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
During his presidential farewell speech January 1961, Dwight
D. Eisenhower
took the opportunity to warn the American
public about
the dangerous rise of a secretive military industrial complex in the US -
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 -
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 connect the dots).
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 in the US 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 American public into full compliance. The
operation's long-term goal was to remake the world at a time when
there existed no rival superpower to stand in its way. The grand idea
began to evolve soon after the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union.
It needs to be pointed out that there was also a convergence of several
interests - Western (namely Anglo-American), Saudi Arabian, Pakistani
and Israeli. By the turn of this century, the plan was ready to be
executed. The only thing needed was the pretext/excuse that would give
them the moral authority as well as the trillions of dollars needed to
commence the campaign.
We
may never know the details of who planned the operation or how it was
carried out, but it is very obvious that the primary purpose of the
operation was to draw Western forces into the Middle East, Africa and
Central Asian for the primary purpose of destabilizing targeted nations
within those regions and establishing a permanent Western military
presence there. I reiterate; the
frenzied war culture that infected policymakers in the West was a direct
result of the Soviet Union's sudden collapse which made the United
States a hyperpower by default. Their confidence was boosted by
the fact that Russia at the time was on its knees and at the mercy of
Western-backed oligarchs and there seemed no hope for its revival. It is
also important to note here that they had tasted blood when they easily
defeated Iraq and Serbia in 1991 and the 1999.
Therefore,
with Russia in retreat, China no where in sight and with the Western
economy still enjoying its bubble, the world was theirs for the taking
by the year 2000 and they were planing a move to keep it that way well
into the new century. Thus, masterminded in the 1990s and
commenced in 2001, the global campaign had several very important
long-term geostrategic goals. These 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 1997 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 publication dating
back to the 1990s 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 that took root in policy
making circles in Washington during 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 invade 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. I also want to commemorate the deaths
of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children around the
world as a direct result of the "war on terror". I
am commemorating this solemn occasion not by waving Chinese-made
American flags... but by enlightening the reader by providing the
following essays, new articles, interviews and film 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 the interview, he unequivocally denied having played any role in the attacks. In fact, Bin-Laden was never indicted by the US government for the attacks on September 11, 2001. Read Bin-Laden's interesting interview. His comments need a closer look now that they have "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:
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
***
***
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
10 events surrounding September 11,
2001
People all over the world are familiar with what happened on
September 11, 2001. On that morning, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked
four US commercial passenger jet airliners and intentionally crashed two
of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The Twin
Towers collapsed within two hours of being struck by the planes.
Civilians from over 70 countries were killed in the attacks, with a
total of 2,995 casualties. In the months before and after September 11,
many important international events occurred. On October 7, 2001, the
US military’s Operation Enduring Freedom was launched, starting the War
in Afghanistan. This list will be documenting ten news stories and
international events surrounding September 11, 2001.
10 - Enron Scandal Revealed
Most Americans are familiar with the failure of the Enron
Corporation. Enron was an American energy company based out of Houston,
Texas. In 2000, Enron was one of the largest businesses in the world.
They had working operations in many areas, mainly electricity, natural
gas, communications and pulp and paper. Amazingly, Enron claimed
revenues of nearly $101 billion in 2000. The problems for Enron started
from the beginning, when a group of executives in the company began
misleading the board of directors and audit committee. They did this by
hiding billions of dollars in debt, acquired from failed deals
and projects. In the months following 9/11, the illegal activity
caught up with Enron and the company failed. Enron stock holders lost
nearly $11 billion, and the resulting scandal marked the largest
bankruptcy reorganization in American history at that time.
The Enron scandal ended the business career of accounting firm Arthur
Andersen. Arthur Andersen Corporation was found guilty of unlawful
practice in the auditing of Enron. In October of 2001, one month after
the attacks in New York and Washington, details of the Enron scandal
were leaked to the world press. The story sparked a panic among Enron
stock holders, and by December 2, 2001, Enron Corp. filed for one of the
largest corporate bankruptcies in US history, with assets of $63.4
billion. Because of the failure, new regulations and legislation were
enacted to expand the reliability of financial
reporting for public companies. Many conspiracy theories have been
formed around the Enron Scandal, and the date on which it was revealed
to the public. Most of these claims document the ties between former
Texas Governor George W. Bush and Enron founder Kenneth Lay.
9 - Executive Order 13233
In 1972, thousands of official and unofficial FBI records were
destroyed, upon the death of J. Edgar Hoover. In fact, in the past it
was common practice for high ranking officials to destroy their most
important business documents.
For this reason, in 1974 the US Congress passed the Presidential
Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, placing the presidential
records of Richard Nixon in federal custody to prevent their
destruction. The Act was meant to reduce secrecy at the highest levels
of government, and to give historians the materials they need to perform
their duties. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 expanded such
protection of historical records. This was accomplished by mandating
that all records of former presidents automatically become the property
of the federal government upon leaving the Oval Office.
The presidential papers of Ronald Reagan and Vice President George
Bush were due to be made public when George W. Bush took office in
January, 2001. However, George W. Bush first delayed the release for 90
days, and then repeated the action, pushing the date back into
September, 2001. On November 1, 2001, Bush issued Executive Order
13233, limiting public access to the records of former U.S. presidents.
The Bush executive order also includes the documents of former vice
presidents. Many people were critical of this action, claiming that it
violated both the “spirit and letter of existing US laws.” The order
severely curtailed public access to presidential records and added to
delays in obtaining materials from presidential libraries. On January
21, 2009, Executive Order 13233 was revoked, by executive order of
President Barack Obama on his first day in office. Obama essentially
restored the original Executive Order 12667.
During his presidency, George W. Bush was accused of acting in violation
of the Presidential Records Act of 1978. In 2007, the Bush White House
e-mail controversy was revealed. The event started when George W. Bush
initiated the, unprecedented, midterm dismissal of seven United States
Attorneys on December 7, 2006. The U.S. attorneys were replaced with
interim appointees, under provisions in the 2005 USA PATRIOT Act
reauthorization. Following the action, a congressional request was
called looking for documents indicating why the attorneys were fired.
This caused the Bush administration to reveal the fact that not all
internal White House emails were available, because they were sent via a
non-government domain,
that was hosted on an e-mail server not controlled by the federal
government. In 2009, it was announced that as many as 22 million emails
may have been deleted by the Bush administration.
8 - 2001 Atlantic Hurricane Season
Hurricane Erin was the first, and longest lived, hurricane in the
2001 Atlantic hurricane season. The storm developed from a tropical
wave on September 1, 2001, and by September 9 it strengthened into a
full blown hurricane. Hurricane Erin passed within 100 miles of
Bermuda, and created nasty weather and rip currents along the East Coast
of the United States. On September 11, Erin decelerated as it turned
to the east, but the hurricane would gain power over Canada and not
dissipate until September 15. It is an interesting story because many
flights and air traffic control workers were directly affected by
Hurricane Erin. The storm produced 6 foot swells off the coast of North
Carolina.
The second hurricane of the 2001 season struck on September 12, 2001.
The storm is named Hurricane Felix and it originated 1,500 miles (2414
km) south of the Azores. Felix did not impact land, but caused weather
problems for boats and aircraft. Hurricane Gabrielle was the third
hurricane recorded during the 2001 Atlantic hurricane season. The storm
developed on September 11, 2001, in the southeastern Gulf of Mexico.
By September 13, Gabrielle intensified and accelerated northeastward
toward Venice, Florida. On September 14, the storm made landfall near
Venice, Florida, and was soon categorized as a hurricane. Hurricane
Gabrielle caused heavy rainfall and bad weather conditions
in Florida, Alabama, Bermuda and Canada. Three people were reported to
have died in the storm, and it caused $230 million in damages. It is
truly unfortunate that the September 11th terrorist attacks fell in line
with a string of high powered hurricanes.
7 - Abnormal Stock Trading
In the week prior to 9/11, an “extraordinary” amount of put options
were placed on United Airlines and American Airlines stocks. If you are
unfamiliar with the stock market, a put option is financial contract
between two parties that will offer the buyer insurance against a company’s excessive loss. Someone who purchases
a put option is expecting a stock to drop or they are protecting their
assets. Between September 6 and 7, 4,744 put options were purchased on
United Airlines stock, compared to 396 call options. On September 10,
4,516 put options were purchased on American Airlines, as compared to
748 call options. The trading activity was 600% above the normal level.
United and American Airlines were the only two companies who had
planes hijacked on 9/11. There were also an abnormal number of put
options purchased in companies who had a stake in the World Trade
Centers.
The majority of the suspicious trading was linked to Deutsche Bank
Alex Brown. On September 12, 2001, the head of the bank, Mayo A.
Shattuck III, resigned from office. The previous director of the bank
was A. B. Krongard, who is the former head of the CIA. Citigroup Inc
and Morgan Stanley also received an abnormal number of put options, and
both companies held offices
in the World Trade Centers, and saw a decrease in stock price after the
attacks. On September 10, 2001, Raytheon, a defense contractor, had an
anomalously high number of call options traded. The Securities and
Exchange Commission launched an insider trading investigation, in which
Osama Bin Laden was a suspect, but no action was taken. The trading was
traced to areas all over the world, with most activity occurring in the
UK, Italy, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, France and the US.
In the days prior to 9/11, the Chicago Exchange saw the highest
number of United and American Airlines options traded in history. The
names of the investors remain a mystery, because they never claimed
their money. After it was discovered that a single U.S.-based
institutional investor, with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda, purchased a
large amount of these options, the 9/11 Commission dismissed the
importance of the events. Unfortunately, the abnormal trading did not
tip off law enforcement, as intelligence agencies constantly monitor the
stock exchange and the sudden rise in activity could have allowed
analysts to “connect the dots” and see that a major event was about to
take place involving American Airlines, United Airlines and The World
Trade Centers. However, nobody could have imagined the scale of the
tragedy.
6 - Death of Ahmad Shah Massoud
In 1979, the Soviet Union began their ten year long conflict with
Afghanistan. Ahmad Shah Massoud was a military leader that played a
leading role in driving the Soviet army out of Afghanistan in the late
1980s. His military prowess made him a hero in Afghanistan, earning him
the nickname Lion of Panjshir. During the war, Massoud was known for
his strategic and mass ambushes against Soviet and Afghan convoys. In
1983, the Soviets offered Massoud a truce, which he accepted. He then
turned his attention to expanding the Afghan resistance movement, and
liberating the northern provinces of Afghanistan. Massoud’s military
forces were considered the most effective of all the various Afghan
resistance movements.
In the middle of the 1990s, the Taliban took control of approximately
90 percent of Afghanistan. In response, Massoud formed an alliance to
fight the Taliban, and provided shelter for people fleeing Afghan
cities. However, on September 9, 2001, two days prior to 9/11, Ahmad
Shah Massoud was killed by a suicide bomber at Khwaja Bahauddin, in
Takhar Province, northeastern Afghanistan. The assassins may have
intended to attack several Northern Alliance council members
simultaneously because others were killed. Prior to his death, Massoud
had warned the European Parliament that a terrorist attack was evident.
