Did the Government Entrap the 9/11 Hijackers?

We've all seen it on television. The defense attorney argues his client was "entrapped". That is, that it wasn't the defendant's idea to commit the crime, but that the police planted the idea and urged him to do it.

Many of us have heard allegations that post-9/11 arrests of suspected Al Qaeda members were based on very thin information. Did you realize that all or virtually all of these arrests occurred due to entrapment? For example:

• PBS' Frontline ran a special report focusing on the the alleged Al Qaeda plot in Lodi, California, which showed -- based upon interviews with top law enforcement officials involved in the case -- that the bust amounted to little more than entrapment and coerced and fabricated confessions from two men who, in fact, had nothing to do with the terrorist group

• The Washington Post ran a story about one alleged threat entitled "Was it a terror sting or entrapment?", showing that the U.S. government lent material support to the wanna-be terrorists, and put violent ideas in their heads

• Raw Story reports that the alleged terrorist group that is alleged to have planned to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower was non-violent before a government informant infiltrated the group and planted violent ideas in their heads

• There are numerous other instances of entrapment of peaceful or mentally incompetent people who are then arrested as "terrorists" (see this, this and this)
  

But surely 9/11 was different, right?. Without doubt, the hijackers were bloodthirsty militant Muslims who, solely due to their crazy beliefs and dark hearts, decided to attack and kill Americans. Right?

Maybe. But let's take a look at the facts before deciding:

• One of al-Qaeda’s top trainers in terrorism and how to hijack airplanes, who was a very close associate of Bin Laden, was an American citizen who was an operative for the FBI, the CIA, and the Army (see also this article from one of Canada's largest newspapers). Indeed, while he was acting as an FBI informant, he smuggled Bin Laden in and out of Afghanistan, helped plan the attacks on US embassies in Africa, and apparently played a pivotal role in planning 9/11

• An Al Qaeda operative very close to one of the top Al Qaeda leaders was a CIA informant

• In an article on the nephew of the supposed key mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Newsday reported in 1995: “FBI officials also are considering a probe of whether the CIA had any relationship with [the nephew], who fought with the CIA-financed mujaheddin in Afghanistan in the 1980s.” A classified FBI file also reportedly indicated that the nephew had been recruited by the local branch of the CIA (pages 220-221)

• The Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here by the Co-Chair of the Joint Inquiry and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham; and see this Newsweek article)

• The president of Pakistan said that one of the masterminds of 9/11 was an MI6 (British intelligence services) agent

• The former president of Italy said that U.S. and Israeli intelligence services were behind the 9/11 attack, and that that fact is widely known by the intelligence services of all of the western nations

• According to intelligence officials in India, Pakistan's military chief of intelligence wired $100,000 to the lead hijacker days before 9/11 (mentioned here in a news roundup). This is especially interesting because: That particular chief of intelligence was appointed to that position with the approval of the U.S., and the intelligence chief had held "consultations" with his U.S. counterparts at the CIA and the Pentagon during the week prior to September 11

• 11 of the hijackers received visas to the U.S. through a consular office where, according to the former head of that office, the CIA routinely insisted that visas be granted to terrorists, even when their visa applications should have been rejected under standard operating procedure

• According to one of France's most reputable newspapers, the CIA met with Bin Laden in an American hospital in Dubai in July 2001

• And several of the hijackers apparently trained at U.S. military bases prior to 9/11

Given the above-described information, and the government's history of entrapping peaceful or mentally incompetent people and placing violent ideas in their heads - and plans and resources in their hands - is it possible that any of the participants in the 9/11 attacks who were not government agents were entrapped by those who were?

Note: I am not arguing that the hijackers' names should be cleared or that they are good people who were victimized. Anyone who took a single life on 9/11 is a murderer and a scoundrel. I am, instead, simply asking who the true masterminds of 9/11 were, and who provided the resources to carry out the plan.

*The nephew was himself one of the planners of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (which is itself interesting, since an FBI informant had infiltrated the cell responsible for that bombing and had offered to stop the 1993 bombing of the world trade center by substituting fake powder for real bombmaking materials, but the FBI allowed the bombing to happen anyway (summary version is free; full version is pay-per-view) (see also this news report)).