September 11, 2001

September 11, 2001 - September, 2011

2011-09-01T15:49:00.000-07:00

September 11, 2001

"If you tell a lie long enough, loud enough and often enough, the people will believe it. The secret to get someone to believe a lie is constant repetition. Just tell it over, and over, and over again"

Adolph Hitler

"See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda"

George W. Bush

Before he was assassinated by his own government, John F Kennedy went out of his way to warn the American citizenry about the dangers of secret societies working deep within government.

JFK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxnpujfanUM&feature=related

After all we now know, after all we have experienced during the past ten years, the real conspiracy crazies are those who still think the attacks on September 11, 2001 were carried out by a state-less Islamic terrorist group hidden somewhere up in the desolate mountains of Afghanistan. The evidence is there (and a lot of it), the intent is clearly there (for those who read), the suspects/beneficiaries are well known to us all (for those who can put one and one together). The attacks on September 11, 2001 were carried out by elements within the US government with the support special interests groups, well placed individuals and foreign intelligence agencies; namely that of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In my opinion, and in the opinions of many other observers, the then new owner of the World Trade Center Larry Silverstein, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney were most probably some of the well placed individuals I mentioned.

The operation in question was the work of covert international special operations teams and it may have been inspired and/or masterminded by influential political think tanks such as the well known Council on Foreign Relations (http://www.cfr.org/) or the now infamous Project For The New American Century (http://www.newamericancentury.org/).

The operation's immediate intent was to force the US government's hand and to shock the public into full compliance.

We may never know the details of who planned the operation and how it was carried out. But it is obvious that the primary purpose of the operation was to draw Western forces into the Middle East, Africa and Central Asian for the purpose of destabilizing targeted nations within those regions and establishing a permanent Western military presence there. This ambitious operation had several very important long-term geostrategic goals.

The geostrategic goals of the "war on terror" are outlined below:

Exploit existing regional oil/gas reserves at a crucial time in history when existing energy reserves under Western control are depleting.
Attempt to enter Central Asia where immense natural wealth (including a lucrative opium trade) exits and in doing so also check Russian, Chinese and Iranian growth.
Protect the Zionist state from nations like Iraq, Syria and Iran, nations that do not or did not adhere to the current global system and are thus a threat to the Zionist state and the regional ambitions of the Western alliance.
Militarily ensure that Iran never becomes a regional superpower to threaten Western, Arabian and Zionist ambitions in the region.
Isolate/surround the Russian Federation and make China's gargantuan economy dependent on Western controlled energy resources and other assets.
Ensure the Western alliance's political, economic and military primacy well into the twenty-first century.

For a deeper geopolitical perspective on this topic please read Zbigniew Brzezinski's now famous work titled - The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. This publication by one of America's premier foreign policy thinkers is a must read for it places the reader in the mindset of high level policy makers in Washington. I have provided a commentary on Brzezinski's work on this page. Another troubling 1990s publication is called - Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? Written by a US military officer this work more-or-less pleads for a tough military approach to Washington's global matters within the twenty-first century; it's a kill or be killed approach rooted in post-Soviet 1990s.

Ten years after the attacks on September 11, 2001 the aforementioned geopolitical agendas and the kill or be killed attitudes are still being maintained in Washington. The campaign to wrestle the twenty-first century from emerging global powers are being diligently worked on - with varying degrees of success. There have been some serious setbacks in their campaign due to the timely rise of Russian political power in Eurasia in recent years. And China also seems not to be too far down the road to begin challenging Washington's global hegemony as well. Nevertheless, the attacks on September 11, 2011 provided the convenient pretext, the badly needed excuse, to embark on this massive long term global campaign.

I tell freedom loving Americans the following:

Majority of terrorists that carried out the attacks were of Saudi Arabian decent (and the Lebanese in the terror group may have had ties to the Mossad); Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda are/were reportedly based in Pakistan; all Islamic terrorists from Bosnia to Chechnya to Kashmir have connections to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia; Islamic fundamentalist schools (madrasas) are established and funded across the world by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan... So, knowing that Islamic fanaticism and terrorism is intimately and directly tied to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (both being close US allies), why did the US attack and destroy Iraq and Afghanistan instead? Why was Libya recently destroyed instead? Why is the US trying to provoke a war with Iran and Syria instead? Faced with reportedly a grave Islamic threat around the world, why is the US diligently trying to undermine the Russian Federation throughout Eurasia instead?

Thus far, none of the Chinese-made-American-flag-waving-pseudo-American-patriots have been able to give me a sensible answer to these questions. The answers, however, are obvious to those who understand the nature of international relations and the character of the current global order spearheaded by Washington.

Since we all know that the world's two most violent Islamic nations have been Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, how have these nations been (in the case of Pakistan, until recently) America's most important allies in the "fight against terrorism"? From Bosnia to Chechnya, from Azerbaijan to Afghanistan, from the Kashmir to western China, Islamic terrorism has only benefited the interests of Washington DC, London, Tel Aviv and friends.

Unlike many others that choose to delve in extreme theories regarding who carried out the attacks and how (in many cases to actually discredit the growing 9/11 truth movement), I am not claiming to know exactly who carried-out the operation or precisely how they were executed. The only thing I'm absolutely confident about is that the government's version of the events in questions reads like an outlandish fairytale made for naive children. Knowing the intellectual caliber of the American sheeple today, this should not be a surprise for anyone.

The official story about the most important event in modern American history simply does not hold up to even the slightest scrutiny. While I do not claim to know who exactly ordered the operation or how it was exactly carried out, I do know with a high degree of certainty that certain elements working within the US government and several of its foreign affiliates had a hand in what occurred.

When confronted with evidence suggesting government involvement, many Americans today react angrily by saying - the government would never do such a horrible thing to its citizenry! And when provided with an abundance of evidence that is available, most end up meekly asking - why would they do such a thing?

Due to America's sub-par educational system and the dumbing down of society through controlled news, pop culture and a vast array of mind-numbing entertainment, it is sad that the American public today is utterly incapable of critical thinking, totally incapable of understanding the complex intricacies of superpower politics and totally incapable of understanding international relations.

As horrible as this may sound, in the grand geopolitical scheme of things the killing of several thousand innocent Americans and the bringing down some problematic and unprofitable structures in downtown Manhattan was a small price to pay to secure trillions of dollars in war spending and to shock the American public into political compliance for at least a generation or two - which, as a matter of fact, is approximately how long the "war on terror" is expected to last.

Those who honestly think elements within the US government are not capable of doing such a thing simply do not understand the post-World War Two nature of the American empire. They also do not understand who runs the political show in Washington, they do not understand how the empire is run and they do not understand the nature of the political world they live in.

For the special interests in charge of running the Western alliance/the American empire/the corporatocracy known as the United States of America, several thousand American lives is a very small price to pay for the ability to turn the American public violently against Muslims; for the ability to allow Israel to carry-our unhindered atrocities against its Arab subjects; for the ability to allow American troops to invade innocent yet resource wealthy nations; for the ability to allow the American government to militarily target Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran; for the ability to allow American troops to set up bases throughout Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East, Caucasus and Persian Gulf...

Several thousand innocent American lives and some property damage in downtown Manhattan is a very small price to pay for the ability to secure the unquestioned provision of trillions of dollars from American tax payers... It is a very small price to pay for the ability to get their hands on trillions of dollars of wealthy around the world... It a very small price to pay for the ability to carry-out drastic agendas against potential global competitors... It is a very small price to pay for being able to finally clamp down on American freedoms which had become a problem for the nation's political and financial elite...

In short, the events of September 11 2001 was a very small price to pay for embarking on an long term project to achieve global supremacy before nations such as Russia and China rose to challenge them. Whether or not they have accomplished what the set out to accomplish some tens years ago is altogether another story.

A better question Americans should be asking themselves is this: Would the American public have supported what the US military and government has been doing around the world in recent years had there not been a 9/11?

The key to understand the horrible event that changed the world forever essentially lies in the simple question I just asked.

I want to commemorate the deaths of nearly three thousand innocent Americans on September 11, 2001 and the hundreds of thousands of deaths that have taken place around the world as a result of the "war on terror" by providing the reader with the following essays, new articles, interviews and documentaries.

I have included on this page perhaps one of the most important yet least known interviews in recent times and one that they rather you not pay too much attention to. Due to the many faked audio messages and video footage attributed to Osama Bin-Laden during the past ten years not many people in America today know that Osama Bin Laden never took responsibility for the attacks he was said to be so proud of. Bin-Laden gave an interview to a Pakistani newspaper reporter soon after the events of September 11, 2001. In it he unequivocally denied having played any role in the attacks. In fact, Bin-Laden was never indicted by the US government for the attacks in question. Bin-Laden had made some very interesting comments in the interview that needs a closer look now that they "officially" killed him. Bin-Laden's death sometime during early-mid 2000s was kept a secret to keep the very lucrative global rampage known as "war on terror" alive. Now that Bin-Laden has been killed again, we can all expect to be provided with yet another "Hitler" that will need to be destroyed by the forces of freedom and democracy.

The following blog entry discusses the alleged assassination of Osama Bin-Laden:

The staged assassination in Pakistan, Washington finally closing the chapter on the Osama Bin Laden fairytale: http://theriseofrussia.blogspot.com/2011/05/osama-bin-laden-assassination-cia.html

Speaking of Bin-Laden: There are two plausible theories regarding who or what he was.

1) he was directly working for Western special operations in conjunction with Saudi Arabian, Pakistani and/or Israeli intelligence agencies

2) he had become an unwitting patsy (a vulnerable scapegoat that was being manipulated/exploited indirectly by special services) of the Western alliance and Saudi Arabian, Pakistani and/or Israeli intelligence agencies

As far as the infamous organization known as "Al-Qaeda" is concerned: it was nothing but a special operations unit created by Washington and its allies during the 1980s to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Today, the ambiguous name in question is simply a term, a brand, that Washington and allies apply to anything Islamic that dares to fight against Western interests anywhere.

I have also included two fascinating interviews with the well-known Pakistani general Hamid Gul. The first one was transcribed merely three weeks after the attacks on September 11, 2001. This is a must read transcript as well. In recent years, the former head of the Pakistani ISI also gave a very shocking interview to CNN's GPS show hosted by Fareed Zakaria. During the interview the former ISI chief basically claimed that the Mumbai attacks in India were staged by Indian intelligence (and by extension, the CIA) with the intention of destabilizing Pakistan. And much to Fareed Zakaria's chagrin, Hamid Gul also insinuated that the September 11 attacks was an "inside job" organized by the CIA and the Israeli Mossad.

The following materials are an excellent sources of information on this contentious topic. If you want to know the truth about the historic event that forever changed the world, I strongly suggest you to read and watch all of the provided materials in their entirety - with an open mind, objectivity and critical analysis.

Arevordi
September, 2011

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The Great Conspiracy: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3221571017565436923

Press For Truth: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3979568779414136481

The Truth & Lies of 9/11: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8797525979024486145

CrossTalk on 9/11: Whodunit?: http://www.youtube.com/user/RussiaToday#p/search/4/avtvrtTV1vw

Pentagon Crash? http://www.freedomfiles.org/war/pentagon.htm

Pentagon Strike: http://www.pentagonstrike.co.uk/flash.htm

New 9/11 photos 'prove WTC exploded from inside': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX_UKdqoa_o

The official version of 9/11 questioned: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkQLNm9Qkpc

Awkward questions about 9/11: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7_pqXokZvQ

U.S. citizens demand truth on 9/11: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew97V8d1rvY

Osama bin Bogeyman? 'CIA getting rid of old asset': http://www.youtube.com/user/RussiaToday#p/search/13/hi2Mphoaaos

Gen Hamid Gul on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2008/12/08/fz.hamid.gul.cnn?iref=videosearch

Five Dancing Israelis Arrested On 9/11: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRfhUezbKLw&feature=related

911 - The Israeli Connection: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6110095161238848541#

Fake Al Qaeda Actors EXPOSED! Adam Gadahn & Yousef al-Khattab: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsUtvOW6SR0

BBC Reported Building 7 Collapse 20 Minutes Early: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tGOt9f3gKk&feature=related

Gen. Hamid Gul: US will start WW3 if war expands to Pakistan: http://www.youtube.com/user/RussiaToday#p/search/0/MH8WUHjo1ms

10 Years After 9/11: Era of Endless Wars?: http://www.youtube.com/user/RussiaToday#p/u/16/PFUU-NU7uyE

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Fifty Questions on 9/11

It's September 11 all over again - eight years on. The George W Bush administration is out. The "global war on terror" is still on, renamed "overseas contingency operations" by the Barack Obama administration. Obama's "new strategy" - a war escalation - is in play in AfPak. Osama bin Laden may be dead or not. "Al-Qaeda" remains a catch-all ghost entity. September 11 - the neo-cons' "new Pearl Harbor" - remains the darkest jigsaw puzzle of the young 21st century. It's useless to expect US corporate media and the ruling elites' political operatives to call for a true, in-depth investigation into the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Whitewash has been the norm. But even establishment highlight Dr Zbig "Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski, a former national security advisor, has admitted to the US Senate that the post-9/11 "war on terror" is a "mythical historical narrative".

The following questions, some multi-part - and most totally ignored by the 9/11 Commission - are just the tip of the immense 9/11 iceberg. A hat tip goes to the indefatigable work of 911truth.org; whatreallyhappened.com; architects and engineers for 9/11 truth; the Italian documentary Zero: an investigation into 9/11; and Asia Times Online readers' e-mails. None of these questions has been convincingly answered - according to the official narrative. It's up to US civil society to keep up the pressure. Eight years after the fact, one fundamental conclusion is imperative. The official narrative edifice of 9/11 is simply not acceptable.

Fifty questions

1) How come dead or not dead Osama bin Laden has not been formally indicted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as responsible for 9/11? Is it because the US government - as acknowledged by the FBI itself - has not produced a single conclusive piece of evidence?

2) How could all the alleged 19 razor-blade box cutter-equipped Muslim perpetrators have been identified in less than 72 hours - without even a crime scene investigation?

3) How come none of the 19's names appeared on the passenger lists released the same day by both United Airlines and American Airlines?

4) How come eight names on the "original" FBI list happened to be found alive and living in different countries?

5) Why would pious jihadi Mohammed Atta leave a how-to-fly video manual, a uniform and his last will inside his bag knowing he was on a suicide mission?

6) Why did Mohammed Atta study flight simulation at Opa Locka, a hub of no less than six US Navy training bases?

7) How could Mohammed Atta's passport have been magically found buried among the Word Trade Center (WTC)'s debris when not a single flight recorder was found?

8) Who is in the possession of the "disappeared" eight indestructible black boxes on those four flights?

9) Considering multiple international red alerts about a possible terrorist attack inside the US - including former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's infamous August 6, 2001, memo - how come four hijacked planes deviating from their computerized flight paths and disappearing from radar are allowed to fly around US airspace for more than an hour and a half - not to mention disabling all the elaborate Pentagon's defense systems in the process?

10) Why the secretary of the US Air Force James Roche did not try to intercept both planes hitting the WTC (only seven minutes away from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey) as well as the Pentagon (only 10 minutes away from McGuire)? Roche had no less than 75 minutes to respond to the plane hitting the Pentagon.
11) Why did George W Bush continue to recite "My Pet Goat" in his Florida school and was not instantly absconded by the secret service?

12) How could Bush have seen the first plane crashing on WTC live - as he admitted? Did he have previous knowledge - or is he psychic?

13) Bush said that he and Andrew Card initially thought the first hit on the WTC was an accident with a small plane. How is that possible when the FAA as well as NORAD already knew this was about a hijacked plane?

14) What are the odds of transponders in four different planes be turned off almost simultaneously, in the same geographical area, very close to the nation's seat of power in Washington, and no one scrambles to contact the Pentagon or the media?

15) Could defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld explain why initial media reports said that there were no fighter jets available at Andrews Air Force Base and then change the reports that there were, but not on high alert?

16) Why was the DC Air National Guard in Washington AWOL on 9/11?

17) Why did combat jet fighters of the 305th Air Wing, McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey not intercept the second hijacked plane hitting the WTC, when they could have done it within seven minutes?

18) Why did none of the combat jet fighters of the 459th Aircraft Squadron at Andrews Air Force Base intercept the plane that hit the Pentagon, only 16 kilometers away? And since we're at it, why the Pentagon did not release the full video of the hit?

19) A number of very experienced airline pilots - including US ally Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a former fighter jet pilot - revealed that, well, only crack pilots could have performed such complex maneuvers on the hijacked jets, while others insisted they could only have been accomplished by remote control. Is it remotely believable that the hijackers were up to the task?

20) How come a substantial number of witnesses did swear seeing and hearing multiple explosions in both towers of the WTC?

21) How come a substantial number of reputed architects and engineers are adamant that the official narrative simply does not explain the largest structural collapse in recorded history (the Twin Towers) as well as the collapse of WTC building 7, which was not even hit by a jet?

22) According to Frank de Martini, WTC's construction manager, "We designed the building to resist the impact of one or more jetliners." The second plane nearly missed tower 1; most of the fuel burned in an explosion outside the tower. Yet this tower collapsed first, long before tower 2 that was "perforated" by the first hit. Jet fuel burned up fast - and by far did not reach the 2000-degree heat necessary to hurt the six tubular steel columns in the center of the tower - designed specifically to keep the towers from collapsing even if hit by a Boeing 707. A Boeing 707 used to carry more fuel than the Boeing 757 and Boeing 767 that actually hit the towers.

23) Why did Mayor Rudolph Giuliani instantly authorized the shipment of WTC rubble to China and India for recycling?

24) Why was metallic debris found no less than 13 kilometers from the crash site of the plane that went down in Pennsylvania? Was the plane in fact shot down - under vice president Dick Cheney's orders?

25) The Pipelineistan question. What did US ambassador Wendy Chamberlain talk about over the phone on October 10, 2001, with the oil minister of Pakistan? Was it to tell him that the 1990s-planned Unocal gas pipeline project, TAP (Turkmenistan/Afghanistan/ Pakistan), abandoned because of Taliban demands on transit fees, was now back in business? (Two months later, an agreement to build the pipeline was signed between the leaders of the three countries).

26) What is former Unocal lobbyist and former Bush pet Afghan Zalmay Khalilzad up to in Afghanistan?

27) How come former Pakistani foreign minister Niaz Niak said in mid-July 2001 that the US had already decided to strike against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban by October? The topic was discussed secretly at the July Group of Eight summit in Genoa, Italy, according to Pakistani diplomats.

28) How come US ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine told FBI agent John O'Neill in July 2001 to stop investigating al-Qaeda's financial operations - with O'Neill instantly moved to a security job at the WTC, where he died on 9/11?

29) Considering the very intimate relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and the ISI and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is Bin Laden alive, dead or still a valuable asset of the ISI, the CIA or both?

30) Was Bin Laden admitted at the American hospital in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on July 4, 2001, after flying from Quetta, Pakistan, and staying for treatment until July 11?

31) Did the Bin Laden group build the caves of Tora Bora in close cooperation with the CIA during the 1980s' anti-Soviet jihad?

32) How come General Tommy Franks knew for sure that Bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora in late November 2001?

33) Why did president Bill Clinton abort a hit on Bin Laden in October 1999? Why did then-Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf abort a covert ops in the same date? And why did Musharraf do the same thing again in August 2001?

34) Why did George W Bush dissolve the Bin Laden Task Force nine months before 9/11?

35) How come the (fake) Bin Laden home video - in which he "confesses" to being the perpetrator of 9/11 - released by the US on December 13, 2001, was found only two weeks after it was produced (on November 9); was it really found in Jalalabad (considering Northern Alliance and US troops had not even arrived there at the time); by whom; and how come the Pentagon was forced to release a new translation after the first (botched) one?

36) Why was ISI chief Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmad abruptly "retired" on October 8, 2001, the day the US started bombing Afghanistan?

37) What was Ahmad up to in Washington exactly on the week of 9/11 (he arrived on September 4)? On the morning of 9/11, Ahmad was having breakfast on Capitol Hill with Bob Graham and Porter Goss, both later part of the 9/11 Commission, which simply refused to investigate two of its members. Ahmad had breakfast with Richard Armitage of the State Department on September 12 and 13 (when Pakistan negotiated its "cooperation" with the "war on terror") and met all the CIA and Pentagon top brass. On September 13, Musharraf announced he would send Ahmad to Afghanistan to demand to the Taliban the extradition of Bin Laden.

38) Who inside the ISI transferred US$100,000 to Mohammed Atta in the summer of 2001 - under orders of Ahmad himself, as Indian intelligence insists? Was it really ISI asset Omar Sheikh, Bin Laden's information technology specialist who later organized the slaying of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi? So was the ISI directly linked to 9/11?

39) Did the FBI investigate the two shady characters who met Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi in Harry's Bar at the Helmsley Hotel in New York City on September 8, 2001?

40) What did director of Asian affairs at the State Department Christina Rocca and the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef discuss in their meeting in Islamabad in August 2001?

41) Did Washington know in advance that an "al-Qaeda" connection would kill Afghan nationalist commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, aka "The Lion of the Panjshir", only two days before 9/11? Massoud was fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda - helped by Russia and Iran. According to the Northern Alliance, Massoud was killed by an ISI-Taliban-al Qaeda axis. If still alive, he would never have allowed the US to rig a loya jirga (grand council) in Afghanistan and install a puppet, former CIA asset Hamid Karzai, as leader of the country.

42) Why did it take no less than four months before the name of Ramzi Binalshibh surfaced in the 9/11 context, considering the Yemeni was a roommate of Mohammed Atta in his apartment cell in Hamburg?

43) Is pathetic shoe-bomber Richard Reid an ISI asset?

44) Did then-Russian president Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence tell the CIA in 2001 that 25 terrorist pilots had been training for suicide missions?

45) When did the head of German intelligence, August Hanning, tell the CIA that terrorists were "planning to hijack commercial aircraft?"

46) When did Egyptian President Mubarak tell the CIA about an attack on the US with an "airplane stuffed with explosives?"

47) When did Israel's Mossad director Efraim Halevy tell the CIA about a possible attack on the US by "200 terrorists?"

48) Were the Taliban aware of the warning by a Bush administration official as early as February 2001 - "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs?"

49) Has Northrop-Grumman used Global Hawk technology - which allows to remotely control unmanned planes - in the war in Afghanistan since October 2001? Did it install Global Hawk in a commercial plane? Is Global Hawk available at all for commercial planes?

50) Would Cheney stand up and volunteer the detailed timeline of what he was really up to during the whole day on 9/11?

Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KI11Ak02.html

Interview with Osama bin Laden. Denies his Involvement in 9/11

Global Research Editor's Note

We bring to the attention of our readers the following text of Osama bin Laden's interview with Ummat, a Pakistani daily, published in Karachi on September 28, 2001. It was translated into English by the BBC World Monitoring Service and made public on September 29, 2001. The authenticity of this interview, which is available in recognized electronic news archives, is confirmed. Osama bin Laden categorically denies his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden's statements in this interview are markedly different from those made in the alleged Osama video tapes. In this interview, Osama bin Laden exhibits an understanding of US foreign policy. He expresses his views regarding the loss of life on 9/11. He also makes statements as to who, in his opinion, might be the likely perpetrator of the September 11 attacks. This is an important text which has not been brought to the attention of Western public opinion. We have highlighted key sections of this interview. It is our hope that the text of this interview, published barely a week before the onset of the war on Afghanistan, will contribute to a better understanding of the history of Al Qaeda, the role of Osama bin Laden and the tragic events of September 11, 2001.

Michel Chossudovsky, May 9, 2011

Full text of September 2001 Pakistani paper's "exclusive" interview with Usamah Bin-Ladin

Ummat (in Urdu), Karachi, 28 September 2001, pp. 1 and 7. Ummat's introduction Kabul: Prominent Arab mojahed holy warrior Usamah Bin-Ladin has said that he or his al-Qa'idah group has nothing to do with the 11 September suicidal attacks in Washington and New York. He said the US government should find the attackers within the country. In an exclusive interview with daily "Ummat", he said these attacks could be the act of those who are part of the American system and are rebelling against it and working for some other system. Or, Usamah said, this could be the act of those who want to make the current century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity. Or, the American Jews, who are opposed to President Bush ever since the Florida elections, might be the masterminds of this act. There is also a great possibility of the involvement of US intelligence agencies, which need billions of dollars worth of funds every year. He said there is a government within the government in the United States.

The secret agencies, he said, should be asked as to who are behind the attacks. Usamah said support for attack on Afghanistan was a matter of need for some Muslim countries and compulsion for others. However, he said, he was thankful to the courageous people of Pakistan who erected a bulwark before the wrong forces. He added that the Islamic world was attaching great expectations with Pakistan and, in time of need, "we will protect this bulwark by sacrificing of lives". Following is the interview in full detail:
Ummat: You have been accused of involvement in the attacks in New York and Washington. What do you want to say about this? If you are not involved, who might be? Usamah [Osama bin Laden]: In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful. Praise be to Allah, Who is the creator of the whole universe and Who made the earth as an abode for peace, for the whole mankind. Allah is the Sustainer, who sent Prophet Muhammad for our guidance. I am thankful to the Ummat Group of Publications, which gave me the opportunity to convey my viewpoint to the people, particularly the valiant and Momin true Muslim people of Pakistan who refused to believe in lie of the demon.

I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people.

Such a practice is forbidden ever in the course of a battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children, and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam. All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel. There is also a warning for those Muslim countries, which witnessed all these as a silent spectator. What had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya, and Bosnia?

Only one conclusion could be derived from the indifference of the United States and the West to these acts of terror and the patronage of the tyrants by these powers that America is an anti-Islamic power and it is patronizing the anti-Islamic forces. Its friendship with the Muslim countries is just a show, rather deceit. By enticing or intimidating these countries, the United States is forcing them to play a role of its choice. Put a glance all around and you will see that the slaves of the United States are either rulers or enemies of Muslims .

The US has no friends, nor does it want to keep any because the prerequisite of friendship is to come to the level of the friend or consider him at par with you. America does not want to see anyone equal to it. It expects slavery from others. Therefore, other countries are either its slaves or subordinates.

