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie told US television yesterday.

"We found a lot of material in that place. We found diaries with some telephone numbers, computers, and ... there was a database in that computer," he said.

"There were a lot of information ... Zarqawi used to carry with him," he said.

"It was very useful, not only to capture Zarqawi and get him out of the way of the Iraqi people, because he's the number one enemy of the Iraqi people. It was the value of the information we got with him," said Rubaie, who said that the information was used to carry out "a lot of raids immediately after we got Zarqawi."

"We got quite a few of not only Zarqawi but others now in the organisation," he said.

"The day of vengeance is near and your strong towers in the Green Zone will not protect you," Abu Hamza al-Muhajir said in a website statement, whose authenticity could not be verified.

"You will see what we have in store for you because of your betrayal and apostasy. Our swords are poised above your necks," the statement said.

The Al-Qaida in Iraq on Monday named a new leader to succeed al-Zarqawi, who was killed last Wednesday.

"The Shura Council of al-Qaida in Iraq unanimously agreed to appoint Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Muhajir as the successor of Sheikh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," said a statement posted on a website.

Zarqawi promised an international rout: by attacking UN headquarters in Baghdad, he succeeded in making United Nations' agencies, NGOs, and businessmen flee Iraq.

Zarqawi promised a ruthless war against the American Army. Even if his participation from a military point of view was undoubtedly less decisive than he claimed - most operations being conducted by Iraqi rebels, ex-Saddamists, Islamists or Sunni villagers - the result is there: no American patrol can hope to leave its base in Baghdad or in the Sunni triangle without being harassed, often to deadly effect.

Zarqawi finally and above all - it's what differentiated him from an Osama bin Laden at war against the West and Saudi Arabia - promised blood and tears to the Shiites, to the Kurds, and a civil war in Iraq: it is there.

Certainly Iraqis have not gone down to the streets, Kalashnikov in hand, in their masses to kill their neighbors.

But Sunni and Shiite militias make daily assassinations, population transfers have begun, and a climate of inter-community distrust - even hatred - sets Iraq ablaze.

This civil war, larval since 2004, more violent since spring 2006, is Zarqawi's principal victory. He has imposed on Iraqis, including the Sunni guerrilla, this absolute hatred of Shiites. He has planted a much more disquieting seed for the Washington and Baghdad governments than the deaths of soldiers and police.

His disappearance consequently changes nothing a priori about the Iraqi challenge. Certainly, we must wait to see who will take over from him. It is necessary above all to resolve the basic questions in Iraq: those of sovereignty and governance, American occupation, Iranian involvement, the destruction of the economy, the Islamization of society.

For Bush, any progress at the moment is critical. Iraq has been at the heart of his political troubles, alienating voters weary of the war, unsettling congressional allies facing reelection this fall, and souring the public mood toward other initiatives by the administration. Even Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove's legal problems stemmed from Iraq and the initial White House effort to justify the decision to invade.

With Zarqawi dead, a new Baghdad government in place and Rove freed from prosecutor's cross hairs, the White House hopes it can pivot to a new stage in which it is no longer on the defensive. In recent weeks, under new Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten, the White House has tried to do more to set an agenda, moving aggressively into the immigration debate and agreeing to join direct talks with Iran over its nuclear program under certain conditions.

"There's a sense of motion and energy and progress on different fronts," said Peter H. Wehner, White House director of strategic initiatives. "There's more of a sense that we're shaping events, rather than being controlled by them."

The spate of positive developments may have arrested the president's months-long slide in opinion polls, at least for now. Bush's approval rating has risen from a low of 31 percent in May to 38 percent this week, according to a USA Today-Gallup poll. Zarqawi's death seems to have somewhat shored up confidence in the prospects for victory in Iraq, with 48 percent now believing the United States will win, compared with 39 percent in April. Still, a CBS News weekend poll with a smaller sample showed Bush's approval rating slipping in the past month from 35 percent to 33 percent.

"When you get into these ruts, you're always looking for anything to bounce you out and get you back on track," said Joel P. Johnson, a White House adviser to President Bill Clinton during difficult times. "They've been in a rut for so long that anything that serves to pull them back onto the road has got to feel pretty good for them. The real question is, does it last a week or is it a real sign of some sort of steadying of the process?"

