A huge milestone in recent history was recognised today in Washington DC as former US president George W. Bush, along with former vice-president Dick Cheney and former secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld as they made the journey back to the Whitehouse for an official state dinner with President Barack Obama.

The 15th anniversary of the decision to plan 9/11 was marked in typical grandeur and style with Beyoncé flying at the request of President Obama to sing the national anthem.

The large banquet attended by key figures from the Pentagon and the CIA represented one of the few occasions the American political and security personnel elite honoured the key people involved in the planning of 9/11, which unofficially began in May 2000.

A military judge halted a hearing at Guantanamo Bay on Monday when two detainees being tried in connection with the September 11 terror attacks said they recognized their translator from a secret CIA prison where they were formerly held.

Moments into the proceedings - the first hearing in six months - Army Col. James L. Pohl recessed court after one defendant, then another, objected to their English-to-Arabic translator, journalists reported from Gitmo.

"The problem is I cannot trust him because he was working at the black site with the CIA, and we know him from there," defendant Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh said soon after Monday morning's hearing began, according to the Miami Herald.

Once Al-Shibh made the allegation, an attorney for co-defendant Walid bin Attash said her client was "visibly shaken" upon seeing the man during Monday's proceedings and raised the same objection.

"My client relayed to me this morning that there is somebody in this courtroom who was participating in his illegal torture," attorney Cheryl Bormann told Col. Pohl, according to Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg.

Monday's hearing was the first for the Gitmo detainees since proceedings took a pause in August, and the first since the Senate Intelligence Committee released an executive summary of its years-in-the-making report on the CIA's use of torture in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Al-Shibh, 42, and Attash, 36, were captured in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and held by the CIA at a secret prison until being transferred to Gitmo in 2006.

Both detainees appear in last year's Senate report as being victims of harsh interrogation techniques deployed by US investigators in an effort to elicit intelligence from suspected terrorists. According to the Senate's analysis, US efforts to coerce detainees into providing information to authorities through torture proved to be largely unsuccessful.

Out of the bowels of a US maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaui, currently serving a life sentence, providentially has shed light on what amounts to the dirtiest secret of the "war on terror".

In over 100 pages of testimony, filed in a federal court in New York earlier this week, Moussaui drops several House of Saud-related bombs. Not least that among leading al-Qaeda donors prior to 9/11 we find former Saudi intel chief Prince Turki al-Faisal (also a former great buddy of Osama bin Laden); notorious former ambassador to the US and failed sponsor of hardcore jihadis in Syria, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, aka Bandar Bush; darling of Western markets (and Rupert Murdoch) Prince al-Waleed bin Talal; and a who's who of Saudi Arabia's top Wahhabi clerics.

None of this is any novelty for those among us who since Afghanistan in the 1980s have been following the extraordinarily murky adventures of Wahhabi-sponsored/derived jihadism.

The information is even more relevant when compared to an upcoming book by Michael Springmann - the former head of the US visa section in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In Visas for al-Qaeda: CIA Handouts that Rocked the World, Springmann essentially details how, "during the 1980s, the CIA recruited and trained Muslim operatives to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Later, the CIA would move those operatives from Afghanistan to the Balkans, and then to Iraq, Libya, and Syria, traveling on illegal US visas. These US-backed and trained fighters would morph into an organization that is synonymous with jihadist terrorism: al-Qaeda."

"The political purpose of these revelations, from Washington's point of view, is to put pressure on the House of Saud to keep pumping their oil surplus. The recent rebound in oil is causing some hysteria in Washington, because it may be linked to the Saudis having second thoughts about their oil price war against, most of all, Russia."

Well, in the beginning there was not even an "organization". By the mid-1980s, "al-Qaeda" was only a database in a computer linked to the communications department of the secretariat of the Islamic Conference. At the time, when Osama bin Laden was nothing but a proxy US agent operating in Peshawar, al-Qaeda's intranet was a good communication system for fighters to exchange code messages. "al-Qaeda" was neither a terrorist organization - an Islamist army - nor personal property of Osama bin Laden.

I remember first reading Sebastian Haffner's Defying Hitler back in 2009. It shook me to the core to read about one man's experience with Nazi Germany, and the persecution he experienced simply trying to maintain his common sense during days of utter darkness. So many lies were taken at face value by his peers, until they finally changed and it became dangerous to speak to them. A tipping point was reached. It became impossible to speak out, despite the fact that social life continued on "as normal". History has recorded what followed. Speech could prove lethal, just as lethal as having the wrong religion, ethnicity, or skin color.

Sebastian's memoirs gave us an insight into what experiencing life under 'the totalitarian beast' looks and smells like. As an American I'd felt the strange change myself, from 9/11 to the expansion of the War on Terror, Homeland Security, and Total Information Awareness. Now 'The Scum' is not the Jew and the Communist, but the "Islamo-fascist".