The timing of the assassination is considered significant by people who
believe Osama bin Laden ordered the murder, and wanted Massoud dead
before staging the 9/11 attacks. Ahmad Shah Massoud died a national
hero, and hundreds of thousands of people attended his funeral. The
date of his death, September 9, is observed as a national holiday in
Afghanistan, known as Massoud Day.
5 - US Government Exercises
On September 11, 2001, the United States government held a series of
military exercises and drills. Operation Northern Vigilance was a NORAD
operation, which involved deploying fighter aircraft to the
northwestern part of North America, specifically Alaska and Northern
Canada. The exercise was one part simulation, one part real world. It
was in response to a similar test acted out by Russia on September 11,
where long-range bombers were dispatched to Russia’s high north. The
exercises were immediately called off after the news of the terrorist
attacks and all simulated information was purged from NORADs computer
screens. However, the event was a distraction for the US government on
9/11.
Operation Northern Vigilance was not the only US exercise planned for
September 11. A series of war games were also acted out, specifically
Global Guardian. Global Guardian is an annual, command-level exercise
held in the United States. It is an important task, and the purpose of
the drill is to test and validate US nuclear command, control and
execution procedures. Vigilant Guardian is an exercise that was run in
conjunction with Global Guardian. It involved a simulated bomber attack
from the former Soviet Union. The drill was conducted in real time,
and appeared legitimate in offices and on computers, but without any
planes in the air. One of the drills included was a traditional
simulated hijacking.
The National Reconnaissance Office drill that was being conducted on
September 11, 2001, is the strangest. In the exercise, a simulated
small aircraft crashed into one of the towers at the NRO headquarters.
No plane was involved in the drill, but to simulate damage from the
crash, some stairwells and exits were closed off. A bioterrorism
exercise was planned for September 12, 2001. It was named Operation
Tripod and included a real life test of the US plan to distribute
antibiotics to an entire city population during a bioterrorism attack.
4 - Nimda Virus
In the months before and after September 11, 2001, the United States
was bombarded with a series of cyber attacks. A group of criminals
exposed vulnerabilities in the Microsoft operating system, and created a
buffer overflow virus, which executed arbitrary code and infected
hundreds of thousands of computers. By July 19, 2001, the amount of
infected hosts reached over 350,000 zombies. A series of separate
viruses named Code Red I and Code Red II crippled valuable servers and
made calculated attacks on US government computers.
On September 18, 2001, a new virus attacked United States operating
systems. The worm was given the name Nimda, and it was an advanced
version of Code Red II. Some might say that the Code Red viruses were
created in preparation for the much larger Nimda attack, which was
executed the week following the attacks on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon. Due to the release date of the virus, members of the American
government speculated on a link between the cyber attacks and Al Qaeda,
but this theory ended up proving unfounded. The American media did not
report much on the virus because of the terrorist attacks.
Multiple propagation vectors allowed Nimda to become the Internet’s
most widespread and dangerous virus. It took only 22 minutes for the
worm to rip through the American financial sector, causing over $3
billion in damage. The Nimda virus was so effective because it used
five different infection vectors. People could, and still can, get the
virus via e-mail, open network shares, infected websites, exploitation
or via back doors left behind by the Code Red II virus. The group of
people behind the Nimda virus and the theft of billions of dollars are
unknown. The event greatly damaged the world’s financial sector and
economy.
3 - Wave of Accidents
In the months following September 11, 2001, there was a wave of
international accidents and events. On September 21, 2001, the AZF
chemical factory located near Toulouse, France exploded. The event
occurred when three hundred tons of ammonium nitrates ignited. The
blast left a crater at the depth of 20 to 30 m (65 to 100 ft), with a
diameter of 200 m (650 ft). It was a major incident in France, and 29
people were killed. The event is recognized as an environmental
catastrophe, and the total damages already paid by insurance groups are
exceeding 1.5 billion euros. The blast is believed to have occurred due
to the improper handling of ammonium nitrate, including the mixing of
chemical impurities. However, on October 2, 2001, France’s then
Environment Minister, Yves Cochet, announced that the explosion “may
have been a terrorist attack” and identified Hassan Jandoubi as a person
of interest.
On October 4, 2001, Siberia Airlines Flight 1812 crashed over the
Black Sea. The plane was en route from Tel Aviv, Israel to Novosibirsk,
Russia, and all 78 people aboard were killed. The crash was initially
thought to be a terrorist attack, since an Armenian plane near the scene
reported seeing the Russian plane explode before it crashed into the
sea. However, American intelligence reported that the crash was due to
an errant S-200 surface to air missile fired as part of a Ukrainian Air
Defense Forces exercise. Many people have labeled this hypothesis
unlikely, considering the missiles range and safety features, claiming
that the US was in fear of mass hysteria with yet another terrorist
attack in the weeks following September 11. Ultimately, the government
of Ukraine officially recognized their military’s fault in the accident
and started negotiating compensation payments for victims’ relatives.
On November 12, 2001, the United States experienced its second
deadliest aviation accident in history. It occurred when American
Airlines Flight 587 crashed into a Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens,
New York. The accident took place two months after the September 11
terrorist attacks, and it caused panic in New York. Thousands of people
witnessed the Airbus A300 crash to the ground, killing all 260 people
on board. Many people reported a fire and explosion before the plane
crashed, but the National Transportation Safety Board attributed the
disaster to the first officer’s overuse of rudder controls. Al-Qaeda
has listed the crash among its successes, but physical evidence was
never presented indicating terrorist activity. Surprisingly, the story
was widely underreported in the United States, considering the magnitude
of the crash. In the months after the tragedy, rumors were circulated
that suggested that the plane was exploded by a shoe bomber, similar to
the failed attempt of Richard Reid, but these claims are
unsubstantiated.
2 - 2001 Anthrax Attacks
Most people are familiar with the wave of anthrax attacks waged
against the United States in the weeks following September, 11.
Beginning on September, 18, a group of letters containing anthrax spores
were mailed to US media outlets, and the offices of two US senators.
In all, five people were killed in the terrorist activity, and seventeen
others were seriously affected. The letters addressed to the US
senators, Democrats Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Leahy of
Vermont, were laced with a highly refined dry anthrax powder. Shortly
after the first wave of attacks, two letters were sent to the New York
Post and NBC News. The letters contained threats mentioning 9/11, and
implied a new wave of terrorist activity. For this reason, it was
highly reported in America that Al-Qaeda was behind the 2001 anthrax
attacks.
On September 11, George W. Bush and the White House staff began
taking a regimen of Cipro, which is a powerful antibiotic. This
activity has led to a list of conspiracy theories accusing the US
government of having pre-knowledge of the anthrax attacks. The
investigation into the crimes was one of the longest and most complex in
the history of law enforcement. Ultimately, investigators began to
focus their attention on an American scientist named Bruce Edwards
Ivins. Ivins worked at the US government’s biodefense labs at Fort
Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. After extensive research, on August 6,
2008, federal prosecutors declared Bruce Edwards Ivins to be the sole
culprit of the 2001 anthrax attacks. He committed suicide on July 29,
2008, after learning that he was going to be formally charged with the
crimes. One would think that a media circus would have ensued, but
little was mentioned about Bruce Edwards Ivins in the US press. His
motives for blaming the attacks on Al-Qaeda are unknown.
1 - USA PATRIOT Act
On October 26, 2001, US President George W. Bush enacted the USA
PATRIOT Act. The bill was in direct response to the terrorist attacks
that occurred on September 11. The goal of the Act was to reduce
restrictions on law enforcement and government officials when
investigating criminal activity. It gave international law
organizations the right to probe and search citizen’s e-mail, medical,
financial and personal records. Some of the main sections of the law
enacted restrictions on foreign intelligence gathering, expanded the
Secretary of the Treasury’s authority to regulate financial
transactions, and broadened immigration laws in regards to detaining and
deporting immigrants suspected of terrorism-related acts. The bill was
passed by a wide margin in the US Congress. It was supported by some
people and seen as an attack on civil liberties by others.
Entire websites have been dedicated to examining the Patriot Acts
apparent lack of safeguards surrounding the rights of American citizens
and foreign advocates. The bill made significant amendments to over 15
important constitutional statutes. The sections of the Patriot Act
discussing Internet supervision and monitoring are confusing and
extensive, ultimately reaching far beyond simple e-mail correspondence.
One of the most surprising aspects of the USA PATRIOT Act is the lack
of public and media debate regarding its introduction. Before September
11, provisions of the Act related to electronic surveillance were
proposed and highly debated. However, many people feel that the Patriot
Act has helped make America a safer place and stopped terrorist
activity. In the first part of 2010, Barack Obama signed a one-year
extension on several provisions in the Patriot Act.
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
Anthrax Suspect Dies in Apparent Suicide
A
top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the
2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just
as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against
him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned. Bruce Ivins, 62,
who for the past 18 years worked at the government's elite biodefense
research laboratories at Fort Detrick, Md., had been informed of his
impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his death and
with the FBI investigation. Ivins, whose name had not been disclosed
publicly as a suspect in the case, had played a central role in research
to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulations used in
experiments on animals. Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins
also had helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one
of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator's office in
Washington, D.C.
Ivins died
Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital after having ingested a massive
dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and
colleague who declined to be identified out of concern, he said, that
he would be harassed by the FBI. The death - without any mention of
suicide - was announced to Ivins' colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical
Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in an e-mail.
"People here are pretty shook up about it," said Caree Vander Linden, a
spokeswoman for USAMRIID, who said she was not at liberty to discuss
details surrounding the death. The anthrax mailings killed five people,
crippled national mail service, shut down a Senate office building and
spread fear of terrorism in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The
extraordinary turn of events came after the government's payment in
June of a settlement valued at $5.82 million to a former government
scientist, Steven Hatfill, who was long targeted as the FBI's chief
suspect despite a lack of any evidence that he had ever possessed
anthrax.
Soon after the
government's settlement with Hatfill was announced June 27, Ivins began
showing signs of serious strain. One of his longtime colleagues told
the Times that Ivins, who was being treated for depression, indicated
to a therapist that he was considering suicide. Soon thereafter, family
members and local police officers escorted Ivins away from USAMRIID,
where his access to sensitive areas was curtailed, the colleague said.
Ivins was committed to a facility in Frederick for treatment of his
depression. July 24, he was released from the facility. The scientist
faced forced retirement, planned for September, said his longtime
colleague, who described Ivins as emotionally fractured by the federal
scrutiny. A spokeswoman for the FBI, Debra Weierman, said Thursday that
the bureau would not comment regarding the death of Ivins. Last week,
however, FBI Director Mueller told CNN that, "in some sense, there have
been breakthroughs" in the case.
Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_10065164
Al Qaeda – The Database
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.
Meet "Al-Qaeda"
"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
Lebanese in Shock Over Arrest of an Accused Spy
For
25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest
divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an
earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired
family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school. To Israel,
he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking
clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983.
Now he sits in a Lebanese prison cell, accused by the authorities of
betraying his country to an enemy state. Months after his arrest, his
friends and former colleagues are still in shock over the extent of his
deceptions: the carefully disguised trips abroad, the unexplained cash,
the secret second wife.