The aftermath of the capture of Saddam Hussein demonstrated how transitory a single moment of victory can be. Bush got a four-point bump in Washington Post-ABC News polling after Hussein was found in December 2003, but it lasted about two months. Recognizing that, Bush orchestrated a flurry of activity on Iraq in the past few days -- including his secret trip, a Camp David war cabinet meeting and a briefing blitz on Capitol Hill -- to demonstrate that progress in Iraq means more than Zarqawi's death.

Analysts agree that after two weak Iraqi prime ministers, Bush finally has a potentially strong partner in the newly installed Nouri al-Maliki, whom he met for the first time yesterday. But the list of challenges still confronting them is daunting: sectarian strife, inadequate electricity, private militias, slow police training and so on.

"Is the insurgency defeated? No. Has it had a great reversal? Yes," said Anthony Cordesman, who studies Iraq at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "When you talk to people in Iraq on a background basis, U.S. or Iraqi, they always tell you this is going to take at least two more years to play out. That doesn't mean there isn't progress, but progress is relative."

Bush has been careful to highlight publicly the hurdles ahead and to warn that the war is nowhere near over. But for the first time this year, aides sound more upbeat about their chances of reassuring the public about the future and reversing the trajectory of the problem-plagued White House. The sight of Bush in Baghdad twinned with the news that Rove had been cleared shot a jolt of relief and optimism through the building.

"This is not a crowd that rides the highs and lows. This is a team that has been through extraordinary moments of history," said White House communications director Nicolle Wallace. "Having said that, it certainly creates momentum and enhances the confidence of the team when you can point to" examples of progress.

Rove's legal jeopardy had hung over the White House for many months as his colleagues contemplated life in the West Wing without him. Some Republican advisers outside the White House had long worried that Rove's problems were distracting him and had led to setbacks that might have been avoided if he were more fully engaged, such as the failed Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers or the battle over the Dubai port deal.

As part of Bolten's White House shakeup, Rove was relieved of day-to-day policy management duties to enable him to focus more on broader strategy and the midterm congressional elections.

Fellow Bush aides vigorously denied for months that Rove was distracted or was in any way responsible for the president's rocky road. But yesterday, they said he will clearly be more valuable now that the legal cloud has lifted.

"The other team thought they'd sacked the quarterback, and even if he came back he'd limp anyway," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a Rove confidant, who had lunch with him yesterday. "Now he's back -- no limp." Switching metaphors, Norquist compared Rove to a bull that has been poked but not killed. "Not only is he in fine fettle, not only is he not wounded, he's pricked enough to be angry."

Rove tried to play down his own development. Having flown back to Washington on Monday night from a New Hampshire speech accusing Democrats of wanting to cut and run in Iraq, he showed up at the White House in time to run yesterday's 7:30 a.m. senior staff meeting, since Bolten was in Iraq with Bush.

As he went around the table soliciting updates on various issues, he made no mention of his legal case, nor did anyone else, according to several people in the room. Norquist said it did not come up during their lunch in the White House mess, either, as they discussed property rights. But Norquist said he did notice aides offering congratulations to Rove as they walked through the halls of the building.

Whether or not he had been distracted before, Rove can focus his attention entirely on the fall midterm elections, which are critical to the remainder of Bush's presidency. Norquist said he believes that after beating his legal woes, Rove will want to demonstrate that he is still "the toughest guy on the block."

If Republicans hold onto the House and Senate, Bush aides figure they have another chance to advance key priorities and shape the president's legacy. If Democrats win the House, the final two years of Bush's administration could be spent fighting rear-guard actions.

The White House took heart from the narrow victory of Brian Bilbray in a California special election to fill the House seat of fellow Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who resigned after pleading guilty to taking $2.4 million in bribes. But it required enormous resources in a traditionally GOP-friendly district, and Republicans presumably need Bush to be performing better with the public to avoid significant losses. Even with his latest bounce, a standard-bearer in the high thirties is not much of an asset.

