Friday, January 29, 2010
Hi my name is Kevin Ryan, and I’ve been working to discover the truth about 9/11 for almost seven years. I believe that the truth will come out and be widely acknowledged eventually, and that each of us can help to speed that process. This talk is about some of my own efforts in that regard, and it centers on the World Trade Center.
One question we need to answer is: Who could have placed explosives in the World Trade Center buildings? We’re faced with that question due to the growing amount of evidence that explosives were used to bring down all three buildings, and due to the enormous implications of that possibility. The evidence includes the unprecedented nature of what happened that day, the eyewitness testimonies of people at the site, and the physical evidence demonstrated by photographs and videos. Evidence for explosives is also given through proof by contradiction in that seven years of ever-changing government reports could not provide a valid non-explosive explanation. More recently, peer-reviewed scientific papers show that explosives were present at the WTC.
When we look at this problem however, we’re forced to admit that we’re looking for evidence of a conspiracy. To clarify that statement, we’re looking for evidence of a conspiracy that is believable, unlike the official conspiracy theory given to us by representatives of the Bush Administration.
To answer the question of who could have placed explosives in the World Trade Center towers, we should first consider who had access to the buildings. Those who had access to the buildings should be further considered to see if they had access to the necessary explosive technologies, and to see if they could have benefited from the destruction of the buildings or from the resulting War on Terror.
Basically, we need to follow the standard process for forensic investigation of explosions that aims to determine who had the means, opportunity and motive to accomplish the explosive event. When that approach is taken with the WTC, we can see that those who had the greatest means and opportunity also had the greatest motive.
The Twin Towers and WTC 7 were among the most secure buildings in the world, and were most readily accessed by tenants, security and related contractors.
On 9/11, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the north tower between floors 94 and 99. In an incredible coincidence, these floors are the only ones in that 110-story building that had been upgraded for fireproofing shortly before 9/11. This coincidence was amplified by the fact that one tenant occupied all of those floors – Marsh & McLennan, which at the time was the world’s largest insurance brokerage company. In addition to its north tower offices, Marsh also occupied 8 floors in the middle of the south tower.
Marsh was known to be notoriously secretive, and had been likened to the CIA. Its chief executive on 9/11 was Jeffrey Greenberg, the son and former employee of Maurice Greenberg, the chairman of American International Group (also known as AIG). AIG has been reported to be at the center of a number of CIA operations, but we know the company better for having recently asked for 80 billion dollars in taxpayer bailout money because it was [quote] “too big to fail.”
Other powerful and well-connected people who worked in senior management at Marsh included Stephen Friedman, a senior principal at Marsh Capital and former partner at Goldman Sachs. Friedman later became George W. Bush’s top economic advisor.
Friedman went to Cornell University and belonged to a society there called Quill and Dagger, the membership of which included Paul Wolfowitz, Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley. Wolfowitz was the Neo-con deputy secretary of defense in the Bush Administration, and was the author in 1992 of the “Wolfowitz Doctrine” of pre-emptive warfare. He also met with General Mahmud Ahmed of the Pakistani Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (or ISI) in the week before 9/11. General Ahmed is known to have ordered his subordinates to wire 100 thousand dollars to Mohammed Atta during that same week.
Quill & Dagger member Sandy Berger, the National Security Advisor to President Clinton, was later caught stealing documents that were requested by the 9/11 Commission during its investigation.
Jules Kroll, the founder of the company that designed the security systems for the WTC, was also a Cornell Quill & Dagger man. I’ll have more to say about him when we get to the security companies in a few minutes.
The President of Marsh & McLennan Real Estate Advisors was Craig Stapleton, the husband of George W. Bush’s cousin, Dorothy Walker Bush. Stapleton once co-owned the Texas Rangers with George W. Bush, and later went on to join Winston Partners, a private investment firm that profited from 9/11 and that was led by George W. Bush’s brother Marvin.
Another connection to the Bush family can be seen in the Marsh acquisition of the New York insurance brokerage Johnson and Higgins in March 1997. Johnson and Higgins was the long-time employer of Prescott Bush Jr, brother to George H. W. Bush. Although Prescott Jr. had semi-retired just before Marsh acquired the firm, he had spent 33 years at Johnson & Higgins as a Senior Vice President. After retirement, Bush continued to consult for the company.
