Santa Claus comes early to Japan this year and he's armed with 9/11 Truth, including Japanese translations of Niels Harrit paper "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in WTC Dust."
NYFD 9/11 Eyewitness Accounts
Graeme MacQueen, Founding Director of the Center for Peace Studies (McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario) reads testimony from New York Fire Dept. firefighters:
Angel Rivera: "When we hit the 19th floor, something horrendous happened. It was like a bomb went off. We thought we were dead. The whole building shook."
NYFD Asst. Commissioner Stephen Gregory: I thought that I saw...low level flashes...I saw flash-flash-flash, and then it looked like the building came down. You know like when they blow up a building, when it falls down? That's what I thought I saw."
Firefighter Daniel Rivera: "At first I thought it was... Do you ever see professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear, 'pop-pop-pop-pop-pop'? That's exactly what, because I thought it was that, when I heard that frigging noise, that's when I saw the building coming down."
NYFD Captain Karin Deshore: "Somewhere around the middle of the World Trade Center there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash kept popping, all the way around the building, and that building had started to explode."
The New York City Fire Department, under the direction of Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen, collected the testimony of 503 first-responder EMTs, Port Authority police, and firefighters. It came to 12,000 pages.
The 9/11 Commission, run by White House appointee and insider, Philip Zelikow, rejected the testimony, just ignored it, not germane to the foregone conclusion.
Angel Rivera: "When we hit the 19th floor, something horrendous happened. It was like a bomb went off. We thought we were dead. The whole building shook."
NYFD Asst. Commissioner Stephen Gregory: I thought that I saw...low level flashes...I saw flash-flash-flash, and then it looked like the building came down. You know like when they blow up a building, when it falls down? That's what I thought I saw."
Firefighter Daniel Rivera: "At first I thought it was... Do you ever see professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear, 'pop-pop-pop-pop-pop'? That's exactly what, because I thought it was that, when I heard that frigging noise, that's when I saw the building coming down."
NYFD Captain Karin Deshore: "Somewhere around the middle of the World Trade Center there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash kept popping, all the way around the building, and that building had started to explode."
The New York City Fire Department, under the direction of Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen, collected the testimony of 503 first-responder EMTs, Port Authority police, and firefighters. It came to 12,000 pages.
The 9/11 Commission, run by White House appointee and insider, Philip Zelikow, rejected the testimony, just ignored it, not germane to the foregone conclusion.
Who is Philip Zelikow? And Why is He Important to 9/11 Truth?
This is a two part video profiling Philip Zelikow - appointed by George W. Bush to head the 9/11 Investigation. Zelikow orchestrated and controlled the "official findings" of the 9/11 Commission Report:
Part 1:
Part 2
Here are a few questions ignored, not yet answered nor fully explained by Philip Zelikow's "Official 9/11 Commission Report:"
WTC 7:
* Symmetrical, complete destruction of forty-seven-story steel-frame into its own footprint
* Destruction took what should have been the path of greatest resistance
* The building’s roofline descended at free-fall acceleration for more than 100 feet as admitted (under pressure) by NIST’s top WTC engineer, and near free-fall throughout the main period of destruction
* Sudden onset
* Massive volume of expanding pyroclastic-like dust clouds
* Sounds of explosions at ground floor—a full second before downward movement began
* Tons of molten metal found in rubble pile by demolition and cleanup workers
* Chemical signature of thermite (an incendiary) found in slag and dust samples
* Rapid oxidation, sulfidation, intergranular melting, even partial evaporation of the steel—documented by FEMA but never explained by any official body
TWIN TOWERS:
* Why were virtually no floors found at the base of either Twin Tower? There were originally 110 floors – each of them one acre in size.
* What was the energy source, and through what mechanism was it applied, that pulverized 400,000 cubic yards of concrete into a fine powder that blanketed Manhattan?
* Why did more than 100 FDNY first responders describe sounds of explosions and flashes of light at the onset of destruction?
* How were massive structural steel members hurled from the Twin Towers at 70 mph – some landing 600 feet away?
* Given that open-air jet fuel fires and normal office fire burn at a maximum temperature of about 1,500° F, and that steel doesn’t melt until about 2,700° F, what thermal energy source produced the tons of molten metal seen in the rubble of the Twin Towers and Building 7?
* How did tons of highly advanced “nanothermite,” developed in US national laboratories, and found in all of the dust samples, get into the Twin Towers?
And we want to know!
Part 1:
Part 2
Here are a few questions ignored, not yet answered nor fully explained by Philip Zelikow's "Official 9/11 Commission Report:"
WTC 7:
* Symmetrical, complete destruction of forty-seven-story steel-frame into its own footprint
* Destruction took what should have been the path of greatest resistance
* The building’s roofline descended at free-fall acceleration for more than 100 feet as admitted (under pressure) by NIST’s top WTC engineer, and near free-fall throughout the main period of destruction
* Sudden onset
* Massive volume of expanding pyroclastic-like dust clouds
* Sounds of explosions at ground floor—a full second before downward movement began
* Tons of molten metal found in rubble pile by demolition and cleanup workers
* Chemical signature of thermite (an incendiary) found in slag and dust samples
* Rapid oxidation, sulfidation, intergranular melting, even partial evaporation of the steel—documented by FEMA but never explained by any official body
TWIN TOWERS:
* Why were virtually no floors found at the base of either Twin Tower? There were originally 110 floors – each of them one acre in size.
* What was the energy source, and through what mechanism was it applied, that pulverized 400,000 cubic yards of concrete into a fine powder that blanketed Manhattan?
* Why did more than 100 FDNY first responders describe sounds of explosions and flashes of light at the onset of destruction?
* How were massive structural steel members hurled from the Twin Towers at 70 mph – some landing 600 feet away?
* Given that open-air jet fuel fires and normal office fire burn at a maximum temperature of about 1,500° F, and that steel doesn’t melt until about 2,700° F, what thermal energy source produced the tons of molten metal seen in the rubble of the Twin Towers and Building 7?
* How did tons of highly advanced “nanothermite,” developed in US national laboratories, and found in all of the dust samples, get into the Twin Towers?
And we want to know!
Sadly, Two US Presidents Ignore Science, Tell the World No 9/11 Discussions
For most of us, it takes great courage to re-consider the tragic events surrounding 9/11. If you are taking the time to read this, we applaud you for your willingness to keep an open mind while you evaluate it for yourself. It would be impossible for us to overstate the importance of doing so.
"The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief" (Gustav LeBon)
President George W. Bush Addresses the U.N. - "Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories regarding the attacks of September 11..."
In Cairo, Egypt, 6/4/09 US President Barack Obama, defends the official 9/11 story. "These are not opinions to be debated, these are facts to be dealt with..."
"The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief" (Gustav LeBon)
President George W. Bush Addresses the U.N. - "Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories regarding the attacks of September 11..."
In Cairo, Egypt, 6/4/09 US President Barack Obama, defends the official 9/11 story. "These are not opinions to be debated, these are facts to be dealt with..."
PRESENTATION: 9/11 Truth: the Challenge to the Peace Movement
Dr. Graeme MacQueen presented a speech at the 9/13/09 conference, "We Demand Transparency! For Peace, Truth, and a New Economics.
"The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief"
Gustave LeBon
*FULL LENGTH MOVIE: The New American Century (PNAC)
This documentary, produced by Massimo Mazzucco, provides the missing link for the truth about 9/11. The missing link is MOTIVE. If you cannot imagine why anyone in government would want to cover up essential evidence, then wonder no more. A terrorist attack was exactly what the members of PNAC hoped for to justify a massive military incursion into the Middle East, all of which was planned long before 9/11.
You will witness decades of maneuvering for the control of oil and gas resources and see, first hand, incredible war profits on a scale much greater than ever before in history. Even if you are familiar with some of these events, this is the first time all of them have been brought together in one place.
You will witness decades of maneuvering for the control of oil and gas resources and see, first hand, incredible war profits on a scale much greater than ever before in history. Even if you are familiar with some of these events, this is the first time all of them have been brought together in one place.
Quotes
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
Desmond Tutu
"The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear."
Jim Bishop (1907-1987)
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."
Alice Walker
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall - think of it, ALWAYS.
Mahatma Gandhi
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science."
Albert Einstein
"The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief"
Gustave LeBon
Desmond Tutu
"The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear."
Jim Bishop (1907-1987)
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."
Alice Walker
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall - think of it, ALWAYS.
Mahatma Gandhi
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science."
Albert Einstein
"The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief"
Gustave LeBon
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 - 1860)
Who Is This Guy Wearing the Black Harley Shirt?
Watch this "unknown" man deliver scripted disinformation at a critical moment when the American public had no idea what happened to the twin towers to make them collapse. He gave us the "easy to understand" Story of 9/11 - just minutes after the collapse of the WTC towers. This is still the "official" story that persists today - despite all evidence to the contrary.
Had Mr. Unknown Man not inserted disinformation right then - we all might have noticed that the towers came down as a result of a gigantic controlled demolition. Sometimes the biggest secrets hide in plain sight because we simply do "not believe our eyes."
I like the Magicians for 9/11 Truth website - they are in the business of fooling people with misdirection and deception. And they recognize how misdirection works when watching magic shows of other magicians & illusionists.
The all-knowing "Harley Shirt Guy" is actor Mark Adrian Humphrey, and is commonly acknowledged as a planted shill mouthing the following script:
"...come out of nowhere and just ream right into the side of the twin tower, exploding through the other side...and then I witnessed both towers collapse, one first then the second. Mostly due to structural failure because the fire was just too intense."