We knew that a modern "Defying Hitler" would not have a Hitler to defy. It would not have a Bush, or an Obama, or an Osama, to defy. We were always treated to some new terrorist, evil dictator, or conspiracy. There were no symbols, like the Swastika, soaked with the blood and dread of a generation.

At our house, the most interesting conversations take place around the breakfast table before we begin our day's work. The topics range from weird animal behavior to politics and everything in between. (Hmmm... in fact, "weird animal behavior" and "politics" may have more in common than one initially suspects!) Well, anyway, this morning the conversation led to an observation by one of the family members that everything is like I described in one of the chapters of The Wave some 16 years ago, that we can look out the window and see cars passing, birds hopping around, people going about their business as though everything was still the same, but it isn't; and knowing that it isn't the same can have a profound, visceral effect on a person.

In The Wave, I was addressing the issue of becoming aware, via collecting evidence and connecting dots, that our reality may be/must be embedded in some bizarre 'hyperdimensional reality', and that we live our lives similar to the example given by Plato in his story of The Cave. Reading about such things as Platonic realms of ideas is an interesting intellectual exercise, but for me, and many others, it is a visceral experience. Anyway, the passage in question goes as follows:

Little more needs to be said. Watch.

President Eisenhower, in an internal discussion, observed to his staff, and I'm quoting now, "There's a campaign of hatred against us in the Middle East, not by governments, but by the people." The National Security Council discussed that question and said, "Yes, and the reason is, there's a perception in that region that the United States supports status quo governments, which prevent democracy and development and that we do it because of our interests in Middle East oil. Furthermore, it's difficult to counter that perception because it's correct." ¹

While the West has been waging a war on terrorism over the past 13 years, the ordinary Muslim people of Middle Eastern countries have born the brunt of the devastating effects of that war. The war on terror has involved the invasion, occupation and bombing of only Middle Eastern nations. The countries in question - Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Palestine - had no significant standing armies to counter any offensive, and the Western attacks were, by definition, attacks on the civilians of those nations, some of whom took up arms in a futile attempt to resist. In Iraq alone, 2.7 million Iraqi Muslims, most of them civilians, have been slaughtered as a direct or indirect result of the 'war on terror'.²

In the last few days since the mass shootings at the offices of the Parisian satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and a Paris Kosher supermarket which left 17 dead, France has seen massive demonstrations in support of the victims and their families, a catchy but misplaced meme of solidarity with the slogan "Je suis Charlie", and a string of anti-Muslim hate speech and attacks. The head of the French National Police is warning of "further attacks", the government is pushing a hard-line stance in the war on terror, and the country is on red alert. Some are calling it France's 9/11. That could be closer to the truth than they intend to convey by making that particular connection, assuming anyone knows the real culprits behind the 9/11 attacks.

To see why, first let's take a look at the Paris attack, the suspects, and what the media has been telling us about them.

Washington - Saying they felt a duty to reveal what truly transpired on September 11, 2001, numerous high-ranking federal officials announced publicly Tuesday that the United States government was responsible for destroying just the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and half a dozen other government bureaus revealed at a morning press conference that they were responsible for the development, funding, and execution of a plan to take down 1 World Trade Center in New York's Financial District. Describing their mission as an unqualified success, officials noted that the completion of their objective was followed 17 minutes later by a separate suicide attack on 2 World Trade Center by al-Qaeda operatives piloting a hijacked airliner.

"The American people deserve to know that, of the two towers that were brought down in Lower Manhattan on 9/11, only one was the target of the federal government," said CIA spokesman Tom McLennan, emphasizing that their carefully guarded plot was a wholly independent event planned without any foreknowledge of the similar act of terrorism designed by al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden for the same day. "While we freely admit our culpability in striking the first building, let us be clear that we had no hand in destroying the other tower. In fact, that was just as shocking and devastating to us as it was to all American citizens."

"Aside from our controlled implosion of Tower No. 1, we can assure the public that the September 11 attacks were carried out by Islamic radicals as part of their war against the West," McLennan added.

The leaders of Islamic terrorists could be under the direct influence of NATO and Western powers using their movements to threaten Russia's territorial integrity, says a former general of Russian military intelligence service.

"There are some grounds to suspect that American and British special services could support the Islamic extremists in order to target the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation," Lieutenant-General Nikolai Pushkaryov, formerly of the Central Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff said in an interview with the RIA-Novosti news agency. "The top of these movements can be under the influence of NATO agents," he added.

The general also commented on the statement by the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, who promised to destroy any Islamic terrorist who voiced threats against Russia. Kadyrov also told reporters that Chechen special services intended to hunt down and kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - the head of the Islamic State group (also known as ISIL and ISIS), adding that this man had been recruited to work for the US by General David Petraeus, the former director of the CIA, and former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Back then, Kadyrov claimed the Islamic State "was acting on orders from the West and Europe."