So the White House is taking a long view, both at home and in Iraq, betting that improvement will continue and trying not to get lost in the news of the moment, good or bad.

Zarqawi: Pentagon psy-op and intelligence asset

What is a well-established (and deliberately unaddressed) fact is that the United States government and US-connected intelligence agencies created Islamic "terrorism." The US and its allies have continued to use and guide terrorist cells, as well as fill worldwide media with "terrorism" propaganda.

See, "Who is Osama bin Laden?" and "Al-Qaeda: the database"

As pointed out by Michel Chossodovsky in "The Anglo-American War of Terror: An Overview", the continuing US-led war of conquest rests upon a labyrinth of deceptions, of which "Zarqawi" is one:

"One of the main objectives of war propaganda is to 'fabricate an enemy.' As anti-war sentiment grows and the political legitimacy of the Bush administration falters, doubts regarding the existence of this illusive 'outside enemy' must be dispelled.

"Propaganda purports not only to drown the truth but also to 'kill the evidence' on how this 'outside enemy,' namely Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda was fabricated and transformed into 'Enemy Number One.'"

With the Zarqawi hit, a bit more of this evidence has been killed. Literally.

Zarqawi, "Bush's man in Iraq" is not just a manipulated Anglo-American intelligence asset, but a clumsy Pentagon psychological operation. The legend of the "shadowy terror mastermind" responsible for virtually every act of violence in Iraq and beyond has morphed and changed over the years. In a bizarre recent twist (perhaps paving the way for last week's finale), Zarqawi, the "great terrorist mastermind," was depicted as an incompetent; an object of ridicule lacking the knowledge to properly handle an automatic weapon (leading to questions about the competence of US propaganda apparatus). Zarqawi has been reported dead more than once, and now he is dead again, deader than ever.

The definitive analysis, "Who is Musab al Zarqawi?" (recently updated to include analysis of the purported Zarqawi hit), chronicles the entire Zarqawi operation from its inception. In this piece, Chossudovsky reveals:

" . . . a recent Washington Post article provides details on leaked internal military documents which confirm the existence of a PSYOP 'Zarqawi program' at the Pentagon. (WP. 10 April 2006 ) The latter consists in creating a 'Zarqawi Legend' by feeding disinformation into the news chain:

"The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work . . ." (WP . 10 April 2006, further details).

"In this regard, the senior commander entrusted with Pentagon's PSYOP operation is General Kimmitt who now occupies the position of senior planner at US Central Command (USCENTCOM), responsible for directing operations in Iraq and the Middle East confirms that

'There was clearly an information campaign to raise the public awareness of who Zarqawi was, primarily for the Iraqi audience but also with the international audience.'

"A goal of the campaign was to drive a wedge into the insurgency by emphasizing Zarqawi's terrorist acts and foreign origin, said officers familiar with the program. 'Through aggressive Strategic Communications, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi now represents: Terrorism in Iraq/Foreign Fighters in Iraq/Suffering of Iraqi People (Infrastructure Attacks)/Denial of Iraqi Aspirations,' the same briefing asserts . . . (Ibid)'"

Once it was exposed, this psy-op had to be shut down in the most opportune and timely fashion, obliterating the trail behind an explosive final blast of propaganda.

Bush administration's final lies

The Bush administration's mighty Wurlitzer is in overdrive, pushing again to inflate Bush's macho image, distract attention from unfolding scandals (that won't go away) and continuing losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. In an election year, Bush-Rove is seeking to boost lowest-ever poll numbers, and silence political opposition, with help from both corporate media and "alternative" media. News broadcasts continue to show self-congratulatory Bush White House players gloating about its glorious hunt for Islamic "quarry," and posturing over photos of the alleged Zarqawi corpse.

As Chossudovsky notes, the spin is obvious and transparent:

"The Bush administration is already announcing 'a post-Zarqawi era,' suggesting that with the death of its presumed leader, the 'insurgency' is in the process of being defeated. Zarqawi's death was an opportunity for the new government to 'turn the tide,' Bush said. 'The ideology of terror has lost one of its most visible and aggressive leaders.'