However, our case is different. We have pledged slavery to God Almighty alone and after this pledge there is no possibility to become the slave of someone else. If we do that, it will be disregardful to both our Sustainer and his fellow beings. Most of the world nations upholding their freedom are the religious ones, which are the enemies of United States, or the latter itself considers them as its enemies. Or the countries, which do not agree to become its slaves, such as China, Iran, Libya, Cuba, Syria, and the former Russia as received .

Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed.

According to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the US government has stated. But the Bush administration does not want the panic to spread. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive. They can be any one, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia. In the US itself, there are dozens of well-organized and well-equipped groups, which are capable of causing a large-scale destruction. Then you cannot forget the American Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge him.

Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This funding issue was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger.

They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Usamah and Taleban and then this incident happened. You see, the Bush administration approved a budget of 40bn dollars. Where will this huge amount go? It will be provided to the same agencies, which need huge funds and want to exert their importance.

Now they will spend the money for their expansion and for increasing their importance. I will give you an example. Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the US secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be diminished. The people in the US Drug Enforcement Department are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat. In the same way, whether it is President Bush or any other US president, they cannot bring Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who made the attacks. Ummat: A number of world countries have joined the call of the United States for launching an attack on Afghanistan. These also include a number of Muslim countries. Will Al-Qa'idah declare a jihad against these countries as well? Usamah: I must say that my duty is just to awaken the Muslims; to tell them as to what is good for them and what is not. What does Islam says and what the enemies of Islam want?

Al-Qa'idah was set up to wage a jihad against infidelity, particularly to encounter the onslaught of the infidel countries against the Islamic states. Jihad is the sixth undeclared element of Islam. The first five being the basic holy words of Islam, prayers, fast, pilgrimage to Mecca, and giving alms Every anti-Islamic person is afraid of it. Al-Qa'idah wants to keep this element alive and active and make it part of the daily life of the Muslims. It wants to give it the status of worship. We are not against any Islamic country nor we consider a war against an Islamic country as jihad.

We are in favour of armed jihad only against those infidel countries, which are killing innocent Muslim men, women, and children just because they are Muslims. Supporting the US act is the need of some Muslim countries and the compulsion of others. However, they should think as to what will remain of their religious and moral position if they support the attack of the Christians and the Jews on a Muslim country like Afghanistan. The orders of Islamic shari'ah jurisprudence for such individuals, organizations, and countries are clear and all the scholars of the Muslim brotherhood are unanimous on them. We will do the same, which is being ordered by the Amir ol-Momenin the commander of the faithful Mola Omar and the Islamic scholars. The hearts of the people of Muslim countries are beating with the call of jihad. We are grateful to them. Ummat: The losses caused in the attacks in New York and Washington have proved that giving an economic blow to the US is not too difficult. US experts admit that a few more such attacks can bring down the American economy. Why is al-Qa'idah not targeting their economic pillars? Usamah: I have already said that we are not hostile to the United States. We are against the system, which makes other nations slaves of the United States, or forces them to mortgage their political and economic freedom. This system is totally in control of the American Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States. It is simply that the American people are themselves the slaves of the Jews and are forced to live according to the principles and laws laid by them. So, the punishment should reach Israel. In fact, it is Israel, which is giving a blood bath to innocent Muslims and the US is not uttering a single word. Ummat: Why is harm not caused to the enemies of Islam through other means, apart from the armed struggle? For instance, inciting the Muslims to boycott Western products, banks, shipping lines, and TV channels. Usamah: The first thing is that Western products could only be boycotted when the Muslim fraternity is fully awakened and organized. Secondly, the Muslim companies should become self-sufficient in producing goods equal to the products of Western companies. Economic boycott of the West is not possible unless economic self-sufficiency is attained and substitute products are brought out. You see that wealth is scattered all across the Muslim world but not a single TV channel has been acquired which can preach Islamic injunctions according to modern requirements and attain an international influence. Muslim traders and philanthropists should make it a point that if the weapon of public opinion is to be used, it is to be kept in the hand. Today's world is of public opinion and the fates of nations are determined through its pressure. Once the tools for building public opinion are obtained, everything that you asked for can be done. Ummat: The entire propaganda about your struggle has so far been made by the Western media. But no information is being received from your sources about the network of Al-Qa'idah and its jihadi successes. Would you comment? Usamah: In fact, the Western media is left with nothing else. It has no other theme to survive for a long time. Then we have many other things to do. The struggle for jihad and the successes are for the sake of Allah and not to annoy His bondsmen. Our silence is our real propaganda. Rejections, explanations, or corrigendum only waste your time and through them, the enemy wants you to engage in things which are not of use to you. These things are pulling you away from your cause.

The Western media is unleashing such a baseless propaganda, which make us surprise but it reflects on what is in their hearts and gradually they themselves become captive of this propaganda. They become afraid of it and begin to cause harm to themselves. Terror is the most dreaded weapon in modern age and the Western media is mercilessly using it against its own people. It can add fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media is doing that. You can understand as to what will be the performance of the nation in a war, which suffers from fear and helplessness. Ummat: What will the impact of the freeze of al-Qa'idah accounts by the US? Usamah: God opens up ways for those who work for Him. Freezing of accounts will not make any difference for Al-Qa'idah or other jihad groups. With the grace of Allah, al-Qa'idah has more than three such alternative financial systems, which are all separate and totally independent from each other. This system is operating under the patronage of those who love jihad. What to say of the United States, even the combined world cannot budge these people from their path.

These people are not in hundreds but in thousands and millions. Al-Qa'idah comprises of such modern educated youths who are aware of the cracks inside the Western financial system as they are aware of the lines in their hands. These are the very flaws of the Western fiscal system, which are becoming a noose for it and this system could not recuperate in spite of the passage of so many days. Ummat: Are there other safe areas other than Afghanistan, where you can continue jihad? Usamah: There are areas in all parts of the world where strong jihadi forces are present, from Indonesia to Algeria, from Kabul to Chechnya, from Bosnia to Sudan, and from Burma to Kashmir. Then it is not the problem of my person. I am helpless fellowman of God, constantly in the fear of my accountability before God. It is not the question of Usamah but of Islam and, in Islam too, of jihad. Thanks to God, those waging a jihad can walk today with their heads raised. Jihad was still present when there was no Usamah and it will remain as such even when Usamah is no longer there. Allah opens up ways and creates loves in the hearts of people for those who walk on the path of Allah with their lives, property, and children. Believe it, through jihad, a man gets everything he desires. And the biggest desire of a Muslim is the after life. Martyrdom is the shortest way of attaining an eternal life. Ummat: What do you say about the Pakistan government policy on Afghanistan attack? Usamah: We are thankful to the Momin and valiant people of Pakistan who erected a blockade in front of the wrong forces and stood in the first file of battle. Pakistan is a great hope for the Islamic brotherhood. Its people are awakened, organized, and rich in the spirit of faith. They backed Afghanistan in its war against the Soviet Union and extended every help to the mojahedin and the Afghan people. Then these are very Pakistanis who are standing shoulder by shoulder with the Taleban. If such people emerge in just two countries, the domination of the West will diminish in a matter of days. Our hearts beat with Pakistan and, God forbid, if a difficult time comes we will protect it with our blood. Pakistan is sacred for us like a place of worship. We are the people of jihad and fighting for the defence of Pakistan is the best of all jihads to us. It does not matter for us as to who rules Pakistan. The important thing is that the spirit of jihad is alive and stronger in the hearts of the Pakistani people.

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24697

"The attacks on New York and Washington were an Israeli-engineered attempt at a coup against the government of the United States"

De Borchgrave: So who did Black Sept. 11?

Gul: Mossad and its accomplices. The U.S. spends $40 billion a year on its 11 intelligence agencies. That's $400 billion in 10 years. Yet the Bush Administration says it was taken by surprise. I don't believe it. Within 10 minutes of the second twin tower being hit in the World Trade Center CNN said Osama bin Laden had done it. That was a planned piece of disinformation by the real perpetrators. It created an instant mindset and put public opinion into a trance, which prevented even intelligent people from thinking for themselves.

Q: So you're already convinced bin Laden didn't do it?

A: I know bin Laden and his associates. I've been with them here, in Europe and the Middle East. They are graduates of the best universities and are highly intelligent with impressive degrees and speak impeccable English. These are people who have rediscovered fundamental Islamic values. Many come from the Gulf countries where ruling royal families have generated hatred by the way they flout divine law, wasting billions on gratifying their whims, jetting around in large private jets by themselves, and sailing the Mediterranean in big private boats for weeks on end. Osama's best recruits come from feudal areas that are U.S. protectorates and where millions of poor people are seeking human dignity. I have even visited a Christian convent school in Murree, 60 miles from here, where my 13-year-old daughter is studying. The young girls there have told me Osama is their hero. Osama's followers identify with Mujahideen freedom fighters wherever they are defending Islam and its values.

Q: So what makes you think Osama wasn't behind Sept. 11?

A: From a cave inside a mountain or a peasant's hovel? Let's be serious. Osama inspires countless millions by standing up for Islam against American and Israeli imperialism. He doesn't have the means for such a sophisticated operation.

Q: Why Mossad?

A: Mossad and its American associates are the obvious culprits. Who benefits from the crime? The attacks against the twin towers started at 8:45 a.m. and four flights are diverted from their assigned air space and no air traffic controller sounds the alarm. And no Air Force jets scramble until 10 a.m. That also smacks of a small scale Air Force rebellion, a coup against the Pentagon perhaps? Radars are jammed, transponders fail. No IFF -- friend or foe identification -- challenge. In Pakistan, if there is no response to IFF, jets are instantly scrambled and the aircraft is shot down with no further questions asked. This was clearly an inside job. Bush was afraid and rushed to the shelter of a nuclear bunker. He clearly feared a nuclear situation. Who could that have been? Will that also be hushed up in the investigation, like the Warren report after the Kennedy assassination?

Q: At this point, someone might be asking what you've been smoking. What is Israel's interest in such a monstrous plot, which, of course, no one believes except Islamist extremists who concocted this piece of disinformation in the first place, presumably to detract from the real culprits?

A: Jews never agreed to Bush 41 (George H.W. Bush, the 41st president) or 43 (his son George W. Bush, the 43rd president). They made sure Bush senior didn't get a second term. His land-for-peace pressure in Palestine didn't suit Israel. They were also against the young Bush because he was considered too close to oil interests and the Gulf countries. Bush senior and Jim Baker had raised $150 million for Bush junior, much of it from Mideast sources or their American go-betweens. Bush 41 and Baker, as private citizens, had also facilitated the new strategic relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran. I have this from sources in both countries. So clearly the prospect of a Bush 43 was a potential danger to Israel. Jews were stunned by the way Bush stole the election in Florida. They had put big money on Al Gore. Israel has given its imperialist guardian parent opportunities to turn disaster into a pretext for imposing an all-encompassing military, political and economic agenda to further the cause of global capitalism. While Colin Powell is cautious and others are reckless and want to make up for their failure to defeat Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War 10 years ago, the global agenda is the same. Israel knows it has a short shelf-life before it is overwhelmed by demographics. It is a state that was born in terrorism that terrorized Palestinians into the exile of refugee camps, where they have now subsisted in squalid refugee camps, and is now very much afraid of Pakistan's nuclear capability. Israel has now handed the Bush family the opportunity it has been waiting for to consolidate America's imperial grip on the Gulf and acquire control of the Caspian basin by extending its military presence in Central Asia. Bush conveniently overlooks -- or is not told -- the fact that Islamic fundamentalists got their big boost in the modern age as CIA assets in the covert campaign I was also involved with to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Bush senior was vice president during that entire campaign. And no sooner did he become president on Jan. 20, 1989, than he summoned an inter-agency intelligence meeting and issued an order, among several others, to clip the wings of ISI (Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence) that had been coordinating the entire operation in Afghanistan. I know this firsthand as I was DGISI at the time (director general, ISI).

Q: So how do you read U.S. strategy in Pakistan?

A: The destabilization of Pakistan is part of the U.S. plan because it is a Muslim nuclear state. The U.S. wants to isolate Pakistan from China as part of its containment policy. President Nixon's book "The Real War" said China would be the superpower of the 21st Century. The U.S. is also creating hostility between Pakistan and Afghanistan, two Muslim states to reverse the perception that the Islamic world now has its own nuclear weapons. Bush 43 doesn't realize he is being manipulated by people who understand geopolitics. He is not leading but being led. All he can do is think in terms of the wanted-dead-or-alive culture, which is how Hollywood conditions the masses to think and act. All summer long we heard about America's shrinking surplus and that the Pentagon would not have sufficient funds to modernize for the 21st century. And now, all of a sudden, the Pentagon can get what it wants without any Democratic Party opposition. How very convenient! Even your cherished civil liberties can now be abridged with impunity to protect the expansion of the hegemony of transnational capitalism. There is now a new excuse to crush anti-globalization protests. Bush 43 follows Bush 41. Iraq was baited into the Kuwaiti trap when the U.S. told Saddam it was not interested in his inter-Arab squabbles. Two days later, he moved into Kuwait, which was an Iraqi province anyway before the British Empire decreed otherwise. Roosevelt baited the Pearl Harbor trap for the Japanese empire, which provided the pretext for entering World War II. And now the Israelis have given the U.S. the pretext for further expansion into an area that will be critical in the next 25 years - the Caspian basin.

Q: Were you a fundamentalist in the days of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan when you worked closely with the CIA?

A: Not as much as I am today.

Q: What turned you against America?

A: Betrayals and broken promises and what was done to my army career.

Q: And what was that?

A: President Ishaq Khan, who succeeded Zia ul-Haq after his plane was blown out of the sky, wanted to appoint me chief of staff, the highest position in the Pakistani army. The U.S., which by then had clipped ISI's wings, also blocked my promotion by informing the president I was unacceptable. So I was moved to a corps commander position. As ISI director, I held the whole Mujahideen movement in the palm of my hands. We were all pro-American. But then America left us in the lurch and everything went to pieces, including Afghanistan. The U.S. pushed for a broad-based Afghan government of seven factions and then waved goodbye. Even in the best of democracies, a broad-based coalition does not work. So we quickly had seven jokers in Kabul interested in only one thing - jockeying for power. The gunplay quickly followed, which led to the creation of Taliban, the students of the original Mujahideen, who decided to put an end to it.

Q: What happened to the 1,000 shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that were supplied by president Reagan in 1986 and 87 to the Mujahideen, and that literally grounded the Soviet air force?

A: After the Soviets pulled out, the CIA allocated $60 million to try to buy them back. This just drove the black market price up for one Stinger from $100,000 to $300,000. The Taliban still have about 250 of them for the kind of situation they face today against U.S. aircraft.

Q: Is the U.S. now your enemy?

A: Is the U.S. national interest in contradiction with the Muslim world? The U.S. needs oil, as do its European allies. You have between 6 and 8 million American Muslims and their ranks are growing. About the same number in Europe. Israel aside, we are America's natural allies. Prof. Sam Huntington in his "Clash of Civilizations" puts Confucius and Judeo-Christians in one corner, and us in the other. His prescription is wrong but is being adopted by Bush 43 who has now put 60 countries on his hit list. This is the diabolical school that wants to launch an anti-Muslim "crusade." Muslims understood what Bush meant when he used that word. We need a meeting, not a clash, of civilizations. We are on the brink of disaster. It is time to pull back from the brink and reassess before we blow ourselves up. The purpose of Islam is service to humanity. The time for like-minded people to have a meeting of the minds is now.

Q: But you are against democracy, so how can there be a meeting of the minds?

A: Democracy does not work. Politicians are constantly thinking of their next election, not the public good, which means, at best, constantly shading the truth to hide it from their constituents. Their pronouncements are laced with lies and the voters are lulled or gulled into believing utter nonsense. The Koran says call a spade a spade. It is the supreme law and tells right from wrong. There is no notion of "my country right or wrong" under divine law. The creator's will predominates. All if subservient to Allah's will and adherence to a set of basic, fundamental values.

Q: So what kind of a system are you advocating?

A: The world needs a post-modern state system. Right now, the nation-state and round the clock satellite TV lead people to imitate America's way of life. Which is mathematically impossible. You have 4 percent of the world's population consuming 32 percent of the world's resources. The creator through Prophet Mohammed said equal distribution. Capitalism is the negation of the creator's will. It leads to imperialism and unilateralism.

Q: So what does this post-modern state system look like?

A: A global village under divine order, or we will have global bloodshed until good triumphs over evil. Islam encapsulates all the principal religions and what was handed down 1,400 years ago was the normal evolutionary sequel to Judaism and Christianity. The prophet's last sermon was a universal document of human rights for everyone that surpasses everything that came since, including America's declaration of independence and the U.N. Charter of universal rights. If you superimpose true secular values on true Islamic values, there is no difference. So surely divine law should supersede man-made law. Islam is egalitarian, tolerant and progressive. It is the wave of the future.

Q: Marxism also believed that the nation-state would eventually wither away.

A: Socialism jumped the rails when it was co-opted by the imperialist Soviet state. Islam believes in dynamism, Christianity stands for static statism. The pope in all his pronouncements has expressed a dogmatic attachment to the status quo. Why are so many black Americans converting to Islam? Because they are looking for true equality which they cannot find under capitalism. Allah has no gender, neither male nor female. Islam has no indirect taxation in an interest-free economy. Usury was a Jewish concept.

Q: And your reaction to U.S. demands on Pakistan?

A: If Pakistan gives the U.S. base rights we will have a national upheaval. And if the U.S. attacks Afghanistan, there will be a call -- a fatwa -- for a general jihad. All borders will then disappear and it will be a no-holds-barred Islamic uprising against Israel and American imperialism. Pakistan will be engulfed in the firestorm. So I can only hope that cooler heads will prevail in Washington.

Q: What about the other U.S. demands?

A: Overflight rights are meaningless since the U.S. violates air space daily all over the world. As for intelligence sharing with ISI, you can't even catch your own terrorists. And what ISI gives you will be of marginal value anyway.

Q: President (Pervez) Musharraf has made strong statements supporting the U.S.

A: He was my student in the army. He is a good man, but he doesn't understand Islam. The army will never fight the masses. If push comes to shove, Musharraf will say no to the Americans rather than turn against the people. He is not just facing a handful of angry people. By his own admission, it's 10 percent to 15 percent of the population, or at least 10 million people willing to fight. For openers, they would close the port of Karachi. A country cannot breathe without lungs.

[...]

Source: http://www.robert-fisk.com/hamid_gul...ept26_2001.htm

Former ISI Chief: Mumbai And 9/11 Both “Inside Jobs

General Hamid Gul, the former head of the Pakistani ISI, told CNN yesterday that both the Mumbai attacks and 9/11 were “inside jobs,” much to the chagrin of host and CFR luminary Fareed Zakaria, who told viewers that Gul’s opinions were “absolutely wrong and thoroughly discredited”. “When you look at the full spectrum of possibilities, who could have done it, then one knows that Samjhauta Express was a similar case, in which Pakistan ISI was accused. But it turned out that it was the militant Hindus themselves who had killed 68 passengers in that train, and that it was an inside job,” said Gul. “Now Colonel Srikant Purohit, who is a serving army officer, he has been caught in this particular case. And the whole thing has turned around.” “So, obviously, there is an inside job.”

The revelation that Mukhtar Ahmed, a “counterinsurgency police officer who may have been on an undercover mission” working for Indian authorities was arrested for illegally buying mobile phone cards used by the Mumbai gunmen, allied with the numerous intelligence warnings proving that the method, arrival and targets of attack were all known well in advance, proves Gul right in his assertion that the terrorists could not have achieved such carnage without help from people on the inside. Asked by Zakaria, “What is your hunch as to who did - who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks?,” Gul responded, “Well, I have been on record, and I said it is the Zionists or the neocons. They have done it. It was an inside job.” “And they wanted to go on the world conquerors. They were looking upon it as an opportunity window, when the Muslim world was lying prostrate. Russia was nowhere in sight. China was still not an economic giant that is has turned out to be.”

“And they thought that this was a good time to go and fill those strategic areas, which are still lying without any American presence. And, of course, to control the energy tap of the world.” “Presently, it is the Middle East, and in future it is going to be Central Asia,” added Gul. Gul told Zakaria that the evidence for 9/11 being planned by Osama Bin Laden and executed by Al-Qaeda has not emerged and that the events are still “shrouded in mystery”. “A lot of people have a lot of misgivings about that. And it’s not only me. I think a lot of people in America would be thinking the same way. There are scientists, there are scholars, who have written articles on it,” added Gul, calling for President elect Barack Obama to set up a new commission to investigate the attacks. Gul said the attacks were planned inside America by people with a dangerous agenda who have “turned the world upside-down”. Returning from a commercial break, Zakaria, editor of Newsweek, Council on Foreign Relations kingpin and also a Trilateral Commission board member, told his viewers, “Some of General Gul’s views are simply false. There is a mountain of evidence about 9/11 that refutes his assertions,” but Zakaria failed to cite any of it. Zakaria was then joined by counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen who said that the Mumbai attacks bore all the hallmarks of a “clandestine operation or a covert operation style activity,” but when pressed he refused to directly implicate Pakistan in the attack.

Source: http://www.infowars.com/?p=6402

Al Qaeda – The Database

by Pierre-Henri Bunel

Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook (pictured above) told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence.

"I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . .

"Two of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students' punishment.

"For example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers used to tell us: 'You'll be noted in 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' which meant 'You'll be logged in the information database.' Meaning 'You will receive a warning . . .' If the case was more severe, they would used to talk about 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Meaning 'the decision database.' It meant 'you will be punished.' For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in 'Al Qaida.'

"In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs.

"It was decided to use a part of the system's memory to host the Islamic Conference's database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network.

"[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' and 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic 'Q eidat ilmu'ti'aat' which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for "base." The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called 'q eidat 'riyadh al 'askariya.' Q eida means "a base" and "Al Qaida" means "the base."

"In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference's secretariat.

"In the early 1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the French Rapid Action Force. Because of my skills in Arabic my job was also to translate a lot of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by our intelligence services . . . We often got intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the UK or from Belgium.

"These documents contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida.

"Al Qaida remained the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member countries of the Islamic Conference are 'rogue states' and many Islamic groups could pick up information from the databases. It was but natural for Osama Bin Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in the banking and business world.

"Because of the presence of 'rogue states,' it became easy for terrorist groups to use the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the 'rogue states' used to fight. And the 'rogue states' included Saudi Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages.

Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden's personal property . . . The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to 'punish' Prime Minister Erdogan for being a 'toot tepid' Islamic politician.

" . . . In the Third World the general opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact 'rogue states," specially the US and other NATO countries.

" Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the 'liberal" economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries under the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed behind them.

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money." (Our emphasis, Ed.)

In yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in December 2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French military court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in 1998. Bunel's case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the details of the case classified. Bunel's character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the system "got him" for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group. It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of "Al Qaeda." We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.

French officer Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel, who knew the truth about "Al Qaeda" -- Another target of the neo-cons

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...articleId=1291

Russian General: International Terrorism Does Not Exist

General Leonid Ivashov (left) with journalist Christopher Bollyn from American Free Press

General Leonid Ivashov was the Chief of Staff of the Russian armed forces when the September 11, 2001, attacks took place. This military man, who lived the events from the inside, offers an analysis which is very different to that of his American colleagues. As he did during the Axis for Peace 2005 conference, he now explains that international terrorism does not exist and that the September 11 attacks were the result of a set-up. What we are seeing is a manipulation by the big powers; this terrorism would not exist without them. He affirms that, instead of faking a "world war on terror", the best way to reduce that kind of attacks is through respect for international law and peaceful cooperation among countries and their citizens.

As the current international situation shows, terrorism emerges where contradiction aggravate, where there is a change of social relations or a change of regime, where there is political, economic or social instability, where there is moral decadence, where cynicism and nihilism triumph, where vice is legalized and where crime spreads. It is globalization what creates the conditions for the emergence of these extremely dangerous phenomena. It is in this context that the new world geo-strategic map is being designed, that the resources of the planet are being re-distributed, that borders are disappearing, that international law is being torn into pieces, that cultural identities are being erased, that spiritual life becomes impoverished...

The analysis of the essence of the globalization process, the military and political doctrines of the United States and other countries, shows that terrorism contributes to a world dominance and the submissiveness of states to a global oligarchy. This means that terrorism is not something independent of world politics but simply an instrument, a means to install a unipolar world with a sole world headquarters, a pretext to erase national borders and to establish the rule of a new world elite. It is precisely this elite that constitutes the key element of world terrorism, its ideologist and its "godfather". The main target of the world elite is the historical, cultural, traditional and natural reality; the existing system of relations among states; the world national and state order of human civilization and national identity.

Today's international terrorism is a phenomenon that combines the use of terror by state and non-state political structures as a means to attain their political objectives through people's intimidation, psychological and social destabilization, the elimination of resistance from power organizations and the creation of appropriate conditions for the manipulation of the countries' policies and the behavior of people. Terrorism is the weapon used in a new type of war. At the same time, international terrorism, in complicity with the media, becomes the manager of global processes. It is precisely the symbiosis between media and terror, which allows modifying international politics and the exiting reality. In this context, if we analyze what happened on September 11, 2001, in the United States, we can arrive at the following conclusions:

1. The organizers of those attacks were the political and business circles interested in destabilizing the world order and who had the means necessary to finance the operation. The political conception of this action matured there where tensions emerged in the administration of financial and other types of resources. We have to look for the reasons of the attacks in the coincidence of interests of the big capital at global and transnational levels, in the circles that were not satisfied with the rhythm of the globalization process or its direction. Unlike traditional wars, whose conception is determined by generals and politicians, the oligarchs and politicians submitted to the former were the ones who did it this time.

2. Only secret services and their current chiefs x or those retired but still having influence inside the state organizations x have the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such magnitude. Generally, secret services create, finance and control extremist organizations. Without the support of secret services, these organizations cannot exist x let alone carry out operations of such magnitude inside countries so well protected. Planning and carrying out an operation on this scale is extremely complex.

3. Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" cannot be the organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders. Thus, a team of professionals had to be created and the Arab kamikazes are just extras to mask the operation. The September 11 operation modified the course of events in the world in the direction chosen by transnational mafias and international oligarchs; that is, those who hope to control the planet's natural resources, the world information network and the financial flows. This operation also favored the US economic and political elite that also seeks world dominance. General Leonid Ivashov with journalist Christopher Bollyn from American Free Press

The use of the term "international terrorism" has the following goals:

Hiding the real objectives of the forces deployed all over the world in the struggle for dominance and control;

Turning the people's demands to a struggle of undefined goals against an invisible enemy;

Destroying basic international norms and changing concepts such as: aggression, state terror, dictatorship or movement of national liberation;

Depriving peoples of their legitimate right to fight against aggressions and to reject the work of foreign intelligence services;

Establishing the principle of renunciation to national interests, transforming objectives in the military field by giving priority to the war on terror, violating the logic of military alliances to the detriment of a joint defense and to favor the anti-terrorist coalition;

Solving economic problems through a tough military rule using the war on terror as a pretext. In order to fight in an efficient way against international terrorism it is necessary to take the following steps:

To confirm before the UN General Assembly the principles of the UN Charter and international law as principles that all states are obliged to respect;

To create a geo-strategic organization (perhaps inspired in the Cooperation Organization of Shanghai comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) with a set of values different to that of the Atlantists;

To design a strategy of development of states, a system of international security, another financial and economic model (which would mean that the world would again rest on two pillars);

To associate (under the United Nations) the scientific elites in the design and promotion of the philosophical concepts of the Human Being of the 21st Century. To organize the interaction of all religious denominations in the world, on behalf of the stability of humanity's development, security and mutual support.

General Leonid Ivashov

General Leonid Ivashov is the vice-president of the Academy on geopolitical affairs. He was the chief of the department for General affairs in the Soviet Union's ministry of Defense, secretary of the Council of defense ministers of the Community of independant states (CIS), chief of the Military cooperation department at the Russian federation's Ministry of defense and Joint chief of staff of the Russian armies.

Source: http://www.rense.com/general69/ism.htm

Former Italian President Says 9-11 Solved

It’s common knowledge, he reveals, CIA, Mossad behind terror attacks

Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, has told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad, and that this was common knowledge among global intelligence agencies. In what translates awkwardly into English, Cossiga told the newspaper Corriere della Sera: “All the [intelligence services] of America and Europe…know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the Mossad, with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part … in Iraq [and] Afghanistan.”

Cossiga was elected president of the Italian Senate in July 1983 before winning a landslide election to become president of the country in 1985, and he remained until 1992. Cossiga’s tendency to be outspoken upset the Italian political establishment, and he was forced to resign after revealing the existence of, and his part in setting up, Operation Gladio. This was a rogue intelligence network under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and ’80s. Gladio’s specialty was to carry out what they termed “false flag” operations—terror attacks that were blamed on their domestic and geopolitical opposition.

In March 2001, Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated, in sworn testimony, “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force … the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.” Cossiga first expressed his doubts about 9-11 in 2001, and is quoted by 9-11 researcherWebster Tarpley saying “The mastermind of the attack must have been a sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel. I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.”

Coming from a widely respected former head of state, Cossiga’s assertion that the 9-11 attacks were an inside job and that this is common knowledge among global intelligence agencies is illuminating. It is one more eye-opening confirmation that has not been mentioned by America’s propaganda machine in print or on TV. Nevertheless, because of his experience and status in the world, Cossiga cannot be discounted as a crackpot.

Source: http://www.americanfreepress.net/htm...solved118.html

The Israeli Spy Ring

Prior to 9/11, the FBI had discovered the presence of a massive spy ring inside the United States run by the government of Israel. This seems a harsh gratitude from a nation which obtains 10% of its annual budget from the American taxpayer, $3+ billion a year. Over the years, American taxpayers have been required to send Israel more than four times what the US spent to go to the moon. What Israel has done in return was to set up government subsidized telecommunications companies which operate here in the United States. One of these companies is Amdocs, which provides billing and directory assistance for 90% of the phone companies in the USA. Amdocs' main computer center for billing is actually in Israel and allows those with access to do what intelligence agencies call "traffic analysis"; a picture of someone's activities based on a pattern of who they are calling and when. Another Israeli telecom company is Comverse Infosys, which subcontracts the installation of the automatic tapping equipment now built into every phone system in America.

Comverse maintains its own connections to all this phone tapping equipment, insisting that it is for maintenance purposes only. However, Converse has been named as the most likely source for leaked information regarding telephone calls by law enforcement that derailed several investigations into not only espionage, but drug running as well. Yet another Israeli telecom company is Odigo, which provides the core message passing system for all the "Instant Message" services. Two hours before the attacks on the World Trade Towers, Odigo employees received a warning. Odigo has an office 2 blocks from the former location of the World Trade Towers. Let us be clear here. There is nothing benign about Israel spying on the United States. When Jonathan Pollard stole our nuclear secrets (which your taxes paid to develop) and sent them to Israel, Israel did not hesitate to trade those secrets to the USSR in exchange for increased emigration quotas.

The implication of these facts is that the billions of our tax dollars sent to Israel (while women and children sleep in America's alleys and eat out of trash bins) have bought and paid for a monstrous phone tracking and phone tapping system that can eavesdrop on almost any phone call in America. Even the White House phones were open to such tapping by listening in on the other end outside the White House itself. This actually happened. The Ken Starr report on Whitewater describes how Bill Clinton informed Monica Lewinsky that their phone sex conversations had been recorded. At the same time, Clinton ordered the FBI to cease the hunt for an Israeli mole known to be operating inside the White House itself! So here we have a foreign nation able to listen in on most phones at will, using taps that cannot be found because they are built into the phone system itself, and willing to use the information gleaned from those calls to blackmail Americans into any desired course of action. This may well be what Ariel Sharon meant when he stated that the Jewish people control America.

That the information gleaned from these phone taps is being used to coerce the behavior of key individuals in the US Government and media is illustrated by the manner in which the government and the media have handled this scandal of the largest spy ring ever uncovered inside the United States, and of phone taps on all of our phones. They are downplaying it. Actually, burying it is a better word. Fox News, alone of all the media, actually ran the story as a four part broadcast, and put the story up on its web site. Then, without explanation, Fox News erased the story from their web site and have never mentioned it again. CNN followed by "Orwellizing" their report of the two hour advance warning of the WTC attacks sent to Odigo employees. But far more telling is the admission made by a US Official in part one of the Fox News report that hard evidence existed linking the events of 9/11 not to Arab Muslims, but to some of the more than 200 Israeli spies arrested both before and after 9/11, but that this evidence had been CLASSIFIED...

Source: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/spyring.html

High-Fivers and Art Student Spies

What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO x- "be on lookout" -- was issued with regard to three suspicious men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned in the radio dispatch to watch for a "vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack": White, 2000 Chevrolet van with 'Urban Moving Systems' sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.

At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO, officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and "was asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black leather fanny pouch type of bag". With guns drawn, the police then "physically removed" Kurzberg, while four other men x- two more men had apparently joined the group since the morning x- were also removed from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their Miranda rights.

They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to DeCarlo's report, "this officer was told without question by the driver [Sivan Kurzberg],'We are Israeli. We are not your problem.Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.'" Another of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo x- falsely x- that "we were on the West Side Highway in New York City during the incident". From inside the vehicle the officers, who were quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey's Bergen Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle "maps of the city with certain places highlighted. It looked like they're hooked in with this", the source told the Record, referring to the 9/11 attacks. "It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park."

The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA counterterrorism teams, who referred to the men as the "high-fivers" for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were given as many as seven liedetector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for ten weeks. Then he failed it.

Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national, abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter's departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.

It was New York's venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers confirmed this to me, noting that movers' vans are a common intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government itself admitted that the men were spies. A "former high-ranking American intelligence official", who said he was "regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials", told reporter Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli government "acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington". Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I asked him if his sources in the Mossad denied the story. "Nobody stopped talking to me", he said.

In June 2002, ABC News' 20/20 followed up with its own investigation into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward. Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as hits in searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro told me that the question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site of their "celebration" with foreknowledge of the attack to come. From the beginning, "the FBI investigation operated on the premise that the Israelis had foreknowledge", according to Cannistraro. A second former CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed the case, but who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators were pursuing two theories. "One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other was that they were at the park location already". Either way, investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when they got there.

Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were "high-level negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials", a settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that by the last week of October 2001, some six weeks after the men had been detained, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified "prominent New York congressmen" were lobbying heavily for their release. According to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report, high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also stepped in as a negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.) And so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.

Today, the crucial questions raised by this matter remain unanswered. There is sufficient reason x- from news reports, statements by former intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government -x to believe that in the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given Israel's concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history of spying on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What's incendiary is the idea -x supported, though not proven, by several pieces of evidence x- that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11 in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a Congressional investigation. Yet none of this information found its way into Congress's joint committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission's final report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. "There weren't even stories saying it was bullshit", says The Forward's Perelman. "Honestly, I was surprised". Instead, the story disappeared into the welter of anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.

It's no small boon to the U.S. government that the story of 9/11-related Israeli espionage has been thus relegated: the story doesn't fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of the attacks. It brings up concerns not only about Israel's obligation not to spy inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor, but about its possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate warning of an impending devastating attack on American soil. Furthermore, the available evidence undermines the carefully cultivated image of sanctity that defines the U.S.- Israel relationship. These are all factors that help explain the story's disappearance, and they are compelling reasons to revisit it now.

Torpedoing the FBI Probe

All five future hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed the Pentagon, maintained addresses or were active within a six-mile radius of towns associated with the Israelis employed at Urban Moving Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where the Israelis were allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging ground for the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives. Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in northern New Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the suicide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who backed Hanjour in the seizing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with or without knowledge of the terrorists' plans, have been tracking the men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?

In public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have denied that the Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an intelligence operation in the United States. "No evidence recovered suggested any of these Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working for Mossad", FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not respond to questions for this article.) According to the source at ABC News, FBI investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups. "There is a lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case", the source told me. "They feel the higher echelons torpedoed the investigation into the Israeli New Jersey cell. Leads were not fully investigated". Among those lost leads was the figure of Dominik Suter, whom the U.S. authorities apparently never attempted to contact. Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there was similar frustration within the CIA: "People I've talked to at the CIA were outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that there hadn't been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging out there without any conclusion."

However, what was "absolutely certain", according to Vincent Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance network in the New York- New Jersey area. The network's purpose was to track radical Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously told me that FBI investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving as Arabic-speaking linguists "running technical operations" in northern New Jersey's extensive Muslim communities. The former CIA officer said the operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones in rooms and mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: "Our conclusion was that they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring operations, i.e., electronic surveillance. People at FBI concur with this". The ABC News source added, "What we heard was that the Israelis may have picked up chatter that something was going to happen on the morning of 9/11".

The former CIA counterterrorism officer told me: "There was no question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If somebody says we don't want the Israelis implicated in this x- we know that they've been spying the hell out of us, we know that they possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be a political nightmare to deal with."

Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham03072007.html

A War in the Planning for Four Years

"THE GRAND CHESSBOARD -- American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives," Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1997

Zbigniew Brzezinski and the CFR Put War Plans in a 1997 Book -- It is "A Blueprint for World Dictatorship," Says a Former German Defense and NATO Official Who Warned of Global Domination in 1984, in an Exclusive Interview With FTW.

These are the very first words in the book, "Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power." -- p. xiii. Eurasia is all of the territory east of Germany and Poland, stretching all the way through Russia and China to the Pacific Ocean. It includes the Middle East and most of the Indian subcontinent. The key to controlling Eurasia, says Brzezinski, is controlling the Central Asian Republics. And the key to controlling the Central Asian republics is Uzbekistan. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Uzbekistan was forcefully mentioned by President George W. Bush in his address to a joint session of Congress just days after the attacks of September 11 as the very first place that the U.S. military would be deployed.

As FTW has documented in previous stories, major deployments of U.S. and British forces had taken place before the attacks. And the U.S. Army and the CIA had been active in Uzbekistan for several years. There is now evidence that what the world is witnessing is a cold and calculated war plan -- at least four years in the making -- and that, from reading Brzezinski's own words about Pearl Harbor, the World Trade Center attacks were just the trigger needed to set the final conquest in motion.

FTW, November 7, 2001, 1200 PST -- There's a quote often attributed to Allen Dulles after it was noted that the final 1964 report of the Warren Commission on the assassination of JFK contained dramatic inconsistencies. Those inconsistencies, in effect, disproved the Commission's own final conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone on November 22, 1963. Dulles, a career spy, Wall Street lawyer, the CIA director whom JFK had fired after the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco -- and the Warren Commission member who took charge of the investigation and final report -- is reported to have said, "The American people don't read."

Some Americans do read. So do Europeans and Asians and Africans and Latin Americans.

World events since the attacks of September 11, 2001 have not only been predicted, but also planned, orchestrated and -- as their architects would like to believe -- controlled. The current Central Asian war is not a response to terrorism, nor is it a reaction to Islamic fundamentalism. It is in fact, in the words of one of the most powerful men on the planet, the beginning of a final conflict before total world domination by the United States leads to the dissolution of all national governments. This, says Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and former Carter National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, will lead to nation states being incorporated into a new world order, controlled solely by economic interests as dictated by banks, corporations and ruling elites concerned with the maintenance (by manipulation and war) of their power. As a means of intimidation for the unenlightened reader who happens upon this frightening plan -- the plan of the CFR -- Brzezinski offers the alternative of a world in chaos unless the U.S. controls the planet by whatever means are necessary and likely to succeed.

This position is corroborated by Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, Ph.D. a former German defense ministry official and advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred Werner. On November 6, he told FTW, "The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, The Trilateral Commission ( founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller -- and the Bliderberger Group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens."

Brzezinski's own words -- laid against the current official line that the United States is waging a war to end terrorism -- are self-incriminating. In an ongoing series of articles, FTW has consistently established that the U.S. government had foreknowledge of the World Trade Center attacks and chose not to stop them because it needed to secure public approval for a war that is now in progress. It is a war, as described by Vice President xxxx Cheney, "that may not end in our lifetimes." What that means is that it will not end until all armed groups, anywhere in the world, which possess the political, economic or military ability to resist the imposition of this dictatorship, have been destroyed.

These are the "terrorists" the U.S. now fights in Afghanistan and plans to soon fight all over the globe. Before exposing Brzezinski (and those he represents) with his own words, or hearing more from Dr. Koeppl, it is worthwhile to take a look at Brzezinski's background. According to his resume Brzezinski, holding a 1953 Ph.D. from Harvard, lists the following achievements:

Counselor, Center for Strategic and International Studies Professor of American Foreign Policy, Johns Hopkins University National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter (1977-81), Trustee and founder of the Trilateral Commission, International advisor of several major US/Global corporations, Associate of Henry Kissinger Under Ronald Reagan, member of NSC-Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy Under Ronald Reagan, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Past member, Board of Directors, The Council on Foreign Relations 1988, Co-chairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force.

Brzezinski is also a past attendee and presenter at several conferences of the Bliderberger group -- a non-partisan affiliation of the wealthiest and most powerful families and corporations on the planet.

The Grand Chessboard

Brzezinski sets the tone for his strategy by describing Russia and China as the two most important countries -- almost but not quite superpowers - whose interests that might threaten the U.S. in Central Asia. Of the two, Brzezinski considers Russia to be the more serious threat. Both nations border Central Asia. In a lesser context he describes the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Iran and Kazakhstan as essential "lesser" nations that must be managed by the U.S. as buffers or counterweights to Russian and Chinese moves to control the oil, gas and minerals of the Central Asian Republics (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan).

He also notes, quite clearly (p. 53) that any nation that might become predominant in Central Asia would directly threaten the current U.S. control of oil resources in the Persian Gulf. In reading the book it becomes clear why the U.S. had a direct motive for the looting of some $300 billion in Russian assets during the 1990s, destabilizing Russia's currency (1998) and ensuring that a weakened Russia would have to look westward to Europe for economic and political survival, rather than southward to Central Asia. A dependent Russia would lack the military, economic and political clout to exert influence in the region and this weakening of Russia would explain why Russian President Vladimir Putin has been such a willing ally of U.S. efforts to date. (See FTW Vol. IV, No. 1 -- March 31, 2001)

An examination of selected quotes from "The Grand Chessboard," in the context of current events reveals the darker agenda behind military operations that were planned long before September 11th, 2001.

"The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world's paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power) (p. xiii)

"But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book. (p. xiv)

"The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (pp 24-5)

"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia) Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia -- and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained. (p.30)

"America's withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival -- would produce massive international instability. It would prompt global anarchy." (p. 30)

"In that context, how America `manages' Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." (p.31)

Source: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RUP111B.html

A Timeline Surrounding September 11

[Expanded and Revised Sept. 4, 2002 - Evidence of Bush Administration Foreknowledge and complicity is now overwhelming. Since our last revision July 11, 2002, 16 New Items! (noted in RED)]

Nov. 2, 2001, 12:00 PST -- On Oct. 31 the French daily Le Figaro dropped a bombshell. While in a Dubai hospital receiving treatment for a chronic kidney infection last July, Osama bin Laden met with a top CIA official -- presumably the chief of station. The meeting, held in bin Laden's private suite, took place at the American hospital in Dubai at a time when he was a wanted fugitive for the bombings of two U.S. embassies and last year's attack on the USS Cole. Bin Laden was eligible for execution according to a 2000 intelligence finding issued by President Bill Clinton before leaving office in January. Yet on July 14, 2001 he was allowed to leave Dubai on a private jet, and there were no Navy fighters waiting to force him down.

In 1985 Oliver North -- the only member of the Reagan-Bush years who doesn't appear to have a hand in the current war -- sent the Navy and commandos after terrorists on the cruise ship Achille Lauro. In his 1991 autobiography "Under Fire," while describing terrorist Abu Abbas North wrote, "I used to wonder: how many dead Americans will it take before we do something?" One could look at the number of Americans Osama bin Laden is alleged to have killed before Sept. 11 and ask the same question.

It gets worse, much worse. A more complete timeline listing crucial events both before and after the Sept. 11 suicide attacks, which have been blamed on bin Laden, establishes CIA foreknowledge of them and strongly suggests that there was criminal complicity on the part of the U.S. government in their execution. It also makes clear that the events that have taken place since Sept. 11 are based upon an agenda that has little to do with the attacks.

[June 19, 2002] -- As the revelations of Bush Administration foreknowledge have progressed from silence, to trickle, to cascade, the question has now changed from forcing the evidence into the open into one of forcing both the media and the people to avoid denying this information in the hopes that their desire for a sense of "normalcy" can be fulfilled. As many of us have known for years, normalcy went out the window forever when the first plane hit the tower. And what has been revealed will not be resolved with an expensive fact-finding commission, a few firing, or even an impeachment proceeding. What is needed in America -- and in the global economic system -- is an overhaul, not a tune up.

1. 1991-1997 - Major U.S. oil companies including ExxonMobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP Amoco, Shell and Enron directly invest billions in cash bribing heads of state in Kazakhstan to secure equity rights in the huge oil reserves in these regions. The oil companies further commit to future direct investments in Kazakhstan of $35 billion. Not being willing to pay exorbitant prices to Russia to use Russian pipelines, the major oil companies have no way to recoup their investments. [Source: "The Price of Oil" by Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, July 9, 2001 - The Asia Times, "The Roving Eye Part I Jan. 26, 2002.]

2. January 1995 - Philippine police investigating a possible attack on the Pope uncover plans for Operation Bojinka, connected to World Trade Center (WTC) bomber Ramsi Youssef. Parts of the plan call for crashing hijacked airliners into civilian targets. Details of the plan are disclosed in Youssef's 1997 trial for the 1993 WTC bombing. [Source: Agence France-Presse, Dec. 7, 2001]

3. Dec. 4, 1997 - Representatives of the Taliban are invited guests to the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negotiate their support for the pipeline. Subsequent reports will indicate that the negotiations failed, allegedly because the Taliban wanted too much money. [Source: The BBC, Dec. 4, 1997]

4. Feb. 12, 1998 - Unocal Vice President John J. Maresca -- later to become a special ambassador to Afghanistan -- testifies before the House that until a single, unified, friendly government is in place in Afghanistan, the trans-Afghani pipeline needed to monetize the oil will not be built. [Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee: http://www.house.gov/international_relations/105th/ap/wsap212982.htm]

5. August 1998 - After the U.S. cruise missile attacks on Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan in retaliation for the African embassy bombings, Unocal officially withdraws from participation in the CentGas trans-Afghani gas pipeline project. [Various sources, Unocal]

6. 1998 - The CIA ignores warnings from Case Officer Robert Baer that Saudi Arabia was harboring an Al Qaeda cell led by two known terrorists. A more detailed list of known terrorists is offered to Saudi intelligence in August 2001 and refused. [Source: Financial Times Jan. 21, 2001; "See No Evil" by Robert Baer (release date February 2002)]

7. April 1999 - Enron with a $3 billion investment to build an electrical generating plant at Dabhol, India loses access to plentiful LNG supplies from Qatar to fuel the plant. Its only remaining option to make the investment profitable is a trans-Afghani gas pipeline to be built by Unocal from Turkmenistan that would terminate near the Indian border at the city of Multan. [Source: The Albion Monitor, Feb. 28, 2002]

8. July 4, 1999 - President Clinton signs Executive Order 13129, which freezes Taliban assets in the U.S. and prohibits trade between the Afghan fundamentalist regime and U.S. entities. [Source: Federal Register, Vol. 64, No. 129, July 7, 1999]

9. 1998 and 2000 - Former President George H.W. Bush travels to Saudi Arabia on behalf of the privately owned Carlyle Group, the 11th largest defense contractor in the U.S. While there he meets privately with the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family. [Source: Wall Street Journal, Sept. 27, 2001. See also FTW, Vol. IV, No. 7 - "The Best Enemies Money Can Buy"
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/carlyle.html]

10. March 2000 - An FBI agent, reportedly angry over a glitch in Carnivore that has somehow mixed innocent non-targeted emails with those belonging to Al Qaeda, destroys all of the FBI's Denver-based intercepts of bin Laden's colleagues in a terrorist investigation. [Source: The Washington Post, May 29, 2002]

11. 2000 (est.) - The FBI refuses to disclose the date of an internal memo stating that a Middle Eastern nation had been trying to purchase a flight simulator. [Source: Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2002]

12. August 2000 -- Suspected Al Qaeda operatives wiretapped by Italian police made apparent references to plans for major attacks involving airports, airplanes and the United States according to transcripts obtained by the Los Angeles Times. The Times suggests that the information might not have been passed to U.S. authorities (hard to believe), but it did report that Italian authorities would not comment on the report. The Times also noted that "Italian and U.S. anti-terrorism experts cooperate closely." [Source: The Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2002]

13. Oct. 24-26, 2000 - Pentagon officials carry out a "detailed" emergency drill based upon the crashing of a hijacked airliner into the Pentagon. [Source: The Mirror, May 24, 2002]

14. January 2001 - The Bush Administration orders the FBI and intelligence agencies to "back off" investigations involving the bin Laden family, including two of Osama bin Laden's relatives (Abdullah and Omar) who were living in Falls Church, Va. -- right next to CIA headquarters. This followed previous orders dating back to 1996 that frustrated efforts to investigate the bin Laden family. [Source: BBC Newsnight, Correspondent Gregg Palast, Nov. 7, 2001]

15. Jan. 30, 2001 - Sept. 11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah was questioned in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A number of UAE, Middle Eastern, European, and U.S. sources were cited in this CNN report, which said the CIA requested Jarrah be interrogated because he had been in Afghanistan and was suspected to have ties to terrorists. An unnamed CIA spokesman said the other sources' claims that the agency knew anything about Jarrah before Sept. 11 were "flatly untrue." Jarrah's Jan. 30 detainment at the airport in Dubai, UAE came six months after he took flying lessons in the U.S. Jarrah was released because "U.S. officials were satisfied," said the report. [Source: CNN, Aug. 1, 2002 http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/08/01/cia.hijacker/index.html]

16. Feb. 13, 2001 - UPI terrorism correspondent Richard Sale -- while covering a trial of bin Laden's Al Qaeda followers -- reports that the National Security Agency has broken bin Laden's encrypted communications. Even if this indicates that bin Laden changed systems in February, it does not mesh with the fact that the government insists that the attacks had been planned for years.

17. May 2001 - Secretary of State Colin Powell gives $43 million in aid to the Taliban regime, purportedly to assist hungry farmers who are starving since the destruction of their opium crop in January on orders of the Taliban regime. [Source: Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2001]

18. May 2001 - Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a career covert operative and former Navy Seal, travels to India on a publicized tour, while CIA Director George Tenet makes a quiet visit to Pakistan to meet with Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Armitage has long and deep Pakistani intelligence connections. It would be reasonable to assume that while in Islamabad, Tenet, in what was described as "an unusually long meeting," also met with his Pakistani counterpart, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmad, head of the ISI. [Source: The Indian SAPRA news agency, May 22, 2001]

19. June 2001 - German intelligence, the BND, warns the CIA and Israel that Middle Eastern terrorists are "planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture." [Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sept. 14, 2001; See
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/f_a_zeitung_story.html]

20. June 8, 2001 - Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) publishes a story headlined, "Central Asia: Charges Link Russian Military to Drug Trade." According to the article, figures for 1999 published in a report by the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) revealed that 80 percent of the heroin consumed in Western Europe originated in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The UNDCP report also revealed half of the drugs in that 80 percent traveled through Central Asia. A study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published in March 2000 said Russian soldiers headquartered in Tajikistan were suspected of helping drug traffickers by providing them with transportation facilities. This was confirmed by a Russian intelligence officer who told the Moscow News weekly, "You can come to an arrangement [with custom officials] so that the search of military transport planes remains purely formal. The same goes for train convoys carrying military cargo [to Russia from Tajikistan]." [Source: www.rferl.org/nca/features/2001/06/08062001111711.asp]

21. July 2001 - FBI agents in Arizona write a memorandum warning about suspicious activities involving a group of Middle Eastern men taking flight training lessons in Phoenix. The memorandum specifically mentions Osama bin Laden and warns of connections to terrorist activities. [Source: The New York Times, May 14, 2002]

22. summer 2001 - The National Security Council convenes a Dabhol working group as revealed in a series of government e-mails obtained by the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. [Source: The Albion Monitor, Feb. 28, 2002]

23. summer 2001 - According to a Sept. 26 story in Britain's The Guardian, correspondent David Leigh reported that "U.S. department of defense official, Dr. Jeffrey Starr, visited Tajikistan in January. The Guardian's Felicity Lawrence established that U.S. Rangers were also training special troops in Kyrgyzstan. There were unconfirmed reports that Tajik and Uzbek special troops were training in Alaska and Montana."

