What Really Happened on 9/11

http://blog.abovetopsecret.com/wecomeinpea...e_real_ver.html

http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2006/09/...html&frame=true

The Controlled Demolition of the World Trade Center, 9/11/02 and "National Security Breach"
As Presented to the US Senate Oversight Committee, and others

AFFIDAVIT:

"The destruction of the World Trade Center, as witnessed on September 11th, 2001, was the result of an elaborately planned, Controlled Demolition." This is the conclusion of thousands of witnesses and hundreds of forensics experts. Given due consideration, these findings imply, that *US MILITARY* personnel are responsible for crimes that led to the murder of an estimated 3,000 innocent Americans.

As a living witness to these actions, as I have described herein, I do hereby officially charge those responsible, both for the execution, and for the '9/11 cover-up,' with the crimes of: Conspiracy, Treason, Genocide and Murder. Additional criminal charges also apply.

My sole objective in composing this document is to publicize the *initial phase* of this covert operation at the World Trade Center, dating back to 1987.* While I was employed by the WTC Architects of Record; Emery Roth and Associates, AIA, New York City, where I discovered both physical samples and written documentation concerning potential hazards with the physical integrity of the Twin Towers. After witnessing these events, I publicly expressed my concern for a thorough public safety-inspection of the Twin Trade Towers, to other architects and contractors.

To date, not one of our staff, nor the 40-or so full-time employees of the WTC building engineering team has spoken-out publicly, or provided a testimony under oath. A thorough investigation of these parties, named herein, will provide disclosure as to precise nature of these events as I have described. This shall serve as a complete legal record of my direct exposure to these *pre-existing physical, materials conditions* at the Twin Trade Center, that collectively support the *financial motivation* which had prompted the New York Port Authority, AND operatives within NORAD, (or NSA) to engage in this seditious act of "espionage."

No similar information has been provided by any other witness(es) that I am aware of, and no individuals have provided details that would serve to dispute my claims in any way. I remain hopeful that others, more closely connected with this property, and ideally, those having access to the City of New York Buildings Departments, will continue with the points of research as suggested by the information in this document.





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Tom-Scott Gordon, 9/11/2001 Legal Deposition, contd., page 2:

Before these events, I was required to pledge a formal, sworn "Oath of Allegiance, to honor and defend the United States of America, from enemies, both foreign and domestic," -prior to my gaining access to the WTC properties, and while working at "Level 'D' Security-access" at the "USAF, Falcon-CSOC facilities, better known as the "NORAD Earth Monitoring Station," in Colorado Springs. I was allowed direct exposure to the workings of these facilities, while photographing their Chain of Command in action. It was explained that;

"Neither the Pentagon, nor the FAA, nor the Whitehouse can by-pass the established, hierarchical data-control mechanisms installed there. This involves a two-tier, rotating 'On-controls' staff, with over 21 'live' operators, who witness and provide a permanent record of,- Not just the Territorial United States, but Every aircraft and satellite currently under motive power in the world! These operative systems can not be moved to the Pentagon, at the whims of the Joint Chief of Staff, as outlined in the CSOC's Permanent Charter."

- Therefore, I must state, unequivocally and emphatically;

To 'override' the U.S. Military's fully redundant, multi-node global Security systems was an essential component of this mission! Doing so, is categorically *IMPOSSIBLE.* Numerous and simultaneous breaches of our Nation's Strategic Defenses can not be dismissed as either a matter of system failure, or substitute foreign, (Mossad) software.

Official admissions of advance intelligence warnings and insider trading attest that there is NO Viability in the claim that the "WAR GAMES" had served to "complicate, or delay our response units," which may have resulted in the "stand-down" orders issued that day!

In publishing this document, I am acting in accordance to the letter of my officially sworn, "United States of America's Patriotic Oath."

Today, All American citizens must accept these same responsibilities.

The U.S. Government must be held accountable as we demand a thorough and transparent public investigation of September 11th. The integrity of our "National Security Policies and Procedures" depends upon the subsequent trial and punishment of those responsible. My testimony, herein, should be included into the official records concerning these case proceedings, as I am a living material witness to these crimes.

Whereas, these 'Charter conditions,' (as I have generally outlined them here;) "DO NOT, and SHALL NOT enable the opportunity for ANY acting "President of the United States, or his Assigns," to randomly usurp the power, and/or Chain-of-Command that would enable any direct control over our Nation's Strategic Defenses, or Policies."







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Tom-Scott Gordon, 9/11/2001 Legal Deposition, contd., page 3:

I was informed of all of this by a "Command-Shift Sergeant," as he and I witnessed the gathering of "The U. S. Joint Chiefs of Staff,' an event that is tense to say the least! "Only Medical and Food-services Personnel were allowed to move from room-to-room during these proceedings." So we sat and talked. This criteria, as he explained, "has been instated for the safety and welfare of every US Citizen, both here and abroad." Immediately following the JCS meeting, (lasting just under two hours,) it was announced over the loudspeakers that,- "ALL Civilian Personnel must Depart at this time!"

This occurred on the same day that the Denver Post announced, on their front-page, top News headline: "President Selects Site for Star Wars". Yet, the entire Falcon facilities, including numerous out-buildings, was completely operational at that time.

The following statements are completely true and faithful to the actual events, as I am best able to describe them.

*All critically sensitive photographs have been withheld from public view.*

A complete, descriptive narrative of my experience at the World Trade Center follows this cover-letter.



__*_________________________________ Date: _7/7/2006____
by: Thomas-Scott Gordon, prior Architectural Photographer;
Emery Roth and Associates, AIA, New York City
Current residence: 2510 Hidden Valley Dr.
Little Rock, AR 72212 (501) 225-1323



Witnessed by: ___**____________________ Date: ___7/7/2006____


Little Rock, Arkansas, USA



* I have just received a notice that suggests a confirmable date of '1987' not 1989 for the completion of building #7. I am dyslexic and I must apologize for this critical error, and I am making this date correction now.* Signatures were provided on the official filings. A link to a .PDF of the actual physical document is available for download at this site, by request only. -You're either with US, or you are working for the New World Order!



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I.) Why The World Trade Towers­
"Must come down!"



A BRIEF TECHNICAL SUMMARY, WHY:

The structural integrity of the massive World Trade Center Towers was contingent upon the combined -value of *both* the internal, perimeter STEEL columns and the adjoining ALUMINIUM fascia-panels.

Over the years, the process known as 'galvanic corrosion' had structurally degraded these buildings beyond repair. Supporting statements to this effect had been compiled by the engineers and delivered to the building owners during the time-frame that I have described. Subsequently, both Mayor Giuiliani's Office, and the New York Port Authority, had allegedly received an order for the buildings to be completely dismantled, by 2007."

Through the continual effects of wind-sheer and [flex-fatigue] this process had eroded the bolt-holds at roughly floors #7 through #25, that fulcrum-point where the lateral pressures were inherently sustained. Photographs, taken after the disaster, reveal that it was only those lowest exterior column sectional groupings which do not appear to have shown severe de-coupling of the joinery, therein. This is evidenced by the bright 'shiny,' cage-like forms that served to contain the bulk of the physical contents among a burning rubble.

Physical evidence verifies that an incendiary 'explosive' material, such as 'thermate,' had come into contact with numerous Steel structural members throughout the entire structures. This has now been verified by independent research scientists from actual samples that had been collected from the site. Witnessed by their locations within the burning pyre, these supporting columns had fallen from the upper-most portions of the two building core-sections.

*My views concerning the chronic construction "flaws" in the World Trade Towers, follows at the end of this document, in section IV. I do not wish to assign 'blame,' nor do I feel the need for me to address these physical matters with any degree of scientific analysis. Sadly enough, the end result of simple human error has now brought the entire world to a state of heightened alarm, to say the very least. I strongly encourage you to cross-reference these issues, as recorded in countless independent and government source documents pertaining to the critical stress-dynamics, and galvanic properties inherent in aluminium alloys.

I also witnessed numerous, "highly suspicious" activities that took place at WTC, building #7, shortly after the structure was erected, and thus concurrent to the events that I have described. Mr. Silverstein was involved from the onset! *Virtually no information concerning the floor-plans, or the construction-phase* has been collected for anyone to do any real investigation into Building #7!

I realize this is a leading statement, but I will challenge any NYC architect to accept the chance to disprove it. After -all, I am the ONLY current spokesperson for the original architects, once officially recognized as the World's foremost design firm. -Put that feather in your cap, Mr. Robert A. M. Stern!



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II.) T. S. Gordon's Inside-experience...

>>> For the complete story, please go to part II. (This page repeats)>>>

(A page of related photographs also follows.)

this link gives a 404

http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2006/09/....php&frame=true


Sergeant Lauro "LJ" Chavez, 9/11 Whistle Blower Speaks Out in Cincinnati Post.

Thought I'd share this rant with all you Veterans - It kills me when
idiots don't do their homework...

Greetings Mr. White,

I felt it necessary to follow up to a recent story that
was published in Cincinnati Post. It was the 1 in 3 believe 9-11
conspiracy theory. I must admit that at first I was overwhelmed with
joy that our local paper was actually starting to have real journalism
and talk about real issues. Then I read the story and it was a total
debunk to make the actual people around the world who feel there was
something not right about 9-11, to look like over reacting
conspiracy theorists.

Im utterly outraged. My 9 year old daughter could have done more
research in this, as opposed to just trying to throw the publics ideas
and feelings out. Is this not what journalism is supposed to represent
- real issues? There have been many, many polls done in major cities
that actually ask people how they felt about the 9-11 tragedy. One
such poll is called the Zogby poll; which was offered in New York City.

Honestly I could care less what is done with this letter, but I feel
that I should speak my mind and Ill tell you some things that I have
not told many people at all. From 1995 till 2002 I was a Sergeant in
the United States Army. Not only this, but I was stationed at United
States Central Command, which is located at MacDill AFB in Tampa
Florida. I was on active duty when 9-11 happened. In the days prior to
the tragedies, we were involved in many exercises. Some of these
exercises included the scenarios of hijacked planes crashing into, our
building the world trade center, the White House, Sears Tower, and the
Pentagon. These drills or exercises as we called them, where
classified Top Secret. Having a Top Secret rated clearance I was
dumbfounded that they would ever push a training exercise above the
level of Secret. Over my 8 years in the Army, I had participated in
many exercises around the world, none of which were ever classified
over the Secret level.

Ill start by saying a few months prior it was announced by President
Bush that Dick Cheney would be heading up operations over NORAD our
North American Aerospace Defense Command. Along with many of my peers,
we were shocked. Over the years, if you research NORAD, it has always
been under the command of a Military officer. It was done this way
because the defense of this country has always been in the hands of
such. Prior to the months before 9-11 this was all of the sudden
changed. Like I said, if you research NORAD and the command structure
you will find that it was imposed long ago that the military should be
in control of the order to scramble planes in the defense of American
air space. For some strange reason, Bush changed this and gave that
power to a civilian person on his Staff team yes I know, very
interesting.

Back to the morning of 9-11; the command was busy with this training
exercise. We were instructed to bring all our gear in to prep for a
mock (staged) deployment to the Middle East. On the morning of 9-11 I
had been on base prepped and ready to go since about 0400am. During my
time at the base that morning, they were setting up barriers around
the command and placing gun posts on the roofs. When I questioned one
of the security officers about the machine gun and shoulder fired
rockets on the roof I was given the answer its a precaution for a
plane attempting to crash into this building.

So, I was standing in the SCIF (Secure Compartmented Information
Facility), which is basically this underground bunker command post for
USCENTCOM, when the first plane hit. We were watching the fly patterns
of all the planes on the aerospace grid. This contained not only all
commercial flights at the time, but all military flights, and fake
enemy planes that were supposedly put on there for the exercise. Many
of the planes sent to intercept the fake blips were scrambled from
Andrews which is an air defense AFB for the East Coast. They were sent
across the US and left very few planes to defend the capital. After
the first plane hit the tower we were all in disbelief. After the
initial shock was over, our questions were what are the odds this
could happen for real, during a training exercise thats covering the
same scenario? We were all at wits end. Then to top all of this off,
Cheney gave NORAD the order to stand down scrambling jets to
intercept. A few moments later tower 2 was hit. Only after the
Pentagon was hit, did he give the orders to scramble the jets to
intercept the plane bound for the White House.

All of this is very interesting to me it sickened me so that I left
the Army after coming back from an 8 month deployment to Afghanistan.
There were just too many questions that no one could answer, too many
things that did not make sense. How is it possible to have a training
exercise about planes hitting the WTC and then actually have planes
hit the WTC? This kind of thing just does not happen unless its
pre-planned. What reason would there be to have this type of exercise
on that morning, Ill tell you if you are placing fake planes all
over the north American aerospace grid then you have no way of
knowing which planes are real and which are fake. Then to thicken the
plot you put a civilian in charge of NORAD so that the military does
not have the power to initiate the order for jets to be scrambled to
intercept. If the military would have still commanded power over NORAD
they would have scrambled jets because they would have simply
followed the procedures that had been in place for this type of
situation for years and years and scrambled jets.

To delve even further, as Im standing there watching the towers
collapse, next to me is one of my good friends and a former commander
of the Army Corps of Engineers. He is a demolitions expert. He was
even more surprised than me. When the towers collapsed he kept saying
this isnt right, this isnt right. When I asked him what he was
talking about he told me that steel buildings dont fall down that
way. Even if they are struck by objects; he went on to say that in
theory if the top 10 floors were hit, then possibly just that part of
the building would fall over and off, but the rest would remain
standing. When I asked him, not understanding the implications of
demolitions, he told me that it looked as if they were brought down by
controlled demolitions. I was utterly amazed, but after he said that
it did sort of appear that way.

Ill tell you what gave this whole thing away was building 7. If
they would not have brought this building down, then they probably
could have gotten away with it all. It was the most amazing site I
have ever seen. Not only was it amazing, it bore reality to the truth
of the situation something was not right here. Now, Im going to
tell you all I have learned, but I urge anyone to just spend 1hr
reading about this incident on the internet and learning the facts.
There have been numerous scholars, numerous physicists that have
analyzed this over and over and over again. And they all come to the
same conclusion, something does not add up. Building 7 was never
directly hit by a plane. Now it was stated that a piece of one of the
towers fell onto the side of building 7 and caught one of the floors
on fire. A few moments later we all witnessed the most perfect example
of controlled demolitions to ever be caught on camera. It could not be
proved that building 7 fell due to fire. My friend and I standing
there in the SCIF watching in uninterruptible awe with all those other
military members; watching building 7 fall perfectly onto its
footprint; my friend stating that it was beautifully done.

We all knew then we all realized that this was not some group of
unorganized cave dwellers from Afghanistan orchestrating a perfect hit
on American soil. It was impossible. Shortly after the Pentagon was
struck I called my close friend that I went to Basic Training with.
All civilian lines were down and I had to contact him via STU which is
a black line classified phone system. He did not answer, but one of
his soldiers did. I asked if SGT Worthington was ok and he said yes. I
asked if the plane did severe damage and he told me I didnt see any
plane. Then when I finally got to speak to my friend, he started
acting strange saying he could not talk about the incident over this
line. He was shipped off overseas a few weeks later and I never to
this day have had the chance to speak with him.

The Pentagon crash tape was released a few months back after 5 years.
You need to watch that tape no where can you see a plane strike the
Pentagon. This is because it was not a plane. I cannot tell you
exactly what hit the Pentagon, but its unanimous; it was definitely
not a plane. I can assure you that there is more than one CCTV camera
around the Pentagon. On September 25, 4 days before my 25th birthday,
I deployed to Afghanistan. Over the 8months I was there I had never
seen one intelligent Afghani soldier. They were all tattered and
scrawny and could barely shoot their weapons straight. This does not
mean that there were not men that could fly a plane, but after what I
saw it was extremely hard to believe they could be taught to fly a
sophisticated piece of aeronautical equipment.

My point Mr. Editor is that I spent 8 months in combat watching my
brothers die in the name of Freedom. I killed, in the name of Freedom
and to this day my brothers are still being killed for this
illusionary war we call the War on Terror. Where the enemy has no face
where there is no clear objective. In this War, anyone with ill
thoughts toward this country can be defined as a terrorist. Well, I
guess that includes me in this group as well as everyone else who
questions the events of 911, because we all hold ill thoughts toward
the leadership of this country and I say the real terrorists in this
world sit right in the heart of its capital.

I have bled for this country and would do so again in a heart beat
but only to protect its people, the true Americans that live here. I
would never again offer my life under the leadership whose real goal
is oil and money. The same ones who staged the most perfect
illusionary tactic in our history that was a pretext to a war on
terror that would never again go away. Their goal was to scare the
American public into submission making it easier for the world powers
to do their evil and get away with it.

Now that may sound like a typical conspiracy theorist I guess, but how
many do you actually talk to? Im not here saying that Aliens came
down and used laser beams to bring the towers down or control the
planes that were flown; Im telling you as a sane, logical and
intelligent individual, something does not add up about this. Earlier
this year I was watching the Discovery channel. They have a PBS
program called Rebuilding America. This particular episode was about
the WTC building 7. They interviewed Larry Silverstein (the owner)
about building 7. He stated on national TV the following which is the
direct quote and can be found here: http://www.wtc7.net/pullit.html

I remember getting a call from the, ER, fire department commander,
telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain
the fire, and I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the
smartest thing to do is pull it." And they made that decision to pull
and we watched the building collapse.

I actually have the program recorded and you are more than welcome to
come by my house and watch it. He actually stated this on national TV.
I was so amazed that I almost shat myself. I could not believe he
actually stated this on a nationally broadcasted TV program. You can
ask any person who has done controlled demolitions please interview
someone they will tell you it takes weeks of planning to do this. We
are expected to believe that this was facilitated and planned in a
matter of hours for building 7, while the damn thing was on fire you
have got to be kidding me. If that is not enough to make you believe
something was fishy well then nothing will ever do.