My point is that, with Prescott Jr, Friedman and Stapleton, Marsh clearly had strong ties to the Bush network, and therefore to those who profited from 9/11. But did those working for Marsh have access to explosives?
To answer that question, we need look at only one other Marsh & McLennan executive, L Paul Bremer. On 9/11, Bremer was the CEO of Marsh Political Risk Practice and he had an office in the south tower.
Just before he came to Marsh, Bremer had been managing director for Kissinger Associates. Bremer was also on the international advisory board for the Japanese mining company Komatsu. At the time, Komatsu was involved in a partnership with Dresser Industries, the oil-services/intelligence front where George H. W. Bush got his start. In July 1996, Komatsu patented a thermite demolition device that could demolish a structure with high efficiency. This is important because residues of thermite, the highly energetic chemical mixture, have been confirmed in samples of the WTC dust, and the use of thermite at the WTC was also revealed by environmental data.
So yes, at least one Marsh & McLennan executive had access to explosives, the very type that has been found at the WTC.
On September 11th, Bremer was interviewed on NBC television, and he claimed that Osama bin Laden was responsible and that possibly Iraq and Iran were involved too, and he called for the most severe military response possible. For some unknown reason, Google removed the interview video from its servers three times. Bremer was called away from Marsh in 2003, to become the Iraq Occupation Governor.
Moving to the south tower, United Airlines Flight 175 hit that building between floors 78 and 83, in the southeast corner. In the impact zone, Baseline Financial Services was located on floors 77 and 78, and AON Corporation was on floor 83.
Baseline was led by a very interesting individual named Joseph Kasputys, who had a history of being well connected to the highest levels of government, as well as to the defense and intelligence industries. Years earlier, Kasputys worked for the US departments of commerce and defense. He was also the deputy director of Nixon’s White House taskforce that dealt with the Arab oil embargo of 1973, and he was instrumental in the creation of the Department of Energy.
Kasputys went on to have a 20 year business relationship with the DOE, which is interesting considering that the DOE was developing thermite ignition devices as early as 1983. Additonally, national laboratories working within the DOE developed nanothermites in the late 1990s. Nanothermites are explosive thermite mixtures where one or more reactants are present at the nanometer scale. These are also called super-thermites due to the extraordinarily large amount of energy released upon ignition. And again, these materials have been found in the WTC dust.
According to official reports, in 1999 Kasputys’ Baseline Financial made structural modifications to the southeast corner of floor 78, exactly where the aircraft hit on 9/11.
Moving to floor 83 of the south tower, there was AON Corporation, a Chicago-based competitor of Marsh. Today General Richard Myers, who was Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11 and therefore responsible for the national response on 9/11, is a director at AON. But the most interesting character working for AON on 9/11 was Jim Pierce, the first cousin of George W. Bush.
I have to ask at this point: Is there anyone in the audience who had three family members working for companies in the impact zones of the WTC towers on 9/11? Well George Bush did, and that doesn’t count the people who later went to work for his administration.
Jim Pierce, George’s first cousin, was managing director of AON on 9/11, and he had arranged a meeting on the 105th floor of the south tower for that morning. Pierce survived the day, despite the fact that twelve people came to the meeting in the south tower, and eleven of them died. The location of the meeting had been changed, the night before, to the Millenium Hotel across the street, where Pierce watched the south tower as it was hit by the aircraft. Apparently the meeting attendees were not all notified of the change in location.
In any case, the tenants in the impact zones are certainly worthy of investigation. Additionally, the companies that designed and implemented the security systems for the WTC buildings are worthy of investigation, as I will now spell out.
Jules Kroll was mentioned earlier, as the founder of the company that designed the security system for the WTC and who was a fraternity brother of Paul Wolfowitz, Marsh & McLennan’s Stephen Friedman and the two National Security Advisors Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley.
Jules Kroll’s company has been hired by some of the most powerful governments and organizations in the world. Other than designing security systems, the company also operates as a private intelligence agency, and has been called The CIA of Wall Street.