24. summer 2001 (est.) - Pakistani ISI Chief Gen. Ahmad (see above) orders an aide to wire transfer $100,000 to Mohammed Atta who was, according to the FBI, the lead terrorist in the suicide hijackings. Ahmad recently resigned after the transfer was disclosed in India and confirmed by the FBI. The individual who makes the wire transfer at Ahmad's direction is Ahmad Umar Sheik, the lead suspect in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. [Source: The Times of India, Oct.11, 2001.]

25. summer 2001 - The online newswire online.ie reports on Sept. 14 that an Iranian man phones U.S. law enforcement to warn of an imminent attack on the WTC in the week of Sept. 9. German police confirm the calls but state that the U.S. Secret Service would not reveal any further information. [Source:
http://www.online.ie/news/viewer.adp?article=1512332.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/online_ie_story.html ]

26. summer 2001 - Jordanian intelligence, the GID, makes a communications intercept deemed so important that King Abdullah's men relay it to Washington, probably through the CIA station in Amman. To make doubly sure the message got through it was passed through an Arab intermediary to a German intelligence agent. The message: A major attack was planned inside the U.S., and aircraft would be used. The code name of the operation was "The Big Wedding." "When it became clear that the information was embarrassing to Bush Administration officials and congressmen who at first denied that there had been any such warnings before Sept. 11, senior Jordanian officials backed away from their earlier confirmations." This case was authenticated by ABC reporter John K. Cooley. [Source: International Herald Tribune (IHT), May 21, 2002]

27. summer 2001 (est.) - The National Security Agency intercepts telephone conversations between bin Laden aide Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Mohammed Atta and does not share the information with any other agencies. [Source: Jonathan Landay, Knight Ridder Newspapers, June 6, 2002]

28. June 26, 2001 - The magazine indiareacts.com states that "India and Iran will 'facilitate' U.S. and Russian plans for 'limited military action' against the Taliban." The story indicates that the fighting will be done by U.S. and Russian troops with the help of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. [Source: indiareacts.com, June 26, 2001]

29. summer 2001 - Russian intelligence notifies the CIA that 25 terrorist pilots have been specifically training for missions involving hijacked airliners. This is reported in the Russian press and news stories are translated for FTW by a retired CIA officer. (Note: The story currently on the Izvestia web site has been edited to delete a key paragraph.) [Source: Izvestia, Sept. 12, 2001,
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/izvestia_story_pic.html]

30. July 4-14, 2001 - Osama bin Laden receives treatment for kidney disease at the American hospital in Dubai and meets with a CIA official, who returns to CIA headquarters on July 15. [Source: Le Figaro, Oct. 31, 2001]
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/Le Figaro_osama_dubai.html

31. July 15, 2001 - Members of the G8, meeting in Genoa, Italy, discuss the Taliban, pipelines, and the handing over of Osama bin Laden. According to Pakistani representative Ambassador Naiz Naik, the U.S. delegation, led by former Clinton Ambassador to Pakistan Tom Simmons warned of a "military option" if the Taliban did not change position. [Source: Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, "Bin Laden: La Verite Interdite," pp76-7. Thanks to Prof. Peter Dale Scott]

32. July 2001 - Immediately after the G8 Summit three American officials -- Tom Simmons (former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan), Karl Inderfurth (former assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs) and Lee Coldren (former State Department expert on South Asia) -- meet with Pakistani and Russian intelligence officers in Berlin and tell them that the U.S. is planning military strikes against Afghanistan in October. A French book released in November, "Bin Laden - La Verite Interdite," discloses that Taliban representatives often sat in on the meetings. British papers confirm that the Pakistani ISI relayed the threats to the Taliban. [Source: The Guardian, Sept. 22, 2001; the BBC, Sept. 18, 2001; The Inter Press Service, Nov. 16, 2001; Alexander's Gas and Oil Connections, Feb. 21, 2002]

33. July 2001 - The G8 summit at Genoa, Italy is surrounded by anti-aircraft guns, and local airspace is closed off after Italian and Egyptian officials (including President Hosni Mubarak) warn American intelligence that airliners stuffed with explosives might be used to attack President Bush. U.S. officials state that the warnings were "unsubstantiated." (But I wonder if they would have taken away the anti-aircraft artillery?) [Source: Los Angeles Times, Sept. 27, 2001]

34. July 26, 2001 - CBS News reports that John Ashcroft has stopped flying commercial airlines due a threat assessment. Ashcroft told the press that he didn't know anything about what had caused it.

35. Aug. 2, 2001 - U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Christine Rocca (a former CIA officer), meets in Islamabad with a Taliban ambassador and demands the extradition of bin Laden. This was the last known meeting on the subject. [Source: Brisard and Dasquie, p 79. Thanks to Prof. Peter Dale Scott]

36. August 2001 - The FBI arrests an Islamic militant linked to bin Laden in Boston. French intelligence sources confirm that the man is a key member of bin Laden's network and the FBI learns that he has been taking flying lessons. At the time of his arrest the man is in possession of technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals. [Source: Reuters, Sept. 13, 2001]

37. Aug. 11 or 12, 2001 ‚ U.S. Navy Lt. Delmart "Mike" Vreeland, jailed in Toronto on U.S. fraud charges and claiming to be an officer with U.S. naval intelligence, writes details of the pending WTC attacks and seals them in an envelope, which he gives to Canadian authorities. [Source: The Toronto Star, Oct. 23, 2001; Toronto Superior Court Records]

38. August 2001 - As reported in the IHT both a French magazine (name not given) and a Moroccan newspaper simultaneously report that a Moroccan agent named Hassan Dabou had penetrated Al Qaeda to the point of getting close to bin Laden, who was "very disappointed" that the 1993 bombing had not toppled the WTC. Dabou was called to the U.S. after reporting this, which curtailed his ability to stay in touch with the organization and gather additional intelligence that might have prevented the attacks. Though not proved beyond a doubt, these stories have been met with a wall of silence. [The IHT, May 21, 2002]

39. August 2001 - Russian President Vladimir Putin orders Russian intelligence to warn the U.S. government "in the strongest possible terms" of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings. [Source: MSNBC interview with Putin, Sept. 15, 2001]

40. August 2001 - President Bush receives classified intelligence briefings at his Crawford, Texas ranch indicating that Osama bin Laden might be planning to hijack commercial airliners. [CBS News; CNN, May 15, 2002]

41. late-August 2001 - Prince Turki, the pro-U.S. head of Saudi intelligence (also known to be close to bin Laden), is replaced by his more neutral half-brother, Prince Nawwaf who is an ally of Crown Prince Abdullah. [Source: Saudi Arabian Information Resource, Aug. 31, 2001; http://www.saudinf.com/ - Thanks to Prof. Peter Dale Scott]

42. August/September 2001 - The Dow Jones Industrial Average drops nearly 900 points in the three weeks prior to the attack. A major stock market crash is imminent.

43. August/September 2001 - According to a detailed 13-page memo written by Minneapolis FBI legal officer Colleen Rowley, FBI headquarters ignores urgent, direct warnings from French intelligence services about pending attacks. In addition, a single Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) in Washington expends extra effort to thwart the field office's investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, in one case rewriting Rowley's affidavit for a search warrant to search Moussaoui's laptop. Rowley's memo uses terms like "deliberately sabotage," "block," "integrity," "omitted," "downplayed," "glossed over," "mis-characterize," "improper political reasons, "deliberately thwarting," "deliberately further undercut," "suppressed," and "not completely honest." These are not terms describing negligent acts but rather, deliberate acts. FBI field agents desperately attempt to get action, but to no avail. One agent speculates that bin Laden might be planning to crash airliners into the WTC, while Rowley ironically noted that the SSA who had committed these deliberate actions had actually been promoted after Sept. 11. [Source: Associated Press, May 21, 2002]

44. Sept. 3-10, 2001 - MSNBC reports on Sept. 16 that a caller to a Cayman Islands radio talk show gave several warnings of an imminent attack on the U.S. by bin Laden in the week prior to 9-11.

45. early-September 2001 - An FBI internal document, based upon field notes from Minnesota field agents discloses that the agents had been investigating and had questioned the "20th hijacker," Zacarias Moussaoui. The field notes speculate that Moussaoui, who had been taking flight lessons, might crash an airliner into the WTC. Interestingly, the field agents' requests to obtain a search warrant for his personal computer were denied. French intelligence confirms to the FBI that Moussaoui has ties to terrorist groups and may have traveled to Afghanistan. The agents also had no knowledge of the Phoenix memo (See Item #18). One news story states that agents were in "a frenzy," absolutely convinced that he was "going to do something with a plane." [Source: Newsweek, May 20, 2002 issue, story by Michael Isikoff].

46. Sept. 1-10 2001 - In an exercise, called Operation "Swift Sword" and planned for four years, 23,000 British troops are steaming toward Oman. Although the 9-11 attacks caused a hiccup in the deployment, the massive operation was implemented as planned. At the same time two U.S. carrier battle groups arrive on station in the Gulf of Arabia just off the Pakistani coast. Also at the same time, some 17,000 U.S. troops join more than 23,000 NATO troops in Egypt for Operation "Bright Star." All of these forces are in place before the first plane hits the WTC. [Sources: The Guardian; CNN; Fox; The Observer; International Law Professor Francis Boyle, the University of Illinois.]

47. Sept. 4-5, 2001 - A freshman at Brooklyn's New Utrecht High School who had recently emigrated from Pakistan reportedly predicts the destruction of the World Trade Center a week prior to the 9-11 attacks, according to the JournalNews newspaper in White Plains, N.Y. Citing "three police sources and a city official familiar with the investigation" as well as confirmation from the FBI that the bureau had received this information, the paper reported that in the midst of a heated class discussion the student pointed to the World Trade Center from a third story window and said, "Do you see those two buildings? They won't be standing there next week." New York City Board of Education spokeswoman Catie Marshall confirmed for the JournalNews "that school officials reported the matter to police within minutes of the Sept. 11 attack" and students told the paper that "FBI agents and NYPD detectives descended on the school on Sept. 13 to interrogate the student [who made the prediction] and others in his class," which was "an English class for Arab-American students." [Source: The JournalNews, Oct. 11, 2001, http://www.thejournalnews.com/newsroom/101101/11warumors.html]

48. Sept. 5, 2001 - "Five hundred websites -- many of them with an Arab or Muslim connection -- crash when an anti-terrorism taskforce raids InfoCom Corp. in Texas," reported Britain's the Guardian on Sept. 10, 2001. A taskforce of approximately 80 federal agents and officials from the FBI, Secret Service, INS, Customs, Bureau of Diplomatic Security, IRS, and Commerce Department occupied InfoCom's office building in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, Texas for four days, "copying every hard disc they could find." InfoCom hosts many websites for Middle Eastern clients and is located across the street from the Holy Land Foundation, a charitable organization which has been alleged to have connections with terrorist groups. InfoCom's vice president of marketing, Ghassan Elashi, is also the chairman of the Holy Land Foundation. [Source: The Guardian, Sept. 10, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,549590,00.html]

49. Sept. 7, 2001 - Florida Governor Jeb Bush signs a two-year emergency executive order (01-261) making new provisions for the Florida National Guard to assist law enforcement and emergency-management personnel in the event of large civil disturbances, disaster or acts of terrorism. [Source: State of Florida website listing of Governor's executive orders]

50. Sept. 6-7, 2001 - Put options (a speculation that the stock will go down) totaling 4,744 are purchased on United Air Lines stock, as opposed to only 396 call options (speculation that the stock will go up). This is a dramatic and abnormal increase in sales of put options. Many of the United puts are purchased through Deutschebank/A.B. Brown, a firm managed until 1998 by the current executive director of the CIA, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard. [Source: The Herzliyya International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT), http://www.ict.org.il/, Sept. 21, 2001 (Note:The ICT article on possible terrorist insider trading appeared eight days *after* the 9/11 attacks.); The New York Times; The Wall Street Journal; The San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 29, 2001]

51. Sept. 10, 2001 - Put options totaling 4,516 are purchased on American Airlines as compared to 748 call options. [Source: Herzliyya Institute - above]

52. Sept. 6-11, 2001 - No other airlines show any similar trading patterns to those experienced by United and American. The put option purchases on both airlines were 600 percent above normal. This at a time when Reuters (Sept. 10) issues a business report stating, "Airline stocks may be poised to take off."

53. Sept. 6-10, 2001 - Highly abnormal levels of put options are purchased in Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, AXA Re(insurance) which owns 25 percent of American Airlines, and Munich Re. All of these companies are directly impacted by the Sept. 11 attacks. [Source: ICT, above;
FTW, Oct. 18, 2001, http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/oct152001.html]

54. 2001-2002 - It has been documented that the CIA, the Israeli Mossad, and many other intelligence agencies monitor stock trading in real time using highly advanced programs reported to be descended from Promis software. This is to alert national intelligence services of just such kinds of attacks. Promis was reported as recently as June 2001 to be in Osama bin Laden's possession and, as a result of recent stories by Fox, both the FBI and the Justice Department have confirmed its use for U.S. intelligence gathering through at least summer 2002. This would confirm that CIA had additional advance warning of imminent attacks. [Sources: The Washington Times, June 15, 2001; Fox, Oct. 16, 2001;

FTW, Oct. 26, 2001, - http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/11_19_01_magic_carpet.html
FTW, Vol. IV, No. 6, Sept. 18, 2001 - http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/sept1801.html;
FTW, Vol. III, No. 7, Sept. 30, 2000 - http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pandora/052401_promis.html]

55. Sept. 9, 2001 - President George W. Bush is presented with detailed war plans to overthrow Al Qaeda, according to U.S. and foreign sources speaking to NBC News. [Source: MSNBC, May 16, 2002. Thanks to Prof. Peter Dale Scott]

56. Sept. 10, 2001 - This item has been removed solely at the request of the party previously named in this entry. Recent court proceedings – which occurred after the news story we had cited - have indicated that there was no connection between the story listed here, the person named therein and the attacks of 9-11-01. At the request of the previously named party, FTW has replaced the $1,000 reward with a $1,000 donation to The Childrens Defense Fund on behalf of the named party and the issue is now amicably resolved without any hard feelings between that party and FTW.

57. Sept. 10, 2001 - According to Newsweek, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly cancelled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns. [Source: Newsweek, Sept. 24, 2001]

58. Sept. 10, 2001 - The Houston Chronicle reports the FBI was notified of a fifth grader from a Dallas suburb who told his teacher, "Tomorrow, World War III will begin. It will begin in the United States, and the United States will lose." The Chronicle was unclear on specifically when Garland, Texas school district officials told the FBI about the incident, but it was some time between Sept. 13, 2001 and the story's publication date of Sept. 19, 2001. [Source: Houston Chronicle, Sept. 19, 2001 http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/1055222]

59. Sept. 10, 2001 - San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown receives a call from what he described as "his security people at the airport" eight hours before the terrorist attacks "advising him that Americans should be cautious about their air travel," as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. Brown was scheduled to fly to New York from San Francisco International Airport. He told the Chronicle the call "didn't come in any alarming fashion, which is why I'm hesitant to make any alarming statement." [Source: San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 12, 2001, http://www.sfgate.com/today/0912_chron_mnreport.shtml]

60. Sept. 11, 2001 - The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the federal agency that runs many of the nation's spy satellites, schedules an exercise involving a plane crashing into one of the agency's buildings. "On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001," according to a website advertising a homeland security conference in Chicago run by the National Law Enforcement and Security Institute, CIA official John Fulton and his team "were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way." Fulton is the head of the NRO's strategic gaming division. [Source: National Law Enforcement and Security Institute, http://www.nlsi.net, http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020821/ap_wo_en_ge/us_sept_11_plane_exercise_1]

61. Sept. 11, 2001 - After the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon occur, National Public Radio's congressional correspondent David Welna reports, "I spoke with congressman Ike Skelton, a Democrat from Missouri and a member of the Armed Services Committee, who said that just recently the director of the CIA warned that there could be an attack -- an imminent attack - on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected." [Source: http://www.thememoryhole.org/updates.htm]

62. Sept. 11, 2001 - United Air Lines flight 23, scheduled to fly from New York City to Los Angeles was delayed after four Muslim passengers began demanding that the plane take off immediately. This happened apparently after the first plane had hit the WTC. The passengers were thrown off the flight. [Source: The Globe and Mail, June 13, 2002]

63. Sept. 11, 2001 - Gen. Mahmud of the ISI (see #16), friend of Mohammed Atta, is visiting Washington on behalf of the Taliban. He is meeting with the Chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., and Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., [Source: MSNBC, Oct. 7, 2001; The New York Times, Feb. 17, 2002]

64. Sept. 11, 2001 - Employees of Odigo, Inc. in Israel, one of the world's largest instant messaging companies with offices in New York, receive threat warnings of an imminent attack on the WTC less than two hours before the first plane hits. Law enforcement authorities have gone silent about any investigation of this. The Odigo research and development offices in Israel are located in the city of Herzliyya, a ritzy suburb of Tel Aviv that is the same location as the Institute for Counter Terrorism, which eight days later reports details of insider trading on 9-11. [Source: CNN's Daniel Sieberg, Sept. 28, 2001; MSNBC Newsbytes, Brian McWilliams, Sept. 27, 2001; Ha'aretz, Sept. 26, 2001]

65. Sept. 11, 2001 - For 50 minutes, from 8:15 AM until 9:05 AM, with it widely known within the FAA and the military that four planes have been simultaneously hijacked and taken off course, no one notifies the President of the United States. It is not until 9:30 that any Air Force planes are scrambled to intercept, but by then it is too late. This means that the National Command Authority waited for 75 minutes before scrambling aircraft, even though it was known that four simultaneous hijackings had occurred. [Source: CNN; ABC; MSNBC; Los Angeles Times; The New York Times; www.tenc.net]

66. Sept. 11-12, 2001 - Nearly a month before the first reported outbreak, White House officials start taking the powerful antibiotic Cipro to treat anthrax. By the end of the year it will be known that the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks against Sens. Leahy and Daschle was produced by CIA programs coordinated through Fort Detrick, the Batelle Memorial Institute and the Dugway Proving Ground. [Source: NBC; CNN; www.tetrahedron.org, www.judicialwatch.org]

67. Sept. 13, 2001 - China is admitted to the World Trade Organization quickly, after years of unsuccessful attempts. [Source: The New York Times, Sept. 30, 2001]

68. Sept. 14, 2001 - Canadian jailers open the sealed envelope from Mike Vreeland in Toronto and see that is describes attacks against the WTC and Pentagon. The U.S. Navy subsequently states that Vreeland was discharged as a seaman in 1986 for unsatisfactory performance and has never worked in intelligence. [Source: The Toronto Star, Oct. 23, 2001; Toronto Superior Court records]

69. Sept. 15, 2001 - The New York Times reports that Mayo Shattuck III has resigned, effective immediately, as head of the Alex Brown (A.B.) unit of Deutschebank.

70. Sept. 29, 2001 - The San Francisco Chronicle reports that $2.5 million in put options on American and United airlines are unclaimed. This is likely the result of the suspension in trading on the New York Stock Exchange after the attacks, which gave the Securities and Exchange Commission time to be waiting when the owners showed up to redeem their put options.

71. Oct. 10, 2001 - The Pakistani newspaper The Frontier Post reports that U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain has paid a call on the Pakistani oil minister. A previously abandoned Unocal gas pipeline project from Turkmenistan, across Afghanistan, to Pakistan is now back on the table "in view of recent geopolitical developments."

72. Oct. 11, 2001 - The Ashcroft Justice Department takes over all terrorist prosecutions from the U.S. Attorneys office in New York, which has had a highly successful track record in prosecuting terrorist cases connected to Osama bin Laden. [Source: The New York Times, Oct. 11, 2001]

73. mid-October 2001 - The Dow Jones Industrial Average, after having suffered a precipitous drop has recovered most of its pre-attack losses. Although still weak and vulnerable to negative earnings reports, a crash has been averted by a massive infusion of government spending on defense programs, subsidies for "affected" industries and planned tax cuts for corporations.

74. Oct. 29, 2001 - The Bush Administration drafts "an executive order that would usher in a new era of secrecy for presidential records and allow an incumbent president to withhold a former president's papers even if the former president wanted to make them public," wrote the Washington Post. The order also required members of the public to prove "at least a demonstrated, specific need'" for a president's papers to be released. Critics contend this would overturn the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which releases documents after 12 years. The White House maintained that a Supreme Court decision in 1977 allows presidents various privileges for their records. [Source: Washington Post, Nov. 1, 2001, http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20731-2001Oct31?language=printer]

75. Nov. 21, 2001 - The British paper The Independent runs a story headlined, "Opium Farmers Rejoice at the Defeat of the Taliban." The story reports that massive opium planting is underway all over the country.

76. Nov. 25, 2001 - The Observer runs a story headlined "Victorious Warlords Set To Open the Opium Floodgates." It states that farmers are being encouraged by warlords allied with the victorious Americans are "being encouraged to plant as much opium as possible."

77. Dec. 4, 2001 - Convicted drug lord and opium kingpin Ayub Afridi is recruited by the U.S. government to help establish control in Afghanistan by unifying various Pashtun warlords. The former opium smuggler who was one of the CIA's leading assets in the war against the Russians is released from prison in order to do this. [Source: The Asia Times Online, Dec. 4, 2001]

78. Dec. 25, 2001 - Newly appointed Afghani Prime Minister Hamid Karzai is revealed as being a former paid consultant for Unocal. [Source: Le Monde]

79. Jan. 3, 2002 - President Bush appoints Zalmy Khalilzad as a special envoy to Afghanistan. Khalilzad, a former employee of Unocal, also wrote op-eds in the Washington Post in 1997 supporting the Taliban regime. [Source: Pravda, Jan. 9, 2002]

80. Jan. 4, 2002 - Florida drug trafficking explodes after 9-11. In a surge of trafficking reminiscent of the 1980s the diversion of resources away from drug enforcement has opened the floodgates for a new surge of cocaine and heroin from South America. [The Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 4, 2002]

81. Jan. 10, 2002 - In a call from a speaker phone in open court, attorneys for Mike Vreeland call the Pentagon's switchboard operator, who confirms that Vreeland is indeed a naval lieutenant on active duty. She provides an office number and a direct dial phone extension to his office in the Pentagon. [Source: Attorney Rocco Galati; Toronto Superior Court records]

82. Jan. 10, 2002 - Attorney General John Ashcroft recuses himself from the Enron investigation because Enron had been a major campaign donor in his 2000 Senate race. He fails to recuse himself from involvement in two sitting federal grand juries investigating bribery and corruption charges against ExxonMobil and BP Amoco, which have massive oil interests in Central Asia. Both were major Ashcroft donors in 2000. [Source: CNN, Jan. 10, 2002; FTW, "The Elephant in the Living Room, Part I," April 4, 2002,
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/04_04_02_elephant.html]

83. Jan. 23, 2002 - Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is kidnapped in Pakistan. Pearl is reported dead on Feb. 21. Lead suspect Ahmad Umar Sheik, former colleague of Gen. Ahmad, is arrested on Feb. 12 and named as the lead suspect in the kidnapping and murder. Legal sources close to the Pakistani government tell FTW that Pearl was investigating the ISI. [Source: CNN.com]

84. Feb. 9, 2002 - Pakistani leader Gen. Musharraf and Afghan leader Hamid Karzai announce their agreement to "cooperate in all spheres of activity," including the proposed Central Asian pipeline. Pakistan will give $10 million to Afghanistan to help pay Afghan government workers. [Source: The Irish Times, Feb. 9, 2002]

85. Feb. 18, 2002 - The Financial Times reports that the estimated opium harvest in Afghanistan in the late-spring 2002 will reach a world record 4,500 metric tons.