Lebanese
investigators say he has confessed to a career of espionage spectacular
in its scope and longevity, a real-life John le Carré novel. Many
intelligence agents are said to operate in the civil chaos of Lebanon,
but Mr. Jarrah’s arrest has shed a rare light onto a world of spying and
subversion that usually persists in secret. Mr. Jarrah’s first wife
maintains that he was tortured, and is innocent; requests to interview
him were denied. From his home in this Bekaa Valley village, Mr. Jarrah,
50, traveled often to Syria and to south Lebanon, where he photographed
roads and convoys that might have been used to transport weapons to
Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, investigators say. He spoke with
his handlers by satellite phone, receiving “dead drops” of money,
cameras and listening devices. Occasionally, on the pretext of a
business trip, he traveled to Belgium and Italy, received an Israeli
passport, and flew to Israel, where he was debriefed at length,
investigators say.
At the start of the 2006 war between
Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli officials called Mr. Jarrah to reassure
him that his village would be spared and that he should stay at home,
investigators said. He was finally arrested last July by Hezbollah,
which now has perhaps the most powerful intelligence apparatus in this
country. It handed him to the Lebanese military — along with his brother
Yusuf, who is accused of helping him spy — and he awaits trial by a
military court. Several current and former military officials agreed to
provide details about his case on condition of anonymity, saying they
were not authorized to discuss it before the trial began. Their accounts
tallied with details provided by Mr. Jarrah’s relatives and former
colleagues.
It is not
the family’s first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins,
Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age
and do not appear to have known each other well.
Mark
Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, declined
to discuss Mr. Jarrah’s situation, saying, “It is not our practice to
publicly talk about any such allegations in this case or in any case.”
Villagers here seemed incredulous that a man they knew all their lives
could have taken money to spy for a country that they regard with
unmixed hatred and disgust. Many maintained his innocence. But Raja
Mosleh, the Palestinian doctor who was his partner for years in a school
and health clinic near here, did not. “I never suspected him before,”
Dr. Mosleh said. “But now, after linking all the incidents together, I
feel he’s 100 percent guilty.” “He used to talk about the Palestinian
cause all the time, how he supported the cause, he supported the people,
he liked everybody — this son of a dog,” Dr. Mosleh added, his voice
thick with contempt.
Mr. Jarrah would often borrow
money to buy cigarettes, apparently posing as a man of limited means.
Investigators say he received more than $300,000 for his work from
Israel. Only recently did he begin to spend in ways that raised
questions. About six years ago, neighbors said, he built a three-story
villa with a terra-cotta roof that is by far the grandest house in this
modest village of low concrete dwellings. Outside is a small roofed
archway and a heavy iron gate, and on a recent day a German shepherd
stood guard. Dr. Mosleh asked him where he got the money, and Mr. Jarrah
said he got help from a daughter living in Brazil. It is a natural
excuse in Lebanon, where a large portion of the population receives
remittances from relatives abroad.
Mr. Jarrah also had a
secret second wife, according to investigators and his former
colleagues. Unlike his first wife, Maryam Shmouri al-Jarrah, who lived
in relative grandeur with their five children in Maraj, the second wife
lived in a cheap apartment in the town of Masnaa, near the Syrian
border. This apparently allowed Mr. Jarrah to travel near the border in
the unremarkable guise of a local working-class man. Mr. Jarrah has said
he was recruited in 1983 — a year after Israel began a major invasion
of Lebanon — by Israeli officers who had imprisoned him, according to
investigators. He was offered regular payments in exchange for
information about Palestinian militants and Syrian troop movements, they
said. After Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, thousands of Lebanese
from the occupied zone in the south were tried and sentenced — mostly
to light prison terms — for collaborating with Israel.
Far
from the border, a different class of collaborators, rooted in their
communities, persisted. A few have been caught and sentenced. Mr.
Jarrah’s motives remain a mystery. He said he tried to stop, but the
Israelis would not let him, investigators said. It all came to an end
last summer. He went on a trip to Syria in July, and when he returned he
said he had been briefly detained by the Syrian police, his first wife
said. He seemed very uneasy, not his usual self, she said. He left the
house that night, saying he was going to Beirut, and never returned,
Mrs. Jarrah said. Only three months later did she get a call from the
Lebanese Army saying it had taken custody of him. A few weeks ago, Mrs.
Jarrah said, she was allowed to see him. He looked terrible, exhausted,
she said. Lebanese security forces released a photograph of Mr. Jarrah,
taken before his arrest. In it, he appears against a blue and white
backdrop, dressed in a formal dark shirt, wearing an enigmatic smile.
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
Ex-Army Officer Accuses CIA of Obstructing Pre-9/11 Intelligence-Gathering
Offering new revelations about the CIA's role in shutting down
military intelligence penetration of al-Qaeda, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer
joins a growing list of government officials accusing former CIA
director George Tenet of misleading federal investigators and sharing
some degree of blame for the 9/11 attacks.
A decorated ex-clandestine operative for the Pentagon offers new
revelations about the role the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
played in the shut-down of the military's notorious Able Danger program, alleged to have identified five of the 9/11 hijackers inside America more than a year before the attacks.
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer joins a growing list of government officials
accusing former CIA director George Tenet of misleading federal bodies
and sharing some degree of blame for the attacks. Shaffer also adds to a
picture emerging of the CIA's Bin Laden unit as having actively
prevented other areas of intelligence, law enforcement and defense from
properly carrying out their counterterrorism functions in the run-up to
September 2001.
Shaffer spoke to documentary filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski in late 2011, on the day Judicial Watch successfully forced
the Department of Defense (DOD) to declassify many Able Danger
documents through their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The
materials newly in the public domain allowed Shaffer to speak more
candidly than ever before. While he maintains the DOD bureaucracy was
always the main obstacle for Able Danger, he offers fresh disclosures on
the role played by the CIA in the shut-down of its military offensive.
In the wake of the devastating African embassy bombings of 1998,
which left more than 200 dead, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) -
responsible for the Pentagon's secret commando units - brought together
specialists from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to begin mapping
the al-Qaeda network. Based in the Information Dominance Center - also
referred to as Land Information Warfare Activity, or LIWA - at Fort
Belvoir, Virginia, the team's advanced data-mining software found
connections between known terrorists and subjects with matching
profiles. This highly classified project was code-named Able Danger.
The project first came to public attention in June 2005, nearly one
year after the 9/11 Commission released its report, when Congressman
Curt Weldon gave a special orders speech
on the floor of the House of Representatives. Following attacks on
Weldon's credibility, five Pentagon whistleblowers came forward to back
up his claims, including Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a CIA-trained senior
intelligence operations officer, Bronze Star Medal recipient and reserve
Army lieutenant colonel with more than 22 years in the intelligence
community.
Shaffer now claims the media's focus on the data-collection aspect of
Able Danger missed the point. "Data mining kind of became, to use a
film term, the MacGuffin," says Shaffer, a reference to a narrative
device - often used in Alfred Hitchcock movies - which drives the plot
while ultimately having no relevance to it. "That was the throwaway they
wanted people to focus on. The overall project was something that
covered the entire command structure of [SOCOM]. The project was put
together to give the national command authority options."
In other words, the collecting of information about al-Qaeda's cell
structures was only meant to be a first step in a larger action to be
taken using the data. "It wasn't simply an experiment. My actual
assignment wasn't Able Danger. I could never testify to the actual
operational objectives assigned to me and my unit for the purposes of
Able Danger." The Able Danger project, portrayed in most media reports
as a mere data-mining exercise, was in fact fully integrated into a
larger military effort to target and disrupt al-Qaeda. Its actual
capabilities and objectives remain classified.
Shaffer contends that the most damning revelations lie in that
still-classified aspect of the project, the operational side. Asked what
the next step was to be against the so-called Brooklyn cell identified
by Able Danger which he says included five of the 9/11 hijackers,
Shaffer responded, "I can't talk about that."
At the center of the military's intended action was a long-term asset
recruited by DIA years before Able Danger, a retired Afghan general who
had direct access to al-Qaeda activities in Afghanistan. "We had a
clear access point to al-Qaeda we were using for our operational
purposes," says Shaffer. "The asset was a separate operation we were
going to use for access. We were going to use still-classified
capabilities." That all changed when CIA got involved.
Following the embassy attacks, the White House became concerned about
a deficit of access by CIA into al-Qaeda. President Clinton's
Cabinet-level counter-terror director Richard Clarke said he pushed for a
shakeup at the agency. "We needed a new direction," Clarke has
explained. At Clarke's behest, Tenet, CIA director between 1997 and
2005, removed Michael Scheuer, the founder of its Bin Laden unit - also
known as Alec Station.
Two men with strong operational backgrounds, Cofer Black and Richard
Blee, were brought in to take over leadership. "When Cofer Black took
over the counterterrorism center at the CIA, he was aghast that they had
no sources inside al-Qaeda," reported Clarke. "So he told me, 'I'm
going to try to get sources in al-Qaeda.'"
As Black and Blee began their efforts at the CIA, Able Danger was
ramping up. Then-Major Anthony Shaffer was at that time in charge of a
secretive DIA unit known as Stratus Ivy, facilitating five major DOD
black operations. The assets each held equal importance. Shaffer says
SOCOM brought him into the Able Danger project to work on agent
coordination in 1999.
That October, Shaffer was asked by Navy Captain Scott Philpott,
then-head of operations for the Able Danger initiative, to brief the CIA
liaison to SOCOM, a senior agency official. But the meeting did not go
well. In the interview with Nowosielski and Duffy, Shaffer names the CIA
representative for the first time. He was Cold War veteran David Rolph,
previously a station chief for the agency in Moscow.
"We, the Able Danger team, would like to have access to Alec Station
to conduct our operations," Shaffer said he told Rolph. But Rolph
explained that unless Gen. Peter Schoomaker, commander of SOCOM,
personally and directly approached CIA director Tenet for access, they
would not get it. Shaffer offered Alec Station a "seat at the table,"
allowing a station employee into their process.
According to Shaffer, Rolph bluntly informed him the CIA would never
cooperate with SOCOM on the matter, because if the military succeeded in
prosecuting the options for going after the infrastructure of al-Qaeda,
it would "steal the thunder" of Alec Station. Shaffer found the
response peculiar, even for the notoriously turf-defensive agency.
"I spent a lot of time working in joint projects between Special
Operations Command and CIA," Shaffer revealed. "So the fact that in this
one area they would not cooperate was new, and it concerned me. But
very often the CIA would just do things without regard to anyone else."
How the CIA's go-it-alone attitude regarding al-Qaeda helped enable
the events of 2001 has only recently gained wider public attention. The
story, reduced to an obscure endnote in the 9/11 Commission Report, exploded in 2011 when it emerged that Richard Clarke, counter-terror director for both Presidents Clinton and Bush, had, in a filmed interview,
accused the CIA of deliberately withholding information on two of the
9/11 conspirators, the same ones separately discovered by Able Danger.