Since that time there have been numerous scholars, some of which have
actually been publicly broadcasted on CSPAN. The latest program was
called: Theories about 9-11. American Perspectives and you can watch
this (which I advise you do) per this link: Theories about 9-11
(American Perspectives) or you can go to www.c-span.org and look under
their video/audio section to find this title. Its an outstanding
video and encompasses the thoughts of not only the American public,
but also Dr Steven Jones from Brigham Young University a physics
professor that actually received a piece of the rubble from the WTC.
Not only does he profoundly agree that building 7 was a controlled
demolition he can prove it. After he analyzed the piece of debris
they found; there were large traces of sulfur and Thermite found. If
you did not know, Thermite is a chemical compound found in many
explosives including C4 which I have used many times in the Army. It
leaves a distinct smell and identifiable residue upon explosion. Dr
Jones found large traces of this from the rubble.

Sir, there are many things that I never wanted to know for one that
the government that is supposed to be caring for the American people
could be corrupt. This was the last thing that I ever wanted to be
true but its time we wake up and smell the "expletive deleted" because its
permeating throughout the American public and we are all starting to
realize whats really going on. If your news station actually did a
similar Zogby type poll here in Cincinnati, I think you would find
that a lot more than 1/3 of the people believe this. I know tons just
in this area.

I could literally write you 100 pages of truths that could prove that
9-11 was an inside job, but Id probably just be passed off as some
crazy conspiracy theorist. Instead I want to give you the tools to
look for yourself because the quest for wisdom is a journey we must
all take alone. So, to you I add the following links and if you just
spend a small portion of your day reading and watching some of this
footage, who knows you may wake up and stand along side the rest of us
in utter amazement.


Respectfully,

SGT Lauro Chavez
United States Central Command

Thanks to the Internet, one of the few freedoms we have left, these
truths can be sent to the public. Thank God we dont have to rely on
news media to get this information out to everyone!

This is only about a 10th of my list of sites. Enjoy; and when you are
sick with the truth of things, let me know and Ill buy you a beer to
ease your nerves.

Loose Change Volume 2
(An outstanding documentary done about 911 that includes news reports
and live footage of the tragedy and finds that some things are not
what they seem)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=15...&q=loose+change


Official Pentagon Plane Crash Video
(You tell me where the plane is)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5658198482624505213


Silverstein saying we decided to pull the building
The collapse of building 7
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6...=WTC+building+7

Another video of bldg 7
(In this you can see the widely noticeable crinkle that is common in
controlled demolitions)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=91...3634920&q=wtc+7


Watch the following in sequence:

1. Showing the Thermite at work.
(In this video you can see the molten concrete and metal spewing out
of the WTC. This is what happens when a Thermite type explosive is
used to cut down steel pillars)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=54...6774&q=thermite

2. Then watch this video
(it shows the spot where the molten metal is coming out the same
spot where the building crinkles and collapses)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=47...6355623&q=wtc+7





Misc Links for research:

http://www.911truth.org/

http://www.st911.org/

http://www.infowars.com/

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/augus...esintensify.htm

Zogby Poll Results
http://www.911truth.org/images/911TruthZog...FinalReport.htm



As you can see, Im not your typical conspiracy theorist I
actually have a good job! I thought at first I might send you this
from an anonymous email address, but you know what now you know Im
not just some stupid kid.
Thanks for taking the time to read.

Respectfully,

Lauro "LJ" Chavez
Director of Information Security
Domin-8 Enterprise Solutions
513-492-5831
lchavez@domin-8.com
www.domin-8.com
As the guardians of technology; security shall be our shield and
vigilance our sword

The Chavez letter is fascinating, especially the part about what occurred while he was on active duty on 9/11.

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/ri...ad_hamilton.htm

-- --
RICE OK'D CLAIM OF 'SAFE AIR' AFTER 9/11

By SUSAN EDELMAN, HEATHER GILMORE and BRAD HAMILTON

September 24, 2006 -- Condoleezza Rice's office gave final approval to the infamous Environmental Protection Agency press releases days after 9/11 claiming the air around Ground Zero was "safe to breathe," internal documents show.
Now Secretary of State, Rice was then head of the National Security Council - "the final decision maker" on EPA statements about lower Manhattan air quality, the documents say.

Scientists and lawmakers have since deemed the air rife with toxins.

Early tests known to the EPA at the time had already found high asbestos levels, the notes say. But those results were omitted from the press releases because of "competing priorities" such as national security and "opening Wall Street," according to a report by the EPA's inspector general.

The chief of staff for then-EPA head Christie Todd Whitman, Eileen McGinnis, told the inspector general of heated discussions, including "screaming telephone calls," about what to put in the press releases.

The notes come from a 2003 probe into public assurances made on Sept. 16, five days after the 9/11 attacks. They tell how a White House staffer "worked with Dr. Condoleezza Rice's press secretary" on reviewing the press releases for weeks.

Whitman said through a spokeswoman Friday that she never discussed her press releases directly with Rice. She also defended her collaboration with the White House.

Now-retired Inspector General Nikki Tinsley told The Post her auditors tried to question the head of President Bush's Environmental Quality Council, but "he would not talk to us."

Calls and e-mails to Rice were not returned.

http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2006/09/...html&frame=true

Video: Olbermann traces Bush Admin's pre-9/11 actions

David Edwards
Published: Thursday September 28, 2006

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has taken a critical look at actions the Bush Administration took before 9/11 against Osama Bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorist network.

In a recent interview on Fox News, Bill Clinton challenged the media to ask the Bush Administration to explain what actions were taken to protect America against terrorist threats between the 8 months from the time Bush took office until the attacks on September 11, 2001.

The 9/11 Commission's summarized the pre-9/11 actions of the Bush administration by writing, "[Bush] did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the Attorney General or whether Rice had done so. We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. ...Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period. Domestic agencies did not know what to do, and no one gave them direction. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI’s efforts. The public was not warned."

In the following video report Keith Olbermann follows the timeline from when Bush took office until the tragic attacks of 9/11. A transcript follows the video.

TRANSCRIPT

OLBERMANN: As the Bush administration continues to try to deflect questions about whether its war in Iraq is encouraging terrorism, it has managed to score a victory in Congress about how it wants to deal with the people it has detained as terrorists, though victory at what cost remains to be seen for all of us, the House voting mainly on party lines, passing the detainee bill today, despite warnings from Democrats that it fails to meet judicial standards, and will likely get struck down in the Supreme Court for being unconstitutional.

The bill says it is up to the president to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Convention, an action interpreted by many international legal scholars as being by itself a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The Senate is expected to pass the bill later this week.

In a sense, we are all still detainees in the wake of 9/11, but there is some unrest among the inmates, being asked what steps he took to stop al Qaeda, President Clinton freeing many to ask what steps, if any, his successor took in the most critical time before the plot.

Yesterday, President Bush declined to address Mr. Clinton‘s remarks, saying, “We‘ve already had the look back this and look back that.” But if we are to look forward with any clarity, it is important to know the facts about where we have been and how we got where we are.

Thus tonight, a special investigation. Mr. Clinton is not in office, Mr. Bush is. His policies determine how the U.S. fights al Qaeda, so it is important that we understand how he has done so in the past. Comparing the two presidents is valid, necessary, to illuminate the capacities of the office. Mr. Clinton said it plainly, he failed to get bin Laden. Mr. Bush has acknowledged no such failure.

But while it has become conventional wisdom, although debunked by the 9/11 report, that Mr. Clinton dropped an offer from Sudan to hand over bin Laden, it is rare to hear anyone discuss whether similar but real feelers were ever extended to Mr. Bush. And it is, we suspect, even more rare to see this tape of the Bush White House addressing reports of such feelers in February 2001, after the government knew al Qaeda had attacked the U.S.S. “Cole.”

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, February 27, 2001)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Taliban in Afghanistan, they have offered that they are ready to hand over Osama bin Laden to Saudi Arabia if the United States drops its sanctions, and the—they have a kind of deal that they want to make with the United States. Do you have any comments (INAUDIBLE)?

ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS Secretary: Let me take that and get back to you on that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: There is no record of any subsequent discussion on that matter.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, of course, responded to President Clinton by defending the Bush record. “We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda,” she said.

Our goal in this report is to rise to Mr. Clinton‘s challenge and assess the record of Mr. Bush‘s efforts against al Qaeda in his first eight months in office.

We begin with Rice‘s claim that Clinton left no strategy to fight al Qaeda.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, January 20, 2001)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: So help me God.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congratulations.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN (voice-over): On January 25, 2001, five days after Mr. Bush took office, counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke sent Rice a memo, attaching to it a document entitled “Strategy for Eliminating the Threat of al Qaeda.” It was, Clarke, wrote, “developed by the last administration to give to you, incorporating diplomatic, economic, military, public diplomacy, and intelligence tools.”

Clarke‘s memo requested a follow-up cabinet-level meeting to address time-sensitive questions about al Qaeda. But President Bush had downgraded counterterrorism from a cabinet-level job, so Clarke now dealt instead with deputy secretaries.

RICHARD CLARKE, FORMER COUNTERTERRORISM CZAR: It slowed it down enormously, by months. First of all, the deputies‘ committee didn‘t meet urgently in January or February.

OLBERMANN: Why the delay? Rice later tried to explain.

RICE: America‘s al Qaeda policy wasn‘t working because our Afghanistan policy wasn‘t working, and our Afghanistan policy wasn‘t working because our Pakistan policy wasn‘t working. We recognized that America‘s counterterrorism policy had to be connected to our regional strategies, and to our overall foreign policy.

OLBERMANN: That, although Clarke‘s January 25 memo specifically warned, “Al Qaeda is not some narrow little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy. By proceeding with separate policy reviews on Central Asia, etc., we would deal inadequately with the need for a comprehensive multiregional policy on al Qaeda.”

Clarke‘s deputies‘ meeting came in April, when, he says, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz insisted the real terrorism threat was not al Qaeda, but Iraq.

By July 16, the deputies had a proposal for dealing with al Qaeda, a proposal, Clarke says, was essentially the same plan he gave Rice five months earlier, and it still had to go to the principals, the cabinet secretaries.

CLARKE: But the principals‘ calendar was full, and then they went on vacation, many of them, in August, so we couldn‘t meet in August. And therefore the principals met in September.

OLBERMANN: Although the principals had already met on other issues, their first meeting on al Qaeda was not until after Labor Day, on September 4, 2001.

But what were Mr. Bush and his top advisers doing during this time? Mr. Bush was personally briefed about al Qaeda even before the election, in November 2000. During the transition, President Clinton and his national security adviser, Sandy Berger, say they told Bush and his team of the urgency of getting al Qaeda.

Three days before President Bush took office, Berger spoke at a passing-the-baton event, which Rice attended.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, January 17, 2001)

SANDY BERGER, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: With (ph) survivors of the U.S.S. “Cole” reinforced the reality that America is in a deadly struggle with a new breed of anti-Western jihadists. Nothing less than a war, I think, is fair to describe this.

OLBERMANN: Eight days later, Clarke sent Rice the strategy Clinton had developed for retaliating in the event that al Qaeda was found to have been behind the previous October‘s attack on the U.S.S. “Cole.” The next day, the FBI conclusively pinned the “Cole” attack on al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush ordered no military strike, no escalation of existing Clinton measures. Instead, he repeated Clinton‘s previous diplomatic efforts, writing a letter to Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf in February and another on August 4.

Until September 11, even when Mr. Bush was asked about the “Cole,” an attack carried out on water by men in a boat, he offered a consistent prescription for keeping America safe, one he reiterated upon taking office.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: To protect our own people, our allies and friends, we must develop and we must deploy effective missile defenses.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Democrats, who controlled the Senate, warned that his focus was misplaced.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CARL LEVIN (D): I‘m also concerned that we may not be putting enough emphasis on countering the most likely threats to our national security and to the security of our forces deployed around the world, those asymmetric threats, like terrorist attacks on the U.S.S. “Cole,” on our barracks and our embassies around the world, on the World Trade Center.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: He was not alone. The executive director of the Hart-Rudmann Commission‘s request to brief Bush and Cheney on the terror threats they had studied was denied.

On February 26, 2001, Paul Bremer said of the administration, quote, “What they will do is stagger along until there‘s a major incident, and then suddenly say, Oh, my God, shouldn‘t we be organized to deal with this?”

According to the 9/11 Commission report, even bin Laden expected Bush to respond militarily to the “Cole” bombing. Quote, “In February 2001, according to a source, bin Laden wanted the United States to attack, and if it did not, he would launch something bigger.”

The most famous warning came in the August 6 presidential daily briefing, reporting “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

According to the 9/11 report, “Bush did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the attorney general, or whether Rice had done so. We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the president and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. Tenet does not recall any discussions with the president of the domestic threat during this period. Domestic agencies did not know what to do, and no one gave them direction. The borders were not hardened, transportation systems were not fortified, electronic surveillance was not targeted against the domestic threat, state and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI‘s efforts. The public was not warned.”

Explanations after the fact suggested a lack of familiarity with the recent history of terrorism.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

RICE: I don‘t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center.

(Subtitle: 1994, France disrupts plot to fly a jet into Eiffel Tower.)

DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There wasn‘t any

way then we could have anticipated what was about to happen, of course, in

on 9/11.

(Subtitle: 1995, Philippines uncovers plot to fly planes into Pentagon and World Trade Center.)

(Subtitle: September 1999, U.S. study: Al Qaeda might crash planes into Pentagon.)

(Subtitle: Spring 2001, New York City trial testimony: Bin Laden sending agents to acquire planes.)

BUSH: These terrorists had burrowed in our country for over two years. They were well organized. They were well planned. They struck in a way that was unimaginable.

(Subtitle: July 2001, FBI told of Zacarias Moussaoui‘s interest in flying jumbo jets.)

(Subtitle: September 2001, FBI memo: Moussaoui could fly something into the World Trade Center.)

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

OLBERMANN: On September 10, 2001, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California requested a meeting with Vice President Cheney to press the case for aggressive counterterrorism measures. She is told Mr. Cheney will need some time to prepare first, six months.

That same day, the NSA intercepted a communique from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia, stating, “Tomorrow is zero hour.” That communique was only translated into English on September 12.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OLBERMANN: It appears now that the operative word in the phrase “We could not have anticipated” was the word “we.”

COUNTDOWN‘s look at what the Bush White House did to take the threat of terrorism seriously on its watch, and what it did not do, from Rice‘s claim this week they were handed no al Qaeda strategy from the Clinton administration, to President Bush‘s reaction to the confirmation that al Qaeda indeed was behind the attack on the U.S.S. “Cole.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ11i6fi7KQ&eurl= (8 minutes)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,...2382788,00.html

Focus: Chilling message of the 9/11 pilots
A video shows two of the world’s most infamous terrorists joking and laughing while filming their ‘death wills’ at Osama Bin Laden’s lair in Afghanistan. The journalist and author Yosri Fouda explains the terrible significance of the new find

See the video from noon today

Two bearded young men laugh and joke for the camera. They appear relaxed, well groomed, intelligent; they might be high-achieving students quietly celebrating an exam success. They look at a piece of paper and laugh some more.

What is so funny? Certainly not the piece of paper. There is Arabic script on it. Easily decipherable is the word “al wasiyyah”. This means “the will”.

It is the handwritten last testament of Ziad Jarrah, the lighter-haired and better-looking of the two young men. A well educated, middle-class Lebanese, he has been studying in Germany. So has his dark-haired companion, Mohammed Atta, also middle class and university educated, but born in Egypt. Atta has his will, too. Unsmiling, both men read them to camera.

These images are part of a videotape, nearly an hour long, that was filmed at Osama Bin Laden’s lair in Afghanistan 6½ years ago. They are revealed today for the first time, and they are a missing chapter in the searing story of the attacks on America on September 11, 2001.

Atta led the team of 19 suicide attackers and flew American Airlines flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Jarrah piloted United Airlines flight 93. His assigned target was Capitol Hill, but the plane crashed.


ATTA and Jarrah have never been pictured together before. Indeed, a key element of their tradecraft was that they steered clear of each other. They were leading figures in the September 11 story, not only because they flew the planes but also because they apparently had everything to live for. Unlike most of the other hijackers, who were mainly provincial Saudi fundamentalists, Atta and Jarrah fitted easily into western society.

To the Germans who knew them in Hamburg they seemed entirely normal. The tape explains this mistake. It would be hard to look less homicidal — until the camera pulls back and reveals that Atta is sitting next to an AK-47.

So the tape not only fills a gap in the story of September 11 but also provides chilling proof of the difficulty of fighting Islamic terrorism: these two “normal”, happy, unthreatening individuals turned out to have an explosive effect on the history of the 21st century.

The unedited video was passed to The Sunday Times through a previously tested channel. On condition of anonymity, sources from both Al-Qaeda and the United States have confirmed its authenticity. It has no sound — and lip-readers have failed to decipher it, according to a US source — but the images speak loudly for themselves.

The tape not only features Atta and Jarrah. It also gives a rare and intriguing sight of Bin Laden with his inner court.

It opens with 100 or so Al-Qaeda hardcore members sitting on the ground in the open air, obviously expecting something to happen. Among them are several children.

A very tall man surrounded by three armed bodyguards arrives in a sedate, presidential manner. It is Bin Laden, dressed in white from head to toe with an all-enveloping, light brown robe. He looks serene as he makes his way to a makeshift podium and beings to speak into a microphone.

The date recorded on this section of the video is January 8, 2000. That makes the occasion Eid ul-Adha, the end of Ramadan.

There are a few recognisable faces among the audience, including Ramzi Binalshibh, Atta’s Hamburg flatmate who was later to become the co-ordinator of the September 11 attacks. And among the bodyguards is Abu Jandal, who was the only one with the authority to put two bullets in Bin Laden’s head if he was about to fall into enemy hands.