86. mid-April, 2002 - World Bank chief James Wolfensohn, at the opening of the World Bank's offices in Kabul, states he has held talks about financing the Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline. He confirms $100 million in new grants for the interim Afghani government. Wolfensohn also states that a number of companies have already expressed interest in the project. [Source: Alexander's Gas and oil Connections, citing an Agence France-Presse story]

87. May 13, 2002 - The BBC reports that Afghanistan is about to close a deal for construction of the $2 billion gas pipeline to run from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India. The story states, "work on the project will start after an agreement is expected to be struck" at a summit scheduled for the end of the month. Unocal will build the pipeline. [Source: BBC, May 13, 2002]

88. May 2002 - A number of sources report progress on both oil and gas pipelines. Regional sources state that Unocal will re-emerge as a pipeline contender after withdrawing from the CentGas pipeline project in 1998. Unocal denies plans to revive the gas pipeline but curiously neglects to mention whether or not it has any interest in the oil pipeline, which local sources say is moving ahead. [Source: The Dawn Group of Newspapers, May 7, May 17, May 22, 2002]

89. May 30, 2002 - Afghanistan's interim leader, Hamid Karzai, Turkmenistan's President Niyazov, and Pakistani President Musharraf meet in Islamabad to sign a memorandum of understanding on the trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline project. The three leaders will meet for more talks on the project in October. The Turkmen-Afghan-Pakistani gas pipeline accord has been published and can be viewed at the following website: http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/nts22622.htm. [Source: NewsBase, June 5, 2002]

90. May 16, 2002 - White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer states unequivocally that while President Bush had been warned of possible hijackings, "The president did not -- not -- receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers." [Source: CBS News, May 15, 2002]

91. May 19, 2002 - Former FBI Agent Tyrone Powers, now a professor at Anne Arundel Community College states on radio station KISS 98.7 that he has credible evidence suggesting that the Bush Administration did in fact allow the Sept. 11 attacks to further a hidden agenda. [Source: http://www.indymedia.org - May 20, 2002]

92. May 31, 2002 - FBI Agent Robert Wright delivers a tearful press conference at the National Press Club describing his lawsuit against the FBI for deliberately curtailing investigations that might have prevented the 9-11 attacks. He uses words like "prevented," "thwarted," "obstructed," "threatened," "intimidated," and "retaliation" to describe the actions of his superiors in blocking his attempts to shut off money flows to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. These are not words of negligence. They are words describing deliberate and malicious actions. [Source: C-SPAN website]

93. June 4, 2002 - Air Force Lt. Col. Steve Butler, who had called President Bush a joke and accused him of allowing the Sept. 11 attacks to happen, is suspended from his post at the Defense Language School in Monterey, Calif. and could face a court martial. [Source: Associated Press, June 4, 2002]

94. June 14, 2002 - Common Dreams website publishes an account from a former member of the 1/118thInfantry Battalion of the South Carolina National Guard: "My unit reported for drill in July 2001 and we were suddenly and unexpectedly informed that all activities planned for the next two months would be suspended in order to prepare for a mobilization exercise to be held on Sept. 14, 2001. We worked diligently for two weekends and even came in on an unscheduled day in August to prepare for the exercise. By the end of August all we needed was a phone call, which we were to expect, and we could hop into a fully prepared convoy with our bags and equipment packed." [Source: Common Dreams, http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0614-02.htm]

95. June 17, 2002 - Reuters reports that Butler's case has been resolved without the necessity of a court martial. (I guess so. There's enough material here to prove him right. -- MCR) [Reuters, June 17, 2002]

96. July 2, 2002 - Motions from Zacarias Moussaoui are unsealed in federal court, indicating that Moussaoui wants to testify before both a grand jury and Congress about the Sept. 11 attacks. Moussaoui claims to have information showing that the U.S. government wanted the attacks to happen. [Source: The Washington Post, July 3, 2002]

97. July 3, 2002 - The first-ever shipment of Russian oil, 200,000 metric tons, arrives in Houston. [Source: The Moscow Times, July 6, 2002].

98. July 6, 2002 - Afghan Vice President Hajji Abdul Qadir is assassinated by Afghan warlords. The New York Times reports that Qadir may have been assassinated by opium warlords upset by Qadir's efforts to reduce the rampant opium farming and processing that has taken place since the U.S. occupation. Qadir had been overseeing a Western-backed eradication program, according to the Times. However, the opium warlords of the region are same ones sponsored, protected, and in some cases released from prison by the CIA and who have been protected by President Bush's special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad. It is reported that the raw opium is being refined near U.S. bases at Kandahar. [Sources: The New York Times, July 8, 2002; Far Eastern Economic Review, April 18, 2002]

99. July 26, 2002 - White House security prevented the legal watch-group Judicial Watch from serving Vice President Cheney with a lawsuit filed on behalf of Halliburton shareholders. Before becoming vice president Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, which has filed for bankruptcy. [Source: Cybercast News Service, cnsnews.com]

100. Aug. 2, 2002 - The FBI asked members of the House and Senate intelligence committees to take lie-detector tests as investigators try to determine who leaked information to CNN about communications in Arabic that made vague references to an impending attack on the United States. The communications were intercepted by the National Security Agency on Sept. 10 but weren't translated until Sept. 12. [Source: Associated Press story published in the Boston Globe, Aug. 2, 2002, http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.03A.fbi.lie.det.p.htm]

101. Aug. 5, 2002 - The Associated Press reported Russia's major role over the last five years in the trafficking of Afghan heroin into Europe. [Source: Santa Fe New Mexican, Aug. 5, 2002, www.sfnewmexican.com]

102. Aug. 16, 2002 - A Knight Ridder story discloses that members of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's staff have created a special planning unit for an invasion of Iraq. The unit is composed primarily of civilians and was spearheaded by conservative members of Rumsfeld's staff, such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The story was headlined, "White House Methodically Preparing for Iraq Campaign." [Source: Knight Ridder Newspapers, www.truthout.org/docs 02/08.17B.wh.prep.irq.p.htm]

103. Aug. 28, 2002 - The Globe and Mail of Canada reports Afghanistan will become the world's top producer of opium this year, surpassing Southeast Asia. [Source: the Globe and Mail, Aug. 28, 2002]

Now, let's go back to the Oct. 31 story by Le Figaro -- the one that has Osama bin Laden meeting with a CIA officer in Dubai in July 2001.

The story says, "Throughout his stay in the hospital, Osama Bin Laden received visits from many family members [There goes the story that he's a black sheep! --MCR] and Saudi Arabian Emirate personalities of status. During this time the local representative of the CIA was seen by many people taking the elevator and going to bin Laden's room.

"Several days later the CIA officer bragged to his friends about having visited the Saudi millionaire. From authoritative sources, this CIA agent visited CIA headquarters on July 15, the day after bin Laden's departure for Quetta.

"According to various Arab diplomatic sources and French intelligence itself, precise information was communicated to the CIA concerning terrorist attacks aimed at American interests in the world, including its own territory.

"Extremely bothered, they [American intelligence officers in a meeting with French intelligence officers] requested from their French peers exact details about the Algerian activists [connected to bin Laden through Dubai banking institutions], without explaining the exact nature of their inquiry. When asked the question, What do you fear in the coming days?' the Americans responded with incomprehensible silence.

"On further investigation, the FBI discovered certain plans that had been put together between the CIA and its 'Islamic friends' over the years. The meeting in Dubai is, so it would seem, consistent with 'a certain American policy.'"

Even though Le Figaro reported that it had confirmed with hospital staff that bin Laden had been there as reported, stories printed on Nov. 1 contained quotes from hospital staff that these reports were untrue. On Nov. 1, as reported by the Ananova press agency, the CIA flatly denied that any meeting between any CIA personnel and Osama bin Laden at any time.

Who do you believe?

Source: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/02_11_02_lucy.html

The Dark Face of Jewish Nationalism

2010-03-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

"The thing that makes Judaism dangerous to everybody, to every race, to every nation, to every idea, is that we smash things that aren't true. We don't believe in the boundaries of nation-states. We don't believe in the ideas of these individual gods that, you know, protect individual groups of people. These are all artificial constructions. Judaism really teaches us how to see that. In a sense our detractors have us right in that we are a corrosive force that we are breaking down the false gods of all nations and all peoples because they are not real. And that's very upsetting to people."

Douglas Roushkoff, Author of Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism

...

"I've never seen a President -- I don't care who he is -- stand up to them. It just boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. If the American people understood what a grip those people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens certainly don't have any idea what goes on."

Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff under Ronald Reagan

...

"Is there any criminal act that Israel can do without being protected from criticism from the United States? If there is I haven't seen it. And I haven't seen it from the Bush Administration or from the Clinton Administration or from any administration before them. But when you consider the influence of Israel's lobby and its political action committees and the more than $41 million they've given to Congress and the White House, is it any wonder Israel is shielded from any shame? For more than 54 years the Israelis have committed acts that no other nation would dare get away with. But even here in America, where it is not yet illegal to publicly ask the wrong questions, any public figure that does so is subjected to smears, intimidation, and the attempted destruction of his career and reputation by Jewish organizations and by the very cooperative news media."

U.S. Brigadier General James J. David (Ret.)

...

"AIPAC is widely regarded as the most powerful foreign-policy lobby in Washington. Its 60,000 members shower millions of dollars on hundreds of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Newspapers like the New York Times (Jewish owned) fear the Jewish lobby organizations as well. "It's very intimidating," said a correspondent at another large daily. "The pressure from these groups is relentless."

Journalist Michael Massing, Nation Magazine

...

"Their greatest danger to this country lies in the Jewish ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government."

Charles Lindbergh

Take the aforementioned quotes into serious consideration when you are in the process of digesting the following information. From the very beginning there had been talk about an Israeli involvement or connection to the attacks that occurred in America on the morning of September 11, 2001. Almost a decade after the horrible event that in effect changed the course of world history the suspicions and accusations against Israel have not gone away. On the contrary, they have actually increased with time. There is strong circumstantial evidence pointing to some form of an Israel involvement in the attacks on America. At the very least, it would be safe to conclude that Israeli intelligence had detailed knowledge of the terror operation before it occurred and were on site monitoring it as it occurred.

I personally began noticing telltale signs within days after the attacks. For instance, within several days after the attacks I read a story in a New York newspaper (I think it was Newsday) about an individual with a Jewish name that was an employee of a certain firm in one of the Twin Towers (which I later learned had Israeli firms in it) receiving a pager notification early in the morning of September 11 warning him about an impending terrorist attack. Soon thereafter, more evidence began to leak out in the mainstream press; strong evidence such as the story about several Israeli young men dancing on the rooftop of a New Jersey building as they were videotaping the attacks across the river in lower Manhattan. Moreover, there were stories in press about Israeli agents tailing the alleged terrorists that carried out the attacks. And then there was the FOX News special report on television addressing the espionage Israeli intelligence engages in America and its close monitoring of the alleged terrorists. At the time dozens of Israeli agents (presumably Mossad) were said to have been apprehend by the FBI. However, as of today, no information have been released by the US government about these arrests...

All this leads me to ask the following questions: why aren't Americans asking questions and demanding answers? Why aren't Americans feeling indignant? Where is the nation-wide rage? Where are all the nation's patriotic flag wavers? Why aren't Americans protesting in Washington in the millions?

While they reveled like careless children in their material comforts for the past several decades their nation was taken hostage. As a result, we are at a point today when Washington no longer serves the people nor does it serve the national interests of this nation. Americans have unwittingly (in the case of our elected officials, willingly) ruined this nation in part because they were blinded by the "kumbayah" rhetoric they were constantly exposed to for decades. America’s political structures, financial system, entertainment industry, academia, press and literature (in other words, how one in America is educated, employed, governed and what one hears, reads and sees) is today either under direct Jewish supervision or is saturated by Jews. Alarmingly, however, a vast majority of the people living in this nation do not have the intellect, the insight or the wisdom to realize any of this. Americans today also have a serious problem with critical thinking, independent thought as well as properly analyzing any given information.As long as these docile attitudes continue in this country there will be no hope for this nation. Needless to say, the American dream is gradually turning into an American nightmare.

America today is fighting Israel's wars with American blood and money. And when concerned patriots in America bring up these serious matters in public they are either labeled Nazi sympathizers or anti-Semites. And when discourse that is critical of Israel attracts the attention of the general public, the nation is immediately given a heavy does of Holocaust tales to remedy the problem...

If the American public ever woke up one day and found out what is happening to this nation they would rise in rage like they have never before. If the America public ever found out where the allegiances of their "elected" officials truly lie there would be a bloody revolution in this country. The key to saving America today is to reeducate its dumbed down citizenry, to reeducate the men and women in the US armed forces, to reeducate the nation's law enforcement officials, and to completely and thoroughly overhaul the nation's utterly defective political system.

What's ruining America from within is a destructive parasite long experienced with destroying one host and moving into another. After they are done running this nation into the ground they will move their operations into yet another gullible host. One day, perhaps one day when it's too damn late, the American sheeple will realize how and why Nazism rose in Germany. I strongly advise everyone to listen to this powerful interview featuring Dr. Alan Sabrosky. I have also included a recent article by him and several other sources pertaining to this topic.

Arevordi

***

The US Military KNOWS Israel did 911 (part 1): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMsdNl_13q4

The US Military KNOWS Israel did 911 (part 2): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lJIJjwoYAU

The US Military KNOWS Israel did 911 (part 3): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHIFk2qlzNI

The US Military KNOWS Israel did 911 (part 4): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfkOxg3bI6Q&feature=related

The Military KNOWS Israel did 911 (part 5): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CWqkmWWre4&feature=related

911 - The Israeli Connection: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6110095161238848541#

Missing Links - 911 - Dancing Israelis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDIrSM4ZJ9M&feature=related

Five Dancing Israelis Arrested On 9/11: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRfhUezbKLw&feature=related

Fake Al Qaeda Actors EXPOSED! Adam Gadahn & Yousef al-Khattab: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsUtvOW6SR0

BBC Reported Building 7 Collapse 20 Minutes Early: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tGOt9f3gKk&feature=related

***

The Dark Face of Jewish Nationalism

March, 2010

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu once remarked to a Likud gathering that "Israel is not like other countries". Oddly enough for him, that time he was telling the truth, and nowhere is that more evident than with Jewish nationalism, whether or not one pins the "Zionist" label on it. Nationalism in most countries and cultures can have both positive and negative aspects, unifying a people and sometimes leading them against their neighbours. Extremism can emerge, and often has, at least in part in almost every nationalist/independence movement I can recall (e.g. the French nationalist movement had The Terror, Kenya's had the Mau Mau, etc.).

But whereas extremism in other nationalist movements is an aberration, extremism in Jewish nationalism is the norm, pitting Zionist Jews (secular or observant) against the goyim (everyone else), who are either possible predator or certain prey, if not both sequentially. This does not mean that all Jews or all Israelis feel and act this way, by any means. But it does mean that Israel today is what it cannot avoid being, and what it would be under any electable government (a point I'll develop in another article). The differences between Jewish nationalism (Zionism) and that of other countries and cultures here I think are fourfold:

1. Zionism is a real witches' brew of xenophobia, racism, ultra-nationalism and militarism that places it way outside of a "mere" nationalist context — for example, when I was in Ireland (both parts) I saw no indication whatsoever that the Provisional Irish Republican Army or anyone else pressing for a united Ireland had a shred of design on shoving Protestants into camps or out of the country, although there may well have been a handful who thought that way — and goes far beyond the misery for others professed by the Nazis;

2. Zionism undermines civic loyalty among its adherents in other countries in a way that other nationalist movements (and even ultra-nationalist movements like Nazism) did not — e.g. a large majority of American Jews, including those who are not openly dual citizens, espouse a form of political bigamy called "dual loyalty" (to Israel and the US) that is every bit as dishonest as marital bigamy, attempts to finesse the precedence they give to Israel over the US (lots of Rahm Emanuels out there who served in the Israeli army but NOT in the US armed forces), and has absolutely no parallel in the sense of national or cultural identity espoused by any other definable ethnic or racial group in America — even the Nazi Bund in the US disappeared once Germany and the US went to war, with almost all of its members volunteering for the US armed forces;

3. The "enemy" of normal nationalist movements is the occupying power and perhaps its allies, and once independence is achieved, normal relations with the occupying power are truly the norm, but for Zionism almost everyone out there is an actual or potential enemy, differing only in proximity and placement on its very long list of enemies (which is now America's target list); and

4. Almost all nationalist movements (including the irredentist and secessionist variants) intend to create an independent state from a population in place or to reunite a separated people (like the Sudeten Germans in the 1930s) — it is very rare for it to include the wholesale displacement of another indigenous population, which is far more common of successful colonialist movements as in the US — and perhaps a reason why most Americans wouldn't care too much about what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians even if they DID know about it, is because that is no different than what Europeans in North America did to the Indians/Native Americans here in a longer and more low-tech fashion.

The implications of this for Middle East peace prospects, and for other countries in thrall to their domestic Jewish lobbies or not, are chilling. The Book of Deuteronomy come to life in a state with a nuclear arsenal would be enough to give pause to anyone not bought or bribed into submission — which these days encompasses the US government, given Israel's affinity for throwing crap into the face of the Obama administration and Obama's visible affinity for accepting it with a smile, Bibi Netanyahu's own "Uncle Tom" come to Washington. The late General Moshe Dayan, who — Zionist or not — remains an honoured part of my own Pantheon of military heroes, allegedly observed that Israel's security depended on its being viewed by others as a mad dog. He may have been correct. But he neglected to note that the preferred response of everyone else is to kill that mad dog before it can decide to go berserk and bite. It is an option worth considering.

Source: http://www.redress.cc/zionism/asabrosky20100312

The Israeli Spy Ring

"Israel does not spy on the United States of America."
-- Mark Regev, a spokesman at the Israeli embassy in Washington

Source: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/spyring.html

High-Fivers and Art Student Spies

What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham03072007.html

FORMER ITALIAN PRESIDENT SAYS 9-11 SOLVED

It’s common knowledge, he reveals, CIA, Mossad behind terror attacks

Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, has told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad, and that this was common knowledge among global intelligence agencies. In what translates awkwardly into English, Cossiga told the newspaper Corriere della Sera: “All the [intelligence services] of America and Europe… know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the Mossad, with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part … in Iraq [and] Afghanistan.”

Cossiga was elected president of the Italian Senate in July 1983 before winning a landslide election to become president of the country in 1985, and he remained until 1992. Cossiga’s tendency to be outspoken upset the Italian political establishment, and he was forced to resign after revealing the existence of, and his part in setting up, Operation Gladio. This was a rogue intelligence network under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and ’80s. Gladio’s specialty was to carry out what they termed “false flag” operations—terror attacks that were blamed on their domestic and geopolitical opposition. In March 2001, Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated, in sworn testimony, “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force … the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”

Cossiga first expressed his doubts about 9-11 in 2001, and is quoted by 9-11 researcherWebster Tarpley saying “The mastermind of the attack must have been a sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel. I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.” Coming from a widely respected former head of state, Cossiga’s assertion that the 9-11 attacks were an inside job and that this is common knowledge among global intelligence agencies is illuminating. It is one more eye-opening confirmation that has not been mentioned by America’s propaganda machine in print or on TV. Nevertheless, because of his experience and status in the world, Cossiga cannot be discounted as a crackpot.

Source: http://www.americanfreepress.net/htm...solved118.html

2010-03-23T17:17:00.000-07:00

Government agents recruiting angry young men with low intelligence to do their dirty work?!

Actually, a fairly common way of recruiting terrorists these days. These types of operations have been around for many years and they have been perfected by many different intelligence organizations. The Israeli Mossad, the Russian FSB, the British MI5 and of course the American CIA excel at this modus operandi. From the inner-cities of the Western world to the slums of Palestine to the stone-age villages of Afghanistan, there are literally millions of uneducated-unemployed-angry-emotionally sick young men (and women) waiting to be plucked by manipulating intelligence agents armed with jidahi rhetoric or bag loads of cash (using whichever method happens to work best). Although the following story appeared in the controlled mainstream press, it is nevertheless a little revealing glimpse of how "terrorists" are recruited these days.

Arevordi

**********

Synagogue Bomb Suspects: The Feds Put Us Up to It!

March, 2010

Defense attorneys say an alleged plot to bomb New York synagogues was hatched and directed by a federal informant. Lawyers for four men from Newburgh have filed a motion to dismiss the terror indictment against them. They said the informant badgered the defendants until they got involved in the plot. They said the informant chose the targets, supplied fake bombs for the synagogues and a fake missile to shoot down planes. The motion said he also offered to pay the defendants, who attorneys alleged weren't inclined toward any crime until the informant began recruiting them.

"The government well knew that their case had been a government-inspired creation from day one and that the defendants had not been independently seeking weapons or targets," the motion said.Federal court spokesman Herb Hadad said the government would file its response next month. The four men, who were arrested last May, face up to life in prison if convicted. They have been previously identified as James Cromitie, 55, David Williams, 28, Onta Williams, 32, and Laguerre Payen, 27, all of Newburgh in upstate New York, where authorities were conducting raids at their homes, sources said.

Authorities have said they had the plotters under surveillance since June of 2008 and there was "no chance" the alleged scheme could succeed. They credited the work of a long time informant with keeping tabs on the group. The FBI has said the Muslim suspects were angry and full of hate for America. According to the criminal complaint, Cromitie said "I hate those f-ing Jewish bastards." He bragged that it would be a "piece of cake" to bomb a Jewish Center in Riverdale, according to the complaint. He said his father lives in Afghanistan and he was upset about U.S. military presence there. "The fact that this type of hatred exists means that we all have to be vigilant all of the time," city councilman Jeffrey Dinowitz said Thursday.

Cromitie was the first to approach the informant, authorities said. He told the informant he has ties to the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammad. Authorities said Cromitie had 27 past arrests and had recently been working at a nation-wide discount retailer, authorities said. Several of the suspects have previously been arrested on drug charges and may have converted to Islam in prison, authorities said. The four men allegedly would meet in a safe house in Newburgh, which authorities said they had bugged with audio and video equipment. The suspects said they wanted to get their hands on stinger missiles to shoot down planes at the nearby Air National Guard Base at Stewart Airport, according to a criminal complaint unsealed late Wednesday. The suspects also received what they believed were two stinger missiles which they intended to use to shoot down military planes, the complaint said. They also bought cell phones to allegedly use in the plot.

Officials said they moved in when they did so the alleged plot could not progress any further. In a separate motion, defense attorneys demanded more information on inducements that the informant may have offered the defendants. The dismissal motion identified the government's agent as Shaheed Hussain, a "professional informant" for the FBI. The defense claimed he was directed to visit suburban mosques, find members with anti-American leanings and recruit them to join a fake terror plot supposedly funded by a Pakistan-based group. He suggested there could be as much as $250,000 available and the government provided him with a BMW, a Hummer and other cars to make him appear well-funded, the defense filings said.

The defense alleged that Hussain tried to incite the defendants by blaming Jews for the world's evil and telling them that attacks against non-Muslims were endorsed by Islam. Nevertheless, they said, he failed to motivate the defendants to any action on their own. Months went by between meetings, and the filings quote Cromitie as saying, "I'm not gonna hurt anybody" and "The plane thing ... is out of the question." Hussain suggested the targets, paid for the defendants' groceries, bought a gun, provided the fake bombs and missile, assembled the explosive devices and acted as chauffeur, the defense said. Since the 9/11 attacks, authorities have arrested suspects in a number of alleged plots against area targets, including the Fort Dix New Jersey military base, John F. Kennedy Airport, the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Source: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local-beat/Synagogue-Bomb-Suspects-The-Feds-Put-Us-Up-to-It-88579537.html

2010-03-10T19:56:00.000-08:00

An American Jew turned Islamic Jihadist who is also said to be a close associate of "Osama Bin Laden" was thought to have finally been arrested in Pakistan several days ago. A great victory for Washington's noble/global war-on-terrorism. Well... not really. Officials are now saying that it was a case of mistaken identity.. This is the official version.

I provide you with a different scenario, my version:

While on an assignment in the Pakistani city of Karachi, Adam Gadahn, an American Jew who has supposedly converted to Islam and is now a spokesperson for Al-Qaeda (a shadowy terror group founded and funded by the CIA, but your are not supposed to know that) was arrested several days ago by Pakistani authorities. The news of his arrest was quickly circulated. As soon as word of his arrest reached Washington and/or Tel Aviv (doesn't matter which), a message was quickly sent out to authorities in Islamabad and the message read - it did not happen. Within two/three days, after officials in Islamabad were able to discuss the matter at hand behind closed doors, Pakistani authorities surprisingly revealed that they had the "wrong" man... False alarm, carry on. But it's not over; there is a bombing of a major Pakistani intelligence facility nonetheless, just to show who's still the boss...

I provide you the following corporate controlled Western media's whitewashed version on what supposedly occurred in Pakistan when an American Jihadist was detained, as well as the bombing of one of Pakistan's main interrogation headquarters within days after the arrest.

These people treat us like a bunch of brain-less idiots - because we are.

Arevordi

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Pakistan: American Al-Qaida Suspect Nabbed

Fake Al Qaeda Actors EXPOSED! Adam Gadahn & Yousef al-Khattab: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsUtvOW6SR0

Al-Qaida Calls on U.S. Muslims to Attack America: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBmhKutfJ48&feature=player_embedded

March, 2010

An American member of al-Qaida was picked up in a raid in Pakistan's southern city of Karachi, Pakistani officials said Monday, but reversed earlier assertions that the detained man was the terror network's U.S.-born spokesman. They identified the suspect as Abu Yahya Majadin Adam, but gave no details on his background or role within al-Qaida. A name very close to that is listed on the FBI's Web site as an alias for Adam Gadahn, the 31-year-old spokesman who has appeared in several videos threatening the West since 2001. The resemblance created confusion among officials Sunday, leading them to believe that the suspect was Gadahn, an army officer and a senior intelligence officer said. "The resemblance of the name initially caused confusion but now they have concluded he is not Gadahn," said an intelligence officer, who like all Pakistani intelligence agents does not allow his name to be used. "He feels proud to be a member of al-Qaida."

U.S. Embassy spokesman Rick Snelsire said the embassy had not been informed of any American being arrested. A senior U.S military intelligence official said Monday the man arrested does not appear to be Gadahn. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive Pakistani operations. On Sunday, two intelligence officers and a senior government official identified the detained man as Gadahn and said he was arrested in recent days. They, too, spoke on condition of anonymity. The government official said his name could not be used because of the sensitivity of the information. None of those officials were available for comment Monday. Pakistan is under intense U.S. pressure to arrest al-Qaida and Taliban leaders living on its soil.

Al-Qaida Calls on U.S. Muslims to Attack America

Gadahn, the first American to face treason charges in more than 50 years, has appeared in more than a half-dozen al-Qaida videos, taunting the West and calling for its destruction. A video that surfaced Sunday showed him urging American Muslims to attack the U.S. He has been on the FBI's most wanted list since 2004 and there is a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest. He was charged with treason in 2006 and faces the death penalty if convicted. He was also charged with two counts of providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_pakistan_al_qaida_arrest

Pakistan Interrogation Center Bombed, Killing 13

A suicide car bomber Monday struck a building where police interrogate high-value suspects in Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore, killing at least 13 people and wounding dozens including women taking children to school, officials said. The attack broke what had been a relative lull in violence in Pakistan, where militant groups revile the government for its alliance with the U.S. It also showed that insurgents retain the ability to strike the country's heartland, far from the Afghan border regions where al-Qaida and the Taliban have long thrived, despite army offensives aimed at wiping them out. Pakistanis living near the building had filed complaints urging authorities to move the unmarked interrogation facility out of the residential area so the street wouldn't become a target for an attack, said Mohammad Musharraf, a neighborhood resident. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility in a telephone call to an Associated Press reporter. It and allied groups are believed responsible for a wave of attacks that killed more than 600 people starting in October, including several in major Pakistani cities. More recent attacks have been smaller and confined to remote northwest regions near Afghanistan. The bomb blast Monday comes amid reports of a Pakistani crackdown on Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida operatives using its soil. Among the militants said to have been arrested is the Afghan Taliban's No. 2 commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. In recent days, Pakistani officials say an American member of al-Qaida has been captured in the southern city of Karachi.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100308/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan

2010-01-09T17:47:00.000-08:00

Was the attempt by a young Nigerian man to blowup an American Delta airliner on Christmas day yet another attempt by American intelligence services to sow panic and fear within society, or was it yet another dismal failure by them? Whatever the truth may be, it is well known that a panicked and scared public is easier to manipulate and govern than one that is complacent and feeling secure. Fortunately, the terror operation in question failed. Unfortunately, this event will still be used by interested parties in Washington to carryout their agendas.