According to Clarke, some 50 employees in Black's and Blee's units
would likely have known from early 2000 that conspirators Khalid
al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi - among those who would commandeer
American Airlines Flight 77, and reportedly the closest to Bin Laden
himself - were working for al-Qaeda and had arrived in the United
States. Incredibly, the agency sat on this information for up to 18
months, ignoring standard protocol requiring them to tell the FBI and
Clarke's team on the White House National Security Council.
Only a high-level decision could explain the silence of officers he
spoke with regularly, Clarke believes. Pressed by John Duffy, the former
head of counter-terrorism sensationally placed the blame on the CIA
director. Tenet and others were quick to issue a dismissive press
statement. But it can now be revealed the CIA's negligence went far
beyond keeping critical intelligence to itself.
Around the same time Alec Station learned of al-Mihdhar's and
al-Hazmi's likely arrival in the US, Able Danger's data-mining also
unearthed the same individuals' domestic presence. According to several
people who directly participated in the project, by mid-2000 their data
mine had identified five "hotspots" for al-Qaeda activity - including
the German- and New York-based cells later implicated in the hijacking
plot. Much of the controversy has centered on whether, more than a year
before the events of 2001, Able Danger had identified lead hijacker Mohammed Atta. A Senate Intelligence Committee investigation and Defense Department Inspector General (IG) report have concluded otherwise.
Still, Shaffer and colleagues remain adamant that key witnesses were
ignored and testimony distorted in the IG's final report. In other
words, it was a classic whitewash.
"We found two of the three cells
which conducted the [9/11] attacks," says Shaffer. "They were the
'Brooklyn cell' not by geography, but they were the Brooklyn cell
because members of the cell formed a similar profile to those who
conducted the '93 World Trade Center bombing. We were looking at
individuals, groups, and who they talked to, relationships, if they went
to a certain mosque during a certain period of time." LIWA analysts
created a massive chart with the names and photos of these terrorists.
"We discovered these guys here and the CIA apparently knew these guys
were here," he insists. "And yeah, nobody really seems to know what was
going on."
Shaffer says the significance was understood at the time. "We were
scared to death that we had found operational cells ... within the
United States. We did not have all the pieces of the puzzle, and we were
not able to make sense of everything we had. Military action was going
to be the ultimate outcome of the project."
Shaffer recruited LIWA as part of that military response. "They were
going to be targeteers in the effort. I was able to convince SOCOM to
bring them in. I knew the commander, Maj. Gen. Bob Newman." Shaffer said
Newman encouraged him to use the Army's Intelligence and Security
Command (INSCOM) - conducting intel, security and information operations
for the military's commanders - to run the "black" side. Shaffer will
only hint that the action to come was to involve cyberspace. "As we
started developing the methodology to approach targeting the global
elements of al-Qaeda, there was a great deal of push-back from the
community."
Shaffer said he personally briefed Tenet on a number of occasions,
from 1999 to 2001, on aspects of Able Danger and other concurrent DIA
projects. In the pre-9/11 structure, the CIA director was also the
director of central intelligence for the US government at large,
overseeing all 16 agencies that made up the intelligence community,
including DIA. We do not know if the presence of the Brooklyn cell
inside the US was briefed to Tenet. Shaffer refused to disclose details
of the classified briefings. Whatever he did report, Shaffer said that,
"Tenet did not feel comfortable with some of the things we were talking
about."
In his 2009 interview with Duffy and Nowosielski, Richard Clarke
speculated that the CIA's Alec Station may already have been running its
own domestic operation by that time to track al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi,
living under their own names in Southern California. Clarke admitted he
had no way of proving his assertion, but believed it was the only way he
could make sense of the facts. His theory is given credence by five
former FBI counter-terror officials who backed his assertion that Alec Station was deliberately withholding information about the future 9/11 hijackers.
That spring, Army Intelligence and Security Command attorney Tony
Gentry got involved, claiming to be concerned over domestic spying by
the US military, which is not allowed; he also worried about rules
prohibiting the retention of data about a US person for longer than 90
days. Shaffer was told many of the individuals in the cells were
becoming citizens or had green cards. They were told they couldn't look
at them, that they were out of bounds. Shaffer said he was informed by
DOD lawyers that many al-Qaeda extremists were inside the US because
they did a lot of American fundraising. They were not considered a
threat.
"I still to this day believe this concern [over data retention] was a
farce," Shaffer says with a tinge of anger in his voice, "based on the
way the US government abuses US citizen information constantly in other
areas." The Brooklyn cell was debated within SOCOM. Shaffer met with
three-star Gen. Larry Ellis, the senior operations officer for Army in
spring 2000. Ellis agreed with Shaffer, but DOD lawyers insisted it was
not the military's job to do that level of information gathering.
"It became clear that someone didn't want us looking at the data, and
they gave an extraordinary direction." Army staff lawyers directed
Capt. Eric Kleinsmith to destroy some 2.5 terabytes
of publicly sourced data. In March or April 2000, the offices of Orion
Scientific Systems, a private contractor employed by LIWA for the
program, were stormed by armed federal agents. Much of the material
produced for Able Danger was confiscated - and with it went the US
military's best shot at unraveling the hijacking plot.
Soon after the end of the data collection aspect of Able Danger, the
CIA pushed for the shut down of the operational side. The retired Afghan
general at the center of Able Danger's planning was what is known in
spook parlance as a "principal agent." Principal agents serve as proxies
for professional intelligence case officers. Case officers for the CIA
or DIA manage principal agents from stations around the world, and those
principal agents in turn handle their own agent networks. The DIA's
asset oversaw a network of other infiltrating agents, their names known
to Shaffer and his team. After briefing the CIA director, Shaffer began
to suspect Alec Station was using the information to recruit from the
Afghan general's network.
"Basically, they were stealing our assets," Shaffer said. He believes
Alec Station had become desperate to infiltrate al-Qaeda. "They were
kind of on the outside looking in. I think we had a better set of
accesses than they did, and that's why they wanted to terminate our
asset and use his subsets for their own."
Once the agency had successfully recruited enough assets from the
DIA's principal agent, they finally wanted DIA out of the picture
altogether. In September or October 2000, Shaffer's boss, Army General
Bob Hardy Jr., was forced to square off against the CIA director in a
closed session before the House Intelligence Committee. Shaffer
characterizes it as "a major battle."
Congress established the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 1977,
supposedly to oversee executive branch departments of the United States
government. Whether it succeeds in its role is debatable, but in any
case when the CIA took the step of complaining to the committee, it was
evidently taken seriously. Tenet made the case that Able Danger was
interfering with a parallel operation by the CIA, apparently being run
from Alec Station.
"George Tenet went to Congress and lied," Shaffer boldly stated.
Tenet painted DIA's retired Afghan general source as a murderer, a claim
Shaffer says was unfounded. He had heard Tenet did so at the behest of
"all of Alec Station," then run by Blee, which was complaining loudly
about Able Danger. "We felt CIA made a huge mistake for political
reasons, only to back off ... with regard to the asset in Afghanistan.
But in hindsight it is very clear the CIA had its own game, and they
were not interested in cooperating to the point where they were
interfering with our ability to conduct our own offensive capability
against al-Qaeda." Based on Tenet's testimony, Congress ordered DIA's
asset - with direct access to al-Qaeda activities in Afghanistan -
terminated. Shaffer characterizes Tenet's deception as causing "huge
damage" to the overall concept of his part of the program.
It is not the first time a former official has accused Tenet of lying
to a government body. Speaking about Alec Station's withholding of
intelligence about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi from himself and his staff,
Richard Clarke explained," [Tenet, Black and Blee] have been able to get
through a joint House investigation committee and get through the 9/11
Commission, and this has never come out. They got away with it."
In his public testimony before the Congressional Intelligence Committees, Tenet was asked directly by Sen. Carl Levin
about a cable that came into Alec Station in 2000 alerting them that
al-Hazmi had flown to the US. Tenet's answer to Levin: "Nobody read that
cable in March, in the March timeframe."
Levin
pushed: "So the cable that said that Hazmi had entered the United
States came to your headquarters, nobody read it?" "Yes sir." Tenet's
own CIA Inspector General, John Helgerson, later revealed in
the declassified summary of his still-classified 9/11 report that 50 to
60 officers inside Black's and Blee's units knew of reports in 2000 that
al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar may have been in the US.
Tom Kean, chairman of the 9/11 commission, also revealed his doubts about Tenet in a 2008 interview with Nowosielski and journalist Rory O'Connor,
asserting the commissioners felt Tenet had been "obviously not
forthcoming" in some of his testimony before their "lawfully constituted
body, created by Congress and the President." Asked whether they
believed he had misspoken during statements that later proved false,
Kean responded, "No, I don't think he misspoke. I think he misled."
In late 2000, the data mining aspect of the military's project was
reconstituted as "Able Danger II" and moved to a classified private
intelligence research center in Garland, Texas. When command of SOCOM
changed hands from the retiring Gen. Schoomaker to Gen. Charles Holland
in November, Holland again ordered termination of the efforts in Texas
and for the personnel to return to SOCOM headquarters in Florida.
Shaffer claimed there were at least three senior military exchanges
over the order that resulted in yelling contests. Most notable was in
December when Maj. Gen. Rod Isler, director of operations for DIA,
called in their boss Admiral Tom Wilson, the DIA Director, who reported
to Tenet. In a shouting match, Wilson directed Isler and Shaffer to stop
supporting Able Danger II.
In January 2001, with a new President, George W. Bush, in the White
House, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer briefed Gen. Hugh Shelton, the man who
had originally supported the formation of Able Danger, on the program
results and operational options, including the possibility of
reactivating the retired Afghan general asset that George Tenet had
caused to be disengaged.
Shaffer said he provided a variation of the same briefing to Tenet
himself in February, with DIA Director Adm. Tom Wilson present. The
following month, Gen. Ron Isler ordered Shaffer
to completely end his work on Able Danger II. Shaffer strongly
disagreed, resulting in an argument, before Isler pulled rank on him.
From that point on, Able Danger II was essentially done.
Two months later, Shaffer would receive a frantic call
from another Able Danger officer desperately wanting to know if Shaffer
would permit him to save the information by moving it to one of
Shaffer's military facilities for the purposes of developing a plan of
action. When Shaffer asked his boss, Col. Mary Moffitt, she took such
offense at his "insubordinance" [sic] in mentioning Able Danger again
that she began the process of demoting Shaffer from his leadership
position to one on the Latin American desk of DIA.
Shaffer believes it is possible, though he has no way of knowing for
certain, that Tenet played a back-channel role in the shut-downs of both
Able Danger and Able Danger II. "Tenet could talk to DOD lawyers. CIA
lawyers could talk to DOD lawyers, with the understanding that Tenet
wants something said. I've been asked to carry messages from senior
leaders, one to another. There's no documentation on that meeting. No
one ever knows it occurred, without any paper trail. It's done all the
time. Lawyers belong to the senior leadership they belong to. It would
not be surprising to me if there was some level of pressure ... brought
to bear to back people off or discourage them."
On the subject of Richard Clarke's bombshell, the decorated
intelligence officer is guarded. "Clarke may well be correct in his
assessment that the CIA felt they were smarter than everybody else," he
reflects. "They were trying to control assets, and I do believe, from my
perspective they were working to suppress other operational activities
which would either compete with them, or potentially report on some of
the things they were doing."