In the background are the tall mud-red walls of an impressive compound. It is clear that the location is part of a complex of about 80 buildings called Tarnak Farm in the desert near Kandahar airport. It was Bin Laden’s clan base during his Afghan sojourn — where he lived with his family and the inner core of Al-Qaeda.
American intelligence knew all about Tarnak Farm. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, “CIA officers were able to map the entire site, identifying the houses that belonged to Bin Laden’s wives and the one where he himself was most likely to sleep”.

Less than two years before the video was recorded, the CIA had a plan to work closely with some of the local tribes to grab Bin Laden as he slept. It was a clear-cut, well rehearsed “perfect operation”, according to Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA Bin Laden unit at the time. But it was never executed and there is still controversy in America about who cancelled it.

TEN days after Bin Laden’s Eid speech, according to the date on the film, Atta and Jarrah read their martyrdom wills to the camera. This proof of their presence in Afghanistan at that time is just about the final main piece of the jigsaw: Atta, the man who decided zero hour on September 11 is for the first time on video, getting ready to record his “martyrdom” will.

Investigators have pieced together most of Atta’s life from his childhood as the son of a lawyer in Giza, northern Egypt, to the moment he boarded flight 11 — except for an unexplained absence from Hamburg in early 2000. The date on the tape perfectly corresponds with this.

Those who have been closely following the story had little doubt where Atta had been. Binalshibh told me, “Afghanistan, what else?” when I asked him during a secret meeting four years ago. But in their painstaking efforts to find the proof that connected the dots, US investigators and, especially, their German counterparts, have struggled with little more than circumstantial evidence and presumed facts.

This played nicely into the hands of conspiracy theorists, both in the Muslim world and in the West. Now the investigators have the proof, and only the flakiest of anti-American fantasists can go on claiming that Bin Laden, Atta, Jarrah and co had no hand in September 11.

We can now even reveal Atta’s itinerary. On November 29, 1999 he boarded Turkish Airlines flight TK1662 from Hamburg to Istanbul, Turkey, where he changed to flight TK1056 bound for Karachi, Pakistan. From there he would have crossed into Afghanistan by road, most probably through Quetta. On the return journey, he left Karachi on February 24, 2000 by flight TK1057 to Istanbul where he changed to flight TK1661 to Hamburg. Five months later he entered the United States to start flight training.

Unedited, the extraordinary footage also gives us a glimpse into the superficially ordinary character of the man who would later spearhead the devastating terrorist attack.

Wearing western clothes — black trousers and a dark brown, zip-collared sweater with zigzag stripes — Atta appears uncomfortable putting on a typical Pashtun hat.

He gives a how-do-I-look glance at the camera. The hat goes off, on, off and he throws it away with wry smile. Ready now. He crosses his legs and picks up his handwritten will.

Cool, gathered and deliberate, Atta reads to camera for 10 minutes before the tape cuts to a collector’s item: Atta and Jarrah together for the first time on camera.

With his stylish glasses, the handsome Lebanese is wearing a white, Saudi-style robe but appears to have western clothes on underneath.

Smiling, laughing and exchanging remarks, they discuss Jarrah’s will as he holds it — a superb set-up shot. Jarrah then gets his seven-minute exclusive appearance to tell the camera his last words.

THE significance of even a single frame of any of the September 11 pilots in Afghanistan could not be overestimated, let alone the sudden appearance of nearly 6,000 frames of the two most important and most puzzling hijackers.

Distinctively the black sheep of the whole lot — plotters and hijackers — Atta and Jarrah came from the two most liberal Arab countries, both from the heart of their respective communities, both from middle-class families, both intelligent, pleasant and trusted wherever they went, and both with impressive educational track records. Jarrah went to a Christian school in Beirut; Atta advanced his English at The American University in Cairo.

Then they both had ambitions beyond what they thought their countries could offer. They both went to Germany; Atta in 1992 to end up preparing a masters degree in city planning; and Jarrah in 1996 to end up preparing his in aeronautical engineering.

Again, they both could not cease to impress. So much so that Professor Dittmar Machule, who taught Atta at the Technical University in Harburg, a quiet suburb of Hamburg, still cannot understand what happened to the brilliant student he used to pick to fill in for him in seminars whenever he was busy.

While they lived in Hamburg, Atta and Jarrah were never meant to be seen together in one place at the same time, almost certainly on instructions.

Atta lived with other members of the Hamburg cell in a small flat while Jarrah was kept apart in a nicer part of Hamburg, living with a girlfriend and drinking alcohol. Yet in Afghanistan they appear at ease in other’s company.

When in mid-2000 they travelled to Florida, they were separate once again — even though they enrolled at flying schools that stood virtually next to each other.

If the appearance of this video solves one mystery, the big question about both Atta and Jarrah is still with us: how on earth did such impressive young men with everything to live for develop such a mindset? Neither was mad and neither was brainwashed. If anything at all they were both the antithesis of such naive and easy explanations.

One would confidently argue that someone of the calibre of Mohammed Atta would have been incapable of being brainwashed.

When Atta taped his will, he was not yet the leader of the hijackers. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the organiser of the plot, had earmarked two other men — Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar — as his spearhead and had sent them to flight school in California. But he quickly changed his mind.

His protégés failed to live up to his expectations. One flight instructor actually called them “dumb and dumber”.

Much more importantly, Atta’s exceptional abilities had just been discovered.

The perfect soldier was here and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could not have asked for more. I would even argue that had not Atta accidentally appeared on Khalid’s radar, the “aeroplanes operation”, as it as known to Al-Qaeda, may never have stood a chance of success.


Yosri Fouda is the chief investigative reporter for Al-Jazeera Television Pictures: The Sunday Times Tarnak Farm, near Kandahar, where Mohammed Atta’s video was shot, has a special place in the history of Al-Qaeda: it was once Osama Bin Laden’s personal kingdom within Afghanistan.


Exclusively Arab, it was home for Bin Laden’s wives and children, as well as for the elite fighters being trained for special operations. And, as we now know, for a few weeks in early 2000 it was home to Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers.

The farm, which covered about 100 acres, lay on a patch of desert about three miles south of Kandahar airport. It had originally been constructed by the Afghan government as an agricultural co-operative.

A mud-brick wall was built 10ft high to create a compound; inside there were about 80 one and two-storey buildings, including dormitories, storehouses, a small mosque and a building that Bin Laden converted into a medical clinic for his family and followers.

US intelligence knew Bin Laden, already a wanted terrorist, used Tarnak as his base, and in spring 1998 the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center began working on a plan to capture him at the compound, partly with the help of Afghan tribal fighters.

Afghans scouted and mapped the farm, and the CIA photographed it from space. The plan called for about 30 fighters to assemble at a staging post before driving to a second position a few miles from Tarnak.

From there the main raiding party would walk to the farm, arriving at 2am and avoiding minefields by crawling through drainage ditches. A second group would make its way towards the front gate, taking out the two guards as the main party attacked the group of huts where Bin Laden’s wives slept.

The plan was to bundle Bin Laden into a Toyota Land Cruiser and drive him to to a cave complex 30 miles away already stocked with food and water.

However, getting the plan accepted at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, was not straightforward. It was known that dozens of women and children lived in the compound, and security chiefs feared there would be many casualties.

By June 1998, much to the disappointment of the field officers responsible for devising the plan, nobody at a senior level within the CIA seemed willing to support it. Nor was there any support within the White House.

The plan was called off shortly afterwards. CIA abandoned plan to snatch Bin Laden from Afghan farm

Atta's journey to mass murder

September 1, 1968 Born in Kafr el-Sheikh in the Nile delta, Egypt

October 1986 Joined Cairo University to study town planning; graduated in 1990

July 24, 1992 Arrived in Germany on a cultural exchange programme
November 23, 1992 Registered for a master’s degree in urban planning at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg

End 1997 Thought to have travelled to Afghanistan for the first time, staying close to the compound of Osama Bin Laden near Kandahar

November 1, 1998 Moved into an apartment in Germany with other members of what later became known as the Hamburg cell. Many Al-Qaeda members lived in this apartment at various times; the September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed visited repeatedly. Ziad Jarrah, the flight 93 pilot with whom Atta is pictured above, moved close by at about the same time

November 29, 1999 Atta flew from Istanbul to Pakistan. From there he travelled to Afghanistan

January 2000 At Bin Laden’s Tarnak Farm he is filmed laughing and joking with Jarrah while filming his last will and testament

March 2000 From Germany, Atta contacted 31 US flight schools to discuss pilot training

June 3, 2000 Entered US for the first time

July 2000 Atta enrolled at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida. Jarrah trains at a flight school nearby

November 2000 Both earned their instrument certificates from the FAA

December 29, 2000 Atta practised on a Boeing 727 simulator in Miami

January 4, 2001 Atta flew to Spain to co-ordinate with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key Al-Qaeda planner, returning to America a week later

April 11 2001 Atta rented an apartment in Coral Springs, Florida, and assisted with the arrival of other hijackers

July-September 2001 Atta made eight or nine flights around America, some to meet other hijackers, some to carry out reconnaissance

August 28, 2001 Atta and other hijackers buy flight tickets for September 11

The other hijackers

Nineteen men hijacked four planes. They acted in teams of five, except on United Airlines 93, which had four hijackers led by Jarrah

Fifteen of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates. Atta came from Egypt, while Jarrah came from Lebanon. Only Atta and Jarrah were highly educated

Four weeks before the attacks Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, had been arrested, ostensibly on immigration charges, after the FBI became suspicious about his pilot training

He later denied knowing about the September 11 attacks, but did plead guilty to conspiring to hijack planes. He is serving life in a US prison

It is thought that 18 of the 19 terrorists recorded video wills. Before this weekend only five had come to light and none from the four pilots
The attacks and the toll

United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center towers on the morning of September 11, 2001. A total of 2,602 people died in the towers and on the ground

American Airlines flight 77, carrying 64 people, crashed into the Pentagon shortly afterwards: 125 people died on the ground

United Airlines flight 93 is thought to have been heading for Capitol Hill. But it crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Forty crew and passengers died

There were no survivors from any of the planes, which were carrying 265 people. In total, the September 11 attacks are thought to have killed 2,973 people, although some others are still listed as missing

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6093000282.html

wo Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice
Sunday, October 1, 2006; Page A17


On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.

Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.

For months, Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism policy, including specific presidential orders called "findings" that would give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden. Perhaps a dramatic appearance -- Black called it an "out of cycle" session, beyond Tenet's regular weekly meeting with Rice -- would get her attention.

Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence he'd seen. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming. He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.

He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one."

But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.

Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined "Bin Laden Threats Are Real."

Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden.

The United States had human and technical sources, and all the intelligence was consistent, the two men told Rice. Black acknowledged that some of it was uncertain "voodoo" but said it was often this voodoo that was the best indicator.

Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies.

As they all knew, a coherent plan for covert action against bin Laden was in the pipeline, but it would take some time. In recent closed-door meetings the entire National Security Council apparatus had been considering action against bin Laden, including using a new secret weapon: the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, that could fire Hellfire missiles to kill him or his lieutenants. It looked like a possible solution, but there was a raging debate between the CIA and the Pentagon about who would pay for it and who would have authority to shoot.

Besides, Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place.

Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. "Adults should not have a system like this," he said later.

The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork on the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about.

Philip D. Zelikow, the aggressive executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and a University of Virginia professor who had co-authored a book with Rice on Germany, knew something about the July 10 meeting, but it was not clear to him what immediate action really would have meant. In 2005 Rice hired Zelikow as a top aide at the State Department.

Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, but she just didn't get it in time, Tenet thought. He felt that he had done his job and had been very direct about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA.

Black later said, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."

Editor's Note: How much effort the Bush administration made in going after Osama bin Laden before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, became an issue last week after former president Bill Clinton accused President Bush's "neocons" and other Republicans of ignoring bin Laden until the attacks. Rice responded in an interview that "what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washingt...int&oref=slogin

October 1, 2006
9/11 Panel Members Weren’t Told of Meeting
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 — Members of the Sept. 11 commission said today that they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a White House meeting in July 2001 at which George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, about an imminent Al Qaeda attack and failed to persuade her to take action.

Details of the previously undisclosed meeting on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward.

The final report from the Sept. 11 commission made no mention of the meeting nor did it suggest there had been such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice, now secretary of state.

Since release of the book, “State of Denial,” the White House and Ms. Rice have disputed major elements of Mr. Woodward’s account, with Ms. Rice insisting through spokesmen that there had been no such exchange in a private meeting with Mr. Tenet and that he had expressed none of the frustration attributed to him in Mr. Woodward’s book.

“It really didn’t match Secretary Rice’s recollection of the meeting at all,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to President Bush, in an interview on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”

“It kind of left us scratching our heads because we don’t believe that’s an accurate account,” he said.

Although passages of the book suggest that Mr. Tenet was a major source for Mr. Woodward, the former intelligence director has refused to comment on the book.

Nor has there been any comment from J. Cofer Black, Mr. Tenet’s counterterrorism chief, who is reported in the book to have attended the July 10 meeting and left it frustrated by Ms. Rice’s “brush-off” of the warnings.

He is quoted as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.” Mr. Black did not return calls left at the security firm Blackwater, which he joined last year.

The book says that Mr. Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting — calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House — because he wanted to “shake Rice” into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings that summer about a terrorist strike. Mr. Woodward writes that Mr. Tenet left the meeting frustrated because “they were not getting through to Rice.”

The disclosures took members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by surprise last week. Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel.

In interviews Saturday and today, commission members said they were never told about the meeting despite hours of public and private questioning with Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, much of it focused specifically on how the White House had dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.

“None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,” said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former House member from Indiana. “I’m deeply disturbed by this. I’m furious.”

Another Democratic commissioner, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said that the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. Woodward’s book and agreed that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.”

“This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about,” he said, referring to the July 10, 2001, meeting.

He said he had attended the commission’s private interviews with both Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice and had pressed “very hard for them to provide us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive branch” about terrorist threats before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and now a top aide to Ms. Rice at the State Department, agreed that no witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting at the White House, nor described the sort of encounter portrayed in Mr. Woodward’s book.

Mr. Zelikow said that it was “entirely plausible” that a meeting occurred on July 10, during a period that summer in which intelligence agencies were being flooded with warnings of a terrorist attack against the United States or its allies.

But he said the commissioners and their staff had heard nothing in their private interviews with Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black to suggest that they had made such a dire presentation to Ms. Rice or that she had rebuffed them.

“If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it would have been a huge thing,” he said. “Repeatedly Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had transpired in some of those meetings.”

Democratic lawmakers have seized on Mr. Woodward’s book in arguing that the Bush administration bungled the war in Iraq and paid too little attention to terrorist threats in the months before Sept. 11.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS that there had been “rumors” of such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice in the summer of 2001.

Mr. Woodward’s book, he said, raised the question of “why didn’t Condi Rice and George Tenet tell the 9/11 commission about that? They were obliged to do that and they didn’t.”

http://911blogger.com/node/3378#comment-76232
-- -- --
The 9/11 Commissioners have reacted to Bob Woodward's disclosure that CIA director George Tenet briefed Condie Rice about the imminent attack by saying "no one told us!"

Uh, turns out someone did, but they didn't mention it in the 9/11 Commission Report. As McClatchy Newspapers [ http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15662785.htm ] puts it:

"The independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission was given the same “scary” briefing about an imminent al Qaida attack on a U.S. target that was presented to the White House two months before the attacks, but failed to disclose the warning in its 428-page report.

Former CIA Director George Tenet presented the briefing to commission member Richard Ben Veniste and executive director Philip Zelikow in secret testimony at CIA headquarters on Jan. 28, 2004, said three former senior agency officials.

Tenet raised the matter himself, displayed slides from a Power Point presentation that he and other officials had given to then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, and offered to testify on the matter in public if the commission asked him to, they said.

In the briefing, Tenet warned "in very strong terms" that intelligence from a variety of sources indicated that Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization was planning an attack on a U.S. target in the near future, but didn't provide specifics about the exact timing or nature of a possible attack, or about whether it would take place in the United States or overseas, said the former senior intelligence officials, all of whom requested anonymity because Tenet’s presentation was classified.

However, said one of the officials, "the briefing was intended to 'connect the dots' contained in other intelligence reports and paint a very clear picture of the threat posed by bin Laden."


The 9/11 Commission needs a new excuse for failing to document Tenet's presentation to the White House. Let's see . . . "the dog ate our homework"?

George Washington at http://www.911blogger.com/ :

The evidence that the government has covered up and whitewashed what really occurred on 9/11 is overwhelming.

For example, the former director of the FBI says there was a cover up by the 9/11 Commission.

And the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials lied to the Commission, and considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements, yet didn't bother to tell the American people ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...00.html?sub=new ).

Indeed, the co-chairs of the Commission now admit that the Commission largely operated based upon political considerations ( http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file...&type=printable ).

9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton says "I don't believe for a minute we got everything right", that the Commission was set up to fail, that people should keep asking questions about 9/11, that the 9/11 debate should continue, and that the 9/11 Commission report was only "the first draft" of history.
[ See CBC Windows video linked at the original).

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/#42666

9/11 Conspiracy Friday
Posted by Evan Derkacz on October 6, 2006 at 11:30 AM.

Will Bunch writes that recent revelations put the pre-9/11 actions of several Administration officials into an even more suspicious light:


On July 26, 2001 - 47 days before the Sept. 11 attacks - CBS News reported that Ashcroft was flying expensive charters rather than commercial flights because of a "threat assessment" by the FBI. CBS said, "Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term." Newsweek later reported that on Sept. 10, 2001, "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns."


Did either Ashcroft or the Pentagon have advance information about a 9/11-style attack and, if so, why wasn't this shared with the American public?

Well, recent revelations from the Woodward book -- namely that Rice was briefed on the high probability of a threat on 7/10 [VIDEO], weeks before the infamous August 6, Presidential Daily Briefing (Al Qaeda Determined to Attack In U.S.) -- make the above question shine like a new dime.

Bunch then points to this report from McClatchey (formerly Knight-Ridder):


WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.