Arevordi

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Arrest of Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab Raises Serious Questions Over Delta Airline Incident in Detroit

Did US know about Christmas day attempted terrorist attack? (RT video report) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa-am3NZCSg

January, 2010

On December 25 the United States authorities arrested a 23-year-old Nigerian Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab aboard a Delta Airline flight from Amsterdam that landed in Detroit. News reports emanating from the U.S. indicate that it was an attempted terrorist attack that resulted in the fire and that Abdul Mutallab was either connected with Al-Qaida or sympathetic to its aims.

However, this incident raises a number of serious questions about the character of the attack. First of all why was Abdul Mutallab granted a multiple-entry visa into the United States in June 2008? In November, his father, Alhaji Umaru Abdul Mutallab, 70, a prominent and wealthy Nigerian banker who recently retired as Chairman of the First Bank Plc of Nigeria, warned the American embassy in Nigeria about concerns related to his son’s behaviour. The senior Mutallab also served as Minister of Economic Development and Reconstruction during the mid-1970s in the Federal Nigerian Government that was under military rule at the time.

Consequently, why was Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab allowed to maintain his U.S. visa status and board a plane bound for the United States? There have been reports that he had spent time in the United Arab Emirates and Yemen and implying that this may indicate a connection with Al-Qaida. However, there has been no specific evidence that he has links with Islamic organizations including Al-Qaida.

In addition, corporate media reports claim that the substances Mutallab had and attempted to ignite could have done substantial damage to the aircraft. This allegation is largely unsubstantiated and raises further questions about the nature of the incident. If these chemicals could have never caused any real damage to the aircraft and in fact the suspect was the only person seriously injured, then this may reveal that the incident is something other than what is being widely reported by media outlets in the U.S. and internationally.

Although U.S.. intelligence and media spokespersons have stated that Yemen is a base for Al-Qaida, they do not make the claim that it is also major field of operations for the American Central Intelligence Agency which is working closely with the Yemeni government to fight the Islamic organizations that are in a military struggle with the government in this country that is divided politically and regionally.

In an Associated Press report on December 25 it stated that “Yemen’s military hit suspected al-Qaida hideouts for the second time in a week, killing at least 30 militants in a remote area of the country–a fragmented, unstable nation the U.S. fears could turn into an Afghanistan-like refuge for the terrorist network.

“The strikes on Thursday, which were carried out with U.S. and Saudi intelligence help, hit a gathering of top leaders and other targets in a remote mountain valley, officials said. The newly aggressive Yemeni campaign against al-Qaida is being boosted by a dose of American aid, a reflection of Washington’s concerns about al-Qaida’s presence in a highly strategic location on the border with oil-rich ally Saudi Arabia.” (AP, December 25)

This same AP article goes on to point out that “The Pentagon recently confirmed it has poured nearly $70 million in military aid into Yemen this year–compared with none in 2008. The U.S. military has boosted its counterterrorism training for Yemeni forces and is providing more intelligence, according to U.S. officials and analysts.. The result appears to be a sharp escalation in Yemen’s campaign against al-Qaida, which previously amounted to scattered raids against militants, mixed with tolerance of some fighters who made vague promises they would avoid terrorist activity.”

Therefore, it is quite obvious that Yemen is a major target of U.S. military and intelligence activity. Corporate media reports continue to emphasize what it calls the unstable character of Yemen and labeling the country a “failed state”, as it did with Afghanistan during the invasion of 2001.

Also Nigeria has been the scene of unrest in the North several months ago where the military and police killed several hundred people in a crackdown against an Islamic group, Boko Haram, where the leader of this group was killed by the police extra-judiciously. There is also a flare up in fighting in the Niger Delta region between groups fighting the western-based oil firms that dominate the area and the federal government’s joint terrorism task force.

In a just as significant recent development, several western-based multi-national oil firms are threatening to sabotage the Nigerian economy because of their displeasure with a deal that was agreed upon with the People’s Republic of China involving a $50 billion petroleum revenue generation project related to the export of oil to China. Shell is offering its operations for sale which will inevitably undermine the oil industry in Nigeria, which no longer is the dominant producer on oil on the continent.

These developments cannot be separated from the recent escalation of the U.S. war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. President Obama announced at West Point military academy on December 1 that his administration would be sending another 30,000 occupation troops into Afghanistan. This act is being carried out despite the overwhelming opposition to the escalation of the Afghan war by people inside the United States.

In Detroit, the FBI assassinated an African-American Imam on October 28. The investigation into the incident is being obstructed on several levels including the refusal of authorities to release the autopsy of the slain Islamic leader, Imam Luqman Ameen Abudllah, who had worked with the poor for decades on the city’s west side. Imam Abdullah’s assassination has drawn protests and calls for an independent investigation into his assassination by agents of the federal government.

Could Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab be a pawn in a possible scenario of international intelligence intrigue controlled and manipulated by the United States? Such threats of terrorism have been used in the past to deflect the attention of the American people away from the worsening economic and political crisis facing the country. Since 2001 the American people have been subjected to reports of one plot and conspiracy after another. During the entire decade trillions of dollars have been literally stolen from the people of the United States through real estate, insurance and bank fraud schemes which the taxpayers have absorbed. Unemployment rates are the highest since the Great Depression and there will be a new upsurge in home foreclosures and evictions during 2010.

If Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab was in contact with people he may have thought were al-Qaida operatives but were in fact CIA agents posing as Islamic resistance leaders, he could have been brainwashed and convinced to embark upon such a futile effort with the United States intelligence personnel knowing that these chemicals would, in all likelihood, only injure the suspect.

The incident of course will be used to intensify security practices in airports and throughout American society. It can also be utilized in attempts to justify and sway public opinion towards supporting the wars of occupation in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and the extension of these imperialist efforts into Horn of Africa, the Gulf of Aden, the Indian Ocean and Yemen located in the Arabian Peninsula.

It is amazing that the Obama administration has said nothing about the incident in Detroit. Over the next few days more information will be revealed surrounding these events. One thing is certain and that is the United States government and ruling class has nothing to offer the people other than war, intensified domestic security and economic austerity. If they can bombard the airwaves with threats of terrorism, it will block any real discussion about the economic crisis in the corporate-controlled media that is heavily biased towards the Pentagon and Wall Street. The question of security will take priority over the economic crisis which has caused the unemployment of 34 million people, the foreclosures of millions of homes, the closing of hundreds of schools and the forcing of tens of thousands of university students away from their studies due to the monumental escalation of fees.

Source: http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/2009/12/arrest-of-farouk-umar-abdul-mutallab.html

2009-12-18T09:06:00.000-08:00

The CIA has been directly linked to the global narcotics trade for decades. It is claimed that the CIA generates much of the funds it spends on covert operations, or black ops, through narcotics trafficking. Columbia, Mexico, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kosovo are considered to be centers of the international narcotics trade today - and also where various US agencies have an unusually strong presence. We all know that the CIA has had deep roots in Afghanistan and Pakistan since the 1980s. The Washington backed Afghan president Hamid Kharzai, a corrupt criminal that would put any two bit despot to shame, has been known to be a CIA asset for many years, especially by Afghans themselves. So it came as no surprise when the New York Times revealed last week that Hamid Kharzai's brother, the narcotics kingpin Ahmed Wali Kharzai, is on the CIA payroll as well. The only question I have about the following New York Times article is about its timing: why now? Who leaked this information and for what reason? Nonetheless, despite the New York Times' clear attempt to somewhat whitewash the story in question here we are witnessing yet again the American empire's criminal modus operandi...

If criminals within the CIA import narcotics into this nation knowing that it will destroying the lives millions of their compatriots just to make a profit, would it really be that far-fetched to claim that it could have had a hand in the September 11, 2001 events?

Arevordi

More on Washington's connection to the global narcotics trade -

CIA drug trafficking-Documentary Proof. Part 1 of 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPEritSwkr0

CIA drug trafficking-Documentary Proof. Part 2 of 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkkCvaleaS8&feature=related

CIA drug trafficking-Documentary Proof. Part 3 of 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNAPw_CJHVU

Ron Paul on CIA Drug Trafficking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6wef25-c1U

Michael Ruppet on CIA Corruption and Drug Trafficking: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8797525979024486145#

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Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home. The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.

The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban. More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.

“If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,” said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan. Ahmed Wali Karzai said in an interview that he cooperated with American civilian and military officials, but did not engage in the drug trade and did not receive payments from the C.I.A. The relationship between Mr. Karzai and the C.I.A. is wide ranging, several American officials said. He helps the C.I.A. operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists. On at least one occasion, the strike force has been accused of mounting an unauthorized operation against an official of the Afghan government, the officials said.

Mr. Karzai is also paid for allowing the C.I.A. and American Special Operations troops to rent a large compound outside the city — the former home of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s founder. The same compound is also the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. “He’s our landlord,” a senior American official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Mr. Karzai also helps the C.I.A. communicate with and sometimes meet with Afghans loyal to the Taliban. Mr. Karzai’s role as a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban is now regarded as valuable by those who support working with Mr. Karzai, as the Obama administration is placing a greater focus on encouraging Taliban leaders to change sides.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article. “No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman. Some American officials said that the allegations of Mr. Karzai’s role in the drug trade were not conclusive. “There’s no proof of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s involvement in drug trafficking, certainly nothing that would stand up in court,” said one American official familiar with the intelligence. “And you can’t ignore what the Afghan government has done for American counterterrorism efforts.”

At the start of the Afghan war, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, American officials paid warlords with questionable backgrounds to help topple the Taliban and maintain order with relatively few American troops committed to fight in the country. But as the Taliban has become resurgent and the war has intensified, Americans have increasingly viewed a strong and credible central government as crucial to turning back the Taliban’s advances. Now, with more American lives on the line, the relationship with Mr. Karzai is setting off anger and frustration among American military officers and other officials in the Obama administration. They say that Mr. Karzai’s suspected role in the drug trade, as well as what they describe as the mafialike way that he lords over southern Afghanistan, makes him a malevolent force.

These military and political officials say the evidence, though largely circumstantial, suggests strongly that Mr. Karzai has enriched himself by helping the illegal trade in poppy and opium to flourish. The assessment of these military and senior officials in the Obama administration dovetails with that of senior officials in the Bush administration. “Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it,” a senior American military officer in Kabul said. Like most of the officials in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the information.

[...]

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=karzai&st=cse

2009-09-11T16:14:00.000-07:00

Fifty Questions on 9/11

"Stop the 9-11 cover-up":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBOWAtLhR_Q

September 11, 2009

2009-09-01T19:12:00.001-07:00

More clues to the puzzle.

Arevordi

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CIA: Osama Helped Bush in '04

August, 2009

Editor’s Note: A new book by former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge describes how Bush administration insiders pressed for an escalation in the color-coded threat level the weekend before the 2004 election following a released videotape of Osama bin Laden denouncing George W. Bush. Ridge says in his book, The Test of Our Times, that Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urged the escalation but Ridge and FBI Director Robert Mueller blocked the move by citing a lack of significant threat evidence. Ridge writes that he wondered, "Is this about security or politics?" -- and the incident firmed up his decision to quit, which he did, although not until after the election. However, lost in the debate over Ridge's revelation is evidence that al-Qaeda was almost as eager for Bush to gain a second term as the Republicans were. One senior al-Qaeda leader later confided to a terrorist ally in Iraq that "prolonging the war is in our interest." Plus, the reason for the threat-elevation discussion -- the release of bin Laden's video -- was being interpretted inside the CIA's analytical division as an attempt by bin Laden to ensure Bush's second term and to make certain Bush's clumsy "war on terror" continued. Because of the Ridge disclosure, we are re-posting a story from our Archive -- originally published on July 4, 2006 -- regarding bin Laden's clever tactic to keep "crusader" Bush in office:

On Oct. 29, 2004, just four days before the U.S. presidential election, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden released a videotape denouncing George W. Bush. Some Bush supporters quickly spun the diatribe as “Osama’s endorsement of John Kerry.” But behind the walls of the CIA, analysts had concluded the opposite: that bin Laden was trying to help Bush gain a second term. This stunning CIA disclosure is tucked away in a brief passage near the end of Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders. Suskind wrote that the CIA analysts based their troubling assessment on classified information, but the analysts still puzzled over exactly why bin Laden wanted Bush to stay in office. According to Suskind’s book, CIA analysts had spent years “parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they’d learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. …

“Their [the CIA’s] assessments, at day’s end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public [was] not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis. Today’s conclusion: bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection. “At the five o’clock meeting, [deputy CIA director] John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: ‘Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.’” McLaughlin’s comment drew nods from CIA officers at the table. Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, suggested that the al-Qaeda founder may have come to Bush’s aid because bin Laden felt threatened by the rise in Iraq of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; bin Laden might have thought his leadership would be diminished if Bush lost the White House and their “eye-to-eye struggle” ended. But the CIA analysts also felt that bin Laden might have recognized how Bush’s policies – including the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the endless bloodshed in Iraq – were serving al-Qaeda’s strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists. “Certainly,” the CIA’s Miscik said, “he would want Bush to keep doing what he’s doing for a few more years,” according to Suskind’s account of the meeting.

As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts drifted into silence, troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. “An ocean of hard truths before them – such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected – remained untouched,” Suskind wrote. One immediate consequence of bin Laden breaking nearly a year of silence to issue the videotape the weekend before the U.S. presidential election was to give the Bush campaign a much needed boost. From a virtual dead heat, Bush opened up a six-point lead, according to one poll.

Symbiotic Relationship

The implications of this new evidence are troubling, too, for the American people as they head toward another election in November 2006 that also is viewed as a referendum on Bush’s prosecution of the “war on terror.” As we have reported previously at Consortiumnews.com, a large body of evidence already existed supporting the view that the Bushes and the bin Ladens have long operated with a symbiotic relationship that may be entirely unspoken but nevertheless has been a case of each family acting in ways that advance the interests of the other. [See “Osama’s Briar Patch” or “Is Bush al-Qaeda's 'Useful Idiot?'”] Before al-Qaeda launched the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks against New York and Washington, Bush was stumbling in a presidency that many Americans felt was headed nowhere. As Bush took a month-long vacation at his Texas ranch in August 2001, his big issue was a plan to restrict stem-cell research on moral grounds.

Privately, Bush’s neoconservative advisers were chafing under what they saw as the complacency of the American people unwilling to take on the mantle of global policeman as the world’s sole superpower. Some neocons felt that only a new “Pearl Harbor” would galvanize a public consensus for action against Iraq and other “rogue states.” Other senior administration officials, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, dreamed of the restoration of the imperial presidency that – after Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal – had been cut down to size by Congress, the courts and the press. A national crisis would help create a cover for a new assertion of presidential power. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, bin Laden and his al-Qaeda militants were facing defeat after defeat. Their brand of Islamic extremism had lost out in Muslim societies from Algeria and Egypt to Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Bin Laden and his lieutenants had even been expelled from Sudan.

Bin Laden and his allies had been chased to the farthest corners of the planet, in this case the caves of Afghanistan. At this critical juncture, al-Qaeda’s brain trust decided that their best hope was to strike at the United States and count on a clumsy reaction that would offend the Islamic world and rally angry young Muslims to al-Qaeda’s banner. So, by early summer 2001, as the clock ticked down to 9/11, 19 al-Qaeda operatives positioned themselves inside the United States and prepared to attack. But U.S. intelligence analysts picked up evidence of al-Qaeda’s plans by sifting through the “chatter” of electronic intercepts. The U.S. warning system was “blinking red.”

‘Something So Big’

Over the weekend of July Fourth 2001, a well-placed U.S. intelligence source passed on a disturbing piece of information to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who later recounted the incident in an interview with Alternet. “The person told me that there was some concern about an intercept that had been picked up,” Miller said. “The incident that had gotten everyone’s attention was a conversation between two members of al-Qaeda. And they had been talking to one another, supposedly expressing disappointment that the United States had not chosen to retaliate more seriously against what had happened to the [destroyer USS] Cole [which was bombed on Oct. 12, 2000]. “And one al-Qaeda operative was overheard saying to the other, ‘Don’t worry; we’re planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.’”

In the Alternet interview, published in May 2006 after Miller resigned from the Times, the reporter expressed regret that she had not been able to nail down enough details about the intercept to get the story into the newspaper. But the significance of her recollection is that more than two months before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA knew that al-Qaeda was planning a major attack with the intent of inciting a U.S. military reaction – or in this case, an overreaction. The CIA tried to warn Bush about the threat on Aug. 6, 2001, with the hope that presidential action could energize government agencies and head off the attack. The CIA sent analysts to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, to brief him and deliver a report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” Bush was not pleased by the intrusion. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, “All right, you’ve covered your ass,” according to Suskind’s book. Then, putting the CIA’s warning in the back of his mind and ordering no special response, Bush returned to a vacation of fishing, clearing brush and working on a speech about stem-cell research.

Al-Qaeda’s Gamble

For its part, al-Qaeda was running a risk that the United States might strike a precise and devastating blow against the terrorist organization, eliminating it as an effective force without alienating much of the Muslim world. If that happened, the cause of Islamic extremism could have been set back years, without eliciting much sympathy from most Muslims for a band of killers who wantonly murdered innocent civilians. After the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda’s gamble almost failed as the CIA, backed by U.S. Special Forces, ousted bin Laden’s Taliban allies in Afghanistan and cornered much of the al-Qaeda leadership in the mountains of Tora Bora near the Pakistani border. But instead of using U.S. ground troops to seal the border, Bush relied on the Pakistani army, which was known to have mixed sympathies about al-Qaeda. The Pakistani army moved its blocking force belatedly into position while bin Laden and others from his inner circle escaped. Then, instead of staying focused on bin Laden and his fellow fugitives, Bush moved on to other objectives. Bush shifted U.S. Special Forces away from bin Laden and al-Qaeda and toward Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

Many U.S. terrorism experts, including White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, were shocked at this strategy, since the intelligence community didn’t believe that Hussein’s secular dictatorship had any working relationship with al-Qaeda – and had no role in the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, ousting Hussein from power but also unleashing mayhem across Iraqi society. Soon, the Iraq War – combined with controversies over torture and mistreatment of Muslim detainees – were serving as recruitment posters for al-Qaeda. Under Jordanian exile Zarqawi, al-Qaeda set up terrorist cells in central Iraq, taking root amid the weeds of sectarian violence and the nation’s general anarchy. Instead of an obscure group of misfits, al-Qaeda was achieving legendary status among many Muslims as the defenders of the Islamic holy lands, battling the new “crusaders” led by Bush.

Back in the USA

Meanwhile, back in the United States, the 9/11 attacks had allowed Bush to reinvent himself as the “war president” who operated almost without oversight. He saw his approval ratings surge from the 50s to the 90s – and watched as the Republican Party consolidated its control of the U.S. Congress in 2002. Though the worsening bloodshed in Iraq eroded Bush’s popularity in 2004, political adviser Karl Rove still framed the election around Bush’s aggressive moves to defend the United States and to punish American enemies.

Whereas Bush was supposedly resolute, Democrat Kerry was portrayed as weak and indecisive, a “flip-flopper.” Kerry, however, scored some political points in the presidential debates by citing the debacle at Tora Bora that enabled bin Laden to escape. The race was considered neck-and-neck as it turned toward the final weekend of campaigning. Then, the shimmering image of Osama bin Laden appeared on American televisions, speaking directly to the American people, mocking Bush and offering a kind of truce if U.S. forces withdrew from the Middle East. “He [Bush] was more interested in listening to the child’s story about the goat rather than worry about what was happening to the [twin] towers,” bin Laden said. “So, we had three times the time necessary to accomplish the events. Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked.”

Though both Bush and Kerry denounced bin Laden’s statement, right-wing pundits, bloggers and talk-show hosts portrayed it as an effort to hurt Bush and help Kerry – which understandably prompted the exact opposite reaction among many Americans. [For instance, conservative blog site, Little Green Footballs, headlined its Oct. 31, 2004, commentary as “Bin Laden Threatens U.S. States Not to Vote for Bush.”] However, behind the walls of secrecy at Langley, Virginia, U.S. intelligence experts reviewed the evidence and concluded that bin Laden was fully aware that his videotape would encourage the American people to do the opposite of what he recommended. By demanding an American surrender, bin Laden knew U.S. voters would instinctively want to fight. That way bin Laden helped ensure that George W. Bush would stay in power, would continue his clumsy “war on terror” – and would drive thousands of new recruits into al-Qaeda’s welcoming arms.

Source: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/082209a.html

2009-09-01T19:08:00.000-07:00

More clues to the puzzle.

Arevordi

****************

CIA Assassin Program Was Nearing New Phase

Panetta Pulled Plug After Training Was Proposed

July, 2008

CIA officials were proposing to activate a plan to train anti-terrorist assassination teams overseas when agency managers brought the secret program to the attention of CIA Director Leon Panetta last month, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter. The plan to kill top al-Qaeda leaders, which had been on the agency's back burner for much of the past eight years, was suddenly thrust into the spotlight because of proposals to initiate what one intelligence official called a "somewhat more operational phase." Shortly after learning of the plan, Panetta terminated the program and then went to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers, who had been kept in the dark since 2001. The Obama administration's top intelligence official, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, yesterday defended Panetta's decision to cancel the program, which he said had raised serious questions among intelligence officials about its "effectiveness, maturity and the level of control." But Blair broke with some Democrats in Congress by asserting that the CIA did not violate the law when it failed to inform lawmakers about the secret program until last month. Blair said agency officials may not have been required to notify Congress about the program, though he believes they should have done so.

"It was a judgment call," Blair said in an interview. "We believe in erring on the side of working with the Hill as a partner."

Democratic lawmakers have accused the CIA of deliberately misleading Congress by failing to disclose the program's existence until the briefing by Panetta on June 24. House Democrats, citing an account given by Panetta, say then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney personally ordered the CIA not to tell Congress about the initiative, which involved a series of intermittent plans to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders using small teams of assassins. Congressional Democrats this week formally requested documents about the program, and some have called for an investigation into whether the CIA improperly withheld information from oversight committees. Sen. Russell Feingold (Wis.), a member of the Senate intelligence committee, was among several prominent Democrats who have accused the CIA of violating the law. He said he had "deep concerns about the program" and had conveyed them to President Obama in a classified letter.

Republicans say the allegations of CIA wrongdoing are false and harmful, and some accused Democrats of raising the issue to deflect attention from recent controversies surrounding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who was heavily criticized after accusing the agency of lying to Congress about its use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques. "We have lost valuable opportunities to improve oversight of the intelligence community because they got caught playing silly games," said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). The plan to deploy small teams of assassins grew out of the CIA's early efforts to battle al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A secret document known as a "presidential finding" was signed by President George W. Bush that same month, granting the agency broad authority to use deadly force against bin Laden as well as other senior members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The finding imposed no geographical limitations on the agency's actions, and intelligence officials have said that they were not obliged to notify Congress of each operation envisaged under the directive.

The CIA declined to reveal specifics of the terminated program. But agency spokesman George Little said it was "never fully operational and never took a single terrorist off the battlefield." Since his appointment, Panetta has been "aggressively using the vast tools and tactics at our disposal -- those that actually work -- to take terrorists off the streets," Little said. Some U.S. officials familiar with the program say it never progressed beyond concepts and feasibility studies, but others described more advanced preparations, including selection of teams and limited training. All of the attempts ultimately had to be scrapped, often because of logistical difficulties or because the risks were deemed too great, said several officials who served in counterterrorism units or had access to top-secret files.

The program was active in fits and starts, and it was essentially killed in 2004 because it was deemed ineffective, former and current intelligence officials said. It reemerged briefly in 2005 but remained largely dormant until this year. Two U.S. officials with detailed knowledge of current CIA operations said the agency presented Panetta last month with new plans for moving forward with training for potential members of the assassination teams -- activities that would have involved "crossing international boundaries," in the words of a former counterterrorism official briefed on the matter. "When a CIA unit brought the program to Panetta's attention, it came with a recommendation to brief Congress since there was some thought being given to moving toward a somewhat more operational phase -- that is, a little training," said an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the events.Despite the new activity surrounding the program, there were "concerns about its feasibility," the official said. "If the country ever needs a capability like this going forward, smart minds will figure out a better way to do it."

Blair said that Panetta told him in advance of the decision to terminate the program and that he supported the action as well as the decision to inform Congress. Panetta "felt it was urgent and appropriate to brief the Hill," Blair said. "You can make a judgment call on whether a briefing was necessary. We were on the side of 'Let's do it.' We're trying to reset our relations with Congress." Blair also asserted that killing the program did not diminish U.S. options for battling al-Qaeda, including the possible use of insertion teams that could kill or capture terrorist leaders. "This particular program didn't make the cut," he said. "But it is absolutely not true that we are doing less against al-Qaeda. Our primary criterion is effectiveness, and we will continue to do things that we think are effective to make terrorist lives miserable, and hopefully, short."

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/15/AR2009071503856.html?hpid=topnews

2009-06-24T11:06:00.000-07:00

More clues to the puzzle.

Arevordi

****************

Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists

June, 2009

Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles. The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers’ copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.