"The killing of Zarqawi has occurred at a time when Bush's public support is at an all time low, as confirmed by the opinion polls. In a press conference at the White House, Bush underscored the role of Zarqawi as 'commanders of the terrorist movement in Iraq. He led a campaign of car bombings, assassinations and suicide attacks that has taken the lives of many American forces and thousands of innocent Iraqis. Osama bin Laden called this Jordanian terrorist the prince of Al Qaida in Iraq. He called on the terrorists around the world to listen to him and obey him.'
"'Now Zarqawi has met his end and this violent man will never murder again,' suggesting that the US has from now on the upper hand in Iraq. 'Zarqawi's death is a severe blow to Al Qaida. It's a victory in the global war on terror, and it is an opportunity for Iraq's new government to turn the tide of this struggle.'"

More importantly: "Zarqawi's death has also served as a convenient cover-up of the extensive war crimes committed by coalition forces in Iraq. The news coverage suggests that Zarqawi, rather than coalition forces, are responsible for countless atrocities and civilian deaths. In the words of Don Rumsfeld, the man who led the criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq: 'I think arguably, over the last several years no single person on this planet has had the blood of more innocent man, women and children on his hands than Zarqawi.'"

(In fact, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and the other murderers of the Bush administration have more blood on their hands than any US presidency in history. They know it. They like it.)

The Bush administration has momentarily succeeded in one respect: hapless congressional Democrats and Left intellectuals (who have enthusiastically supported the "war on terrorism") have been maneuvered and cowed into congratulating Bush's "success," and echoing the administration's lies verbatim. They, along with a large portion of the American sheeple, still jump through the time-honored 9/11 propaganda hoops in Pavlovian fashion, each time Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the New York Times and Fox News, say "jump." But even this trick has lost its power. Even mainstream reports have noted that any momentary popularity bump for Bush and his war have been "fleeting" at best.

No psychological operation can hide the fact that the Bush administration and its neocon "plan" has failed in catastrophic fashion: failed to do the job it was installed into power to do; failed to conquer Central Asia and the Middle East; failed to secure and control cheap oil; failed to gain geopolitical advantage over superpower rivals. In fact, Bush-Cheney has obliterated what little international respect the New World Order once believed it commanded.

The Zarqawi "crescendo" signals what is likely the beginning of a final chapter in the Bush administration's "war on terror" fiction, as the administration itself faces its own fall. In an attempt to save face, the mentally ill Bush and his criminals know they must act now to create the illusion of victory, even as their violent, criminal acts have left the New World Order, and the entire world, in flames.
Could a spectacular pursuit and execution of "Osama bin Laden" be far behind?

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In fact, the nine-year-old group, whose 27 founders included Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, among at least half a dozen of the most powerful hawks in the George W. Bush administration's first term, has been inactive since January 2005, when it issued the last of its "statements", an appeal to significantly increase the size of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to cope with the growing demands of the kind of "Pax Americana" it had done so much to promote.

As a platform for the three-part coalition that was most enthusiastic about war in Iraq -- aggressive nationalists like Cheney, Christian Zionists of the religious Right, and Israel-centred neo-conservatives -- PNAC actually began breaking down shortly after the Iraq invasion.

It was then that the group's predominantly neo-conservative leadership -- Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, PNAC director Gary Schmitt, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace analyst Robert Kagan -- began attacking Rumsfeld, in particular, for failing to deploy enough troops to pacify the country and launch a true nation-building exercise, as in post-World War II Germany and Japan.

It was the first of a number of policy splits that, along with the deepening quagmire in Iraq itself, have debilitated the hawks, forcing neo-conservatives in the group to reach out to liberal interventionists with whom they sponsored a series of joint statements extolling the virtues of nation-building and a larger army, or calling for a tougher U.S. stance toward Russia and China.

PNAC was launched by Kristol and Kagan in 1997, shortly after their publication of an article in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy", in which they called for Washington to exercise "benevolent global hegemony" to be sustained "as far into the future as possible".