Had Mr. Unknown Man not inserted disinformation right then - we all might have noticed that the towers came down as a result of a gigantic controlled demolition. Sometimes the biggest secrets hide in plain sight because we simply do "not believe our eyes."
I like the Magicians for 9/11 Truth website - they are in the business of fooling people with misdirection and deception. And they recognize how misdirection works when watching magic shows of other magicians & illusionists.
The all-knowing "Harley Shirt Guy" is actor Mark Adrian Humphrey, and is commonly acknowledged as a planted shill mouthing the following script:
"...come out of nowhere and just ream right into the side of the twin tower, exploding through the other side...and then I witnessed both towers collapse, one first then the second. Mostly due to structural failure because the fire was just too intense."
Bush "Explains" Iraq and 9/11
Without 9/11, our two enduring wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq couldn't have happened.
George Bush admits there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Iraq had no ties with al-Qaeda. And Iraq had nothing to do with the tragic events of 9/11.
Below, Bush "laughs" at 9/11 accusation.
Bring 'em on...
George Bush admits there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Iraq had no ties with al-Qaeda. And Iraq had nothing to do with the tragic events of 9/11.
Below, Bush "laughs" at 9/11 accusation.
Bring 'em on...
Bush Talks About EXPLOSIVES in Building (on 9/11?)
Bush says this: "For example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed described the design of planned attacks of buildings inside the U.S. and how operatives were directed to carry them out. That is valuable information for those of us who have the responsibility to protect the American people. He told us the operatives had been instructed to ensure that the explosives went off at a high -- a point that was high enough to prevent people trapped above from escaping."
It sounds eerily like what happened at the WTC on 9/11. Was Bush saying that the "terrorists" planted explosives in the towers or that foiled plots had planned to use that tactic? Or was he referring to the WTC? Was he covering himself in case explosives were found in the dust of the WTC? Was the KSM "confession" the result of torture?
New Ground Level Footage With Demolition Truck
Ground level footage starting shortly after the first tower was hit. At one point a Manhattan Demolitions Co. Inc. truck can be seen driving in front of the camera (slowed down in the film so you can see it clearly). The company is based only 2.4 miles outside of NYC so it may be totally normal that it was there - or maybe not.
Part 2 of 2 has the Demolition Truck:
Part 1 of 2 can be seen here - No truck but an odd piece of debris falls to the sidewalk. In this part you will see people jumping...
Part 2 of 2 has the Demolition Truck:
Part 1 of 2 can be seen here - No truck but an odd piece of debris falls to the sidewalk. In this part you will see people jumping...
How "Official" Disinformation Works
I found this letter in an Amazon Review of one of David Ray Griffin's books, "The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé." The author (Kameelyun) is writing about a man who identifies himself as "James B" who writes reviews that promote the official story and he attempts to lie about and discredit those who examine the evidence and see the truth. Click here to view the source.
Dr. Griffin,
I've admired your work ever since NPH. I'm glad you set the record straight regarding the context of the exchanges between you and James B.
For those that aren't aware, James B is a well known online shill defender of the official theory, most likely paid to do so.* He along with Pat Curley are the main brainchilds behind the screw loose change blog and are regulars at the JREF conspiracy forum.
They along with Mark Roberts and Ron Wieck like to troll major internet sites like amazon and youtube and use O'Reilly-style spin, distortion, and half-truth in order to smear academics, engineers, pilots, ex air force, and regular citizens who question the official 9/11 story.
*A proven historical example of how "paid shills" (in this case the PR firm Hill & Knowleton) influence public opinion. People being paid to lie to millions.
(See video above)
It took the Canadian media to expose this American lie, because the US media just didn't have the guts. Things hadn't changed by 2001 and they still haven't today.
Editor's Footnote: Thanks Canada!
Read about the Eight Traits of the disinformationalist here.
Richard Gage on KMPH Fox 26 in Fresno, California
Richard Gage & other Architects & Engineers for 911 Truth, need to be on mainstream TV much more often. This local channel deserves a LOT of credit for putting him on.
"Reliable information on these issues is systematically missing in corporate media outlets, where the vast majority of the American people continue to turn for news and information.
Tens of thousands of Americans engaged in various social justice issues constantly witness how corporate media marginalize, denigrate, or simply ignore their concerns. Activist groups working on issues like 9/11 Truth have been systematically excluded from mainstream news and the national conversation leading to a genuine Truth Emergency in the country as a whole."
The comments above have been excerpted from an article entitled: "Inside the Military Media Industrial Complex: Impacts on Movements for Peace and Social Justice." You can read it here.
Foreknowledge and failure: what was once unthinkable is now considered obvious
The federal government had advance warning of the September 11th suicide hijack plot and failed to prevent it.
By *William Norman Grigg, The New American (Magazine), March 11, 2001
Please note that: *William Norman Grigg was the senior editor and a prolific contributor to The New American, the official magazine of the John Birch Society.
Was it culpable negligence -- or something much worse -- behind the federal government's failure to prevent the Black Tuesday atrocity? This question is now on the minds of millions of Americans following a stream of outrageous disclosures concerning prior knowledge of the attack. But a version of it had become office banter among agents in the FBI's Minneapolis office in the weeks before 9-11.
In a memo written and hand-delivered to FBI Director Robert Mueller in May, whistleblower Coleen Rowley, chief attorney for the Minneapolis FBI office, described how the Bureau's headquarters worked to "deliberately sabotage" the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, a suspected conspirator in the September 11th attack. According to Rowley, "HQ personnel never disclosed to the Minneapolis agents that the Phoenix division had, only approximately three weeks earlier, warned of al-Qaeda operatives in flight schools seeking flight training for terrorist purposes!"
"Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage a case?" wrote Rowley. After seeing their investigative efforts collide with roadblocks set up by FBI headquarters, frustrated field agents in Minneapolis bitterly joked that key officials in Washington "had to be spies or moles ... working for Osama bin Laden."
When THE NEW AMERICAN first examined the case for prior knowledge of the attack, there was little if any appetite on the part of the American public to examine the issues we raised. (See "Could We Have Prevented the Attacks?" and "Did We Know What Was Coming?" in our issues for November 5, 2001, and March 11, 2002.) Thanks to a series of dramatic disclosures, capped by Rowley's breathtaking memo, what was deemed unthinkable mere weeks ago is now considered obvious: Washington had detailed advance warning of the suicide hijack plot -- and failed to prevent it.
The Long Train of Errors
In our March 11th report, we concluded: "[T]he feds knew no later than June [2001] that an attack from bin Laden was coming. By August it had identified several key co-conspirators, and had one in custody." One active counter-intelligence agent told us that detailed information about the planned attack "came from some of [the Bureau's] most experienced guys.... In some cases, these field agents predicted, almost precisely, what happened on September 11th. So we were all holding our breath hoping that the situation would be remedied."
We described the case of bin Laden operative Hani Hanjour, who had come to the attention of the Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) while studying at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Phoenix. Concerned about Hanjour's inability to speak English, the international language of aviation, flight school officials contacted the FAA. After sending an observer to Hanjour's class, the FAA intervened -- by insisting that the flight school find an Arabic translator to help the terrorist understand his training.
Our cover story also pointed out that FBI agents in Minnesota asked for, but did not receive, a national security warrant to search Zacarias Moussaoui's residence. Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, was arrested while training at a flight school in Eagan, Minnesota. He had prompted misgivings on the part of his instructor by his evasiveness, belligerence, and complete unsuitability to be a pilot -- and for peculiar comments suggesting that he intended to use a jumbo jet as a bomb. His instructor called the FBI, warning that Moussaoui "wants training on a 747. A 747 fully loaded with fuel could be used as a weapon!"
Federal officials collected these substantial clues following pointed warnings that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network planned a spectacular attack on America. In our March 11th cover story we recalled Attorney General John Ashcroft's warning last June that "Americans are a high-priority target for terrorists." This roughly coincided with a remarkably detailed warning issued to airline industry personnel on June 23rd that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network posed an immediate threat to American civilian aviation.
These warnings came in the wake of a June 21st story carried by the Arabic-language MBC satellite television network in which a reporter who had interviewed bin Laden predicted: "a severe blow is expected against U.S. and Israeli interests worldwide. There is a major state of mobilization among the Osama bin Laden forces. It seems that there is a race of who will strike first. Will it be the United States or Osama bin Laden?"
Subsequent disclosures have validated our earlier reports -- and added some critical details:
* While on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on August 6th, President Bush received a CIA briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." That report predicted an attempt by al-Qaeda terrorists to hijack civilian jetliners to "bring the fight to America...."
* In July 2001, Kenneth Williams, a highly regarded 1.1-year veteran of the FBI's counter-terrorism division stationed in Phoenix, sent a memo to headquarters urging an investigation to determine if al-Qaeda operatives were studying at U.S. flight schools. Hani Hanjour, the al-Qaeda terrorist believed to have piloted American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, had studied at the Pan Am Flight School in Phoenix, where he had come to the attention of the FAA.
* In its May 15th story, the New York Times noted that Zacarias Moussaoui "had told the school's instructors that he wanted to train on a flight simulator trip from Heathrow Airport in London to Kennedy Airport in New York. Based on that information, one [FBI] agent speculated in an internal meeting last August that ... Moussaoui might have intended to crash a plane into the [World] Trade Center...."