The Saudis and their defenders in Washington have long denied links to terrorists, and they have mounted an aggressive and, so far, successful campaign to beat back the allegations in federal court based on a claim of sovereign immunity. Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism have been the subject of years of government investigations and furious debate. Critics have said that some members of the Saudi ruling class pay off terrorist groups in part to keep them from being more active in their own country. But the thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents compiled by lawyers for the Sept. 11 families and their insurers represented an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence. Internal Treasury Department documents obtained by the lawyers under the Freedom of Information Act, for instance, said that a prominent Saudi charity, the International Islamic Relief Organization, heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, showed “support for terrorist organizations” at least through 2006.

A self-described Qaeda operative in Bosnia said in an interview with lawyers in the lawsuit that another charity largely controlled by members of the royal family, the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, provided money and supplies to the terrorist group in the 1990s and hired militant operatives like himself. Another witness in Afghanistan said in a sworn statement that in 1998 he had witnessed an emissary for a leading Saudi prince, Turki al-Faisal, hand a check for one billion Saudi riyals (now worth about $267 million) to a top Taliban leader. And a confidential German intelligence report gave a line-by-line description of tens of millions of dollars in bank transfers, with dates and dollar amounts, made in the early 1990s by Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other members of the Saudi royal family to another charity that was suspected of financing militants’ activities in Pakistan and Bosnia.

The new documents, provided to The New York Times by the lawyers, are among several hundred thousand pages of investigative material obtained by the Sept. 11 families and their insurers as part of a long-running civil lawsuit seeking to hold Saudi Arabia and its royal family liable for financing Al Qaeda. Only a fraction of the documents have been entered into the court record, and much of the new material is unknown even to the Saudi lawyers in the case. The documents provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. And the broader links rely at times on a circumstantial, connect-the-dots approach to tie together Saudi princes, Middle Eastern charities, suspicious transactions and terrorist groups. Saudi lawyers and supporters say that the links are flimsy and exploit stereotypes about terrorism, and that the country is being sued because it has deep pockets and was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.

“In looking at all the evidence the families brought together, I have not seen one iota of evidence that Saudi Arabia had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks,” Michael Kellogg, a Washington lawyer representing Prince Muhammad al-Faisal al-Saud in the lawsuit, said in an interview. He and other defense lawyers said that rather than supporting Al Qaeda, the Saudis were sworn enemies of its leader, Osama bin Laden, who was exiled from Saudi Arabia, his native country, in 1996. “It’s an absolute tragedy what happened to them, and I understand their anger,” Mr. Kellogg said of the victims’ families. “They want to find those responsible, but I think they’ve been disserved by their lawyers by bringing claims without any merit against the wrong people.” The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment. Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, made up of survivors of the attacks and family members of those killed, throwing out the suit on the ground that the families cannot bring legal action in the United States against a sovereign nation and its leaders.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide this week whether to hear an appeal, but the families’ prospects dimmed last month when the Justice Department sided with the Saudis in their immunity claim and urged the court not to consider the appeal. The Justice Department said a 1976 law on sovereign immunity protected the Saudis from liability and noted that “potentially significant foreign relations consequences” would arise if such suits were allowed to proceed. “Cases like this put the U.S. government in an extremely difficult position when it has to make legal arguments, even when they are the better view of the law, that run counter to those of terrorist victims,” said John Bellinger, a former State Department lawyer who was involved in the Saudi litigation.

Senior Obama administration officials held a private meeting on Monday with 9/11 family members to speak about progress in cracking down on terrorist financing. Administration officials at the meeting largely sidestepped questions about the lawsuit, according to participants. But the official who helped lead the meeting, Stuart A. Levey, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, has been outspoken in his criticism of wealthy Saudis, saying they have helped to finance terrorism. Even if the 9/11 families were to get their trial in the lawsuit, they might have difficulty getting some of their new material into evidence. Some would most likely be challenged on grounds it was irrelevant or uncorroborated hearsay, or that it related to Saudis who were clearly covered by sovereign immunity. And if the families were to clear those hurdles, two intriguing pieces of evidence in the Saudi puzzle might still remain off limits.

One is a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint Congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. The secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers, and the Saudis themselves urged at the time that it be made public. President George W. Bush declined to do so. Kristen Breitweiser, an advocate for Sept. 11 families, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center, said in an interview that during a White House meeting in February between President Obama and victims’ families, the president told her that he was willing to make the pages public. But she said she had not heard from the White House since then...

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/world/middleeast/24saudi.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=saudi&st=cse

2009-03-09T19:48:00.000-07:00

Was America Attacked by Muslims on 9/11?

By David Ray Griffin

Much of America's foreign policy since 9/11 has been based on the assumption that it was attacked by Muslims on that day. This assumption was used, most prominently, to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is now widely agreed that the use of 9/11 as a basis for attacking Iraq was illegitimate: none of the hijackers were Iraqis, there was no working relation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and Iraq was not behind the anthrax attacks. But it is still widely believed that the US attack on Afghanistan was justified. For example, the New York Times, while referring to the US attack on Iraq as a "war of choice," calls the battle in Afghanistan a "war of necessity." Time magazine has dubbed it "the right war." And Barack Obama says that one reason to wind down our involvement in Iraq is to have the troops and resources to "go after the people in Afghanistan who actually attacked us on 9/11."

The assumption that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11 also lies behind the widespread perception of Islam as an inherently violent religion and therefore of Muslims as guilty until proven innocent. This perception surely contributed to attempts to portray Obama as a Muslim, which was lampooned by a controversial cartoon on the July 21, 2008, cover of The New Yorker. As could be illustrated by reference to many other post-9/11 developments, including as spying, torture, extraordinary rendition, military tribunals, America's new doctrine of preemptive war, and its enormous increase in military spending, the assumption that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked by Muslim hijackers has had enormous negative consequences for both international and domestic issues.1

Is it conceivable that this assumption might be false? Insofar as Americans and Canadians would say "No," they would express their belief that this assumption is not merely an "assumption" but is instead based on strong evidence. When actually examined, however, the proffered evidence turns out to be remarkably weak. I will illustrate this point by means of 16 questions.

1. Were Mohamed Atta and the Other Hijackers Devout Muslims?

The picture of the hijackers conveyed by the 9/11 Commission is that they were devout Muslims. Mohamed Atta, considered the ringleader, was said to have become very religious, even "fanatically so."2 Being devout Muslims, they could be portrayed as ready to meet their Maker---as a "cadre of trained operatives willing to die."3

But this portrayal is contradicted by various newspaper stories. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Atta and other hijackers had made "at least six trips" to Las Vegas, where they had "engaged in some decidedly un-Islamic sampling of prohibited pleasures." These activities were "un-Islamic" because, as the head of the Islamic Foundation of Nevada pointed out: "True Muslims don't drink, don't gamble, don't go to strip clubs."4

One might, to be sure, rationalize this behavior by supposing that these were momentary lapses and that, as 9/11 approached, these young Muslims had repented and prepared for heaven. But in the days just before 9/11, Atta and others were reported to be drinking heavily, cavorting with lap dancers, and bringing call girls to their rooms. Temple University Professor Mahmoud Ayoub said: "It is incomprehensible that a person could drink and go to a strip bar one night, then kill themselves the next day in the name of Islam. . . . Something here does not add up."5

In spite of the fact that these activities were reported by mainstream newspapers and even the Wall Street Journal editorial page,6 the 9/11 Commission wrote as if these reports did not exist, saying: "we have seen no credible evidence explaining why, on [some occasions], the operatives flew to or met in Las Vegas."7

2. Do Authorities Have Hard Evidence of Osama bin Laden's Responsibility for 9/11?

Whatever be the truth about the devoutness of the hijackers, one might reply, there is certainly no doubt about the fact that they were acting under the guidance of Osama bin Laden. The attack on Afghanistan was based on the claim that bin Laden was behind the attacks, and the 9/11 Commission's report was written as if there were no question about this claim. But neither the Bush administration nor the Commission provided any proof for it. Two weeks after 9/11, Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking to Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," said he expected "in the near future . . . to put out . . . a document that will describe quite clearly the evidence that we have linking [bin Laden] to this attack."8 But at a press conference with President Bush the next morning, Powell reversed himself, saying that although the government had information that left no question of bin Laden's responsibility, "most of it is classified."9 According to Seymour Hersh, citing officials from both the CIA and the Department of Justice, the real reason for the reversal was a "lack of solid information."10

That same week, Bush had demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden. But the Taliban, reported CNN, "refus[ed] to hand over bin Laden without proof or evidence that he was involved in last week's attacks on the United States." The Bush administration, saying "[t]here is already an indictment of Osama bin Laden" [for the attacks in Tanzania, Kenya, and elsewhere]," rejected the demand for evidence with regard to 9/11.11

The task of providing such evidence was taken up by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who on October 4 made public a document entitled "Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States." Listing "clear conclusions reached by the government," it stated: "Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the terrorist network which he heads, planned and carried out the atrocities on 11 September 2001."12

Blair's report, however, began by saying: "This document does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a court of law." This weakness was noted the next day by the BBC, which said: "There is no direct evidence in the public domain linking Osama Bin Laden to the 11 September attacks. At best the evidence is circumstantial."13

After the US had attacked Afghanistan, a senior Taliban official said: "We have asked for proof of Osama's involvement, but they have refused. Why?"14 The answer to this question may be suggested by the fact that, to this day, the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorist" webpage on bin Laden, while listing him as wanted for bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, makes no mention of 9/11.15

When the FBI's chief of investigative publicity was asked why not, he replied: "The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden's Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."16

It is often claimed that bin Laden's guilt is proved by a video, reportedly found by US intelligence officers in Afghanistan in November 2001, in which bin Laden appears to report having planned the attacks. But critics, pointing out various problems with this "confession video," have called it a fake.17 General Hamid Gul, a former head of Pakistan's ISI, said: "I think there is an Osama Bin Laden look-alike."18 Actually, the man in the video is not even much of a look-alike, being heavier and darker than bin Laden, having a broader nose, wearing jewelry, and writing with his right hand.19 The FBI, in any case, obviously does not consider this video hard evidence of bin Laden's responsibility for 9/11. What about the 9/11 Commission? I mentioned earlier that it gave the impression of having had solid evidence of bin Laden's guilt. But Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the Commission's co-chairs, undermined this impression in their follow-up book subtitled "the inside story of the 9/11 Commission."20

Whenever the Commission had cited evidence for bin Ladin's responsibility, the note in the back of the book always referred to CIA-provided information that had (presumably) been elicited during interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives. By far the most important of these operatives was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), described as the "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks. The Commission, for example, wrote: Bin Ladin . . . finally decided to give the green light for the 9/11 operation sometime in late 1998 or early 1999. . . . Bin Ladin also soon selected four individuals to serve as suicide operatives. . . . Atta---whom Bin Ladin chose to lead the group---met with Bin Ladin several times to receive additional instructions, including a preliminary list of approved targets: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Capitol.21

The note for each of these statements says "interrogation of KSM."22

Kean and Hamilton, however, reported that they had no success in "obtaining access to star witnesses in custody . . . , most notably Khalid Sheikh Mohammed."23 Besides not being allowed to interview these witnesses, they were not permitted to observe the interrogations through one-way glass or even to talk to the interrogators.24 Therefore, they complained: "We . . . had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information. How could we tell if someone such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed . . . was telling us the truth?"25

An NBC "deep background" report in 2008 pointed out an additional problem: KSM and the other al-Qaeda leaders had been subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques," i.e., torture, and it is now widely acknowledged that statements elicited by torture lack credibility. "At least four of the operatives whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report," this NBC report pointed out, "have claimed that they told interrogators critical information as a way to stop being "-tortured.'" NBC then quoted Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, as saying: "Most people look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a trusted historical document. If their conclusions were supported by information gained from torture, . . . their conclusions are suspect."26

Accordingly, neither the White House, the British government, the FBI, nor the 9/11 Commission has provided solid evidence that Osama bin Laden was behind 9/11.

3. Was Evidence of Muslim Hijackers Provided by Phone Calls from the Airliners?

Nevertheless, many readers may respond, there can be no doubt that the airplanes were taken over by al-Qaeda hijackers, because their presence and actions on the planes were reported on phone calls by passengers and flight attendants, with cell phone calls playing an especially prominent role. The most famous of the reported calls were from CNN commentator Barbara Olson to her husband, US Solicitor General Ted Olson. According to CNN, he reported that his wife had "called him twice on a cell phone from American Airlines Flight 77," saying that "all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by . . . hijackers [armed with] knives and cardboard cutters."27

Although these reported calls, as summarized by Ted Olson, did not describe the hijackers so as to suggest that they were members of al-Qaeda, such descriptions were supplied by calls from other flights, especially United 93, from which about a dozen cell phone calls were reportedly received before it crashed in Pennsylvania. According to a Washington Post story of September 13,

[P]assenger Jeremy Glick used a cell phone to tell his wife, Lyzbeth, . . . that the Boeing 757's cockpit had been taken over by three Middle Eastern-looking men. . . . The terrorists, wearing red headbands, had ordered the pilots, flight attendants and passengers to the rear of the plane.28

A story about a "cellular phone conversation" between flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw and her husband gave this report: She said the plane had been taken over by three men with knives. She had gotten a close look at one of the hijackers. . . . "He had an Islamic look," she told her husband.29

From these calls, therefore, the public was informed that the hijackers looked Middle Eastern and even Islamic. Still more specific information was reportedly conveyed during a 12-minute cell phone call from flight attendant Amy Sweeney on American Flight 11, which was to crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.30 After reaching American Airlines employee Michael Woodward and telling him that men of "Middle Eastern descent" had hijacked her flight, she then gave him their seat numbers, from which he was able to learn the identity of Mohamed Atta and two other hijackers.31 Amy Sweeney's call was critical, ABC News explained, because without it "the plane might have crashed with no one certain the man in charge was tied to al Qaeda."32

There was, however, a big problem with these reported calls: Given the technology available in 2001, cell phone calls from airliners at altitudes of more than a few thousand feet, especially calls lasting more than a few seconds, were not possible, and yet these calls, some of which reportedly lasted a minute or more, reportedly occurred when the planes were above 30,000 or even 40,000 feet. This problem was explained by some credible people, including scientist A.K. Dewdney, who for many years had written a column for Scientific American.33

Although some defenders of the official account, such as Popular Mechanics, have disputed the contention that high-altitude calls from airliners were impossible,34 the fact is that the FBI, after having at first supported the claims that such calls were made, withdrew this support a few years later. With regard to the reported 12-minute call from Amy Sweeney to Michael Woodward, an affidavit signed by FBI agent James Lechner and dated September 12 (2001) stated that, according to Woodward, Sweeney had been "using a cellular telephone."35 But when the 9/11 Commission discussed this call in its Report, which appeared in July 2004, it declared that Sweeney had used an onboard phone.36

Behind that change was an implausible claim made by the FBI earlier in 2004: Although Woodward had failed to mention this when FBI agent Lechner interviewed him on 9/11, he had repeated Sweeney's call verbatim to a colleague in his office, who had in turn repeated it to another colleague at American headquarters in Dallas, who had recorded it; and this recording---which was discovered only in 2004---indicated that Sweeney had used a passenger-seat phone, thanks to "an AirFone card, given to her by another flight attendant."37

This claim is implausible because, if this relayed recording had really been made on 9/11, we cannot believe that Woodward would have failed to mention it to FBI agent Lechner later that same day. While Lechner was taking notes, Woodward would surely have said: "You don't need to rely on my memory. There is a recording of a word-for-word repetition of Sweeney's statements down in Dallas." It is also implausible that Woodward, having repeated Sweeney's statement that she had used "an AirFone card, given to her by another flight attendant," would have told Lechner, as the latter's affidavit says, that Sweeney had been "using a cellular telephone." Lechner's affidavit shows that the FBI at first supported the claim that Sweeney had made a 12-minute cell phone call from a high-altitude airliner. Does not the FBI's change of story, after its first version had been shown to be technologically impossible, create the suspicion that the entire story was a fabrication?

This suspicion is reinforced by the FBI's change of story in relation to United Flight 93. Although we were originally told that this flight had been the source of about a dozen cell phone calls, some of them when the plane was above 40,000 feet, the FBI gave a very different report at the 2006 trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. The FBI spokesman said: "13 of the terrified passengers and crew members made 35 air phone calls and two cell phone calls."38 Instead of there having been about a dozen cell phone calls from Flight 93, the FBI declared in 2005, there were really only two.

Why were two calls still said to have been possible? They were reportedly made at 9:58, when the plane was reportedly down to 5,000 feet.39 Although that was still pretty high for successful cell phone calls in 2001, these calls, unlike calls from 30,000 feet or higher, would have been at least arguably possible.

If the truth of the FBI's new account is assumed, how can one explain the fact that so many people had reported receiving cell phone calls? In most cases, it seems, these people had been told by the callers that they were using cell phones. For example, a Newsweek story about United 93 said: "Elizabeth Wainio, 27, was speaking to her stepmother in Maryland. Another passenger, she explains, had loaned her a cell phone and told her to call her family."40 In such cases, we might assume that the people receiving the calls had simply mis-heard, or mis-remembered, what they had been told. But this would mean positing that about a dozen people had made the same mistake.

An even more serious difficulty is presented by the case of Deena Burnett, who said that she had received three to five calls from her husband, Tom Burnett. She knew he was using his cell phone, she reported to the FBI that very day and then to the press and in a book, because she had recognized his cell phone number on her phone's Caller ID.41 We cannot suppose her to have been mistaken about this. We also, surely, cannot accuse her of lying.

Therefore, if we accept the FBI's report, according to which Tom Burnett did not make any cell phone calls from Flight 93, we can only conclude that the calls were faked---that Deena Burnett was duped. Although this suggestion may at first sight seem outlandish, there are three facts that, taken together, show it to be more probable than any of the alternatives.

First, voice morphing technology was sufficiently advanced at that time to make faking the calls feasible. A 1999 Washington Post article described demonstrations in which the voices of two generals, Colin Powell and Carl Steiner, were heard saying things they had never said.42

Second, there are devices with which you can fake someone's telephone number, so that it will show up on the recipient's Caller ID.43

Third, the conclusion that the person who called Deena Burnett was not her husband is suggested by various features of the calls. For example, when Deena told the caller that "the kids" were asking to talk to him, he said: "Tell them I'll talk to them later." This was 20 minutes after Tom had purportedly realized that the hijackers were on a suicide mission, planning to "crash this plane into the ground," and 10 minutes after he and other passengers had allegedly decided that as soon as they were "over a rural area" they must try to gain control of the plane. Also, the hijackers had reportedly already killed one person.44 Given all this, the real Tom Burnett would have known that he would likely die, one way or another, in the next few minutes. Is it believable that, rather than taking this probably last opportunity to speak to his children, he would say that he would "talk to them later"? Is it not more likely that "Tom" made this statement to avoid revealing that he knew nothing about "the kids," perhaps not even their names?

Further evidence that the calls were faked is provided by timing problems in some of them. According to the 9/11 Commission, Flight 93 crashed at 10:03 as a result of the passenger revolt, which began at 9:57. However, according to Lyzbeth Glick's account of the aforementioned cell phone call from her husband, Jeremy Glick, she told him about the collapse of the South Tower, and that did not occur until 9:59, two minutes after the alleged revolt had started. After that, she reported, their conversation continued for several more minutes before he told her that the passengers were taking a vote about whether to attack. According to Lyzbeth Glick's account, therefore, the revolt was only beginning by 10:03, when the plane (according to the official account) was crashing.45

A timing problem also occurred in the aforementioned call from flight attendant Amy Sweeney. While she was describing the hijackers, according to the FBI's account of her call, they stormed and took control of the cockpit.46 However, although the hijacking of Flight 11 "began at 8:14 or shortly thereafter," the 9/11 Commission said, Sweeney's call did not go through until 8:25.47 Her alleged call, in other words, described the hijacking as beginning over 11 minutes after it, according to the official timeline, had been successfully carried out.

Multiple lines of evidence, therefore, imply that the cell phone calls were faked. This fact has vast implications, because it implies that all the reported calls from the planes, including those from onboard phones, were faked. Why? Because if the planes had really been taken over in surprise hijackings, no one would have been ready to make fake cell phone calls. Moreover, the FBI, besides implying, most clearly in the case of Deena Burnett, that the phone calls reporting the hijackings had been faked, comes right out and says, in its report about calls from Flight 77, that no calls from Barbara Olson occurred. It does mention her. But besides attributing only one call to her, not two, the FBI report refers to it as an "unconnected call," which (of course) lasted "0 seconds."48 In 2006, in other words, the FBI, which is part of the Department of Justice, implied that the story told by the DOJ's former solicitor general was untrue. Although not mentioned by the press, this was an astounding development.

This FBI report leaves only two possible explanations for Ted Olson's story: Either he made it up or else he, like Deena Burnett and several others, was duped. In either case, the story about Barbara Olson's calls, with their reports of hijackers taking over Flight 77, was based on deception. The opening section of The 9/11 Commission Report is entitled "Inside the Four Flights." The information contained in this section is based almost entirely on the reported phone calls. But if the reported calls were faked, we have no idea what happened inside these planes. Insofar as the idea that the planes were taken over by hijackers who looked "Middle Eastern," even "Islamic," has been based on the reported calls, this idea is groundless.

4. Was the Presence of Hijackers Proved by a Radio Transmission "from American 11"?

It might be objected, in reply, that this is not true, because we know that American Flight 11, at least, was hijacked, thanks to a radio transmission in which the voice of one of its hijackers is heard. According to the 9/11 Commission, the air traffic controller for this flight heard a radio transmission at 8:25 AM in which someone---widely assumed to be Mohamed Atta---told the passengers: "We have some planes. Just stay quiet, and you'll be okay. We are returning to the airport." After quoting this transmission, the Commission wrote: "The controller told us that he then knew it was a hijacking."49 Was this transmission not indeed proof that Flight 11 had been hijacked?

It might provide such proof if we knew that, as the Commission claimed, the "transmission came from American 11."50 But we do not. According to the FAA's "Summary of Air Traffic Hijack Events," published September 17, 2001, the transmission was "from an unknown origin."51 Bill Peacock, the FAA's air traffic director, said: "We didn't know where the transmission came from."52 The Commission's claim that it came from American 11 was merely an inference. The transmission could have come from the same room from which the calls to Deena Burnett originated. Therefore, the alleged radio transmission from Flight 11, like the alleged phone calls from the planes, provides no evidence that the planes were taken over by al-Qaeda hijackers.

5. Did Passports and a Headband Provide Evidence that al-Qaeda Operatives Were on the Flights?

However, the government's case for al-Qaeda hijackers on also rested in part on claims that passports and a headband belonging to al-Qaeda operatives were found at the crash sites. But these claims are patently absurd.

A week after the attacks, the FBI reported that a search of the streets after the destruction of the World Trade Center had discovered the passport of one of the Flight 11 hijackers, Satam al-Suqami.53 But this claim did not pass the giggle test. "[T]he idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged," wrote one British reporter, "would [test] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI's crackdown on terrorism."54

By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission was discussing the alleged discovery of this passport, the story had been modified to say that "a passer-by picked it up and gave it to a NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed."55 So, rather than needing to survive the collapse of the North Tower, the passport merely needed to escape from the plane's cabin, avoid being destroyed or even singed by the instantaneous jet-fuel fire, and then escape from the building so that it could fall to the ground! Equally absurd is the claim that the passport of Ziad Jarrah, the alleged pilot of Flight 93, was found at this plane's crash site in Pennsylvania.56

This passport was reportedly found on the ground even though there was virtually nothing at the site to indicate that an airliner had crashed there. The reason for this absence of wreckage, we were told, was that the plane had been headed downward at 580 miles per hour and, when it hit the spongy Pennsylvania soil, buried itself deep in the ground. New York Times journalist Jere Longman, surely repeating what he had been told by authorities, wrote: "The fuselage accordioned on itself more than thirty feet into the porous, backfilled ground. It was as if a marble had been dropped into water."57

So, we are to believe, just before the plane buried itself in the earth, Jarrah's passport escaped from the cockpit and landed on the ground. Did Jarrah, going 580 miles per hour, have the window open?58 Also found on the ground, according to the government's evidence presented to the Moussaoui trial, was a red headband.59

This was considered evidence that al-Qaeda hijackers were on Flight 93 because they were, according to some of the phone calls, wearing red headbands. But besides being absurd for the same reason as was the claim about Jarrah's passport, this claim about the headband was problematic for another reason. Former CIA agent Milt Bearden, who helped train the Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, has pointed out that it would have been very unlikely that members of al-Qaeda would have worn such headbands:

[The red headband] is a uniquely Shi'a Muslim adornment. It is something that dates back to the formation of the Shi'a sect. . . . [I]t represents the preparation of he who wears this red headband to sacrifice his life, to murder himself for the cause. Sunnis are by and large most of the people following Osama bin Laden [and they] do not do this.60

We learned shortly after the invasion of Iraq that some people in the US government did not know the difference between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims. Did such people decide that the hijackers would be described as wearing red headbands?

6. Did the Information in Atta's Luggage Prove the Responsibility of al-Qaeda Operatives?

I come now to the evidence that is said to provide the strongest proof that the planes had been hijacked by Mohamed Atta and other members of al-Qaeda. This evidence was reportedly found in two pieces of Atta's luggage that were discovered inside the Boston airport after the attacks. The luggage was there, we were told, because although Atta was already in Boston on September 10, he and another al-Qaeda operative, Abdul al-Omari, rented a blue Nissan and drove up to Portland, Maine, and stayed overnight. They caught a commuter flight back to Boston early the next morning in time to get on American Flight 11, but Atta's luggage did not make it.

This luggage, according to the FBI affidavit signed by James Lechner, contained much incriminating material, including a handheld flight computer, flight simulator manuals, two videotapes about Boeing aircraft, a slide-rule flight calculator, a copy of the Koran, and Atta's last will and testament.61 This material was widely taken as proof that al-Qaeda and hence Osama bin Laden were behind the 9/11 attacks. When closely examined, however, the Atta-to-Portland story loses all credibility. One problem is the very idea that Atta would have planned to take all these things in baggage that was to be transferred to Flight 11. What good would a flight computer and other flying aids do inside a suitcase in the plane's luggage compartment? Why would he have planned to take his will on a plane he planned to crash into the World Trade Center?