The State Department's disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don't remember the warning.


One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a "10 on a scale of 1 to 10" that "connected the dots" in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again.

Powerpoint presentation on Al Qaeda threat --> Sudden change in flying habits of those briefed --> 9/11 --> Ugh. (Attytood)

http://www.wpi.edu/News/Transformations/20...ring/steel.html
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The "Deep Mystery" of Melted Steel

There is no indication that any of the fires in the World Trade Center buildings were hot enough to melt the steel framework. Jonathan Barnett, professor of fire protection engineering, has repeatedly reminded the public that steel--which has a melting point of 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit--may weaken and bend, but does not melt during an ordinary office fire. Yet metallurgical studies on WTC steel brought back to WPI reveal that a novel phenomenon--called a eutectic reaction--occurred at the surface, causing intergranular melting capable of turning a solid steel girder into Swiss cheese.

Materials science professors Ronald R. Biederman and Richard D. Sisson Jr. confirmed the presence of eutectic formations by examining steel samples under optical and scanning electron microscopes. A preliminary report was published in JOM, the journal of the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. A more detailed analysis comprises Appendix C of the FEMA report. The New York Times called these findings "perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation." The significance of the work on a sample from Building 7 and a structural column from one of the twin towers becomes apparent only when one sees these heavy chunks of damaged metal.

A one-inch column has been reduced to half-inch thickness. Its edges--which are curled like a paper scroll--have been thinned to almost razor sharpness. Gaping holes--some larger than a silver dollar--let light shine through a formerly solid steel flange. This Swiss cheese appearance shocked all of the fire-wise professors, who expected to see distortion and bending--but not holes.

A eutectic compound is a mixture of two or more substances that melts at the lowest temperature of any mixture of its components. Blacksmiths took advantage of this property by welding over fires of sulfur-rich charcoal, which lowers the melting point of iron. In the World Trade Center fire, the presence of oxygen, sulfur and heat caused iron oxide and iron sulfide to form at the surface of structural steel members. This liquid slag corroded through intergranular channels into the body of the metal, causing severe erosion and a loss of structural integrity.

"The important questions," says Biederman, "are how much sulfur do you need, and where did it come from? The answer could be as simple--and this is scary- as acid rain."

Have environmental pollutants increased the potential for eutectic reactions? "We may have just the inherent conditions in the atmosphere so that a lot of water on a burning building will form sulfuric acid, hydrogen sulfide or hydroxides, and start the eutectic process as the steel heats up," Biederman says. He notes that the sulfur could also have come from contents of the burning buildings, such as rubber or plastics. Another possible culprit is ocean salts, such as sodium sulfate, which is known to catalyze sulfidation reactions on turbine blades of jet engines. "All of these things have to be explored," he says.

From a building-safety point of view, the critical question is: Did the eutectic mixture form before the buildings collapsed, or later, as the remains smoldered on the ground. "We have no idea," admits Sisson. "To answer that, we would need to recreate those fires in the FPE labs, and burn fresh steel of known composition for the right time period, with the right environment." He hopes to have the opportunity to collaborate on thermodynamically controlled studies, and to observe the effects of adding sulfur, copper and other elements. The most important lesson, Sisson and Biederman stress, is that fail-safe sprinkler systems are essential to prevent steel from reaching even 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, because phase changes at the 1,300-degree mark compromise a structure's load-bearing capacity.

The FEMA report calls for further metallurgic investigations, and Barnett, Biederman and Sisson hope that WPI will obtain NIST funding and access to more samples. They are continuing their microscopic studies on the samples prepared by graduate student Jeremy Bernier and Marco Fontecchio, the 2001–02 Helen E. Stoddard Materials Science and Engineering Fellow. (Next year's Stoddard Fellow, Erin Sullivan, will take up this work as part of her graduate studies.) Publication of their results may clear up some mysteries that have confounded the scientific community.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9807

October 6, 2006
States of Denial
Bob Woodward's best-selling State of Denial dooms the official 9/11 narrative
by Justin Raimondo
Bob Woodward's revelation that Condoleezza Rice was warned by George Tenet and two other top CIA officials, on July 10, 2001, that a terrorist attack on the U.S. was imminent continues to reverberate – auguring potentially devastating consequences for the Bush White House. While Rice initially denied it, her spokesman confirmed that a meeting took place on that date, although Rice continues to plead a memory lapse. And as the news that Rice wasn't the only one privy to this briefing leaks out, a veritable epidemic of amnesia seems to be breaking out in Washington.

Less than two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped taking commercial domestic flights, and started chartering government jets for all his travels. Now why was that? In the wake of the attacks, so-called "conspiracy theorists" immediately glommed on to this information and hailed it as evidence that 9/11 was "an inside job." Now we know that the conspiracy theorists were on to something, although not exactly what they imagined.

According to a report in the McClatchy newspapers, within a week of Rice's brushoff of the CIA's alarum,

"Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaeda strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

Although Ashcroft is telling the media "that it was 'disappointing' that he never received the briefing, either," Rice's office, besides confirming she'd been briefed "on or around July 10," also confirmed passing it on to Ashcroft and Rumsfeld. Both were presented with an explicit warning – described by one CIA officer present as "a 10 on a scale of 1-to-10" – "by July 17." A week or so later, as CBS reported at the time, Ashcroft's office announced that he would henceforth abjure traveling on commercial airlines. A week earlier his office had leased a jet, and the authorities were explaining his decision in terms of a "threat" that went unspecified:

"'There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines,' an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected, or who made it."

Ashcroft himself explicitly denied any knowledge of imminent danger:

"'I don't do threat assessments myself and I rely on those whose responsibility it is in the law enforcement community, particularly the FBI. And I try to stay within the guidelines that they've suggested I should stay within for those purposes,' Ashcroft said.

"Asked if he knew anything about the threat or who might have made it, the attorney general replied, 'Frankly, I don't. That's the answer.'"

Ashcroft was lying then, and he's lying now when he denies receiving Tenet's warning. He knew everything about the threat and who had made it. The McClatchy report describes the Tenet briefing as a PowerPoint presentation that "connected the dots" and urgently predicted al-Qaeda would strike soon. Woodward writes that Tenet and Black tried to impress upon Rice that "al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly within the United States itself."

Tenet and Black were given "the brush-off," as Woodward puts it, but as the CIA duo's dire premonition of what Tenet called "the big one" was communicated to Bush's inner circle, one doubts that only Ashcroft took precautions. While the rest of us peons went about our lives in ignorant bliss, the warlords of Washington ducked and covered.

What is illuminating about this developing story is that it reveals the essential context in which 9/11 occurred, and how it contradicts the "it-came-out-of-the-sheer-blue-sky" explanation that frames the official narrative. The Tenet briefing, of course, never made it into the report of the 9/11 Commission. Both Richard Ben-Veniste, a top Democratic member of the bipartisan Commission, and Philip Zelikow, the author of the Commission's report, met with Tenet and saw the same PowerPoint presentation viewed by Rice, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld. According to the McClatchy report,

"Tenet outlined to commission members Ben-Veniste and Zelikow in secret testimony at CIA headquarters. The State Department confirmed that the briefing materials were 'made available to the 9/11 Commission, and Director Tenet was asked about this meeting when interviewed by the 9/11 Commission.'"

Tenet, however, tells a different story. Citing multiple sources within the intelligence community, the McClatchy piece avers that

"Tenet raised the matter with the panel himself, displayed slides from the PowerPoint presentation, and offered to testify on the matter in public.

"Ben-Veniste confirmed to McClatchy Newspapers that Tenet outlined for the 9/11 commission the July 10 briefing to Rice in secret testimony in January 2004. He referred questions about why the commission omitted any mention of the briefing in its report to Zelikow, the report's main author. Zelikow didn't respond to e-mail and telephone queries from McClatchy Newspapers."

Surely Zelikow has some explaining to do, but this yawning gap in the official narrative isn't so inexplicable given his ideological background. A strong supporter of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda, Zelikow is very close to Rice, having co-authored a book with her. She had him rewrite the original National Security Strategy authored by Richard Haass, to emphasize the neocon commitment to the principle of brazen aggression, otherwise known as "preemption."

Zelikow's closeness to the administration was immediately seized on by the families of 9/11 victims as a gigantic conflict of interest. A serious academic, he is also a bit of an odd duck who has been unusually candid about what he calls the real "unspoken" agenda behind the Bush's administration's rush to war with Iraq: the "defense" of Israel. Unlike others who have made this same observation, however, he has not been accused of hatching "conspiracy theories" or smeared as "anti-Semitic." In a piece he co-authored for Foreign Affairs in the winter of 1998, Zelikow wrote of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center that, if it had succeeded on a larger scale,

"The resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently."

Having anticipated well in advance the judgment of negligence, incompetence, and worse pronounced on this administration, Zelikow did his best to cover up the evidence. It wasn't good enough, however, and the official story is rapidly unraveling. The question now is, what did they know, who knew, and when did they know it?

The level of "chatter" picked up by our intelligence agencies prior to 9/11 kept Tenet up at night and energized him enough to go charging into Condi Rice's office, without notice, with a warning so urgent it couldn't wait a moment longer. Yet he and his fellow CIA officers ran up against a brick wall of, at best, indifference on the part of Condi, as well as Rumsfeld's outright obstructionism. Rumsfeld is said to have disdained the idea that a serious plot was afoot. Woodward writes:

"Tenet has been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Rumsfeld has questioned all the NSA intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses. Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts. They concluded they were genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30 a TOP SECRET senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined, 'Bin Laden Threats Are Real.'"

Incompetence on this scale is hard to imagine. Aside from the pigheadedness we have come to know and loathe in Rumsfeld and our commander in chief, and the tendency of government officials – and any sort of bureaucracy – to move slowly and uncertainly, preoccupied by questions of turf and intramural politics, there is perhaps another and more troubling explanation for why we didn't catch on to what was happening.

Yes, the administration was indeed distracted from real threats, focused as they were on the nonexistent "threat" from Iraq. However, these factors alone do not fully explain how, with all the "noise" emanating from intelligence sources – relayed directly and urgently to the White House by Tenet and others – they managed to miss the rising flood tide of indications that something wicked this way comes. The long trail of "errors" and "intelligence failures" smacks just as much of willful blindness as it does of monumental incompetence. An element of deliberate obstruction, on some level, of Tenet's lonely crusade to get the administration to do something, makes a certain amount of sense: after all, the sheer mass of evidence that something was afoot suggests a considerable effort to downplay or suppress it. There were forces working against Tenet, Black, and the CIA – but who were they, and what were their motives?

What all this suggests is that the U.S. government had been successfully infiltrated on some level. And it wasn't some obscure "conspiracy theorist" but New York Times columnist William Safire, who, two days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, first reported al-Qaeda's success in penetrating the most closely-guarded secrets of the U.S. government:

"A threatening message received by the Secret Service was relayed to the agents with the president that 'Air Force One is next.' According to the high official, American code words were used showing a knowledge of procedures that made the threat credible.

"(I have a second, on-the-record source about that: Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser, tells me: 'When the president said "I don't want some tinhorn terrorists keeping me out of Washington," the Secret Service informed him that the threat contained language that was evidence that the terrorists had knowledge of his procedures and whereabouts. In light of the specific and credible threat, it was decided to get airborne with a fighter escort.')"

Although the White House later backtracked and tried to claim that no such threat was made, I'd go with the first story simply because such an elaborate lie seems unlikely – especially one that makes them look bad. And if al-Qaeda could gain access to super-secret code words and acquire specific knowledge of the security procedures attending the president as well as his exact whereabouts, then surely they had penetrated the U.S. government in some way, shape, or form – perhaps with the aid of a cooperative foreign intelligence agency. At any rate, in this context it is not unreasonable to posit a fifth column operating inside the U.S. government, feeding vital information to the terrorists – and fiercely obstructing Tenet and the CIA from gaining the favorable attention of our addled president and his inner circle.

In this sense, then, it could be said that 9/11 was an "inside job," not because the WTC was felled by "controlled demolition," as the wackos assert, and not because we bombed ourselves on 9/11, but because the plot couldn't have succeeded without some form of outside assistance. Whether this was from a foreign intelligence agency, al-Qaeda spies placed deep inside the national security bureaucracy, or perhaps both, is a matter of pure speculation, but it seems to me that, when it comes to 9/11, the whole question of foreknowledge is now becoming a vitally important question.

This opens up a fascinating investigative trail that leads directly to all sorts of interesting reports – in particular this four-part report from Carl Cameron of Fox News – just as credible as Woodward's journalism, that bear some looking into. Antiwar.com has been in the lead on this issue from Day One, and I have even written a short book on the subject of which intelligence agencies were likely to have stumbled across the 9/11 terrorist plot in the making – and might have been sympathetic to the conspirators' aims, if not their motives. This is the great unexplored aspect of the biggest terrorist attack in our history. When the report by the joint Senate and House Intelligence Committees on intelligence-gathering efforts was released in highly redacted form, Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee, told PBS' Gwen Ifill:

"Yes, going back to your question about what was the greatest surprise. I agree with what Senator Shelby said the degree to which agencies were not communicating was certainly a surprise but also I was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States."

Sure, the Bush administration was in a state of denial when it came to realistically assessing the terrorist threat, and they are in a similar state when it comes to the effect our foreign policy – specifically the Iraq war – has on our fight to eradicate that threat. The real problem, however, is that we are all enmeshed in multiple states of denial, blocked from going down certain paths of investigation by taboos against "conspiracism" and "revisionism" that preclude all but a highly sanitized – and unsatisfactory – version of the 9/11 story.

Yet "revisionism" is inherent in the study of history, or, indeed, the study of anything: as we do not have perfect knowledge, we are constantly revising and updating our views in light of new information. Revisionism is the opposite of dogmatism, which carves the "accepted" version in stone even before all the facts are in.

In any event, the cause of 9/11 revisionism, which I have touted in the past, has been given a major boost by Woodward's chronicle of the pre-attack struggle between the intelligence professionals who tried to prevent disaster and those politicians and apparatchiks who stood in their way. He has given us plenty of fresh clues as to where the bodies are buried, and the debunking of the "official" story proceeds apace.

http://www.reason.com/links/links101006.shtml
It Usually Starts with John Ashcroft
The pre-9/11 timeline has never made less sense
Jeff A. Taylor



As the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui conclusively proved, amazing things happen when you ask people to tell the truth or go to jail. Testimony by FBI officials in a real criminal court revealed long-buried facts that show that federal officials had far more information about the 9/11 plot than anyone had suspected.

Now, thanks to Bob Woodward's book State of Denial, we have learned that immediately prior to the Moussaoui-inspired August 2001 attempts by the Minneapolis FBI office to raise an alarm about terror attacks, the CIA was in Washington briefing top Bush administration officials like John Ashcroft and Condoleezza Rice about terror threats.

What's more, at least one crucial July 10, 2001 CIA briefing given to Rice completely escaped the 9/11 Commission report. That would be the same 9/11 Commission that John Ashcroft stonewalled in 2004 and now rips in his new book Never Again: The Moral Imperative for Toughness.

As UPI reports:


Former Attorney General John Ashcroft this week became the only Cabinet-level Bush official to attack the Sept. 11 Commission, writing in his memoirs it "seemed obsessed with trying to lay the blame for the terrorist attacks at the feet of the Bush administration, while virtually absolving the previous administration of responsibility."

Ashcroft also writes that the commission's hearings "were not so much about discovering the truth as they were about assessing blame and grandstanding," adding that they "degenerated into show trials."

GOP Commissioner Slade Gorton, a former senator from Washington State, told United Press International Thursday that he found the charges "extraordinary," recalling that President Bush had personally repudiated Ashcroft's tactics in his sparring with the commission.

"Most of the criticism (the commission received) was the exact opposite: that we didn't blame anyone," he said. "Our job was to write a factual account which readers could use to assess blame for themselves."

Ashcroft "may very well have been the worst witness we interviewed," he said, adding he was "very unresponsive and unhelpful."


What alternate reality are we in where the 9/11 panel's perfunctory, at best, stenography of the 9/11 principals is some sort of partisan witch hunt? Welcome to the world of John Ashcroft, who is now emerging as the epicenter of the pre-9/11 "no warning" cover story.

As Attorney General in 2001, Ashcroft was at the intersection of law enforcement and counter-terrorism. Contrary to the Ashcroft-constructed myth that a Clinton administration-built wall existed between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, info did pass back and forth between the two sides. Only believers in that myth would be surprised to learn that on or around July 17, 2001 Ashcroft was briefed by the CIA on terror threats. In keeping with the myth, Ashcroft denies ever getting such info.

McClatchy Newspapers reported last week:


One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a "10 on a scale of 1 to 10" that "connected the dots" in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again. .

David Ayres, who was Ashcroft's chief of staff at the Justice Department, said that the former attorney general also has no recollection of a July 17, 2001, terrorist threat briefing. Later, Ayres said that Ashcroft could recall only a July 5 briefing on threats to U.S. interests abroad.

He said Ashcroft doesn't remember any briefing that summer that indicated that al-Qaida was planning to attack within the United States.


Ah, yes, the little wrinkle of there being no warning about a domestic attack. Ashcroft's Justice Department did have three FBI field offices—Minneapolis, Phoenix, and New York—all pursuing domestic terror investigations with varying degrees of connectedness to the 9/11 plot in the weeks before the attack. This, alone, seems to poke a rather large hole in the no-warning myth.

There were, in fact, many pre-9/11 warnings. One involves the small matter of Ashcroft suddenly opting to ditch domestic commercial aircraft. As CBS News reported on July 26, 2001:


In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, 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.

"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.


Give the same set of circumstantial facts to any U.S. Attorney looking for fore-knowledge of corporate malfeasance and that lawyer would jump into an investigation to ferret out the truth.

And unease over further investigation into the pre-9/11 timeline apparently has troubled Ashcroft for some time. Certainly his new book has doubled back to blast the 9/11 Commission over just these very points and Ashcroft continues to press the notion that the government pre-9/11 had no hope of stopping terrorists and that only "toughness" can succeed.