What if David Rolph, speaking on behalf of the agency's director when
he met Shaffer in late 1999, had been more cooperative? What if Tenet
had not pushed Congress to shut down the military's long-term asset with
connections inside al-Qaeda? What if the CIA had worked with, instead
of against, the military? We will never know.
Source: http://truth-out.org/news/item/14008-ex-army-officer-accuses-cia-of-obstructing-pre-9-11-intelligence-gathering
Bush and Cheney knew about 9/11 months before it happened
Susan Lindauer was arrested under
the Patriot Act after she tried to come forward and testify before the
Congress about 9/11. The government’s answer to her offer to tell the
truth was to send the FBI to her house to arrest her.
Lindauer is now courageously
speaking out about the incredible experiences she claims landed her in
prison. She
presents powerful evidence that the real reason she was arrested,
imprisoned, and declared incompetent was because she knew the U.S.
government had clear foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and much more.
Allegedly, the CIA claimed she was accepting money from Iraq. The truth
was, however, that she was sent as a CIA asset to talk to Iraq’s UN
ambassador. At that time, the Iraqis were helping the US to spy on Al
Qaeda. In
the Youtube video recently released by one of Russian TV channels Ms
Lindauer mentions that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld knew that the 911
attack was coming. In thr video Mr Lindauer says that Dr
Richard Fuisz, her control officer at the CIA, saw the nearly live feed
of the planes hitting the WTC Towers sent from the Israelis. This has
to be taken as an admission that Israel did 9/11 but it was too
controversial to be allowed on cable TV in the US.
9-11 advanced knowledge, MOSSAD, CIA and the PNAC
The world’s mass media have recently
publicized the case of Susan Lindauer, a former CIA operative who was
arrested under the Patriot Act after she attempted to testify about 9-11
and U.S. Government foreknowledge and involvement in the attacks of
9-11-2001. The U.S. Government sent 5 FBI agents to her home and
arrested her and then attempted to administer psychotropic drugs to her
and hold her without trial or hearing.
Since 9-11 the mass media, in particular in
the U.S. has almost never publicized the plights of the thousands of
voices who have had evidence which runs contrary to the official version
of 9-11. The voices which have come out against the official narrative
of 9-11 have included structural engineers, respected scientists,
military personnel, professors, eyewitnesses, reporters, bloggers and
countless in what can be loosely termed the 9-11 truth movement.
For
the most part anyone who has had anything to say against the official
narrative, no matter how well-founded or researched or provable, has
been marginalized, ignored, threatened or even disappeared. Why the mass
media is finally running with the story of a CIA operative who was
arrested on false grounds is a little odd at this late date but it has
thrown the cover up of the events of 9-11 back on the front page.
According
to various data and open source intelligence there were perhaps upwards
of 9,000 people secretly arrested, detained or disappeared after 9-11
bring the toll on human lives and the number of those affected adversely
by the events into the tens of thousands. This does not include those
killed maimed or affected by the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan and in
the entire “War on Terror”. Some say the events of 9-11 were planned as a
catalyst for the entire post 9-11 environment and the War on Terror
paradigm, with its accompanying global militarization and the spread of
the surveillance state, as well as what has been effectively a war on
Islam.
Susan Lindauer claims that the events of 9-11
were planned by Mossad, something that has been echoed by others,
claiming that the events of 9-11 allowed for the planned disintegration
of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East and the guaranteed U.S. military
presence in the region. For the U.S. this has allowed them to
effectively take control of the resources in the oil rich region one
country after the other and served as a pretext for the military
takeover of the world.
For many years the timeline of
the events leading up to and subsequent to 9-11 have been one of the
most clear and unarguable pieces of evidence pointing to something
terribly wrong with the official U.S. narrative, coupled with scientific
evidence and the controlled demolition of building 7, an event which
Larry Silverstein himself admitted to ordering in an interview on the
record.
Some of the key events related to 9-11 that have been documented and proven are as follows:
1. August 1997 FEMA's Emergency Response to Terrorism handbook depicts the World Trade center in crosshairs.
2. In 1999 NORAD conducted hijacking exercises where planes were flown into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
3. June 2000 DOJ releases a terrorism manual with the World Trade Center in crosshairs again.
4.
September 2000 the Project for a New American Century releases a report
called Rebuilding America's Defenses in which they state that without
an event such as a new Pearl Harbor the process of transformation is
likely to be a long one.
5. October 24, 2000 the
Pentagon conducts the first in a series of training exercises called
MASCAL the pretext of which is a passenger airliner, a Boeing 757,
crashing into the Pentagon. Charles Burlingame an ex Navy F-4 pilot who
worked in the Pentagon participated in the exercise before retiring to
take a job with American Airlines, less than a year later the American
Airlines plane, a Boeing 757, that he was the Captain of supposedly
crashed into the Pentagon.
6. April 2001 NORAD plans an exercise in which a plane is flown into the Pentagon but it is rejected as too unrealistic.
7.
June 2001 new instructions are implemented to deal with intervention in
the case of a hijacking, part of it reads: " For all non-immediate
responses the DOD must get permission directly from the SOD. Donald
Rumsfeld. Attorney General John Ashcroft begins flying only on charter jets due to a threat assessment by the FBI.
8.
July 4, 2001 Osama Bin Laden receives medical help at the American
Hospital in Dubai. While he is there he is visited by the local chief of
the CIA.
9. July 24, 2001 Larry A Silverstein signs a
3.2 billion dollar 99 year lease on the entire World Trade Center
complex, this was six weeks before 9-11, part of the lease included a
3.5 billion dollar insurance policy that specifically covered acts of
terrorism.
10. September 6, 2001 suspicious trading of American Airlines stock takes place. Bomb
sniffing dogs were pulled off the World Trade Center and security
guards were pulled of the twelve hour shifts that they had been working.
11.
September 7, 2001 More excessive trading of American Airline stock
involving PUT options which means that people were betting that the
stock would fall.
12.
September 10, 2001 more of the
same. Newsweek reported that a number of top Pentagon officials
cancelled their flight plans for the next morning. Willie Brown the
Mayor of San Francisco receives a phone call from Condi Rice warning him
not to fly the next day. In
Pakistan at a military hospital all of the urologists are replaced by a
special team in order to host Osama Bin Laden, who was well cared for
and looked after.
13. September 11, 2001 with most of
the intercept aircraft on training exercises in Canada and in the far
North or sent far from Washington and New York on training exercises,
there were only 14 aircraft left to guard the entire United States.
Experts said it could not have
flown at those speeds without going into a high speed stall and that at
such high Gs the plane would have just fallen out of the sky. All
of the experienced air traffic controllers who watched the plane that
was supposed to be flight 77 maneuvering and turning believed that it
was a military fighter plane.
All of the lights poles
that flight 77 was supposed to have sheered of seemed to have just
popped out of the ground, under normal circumstances they would have
ripped the wings right off of the planes. If you look
at the photos and listen to the eyewitness accounts it is clear that a
commercial airliner did not hit the pentagon the damage was consistent
with a missile strike.
Although the plane was supposed
to have melted upon impact all of the bodies on board were identified by
the same forensic laboratory that identified the non casualties in
Pennsylvania. You get the idea. The only piece of
wreckage was part of a J3-8D turbojet engine from a US Air force A-3 Sky
Warrior. The few A-3s left are stored by Ratheon in Van Nuys
California. A diffuser case was also found not belonging to a 757.
Through analysis it is clear that a missile such as a Tomahawk was used
to create the damage.
9:59
The South Tower collapses in about ten seconds, 29 minutes later the
North Tower collapses in about ten seconds as well. 5:20
World Trade Center 7, a 47 story office building 300 feet away from the
World Trade Center collapses in under 6 seconds into a neat little
pile, while all of the buildings surrounding it were undamaged. These
are the first three building in history to collapse because of a fire.
The buildings came down in almost free fall speed, witnesses,
video-tapes and expert testimony make it clear the World Trade Center
was demolished using controlled explosions that had been placed in the
buildings in strategic locations earlier and then detonated in order to
cause the buildings to collapse, some witnesses reported up to six
simultaneous explosions concurrent with the six support structures of
the buildings.10:00 Cleveland Hopkins Airport was evacuated amidst fears
that a hijacked plane was about to land. 10:06
Flight 93 was supposedly headed for the White House and crashed into a
field in Pennsylvania witnesses said there was nothing to be seen at the
crash scene and nothing that resembled an airline crash. The debris
that was found was able to be carried away by hand in several plastic
bags. 10:10 The sixty nine people on flight 1989, the
first plane that landed in Cleveland, were evacuated to the FAA HQ in
two hours and twenty minutes and later released. 10:45
The two hundred people on board flight 93 were evacuated to a special
NASA building in under thirty minutes and never heard from again. 11:43
Cleveland WCPO a local television station in Cincinnati Ohio reported
that two planes landed at Cleveland Hopkins Airport due to a bomb
threat, United identified the plane as flight 93.
October
12, 2001 Donald Rumsfeld, in an interview with Parade Magazine,
mentions a missile that damaged the World Trade Center even though
officially one was never mentioned.
Bin Laden's
original statement: "The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for
being behind every attack. I would like to assure the world that I did
not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people
for personal reasons. I have been living in the Islamic emirate of
Afghanistan and following its leaders' rules. The current leader does
not allow me to exercise such operations."
April
10,
2003 Chicago O'Hare: flight 93 is spotted its tail number N591UA is
spotted on flight 1111. According to the FAA N612UA the Pentagon plane
and N591UA, the Pennsylvania plane, are still valid numbers. 9 of the 19
hijackers are still alive and well. Silverstein demanded 7.2 billion
dollars from his insurers. Received 2.2b. There
is suspicion that some people had advance knowledge of the time of the
crashes in order to move out amounts exceeding $100 million. $160
billion dollars in gold vanished but only $200 million was found in an
empty ten wheeled truck with an empty escort of cars which had been
abandoned just before the south tower.
With the current
PRISM and other revelations, will people begin to question? The truth
is so disturbing that the average person does not want to accept it, but
the truth is something that can not be hidden forever and when the
truth does finally come out it will shake the world, or perhaps it may
be too late.
Susan Lindauer, the former CIA operative,
knows that Bush and Cheney had advanced knowledge of 9-11 and the world
is now beginning to listen, perhaps this one clue will be enough to
begin to bring down the house of cards.
9-11 was massive mind control exercise - Dr. Kevin Barret
The events in the United States on
9-11-2001, plunged the entire world into America’s own “War on Terror”
paradigm. High level military officers, academics, doctors and
professors from almost every field, citizens, scholars, legal
specialists, and millions upon millions question what they witnessed
before their very eyes, namely the controlled demolitions which took
place on 9-11. Slowly as the collective shock of the world’s citizenry
wears off and we see how it has been exploited and used by those who
took power in the United States, more and more media outlets and
individuals are beginning to realize that, yes, something is very, very
wrong with 9-11.