By 1991, due to his experience with international investigations, Jules Kroll had developed an expert knowledge of the terrorist financing bank BCCI and how it moved and hid money all over the world. Coincidentally, during the same time that Jules Kroll was gaining this knowledge, WTC tenant L. Paul Bremer was managing director at Kissinger Associates, a firm that had been having meetings with BCCI but would later refuse to reveal any details to the US Senate’s investigation committee.
The security plan for the WTC complex that was designed by Kroll required years of work to implement. There were four contractors that led the effort to implement what Kroll had designed. All four of these security implementation companies have interesting connections, and all four of them did significant work in Saudi Arabia prior to their work at the WTC. But Stratesec, the company that was responsible for the overall security system integration, was the most interesting.
Stratesec had contracts to provide security services not only for the WTC, but also for United Airlines, and Dulles Airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off on 9/11. Another client was Los Alamos National Laboratory, where scientists were working on the development of nanothermite.
Stratesec had a small board of directors that included Marvin Bush (the brother of George W. Bush) and Wirt Walker, a distant relative of the Bush brothers. Other directors included Yousef Saud Al Sabah, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family.
In 1998, Barry McDaniel came to Stratesec to become its Chief Operating Officer. McDaniel was therefore in charge of the security operation at the WTC in terms of what he called a completion contract, to provide services [quote] “up to the day the buildings fell down.” McDaniel came to Stratesec directly from BDM International, where he had been Vice President for nine years. BDM was a major subsidiary of The Carlyle Group during that time. When Barry McDaniel started at BDM, the company began getting a large amount of government business in an area called Black Projects, or budgets that were kept secret.
BDM was sold to The Carlyle Group in 1992, at which time Frank Carlucci became chairman. Carlucci was a covert operative in his early career, and got his start in national politics through his old college roommate, Donald Rumsfeld. Carlucci went on to be named Deputy Director of the CIA and Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, before joining Carlyle.
During the time that Stratesec executive McDaniel worked for them, the Caryle Group added other very powerful people to their leadership team. One such person was James Baker, who went to Princeton with Rumsfeld and Carlucci, and who was White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Treasury for President Reagan. Baker was later George H.W. Bush’s Chief of Staff and Secretary of State. Baker became a partner at Carlyle just two weeks after the February 1993 bombing of the WTC.
Earlier in his career, Baker had worked in President Ford’s department of Commerce, along with WTC impact zone tenant Joseph Kasputys. And Baker was a longtime, close friend of Raymond Hill, an elite Texan who owned the savings and loan called Mainland Savings. American taxpayers shelled out approximately $500 million when Mainland failed in 1986. Investigators have since discovered that Mainland, like a number of other savings and loans that failed in the late 1980s, was a vehicle for CIA and mafia activities.
Baker is also remembered as the one person most responsible for changing the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, in favor of George W. Bush. As Congressman John Conyers wrote: [quote] “Mr. Baker will be forever remembered for his ultimately successful efforts to shut down the counting of votes in the 2000 Florida election.”
On September 11, 2001, Baker was at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington DC, for the annual investor conference of the Carlyle Group. Also present with Baker was Carlucci, "representatives of the bin Laden family,” and George H. W. Bush. The Carlyle Group had been doing business with the bin Laden family since the early 1990s, throughout the time that Barry McDaniel worked for them.
Marvin Bush was a director of Stratesec from 1993 to 2000. It was during that time that Kroll and Stratesec planned and executed the extensive rebuilding of the security systems at the WTC complex. As his stint with Stratesec ended, Marvin Bush became a principal in the company HCC Insurance, one of the insurance carriers for the World Trade Center.
The FBI briefly considered investigating Stratesec for insider trading related to 9/11, due to an SEC referral of suspicious accounts. But since the people involved were considered to not have any [quote] “ties to terrorism or other negative information,” an investigation into Stratesec was not pursued.
When we examine who had the greatest motive for the attacks of 9/11, we need to look at who most benefited from those events. Maurice Greenberg’s AIG is among those that profited the most after 9/11. Less than a month after the attacks, Greenberg said –[quote] “The opportunities for us are enormous. It's not just in the United States, but rates are rising throughout the world. So our business looks quite good going forward.''
But The Carlyle Group and oil industry companies like Halliburton led the field in terms of profiting from 9/11.