A book promo talk last week with right-wing bloggers is quite illuminating on that front. Among friends Ashcroft evidently felt comfortable enough to uncork a few doozies, including suggesting that anyone worrying about how America treats its prisoners should consider the alternative—killing prisoners outright. And when asked about criticisms of the PATRIOT Act, clearly what Ashcroft regards as his lasting legacy, the former Senator from the Show-Me State said, "Name one person who's been victimized by the PATRIOT Act."

Alright, but it will take some setup:

When you have a loose spark plug wire and the auto shop replaces the entire electrical system instead, you have a problem, perhaps a fraud. The real issue is missed and many, many expensive new fixes are attempted.

It is becoming very clear that the 9/11 attacks were the result of a bad spark plug wire. The overall system basically worked. A threat was detected and that information was conveyed to the nation's leaders in a timely fashion. They opted to ignore it. That was the breakdown: not the laws, but the leaders.

The PATRIOT Act and the across-the-board ramping up of government surveillance represent the unneeded new electrical system. A colossal waste of time and resources that does not fix the fundamental problem of a backward-looking and, frankly, Missouri-mule-stubborn ruling class that insists on seeing the world as it would like it to be rather than how it actually exists.

Who has been victimized by the PATRIOT Act? Certainly every American who expects their government to act responsibly and accept blame when things go wrong.

John Ashcroft now stands as the face of this peculiar mix of arrogance and cowardice. His criticism of the 9/11 Commission as a show trial projects his greatest fear: To swear before his God to tell the truth, with the tangible threat of going to prison to back that up.

Anything less, it seems, will not recover reality.



Jeff A. Taylor writes the weekly Reason Express.

Scientific Poll: 84% Reject Official 9/11 Story

Only 16% now believe official fable
according to New York Times/CBS News poll

Truth Movement has the huge majority of opinion
How will the Bush Cabal react?

A monumental new scientific opinion poll has emerged which declares that only 16% of people in America now believe the official government explanation of the September 11th 2001 terror attacks.

According to the new New York Times/CBS News poll, only 16% of Americans think the government is telling the truth about 9/11 and the intelligence prior to the attacks:

"Do you think members of the Bush Administration are telling the truth, are mostly telling the truth but hiding something, or are they mostly lying?

Telling the truth 16%

Hiding something 53%

Mostly lying 28%

Not sure 3%"

The 84% figure mirrors other recent polls on the same issue. A Canadian Poll put the figure at 85%. A CNN poll had the figure at 89%. Over 80% supported the stance of Charlie Sheen when he went public with his opinions on 9/11 as an inside job.

A recent CNN poll found that the percentage of Americans who blame the Bush administration for the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington rose from almost a third to almost half over the past four years. This latest poll shows that that figure has again risen exponentially and now stands at well over three quarters of the population.

It took 35 plus years for the majority of Americans to wake up to the fact that the assassination of JFK was a government operation. It has only take five years for MORE Americans to wake up to the fact that 9/11 was an inside job on behalf of the Neoconservative crime syndicate within the US.

Reference to past polls show that in the last five years there has been an explosion in numbers of those who do not buy the official line.

In 2004 a Zogby Poll showed that just over half of New Yorkers believed there was a cover up.

In May of this year another Zogby poll indicated that around half of ALL Americans did not buy the official story.

The latest poll also shows a massive awakening has occurred recently given that previous estimates indicated that around 34% still believed the official story and around 30% were oblivious altogether.

-- snip--

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/Octob.../141006poll.htm

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New poll and story at:
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/...em/itemID/13469
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from the Carolyn Baker newsletter "Speaking Truth to Power"
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UNLIKE EXPLOSIVES IN THE BUILDINGS, THE COLLAPSE OF WTC 7 , AND "DID A PLANE HIT THE PENTAGON?", THIS IS THE KIND OF EVIDENCE THAT CAN'T BE DESTROYED AND IS THE ONLY KIND OF EVIDENCE THAT WOULD HOLD WATER IN A COURT OF LAW.

www.onlinejournal.com

Commentary
The PROMIS of 9/11 and beyond
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor

Oct 17, 2006, 00:45

As whistleblower Richard Grove points out, SilverStream (the software company he worked for at the time of 9/11), served not only AIG (American Insurance Group), it also built trading applications for Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Banker’s Trust, Alex Brown, Morgan Stanley, and Marsh McLennan. With this impressive list, according to Grove, “you pretty much had the major players involved in the financial aspect of the 9/11 fraudulent trading activity.”

I might add that fraudulent activity extended from finance to our government as well.

In the weeks preceding 9/11, many elves on Wall Street were working into the night to make Marsh and others’ SilverStream fully operable. The software, as Grove pointed out to me, “was an internet portal framework. Panacya is AI (Artificial Intelligence). PROMIS and P-Tech are the grandparents if you will.” So let’s consider the grandparents to fully understand the power of the grandchildren. Sort of like Prescott Bush in relation to George W., Jeb, Neil and Marvin Bush.

PROMIS software (originally Prosecutor Management Intelligence System) appeared in the early 1980s. It was developed by a by a small Washington, DC, company, Inslaw Inc., and proved to be the perfect intelligence tool. Though designed for the Department of Justice to help prosecutors in case management, it hooked the attention of corrupt officials and Israeli intelligence. Subsequently stolen from Inslaw, the software was hacked and given a “trap door.” This trojan gave it the power to retrieve info for the US and Israel from the very foreign intelligence services and banks it had been sold to in some 40 countries.

The software helped the US win the Cold War against the Soviets, but also helped the Russian mafia, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden & Company and any number of spies and crooks.

In 1985 Mossad spy and British media tycoon Robert Maxwell, opened the “trap door” secret to Chinese Military Intelligence (PLA-2), at the same time selling them a copy of PROMIS for $9 million, turning it against the US. Unfortunately, in the mid-90s PLA-2 hacked the databases of Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories to cop US nuclear secrets.

The KGB also bought PROMIS from Maxwell, and also received the back door trojan to plant in a tender part of the FBI. Yes there is no honor among thieves. We also provided PROMIS to Russia and China to backdoor their intelligence, figuring the 64 federal agencies they could expose did not outweigh the many other look-sees PROMIS provided the US.

Actually, using the same PROMIS bought from Russia, Saddam and his regime shifted major money through the banking system. Some of these funds still feed Iraqi anti-coalition and resistance fighters.

Unfortunately, when Maxwell tried to extort more money from the KGB to pay off his huge corporate debts, he ended up falling off the back of a yacht into the deep blue drink, stung by a hot shot needle, this with a little help from his friends. Nevertheless PROMIS was as Michael Ruppert described in Crossing the Rubicon . . .


“ . . . software that could think, understand every major language in the world, that provided peepholes into everyone else’s computer ‘dressing rooms,’ that could insert data into computers without people’s knowledge, that could fill in blanks beyond human reasoning, and also predict what people would do — before they did it? You would probably use it wouldn’t you? But PROMIS is not a virus. It has to be installed as a program on the computer systems that you want to penetrate. Being as uniquely powerful as it is, this is usually not a problem. Once its power and advantages are demonstrated, most corporations, banks, or nations are eager to be a part of the 'exclusive' club that has it. And, as is becoming increasingly confirmed by sources connected to this story, especially in the worldwide banking system, not having PROMIS -- by whatever name it is offered -- can exclude you from participating in the ever more complex world of money transfers and money laundering. As an example, look at any of the symbols on the back of your ATM card. Picture your bank refusing to accept the software that made it possible to transfer funds from LA to St. Louis or from St. Louis to Rome.”


PROMIS Plus P-Tech Equal Disaster

The disaster I refer to is 9/11 . . . and is referenced in a FTW article by Jamey Hecht, with research assistance by Michael Kane and editorial comment by Michael C. Ruppert. The article is startlingly titled “PROMIS Connections to Cheney Control of 9/11 Attacks Confirmed.” It’s part of an equally startling piece “PTECH, 9/11, and USA-SAUDI TERROR -- Part 1. In it, is an interview between FTW and Wall Street whistleblower Indira Singh. Here’s a piece of it . . .

“FTW: You said at the 9/11 Citizens' Commission hearings, you mentioned -- it's on page 139 of transcript - that Ptech was with Mitre Corporation in the basement of the FAA for 2 years prior to 9/11 and their specific job was to look at interoperability issues the FAA had with NORAD and the Air Force, in case of an emergency .

”Indira Singh: Yes, I have a good diagram for that.


“FTW: And that relationship had been going on mediated by Ptech for 2 years prior to 9/11. You elsewhere say that the Secret Service is among the government entities that had a contract with Ptech. Mike Ruppert's thesis in Crossing the Rubicon, as you know, is that the software that was running information between FAA & NORAD was superseded by a parallel, subsuming, version of itself that was being run by the Secret Service on state of the art parallel equipment in the PEOC with a nucleus of Secret Service personnel around Cheney. In your view, might it have been the case that Cheney was using Ptech to surveil the function of the people in FAA & NORAD who wanted to do their jobs on 9/11, and then intervene to turn off the legitimate response?

“Indira Singh: Is it possible from a software point of view? Absolutely it's possible. Did he (Cheney) have such a capability? I don't know. But that's the ideal risk scenario - to have an overarching view of what's going on in data. That's exactly what I wanted for JP Morgan. You know what's ironic about this - I wanted to take my operational risk blueprint which is for an operational event going wrong and I wanted to make it generic for extreme event risk to surveil across intelligence networks. What you're describing is something that I said, 'boy if we had this in place maybe 9/11 wouldn't have happened.' When I was going down to DARPA and getting these guys excited about creating an extreme event risk blueprint to do this, I'm thinking of doing exactly what you're saying Cheney might have already had!

“I believe that Dick Cheney also had the ability using evolutions of the PROMIS software, to penetrate and override any other radar computer or communications system in the government.

(Mike Ruppert, in "Summation: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury," from Crossing The Rubicon, p.592.)

Also of prime importance is this second statement from the same piece . . .

“The Ptech story is a crucial piece of 9/11 because the software was used to simultaneously coordinate the FAA with NORAD and the Secret Service. But it transcends 9/11 because that terror attack is continuous with preceding decades of violent Islamic extremism epitomized in the international Muslim Brotherhood, of which al Qaeda is only one, relatively recent, incarnation.6 Worse, the Muslim Brotherhood has from its first days been linked to the Nazi party and its Swiss neo-Nazi epigones.7 Anti-Soviet projects of the CIA and the Pentagon (from 11-22-63 to the Afghan War) have long been recognized as continuous with the absorption of Nazi SS personnel into what became the CIA.8 The connection of the Bush crime family to the political economy of the Nazi movement is familiar from the excellent work of former Justice Department Nazi war crimes prosecutor John Loftus and others.9 Its triangulation with the Bush-Saudi alliance forms a powerful explanatory paradigm - one to which FTW will be paying further attention in the sequel to this story.”

And in another place, FTW reports, “September 1996/ Ptech already working with the DoD’s research group DARPA: ‘Ptech, based in Cambridge, Mass., offers an integrated set of object-oriented tools that enable users to create interactive blueprints of business processes. Software code can be generated from the hierarchical layout, providing rapid and consistent application development. The Advanced Research Projects Agency is using [Ptech’s program called] Framework to help transfer commercial software methodologies to the defense sector.”

The point of all this is aptly summed up in the “CODA: Knowledge is Power":

“The computational power of the Ptech evolution of PROMIS software represents a daunting new surveillance-and-intervention capability in the hands of the same elites who planned 9/11, prosecute the subsequent resource wars, and are presiding over what may become a full economic and military disaster for the resource-consuming citizens of America and the world. Since the ‘War On Terror’ and this coming dollar / natural gas collapse will necessitate new levels of domestic repression, this is just the capability those elites require. Ptech is Total Information Awareness . . .

“Programs based on datamining are powerful analytical tools; finding meaningful patterns in an ocean of information is very useful. But when such a tool is driven by a high-caliber artificial intelligence core [P-tech], its power gets spooky. The datamining capability becomes a smart search tool of the AI program, and the system begins to learn.

“ . . . ’Neural Network’ programming is modeled on the computational techniques used by the human brain - an electrochemical computer that uses neurons instead of semiconductors; the firing or non-firing of neurons instead of ones and zeros.

With neural networking, software has become much smarter than it had been . . .

“ . . . Ptech's Framework can exploit the patterns it detects and extrapolate future probabilities. Then it can integrate itself with the computers from which it's getting the information and intervene in their functioning. The result is a tool for surveillance and intervention. The program can identify suspect streams of cash in a banking network and allow a bank officer to freeze the suspect assets. Of course, a user could direct the same program to prevent detection. It can discover salient anomalies in a person's movements through a city and either flag those anomalies for further scrutiny, or erase them from the record. And it can find errant flights in an air traffic map and initiate an intercept response. Or not.”

We seem to have arrived not only at 1984 but taken off for an unbidden future of governmental "Total Information Awareness" (TIA from DARPA) to be used in a new kind of warfare, not only on enemies, but on the people, too. For instance, IBM in a 2001 newsletter/promotion piece, boasts that “IBM Enterprise Architecture Method enabled through Ptech Framework” for commercial purposes. But considering Ptech’s nasty beginning and development through financial support from a trilogy of elites, neo-Nazis plus Muslim Brotherhood forces, we should take a look back to IBM’s historic contributions to the Nazi effort on Final Solutions: How IBM Helped Automate the Nazi Death Machine in Poland by Edwin Black.

“When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, most of the world saw a menace to humanity. But IBM saw Nazi Germany as a lucrative trading partner. Its president, Thomas J. Watson, engineered a strategic business alliance between IBM and the Reich, beginning in the first days of the Hitler regime and continuing right through World War II. This alliance catapulted Nazi Germany to become IBM's most important customer outside the U.S. IBM and the Nazis jointly designed, and IBM exclusively produced, technological solutions that enabled Hitler to accelerate and in many ways automate key aspects of his persecution of Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others the Nazis considered enemies. Custom-designed, IBM-produced punch cards, sorted by IBM machines leased to the Nazis, helped organize and manage the initial identification and social expulsion of Jews and others, the confiscation of their property, their ghettoization, their deportation, and, ultimately, even their extermination.”

This opening paragraph of the article from the Village Voice, March 27 - April 2, 2002, should not only give you pause, but hopefully propel you through the rest of the piece. You will see specifically how IBM of 1933 and beyond enabled the organization of the death camps -- thanks to the chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson, the New York Madison Avenue branch of IBM, the German Subsidiary, acronym “Dehomag,” and Watson Business Machines headquartered at Warsaw, continuing operation well past 1941 under German management, preserving and delivering profits on all the information-organization machines of IBM.

Here we have a military industrial complex at one of its lowest ebbs in history. Perhaps it is about to be matched in the use of various software technology and its intelligence gathering capability to initiate and implement the War on Terror vis-a-vis 9/11, the New Pearl Harbor, and in the ongoing neocon march to world hegemony. That may be the PROMIS of our future. Or do we have something to say about it as a people?

If this all seems terribly grim to you, its purpose is to help keep you aware and alive, to enjoy the beauty and power of life; and also to understand just how low sectors of humanity can sink to reach the greatest heights of political power, which inevitably ends up destroying untold numbers of innocent people around the world.

This theme is explored as well in Carolyn Baker’s FTW article, The War On You: U.S. Government Targeting of American Dissidents, Part II, provided free. It not only connects many dots but blows its whistle loud enough to wake up the most “doubting Thomas” as to what was and is being planned for the near future. My thanks to Michael Ruppert, wherever he is in the Wilderness, to have so diligently put his intelligence and life on the line to first inform us. What began as software to help prosecutors manage their intelligence data has evolved into a Big Brother Prosecutor with a super human intelligence to manage our existence through data mining.

Have a good and conscious day.

-- --
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York.
Copyright © 1998-2006 Online Journal
Email Online Journal Editor

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PROMIS, Panacya, Richard Andrew Grove et al were previously discussed in this thread.

Jesus Christ...all these things tying into each other, and just Friday I was talking to someone about Maxwell falling into the ocean...and then how Murdock seemed to take over everything after that, and I bet Maxwell and the ocean was no suicide

Holy freakin' ...turns and turns and turns

"What she discovers is mind-boggling. The targets of FBI wiretaps are not only foreign individuals supected of espionage and terrorism in the U.S. but also their accomplices, that is… top officials at the State Department and at the Pentagon. These people are clearly engaged in criminal activities such as technological espionage, nuclear black market, heroin trafficking, money laundering, corruption of high-ranking officials, particularly in the U.S. Congress."

http://justacitizen.com/KillTheMessenger/K...omo_English.pdf

and by wiretapping these people and finding they too are connected...

VOILA!!! New people available to blackmail to support the Bush's side...
and the circle goes on and on and on and on and on...

http://www.911blogger.com/
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Amazon's #1 Non-fiction Reviewer:
Tarpley's 9/11 Synthetic Terror[/I[I]]: Made in USA is "strongest of the 770+ books I have reviewed"

Progressive Press announced that its "9/11 Synthetic Terror" has just been cited as the best non-fiction book ever by Amazon's top non-fiction book reviewer, intelligence professional Robert Steele, in a 5-star review at http://www.amazon.com/dp/0930852370 .

Progressive specializes in books that contend 9/11 was an "inside job." Publisher John Leonard says "it's a coup to have Steele with us on this. Here you have a level-headed, respected insider, lifelong Republican, veteran spy, and he's breaking the taboos. It's a great tribute and a vindication of the work we put into 9/11 Synthetic Terror."

Steele's statement that 9/11 was a "US-based conspiracy" may be a first coming from a senior US intelligence community figure. He came to this conclusion "with great sadness" after reading "9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA," which he praises as "without question, the most important modern reference on state-sponsored terrorism."