While critical of then President Bill Clinton, the article was directed more against a Republican Congress which, in their view, had grown increasingly isolationist, particularly after the precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Somalia in 1994 and strong Republican opposition to intervention in the Balkans against Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

It was in this spirit that the two co-founded PNAC, whose charter was signed by leading neo-conservatives, including Cheney's future chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby; Rumsfeld's future deputy, Paul Wolfowitz; Bush's future top Middle East aide, Elliott Abrams; his future ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad; Rumsfeld's future top international security official, Peter Rodman; American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow and neo-cons impresario Richard Perle, and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; as well as Cheney and Rumsfeld themselves.

The charter's few specifics, as well as follow-up reports published by PNAC -- "Rebuilding America's Defenses" and "Present Dangers", both published in 2000 to influence the foreign policy debate during the presidential campaign that year -- were based to a great extent on an infamous "Defense Planning Guidance" (DPG) draft produced under Cheney when he served as secretary of defence under President George H.W. Bush in 1992.

That paper, which was developed by then-Undersecretary of Defence Wolfowitz, Libby, Khalilzad, and the current deputy national security adviser, J.D. Crouch, with assistance from Perle and other like-minded defence specialists, called for the "benevolent domination by one power" (the U.S.) to replace "collective internationalism" and for Washington to ensure that domination, particularly in Eurasia, in order to prevent the emergence, by confrontation if necessary, of any possible regional or global rival.

It was PNAC's role to sustain and propagate these ideas through its reports, its periodic letters and statements signed by right-wing notables, and a steady flow of opinion-pieces and essays, that acted as part of a larger neo-conservative "echo chamber" that included Kristol's Weekly Standard, Fox News, the Washington Times, and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, to frame debates in official Washington and the mainstream media.

In this sense, PNAC was more of a "letter-head organisation" that acted more as a mechanism for developing consensus on issues among different political forces -- in its case, Republican hawks -- and then pushing them in public, than as a think tank.

Indeed, the fact that several of its half-a-dozen staff members -- most recently, PNAC director Schmitt -- have taken posts at the much-larger AEI located just five floors above PNAC's offices helps illustrate the incestuous nature of the larger network. Nonetheless, PNAC was the first to call publicly (in 1998) for Washington to pursue "regime change" in Iraq by military means in conjunction with the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi, who would later play a key role in the propaganda campaign against Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

But perhaps its most notable letter was sent to Bush Sep. 20, 2001, just nine days after the 9/11 attacks. In addition to calling for the ouster of the Taliban and war on al Qaeda, the letter called for waging a broader and more ambitious "war on terrorism" that would include cutting off the Palestinian Authority under Yassir Arafat, taking on Hezbollah, threatening Syria and Iran and, most importantly, ousting Hussein regardless of his relationship to the attacks or al Qaeda.

"It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States," it said. "But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."

The letter was signed by 38 members of the predominantly neo-conservative Washington echo chamber, many of whom -- especially Kristol, Kagan, Defence Policy Board members Perle, Woolsey, Eliot Cohen, Centre for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney, former Education Secretary William Bennett, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, and Foundation for the Defence of Democracies director Clifford May --would emerge, along with Woolsey, as the most ubiquitous champions of war with Iraq outside the administration.

Seven months later, PNAC issued another letter signed by many of the same people urging Bush to step up preparations for war with Iraq, sever all ties to the Palestinian Authority under Arafat and give full backing to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's efforts to crush the Palestinian intifada.

"Israel's fight against terrorism is our fight. Israel's victory is an important part of our victory," the letter noted. "For reasons both moral and strategic, we need to stand with Israel in its fight against terrorism." Bush complied two months later.

That period -- Sep. 20, 2001, to the run-up to the Iraq war in early 2003 -- marked the high-water mark of PNAC's existence. Since then, things have generally gone downhill, as the hawks they represented, including the group's dominant neo-conservatives, have fallen prey to internal disagreements: over Rumsfeld's stewardship of Iraq and the Pentagon; over the wisdom of democratic "transformation" in the Arab Middle East; over Sharon's Gaza disengagement plan; over China; and even over the latest administration moves on Iran.

All of which has made it far more difficult to forge consensus -- and compose letters -- in these areas.

Copyright © 2006 IPS-Inter Press Service