Dick Cheney was hired as CEO of Halliburton in 1995, despite having no business leadership experience. He quickly went on to add new directors that shared his political convictions, including Lawrence Eagleburger, the former Secretary of State under George HW Bush. Eagleburger also served as a director of Kissinger Associates, and was on the board of Dresser Industries, where George HW Bush got his start.
Cheney named Charles DiBona as one of his first appointees to the board of Halliburton. DiBona was also an associate of south tower impact zone tenant Joseph Kasputys, at the Logistics Management Institute. DiBona and Kasputys had previously worked together during the Arab Oil Embargo as representatives of the emerging Department of Energy. In fact, DiBona was one of the first US “Energy Czars.”
Kasptuys went on to run a large corporation called Primark that had offices in both towers on 9/11. At least one of the subsidiaries of Primark, The Analytical Sciences Corporation, worked on black ops projects like Carlyle’s BDM did.
DiBona went on to lead the American Petroleum Institute, the petroleum industry's national trade association, in a position he held for nineteen years. Before becoming a Halliburton director, DiBona was also a director of First American Bancshares, the American bank secretly owned by BCCI.
BCCI is significant relative to 9/11 because it was involved in funding terrorists and was linked to the Pakistani intelligence network, from which came not only General Mahmud Ahmed mentioned before, but also several alleged 9/11 conspirators, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In fact, Time magazine reported, relative to BCCI, that – [quote] “You can't draw a line separating the bank's black operatives and Pakistan's intelligence services."
Henry Kissinger and his associates were also connected to BCCI in several ways. For example, Sergio da Costa, who served as Brazil’s Ambassador to the US in the 80s, worked for Kissinger Associates and was also a nominee shareholder for BCCI. And Kissinger was linked to BCCI through the Pakistanis that arranged for his first visit to China. Kissinger returned to China many times and on occasion took very close friends and business associates along with him, most notably Maurice Greenberg of AIG.
Actually, the numerous connections between assistants and associates of Kissinger, and the most significant events of 9/11, are astounding. To begin with, Kissinger, who is considered by some to be an international terrorist himself due to his bombing of Cambodia, his role in the 1973 coup in Chile, and other atrocities, was the Bush Administration’s first choice to lead the 9/11 Commission. Although he later resigned from the Commission to avoid exposing his client list, Kissinger’s closest friends and aides played significant roles with regard to 9/11. For example…
• L. Paul Bremer, the managing director at Kissinger Associates, left there to take a job with WTC impact zone tenant Marsh & McLennan, and then played a leading role in establishing the official myth of 9/11
• Peter Rodman, member of the Project for a New American Century and Assistant Secretary of Defense on 9/11, hosted the meetings with Pakistani ISI General Ahmed the week before 9/11, and had previously been a Special Assistant to Kissinger for eight years.
• Joseph Kasputys, south tower impact zone tenant, worked with Kissinger in the Ford Administration along with Cheney, DiBona, and Rumsfeld.
• Kissinger is also closely associated with several 9/11 Commissioners, including his long-time National Security Council assistant John Lehman, and his fellow Hollinger board member James R. Thompson.
• And Phillip Odeen of BDM, who was Barry McDaniel’s boss until McDaniel left to lead Stratesec, was a Kissinger assistant for several years.
There was also Renato Ruggiero of Kissinger Associates. Mr. Ruggerio was present on 9/11 in the sense that he was on the International Advisory Board for Salomon Smith Barney, the company that occupied most of the floors in WTC building 7. Salomon Smith Barney even shared the all-important 23rd floor with the New York City Office of Emergency management or OEM. More striking is the fact that Donald Rumsfeld was the chairman of that Salomon Smith Barney board, and Dick Cheney was a board member as well. Rumsfeld had to resign as chairman of that board in 2001 when he was confirmed as George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, and Cheney resigned at the same time when he became Vice President.
So there are many connections between the companies that were tenants in the impact zones and WTC 7, those that handled security for the WTC, and those who benefited from the crimes of 9/11.
Someone that was only briefly mentioned so far, but played an important role in the events of 9/11 and in the myth of what happened that day, was Rudy Giuliani.
In the late 1980s, Giuliani was the US attorney for the Southern District of NY, and was in charge of investigating organized crime and terrorism. It was reported that Giuliani received documents during this time, about secret bank accounts related to terrorist financing. What is less well reported is that, when Giuliani left his job at the Justice Department to start a political career, he worked for a law firm called White & Case that actually represented BCCI.