(visit the link for the full press release)

From wikipedia:

Robert David Steele Vivas (b. July 16, 1952 New York City), is a former Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer for twenty years and was the second-ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988-1992. Steele is a former clandestine services case officer Central Intelligence Agency.[1] He is the founder and CEO of OSS.Net, Inc. as well as the Golden Candle Society.[2] Steele also was a member of the Adjunct Faculty of Marine Corps University in the mid-1990's.

From Strategic Strategy Research Military site:

ROBERT D. STEELE is a retired Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. He is the founder and president of Open Source Solutions, Inc., and is an acknowledged expert on computer and information vulnerabilities. Mr. Steele holds graduate degrees in International Relations and Public Administration from Leigh University and the University of Oklahoma. He has also earned certificates in Intelligence Policy from Harvard University and in Defense Studies from the Naval War College.

From Steele's Amazon review:

It is with great sadness that I conclude that this book is the strongest of the 770+ books I have reviewed here at Amazon, almost all non-fiction. I am forced to conclude that 9/11 was at a minimum allowed to happen as a pretext for war (see my review of Jim Bamford's "Pretext for War"), and I am forced to conclude that there is sufficient evidence to indict (not necessarily convict) Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and others of a neo-conservative neo-Nazi coup d'etat and kick-off of the clash of civilizations (see my review of "Crossing the Rubicon" as well as "State of Denial"). Most fascinatingly, the author links Samuel Huntington, author of "Clash of Civilizations" with Leo Strauss, the connecting rod between Nazi fascists and the neo-cons.

This is, without question, the most important modern reference on state-sponsored terrorism, and also the reference that most pointedly suggests that select rogue elements within the US Government, most likely led by Dick Cheney with the assistance of George Tenet, Buzzy Kronguard, and others close to the Wall Street gangs, are the most guilty of state-sponsored terrorism.

[Devlin Buckley, freelance writer and avid reader of FTW, offers this story reviewing the new book by Pakistani President, Pervez Musharraf, which by its curious silences on key issues, corroborates the analyses of 9/11 written by Mike Ruppert, Nafeez Ahmed, and Michel Chossudovsky—CB]

Musharraf names 9/11 suspect as possible British asset
Fails to mention links to 9/11, ISI, CIA

By Devlin Buckley



© Copyright 2006, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. This story may NOT be posted on any Internet web site without express written permission. Contact admin@copvcia.com. May be circulated, distributed or transmitted for non-profit purposes only.

October 25th 2006, 4:47[PST] - The man identified by the FBI as one of the primary financers of the 9/11 attacks, Omar Sheikh, may have worked for British intelligence during the 1990s, according to a newly released book by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

“It is believed in some quarters that while Omar Sheikh was at the LSE (London School of Economics) he was recruited by the British intelligence agency MI6,” Musharraf writes in his book, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir. “It is said,” Musharraf notes, “that MI6 persuaded him to take an active part in demonstrations against Serbian aggression in Bosnia and even sent him to Kosovo to join the jihad.”1

The man in question, Omar Sheikh, became infamous in 2002 when he was sentenced to death for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, a crime Musharraf and several others claim Omar did not commit.2

While Omar Sheikh’s reported ties to Pearl’s death have been making headlines for years, his alleged links to 9/11, as well as to Pakistani and Western intelligence agencies, have gone significantly underreported.

Similarly, several key points have been omitted from Musharraf’s book, perhaps in an attempt to cover up embarrassing and possibly criminal activities of Pakistani and US officials.

Musharraf’s book does not mention Omar Sheikh’s alleged role in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, nor does it mention Omar’s widely reported connections to Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, nor does mention Omar’s alleged history with the CIA.

A brief review of such details would have revealed startling information.

Prior to the 9/11 attacks, the head of Pakistan’s ISI, General Mahmud Ahmed, ordered Omar Sheikh to wire $100,000 to the lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta—a report that has been confirmed by the director of the FBI’s financial crimes unit, Dennis Lormel.3

General Mahmud, who is portrayed in Musharraf’s book as a close military advisor and a strong ally during the 1999 coup,4 maintained simultaneous relationships with the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the governments of both Pakistan and the United States.5

In fact, General Mahmud (who allegedly ordered Omar Sheikh to finance the 9/11 attacks) was in Washington the week of 9/11 for, as one Pakistani report put it, “mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council.”6

As the attacks were occurring, General Mahmud was actually meeting with members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees,7 and according to Senator Bob Graham, who attended the meeting, General Mahmud had just received a gift (a book about the American Civil War) from Rep. Porter Goss—then Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a former CIA agent who would go on to become CIA Director in 2004.8

This seemingly explosive information, however, is curiously absent from Musharraf’s book.

Perhaps even more astonishing is the fact that Omar Sheikh, who allegedly financed the 9/11 attacks under orders from General Mahmud, reportedly acted as an asset for U.S., British, and Pakistani intelligence services during the 1990s9—adding significant depth to Musharraf’s latest claims regarding Omar’s affiliations with the MI6.

As Musharraf notes in his book, it is believed that Omar was originally recruited by the MI6 to fight in Bosnia, and later sent to “join the jihad” in Kosovo. What Musharraf neglects to mention is that both the U.S. and Pakistan played an instrumental role in these operations—continuing a strategy used by both countries during the Afghan jihad of the 1980s when the CIA and the ISI backed Osama bin Laden and the Islamic ‘mujahedin’ against the Soviets.10

As London’s The Spectator has noted, “If Western intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahadeen, Western intervention in Bosnia appears to have globalised it.”

“From 1992 to 1995,” according to The Spectator, “the Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of mujahadeen and other Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. … In the late 1990s, in the run-up to Clinton's and Blair's Kosovo war of 1999, the USA backed the [Osama bin Laden-linked] Kosovo Liberation Army against Serbia. … It seems that, for all its hand-wringing, the USA just couldn't break the pact with the devil.”11

Such reports have been corroborated and expanded upon by several reputable authors, journalists, and experts, including Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Michel Chossudovsky, and Michael Ruppert, to name a few.12

In regards to Omar Sheikh in particular, according to Bahukutumbi Raman, a former senior counter-terrorism official in India, it was the ISI at the request of the CIA that originally sent Omar to fight in Bosnia.

The British-born Omar Sheikh was reportedly part of a contingent consisting of a large number of British Muslims of Pakistani origin, who were indoctrinated, trained, and sent to fight against the Serbs, as Raman writes, “with the full knowledge and complicity of U.S. and British intelligence agencies.”13

Omar was recruited into the militant group, the Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen (HUM), which, according to a 2002 report by Raman, was one of three organizations given the “leadership role” by the CIA during the Afghan jihad of the previous decade.

“Omar Sheikh,” as Raman has noted, “had his jihadi inoculation in Bosnia just as bin Laden had his in Afghanistan.”

During the 1990s, according to Raman, “the CIA asked the ISI to divert part of the dregs of the HUM…to Bosnia to assist the Muslims there in their fight against the Serbs. … From Bosnia, they were diverted to Kosovo by the CIA and thereafter again left in the lurch after they had done the USA's hatchet job in the Balkans.”14

Omar Sheikh was arrested by Indian authorities in late 1994, but freed in December of 1999 in exchange for the safe release of the passengers of Indian Airlines Flight 814, which had been hijacked by HUM militants. The ransom operation, according to Indian authorities, was “masterminded” by the ISI.15

Immediately following his release, according to Vanity Fair, Omar “stayed at a Kandahar guesthouse for several days, conferring with Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar and — reports had it — Osama bin Laden, who was said to refer to him as ‘my special son.’”

When Omar Sheikh “crossed the Pakistan frontier in early January 2000, an ISI colonel was waiting to conduct him to a safe house in Islamabad. From there he proceeded to London, where he reunited with family,” Vanity Fair reported.16

Despite Omar’s affiliations to terrorism, the British government did not prosecute him or even dispute his presence in the country. On the contrary, Omar was welcomed with open arms.

“It is quite possible that Mr Sheikh will come back to this country where his family is. … And as a full British national he has every right to return,” a spokesman for Britain’s Foreign Office was quoted by BBC News as saying at the time. “[I]f he was to contact us, and asked us for passport facilities,” the spokesman added, “we would issue him with a passport.”17

Omar’s time in the UK was brief, however, and he soon returned to Pakistan to continue his work as a terrorist operative. But of course, Omar was not the typical fundamentalist.

As Newsweek reported, Omar began living “openly-and opulently-in a wealthy Lahore neighborhood. U.S. sources say he did little to hide his connections to terrorist organizations, and even attended swanky parties attended by senior Pakistani government officials.”18

During this time, as Omar would later tell Karachi police, he orchestrated several terrorist attacks in India on behalf of the ISI; regularly traveled to Kandahar to meet with Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mulla Mohammad Omar; and even met with the ‘ringleader’ of the 9/11 attacks, Mohammad Atta.

In addition, Omar told investigators he had prior knowledge of the plans for the 9/11 attacks and had even discussed the plans with his superiors at the ISI.

For this and other reasons, Bahukutumbi Raman interestingly notes, “It is…impossible that the Pakistani authorities would not have known of Al Qaeda's plans for the 9/11 terrorist strikes,” adding:

“The relevant question from the point of view of any credible investigation is: Why the Pakistani military regime did not pass on the information conveyed by Omar Sheikh to the US and alert it to the imminence of the terrorist strikes? If it had and the US agencies had not acted on the information, they are guilty of gross negligence. If it had not, Pakistan is guilty of complicity in the terrorist strikes.”19

As mentioned earlier, not only did Pakistan do nothing to prevent the attacks, the head of the ISI, who was in Washington on 9/11, reportedly ordered Omar Sheikh to wire $100,000 to the lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta. Furthermore, investigators in Britain believe Omar trained the 9/11 attackers in hijacking techniques.20

This suggests Pakistan is not only guilty of complicity in the 9/11 attacks, but is directly responsible for financing and coordinating the operation, which may explain why Musharraf chose to omit such pertinent information from his new book.

Moreover, there are several members of Musharraf’s own government, according to The Pittsburgh Tribune, who believe Omar Sheikh’s true power “comes not from the ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA.”21

Given Omar’s reported history, this certainly seems like a plausible explanation; and if true, it would establish a significant degree of U.S. government culpability for the 9/11 attacks.

Musharraf neglects to mention this, however, and instead focuses on Omar’s widely reported connections to the kidnap and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Even when discussing the Pearl case, however, Musharraf leaves out relevant parts of the story.

Musharraf’s main argument, which is corroborated by other reports, is that although Omar Sheikh admittedly helped to plan Pearl’s kidnapping, the execution was carried out against Omar’s instructions, possibly by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.22

While this may be true, Musharraf neglects to mention that Daniel Pearl was investigating links between the ISI and Islamic militant groups affiliated with al-Qaeda—the reason many believe he was kidnapped in the first place.23

Furthermore, in 2002, after turning himself in for plotting Pearl’s abduction, Omar Sheikh began speaking openly to interrogators about his involvement with the ISI, his meetings with al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, his orchestration of attacks in India, and his foreknowledge of the plans for 9/11.

It was Musharraf who personally stepped in to persuade Omar to retract his statements; and after such attempts ultimately failed, the Pakistani President reportedly ordered all interrogations of Omar Sheikh to be stopped. “I am prepared to talk to them, but they are afraid of my talking,” Omar reportedly said at the time.24

Moreover, while Omar’s trial was still ongoing Musharraf publicly expressed his desire to see Omar put to death, leading Omar’s attorneys to file a contempt of court application against the Pakistani President.

“To demand the sentence of death for Omar is to tell the courts to convict and sentence the accused to capital punishment,” one of Omar’s lawyers reportedly said at the time. As BBC News noted, the lawyers said they “did not believe the accused could be convicted on what they called circumstantial evidence.”25

Nonetheless, in 2002 Omar was sentenced to death for killing Pearl. His appeal, however, has been adjourned more than thirty times and he remains alive in Pakistani custody.

Ironically, Omar Sheikh’s lawyer now plans to use President Musharraf's book to support Omar’s appeal.26

It would appear the U.S. has no interest in extraditing Omar Sheikh; and neither Omar nor General Mahmud Ahmed has been charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks.

In fact, as The New Yorker reported, following his forced resignation from the ISI General Mahmud “resurfaced in Pakistan as the head of a subsidiary of a prominent business consortium, a position that required government backing.”27

Meanwhile, according to Labour MP Michael Meacher, “reports from Pakistan suggest that [Omar] Sheikh continues to be active from jail, keeping in touch with friends and followers in Britain.”28

Indeed, several of the suspects arrested in connection with the UK ‘liquid explosive plot’ this summer reportedly met with Omar in Pakistan;29 and according to Raman, there are even “grounds to suspect that the [London 7/7] blasts were orchestrated by Omar Sheikh from his jail in Pakistan.”

Devlin Buckley is a freelance writer and journalist residing in Troy, New York. His blog, the American Monitor, may be viewed here and you may contact him via e-mail at PDevlinBuckley@yahoo.com.

For more information regarding Omar Sheikh, see Paul Thompson’s “Sept. 11's Smoking Gun: The Many Faces of Saeed Sheikh,” at cooperativeresearch.org. For more information pertaining to the use of Islamic militants as proxy forces by Western intelligence agencies, as well as Omar Sheikh’s “simultaneous intelligence connections to the CIA, ISI and MI6,” see The War on Truth and The London Bombings by British author Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. And for additional underreported details regarding the events leading up, during, and after the 9/11 attacks, see Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (Free Press, 2006), p. 225. Pervez Musharraf, “How we found Pearl buried in ten pieces,” The Times book extracts, 26 September 2006,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,88...74550_1,00.html

2 Asra Q. Nomani, “Who really killed Danny Pearl?,” Salon, 22 October 2003,Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (Free Press, 2006), p. 226-228.
http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature...earl/index.html

Paul Thompson, “Sept. 11’s Smoking Gun: The Many Faces of Saeed Sheikh,” Cooperativeresearch.org, http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/essay_p...icle=essaysaeed. Michael Meacher, “Britain now faces its own blowback—Intelligence interests may thwart the July bombings investigation,” The Guardian, 10 September 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1566916,00.html.

4 Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (Free Press, 2006), p. 106, 120-122,134, 143.

5 Derek Mitchell and Paul Thompson, “Complete 9/11 Timeline, ISI Director Mahmood Ahmed,” Cooperativeresearch.org, http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=
complete_911_timeline&the_isi:_a_more_detailed_look=mahmoodAhmed

6Amir Mateen, "ISI Chief's Parleys Continue in Washington," The News (Pakistan), 10 September 2001, Archived by the 9/11 Reading Room, http://www.911readingroom.org/bib/whole_do...?article_id=235.

7 Richard Leiby, “A Cloak But No Dagger -- An Ex-Spy Says He Seeks Solutions, Not Scapegoats for 9/11,” The Washington Post, 18 March 2002, Page C01, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?p...7¬Found=true.

8 Bob Graham with Jeff Nussbaum, Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America’s War on Terror (Random House Publishing Group, 2004), p. ix-xi.

9 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Olive Branch Press, 2005) p. 139-144. Bahukutumbi Raman, “How London brought terror on itself,” Asia Times Online, 16 July 2005, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GG16Df04.html. Paul Thompson, “Sept. 11’s Smoking Gun: The Many Faces of Saeed Sheikh,” Cooperativeresearch.org, http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/essay_p...icle=essaysaeed.

10 Michel Chossudovsky, “Osamagate,” Centre for Research on Globalisation, 9 October 2001, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO110A.html. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Olive Branch Press, 2005) p. 31-57.

11 Brendan O'Neill, “How we trained al-Qa'eda,” The Spectator, 13 September 2003, archived online by Findarticles.com, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa37...309/ai_n9253533.

12 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Olive Branch Press, 2005) p. 31-57. Michel Chossudovsky, “Osamagate,” Centre for Research on Globalisation, 9 October 2001, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO110A.html. Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (New Society Publishers) p. 71, 73, 134-136. Michael C. Ruppert, “Beyond Bush II,” From The Wilderness, 1 July 2003, http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/...ond_bush_2.html.

13 Bahukutumbi Raman, “How London brought terror on itself,” Asia Times Online, 16 July 2005, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GG16Df04.html.

14 Bahukutumbi Raman, “PUNISHMENT TERRORISM: Questions & Answers-- Part III,” Paper number 433, South Asia Analysis Group, 31 March 2002, http://www.saag.org/papers5/paper433.html.

15 Suo Motu, “Statement by the Minister of External Affairs in Parliament on the Hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814,” Embassy of India, 13 March 2000, http://www.indianembassy.org/policy/Terror...03_13_2000.html.

16 Robert Sam Anson, “The Journalist and The Terrorist,” Vanity Fair, 1 August 2002, archived by 9/11 Reading Room, http://911readingroom.org/bib/whole_docume...?article_id=394.

17 “Militant free to return to UK,” BBC News, 3 January 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/588915.stm.

18 Daniel Klaidman, “Federal Grand Jury Set to Indict Sheikh,” Newsweek, National Affairs Web Exclusive, 13 March 2002, archived online at http://nl.newsbank.com.

19 Bahukutumbi Raman, “The man who knows and talks too much,” South Asia Analysis Group, Paper number 424, 13 March 2002, http://www.saag.org/papers5/paper424.html.

20 David Bamber, Chris Hastings and Rajeev Syal, “London house linked to US plot,” The Telegraph, 30 September 2001, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml.../30/nhunt30.xml.

21 “Did Pearl die because Pakistan deceived CIA?,” The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 3 March 2002, http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_20141.html.

22 Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (Free Press, 2006), p. 226-228. Asra Q. Nomani, “Who really killed Danny Pearl?,” Salon, 22 October 2003, http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature...earl/index.html.

23 Paul Thompson, “Profile: Daniel Pearl,” Cooperativeresearch.org, (October 1, 2006) http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity....ty=daniel_pearl.

24 Bahukutumbi Raman, “The man who knows and talks too much,” South Asia Analysis Group, Paper number 424, 13 March 2002, http://www.saag.org/papers5/paper424.html.