This is part 3 of interview with Dr. Kevin Barret. PART 1, PART 2
I
am speaking with Kevin Barrett, a Doctor in Arabic and Islamic Studies
and the Co-Founder of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for Truth. He
is also the owner of Truthjihad.com
Robles:
I’ve researched 9/11 myself, a lot, and I always suspected that there
was something like you’ve just mentioned; the buildings were condemned
due to asbestos. How widespread is that information, because I’ve never
heard it before?
Barret: There was
a court case, so it’s a public record and I believe the court case was
in something like February or March of 2001. It was early 2001 in any
case, and a Federal Judge ordered the city of New York Port Authority,
which then was the owner of the buildings, to do an asbestos abatement
plan or to, basically remove the asbestos from these buildings, and as I
said that would have been prohibitively expensive.
There
are some good pieces on this, I have cited some of the sources on this
including that there was a lawyer from a New York law firm, a pretty
straight-laced law firm and the guy was a little bit careful about the
way he wrote it up but he did cover many of the bases and I’ve cited
that article a number of times in my own essays on this topic at
veteranstoday.com.
Robles: That was actually ”another” reason to demolish these buildings, they were supposed to be demolished, “anyway”, right?
Barret:
Yes, the towers had become white elephants. They had outmoded
communication equipment, they had high vacancy rates, they had all that
asbestos and increasingly the city was seeing them as a big eyesore, so
there had been all kinds of talk, in New York, about how to get rid of
these things before 9/11.
Of course it is kind of
hilarious, they did it in such an obvious way, having notorious mobster
Larry Silverstein, who got his start in the illicit sex industry,
supposedly before he became a real estate mogul, buy the entire world
trade complex, just 2 months before 9/11.
It is kind of
shocking that they can do it in such a obvious way, and then Silverstein
actually goes and confesses to participating in the demolition of
building 7 on national television. It really shows just how in control
the US media is that can do these things so obviously.
Robles: What is this confession? I mean can you “refresh” our memories?
Barret:
Yeah, sure. In a PBS documentary called “America Rebuilds”, Larry
Silverstein is seen talking about what happened to building 7. He
says: “You know I remember I was talking with, ah err, fire department
commander and we said, ‘… you know, there’s been such a terrible loss of
life that maybe the best thing to do is, pull it!” “So, we made that
decision to pull and we watched the buildings collapse.” Pull, “pull it”
is a slang term for controlled demolition. It is quite stunning! That.
If
you want people to wake up to 9-11, you can show them a 3-minute film
by Doctor Bob Bowman called WTC7 Smoking Gun, it shows the obvious
controlled demolition of building 7 which starts with a little crimp in
the middle of the roof and comes straight down at free-fall
acceleration, 6.5 seconds for a 47 storey-building. Perfectly
symmetrical like an elevator going straight into the ground, and then
you can see, in the same little film WTC7 Smoking Gun, Larry Silverstein
confessing to the demolition, and then you can see the BBC reporting
that building 7 has collapsed 20 minutes before it actually did.
Apparently somebody had planted the news a little early.
Robles:
I see. A lot of people who are against any kind of questioning of 9-11,
one of the things they always bring up is: “Oh, our government could
not have possibly killed, 2,999…or almost 3,000 people!”, and they say;
“What about the people on the planes?” What do you think happened to the
people on the planes? Especially the one that was supposedly… a “piece”
of it was found in a field in Pennsylvania? They say those people were
all murdered in Ohio. What can you tell us about all the people, the
pilots and the planes?
Barret:
Well it’s still a bit of a mystery, what happened with these planes, or
we could even say “alleged” planes, because there is no evidence, that
should be there, for actual crashes of any of the 4 alleged attack jets,
at any of the 4 locations, where they supposedly crashed. Not
one coded part has ever produced from any of these planes from these
alleged crash sites, and that has convinced a number of high-level
former US military officers that there is something very, very wrong
with this story.
And anybody can see by simply closely
examining the damage pattern at the Pentagon and this 15-foot hole in
the ground in Shanksville, Pennsilvania, that there is no evidence of a
big plane crash. At the Pentagon there is evidence of 2
separate bombings that are quite widely separated, but it is obvious
that no single plane or even no single bomb could possibly create the 2
big bomb craters at the Pentagon.
And in Shanksville,
Pennsylvania, that 15-foot-hole-in-the-ground, without any plane debris,
is the sorriest excuse for an alleged jet plane crash site that ever
been used to deceive the public.
It is actually kind of humorous. The government claims that this the huge 757 just disappeared.
Robles: It evaporated! The whole thing evaporated.
Barret:
That was at the Pentagon, they said the Pentagon plane evaporated, that
is why there was no wreckage, the hundred tons of wreckage just didn’t
exist at the Pentagon because it all evaporated. But in Shanksville they
actually claimed that the plane buried itself in the soft ground, and
they claim that they excavated it but nobody has shown us where are the
plane parts and the body parts and so on, that they excavated. There is
no record whatsoever of any such excavation. It is really stunning how
absurd this official story is.
Robles:
And people still buy it. I mean it is like the biggest lie in the
history of mankind, I think, and… Why are Americans so fearful of
questioning the official version?
Barret:
I think 9-11 was a very clever psychological operation. It is what we
call “Trauma Based Mind Control”. The CIA has long researched how to
mind-control people using severe trauma.
We
learned about this from among other sources from Naomi Klein’s book
“The Shock Doctrine”, by using electro-shock and torture and things like
that.
It turns out if you shock people profoundly,
they become extremely vulnerable to imprinting, and an authority figure
can imprint, just about anything they want, on the brain of a person who
has been profoundly shocked. Well in 9-11, more than
half of the population has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, clinical
level PTSD, just from watching these images on the television.
So,
there was a profound shock to the nervous system of the people,
especially the Americans who watched this, and there is a thing called
coercion, which is this kind of Trauma-Based Mind Control where they
shock someone or otherwise confuse the person so that they are
disoriented and once the person is disoriented, then a parental
authority figure steps in and seizes control and basically imprints
anything they want on the victim’s mind.
And that is
what happened on 9-11. They shocked people with these horrible images
and the authority figures were the newscasters and the politicians,
President Bush who stepped in and told people what happened, and people
just accepted it. It was imprinted on their brain in
the same way as a baby duck is imprinted by whatever they first see,
they think it is their mother and they follow it around. All
of the American people were imprinted with this image of Bin Laden and
this 19 Arab story immediately, and they have been following it around
like a baby duck, following a dog around.
Robles: Very interesting. Thank you very much Kevin, Dr. Barret. I really appreciate you speaking with me on this.That
was John Robles. I was speaking with Dr. Kevin Barrett, the Doctor in
Arabic and Islamic Studies and the Co-Founder of the
Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for Truth. He is also the owner of
Truthjihad.com
Saudi Arabia May Be Tied to 9/11 Attacks, Ex-Senators Say
In a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that has made its way through
federal courts since 2002, plaintiffs are taking legal action against
the Saudi government and dozens of institutions in the country for their
alleged ties to al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11. The case is set to be
reheard in United States District Court in Manhattan in the coming
months.
“I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of
the terrorists who carried out the September 11th attacks and the
government of Saudi Arabia,” former Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of
Florida said in an affidavit. Graham led a joint 2002 Congressional
inquiry into the 9/11 attacks.
Another former senator, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, also served on that
inquiry and said in a his own sworn affidavit that “significant
questions remain unanswered” about the role of Saudi institutions.
“Evidence relating to the plausible involvement of possible Saudi
government agents in the September 11th attacks has never been fully
pursued,” Mr. Kerrey said.
Lawyers for the Saudis in the case as well as officials at the Saudi
Embassy in Washington have declined to comment on the case. The Saudi
government has denied the accusations of involvement and have sought to
have the case dismissed.
The classified evidence seen by Graham and Kerrey has not been disclosed, but the New York Times reports,
“unanswered questions include the work of a number of Saudi-sponsored
charities with financial links to Al Qaeda, as well as the role of a
Saudi citizen living in San Diego at the time of the attacks, Omar
al-Bayoumi, who had ties to two of the hijackers and to Saudi
officials.”
Despite these known concerns, or “unanswered questions,” Washington
has kept up extremely close ties to the Saudi government, giving them
huge annual arms packages and constantly referring to them as our close
allies. More than that, U.S. foreign aggression since 9/11 has almost
always had a pretext of fighting terrorism, state sponsors of terror, or
those with ties to terrorists. All of those cases of U.S. aggression
appear to have had less evidence of ties to al-Qaeda than Saudi Arabia.
Source: http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/01/saudi-arabia-may-be-tied-to-911-attacks-ex-senators-say/
Insiders Voice Doubts About CIA’s 9/11 Story
Former FBI agents say the agency's bin Laden unit misled them about two hijackers
A growing number
of former government insiders — all responsible officials who served in
a number of federal posts — are now on record as doubting ex-CIA
director George Tenet’s account of events leading up to the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks on the United States. Among them are several special
agents of the FBI, the former counterterrorism head in the Clinton and
Bush administrations, and the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, who told
us the CIA chief had been “obviously not forthcoming” in his testimony
and had misled the commissioners.
These doubts
about the CIA first emerged among a group of 9/11 victims’ families
whose struggle to force the government to investigate the causes of the
attacks, we chronicled in our 2006 documentary film “Press for Truth.” At that time, we thought we were done with the subject. But tantalizing information unearthed by the 9/11 Commission’s final report and spotted by the families (Chapter 6, footnote 44) raised a question too important to be put aside:
Did Tenet fail to
share intelligence with the White House and the FBI in 2000 and 2001
that could have prevented the attacks? Specifically, did a group in the
CIA’s al-Qaida office engage in a domestic covert action operation
involving two of the 9/11 hijackers, that — however legitimate the
agency’s goals may have been — hindered the type of
intelligence-sharing that could have prevented the attacks? And if not,
then what would explain seemingly inexplicable actions by CIA
employees?
As we sought to
clarify how the CIA had handled information about the hijackers before
9/11, we found a half dozen former government insiders who came away
from the Sept. 11 tragedy feeling burned by the CIA, particularly by a
small group of employees within the agency’s bin Laden unit in 2000 and
2001, then known as Alec Station. Among them was Gov. Thomas Kean,
co-chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,
which was responsible for investigating 9/11. He agreed to an
on-camera interview for our documentary in 2008. He surprised us by
voicing many doubts and questions about the CIA’s actions preceding
Sept. 11 — and especially about former CIA director George Tenet.
Four years after
Tenet testified to the commission, Kean said the CIA director had been
“obviously not forthcoming” in some of his testimony. Tenet said under
oath that he had not met with President Bush in the month of August
2001, Kean recalled. It was later learned he had done so twice. Did
Tenet misspeak? we asked the New Jersey Republican. “No, I don’t think
he misspoke,” Kean responded. “I think he misled.”
A tale of two hijackers
The story buried in footnote 44 of Chapter 6 of the 9/11 Commission report was this:
The commission
became aware in early 2004 of a warning written by Doug Miller, an FBI
agent working inside the CIA’s Alec Station. In January 2000, Miller
tried to inform his bosses about a man named Khalid Al Mihdhar, who had
previously been identified as a member of an al-Qaida operational
cadre. By the spring of 2000, the CIA had learned that Mihdhar and
another suspected al-Qaida operative, Nawaf Al Hazmi, had likely
arrived in Southern California. But the CIA did not pass along the
information to the FBI.