* The Wall Street Journal reported on May 20th: "A week before the September 11th attack, investigators told the Federal Aviation Administration that student-pilot Zacarias Moussaoui had been arrested and was under investigation as a potential terrorist with a particular interest in flying Boeing 747s. But the agency decided against warning U.S. airlines to increase security." "Nothing [the FBI] told us was evidence that there was an imminent threat and as a result we issued no bulletins to the airlines or airports," explained FAA spokesman Scott Brenner. "All we knew was he was in jail. As a result of him being in jail, we did not think a threat was imminent."
* In a May 16th White House briefing, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice also insisted that the administration's foreknowledge was not specific: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile...."
In fact, an eerily prescient 1999 Library of Congress report on terrorism predicted that terrorists would make precisely that use of hijacked aircraft. Entitled The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist, and Why?, the report predicted: "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives ... into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House. [al-Qaeda terrorist] Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters." This would be done, the report speculated, in retaliation for the August 1998 cruise missile attack on al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan (timed to coincide with Monica Lewinsky's Grand Jury testimony). The report predicted that "al Qaida's retaliation [may take the form of] bombing one or more U.S. airliners with time-bombs. Yousef was planning simultaneous bombings of 11 U.S. airliners prior to his capture. Whatever form an attack may take, bi n Laden will most likely retaliate in a spectacular way..."
* With the newest revelations, media interest has been renewed in "Project Bojinka," an al-Qaeda plot to use jetliners as terrorist missiles. Philippine authorities discovered the existence of Project Bojinka in 1995. The FBI was fully briefed on Project Bojinka, as well as a December 1994 plot by Algerian terrorists to use a hijacked jetliner to attack the Eiffel Tower. The May 27th issue of Newsweek notes that a June 1994 "Pentagon-commissioned report conclude[d] that religious terrorists could hijack commercial airliners and crash them into the Pentagon or the White House." (Indeed, that same month saw publication of Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor, which concludes with a kamikaze strike on the U.S. Capitol building using a jumbo jet.)
Feudalist Priorities
As public outrage grew over these disclosures, Vice President Cheney insisted that "there wasn't anything out there that would have allowed us to predict what was going to happen" on September 11th. Speaking on the May 19th edition of NBC's "Meet the Press," Mr. Cheney expressed "a deep sense of anger that anyone would suggest that the president of the United States had advance knowledge that he failed to act on. I thought it was beyond the pale."
In a peculiar way, the vice president has a point. It is unreasonable to believe that the president "failed to act on" the detailed warnings he received. In fact, evidence exists that the administration took extraordinary precautions to deal with the threat of terrorism -- on behalf of high-ranking government officials.
A CBS story filed on June 26, 2001 described how Attorney General John Ashcroft, acting on a recommendation from his security detail, "was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines." When the network inquired about the policy, the Justice Department "cited what it called a 'threat assessment' by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term."
So even though the Americans who boarded the four doomed airliners on September 11th had been kept in the dark about the terrorist threat, the feds had already taken steps to keep Attorney General Ashcroft out of harm's way.
Stephen Push, whose wife died when terrorists plunged Flight 77 into the Pentagon, put the matter succinctly: "My wife, had she known, would not have taken that flight." Push's comments were offered in reaction to the news that the president had received warnings in August of a bin Laden plot to hijack American airliners. Continued Push: "It's shameful that they know as much as they did and didn't warn anyone." That is, they didn't warn anyone outside the privileged confines of the executive branch.
Extraordinary security measures deployed during the July 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, also underscore the Bush administration's awareness of a potential threat from bin Laden's suicide-bombers. The administration acted to protect itself and its partners among the international elite. In recent years, G-8 summits, like meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, have been besieged by "anti-globalization" protests - malodorous Marxist mobs whose actual purpose is to advance global socialism in the guise of opposing global capitalism. (See "Globalization's False Opposition" in our May 20th issue.) While security personnel in Genoa did make provisions for the leftist rent-a-mob, their larger concern was the possibility of a bin Laden strike.
The London Guardian reported on July 11th that "Italy has installed a missile defense system at Genoa's airport to deter airborne attacks during next week's G-8 summit.... A land-based battery of rockets with a range of nine miles and an altitude of 5,000 feet has been positioned...." With the missile battery in place, "unidentified planes, helicopters and balloons risk being shot down should they drift too close to the heads of state," warned the report.
Prior to the summit, Time magazine reported that "European security services are preparing to counter a Bin Laden attempt to assassinate President Bush at next month's G8 summit in Genoa, Italy. According to German intelligence sources, the plot involved Bin Laden paying German neo-Nazis to fly remote controlled-model aircraft packed with Semtex into the conference hall and blow the leaders of the industrialized world to smithereens." The plot was reportedly disclosed during interrogation of bin Laden-connected Islamic militants arrested in Milan and Frankfurt shortly before the summit.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini confirmed the terrorism warning, but offered a slightly different account of the alleged plot. In comments reported by the Italian news agency ANSA following 9-11, Fini recalled that "there was the possibility of an attack against the U.S. president using an airliner. That's why we closed the airspace and installed the missiles. Those who made cracks should now think a little."
This disclosure should provoke the following thought: In the months leading up to Black Tuesday, the Bush administration undertook extraordinary measures to protect its highest officials from precisely the kind of attack that claimed the lives of thousands of civilians on that terrible morning.
Who's Responsible?
Six days after 9-11, FBI Director Robert Mueller told reporters that "there were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country." In fact, the FBI, as we have seen, was given specific warnings about precisely the type of attack that took place on September 11th. In post-September 11th testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA Director George Tenet claimed that the Agency had known "in broad terms" that terrorists might be planning major operations in the United States, but he insisted that the reports lacked "texture" -- meaning enough specific information -- to stop what happened. But the Agency knew enough to warn National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on June 28th that a "significant al-Qaeda attack" in the near future was "highly likely" -- and to refine that warning into a prediction of a U.S. civilian aviation hijacking in the August 6th briefing for President Bush.
Given the extent of prior knowledge, why hasn't anyone been held responsible? Shouldn't CIA Director George Tenet, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and other high-profile figures in the intelligence community resign, as a matter of principle? And shouldn't Congress conduct in-depth inquests regarding the consummate failure of our "national security" establishment to protect our nation's security?
"Look at all of the investigations that have been held to examine the Enron collapse, a financial thing," Kathy Ashton, whose 21-year-old son Tommy was among the victims killed at the World Trade Center, commented to Newsweek. "Why, eight months later, are we not investigating the mass murder of 3,000 human beings on American soil by an enemy of the United States that was enabled to carry out this mass murder because many agencies in this country dropped the ball?"
Retired undercover agent Michael Levine knows the labyrinth of federal law-enforcement from the inside. For 25 years, Levine served as a "deep cover" specialist for four federal agencies, eventually becoming the most highly decorated undercover agent in the history of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Levine told THE NEW AMERICAN: "What happened last September is something that land a lot of my friends and contacts in federal law enforcement had seen coming -- and it's going to happen again, unless people are held responsible and the problems are fixed."
"Four years ago, on my 'Expert Witness' radio program, I brought together four of America's top covert operatives -- with a combined total of more than 100 years, frontline, international experience with CIA, FBI and DEA -- who had tried to warn America that there was 'massive ineptitude' in our nation's frontline defenses in the war on terrorism," Levine recalled to THE NEW AMERICAN. "The specific conclusion of our discussion was that unless Congress took immediate action America was vulnerable to terrorist acts that would 'defy the imagination.' The problems we discussed in that program -- such as a lack of qualified law enforcement personnel capable of handling human intelligence, a refusal by the FBI to share its intelligence with state and local police departments, and an emphasis on public relations over sound police work -- persist to this day."
Levine emphasized that if the FBI had been required to notify local police about the leads it had gathered before 9-11, "it is possible that the whole thing could have been prevented." Rather than deferring to the primary role of local police in criminal investigations, however, the national security establishment has reacted to Black Tuesday by absorbing even greater powers and devouring an even larger portion of the federal budget -- while carefully insulating its most prominent bureaucratic officials from hostile scrutiny. "Neither Congress nor the media is willing to hurt any of the bureaucratic egos in the FBI or CIA," Levine commented to THE NEW AMERICAN.
"But unless there's a thorough shake-up and the system is entirely cleaned out, we're going to get clobbered again -- and this time it may involve nuclear weapons."
On this point, Levine agrees with the federal officials he criticizes. In addition to the wave of disclosures of prior knowledge, Bush administration officials, including Vice President Cheney and FBI Director Mueller, warned the public that further terrorist attacks -- including Hamas-style suicide bombings -- are "inevitable." The unspoken but unmistakable message of these warnings is that our federal protectors are too busy defending us against the next attack to assess -- and hold officials responsible for -- the mistakes that led to the last one.
Moral Hazard
Governments benefit from a peculiar form of "moral hazard": They actually stand to benefit when they fail to carry out their sole legitimate function -- namely, to protect their citizens from murderous foreign aggression. Presiding over such disasters, ruling elites typically react: "We've failed -- so give us more power." Indeed, by piling up evidence of the pre-9-11 intelligence failure, The Powers That Be are depicting the national security system as suffering from inadequate powers and excessive decentralization. The remedy they prescribe is simple: Centralize law enforcement and intelligence in the interest of combating terrorism, and give it even more extensive powers.