Having detailed knowledge and experience with the terrorist financing, it’s remarkable that Giuliani never mentioned terrorism as an issue in his campaign for NYC mayor in 1993. But Giuliani was the mayor of New York City on 9/11, and unlike most of us he had foreknowledge of the collapse of the WTC buildings. He described this fact in an interview with Peter Jennings immediately after the attacks. In this same interview Giuliani falsely claimed that no one had ever predicted airliner crashes into the WTC, by saying – [quote] “Oh there’s no question we were all caught totally off balance. No one, no one, no one could possibly expect, uh, large airplanes to crash into the, you know, the World Trade Center, uh, the way this happened.”
Giuliani’s OEM staff also had foreknowledge about the fall of the buildings, and they warned some people. This was reported by Richard Zarrillo, an EMT at the scene, when he said in his official testimony – [quote] “OEM says the buildings are going to collapse; we need to get out.”
Giuliani and his Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik were wandering around the WTC site after the planes had hit the towers. By the time the first tower fell, Giuliani and Kerik had already moved away from immediate danger, but were still within area. As they were walking, they coincidentally happened upon a TV reporter who just the year before had published a flattering biography of Giuliani called “Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City.” This apparent coincidence of running into his flattering biographer at this most critical moment is what led to Giuliani being portrayed as the heroic leader of the response to 9/11, through a series of “walking press conferences” that day.
Giuliani’s firm, Giuliani Partners, now employs many of the people who were in charge of protecting us from terrorism, or who played important roles on 9/11. This includes Pat D'Amuro, the agent who ran the FBI’s 9/11 investigation and stole evidence from Ground Zero. New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik worked at Giuliani Partners as well. While he worked at Giuliani’s firm, Kerik took a short leave when he was appointed by George W. Bush to be Iraq’s Minister of the Interior reporting to L. Paul Bremer.
Kerik was widely know to be connected to organized crime, but what is less well known is that beginning in the 1970s, he worked four years as an employee of the Saudi royal family. During Kerik’s years in Saudi Arabia, starting in 1978, he worked in security at a construction site in the desert, with mercenaries. It’s not certain if he worked directly for or with The Carlyle Group’s mercenary company the Vinnell Corporation, but that seems very possible.
Rudy Giuliani also had connections to organized crime, apart from Bernard Kerik. Rudy’s father, Harold Giuliani was a convicted hold-up man who served time in Sing Sing prison, and was later employed as an enforcer for a Mafia loan shark operation. Rudy’s uncle Leo D'Avanzo, ran a loan-sharking and gambling operation. Additionally, according to author Wayne Barrett, Rudy’s first cousin Lewis D'Avanzo was [quote] “a stone cold gangster who was shot to death in 1977 by FBI agents when he tried to run them down with his car.”
Of course, the sins of Rudy’s father, and his uncle, and his cousin, and his appointed Police Commissioner should not be used to judge Rudy himself. But these facts are worth considering in that Rudy hired mafia–connected companies to cleanup Ground Zero. Tens of millions of dollars were paid out to these mob-connected companies over a period of months after 9/11, and it was clear that something was being hidden during that clean-up operation.
This fact was clear because security at the site was intense, while safety management was lax or nonexistent and human concerns took a back seat to the goal of rapidly disposing of the evidence. In fact, much of the steel evidence was quickly destroyed before investigators ever reached the site. Additionally, evidence was stolen with the approval and coordination of FBI agents.
In conclusion, although some of the people mentioned in this talk might had access to the buildings and the explosive technologies, we can’t say with certainty that they were responsible for placing the explosive charges in the three WTC buildings.
What we can say today, with certainty, is that if we are to believe that al Qaeda orchestrated the events of 9/11 then we do not know much about al Qaeda. Alternatively, there was a far more powerful and highly connected system of intelligence and financial networks, represented by organizations like Carlyle, Kissinger and Halliburton, that converged upon the events of 9/11. That other system continues to profit from the 9/11 attacks, and uses the fear and rage generated by al Qaeda-attributed terrorism to its own advantage. Understanding and destroying terrorism might simply be a matter of understanding and destroying the organizations that continue to profit from 9/11.
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