25 “Musharraf accused of Pearl case contempt,” BBC News, 12 April 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1924466.stm.

26 “Musharraf memoir could be used in Pearl murder appeal,” Reuters, 26 September
2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews....&archived=False.

27 Jane Mayer, “The Search for Osama -- Did the government let bin Laden’s trail go cold?,” The New Yorker, 28 July 2003, http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/030804fa_fact.

28 Michael Meacher, “Britain now faces its own blowback—Intelligence interests may thwart the July bombings investigation,” The Guardian, 10 September 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1566916,00.html.

29 Praveen Swami, “Evidence mounts of Pakistan links,” The Hindu, 12 August 2006, http://www.hindu.com/2006/08/12/stories/2006081205941200.htm. Devlin Buckley, “UK Terror Suspects Met With 9/11 Paymaster,” The American Monitor, 4 September 2006, http://americanmonitor06.blogspot.com/2006...t-with-911.html.

30 Bahukutumbi Raman, “Daniel Pearl and the London blasts,” South Asia Analysis Group, Paper number 1458, 15 July 2005, http://www.saag.org/%5Cpapers15%5Cpaper1458.html.

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/More_all...lower_1026.html
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More allegations from EPA whistleblower

Brian Beutler
Published: Thursday October 26, 2006

An Environmental Protection Agency whistleblower who has long argued that her agency failed to issue proper warnings about air quality at the World Trade Center disaster site, has leveled new accusations against the agency, RAW STORY has learned.

As RAW STORY reported this past August, Cate Jenkins, an EPA biochemist, sent a letter to the New York congressional delegation, alleging that the inconsistent official reports about inhalant alkalinity were part of an intentional cover up by government scientists and officials.

Jenkins' latest sixty-page document, addressed to the acting Inspector General of the EPA, is in large part a compilation of her previous allegations, but also claims to offer new evidence that criminal fraud is to blame.

In the latest report, Jenkins contends that by failing to report that some of the particulates in the air constituted a severe health hazard--and by suppressing the results of tests for the presence of other toxic chemicals--the EPA misled the public about the dire health consequences of remaining near ground zero or participating in the clean-up effort in the days following the attack.

Tens of thousands of cases of lung disease have reportedly resulted from exposure to the smoke and debris that hovered in the vicinity of the disaster site for months after the towers collapsed.

Earlier this year, federal judge Deborah Batts ruled that then-EPA director Christine Todd Whitman had misled residents and rescuers when she pronounced that the air quality in lower Manhattan met public safety standards and necessitated neither a surgical mask nor a respirator.

John Manibusan, spokesman for the office of the Inspector General, told RAW STORY that he had not yet received the complaint, but added, “[Jenkins] has issued a number of complaints to our office, about the World Trade Center and other things. We always take a look at them. In some cases we issue a response. How long that takes depends on a lot of factors.”

Manibusan directed Raw to a 2004 official response to earlier Jenkins allegations of a conflict of interest in the peer review of EPA's assesment of ground-zero health hazards. That investigation found that though the “EPA's Contractor did not inquire whether the three panelists had received funding from industry or had publically expressed viewpoints on the issues to be reviewed,” they “did not find that the panel's input was biased,” or “that any of the panelists should have been excluded” from participating.

Jenkins' full memorandom may be read here: http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/epamemocomplaint.pdf

http://www.911blogger.com/
-- --

The much anticipated release of the Doubletree Hotel security video that has been speculated it will show a Boeing 757 hitting the Pentagon is due to be released by one week from today the latest:

“The FBI has agreed to release to Judicial Watch a videotape obtained from the Doubletree Hotel near the Pentagon by November 9, 2006.” - Judicial Watch

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0406/S00031.htm
-- --
UQ Wire: Long Debunked Rumor Validated by Giuliani
Thursday, 3 June 2004, 12:34 pm
Opinion: www.UnansweredQuestions.org

Distribution via the Unanswered Questions Wire
Sign up for the wire at:
http://www.unansweredquestions.org/headlines.php
Unanswered Questions : Thinking for ourselves.

Long Debunked "Rumor" Validated by Giuliani

FEMA in NYC prior to 9-11 for Project TRIPOD terror drill,
scheduled for 9-12
By Gregor Holland

As of this writing, June 2, 2004, the transcript of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's testimony to the 9-11 Commission during the May 18-19, 2004 hearings in New York is the only transcript of that hearing omitted from the Commission website ( http://www.9-11commission.gov).

Did Rudy say something wrong?

In case you missed it live, you can listen to his testimony in full at the WNYC radio website at: http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/28147. As Giuliani recounts his experience of the day of 9/11, and the evolving location of the Emergency Command Center that morning, you might want to pay special attention to what he says at the end of his prepared statement:

"... the reason Pier 92 was selected as a command center was because on the next day, on September 12, Pier 92 was going to have a drill, it had hundreds of people here, from FEMA, from the Federal Government, from the State, from the State Emergency Management Office, and they were getting ready for a drill for biochemical attack. So that was gonna be the place they were going to have the drill. The equipment was already there, so we were able to establish a command center there, within three days, that was two and a half to three times bigger than the command center that we had lost at 7 World Trade Center. And it was from there that the rest of the search and rescue effort was completed."

Readers may remember that on the days immediately after 9/11/01 there was a nasty little rumor running around the internet that FEMA had arrived in NYC on Monday September 10, thus implying foreknowledge of the disaster. The source of the rumor was a September 13, 2001 interview between CBS News anchor Dan Rather and Tom Kennedy (later corrected to Kenney) of FEMA National Urban Search and Rescue. Here is a transcript of the brief interview:

Rather: "Tom Kennedy... Kenney, a rescue worker with the National Urban Search and Rescue, it's part of FEMA... "

Kennedy: "We're currently one of the first teams that was deployed to support the city of New York for this disaster. We arrived on late Monday night, and went into action on Tuesday morning. And not until today did we get a full opportunity to work the entire site."

The rumors which subsequently ravaged online chatrooms and 9/11 websites were officially denied by FEMA. In a November 15, 2001 WorldNetDaily piece titled "FEMA: No prior knowledge of 9-11: Agency dispels Net rumor, says team didn't arrive in NYC Sept. 10", Jon Dougherty wrote: ( http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article....TICLE_ID=25329)

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency has said it did not have urban search and rescue teams in place in New York City prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, contrary to an Internet-based rumor alleging otherwise.

In the interview, Kenney misspoke when he said he and his team arrived in New York City and were "finally on the ground" and deployed by "Monday night. ... " If accurate, that would have meant the team arrived Sept. 10 - the night before the attacks.

According to a spokesman in the office of Vito Pizzi, who works in FEMA's federal coordination office, a total of 16 teams were put on alert or activated Sept. 11. Two of those teams were sent in to Ground Zero the next day, Sept. 12.

FEMA officials said Kenney, in the head of the moment, misstated his team's arrival date. Kenney could not be reached for comment."

The rumor of FEMA presence prior to 9/11 was so stubborn that it took another debunking in a September 5, 2002 Boston Herlad piece written by a Stephanie Schorow. Schorow recommends that 'X-File fiction' can be separated from fact with simple research and checking of multiple sources. In reference to the rumor that "FEMA sent the Urban Search and Rescue Team to New York City THE NIGHT BEFORE the attacks occurred!", Schorow writes:

"But if you search further, you'll see Tom "Kennedy'' is actually Tom Kenney, an officer from the Massachusetts Urban Search and Rescue Task Force; apparently Rather got the name wrong. Likewise, common sense dictates Kenney simply said Monday when he meant Tuesday.

To confirm, the Herald called the Kenney home on Cape Cod and spoke to Kenney's wife, who said that her husband did go to New York on Sept. 11, not Sept. 10. She explained that he was under extreme stress when Rather interviewed him, and added wryly that it was typical of her husband to confuse dates."

( http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timelin...rald090502.html )

We should note that the actual wording of the debunking accounts does not deny that FEMA was in New York on September 10, it merely denies that the Urban Search and Rescue Task Force was not in New York on September 10. We should note that FEMA, when denying presence in NYC prior to 9/11 did not raise the possibility that there was confusion about the existence of a separate FEMA team for the scheduled 9/12 bioterror drill, a drill which we have learned is named Operation TRIPOD. It seems that prior to the Giuliani testimony there has been scant mentioning of the bioterror drill.

According to a May 22, 2002 Press Release from the NYC Office of Emergency Management, the TRIPOD, or 'Point-of-Dispensing' drill, was successfully held that day. The Press Release states:

"TRIPOD had originally been scheduled to take place on September 12th, 2001, at Pier 92 - which ironically had served as the temporary home of OEM shortly after the terrorist attacks on 9/11."

The release also mentions that the TRIPOD exercise is supported by "The Office of Justice Programs, through the Office for Domestic Preparedness". The Office for Domestic Preparedness was the effort assigned to Dick Cheney by George W. Bush on May 8, 2001. Although reports indicate that Cheney never convened any meetings of this Task Force prior to September 2001, it seems that there must have been some sort of planning involved with the organization and scheduling of Operation TRIPOD for September 12, 2001. With all of the unpleasant news of 9/11, it must have pleased Cheney that the scheduling of this drill made the pre-assembled emergency team immediately available to New York City. Who would have thought?

Major questions exist as to why FEMA would deny being in New York City prior to 9/11 without mentioning the 9/12 bioterror drill. These questions must now be addressed as the initial suspicions of those who learned of the Tom Kenney statement have been clearly validated. The coincidental presence of a large FEMA team in NYC at the location, Pier 92, which became the Command Center for the entire emergency operation is disturbing. An alert press and a legitimate 9-11 Commission should have raised this issue long ago.

Mr. Vito Pizzi, listed as FEMA Branch Chief was contacted for this article.

© Gregor Holland 2004. All rights reserved.
-- ----


See also:

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2004/07/fema-in-big-apple.html

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/fematape.html

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april...5gotwarning.htm

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/20...20030319-1.html
-- --

March 18, 2003

Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)

Consistent with section 3( of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), and based on information available to me, including that in the enclosed document, I determine that:

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither (A) adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor ( likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Sincerely,

GEORGE W. BUSH

http://rigint.blogspot.com/
-- -- --

"... We've had more than a few of those moments this century, when a story breaks and bridges the disconnect between the world as we know it and the world as most presume it. A privileged gay hooker in the White House, for instance. British Special Forces in Basra, dressed as Arabs, shooting up a police station. A naturalized American waging a false-flag bombing campaign in the Philippines, escorted to US sanctury by federal authorities. The death of David Kelly. Sibel Edmonds' gag order, and the WTF? conditions upon George Bush's testimony before the 9/11 commission. Usually the news is quickly changed, ignored or papered-over. Sometimes, as with Michael Meiring, it's met with blanket silence by American media, and the silence itself becomes a kind of confirmation.

Daniel Hopsicker may be having one of those moments.

As anyone who's followed his investigation of Florida's 9/11 crime scene will know, he's researched Mohamed Atta's connections to a protected international network of drugs, guns and money-laundering. Atta's "brothers" were German cocaine playboys mixed up with Russian mafia, not Saudi fundamentalists. One German of whom Hopsicker has written is Wolfgang Bohringer.

From his Welcome to Terrorland:

Wolfgang was instrumental in bringing another of Atta's German associates to Florida, a pilot named "Stephan," who has done jail time in Germany, was on parole when he came to the US, and thus not supposed to be flying. But "being connected means never having to say you're sorry," and while regular German flight students struggle to obtain the necessary visas, Wolfgang and Stephan had inside connections which smoothed their progress.

Last night I received this e-mail from Hopsicker:

BREAKING NEWS: FBI Terror Alert in South Pacific for Wolfgang Bohringer; German pilot was first identified as "close associate" of Mohamed Atta in The MadCowMorningNews

Wolfgang Bohringer, a German pilot identified more than two years ago as one of Mohamed Atta's closest associates in Florida in the MadCowMorningNews and "Welcome to TERRORLAND," is the subject of an FBI terror alert in the South Pacific.

A spate of recent news stories in the MadCowMorningNews has drawn attention to Bohringer's suspicious activities on tiny Fanning Island in the South Pacific, where he had announced an intention to establish a flight school that only trained pilots to fly DC3's... on an island with no electricity and barely a hundred inhabitants more than a thousand miles from a city of any size.

The unwanted scrutiny apparently caused Bohringer to flee aboard his yacht.
Tonight the Associated Press is reporting that U.S. authorities have "uncovered a plot to set up a flight training school in Kiribati and suspect the man behind it may have had links to September 11 mastermind Mohamed Atta."

Even though no one is crediting us for first reporting and identifying Mohamed Atta's German associates in Florida, it is still very satisfying to have finally broken a story from the enormous 'pile' of suppressed news from the terrorist's base of operations in Venice FL which we have been alone in reporting for almost four years.

Headlines at this hour include:

"FBI raises terror alarm about South Pacific flying school"—International Herald Tribune;

"Man with Sept 11 links set up flight school" — The Australian.

"Terror suspect linked to Kiribati flight-school plot says FBI"—New Zealand Herald


Let's see where the Bohringer story goes. And let's credit Hopsicker with being several years ahead of it."

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Judge_or...sures_1120.html
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Judge: FBI must correct disclosures on evacuation of Saudis after 9/11
RAW STORY
Published: Monday November 20, 2006

A U.S. district court judge has ordered the FBI to correct disclosures regarding the US government's evacuation of Saudi royals and bin Laden family members after the September 11 attacks in 2001, a conservative, non-partisan group announced today.

"Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that U.S. District Court Judge Richard W. Roberts of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to submit 'proper disclosures' to the Court and Judicial Watch by December 15, 2006 concerning the U.S. government's evacuation of Saudi royals and members of the bin Laden family from the United States immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks," the group said in a press release obtained by RAW STORY.

Judicial Watch notes that Judge Roberts criticized "the adequacy of redaction descriptions, the accuracy of the sworn statement submitted with the documents, the validity of exemption claims, and other errors in the FBI’s disclosures.

"The FBI’s 220-page annotated production and accompanying … Declaration together do not, as they must, provide sufficient detail or precision about the withheld information … the FBI’s motion for summary judgment will be denied and the FBI will be directed to file disclosures that fairly meet the requirements of [court precedent]," wrote Judge Roberts.

Judge Roberts added that one particular FBI exemption argument "strains credulity."

According to Judicial Watch, US government documents reveal that 160 Saudis flew from the US between September 11 and September 15, 2001. [See http://www.judicialwatch.org/3569.shtml ]

(A 19-page PDF of the Court's opinion can be read at this link: http://www.judicialwatch.org/archive/2006/FBICourtOrder.pdf )

Much as I detest the manner in which BushCo got his buddies out of the USA, one has to admit that their lives were in grave danger, considering how freaked out we were after 9/11.

I would not have been at all surprised if they were lynched.

We are a nation of nutters we are.

http://www.911blogger.com/node/4642
-- --

US-terror links kept in the dark as former Bush associate refuses to testify

Fearing for his life, Sami al-Arian, an admitted terrorist financer and one-time acquaintance of President George W. Bush, has refused to provide information to a federal grand jury regarding a Northern Virginia-based criminal network with connections to the U.S. government. [See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6111301205.html ]

For nearly five years, investigators have been attempting to untangle the complex web of corporations, charities, and think tanks, which have allegedly been used by al-Arian and his associates to launder money for terrorist activities overseas and in the United States.

Although it has been grossly underreported in the mainstream media, the network under investigation has been intimately linked to the U.S. government, suggesting that some of the group’s activities have been sanctioned, protected, and possibly even coordinated by U.S. intelligence.

Sami al-Arian and another convicted terrorist supporter, Abdurahaman Alamoudi, both of whom have alleged links to 9/11, met several times with senior Bush Administration officials in the run-up to the attacks. [See http://www.madcowprod.com/10292004issue.html ]

In June 2001, for instance, as a member of the American Muslim Council (AMC) (which was founded by Alamoudi) al-Arian was “invited to the White House complex for a briefing by Bush political adviser Karl Rove.” [See http://www.sptimes.com/2003/03/11/Floridia...igh_place.shtml ]

Similarly, in 2000 Alamoudi “was one of several Muslims invited to meet with [presidential] candidate [George W.] Bush in Austin, Texas”; and remarkably, just three days after the 9/11 attacks, Alamoudi was invited to a prayer service with the president. [See http://www.bigeye.com/jj022703.htm and http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_..._17/ai_79439332 ]

In addition to founding the AMC, Alamoudi also co-founded a U.S. government-contracted company known as Ptech, which U.S. intelligence officials have described as a CIA front “on the level of Iran-Contra.” [See http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3...563225089&hl=en ]

Ptech, which has been reportedly connected to money laundering, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing, maintained contracts with numerous U.S. government departments and agencies, including the Army, the Air Force, Naval Air Command, Congress, the Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, Customs, the FAA, the IRS, NATO, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the White House. [See http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publis...ticle_570.shtml ]

Ptech’s primary investor and owner, Yassin al-Qadi, has been identified as one of Osama bin Laden’s “chief money launderers”. Al-Qadi escorted U.S. officials around during their official visits to Saudi Arabia and, prior to being publicly connected to money laundering and terrorist-financing, al-Qadi openly and regularly spoke of his friendship with Vice President Dick Cheney. [See http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page...T20020530d.html ]

Furthermore, Ptech cofounder Alamoudi also founded a U.S. Army chaplain program for which he served as a consultant for over a decade. “The right to select military chaplains,” the ultra conservative Front Page Magazine has noted, “offered Alamoudi and his colleagues the chance to recruit still more Islamists with specialized and highly useful skill-sets.” [See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3341720/ and http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/reada...le.asp?ID=11209 ]

At the center of the investigation, the National Review noted, is Yaqub Mirza, who was also a Ptech board member and who is said to have contacts high within the FBI. [See http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comm...devon052703.asp]

“Mirza has been publicly linked to the alleged financing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad through his organizations International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and Safa Trust,” the National Review reported.