Typical of this approach is S. 2452, the "National Homeland Security and Combating Terrorism Act of 2002," which would elevate the Office of Homeland Security to Cabinet status. In addition to exercising powers previously wielded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Cabinet-level "Homeland Security Czar" would "integrate the elements and goals of the [national counter-terrorism] Strategy into the strategies and plans of Federal, State, and local departments and agencies This would effectively make the head of Homeland Security an American "Interior Minister" -- the director of a nationalized police force.
Newsweek essayist Fareed Zakaria, former editor of the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs, offers another version of the emerging party line: What is needed, he opined in the May 27th issue, is "a domestic CIA": "We need a domestic intelligence capability. Every major power in the world has one.... Britain's M.I. 5 and France's Renseignements Generaux can tap phones at will.... In an age of terrorism, when the enemy will often be operating inside America, we can't remain blindfolded."
But the "blindfold" Zakaria refers to is, in a sense, a self-inflicted liability. As THE NEW AMERICAN has warned repeatedly, decades of agitation by radicals and subversive organizations climaxed in the mid-1970s with the abolition of federal, state, and local investigative organs that had carried out our counter-terrorism efforts. Prior to that, our nation was blessed with an effective, multi-layered, and constitutionally sound counter-terrorism apparatus.
Congressional investigative committees gathered evidence on international and domestic terrorist organizations, and conducted valuable security probes of the military and executive branch. With the assistance of the FBI -- which under Director J. Edgar Hoover was primarily an investigative body, rather than an embryonic national police force -- state and municipal police agencies maintained intelligence units that scrutinized subversive groups. And prior to the disastrous immigration reform law of 1965, the federal government took seriously its responsibility to protect the integrity of our borders.
Centralized law enforcement agencies invariably become tools of a ruling elite, protecting the regime rather than the public's rights and property. The intelligence "failure" that presaged 9-11 illustrates this principle at work: Given detailed warnings of impending terrorism, the national security establishment saw to the safety of the ruling elite, while leaving the public in the dark.
Giving new, unaccountable powers to the same federal government that failed us so spectacularly would be not only unwise and counterproductive, it would dishonor the memory of the Americans who died because of our government's delinquency. Citizens across our nation should demand that Congress -- not a make-work "bipartisan commission" -- conduct a genuine inquiry into prior knowledge. It should use its subpoena powers where necessary, and it shouldn't be afraid to ruin careers. We must also make it clear that we will not countenance any effort to reward Washington's culpable negligence by creating a "domestic CIA" or appointing an "Interior Minister."
Link to original article.
By *William Norman Grigg, The New American (Magazine), March 11, 2001
Please note that: *William Norman Grigg was the senior editor and a prolific contributor to The New American, the official magazine of the John Birch Society.
Was it culpable negligence -- or something much worse -- behind the federal government's failure to prevent the Black Tuesday atrocity? This question is now on the minds of millions of Americans following a stream of outrageous disclosures concerning prior knowledge of the attack. But a version of it had become office banter among agents in the FBI's Minneapolis office in the weeks before 9-11.
In a memo written and hand-delivered to FBI Director Robert Mueller in May, whistleblower Coleen Rowley, chief attorney for the Minneapolis FBI office, described how the Bureau's headquarters worked to "deliberately sabotage" the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, a suspected conspirator in the September 11th attack. According to Rowley, "HQ personnel never disclosed to the Minneapolis agents that the Phoenix division had, only approximately three weeks earlier, warned of al-Qaeda operatives in flight schools seeking flight training for terrorist purposes!"
"Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage a case?" wrote Rowley. After seeing their investigative efforts collide with roadblocks set up by FBI headquarters, frustrated field agents in Minneapolis bitterly joked that key officials in Washington "had to be spies or moles ... working for Osama bin Laden."
When THE NEW AMERICAN first examined the case for prior knowledge of the attack, there was little if any appetite on the part of the American public to examine the issues we raised. (See "Could We Have Prevented the Attacks?" and "Did We Know What Was Coming?" in our issues for November 5, 2001, and March 11, 2002.) Thanks to a series of dramatic disclosures, capped by Rowley's breathtaking memo, what was deemed unthinkable mere weeks ago is now considered obvious: Washington had detailed advance warning of the suicide hijack plot -- and failed to prevent it.
The Long Train of Errors
In our March 11th report, we concluded: "[T]he feds knew no later than June [2001] that an attack from bin Laden was coming. By August it had identified several key co-conspirators, and had one in custody." One active counter-intelligence agent told us that detailed information about the planned attack "came from some of [the Bureau's] most experienced guys.... In some cases, these field agents predicted, almost precisely, what happened on September 11th. So we were all holding our breath hoping that the situation would be remedied."
We described the case of bin Laden operative Hani Hanjour, who had come to the attention of the Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) while studying at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Phoenix. Concerned about Hanjour's inability to speak English, the international language of aviation, flight school officials contacted the FAA. After sending an observer to Hanjour's class, the FAA intervened -- by insisting that the flight school find an Arabic translator to help the terrorist understand his training.
Our cover story also pointed out that FBI agents in Minnesota asked for, but did not receive, a national security warrant to search Zacarias Moussaoui's residence. Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, was arrested while training at a flight school in Eagan, Minnesota. He had prompted misgivings on the part of his instructor by his evasiveness, belligerence, and complete unsuitability to be a pilot -- and for peculiar comments suggesting that he intended to use a jumbo jet as a bomb. His instructor called the FBI, warning that Moussaoui "wants training on a 747. A 747 fully loaded with fuel could be used as a weapon!"
Federal officials collected these substantial clues following pointed warnings that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network planned a spectacular attack on America. In our March 11th cover story we recalled Attorney General John Ashcroft's warning last June that "Americans are a high-priority target for terrorists." This roughly coincided with a remarkably detailed warning issued to airline industry personnel on June 23rd that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network posed an immediate threat to American civilian aviation.
These warnings came in the wake of a June 21st story carried by the Arabic-language MBC satellite television network in which a reporter who had interviewed bin Laden predicted: "a severe blow is expected against U.S. and Israeli interests worldwide. There is a major state of mobilization among the Osama bin Laden forces. It seems that there is a race of who will strike first. Will it be the United States or Osama bin Laden?"
Subsequent disclosures have validated our earlier reports -- and added some critical details:
* While on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on August 6th, President Bush received a CIA briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." That report predicted an attempt by al-Qaeda terrorists to hijack civilian jetliners to "bring the fight to America...."
* In July 2001, Kenneth Williams, a highly regarded 1.1-year veteran of the FBI's counter-terrorism division stationed in Phoenix, sent a memo to headquarters urging an investigation to determine if al-Qaeda operatives were studying at U.S. flight schools. Hani Hanjour, the al-Qaeda terrorist believed to have piloted American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, had studied at the Pan Am Flight School in Phoenix, where he had come to the attention of the FAA.
* In its May 15th story, the New York Times noted that Zacarias Moussaoui "had told the school's instructors that he wanted to train on a flight simulator trip from Heathrow Airport in London to Kennedy Airport in New York. Based on that information, one [FBI] agent speculated in an internal meeting last August that ... Moussaoui might have intended to crash a plane into the [World] Trade Center...."
* The Wall Street Journal reported on May 20th: "A week before the September 11th attack, investigators told the Federal Aviation Administration that student-pilot Zacarias Moussaoui had been arrested and was under investigation as a potential terrorist with a particular interest in flying Boeing 747s. But the agency decided against warning U.S. airlines to increase security." "Nothing [the FBI] told us was evidence that there was an imminent threat and as a result we issued no bulletins to the airlines or airports," explained FAA spokesman Scott Brenner. "All we knew was he was in jail. As a result of him being in jail, we did not think a threat was imminent."
* In a May 16th White House briefing, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice also insisted that the administration's foreknowledge was not specific: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile...."
In fact, an eerily prescient 1999 Library of Congress report on terrorism predicted that terrorists would make precisely that use of hijacked aircraft. Entitled The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist, and Why?, the report predicted: "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives ... into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House. [al-Qaeda terrorist] Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters." This would be done, the report speculated, in retaliation for the August 1998 cruise missile attack on al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan (timed to coincide with Monica Lewinsky's Grand Jury testimony). The report predicted that "al Qaida's retaliation [may take the form of] bombing one or more U.S. airliners with time-bombs. Yousef was planning simultaneous bombings of 11 U.S. airliners prior to his capture. Whatever form an attack may take, bi n Laden will most likely retaliate in a spectacular way..."
* With the newest revelations, media interest has been renewed in "Project Bojinka," an al-Qaeda plot to use jetliners as terrorist missiles. Philippine authorities discovered the existence of Project Bojinka in 1995. The FBI was fully briefed on Project Bojinka, as well as a December 1994 plot by Algerian terrorists to use a hijacked jetliner to attack the Eiffel Tower. The May 27th issue of Newsweek notes that a June 1994 "Pentagon-commissioned report conclude[d] that religious terrorists could hijack commercial airliners and crash them into the Pentagon or the White House." (Indeed, that same month saw publication of Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor, which concludes with a kamikaze strike on the U.S. Capitol building using a jumbo jet.)
Feudalist Priorities
As public outrage grew over these disclosures, Vice President Cheney insisted that "there wasn't anything out there that would have allowed us to predict what was going to happen" on September 11th. Speaking on the May 19th edition of NBC's "Meet the Press," Mr. Cheney expressed "a deep sense of anger that anyone would suggest that the president of the United States had advance knowledge that he failed to act on. I thought it was beyond the pale."
In a peculiar way, the vice president has a point. It is unreasonable to believe that the president "failed to act on" the detailed warnings he received. In fact, evidence exists that the administration took extraordinary precautions to deal with the threat of terrorism -- on behalf of high-ranking government officials.