The draft cable —
blocked by Miller’s CIA superiors — was not turned over to the
commissioners or to the earlier congressional investigation. It was
discovered in CIA records by an investigator working for a concurrent
inquiry conducted by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
Apparently it had been missed by Tenet’s DCI Review Group, convened
immediately after the attacks to examine CIA records in order to prepare
the director for the coming government investigations. Kean was
disturbed by the revelation.
“The idea that
that information was left out of something that was so essential for
the FBI, whose job it is to work within the United States and track
these people … you know, it’s one of the most troubling aspects of our
entire report, that particular thing,” Kean said. We pushed Kean. Could
it be this was a simple mistake, a failure to recognize the
significance of Mihdhar and Hazmi, as the CIA had initially
characterized it?
“Oh, it wasn’t
careless oversight,” Kean replied. “It was purposeful. No question
about that in my mind … In the DNA of these organizations was secrecy.”
Mihdhar and Hazmi
boarded American Flight 77 at Washington Dulles airport on the morning
of Sept. 11. After the plane took off, they joined three other men in
commandeering the aircraft and flying it into the Pentagon, killing a
total of 184 people. So how then had George Tenet and those responsible
at the CIA managed to get away with misrepresenting the incident as a
mistake for so long? “Tenet was a likable guy,” Kean concluded. “He got
away with some stuff because people liked him.”
“Malfeasance and misfeasance”
In 2009, former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke took the scenario further. In an on-camera interview he
suggested that Tenet, once a close friend and colleague, had ordered
the withholding of the information about the two al-Qaida operatives
from the FBI and from the White House. Clarke explained why he had come
to that remarkable conclusion. Tenet, he said, followed all information
about al-Qaida “in microscopic detail” and would call Clarke at the
White House several times a day to share “the most trivial of
information.” In addition, there were terrorism threat meetings held in
person every other day.
We
must have had dozens, scores of threat committee meetings over the
time when they knew these guys had entered the country … They told us
everything except this … So now the question is, why?
The
only explanation Clarke could offer was admittedly speculative: that
the CIA may have been running an operation to recruit the two al-Qaida
operatives while they were living under their own names in Southern
California. This might appear to have been a reasonable thing for the
CIA to do. After all, Bill Clinton’s White House had long complained to
the agency about the lack of penetration agents in al-Qaida.
But if the CIA
was following or recruiting or monitoring Mihdhar and Hazmi in the
United States, that might well have qualified as operating on U.S.
soil, a violation of the agency’s charter. Once the two men were
identified as hijackers on Flight 77, CIA officials may have begun a
coverup of their earlier “malfeasance and misfeasance,” as Clarke
charges. His language is blunt, especially for a national security
policymaker.
“I am outraged
and have been ever since I first learned that the CIA knew these guys
were in the country,” explained Clarke. “But I believed for the longest
time that this was probably one or two low-level CIA people who made
the decision not to disseminate the information. Now that I know that
50 CIA officers knew this, and they included all kinds of people who
were regularly talking to me, saying I’m pissed doesn’t begin to
describe it.”
Clarke
said he assumed that “there was a high-level decision in the CIA
ordering people not to share that information.” When asked who might
have issued such an order, he replied, “I would think it would have
been made by the director,” referring to Tenet — although he added that
Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today “even if you
waterboarded them.”
The view from the FBI
We found the same
suspicion was also prevalent among FBI counterterrorism agents from
the time, particularly those who had worked under a legendary FBI agent
named John O’Neill in New York. O’Neill,
movingly portrayed in Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The
Looming Tower,” was one of the special agents in charge of
counterterrorism in the FBI’s New York office. He retired to serve as
chief of security at the World Trade Center and was killed in the Sept.
11 attacks, only three weeks after leaving the bureau. O’Neill’s deputy
for counterterrorism was Pasquale D’Amuro, who was appointed inspector
in charge of the FBI’s investigation into the attacks.
“I am cautious about saying it, because you have to deal with the facts,” D’Amuro told us. He said that he was told that Richard Blee, the chief of Alec Station, and his deputy, Tom Wilshere,
had blocked the sharing of intelligence on Mihdhar and Hazmi with the
FBI. “I had heard that Blee stopped it from coming over, that Blee and
Wilshere had had the conversation and stopped it,” D’Amuro said.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that that went up further in the agency
than just those two guys. And why they didn’t send it over — to this
day, I don’t know why.”
Jack Cloonan,
former manager at the FBI’s al-Qaida-busting I-49 Squad, is another
insider pained by the CIA’s actions. “If you start to look into
everything that’s Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi, you can’t help
but conclude to most people’s minds that this is it,” Cloonan, said
during an emotional interview in his New Jersey living room. “9/11
occurred not because the systems failed. The systems actually worked.
Somebody made a critical decision not to share this information … If
you look at this, it’s really just a handful of people. I don’t know
how they sleep at night, I really don’t.”
The CIA’s failure
to inform the FBI meant that a last chance to stop the hijackers was
missed, says Clarke. “And if they had….” Clarke told us, his voice
trailing off. “Even as late as Sept. 4,” he went on, “we would have
conducted a massive sweep. We would have conducted it publicly. We
would have found those assholes. There’s no doubt in my mind — even
with only a week left — we would have found them…”
Clarke is not an
infallible or even a disinterested witness. As a top counterterrorism
adviser at the time of the attack, he cannot help but take the tragedy
personally. That said, the fact that at least three FBI agents share
his views certainly enhances his credibility. A spokesman for the CIA
rejects the notion, telling Salon, “any suggestion that the CIA
purposely refused to share critical lead information on the 9/11 plots
with the FBI is simply wrong.” The spokesman cited the 9/11 Commission
report and a report of the CIA’s independent inspector general. (The
latter study, completed in 2004, has never been made public.)
The story of the
alleged CIA intelligence failure attracted little other media interest
until this August. That’s when Tenet, Richard Blee and another CIA
official criticized by Clarke, Counterterrorism Center director J.
Cofer Black, replied to our request for an interview. We had asked them
to respond to Clarke’s speculation. Although they declined to be
interviewed, Tenet, Black and Blee sent us a joint written statement
that charged Clarke was “reckless and profoundly wrong” and that he
had “suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the
record and unworthy of serious consideration.”
The statement, which we shared with the Daily Beast,
was newsworthy because the three men had never before felt the need to
explain their actions directly to the American public. “We testified
under oath about what we did, and what we didn’t know,” they stated. “We
stand by that testimony. The relevance of their testimony to Clarke’s
theory is hard to assess. Tenet and Black
were never asked about the surveillance of Mihdhar and Hazmi, at least
in their public testimony. Blee’s testimony has never been made
public.
“You’re not going to say anything”
The CIA’s
explanation is not convincing to Mark Rossini, an FBI agent who was
assigned to Alec Station in 2000 and 2001. The assignment of tracking
Khalid Al Mihdhar, he told us, had been given to a young staff
operations officer who shared responsibility for watching events in
Yemen along with Alec Station deputy chief Tom Wilshere. Rossini, who
resigned from the FBI in the wake of legal troubles,
recalled in a phone interview that the staff officer’s direct
supervisor was a redheaded analyst working directly for Wilshere. He
says that this supervisor, not referred to by even so much as an alias
in any of the government reports on 9/11, is the same woman who told
congressional investigators that she had hand-delivered Mihdhar’s visa
information to FBI headquarters.
This was later
proven false when the investigators checked the log books at the FBI
headquarters, discovering that she had never set foot in the building.
Eleanor Hill, staff director of the congressional inquiry, also told us
that her investigators found no evidence that the FBI had ever
received the information. Rossini remembered that the staff operations
officer working under that redhead had ordered him and his fellow.
FBI agent Doug
Miller not to tell their colleagues at the bureau, including John
O’Neill’s New York office, that Mihdhar was likely on his way to the
United States in early 2000. “She got a little heated,” Rossini
recalled. “She just put her hand on her hip and just said to me,
‘Listen, it’s not an FBI case. It’s not an FBI matter. When we want the
FBI to know, we’ll let them know. And you’re not going to say
anything.’”
Only two days
before, this same officer had sent a message internally throughout the
CIA misleading her fellow agents into believing that the information
had been passed on to the FBI. Her later conversation with Rossini
makes it appear that this was a deliberate misstatement. According to
the Justice Department inspector general, she sent the misleading
message only hours after posting an electronic note on Doug Miller’s
draft warning to the FBI: “pls hold off … for now per [the CIA deputy
chief of bin Laden unit],” a reference to Tom Wilshere. We now know the
staff officer is a woman named Michael Anne Casey. Her red-haired
supervisor was a woman named Alfreda Frances Bikowsky.
Google penetrates the CIA
How we learned
the names of those two CIA personnel can be summarized in one word:
Google. In the case of the redhead, an Associated Press article from
February 2011 seemed to refer to her. She had also been referenced in
Jane Mayer’s book “The Dark Side,” by her middle name, Frances. The AP
article stated that she had an unusual first name. After searching
State Department nominations from the past decade — often cover
positions for CIA personnel but still entered into the Congressional
Record -– a contemporary historian named Kevin Fenton with whom we work
closely found a name that seemed to fit.
For the staff
officer, we knew three important facts. She had a “man’s name” — most
likely Michael, the name used in the Commission Report. She was in her
late 20s at the time of the incident, and was a “CIA brat,” meaning she
had at least one parent or another family member inside the agency. We
wondered if she might be related to a prominent CIA figure, as her
boss Richard Blee
had turned out to be. One of the first names that came to mind, given
her probable birth year, was William J. Casey, Ronald Reagan’s CIA
director.
Pairing the first
name “Michael” with the last name “Casey,” we found a number of people
with that name working in State Department or military positions.
Again looking in the Congressional Record, we found the name Michael Anne
Casey — a woman with a man’s name — and another website listing Casey
as 27 years old in 1999 and living in the D.C. area, which seemed to
make her very likely the person in question. (Incidentally, we were
later informed that she is no relation to William J. Casey.)
A CIA threat
When we informed
the agency’s Public Affairs office that we planned to release an
investigative podcast on iTunes on Sunday, Sept. 11, that named
Bikowsky and Casey, the agency replied immediately. “We strongly believe
it is irresponsible and a potential violation of criminal law [emphasis
added] to print the names of two reported undercover CIA officers who
you claim have been involved in the hunt against al-Qaida,” said
spokesman Preston Golson.
Erring on the
side of caution, we took the names out of our podcast. On the day we
released the revised podcast on our website, we heard from Sibel
Edmonds. A former FBI analyst and prominent whistleblower, Edmonds posted a story
on her blog Sept. 21 stating that she had three credible sources and a
document confirming that the redhead in our revised story was
Bikowsky. She also stated that the staff officer involved was Michael
Anne Casey and cited our website, Secrecy Kills.
It was only then that we discovered our webmaster had briefly and
inadvertently placed our entire email to the CIA on our site. Edmonds
saw the information and published it.