A second problem involves the question of why Atta's luggage did not get transferred onto Flight 11. According to an Associated Press story that appeared four days after 9/11, Atta's flight "arrived at Logan . . . just in time for him to connect with American Airlines flight 11 to Los Angeles, but too late for his luggage to be loaded."62 The 9/11 Commission had at one time evidently planned to endorse this claim.63 But when The 9/11 Commission Report appeared, it said: "Atta and Omari arrived in Boston at 6:45" and then "checked in and boarded American Airlines Flight 11," which was "scheduled to depart at 7:45."64 By thus admitting that there was almost a full hour for the luggage to be transferred to Flight 11, the Commission was left with no explanation as to why it was not.

Still another problem with the Atta-to-Portland story was the question why he would have taken this trip. If the commuter flight had been late, Atta, being the ringleader of the hijackers as well as the intended pilot for Flight 11, would have had to call off the whole operation, which he had reportedly been planning for two years. The 9/11 Commission, like the FBI before it, admitted that it had no answer to this question.65

The fourth and biggest problem with the story, however, is that it did not appear until September 16, five days after 9/11, following the collapse of an earlier story. According to news reports immediately after 9/11, the incriminating materials, rather than being found in Atta's luggage inside the airport, were found in a white Mitsubishi, which Atta had left in the Boston airport parking lot. Two hijackers did drive a blue Nissan to Portland and then take the commuter flight back to Boston the next morning, but their names were Adnan and Ameer Bukhari.66 This story fell apart on the afternoon of September 13, when it was discovered that the Bukharis, to whom authorities had reportedly been led by material in the Nissan at the Portland Jetport, had not died on 9/11: Adnan was still alive and Ameer had died the year before.67

The next day, September 14, an Associated Press story said that it was Atta and a companion who had driven the blue Nissan to Portland, stayed overnight, and then taken the commuter flight back to Boston. The incriminating materials, however, were still said to have been found in a car in the Boston airport, which was now said to have been rented by "additional suspects."68 Finally, on September 16, a Washington Post story, besides saying that the Nissan had been taken to Portland by Atta and al-Omari, specified that the incriminating material had been found in Atta's luggage inside the Boston airport.69

Given this history of the Atta-to-Portland story, how can we avoid the conclusion that it was a fabrication?

7. Were al-Qaeda Operatives Captured on Airport Security Videos?

Still another type of evidence for the claim that al-Qaeda operatives were on the planes consisted of frames from videos, purportedly taken by airport security cameras, said to show hijackers checking into airports. Shortly after the attacks, for example, photos showing Atta and al-Omari at an airport "were flashed round the world."70 However, although it was widely assumed that these photos were from the airport at Boston, they were really from the airport at Portland. No photos showing Atta or any of the other alleged hijackers at Boston's Logan Airport were ever produced. We at best have photographic evidence that Atta and al-Omari were at the Portland airport.

Moreover, in light of the fact that the story of Atta and al-Omari going to Portland was apparently a late invention, we might expect the photographic evidence that they were at the Portland Jetport on the morning of September 11 to be problematic. And indeed it is. It shows Atta and Omari without either jackets or ties on, whereas the Portland ticket agent said that they had been wearing jackets and ties.71 Also, a photo showing Atta and al-Omari passing through the security checkpoint is marked both 05:45 and 05:53.72

Another airport video was distributed on the day in 2004 that The 9/11 Commission Report was published. The Associated Press, using a frame from it as corroboration of the official story, provided this caption: Hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar . . . passes through the security checkpoint at Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Va., Sept. 11 2001, just hours before American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon in this image from a surveillance video.73

However, as Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall have pointed out, a normal security video has time and date burned into the integral video image by proprietary equipment according to an authenticated pattern, along with camera identification and the location that the camera covered. The video released in 2004 contained no such data.74

The Associated Press notwithstanding, therefore, this video contains no evidence that it was taken at Dulles on September 11. Another problem with this so-called Dulles video is that, although one of the men on it was identified by the 9/11 Commission as Hani Hanjour,75 he "does not remotely resemble Hanjour." Whereas Hanjour was thin and had a receding hairline (as shown by a photo taken six days before 9/11), the man in the video had a somewhat muscular build and a full head of hair, with no receding hairline.76

In sum: Video proof that the named hijackers checked into airports on 9/11 is nonexistent. Besides the fact that the videos purportedly showing hijackers for Flights 11 and 77 reek of inauthenticity, there are no videos even purportedly showing the hijackers for the other two flights. If these 19 men had really checked into the Boston and Dulles airports that day, there should be authentic security videos to prove this.

8. Were the Names of the "Hijackers" on the Passenger Manifests?

What about the passenger manifests, which list all the passengers on the flights? If the alleged hijackers purchased tickets and boarded the flights, their names would have been on the manifests for these flights. And we were told that they were. According to counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, the FBI told him at about 10:00 that morning that it recognized the names of some al-Qaeda operatives on passenger manifests it had received from the airlines.77 As to how the FBI itself acquired its list, Robert Bonner, the head of Customs and Border Protection, said to the 9/11 Commission in 2004: On the morning of 9/11, through an evaluation of data related to the passenger manifest for the four terrorist hijacked aircraft, Customs Office of Intelligence was able to identify the likely terrorist hijackers. Within 45 minutes of the attacks, Customs forwarded the passenger lists with the names of the victims and 19 probable hijackers to the FBI and the intelligence community.78

Under questioning, Bonner added: We were able to pull from the airlines the passenger manifest for each of the four flights. We ran the manifest through [our lookout] system. . . . [B]y 11:00 AM, I'd seen a sheet that essentially identified the 19 probable hijackers. And in fact, they turned out to be, based upon further follow-up in detailed investigation, to be the 19.79

Bonner's statement, however, is doubly problematic. In the first place, the initial FBI list, as reported by CNN on September 13 and 14, contained only 18 names.80 Why would that be if 19 men had already been identified on 9/11?

Second, several of the names on the FBI's first list, having quickly become problematic, were replaced by other names. For example, the previously discussed men named Bukhari, thought to be brothers, were replaced on American 11's list of hijackers by brothers named Waleed and Wail al-Shehri. Two other replacements for this flight were Satam al-Suqami, whose passport was allegedly found at Ground Zero, and Abdul al-Omari, who allegedly went to Portland with Atta the day before 9/11. Also, the initial list for American 77 did not include the name of Hani Hanjour, who would later be called the pilot of this flight. Rather, it contained a name that, after being read aloud by a CNN correspondent, was transcribed "Mosear Caned."81 All in all, the final list of 19 hijackers contained six names that were not on the original list of 18---a fact that contradicts Bonner's claim that by 11:00 AM on 9/11 his agency had identified 19 probable hijackers who, in fact, "turned out to be. . . the 19."

These replacements to the initial list also undermine the claim that Amy Sweeney, by giving the seat numbers of three of the hijackers to Michael Woodward of American Airlines, allowed him to identify Atta and two others. This second claim is impossible because the two others were Abdul al-Omari and Satam al-Suqami,82 and they were replacements for two men on the original list---who, like Adnan Bukhari, turned up alive after 9/11.83 Woodward could not possibly have identified men who were not added to the list until several days later.84

For all these reasons, the claim that the names of the 19 alleged hijackers were on the airlines' passenger manifests must be considered false. This conclusion is supported by the fact that the passenger manifests that were released to the public included no names of any of the 19 alleged hijackers and, in fact, no Middle Eastern names whatsoever.85

These manifests, therefore, support the suspicion that there were no al-Qaeda hijackers on the planes. It might appear that this conclusion is contradicted by the fact that passenger manifests with the names of the alleged hijackers have appeared. A photocopy of a portion of an apparent passenger manifest for American Flight 11, with the names of three of the alleged hijackers, was published in a 2005 book by Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers.86 McDermott reportedly said that he received these manifests from the FBI.87 But the idea that these were the original manifests is problematic. For one thing, they were not included in the evidence presented by the FBI to the Moussaoui trial in 2006.88 If even the FBI will not cite them as evidence, why should anyone think they are genuine?

Another problem with these purported manifests, copies of which can be viewed on the Internet,89 is that they show signs of being late creations. One such sign is that Ziad Jarrah's last name is spelled correctly, whereas in the early days after 9/11, the FBI was referring to him as "Jarrahi," as news reports from the time show.90 A second sign is that the manifest for American Flight 77 contains Hani Hanjour's name, even though its absence from the original list of hijackers had led the Washington Post to wonder why Hanjour's "name was not on the American Airlines manifest for the flight."91 A third sign is that the purported manifest for American Flight 11 contains the names of Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Shehri, Satam al-Suqami, and Abdul al-Omari, all of whom were added some days after 9/11. In sum, no credible evidence that al-Qaeda operatives were on the flights is provided by the passenger manifests.

9. Did DNA Tests Identify Five Hijackers among the Victims at the Pentagon?

Another type of evidence that the alleged hijackers were really on the planes could have been provided by autopsies. But no such evidence has been forthcoming. In its book defending the official account of 9/11, to be sure, Popular Mechanics claims that, according to a report on the victims of the Pentagon attack by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology: "The five hijackers were positively identified."92 But this claim is false. According to a summary of this pathology report by Andrew Baker, M.D., the remains of 183 victims were subjected to DNA analysis, which resulted in "178 positive identifications." Although Baker says that "[s]ome remains for each of the terrorists were recovered," this was merely an inference from the fact that there were "five unique postmortem profiles that did not match any antemortem material provided by victims' families."93

A Washington Post story made even clearer the fact that this conclusion---that the unmatched remains were those of "the five hijackers"---was merely an inference. It wrote: "The remains of the five hijackers have been identified through a process of exclusion, as they did not match DNA samples contributed by family members of all 183 victims who died at the site" (emphasis added).94 All the report said, in other words, was that there were five bodies whose DNA did not match that of any of the known Pentagon victims or any of the regular passengers or crew members on Flight 77. We have no way of knowing where these five bodies came from. For the claim that they came from the attack site at the Pentagon, we have only the word of the FBI and the military, which insisted on taking charge of the bodies of everyone killed at the Pentagon and transporting them to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.95

In any case, the alleged hijackers could have been positively identified only if samples had been obtained from their relatives, and there is no indication that this occurred. Indeed, one can wonder why not. The FBI had lots of information about the men identified as the hijackers. They could easily have located relatives. And these relatives, most of whom reportedly did not believe that their own flesh and blood had been involved in the attacks, would have surely been willing to supply the needed DNA. Indeed, a story about Ziad Jarrah, the alleged pilot of Flight 93, said: "Jarrah's family has indicated they would be willing to provide DNA samples to US researchers, . . . [but] the FBI has shown no interest thus far."96

The lack of positive identification of the alleged hijackers is consistent with the autopsy report, which was released to Dr. Thomas Olmsted, who had made a FOIA request for it. Like the flight manifest for Flight 77, he revealed, this report also contains no Arab names.97

10. Has the Claim That Some of the "Hijackers" Are Still Alive Been Debunked?

Another problem with the claim that the 19 hijackers were correctly identified on 9/11, or at least a few days later, is that some of the men on the FBI's final list reportedly turned up alive after 9/11. Although Der Spiegel and the BBC claim to have debunked these reports, I will show this is untrue by examining the case of one of the alleged hijackers, Waleed al-Shehri---who, we saw earlier, was a replacement for Adnan Bukhari, who himself had shown up alive after 9/11.

In spite of the fact that al-Shehri was a replacement, the 9/11 Commission revealed no doubts about his presence on Flight 11, speculating that he and his brother Wail---another replacement---stabbed two of the flight attendants.98 But the Commission certainly should have had doubts. On September 22, 2001, the BBC published an article by David Bamford entitled "Hijack "-Suspect' Alive in Morocco." It showed that the Waleed al-Shehri identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers was still alive. Explaining why the problem could not be dismissed as a case of mistaken identity, Bamford wrote:

His photograph was released by the FBI, and has been shown in newspapers and on television around the world. That same Mr Al-Shehri has turned up in Morocco, proving clearly that he was not a member of the suicide attack. He told Saudi journalists in Casablanca that . . . he has now been interviewed by the American authorities, who apologised for the misunderstanding.99

The following day, September 23, the BBC published another story, "Hijack "-Suspects' Alive and Well." Discussing several alleged hijackers who had shown up alive, it said of al-Shehri in particular: "He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach. . . . But, he says, he left the United States in September last year, became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in Morocco."100

In 2003, an article in Der Spiegel tried to debunk these two BBC stories, characterizing them as "nonsense about surviving terrorists." It claimed that the reported still-alive hijackers were all cases of mistaken identity, involving men with "coincidentally identical names." This claim by Der Spiegel depended on its assertion that, at the time of the reports, the FBI had released only a list of names: "The FBI did not release photographs until four days after the cited reports, on September 27th."101 But that was not true. Bamford's BBC story of September 22, as we saw, reported that Waleed al-Shehri's photograph had been "released by the FBI" and "shown in newspapers and on television around the world."

In 2006, nevertheless, the BBC used the same claim to withdraw its support for its own stories. Steve Herrmann, the editor of the BBC News website, claimed that confusion had arisen because "these were common Arabic and Islamic names." Accordingly, he said, the BBC had changed its September 23 story in one respect: "Under the FBI picture of Waleed al Shehri we have added the words "-A man called Waleed Al Shehri...' to make it as clear as possible that there was confusion over the identity."102 But Bamford's BBC story of September 22, which Herrmann failed to mention, had made it "as clear as possible" that there could not have been any confusion.

These attempts by Der Spiegel and the BBC, in which they tried to discredit the reports that Waleed al-Shehri was still alive after 9/11, have been refuted by Jay Kolar, who shows that FBI photographs had been published by Saudi newspapers as early as September 19. Kolar thereby undermines the only argument against Bamford's assertion, according to which there could have been no possibility of mistaken identity because al-Shehri had seen his published photograph prior to September 22, when Bamford's story appeared.103

The fact that al-Shehri, along with several other alleged hijackers,104 was alive after 9/11 shows unambiguously that at least some of the men on the FBI's final list were not on the planes. It would appear that the FBI, after replacing some of its first-round candidates because of their continued existence, decided not to replace any more, in spite of their exhibition of the same defect.

11. Is There Positive Evidence That No Hijackers Were on the Planes?

At this point, defenders of the official story might argue: The fact that some of the men labeled hijackers were still alive after 9/11 shows only that the FBI list contained some errors; it does not prove that there were no al-Qaeda hijackers on board. And although the previous points do undermine the evidence for such hijackers, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Evidence of absence, however, is implicit in the prior points in two ways. First, the lack of Arab names on the Pentagon autopsy report and on any of the issued passenger manifests does suggest the absence of al-Qaeda operatives. Second, if al-Qaeda hijackers really were on the flights, why was evidence to prove this fact fabricated?

Beyond those two points, moreover, there is a feature of the reported events that contradicts the claim that hijackers broke into the pilots' cabins. This feature can be introduced by reference to Conan Doyle's short story "Silver Blaze," which is about a famous race horse that had disappeared the night before a big race. Although the local Scotland Yard detective believed that Silver Blaze had been stolen by an intruder, Sherlock Holmes brought up "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." When the inspector pointed out that "[t]he dog did nothing in the night-time," Holmes replied: "That was the curious incident."105 Had there really been an intruder, in other words, the dog would have barked. This has become known as the case of "the dog that didn't bark."

A similar curious incident occurred on each of the four flights. In the event of a hijacking, pilots are trained to enter the standard hijack code (7500) into their transponders to alert controllers on the ground. Using the transponder to send a code is called "squawking." One of the big puzzles about 9/11 was why none of the pilots squawked the hijack code. CNN provided a good treatment of this issue, saying with regard to the first flight: Flight 11 was hijacked apparently by knife-wielding men. Airline pilots are trained to handle such situations by keeping calm, complying with requests, and if possible, dialing in an emergency four digit code on a device called a transponder. . . . The action takes seconds, but it appears no such code was entered.106

The crucial issue was indicated by the phrase "if possible": Would it have been possible for the pilots of Flight 11 to have performed this action? A positive answer was suggested by CNN's next statement: [I]n the cabin, a frantic flight attendant managed to use a phone to call American Airlines Command Center in Dallas. She reported the trouble. And according to "The Christian Science Monitor," a pilot apparently keyed the microphone, transmitting a cockpit conversation.107

If there was time for both of those actions to be taken, there would have been time for one of the pilots to enter the four-digit hijack code. That would have been all the more true of the pilots on United Flight 93, given the (purported) tapes from this flight. A reporter at the Moussaoui trial, where these tapes had been played, wrote: In those tapes, the pilots shouted as hijackers broke into the cockpit. "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!" a pilot screamed in the first tape. In the second tape, 30 seconds later, a pilot shouted: "Mayday! Get out of here! Get out of here!"108

According to these tapes, therefore, the pilots were still alive and coherent 30 seconds after realizing that hijackers were breaking into the cockpit. And yet in all that time, neither of them did the most important thing they had been trained to do---turn the transponder to 7500. In addition to the four pilots on Flights 11 and 93, furthermore, the four pilots on Flights 175 and 77 failed to do this as well. In "Silver Blaze," the absence of an intruder was shown by the dog that didn't bark. On 9/11, the absence of hijackers was shown by the pilots who didn't squawk.

12. Were bin Laden and al-Qaeda Capable of Orchestrating the Attacks?

For prosecutors to prove that defendants committed a crime, they must show that they had the ability (as well as the motive and opportunity) to do so. But several political and military leaders from other countries have stated that bin Laden and al-Qaeda simply could not have carried out the attacks. General Leonid Ivashov, who in 2001 was the chief of staff for the Russian armed forces, wrote: Only secret services and their current chiefs---or those retired but still having influence inside the state organizations---have the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such magnitude. . . . . Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" cannot be the organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders.

Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, the former foreign minister of Egypt, wrote: Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation of this magnitude. When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaida as if it was Nazi Germany or the communist party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I know what is there. Similar statements have been made by Andreas von Bülow, the former state secretary of West Germany's ministry of defense, by General Mirza Aslam Beg, former chief of staff of Pakistan's army, and even General Musharraf, the president of Pakistan until recently.109

This same point was also made by veteran CIA agent Milt Bearden. Speaking disparagingly of "the myth of Osama bin Laden" on CBS News the day after 9/11, Bearden said: "I was there [in Afghanistan] at the same time bin Laden was there. He was not the great warrior." With regard to the widespread view that bin Laden was behind the attacks, he said: "This was a tremendously sophisticated operation against the United States---more sophisticated than anybody would have ascribed to Osama bin Laden." Pointing out that a group capable of such a sophisticated attack would have had a way to cover their tracks, he added: "This group who was responsible for that, if they didn't have an Osama bin Laden out there, they'd invent one, because he's a terrific diversion."110

13. Could Hani Hanjour Have Flown Flight 77 into the Pentagon?

The inability of al-Qaeda to have carried out the operation can be illustrated in terms of Hani Hanjour, the al-Qaeda operative said to have flown Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

On September 12, before it was stated that Hanjour had been the pilot of American 77, the final minutes of this plane's trajectory had been described as one requiring great skill. A Washington Post story said:

[J]ust as the plane seemed to be on a suicide mission into the White House, the unidentified pilot executed a pivot so tight that it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver. . . . Aviation sources said the plane was flown with extraordinary skill, making it highly likely that a trained pilot was at the helm.111

But Hani Hanjour was not that. Indeed, a CBS story reported, an Arizona flight school said that Hanjour's "flying skills were so bad . . . they didn't think he should keep his pilot's license." The manager stated: "I couldn't believe he had a commercial license of any kind with the skills that he had."112 A New York Times story, entitled "A Trainee Noted for Incompetence," quoted one of his instructors as saying that Hanjour "could not fly at all."113

The 9/11 Commission even admitted that in the summer of 2001, just months before 9/11, a flight instructor in New Jersey, after going up with Hanjour in a small plane, "declined a second request because of what he considered Hanjour's poor piloting skills."114 The Commission failed to address the question of how Hanjour, incapable of flying a single-engine plane, could have flown a giant 757 through the trajectory reportedly taken by Flight 77: descending 8,000 feet in three minutes and then coming in at ground level to strike Wedge 1 of the Pentagon between the first and second floors, without even scraping the lawn.

Several pilots have said this would have been impossible. Russ Wittenberg, who flew large commercial airliners for 35 years after serving as a fighter pilot in Vietnam, says it would have been "totally impossible for an amateur who couldn't even fly a Cessna" to fly that downward spiral and then "crash into the Pentagon's first floor wall without touching the lawn."115 Ralph Omholt, a former 757 pilot, has bluntly said: "The idea that an unskilled pilot could have flown this trajectory is simply too ridiculous to consider."116 Ralph Kolstad, who was a US Navy "top gun" pilot before becoming a commercial airline pilot for 27 years, has said: "I have 6,000 hours of flight time in Boeing 757's and 767's and I could not have flown it the way the flight path was described. . . . Something stinks to high heaven!"117

The authors of the Popular Mechanics book about 9/11 offered to solve this problem. While acknowledging that Hanjour "may not have been highly skilled," they said that he did not need to be, because all he had to do was, using a GPS unit, put his plane on autopilot.118 "He steered the plane manually for only the final eight minutes of the flight," they state triumphantly119---ignoring the fact that it was precisely during those minutes that Hanjour had allegedly performed the impossible.

14. Would an al-Qaeda Pilot Have Executed that Maneuver?

A further question is: Even if one of the al-Qaeda operatives on that flight could have executed that maneuver, would he have done so? This question arises out of the fact that the plane could easily have crashed into the roof on the side of the Pentagon that housed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and all the top brass. The difficult maneuver would have been required only by the decision to strike Wedge 1 on the side.

But this was the worst possible place, given the assumed motives of the al-Qaeda operatives: They would have wanted to kill Rumsfeld and the top brass, but Wedge 1 was as far removed from their offices as possible. They would have wanted to cause as much destruction as possible, but Wedge 1---and only it---had been renovated to make it less vulnerable to attack. Al-Qaeda operatives would have wanted to kill as many Pentagon employees as possible, but because the renovation was not quite complete, Wedge 1 was only sparsely occupied. The attack also occurred on the only part of the Pentagon that would have presented physical obstacles to an attacking airplane. All of these facts were public knowledge. So even if an al-Qaeda pilot had been capable of executing the maneuver to strike the ground floor of Wedge 1, he would not have done so.

15. Could al-Qaeda Operatives Have Brought Down the World Trade Center Buildings?

Returning to the issue of competence, another question is whether al-Qaeda operatives could have brought down the Twin Towers and WTC 7?

With regard to the Twin Towers, the official theory is that they were brought down by the impact of the airplanes plus the ensuing fires. But this theory cannot explain why the towers, after exploding outwards at the top, came straight down, because this type of collapse would have required all 287 of each building's steel columns---which ran from the basement to the roof---to have failed simultaneously; it cannot explain why the top parts of the buildings came straight down at virtually free-fall speed, because this required that the lower parts of the building, with all of their steel and concrete, offered no resistance; it cannot explain why sections of steel beams, weighing thousands of tons, were blown out horizontally more than 500 feet; it cannot explain why some of the steel had melted, because this melting required temperatures far hotter than the fires in the buildings could possibly have been; and it cannot explain why many firefighters and WTC employees reported massive explosions in the buildings long after all the jet-fuel had burned up. But all of these phenomena are easily explainable by the hypothesis that the buildings were brought down by explosives in the procedure known as controlled demolition.120

This conclusion now constitutes the consensus of independent physicists, chemists, architects, engineers, and demolition experts who have studied the facts.121 For example, Edward Munyak, a mechanical and fire protection engineer who worked in the US departments of energy and defense, says: "The concentric nearly freefall speed exhibited by each building was identical to most controlled demolitions. . . . Collapse [was] not caused by fire effects."122 Dwain Deets, the former director of the research engineering division at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, mentions the "massive structural members being hurled horizontally" as one of the factors leaving him with "no doubt [that] explosives were involved."123

Given the fact that WTC 7 was not even hit by a plane, its vertical collapse at virtually free-fall speed, which also was preceded by explosions and involved the melting of steel, was still more obviously an example of controlled demolition.124 For example, Jack Keller, emeritus professor of engineering at Utah State University, who has been given special recognition by Scientific American, said: "Obviously it was the result of controlled demolition."125 Likewise, when Danny Jowenko---a controlled demolition expert in the Netherlands who had not known that WTC 7 had collapsed on 9/11---was asked to comment on a video of its collapse, he said: "They simply blew up columns, and the rest caved in afterwards. . . . [I]t's been imploded. . . . A team of experts did this."126

If the Twin Towers and WTC 7 were brought down by explosives, the question becomes: Who would have had the ability to place the explosives? This question involves two parts: First, who could have obtained access to the buildings for all the hours it would have taken to plant the explosives? The answer is: Only someone with connections to people in charge of security for the World Trade Center. The second part of the question is: Who, if they had such access, would have had the expertise to engineer the controlled demolition of these three buildings? As Jowenko's statement indicated, the kind of controlled demolition to which these buildings were subjected was implosion, which makes the building come straight down. According to ImplosionWorld.com, an implosion is "by far the trickiest type of explosive project, and there are only a handful of blasting companies in the world that possess enough experience . . . to perform these true building implosions."127

Both parts of the question, therefore, rule out al-Qaeda operatives. The destruction of the World Trade Center had to have been an inside job.

16. Would al-Qaeda Operatives Have Imploded the Buildings?

Finally, we can also ask whether, even if al-Qaeda operatives had possessed the ability to cause the World Trade Center buildings to implode so as to come straight down, they would have done so? The answer to this question becomes obvious once we reflect upon the purpose of this kind of controlled demolition, which is to avoid damaging near-by buildings. Had the 110-story Twin Towers fallen over sideways, they would have caused massive destruction in lower Manhattan, destroying dozens of other buildings and killing tens of thousands of people. Would al-Qaeda have had the courtesy to make sure that the buildings came straight down?

Conclusion

All the proffered evidence that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11, when subjected to critical scrutiny, appears to have been fabricated. If that is determined indeed to be the case, the implications would be enormous. Discovering and prosecuting the true perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks would obviously be important. The most immediate consequence, however, should be to reverse those attitudes and policies that have been based on the assumption that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11.

Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20723.htm