A CBS story filed on June 26, 2001 described how Attorney General John Ashcroft, acting on a recommendation from his security detail, "was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines." When the network inquired about the policy, the Justice Department "cited what it called a 'threat assessment' by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term."
So even though the Americans who boarded the four doomed airliners on September 11th had been kept in the dark about the terrorist threat, the feds had already taken steps to keep Attorney General Ashcroft out of harm's way.
Stephen Push, whose wife died when terrorists plunged Flight 77 into the Pentagon, put the matter succinctly: "My wife, had she known, would not have taken that flight." Push's comments were offered in reaction to the news that the president had received warnings in August of a bin Laden plot to hijack American airliners. Continued Push: "It's shameful that they know as much as they did and didn't warn anyone." That is, they didn't warn anyone outside the privileged confines of the executive branch.
Extraordinary security measures deployed during the July 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, also underscore the Bush administration's awareness of a potential threat from bin Laden's suicide-bombers. The administration acted to protect itself and its partners among the international elite. In recent years, G-8 summits, like meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, have been besieged by "anti-globalization" protests - malodorous Marxist mobs whose actual purpose is to advance global socialism in the guise of opposing global capitalism. (See "Globalization's False Opposition" in our May 20th issue.) While security personnel in Genoa did make provisions for the leftist rent-a-mob, their larger concern was the possibility of a bin Laden strike.
The London Guardian reported on July 11th that "Italy has installed a missile defense system at Genoa's airport to deter airborne attacks during next week's G-8 summit.... A land-based battery of rockets with a range of nine miles and an altitude of 5,000 feet has been positioned...." With the missile battery in place, "unidentified planes, helicopters and balloons risk being shot down should they drift too close to the heads of state," warned the report.
Prior to the summit, Time magazine reported that "European security services are preparing to counter a Bin Laden attempt to assassinate President Bush at next month's G8 summit in Genoa, Italy. According to German intelligence sources, the plot involved Bin Laden paying German neo-Nazis to fly remote controlled-model aircraft packed with Semtex into the conference hall and blow the leaders of the industrialized world to smithereens." The plot was reportedly disclosed during interrogation of bin Laden-connected Islamic militants arrested in Milan and Frankfurt shortly before the summit.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini confirmed the terrorism warning, but offered a slightly different account of the alleged plot. In comments reported by the Italian news agency ANSA following 9-11, Fini recalled that "there was the possibility of an attack against the U.S. president using an airliner. That's why we closed the airspace and installed the missiles. Those who made cracks should now think a little."
This disclosure should provoke the following thought: In the months leading up to Black Tuesday, the Bush administration undertook extraordinary measures to protect its highest officials from precisely the kind of attack that claimed the lives of thousands of civilians on that terrible morning.
Who's Responsible?
Six days after 9-11, FBI Director Robert Mueller told reporters that "there were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country." In fact, the FBI, as we have seen, was given specific warnings about precisely the type of attack that took place on September 11th. In post-September 11th testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA Director George Tenet claimed that the Agency had known "in broad terms" that terrorists might be planning major operations in the United States, but he insisted that the reports lacked "texture" -- meaning enough specific information -- to stop what happened. But the Agency knew enough to warn National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on June 28th that a "significant al-Qaeda attack" in the near future was "highly likely" -- and to refine that warning into a prediction of a U.S. civilian aviation hijacking in the August 6th briefing for President Bush.
Given the extent of prior knowledge, why hasn't anyone been held responsible? Shouldn't CIA Director George Tenet, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and other high-profile figures in the intelligence community resign, as a matter of principle? And shouldn't Congress conduct in-depth inquests regarding the consummate failure of our "national security" establishment to protect our nation's security?
"Look at all of the investigations that have been held to examine the Enron collapse, a financial thing," Kathy Ashton, whose 21-year-old son Tommy was among the victims killed at the World Trade Center, commented to Newsweek. "Why, eight months later, are we not investigating the mass murder of 3,000 human beings on American soil by an enemy of the United States that was enabled to carry out this mass murder because many agencies in this country dropped the ball?"
Retired undercover agent Michael Levine knows the labyrinth of federal law-enforcement from the inside. For 25 years, Levine served as a "deep cover" specialist for four federal agencies, eventually becoming the most highly decorated undercover agent in the history of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Levine told THE NEW AMERICAN: "What happened last September is something that land a lot of my friends and contacts in federal law enforcement had seen coming -- and it's going to happen again, unless people are held responsible and the problems are fixed."
"Four years ago, on my 'Expert Witness' radio program, I brought together four of America's top covert operatives -- with a combined total of more than 100 years, frontline, international experience with CIA, FBI and DEA -- who had tried to warn America that there was 'massive ineptitude' in our nation's frontline defenses in the war on terrorism," Levine recalled to THE NEW AMERICAN. "The specific conclusion of our discussion was that unless Congress took immediate action America was vulnerable to terrorist acts that would 'defy the imagination.' The problems we discussed in that program -- such as a lack of qualified law enforcement personnel capable of handling human intelligence, a refusal by the FBI to share its intelligence with state and local police departments, and an emphasis on public relations over sound police work -- persist to this day."
Levine emphasized that if the FBI had been required to notify local police about the leads it had gathered before 9-11, "it is possible that the whole thing could have been prevented." Rather than deferring to the primary role of local police in criminal investigations, however, the national security establishment has reacted to Black Tuesday by absorbing even greater powers and devouring an even larger portion of the federal budget -- while carefully insulating its most prominent bureaucratic officials from hostile scrutiny. "Neither Congress nor the media is willing to hurt any of the bureaucratic egos in the FBI or CIA," Levine commented to THE NEW AMERICAN.
"But unless there's a thorough shake-up and the system is entirely cleaned out, we're going to get clobbered again -- and this time it may involve nuclear weapons."
On this point, Levine agrees with the federal officials he criticizes. In addition to the wave of disclosures of prior knowledge, Bush administration officials, including Vice President Cheney and FBI Director Mueller, warned the public that further terrorist attacks -- including Hamas-style suicide bombings -- are "inevitable." The unspoken but unmistakable message of these warnings is that our federal protectors are too busy defending us against the next attack to assess -- and hold officials responsible for -- the mistakes that led to the last one.
Moral Hazard
Governments benefit from a peculiar form of "moral hazard": They actually stand to benefit when they fail to carry out their sole legitimate function -- namely, to protect their citizens from murderous foreign aggression. Presiding over such disasters, ruling elites typically react: "We've failed -- so give us more power." Indeed, by piling up evidence of the pre-9-11 intelligence failure, The Powers That Be are depicting the national security system as suffering from inadequate powers and excessive decentralization. The remedy they prescribe is simple: Centralize law enforcement and intelligence in the interest of combating terrorism, and give it even more extensive powers.
Typical of this approach is S. 2452, the "National Homeland Security and Combating Terrorism Act of 2002," which would elevate the Office of Homeland Security to Cabinet status. In addition to exercising powers previously wielded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Cabinet-level "Homeland Security Czar" would "integrate the elements and goals of the [national counter-terrorism] Strategy into the strategies and plans of Federal, State, and local departments and agencies This would effectively make the head of Homeland Security an American "Interior Minister" -- the director of a nationalized police force.
Newsweek essayist Fareed Zakaria, former editor of the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs, offers another version of the emerging party line: What is needed, he opined in the May 27th issue, is "a domestic CIA": "We need a domestic intelligence capability. Every major power in the world has one.... Britain's M.I. 5 and France's Renseignements Generaux can tap phones at will.... In an age of terrorism, when the enemy will often be operating inside America, we can't remain blindfolded."
But the "blindfold" Zakaria refers to is, in a sense, a self-inflicted liability. As THE NEW AMERICAN has warned repeatedly, decades of agitation by radicals and subversive organizations climaxed in the mid-1970s with the abolition of federal, state, and local investigative organs that had carried out our counter-terrorism efforts. Prior to that, our nation was blessed with an effective, multi-layered, and constitutionally sound counter-terrorism apparatus.
Congressional investigative committees gathered evidence on international and domestic terrorist organizations, and conducted valuable security probes of the military and executive branch. With the assistance of the FBI -- which under Director J. Edgar Hoover was primarily an investigative body, rather than an embryonic national police force -- state and municipal police agencies maintained intelligence units that scrutinized subversive groups. And prior to the disastrous immigration reform law of 1965, the federal government took seriously its responsibility to protect the integrity of our borders.
Centralized law enforcement agencies invariably become tools of a ruling elite, protecting the regime rather than the public's rights and property. The intelligence "failure" that presaged 9-11 illustrates this principle at work: Given detailed warnings of impending terrorism, the national security establishment saw to the safety of the ruling elite, while leaving the public in the dark.
Giving new, unaccountable powers to the same federal government that failed us so spectacularly would be not only unwise and counterproductive, it would dishonor the memory of the Americans who died because of our government's delinquency. Citizens across our nation should demand that Congress -- not a make-work "bipartisan commission" -- conduct a genuine inquiry into prior knowledge. It should use its subpoena powers where necessary, and it shouldn't be afraid to ruin careers. We must also make it clear that we will not countenance any effort to reward Washington's culpable negligence by creating a "domestic CIA" or appointing an "Interior Minister."
Link to original article.