Within minutes the information had spread widely through social media on the Internet. Before long Gawker
breathlessly announced the latest of the CIA’s problems: that
Bikowsky, who had risen to become the head of the CIA’s global jihad
unit, had been outed. The rather more significant story — that a CIA
intelligence failure had contributed to the 9/11 attacks — got short
shrift from the popular gossip site.
In an effort to
clarify the story, we asked the CIA two factual questions. We asked if
Bikowsky’s statement to the congressional 9/11 inquiry — that she had
delivered Mihdhar’s visa information to the FBI prior to the attacks —
was accurate. We also asked if former FBI agent Mark Rossini’s
recollection that Michael Anne Casey had told him not to report
information about Mihdhar and Hazmi was accurate. The agency did not
address the specifics of either question.
“We do not, as a
rule, publicly confirm or deny the identities of currently serving
agency officers,” a spokesman replied. “That includes those dedicated
to the disruption of terrorist plots. The officers involved in those
critical efforts have, thanks to their skill and focus, saved countless
American lives.”
The story of
Mihdhar and Hazmi could easily be clarified, says Robert Baer, a
retired CIA officer in the Middle East who worked directly with some of
the people involved. “A lot of these people who withheld this
information were not covert operatives,” he explained. “There was no
reason to hide their names. They are out there in the public. You can
find them in data and credit checks and the rest of it … They certainly
could have been brought before the House or the Senate in closed
session and an explanation and a report put out there.”
Langley on the defensive
The CIA prefers
not to disclose but to protect the handful of people at the heart of
this story. Tenet remained George W. Bush’s CIA director for another
two and a half years, where he was famously involved in passing along
faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that justified
the disastrous invasion of Iraq. On Dec. 14, 2004, George Tenet was
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush.
Richard Blee,
chief of Alec Station in 2001, reportedly took over the CIA operation
during the invasion of Afghanistan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden
when bin Laden was surrounded in the mountains of Tora Bora three
months after 9/11. According to 23-year career CIA officer Gary
Berntsen, as reported in his book, “Jawbreaker,” Blee was in charge at
the time bin Laden managed to slip away to Pakistan to live comfortably
for nearly a decade. Harper’s Ken Silverstein
reported that Blee was active in the controversial renditions and
detainee-abuse programs. He is now retired and living in Los Angeles.
We do not know
exactly what became of Tom Wilshere, a mysterious figure who has
managed to maintain an even lower profile than the rest. Dale Watson,
former head of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, told us that us
that Wilshere became a White House briefer during the Bush era. Casey
and Bikowsky have risen in the CIA’s ranks, despite the fact that
Bikowsky has been associated with at least one major blunder. The AP reported
that Bikowsky was at the center of “the el-Masri incident,” in which
an innocent German citizen was renditioned (a euphemism for kidnapped) by the CIA in 2003 and held under terrible conditions (a euphemism for tortured)
in a secret Afghan prison. The AP characterized it as “one of the
biggest diplomatic embarrassments of the U.S. war on terrorism.” It was
no doubt something more to Khaled el-Masri. Despite that episode
Bikowsky was promoted.
As chief of the
counterterrorism center, Cofer Black was the boss of Casey, Bikowsky
and Blee. He too was associated with the abuses of the extraordinary rendition program. He resigned shortly after George Bush was elected to a second term. Black then served as vice chairman of Blackwater USA,
the controversial U.S.-based private security firm, from 2005 to 2008.
Earlier this month Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney
announced that Black would join his campaign as a foreign policy
adviser.
- Rory
O’Connor is an award-winning journalist, author and filmmaker, and
co-founder and president of the international media firm Globalvision.
Producer-writer Ray Nowosielski made his documentary debut directing
"Press for Truth" in 2006. Co-founder of the media production company
Banded Artists, he also was a senior producer for Globalvision. More Rory O'Connor and Ray Nowosielski
Source: http://www.salon.com/2011/10/14/insiders_voice_doubts_cia_911/singleton/
FBI organizes almost all terror plots in the US
The
Federal Bureau of Investigation employs upwards of 15,000 undercover
agents today, ten times what they had on the roster back in 1975. If
you think that’s a few spies too many — spies earning as much as
$100,000 per assignment — one doesn’t have to go too deep into their
track record to see their accomplishments. Those agents are responsible
for an overwhelming amount of terrorist stings that have stopped major
domestic catastrophes in the vein of 9/11 from happening on American
soil.
Another
thing those agents are responsible for, however, is plotting those very
schemes. The FBI has in recent years used trained informants not just
to snitch on suspected terrorists, but to set them up from the get-go. A
recent report put together by Mother Jones and the Investigative
Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkley analyses some
striking statistics about the role of FBI informants in terrorism
cases that the Bureau has targeted in the decade since the September 11
attacks.
The
report reveals that the FBI regularly infiltrates communities where
they suspect terrorist-minded individuals to be engaging with others.
Regardless of their intentions, agents are sent in to converse within
the community, find suspects that could potentially carry out “lone
wolf” attacks and then, more or less, encourage them to do so. By
providing weaponry, funds and a plan, FBI-directed agents will encourage
otherwise-unwilling participants to plot out terrorist attacks, only
to bust them before any events fully materialize.
Additionally,
one former high-level FBI officials speaking to Mother Jones says
that, for every informant officially employed by the bureau, up to
three unofficial agents are working undercover. The FBI has used those
informants to set-up and thus shut-down several of the more high
profile would-be attacks in recent years. The report reveals that the
Washington DC Metro bombing plot, the New York City subway plot, the
attempt to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and dozens more were all
orchestrated by FBI agents. In fact, reads the report, only three of the
more well-known terror plots of the last decade weren’t orchestrated
by FBI-involved agents.
The
report reveals that in many of the stings, important meetings between
informants and the unknowing participants are left purposely
unrecorded, as to avoid any entrapment charges that could cause the
case to be dismissed. Perhaps the most high-profile of the FBI-proposed
plots was the case of the Newburgh 4. Around an hour outside of New
York City, an informant infiltrated a Muslim community and engaged four
local men to carry out a series of attacks. Those men may have never
actually carried out an attack, but once the informant offered them a
plot and a pair of missiles, they agreed. Defense attorneys cried
“entrapment,” but the men still were sentenced to 25 years apiece.
"The
problem with the cases we're talking about is that defendants would
not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents,"
Martin Stolar tells Mother Jones. Stolar represented the suspect
involved in a New York City bombing plot that was set-up by FBI agents.
"They're creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror." For their part, the FBI says this method is a plan for "preemption," "prevention" and "disruption."
The
report also reveals that, of the 500-plus prosecutions of
terrorism-related cases they analyzed, nearly half of them involved the
use of informants, many of whom worked for the FBI in exchange for
money or to work off criminal charges. Of the 158 prosecutions carried
out, 49 defendants participated in plots that agent provocateurs
arranged on behalf of the FBI. Experts note that the chance of winning a
terrorism-related trial, entrapment or not, is near impossible.
"The
plots people are accused of being part of — attacking subway systems
or trying to bomb a building — are so frightening that they can
overwhelm a jury," David Cole, a Georgetown University law
professor, tells Mother Jones. Since 9/11, almost two-thirds of the
cases linked to terrorism have ended with guilty pleas. “They don't say, 'I've been entrapped,' or, 'I was immature,’” a retired FBI official remarks.
ll
of this and those guilty pleas often stem for just being in the right
place at the wrong time. Farhana Khera of the group Muslim Advocate
notes that agents go into mosques on “fishing expeditions” just to see
where they can get interest in the community. "The FBI is now telling agents they can go into houses of worship without probable cause," says Khera. "That raises serious constitutional issues."
From
the set-up to the big finish, the whole sting operation is ripe with
constitutional issues such as that. A decade since 9/11, however, the
FBI is reaching through whatever means it can pull together to keep
terrorists — or whom they think could someday become one — from ever
hurting America.
Source: http://rt.com/usa/news/fbi-terror-report-plot-365-899/
The Deafness Before the Storm
On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review
of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al
Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret
document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the
now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few
weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal.
On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief — and only that daily brief —
in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was
investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration officials
dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the
jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history,
not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered
that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument
had some validity.
That
is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding
Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those
documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of
them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an
inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush
was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected
significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words,
the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not
nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.
The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the
Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a
group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist
operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.
But
some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster.
An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both
told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently
assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the
C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely
pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from
Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence
officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden,
an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi
secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were
nevertheless carrying the day.
In
response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with
the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.
“The
U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin
Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s
transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name. Going on for more than a
page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview
that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides
warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the
terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being
recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.
And
the C.I.A. repeated the warnings in the briefs that followed.
Operatives connected to Bin Laden, one reported on June 29, expected the
planned near-term attacks to have “dramatic consequences,” including
major casualties. On July 1, the brief stated that the operation had
been delayed, but “will occur soon.” Some of the briefs again reminded
Mr. Bush that the attack timing was flexible, and that, despite any
perceived delay, the planned assault was on track.
Yet,
the White House failed to take significant action. Officials at the
Counterterrorism Center of the C.I.A. grew apoplectic. On July 9, at a
meeting of the counterterrorism group, one official suggested that the
staff put in for a transfer so that somebody else would be responsible
when the attack took place, two people who were there told me in
interviews. The suggestion was batted down, they said, because there
would be no time to train anyone else.
That
same day in Chechnya, according to intelligence I reviewed, Ibn
Al-Khattab, an extremist who was known for his brutality and his links
to Al Qaeda, told his followers that there would soon be very big news.
Within 48 hours, an intelligence official told me, that information was
conveyed to the White House, providing more data supporting the
C.I.A.’s warnings. Still, the alarm bells didn’t sound.
On
July 24, Mr. Bush was notified that the attack was still being
readied, but that it had been postponed, perhaps by a few months. But
the president did not feel the briefings on potential attacks were
sufficient, one intelligence official told me, and instead asked for a
broader analysis on Al Qaeda, its aspirations and its history. In
response, the C.I.A. set to work on the Aug. 6 brief.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush officials attempted to deflect criticism
that they had ignored C.I.A. warnings by saying they had not been told
when and where the attack would occur. That is true, as far as it
goes, but it misses the point. Throughout that summer, there were
events that might have exposed the plans, had the government been on
high alert. Indeed, even as the Aug. 6 brief was being prepared,
Mohamed al-Kahtani, a Saudi believed to have been assigned a role in
the 9/11 attacks, was stopped at an airport in Orlando, Fla., by a
suspicious customs agent and sent back overseas on Aug. 4. Two weeks
later, another co-conspirator, Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested on
immigration charges in Minnesota after arousing suspicions at a flight
school. But the dots were not connected, and Washington did not react.
Could
the 9/11 attack have been stopped, had the Bush team reacted with
urgency to the warnings contained in all of those daily briefs? We can’t
ever know. And that may be the most agonizing reality of all. Kurt
Eichenwald, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a former reporter for The New York Times, is the author of “500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
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A Timeline Surrounding September 11
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[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.]
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]
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
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;
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 1/118th Infantry
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 |