Evidence for Foreknowledge by US Officials
NOTE that his is excerpted from the source article: 9/11 and the American Empire: How Should Religious People Respond? by David Ray Griffin
"A central aspect of the official story about 9/11 is that the attacks were planned entirely by al Qaeda, with no one else knowing the plans. A year after the attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller said: "To this day we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot."[19] Since that time, federal officials have had to admit that they had received far more warnings prior to 9/11 than they had previously acknowledged. But these admissions, while raising the question of why further safety measures were not put in place, do not necessarily show that federal officials had specific foreknowledge of the attacks. One could still, as did the 9/11 Commission, accept the conclusion published at the end of 2002 by the Congressional Joint Inquiry, according to which “none of [the intelligence gathered by the US intelligence community] identified the time, place, and specific nature of the attacks that were planned for September 11, 2001.”[20]
Unfortunately for the official account, however, there are reports indicating that federal officials did have that very specific type of information. I will give two examples.
David Schippers and the FBI Agents: The first example involves attorney David Schippers, who had been the chief prosecutor for the impeachment of President Clinton. Two days after 9/11, Schippers declared that he had received warnings from FBI agents about the attacks six weeks earlier--warnings that included both the dates and the targets. These agents had come to him, Schippers said, because FBI headquarters had blocked their investigations and threatened them with prosecution if they went public with their information. They asked Schippers to use his influence to get the government to take action to prevent the attacks. Schippers was highly respected in Republican circles, especially because of his role in the impeachment of Clinton. And yet, he reported, Attorney General Ashcroft repeatedly failed to return his calls.[21]
Schippers’ allegations about the FBI agents were corroborated in a story by William Norman Grigg called “Did We Know What Was Coming?”, which was published in The New American, a very conservative magazine. According to Grigg, the three FBI agents he interviewed told him “that the information provided to Schippers was widely known within the Bureau before September 11th.”[22]
If Schippers, Grigg, and these agents are telling the truth, it would seem that when FBI Director Mueller claimed that the FBI had found no one in this country with advance knowledge of the plot, he was not telling the truth.
The Put Options: The government also would have had foreknowledge of the attacks because of an extraordinarily high volume of “put options” purchased in the three days before 9/11. To buy put options for a particular company is to bet that its stock price will go down. These purchases were for two, and only two, airlines--United and American--the two airlines used in the attacks, and for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which occupied 22 stories of the World Trade Center. The price of these shares did, of course, plummet after 9/11. As the San Francisco Chronicle said, these unusual purchases, which resulted in profits of tens of millions of dollars, raise “suspicions that the investors . . . had advance knowledge of the strikes.”[23]
For our purposes, the most important implication of this story follows from the fact that US intelligence agencies monitor the market, looking for signs of imminent untoward events.[24] These extraordinary purchases, therefore, would have suggested to intelligence agencies that in the next few days, United and American airliners were going to be used in attacks on the World Trade Center. This is fairly specific information.
These two examples imply the falsity of the Joint Inquiry’s statement that “none of [the intelligence gathered by the US intelligence community] identified the time, place, and specific nature of the attacks.” Indeed, one of the FBI agents interviewed by William Grigg reportedly said: “Obviously, people had to know. . . . It’s terrible to think this, but this must have been allowed to happen as part of some other agenda.”[25]
He was right. This would be terrible. There is considerable evidence, however, that the full truth is even more terrible---that the reason some US officials had foreknowledge of the attacks is because they had planned them."
Endnotes:
19. I quoted this statement in The New Pearl Harbor (henceforth cited as NPH), 69.
20. This statement is contained in the summary of the final report of the Joint Inquiry conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees, posted at http://intelligence.senate.gov/press.htm under December 11, 2002; it is quoted in NPH, 69.
21. See The Alex Jones Show, Oct. 10, 2001; “David Schippers Goes Public: The FBI Was Warned,” Indianapolis Star, Oct. 13, 2001; and “Active FBI Special Agent Files Complaint Concerning Obstructed FBI Anti-Terrorist Investigations,” Judicial Watch, Nov. 14, 2001.
22. William Norman Grigg, “Did We Know What Was Coming?” The New American 18/5 (March 11, 2002).
23. The San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 29, 2001. The 9/11 Commission tried to scotch these suspicions. Its most important claim is that it found that 95 percent of the puts for United Airlines were purchased by “[a] single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda” (The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition [New York: W. W. Norton, 2004], 499 note 130). But this argument is viciously circular. What is at issue is whether people other than al Qaeda knew about the attacks in advance, perhaps because they had helped plan them. But the Commission simply assumes that al Qaeda and only al Qaeda planned and knew about the attacks. Accordingly, runs the Commission’s logic, if the investors who purchased the put options in question had no ties with al Qaeda, they could not possibly have had insider knowledge. They were simply lucky.
24. UPI, Feb. 13, 2001; Michael Ruppert, “Suppressed Details of Criminal Insider Trading Lead Directly into the CIA’s Highest Ranks,” From the Wilderness Publications (www.fromthewilderness.com), Oct. 9, 2001.
25. William Norman Grigg, “Did We Know What Was Coming?” The New American (www.thenewamerican.com) 18/5: March 11, 2002.
Kevin Ryan's Presentation at Keene State College, New Hampshire
Below are the 56 slides from the presentation* Kevin Ryan gave at Keene State College in New Hampshire, on 9/12/09. The full presentation, with many more details are given in the transcript.
*This presentation was sponsored by The Monadnock 9/11 Truth Alliance.
Keene Sept 12 Final
View more presentations from Dainin.
*This presentation was sponsored by The Monadnock 9/11 Truth Alliance.
Carlyle, Kissinger, SAIC and Halliburton: A 9/11 Convergence
This is an important article written by Kevin Ryan, and posted by him in 911Blogger.com on 12/12/2009
Careful investigation leads one to notice that a number of intriguing groups of people and organizations converged on the events of September 11th, 2001.
An example is the group of men who were members of Cornell University’s Quill & Dagger society. This included Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Advisors Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley, Marsh & McLennan executive Stephen Friedman, and the founder of Kroll Associates, Jules Kroll. Another interconnected group of organizations is linked to these Cornell comrades, and is even more interesting in terms of its members being integral to the events of 9/11, and having benefited from those events.
After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (WTC), a company called Stratesec (or Securacom) was responsible for the overall integration of the new security system designed by Kroll Associates. Stratesec had a small board of directors that included retired Air Force General James Abrahamson, Marvin Bush (the brother of George W. Bush) and Wirt Walker III, a cousin of the Bush brothers. Other directors included Charles Archer, former Assistant Director in charge of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, and Yousef Saud Al Sabah, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family.[1]
Yousef Saud Al Sabah was also chairman of the Kuwait-American Corporation (KuwAm), which between 1993 and 1999 held a controlling share of Stratesec. The other owners of Stratesec were Walker and an entity controlled by Walker and Al Sabah, called Special Situation Investment Holdings (SSIH).[2] SSIH was said to form a group with KuwAm, and the group owned several other companies, including Commander Aircraft and Aviation General. In any case, the Kuwaiti royal family can be said to have benefited from 9/11 due to “The War on Terror” that removed Saddam Hussein from power. Of course, that was the second consecutive US war that Kuwait benefited from, the first being the 1991 Gulf War led by President George H.W. Bush.
Stratesec director James Abrahamson was President of Hughes Aircraft from 1989 to 1992, when Prescott Bush Jr. was helping Hughes lobby Bush’s brother, the US President, to lift sanctions on the Chinese government. Abrahamson became a director of Stratesec in December 1997.[3] He also co-founded a company called with the Pakistani-American, Crescent Investment Management (Crescent)Mansoor Ijaz. Crescent’s board of advisors included James Woolsey, the CIA Director for President Clinton who became a PNAC signatory and Booz Allen Hamilton executive.[4]
Mansoor Ijaz is the CEO of Crescent, and is a rare individual in that he claimed to have the ability to persuade several governments to extradite Osama bin Laden. After meetings with Clinton and his National Security Advisor Sandy Berger (who first introduced Woolsey to Clinton), Ijaz said that he could not convince them to work toward the extradition.[5] Additionally, Ijaz introduced the journalist Daniel Pearl, by way of a personal letter, to those in Pakistan who are believed to have been involved in his death.[6] Ijaz went on to become a Fox News correspondent, and he was a strong promoter of false claims leading up to the Iraq War, including WMDs and ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.[7]
Stratesec had contracts to provide security services for United Airlines, and Dulles Airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off on 9/11. Another client was Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where scientists were working on the development of nanothermite, a type of explosive material that has since been discovered in the WTC dust.[8,9]
The Carlyle Group
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 “up to the day the buildings fell down.”[10] McDaniel had previously worked for the United States Army Materiel Command (AMC), located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. But 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 for most of that time. When Barry McDaniel started at BDM, the company began getting a large amount of government business “in an area the Navy called Black Projects,” or budgets that were kept secret.[11]
BDM has had an interesting history. In 1990 it was a subsidiary of Loral Corporation, a company owned by Bernard Schwartz that was related to WTC security company Ensec, and Ensec director Terry McAuliffe.[12] Loral sold BDM to The Carlyle Group in 1992, at which time Frank Carlucci became chairman of BDM. Carlucci was a covert operative in his early career, and got his start in national politics through his old college roommate, Donald Rumsfeld, becoming Rumsfeld’s assistant at the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969. Carlucci went on to be named Deputy Director of the CIA and Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense.
During his first few years at Carlyle, Carlucci asked his friend Norman Augustine, later CEO of Lockheed Martin, if Carlyle could be included in a deal to buy the defense contractor LTV Corp.[13] That deal did not happen, but LTV was among the companies whose stocks were flagged for insider trading related to 9/11.[14,15] The FBI also 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 “ties to terrorism or other negative information,” an investigation into Stratesec was not pursued.[16] Putnam Investments, a subsidiary of WTC impact zone tenant Marsh & McLennan, was one of Stratesec’s investors.
During the time that Stratesec executive McDaniel worked for them, the Caryle Group began to add some very powerful people to their leadership group. One such figure 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 Reagan. Baker was also George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager and Secretary of State, and Bush’s White House Chief of Staff again in his last government position. 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 mafia and CIA-connected 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.[17]
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: “Mr. Baker will be forever remembered for his ultimately successful efforts to shut down the counting of votes in the 2000 Florida election.”[18]
On September 11, 2001, Baker was at the Ritz-Carlton 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.[19] Carlyle had been doing business with the bin Laden family since the early 1990s.
Baker’s grandfather started the law firm Baker Botts, which had offices in Saudi Arabia and which, after 9/11, represented the Saudi Arabian government in a lawsuit filed by families of those killed and injured in the attacks. The Saudi connection is interesting considering that Carlyle owned, through BDM International, the Vinnell Corporation, a mercenary operation that had extensive contracts in the Middle East since 1975, training the Saudi Arabian National Guard and also training Turkish security forces.
Vinnell was considered “by some experts to be a CIA front.”[20] Of course Frank Carlucci was Deputy Director of the CIA, and George H.W. Bush, who was Baker’s boss for many years, was in the CIA for a majority of his career.[21] Perhaps as a result, in 1995 Vinnell was reported to be one of the first targets of al Qaeda, in Saudi Arabia.
BDM, Vinnell’s parent company, was sold to TRW in 1997. Directors at BDM at the time included Carlyle Group executives and a former assistant to Henry Kissinger, Philip Odeen, who went on to become the CEO of TRW. Directors at TRW at the same time included Robert M. Gates, former Director of Central Intelligence and current Secretary of Defense. Arden Bement, who was appointed by George W. Bush to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) one month after the 9/11 attacks, had left his position as TRW Vice President in 1992, moving to Purdue University in the interim.
In 1998, at the time that Barry McDaniel moved to Stratesec, TRW merged with Lockheed Martin, the company that sub-contracted the WTC security job to Ensec.[22] Stratesec and Ensec, along with E.J. Electric and Electronic Systems Associates, worked to build the security system that was in place at the WTC when the buildings were destroyed. All four of these companies had done significant work in Saudi Arabia before working at the WTC.[23]
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.
SAIC
Marvin Bush was the cofounder of Winston Partners in 1993, a company that benefited greatly from the War on Terror. In 2000, Winston Partners invested heavily in a defense contractor called AMSEC that was 55% owned by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). It has been noted that SAIC was not only a major contributor to the NIST WTC report, it was also a company that had expertise in nanothermites, explosive materials which were found in the WTC dust as mentioned earlier.[24]
Founded by a scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory, SAIC had a long history at the WTC, having evaluated the basement levels of the buildings as a potential terrorist target in 1986.[25] Interestingly, the company was hired to investigate the 1993 bombing of the WTC, an event that was “remarkably like the one which” they had foreseen in 1986.[26] In fact, SAIC later boasted that -- “After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, our blast analyses produced tangible results that helped identify those responsible.”[27]
After 9/11, SAIC supplied the largest contingent of non-governmental investigators to the WTC investigation conducted by NIST. At the same time, “SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them.”[28]
SAIC was also a pioneer in the intelligence contracting business, as a founding member of the Security Affairs Support Association in 1979, along with companies like TRW, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed and Hughes Aircraft. A special taskforce of the Defense Science Board, which was led in 1993 by BDM’s Philip Odeen, recommended a vast increase in the outsourcing of intelligence, which all these companies ended up benefiting from greatly.
Today a majority of government intelligence work is outsourced, and SAIC is known first and foremost as an intelligence contractor. SAIC sells expertise about weapons, about homeland security, about surveillance, about computer systems, about “information dominance” and “information warfare,” and has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other private company in America. In fact, the company was paid huge sums to rebuild the NSA and FBI systems that supposedly failed before 9/11.[29]
SAIC is integral to the operations of all the major intelligence collection agencies, particularly the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the CIA. In fact, the CIA relies on SAIC to spy in its own workforce.[30] But SAIC has also played an integral role in the “War on Terror”, and was even responsible for capturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was SAIC staff and technology that “tease[ed] out crucial clues about Mohammed's activities from intercepted text messages that he sent to his al Qaeda operatives using as many as 20 different cell phones.”[31]
In an interesting coincidence, while the Carlyle/BDM subsidiary Vinnell Corp was training the Saudi Arabian National Guard, SAIC was training the Saudi Navy and bringing Saudi military personnel to company headquarters in San Diego for further study. Simultaneously, Booz Allen Hamilton was managing the Saudi Marine Corps and running the Saudi Armed Forces Staff College.[32] Vinnell now works with SAIC to train the Iraqi military.[33]
SAIC employees or board members have included Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former Deputy Director of CIA Bobby Ray Inman, former NYC OEM director Jerome Hauer, anthrax attack suspect Stephen Hatfill, former CIA Director John Deutch, and Lawrence B. Prior, a military intelligence officer and former TRW executive. Also formerly with SAIC, during the time of the planning and implementation of the 9/11 attacks, was Dick Cheney’s undersecretary of defense, Duane Andrews.
Duane Andrews considered Dick Cheney to be his personal, lifelong hero.[34] While he worked for Cheney, Andrews supervised Stephen Cambone, who went on to become Donald Rumsfeld’s “special assistant.” When Andrews left the Pentagon in 1993, he became chief operating officer for SAIC, where he supervised “much of the company's work on secret projects with defense and national security agencies.”[35] Andrews and Cambone both later hired on to the British intelligence firm Qinetiq, along with George Tenet. Coincidentally, The Carlyle Group was a major shareholder in Qinetiq as of February 2003.
Halliburton and BCCI
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. Certainly SAIC and other companies like Maurice Greenberg’s American International Group (AIG) are among those who profited the most after 9/11. But The Carlyle Group and oil 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 practical 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 the first President George Bush. Eagleburger also served as a director of Kissinger Associates, and on the board of Dresser Industries, where George H.W. Bush got his start. Others Cheney added to his team included Ray Hunt, of Dallas-based Hunt Oil, a longtime supporter of the Bush clan.
Cheney named Charles DiBona as one of his first appointees to the board of Halliburton. DiBona had been the Deputy Director of the White House Policy Office and Special Assistant to President Nixon in the early 1970s. DiBona was also an associate of WTC south tower impact zone tenant Joseph Kasputys, at the Logistics Management Institute, and DiBona and Kasputys had previously worked together during the Arab Oil Embargo as representatives of the emerging US Department of Energy (DOE). In fact, DiBona was one of the first US “Energy Czars.”
Like DiBona, Joseph Kasputys was in the US Navy for 20 years, and both of them retired as Commanders. They then both worked for the predecessor agencies of the DOE, and Kasputys worked for the Department of Defense as well. In 1975, Kasputys was appointed by President Ford to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce. As stated in the review of tenants in the towers, Kasptuys went on to run a large corporation called Primark that had offices in both towers on 9/11. One of the subsidiaries of Primark, The Analytical Sciences Corporation (TASC), worked with “so-called 'black' or top secret programs.” TASC also worked closely with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.[36]
After his government service, DiBona went on to lead the American Petroleum Institute, the petroleum industry's national trade association, in a position he held for nineteen years. During that time, DiBona was also a director of First American Bancshares, the American bank secretly owned by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).
BCCI is significant relative to 9/11 because it was involved in funding terrorists in the late 1980s and was linked to the Pakistani intelligence network, from which several alleged 9/11 conspirators came, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In fact, Time magazine reported, relative to BCCI, that -- "You can't draw a line separating the bank's black operatives and Pakistan's intelligence services."[37]
BCCI was also clearly connected to the mafia. Munther Bilbeisi, a notorious BCCI representative who was finally indicted for tax fraud in 1991, was associated with several mafia families in New Jersey, including the DeCavalcante and Luchese crime families.[38]
More importantly, there were indications that the CIA was involved in the founding of BCCI.[39] There were also connections between George H. W. Bush, who was CIA director during heyday, and BCCI’sGeorge W. Bush, through Harken Energy. But other US government representatives helped BCCI too, simply by not doing anything or allowing BCCI to make acquisitions in the US when they should have closed the operation down. For example, at the time that BCCI was first publicly suspected of wrongdoing, in 1988, both the US Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) were hesitant to investigate or prosecute, despite the fact that there were signs that both of these organizations already knew of BCCI’s fraud. When the Fed finally did take its first disciplinary action, it appeared that BCCI had a friend at the top, in that one member abstained from a critical vote. That member was the chairman, Alan Greenspan. Greenspan later explained that he had socialized with BCCI attorney and First American Bancshares President, Robert Altman.[40]
Kissinger and his associates
Henry Kissinger and his associates were also connected to BCCI in several ways, although he refused to share documents with the related Senate investigation. For example, Sergio Correa da Costa, who served as Brazil’s Ambassador to the US in the mid-1980s (note that Ensec was a Brazilian company), worked for Kissinger’s consulting company, Kissinger Associates, and was also a nominee shareholder for BCCI. And as early as 1971, Kissinger was linked to BCCI through the Pakistanis that arranged for his first visit to China.[41] At the time, Pakistrani agents who later became BCCI representatives were involved in fooling journalists into thinking was in KissingerPakistan instead of China. Kissinger returned to China many times and on occasion took very close friends and business associates along with him, most notably of Maurice GreenbergAIG, who traveled extensively with Kissinger.[42]
From 1985 to 1990, a client of Kissinger Associates, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) provided $4 billion in unreported loans to Saddam Hussein and his government in Iraq. Henry Kissinger was on the International Advisory Board of BNL during that same time period. Kissinger and his leading assistants Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger were investigated in this matter by the House Banking Committee just as the first Gulf War was ending.[43]
But 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 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.
L. Paul Bremer, the managing director at Kissinger Associates from 1989 to 2000, 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, PNAC member and Assistant Secretary of Defense on 9/11, hosted meetings with Pakistani ISI General Ahmed the week before 9/11, and had previously been a Special Assistant to Kissinger for eight years.[44]
Joseph Kasputys, south tower impact zone tenant, worked with Kissinger in the Ford Administration (along with Cheney, Greenspan, DiBona, and Rumsfeld).[45]
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 WTC security company Stratesec, was a Kissinger assistant for several years.
There was also Renato Ruggiero of Kissinger Associates. Mr. Ruggiero was present on 9/11 in the sense that he was on the International Advisory Board for Salomon Smith Barney (SSB), the company that occupied all but ten of the 47 floors in WTC building 7.[46] SSB even shared the all-important 23rd floor with the New York City OEM. More striking is the fact that Donald Rumsfeld was the chairman of that SSB board, and Dick Cheney was a board member as well. Rumsfeld served as chairman of the SSB International Advisory Board since its inception in 1999, but had to resign 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.
Another interesting coincidence is that Global Crossing was brought public in 1998 by SSB. Global Crossing was the company that Ensec director McAuliffe made a fortune on, when he purchased $100,000 in stock before the company went public and cashed out several years later for $18 million. Richard Perle was a lobbyist for Global Crossing.
On 9/11/01, Salomon Smith Barney’s parent company was Citigroup. Citicorp was the nation’s largest bank in 1990, but dropped half of its value from the summer to the winter of that year due to the S&L scandal. The company was saved by Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia, who pumped an initial $590 MM into the company in a deal brokered by The Carlyle Group. It is believed that the money, and more, came from BCCI as it was dissolving.[47]
Therefore, when Salomon Smith Barney was taken over by Citigroup in 1998, it was taken over in part by Saudi owners who were apparently redistributing the funding and networks of BCCI. Rumsfeld and Cheney entered the picture less than a year later, in May 1999. Jules Kroll, the founder of the WTC security design firm, and Rudy Giuliani, who was a former Department of Justice official, were responsible for investigating organized crime and BCCI, and were well aware of the extent of those networks ten years prior to that. Others like them, who brought the late indictments against BCCI, were leaders of the US Department of Justice.
Stratesec was at the WTC, and therefore, through Barry McDaniel and the Bush family, the influence of The Carlyle Group was present as well. In a sense, Rumsfeld and Cheney were also present at the WTC, because both of them were on the advisory board of Salomon Smith Barney. And SAIC was at the WTC on 9/11 too, as it was one of the first companies to show up at Ground Zero on that day. That fact will be discussed in the third installment of the essay series entitled Demolition Access to the WTC.
As for Kissinger, within hours of the events of 9/11 he was writing an opinion piece for the Washington Post. In it, he claimed to have thorough knowledge of what would be required to pull off such a coordinated set of attacks. Kissinger went on to inform the American public of what must happen next: “the destruction of the system that is responsible.”[48] No one can argue with that sentiment. But to this day, no one can accurately describe the terrorist system that was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, let alone destroy it.
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, SAIC 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.
Endnotes
1. Stratesec Incorporated, Notice of Annual Meeting of Shareholders, December 23, 2002
2. Securities and Exchange Commission document, Kuwam Corp · SC 13G · Stratesec Inc · On 2/19/98 http://www.secinfo.com/dS7kv.7v.htm
3. Stratesec Incorporated, Notice of Annual Meeting of Shareholders, December 23, 2002
4. Sourcewatch webpage for Crescent Investments, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Crescent_Technology_Ventures_...
5. Sourcewatch webpage for Mansoor Ijaz/Sudan, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mansoor_Ijaz/Sudan
6. Chaim Kupferberg, There’s Something About Omar: Truth, Lies, and The Legend of 9/11, Centre for Research on Globalization, October 21, 2003, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/KUP310A.pdf
7. Mansoor Ijaz, Hand in Glove: Iraq and al Qaeda, National Review Online, February 18, 2003, http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzlhNDE4YTkyODA2NGE1ZjJlY2UwMjBmNWQ...
8. Danen, W.C., Jorgensen, B.S., Busse, J.R., Ferris, M.J. and Smith, B.L. "Los Alamos Nanoenergetic Metastable Intermolecular Composite (Super Thermite) Program," 221st ACS National Meeting, San Diego, CA, 1-5 April 2001.
9. Niels H. Harrit, et al, Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, The Open Chemical Physics Journal, Vol 2, 2009, doi: 10.2174/1874412500902010007, http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/000000...
10. History Commons page for Stratesec, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=stratesec
11. Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of The Carlyle Group, Wiley publishers, 2003, p35
12. Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition Access To The WTC Towers: Part Two – Security, Scoop Independent News, August 13, 2009, found at 911Truth.org, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090813150853871
13. Dan Briody, The Iron Traingle
14. FBI Memorandum released by 9/11 Commission, "FBI Briefing on Trading", Prepared by: Doug Greenburg, 8/18/03, http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00269.pdf
15. Jim Hoffman, Insider Trading: Pre-9/11 Put Options on Companies Hurt by Attack Indicates Foreknowledge, 911Research.wtc7.net, http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/stockputs.html
16. FBI Memorandum released by 9/11 Commission, “FBI Briefing on Trading”, Prepared by: Doug Greenburg, 8/18/03, http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00269.pdf
17. Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA & George Bush: Corruption, Greed and abuse of power in the nation’s highest office, S.P.I. Books, 1992
18. Letter from John Conyer to former President Jimmy Carter, April 11, 2005, http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/ltrtopotuscarter.pdf
19. Sourcewatch page for James A. Baker III, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=James_Addison_Baker_III
20 Ian Cobain, Firm was 'cover for CIA', Times Online, May 14, 2003 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article1132056.ece
21. George H.W. Bush’s exploits in the CIA, and his many connections to the most troubling events of American history, are described in Russ Baker's book Family of Secrets, Bloomsbury Press
22. Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition access to the World Trade Center towers: Part one – Tenants, 7-09-09, Distributed via the Unanswered Questions Wire and found at 911Truth.org, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090713033854249
23. Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition Access To The WTC Towers: Part Two – Security
24. Kevin R. Ryan, The Top Ten Connections Between NIST and Nanothermites, Journal of 9/11 Studies, July 2008, http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/Ryan_NIST_and_Nano-1.pdf
25. History Commons, Context of '(Mid-1986): Report Rates Vulnerability of Public Areas of WTC to Terrorist Attack as ‘Very High’', http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a86saicreport
26. New York State Law Reporting Bureau, In The Matter of World Trade Center Bombing Litigation, 2004 NY Slip Op 24030 [3 Misc 3d 440], January 20, 2004, http://www.courts.state.ny.us/reporter/3dseries/2004/2004_24030.htm
27. Science Applications International Corporation, Annual Report 2004 http://www.saic.com/news/pdf/Annual-Report2004.pdf
28. Charlie Cray, "Science Applications International Corporation," CorpWatch, http://www.corpwatch.org/section.php?id=17 ; cf. Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow."
29. Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Washington's $8 Billion Shadow, Vanity Fair, March 2007, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703
30. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire, Simon and Schuster, 2008
31. Paul Kaihla, US: In The Company Of Spies, CorpWatch, May 1st, 2003, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=7892
32. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire, Simon and Schuster, 2008
33. The Center for Public Integrity, Winning Contractors: U.S. Contractors Reap the Windfalls of Post-war Reconstruction, October 30, 2003, http://projects.publicintegrity.org/wow/report.aspx?aid=65
34. Laura Rozen, The First Contract, The American Prospect, March 30, 2007, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=12612
35. Bruce V. Bigelow, No. 2 executive at SAIC resigns after 13 years, The San Diego Union-Tribune, February 2, 2006, http://ww.uniontrib.com/uniontrib/20060202/news_1b2saic.html
36. The Funding Universe web page for Analytic Sciences Corporation, http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Analytic-Sciences-Corpo...
37 Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, Scandals: Not Just a Bank, September 2, 1991, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973732-4,00.html
38. Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, The World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire, Houghton Mifflin, 1992, pp 181, 286, 359, 365, 432
39. Ibid
40. Ibid
41. Ibid, p 141
42. Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography, Simon & Schuster, 1992, p 739
43. Kissinger Associates, BNL and Iraq, Pinknoiz, http://www.pinknoiz.com/covert/iraqgate04.html
44. Kevin R. Ryan, Mahmud Ahmed's itinerary from his Washington DC visit the week of 9/11, 911blogger.com, 11/27/2009, http://www.911blogger.com/node/21978
45. See the following daily diary of President Ford for typical meetings that all these people shared, http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/diary/pdd750718.pdf
46. List of tenants in Seven World Trade Center, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tenants_in_Seven_World_Trade_Center
47. Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle
48. Henry Kissinger, Destroy the Network, The Washington Post, September 12, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentI...
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