According to investigators, IIIT was once the largest contributor to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which they allege was a front group run by Sami Arian, who is now refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida.

There are indications that prior to 9/11, al-Arian, Alamoudi, al-Qadi, Mirza, and other members of the alleged criminal network were protected from prosecution by high-ranking US officials, effectively preventing the FBI from stopping 9/11.

FBI Agent Robert Wright, who was in charge of investigating the Virginia-based network during the 1990s, said the FBI “intentionally and repeatedly thwarted and obstructed” his attempts to arrest terrorists, seize assets, and expand his investigation.

Approximately three months prior to the 9/11 attacks, agent Wright wrote a memo warning that American citizens would die as a result of the FBI's incompetence. He said there was “virtually no effort on the part of the FBI's International Terrorism Unit to neutralize known and suspected international terrorists living in the United States."

According to former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus, even after 9/11 "people in the intelligence community came and said-guys like Alamoudi and Sami al-Arian and other terrorists weren’t being touched because they’d been ordered not to investigate the cases, not to prosecute them, because there were being funded by the Saudis and a political decision was being made at the highest levels, don’t do anything that would embarrass the Saudi government.” He went on to say:

“[W]ho was it that fixed the cases? How could these guys operate for more than a decade immune from prosecution? And, the answer is coming out in a very strange place. What Alamoudi and al-Arian have in common is a guy named Grover Norquist. He's the super lobbyist. ...Grover Norquist's best friend is Karl Rove, the White House chief of staff, and apparently Norquist was able to fix things.” [ http://www.msnbc.com/news/984616.asp?cp1=1 ]

Norquist started an Islamic lobbying group, founded with seed money from Alamoudi. The group, according to Front Page Magazine, “has placed a number of questionable Muslim activists -- including the son of a Wahhabi preacher who helped Osama bin Laden's second in command raise money -- inside the Bush administration, including the White House, the Transportation Department and the Homeland Security Department, as well as other sensitive agencies.” [See http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadA...le.asp?ID=20487 ]

Ex-employee says FAA warned before 9/11

By Catherine Rampell

"Immediately (after 9/11), numerous government officials from FAA as well as other government agencies made defensive statements such as, 'How could we have known this was going to happen?' " Dzakovic testified later before the 9/11 Commission. "The truth is, they did know."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15735.htm

According to both Karen Hughes, [P]residential spokesperson, and the [P]resident of the United States, the government's emergency response plan was placed into operation immediately following the first WTC impact.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseacti...eoid=1490502444

Gee...


The video is mirrored here: http://www.911blogger.com/blog

It is 2 weeks later-has this story gone anywhere?

Well, if you follow the link you posted, you find out that Mike Ruppert is very sick and that FromThe Wilderness is either bankrupt or nearly so.

I never heard that before. Did you?

BTW I read Crossing the Rubicon about 2 years ago. I found it very revealing.

No, not to the best of my knowledge.... but then Hopsicker and others like him have never been given much credence by the MSM or politicians or most of the people. If you took a poll tomorrow across America, I don't think you'd find more than 10% of the population who'd know who he was, or who could lend any articulation about the people and themes he writes about.

This thread (through its earlier volumes) is almost a year old...

The subject of this thread is five years old....

Has anything of it gone anywhere of significance?

If the Speaker of the House (to be) says that impeachment is off the table despite the fact one reason for it is openly admitted to, and another is staring everyone in the face, then how can we expect anyone to pay attention to Hopsicker?

I was asking rhetorically, knowing that the MSM again has let us down.
We did seem close around primary time, then came Labor Day and all of a sudden it appeared the blinders came back on. Almost like everyone agreed it all happened just the way these threads said it did, and then sigh, a shrug, and it was collectively forgotten again.
As if it is not important.

Something tells me the new congress would in a heartbeat authorize anything once again, should an "event" happen again. Now 2 would rise in anger (Feingold and Webb), but the others would give Bush everything in the name of national security once again. (Out of Iraq and into Iran).

Yup... but it'd be nice to get past rhetorical questions to some real ones.

Can you imagine... I mean, can you imagine... having all these characters lined up in front of the TV cameras under oath and asking them a few questions? We could get them some ice water, and they'd be allowed to mop their brow and even put their hand over the mike and consult with their attorney and we could watch them squirm. Now that would be entertaining... they could put it on PayPerView and it'd be a blockbuster. I'd watch that for hours and hours, days and days... There's enough material for review that the show would have to be renewed for a second season. It'd be like Abu Ghraib and Gitmo in some Cannon building hearing room. The snarling dogs would be on the dais, and the pursuant questioning would be like water-boarding... except that it would be legal, and it wouldn't break any international conventions of law or human rights.

All it would take is some guts (integrity, courage, willpower) and a few starter questions asked of a few people under oath.

http://villagevoice.com/news/0648%2Clombar...C75156%2C2.html
---- -- -- --

Death by Dust
The frightening link between the 9-11 toxic cloud and cancer

by Kristen Lombardi
November 28th, 2006 5:22 PM


To date, 75 recovery workers at ground zero have been diagnosed with blood cell cancers that a half-dozen top doctors and epidemiologists have confirmed as having been likely caused by that exposure. Ernie Vallabuona is one of them.

It was October 6, 2004, three years after Ernie Vallebuona's three-month stint as a rescue and recovery worker at ground zero in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and he was hunched over and trembling, racked by a pain like nothing he had experienced in his 40 years of sound health. He had just returned to his Rockland County home after finishing the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift in the NYPD vice unit, where he'd reported to work for the last six years. Vallebuona had bought some fish from a street vendor near his office, on the Lower East Side. And as he drove the 35 miles from Manhattan to New City, he chalked up a searing stomachache to food poisoning. Maybe the vendor had filleted that fish with a dirty machete?

By the time he pulled into his driveway, the pain had grown excruciating, too horrible for him to even lie in bed that day. The chills swept over his body; so did the shakes. He called his doctor, who suggested ulcer medication. His mother advised him to forget that diagnosis and consult a specialist instead, but like a lot of young, healthy men, he didn't listen right away.

Vallebuona isn't much for complaining; what ailing cop is? But for six months, he had noticed his body betraying him. His toes had reddened; his joints had stiffened. They throbbed in prickly pangs, as if glass shards were wedged underneath his skin. When his own heartbeat began to hurt, he had visited the family doctor, who diagnosed him with gout. He was told to drink cherry juice and take anti-inflammatory medicine. Neither worked.

Now as his stomach convulsed, Vallebuona listened to his mother at last. Later that day, he found himself at a gastroenterologist's office in Pomona, lying on a table, watching a nurse poke at his abdomen. She felt a lump and ordered tests. It would take a month to reach a definitive diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphoid tissue. Evidently, Vallebuona had developed a golf-ball-sized mass in his abdomen that had grown so fast and so quick that pieces of it were dying and depositing into his blood, causing gout-like symptoms.

One week after that, he was at a Manhattan hospital, meeting his oncologist, hearing about the heavy-duty chemotherapy he would have to undergo over the next four months. At the visit, a nurse explained he had an aggressive cancer—a rare stage-three—and asked a battery of questions.

Did he ever do modeling with glue?
Did he ever handle insecticides?
Did he ever work with chemicals like benzene?

Vallebuona answered no to all the questions. He had led a clean life; before becoming a cop, he'd worked in a bank.

Sitting in the examining room with him, Vallebuona's wife, Amy, finally spoke up.

"What about 9-11?" she asked. "What about all that smoke and dust?"

Only then did Ernie Vallebuona first consider the possibility that the events of September 11 could be the cause of his cancer.


This is not the story of rescue and recovery workers at ground zero getting sick with respiratory illnesses from their exposure; you have read those stories, and you have heard those cases.

This is the story of 9-11 and cancer.

To date, 75 recovery workers on or around what is now known as "the Pile"—the rubble that remained after the World Trade Center towers collapsed on the morning of September 11, 2001—have been diagnosed with blood cell cancers that a half-dozen top doctors and epidemiologists have confirmed as having been likely caused by that exposure.

Those 75 cases have come to light in joint-action lawsuits filed against New York City on behalf of at least 8,500 recovery workers who suffer from various forms of lung illnesses and respiratory diseases—and suggest a pattern too distinct to ignore. While some cancers take years, if not decades, to develop, the blood cancers in otherwise healthy and young individuals represent a pattern that experts believe will likely prove to be more than circumstantial. The suits seek to prove that these 8,500 workers—approximately 20 percent of the total estimated recovery force that cleared the rubble from ground zero—all suffer from the debilitating effects of those events.

The basis for the suits stems from the plaintiffs' argument that the government—in a desperate attempt to revive downtown in the wake of the catastrophic events on 9-11—failed to protect workers from cancer-causing benzene, dioxin, and other hazardous chemicals that permeated the air for months. Officials made these failures worse by falsely reassuring New Yorkers that they faced no long-term dangers from exposure to the air lingering over ground zero.

"We are very encouraged that the results from our monitoring of air-quality and drinking-water conditions in both New York and near the Pentagon show that the public in these areas is not being exposed to excessive levels of asbestos or other harmful substances," Christine Todd Whitman, the then administrator of the EPA, told the citizens of New York City in a press release on September 18—only seven days after the attacks. "Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York . . . that their air is safe to breathe and the water is safe to drink."

Those statements were not only false and misleading, but may even play into the basis for the city's liability for millions of dollars in the recovery workers' lawsuits. Last February, U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts cited Whitman's false statements as the basis for allowing a different class-action lawsuit to proceed—this one, against the EPA and Whitman, is on behalf of residents, office workers, and students from Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, many of whom suffer from respiratory illnesses as a result of 9-11.

"No reasonable person would have thought that telling thousands of people that it was safe to return to Lower Manhattan, while knowing that such return could pose long-term health risks and other dire consequences, was conduct sanctioned by our laws," Batts wrote in her February 2 ruling. "Whitman's deliberate and misleading statements made to the press, where she reassured the public that the air was safe to breathe around Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and that there would be no health risk presented to those returning to the areas, shocks the conscience."

And that was before anyone knew of the apparent cancer link, first reported in the New York news media in the spring of 2004. Even more shocking is the incidence of cancer and other life-threatening illnesses that have developed among those participating in the recovery workers' lawsuits. Given the fact that some cancers are slower to develop than others, it seems likely to several doctors and epidemiologists that many more reports of cancer and serious lung illnesses will surface in the months and years to come. The fact that 8,500 recovery workers have already banded together to sue, only five years later—with 400 total cancer patients among their number—leads many experts to predict that these figures are likely to grow, meaning a possible death toll in the thousands.

In many ways, these illnesses suggest the slow but deteriorating health issues that faced the atomic-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where thousands died in the years and decades that followed the United States' use of nuclear weapons. And that similarity has not been lost on David Worby, the 53-year-old attorney leading the joint-action suits on behalf of those workers who are already sick, and even dying.

"In the end," Worby declares, "our officials might be responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden on 9-11."

In the five years since the attacks, much of the focus on the 9-11 health crisis has missed a broader question, the one that every ground zero worker fears most and the one that Ernie Vallebuona has already had to ponder: What about cancer? What if all that pulverized concrete and ground glass and caustic mist that Vallebuona inhaled while on the Pile didn't attack his lungs but instead went straight for his lymph nodes? Could this noxious mix have caused his lymphoma?

No one has done a comprehensive study of the health consequences on the estimated 40,000 rescue and recovery workers who raced to ground zero after the attacks. A study by Mount Sinai Medical Center—one that received widespread media attention two months ago—released statistics on the five-year anniversary of 9-11 that focused almost exclusively on respiratory problems and bypassed any mention of cancer today.

But David Worby has tracked the cancer patients among his growing client base for the last two years. Here are the latest tallies: Of the 8,500 people now suing the city, 400, or about 5 percent, have cancer. The biggest group by far consists of people like Vallebuona, who have blood cell cancers. Seventy-five clients suffer from lymphoma, leukemia, multiple myeloma, and other blood cell cancers; most are men, aged 30 to 60, who appeared in perfect health just five years ago.

The field of cancer research is not known for consensus. But six prominent specialists on cancer and the link to toxins—on the faculty of the nation's top medical schools and public health institutions—all come to the same conclusions when told these statistics. They are Richard Clapp and David Ozonoff, professors of environmental health at Boston University School of Public Health; Michael Thun, director of epidemiological research at the American Cancer Society; Francine Laden, assistant professor of environmental epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health; Jonathan Samet, chairman of the epidemiology department at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and Charles Hesdorffer, associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. These doctors and epidemiologists agree that the incidence of cancer among this subset of workers sounds shockingly high, that they cannot and should not be dismissed as coincidence, and that the toxic dust cloud that hung over downtown Manhattan, and particularly the Pile, likely caused or promoted the diseases. Some even went so far as to say that the blood cancer cases, especially, indicate what could become a wave of cancer cases stemming from 9-11 over the next decades.

"Those numbers seem quite outrageous," is how Hesdorffer puts it. Now at Johns Hopkins, Hesdorffer directed until last year the tumor immunotherapy program at Columbia University Medical Center, where he treated two recovery workers who got cancer post–9-11. He notes that the average healthy adult person has a 20 percent risk of having cancer over a lifetime. Calculate that risk over five years—the time frame from the events of 9-11 until today—and it drops to about 1 percent. Yet 5 percent of the suits' workers—1 percent of the overall worker population—have already been diagnosed with malignancies. And these patients don't include the thousands whose illnesses have yet to be recorded because they aren't participating in the lawsuits or in the World Trade Center medical-monitoring programs.

What the experts find most telling are the types of cancer now emerging. They say the blood cancer cases seem too disproportionate to be random. Two percent of these workers have been diagnosed with what amounts to related diseases, none of which fall into the "high-frequency" category, which includes prostate cancer. One out of 9,000 people nationwide gets lymphoma a year; for myeloma, it's one out of 30,000. By contrast, the 75 blood cancer patients translate into several dozen new cases a year.

"That's not just a fluke," says Ozonoff, who studies cancer clusters and toxic waste sites.

Samet, a worldwide expert on smoking and cancer, notes that when so many cases of related cancers emerge, it can signal a forming cluster. "It sounds like an impressive cluster of cancer cases, and I would want to study it," he says.

To be sure, the experts advise caution until more evidence is collected. They acknowledge that the data needed to draw a definite link between 9-11 and cancer don't exist. None of the cancers emerging now are the kinds that come only from toxic exposures—like, say, asbestosis, which is caused by asbestos and can take two decades to grow. This sentinel cancer would go a long way toward proving a 9-11 connection. Absent that, scientists would want to determine whether a higher proportion of cancer patients exists among the workers than in the general public. But because there are no independent data on the 40,000-strong group, they can't make this calculation yet. Meanwhile, the latency periods for most cancers from the time of a full-blown carcinogenic exposure to a full-blown malignancy can take years, if not decades. Says Thun, of the American Cancer Society: "It is the exception rather than the rule to have cancers develop this quickly."

Despite the lack of definitive data, we may still be in the midst of a cancer epidemic. Indeed, according to these experts, traditional data don't help much here because 9-11 represents such a singular exposure. No one can deny that the workers were exposed to a blend of pulverized and aerosolized toxins that had never existed in any occupational setting before. And this mix of toxins alone is enough to cause more aggressive cancers.

"It's also enough to throw out prescriptions on timing," Hesdorffer adds.

Back in May 2004, before most doctors even contemplated a 9-11 link to cancer, Hesdorffer provided testimony to the federal government's September 11 Victim Compensation Fund on behalf of one police officer who had developed pancreatic cancer within a year after his recovery stint. Hesdorffer finds it odd that two of his patients had been diagnosed with the rare cancer after working on the Pile. "It's strange to have two people who were subjected to the same exposure," he says, "developing the same cancer in the same time frame." Now that he has learned of Worby's statistics, he is convinced that "there is definitely more than a likely link between the 9-11 exposures and cancer."

Francine Laden, who specializes in air pollution and cancer, agrees. Because so many of Worby's clients have blood cancers—which have faster incubation periods than tumor cancers, forming in as little as five years—Laden confirms that it's not a stretch to attribute their diseases to the dust cloud. "Blood cancers are different," she says, noting the tie between benzene and leukemia, as well as dioxin and lymphoma. "It's not beyond the realm of feasibility that these chemicals caused these cancers."

Ozonoff puts it more firmly: "For an acute episode like this, it's definitely possible these blood cancers were caused by 9-11."

Ozonoff echoes all five of his colleagues when he draws parallels between the aftermath of 9-11 and that of another massive exposure: the atomic-bombs dropped on Japan. Bomb survivors experienced excessive spikes in leukemia rates within the first five years, a surprising discovery for epidemiologists in the mid 20th century. While this outbreak resulted from radiation, both it and 9-11 involved a sudden and intense blast of carcinogens. For bomb survivors, leukemia appeared first, followed by breast and lung cancer. "That could happen with 9-11," says Samet, the Johns Hopkins epidemiology department chair. "It might be what we're seeing today."

It's also possible that the carcinogens in the Trade Center dust accelerated cancers already dormant or developing in the recovery workers, epidemiologists say. According to Richard Clapp, who directed the Massachusetts Cancer Registry from 1980 to 1989, toxins can not only instigate the genes that cause cancerous cells to divide, but also hasten their dividing. That means that a person with an undetected cancer will develop it faster and in a more virulent manner. He calls this the "promotional effect" and says some toxins associated with 9-11 have been known to speed up lymphomas and leukemias. "The promotional effect could have happened already," he says.

Either way, Clapp adds, "It's hard not to attribute these cancers to 9-11." His gut, he says, is telling him one thing: "We'll be seeing a cancer explosion from 9-11, and we're starting to see it today."

A nurse would ask John Walcott about possible causes of his acute myelogenous leukemia. Like Vallebuona, Walcott answered no to all the questions. And like Vallebuona, he didn't connect the dots between his time at ground zero and the cancer growing in his body.

At 8:30 on the morning of the terrorist attacks, Ernie Vallebuona was driving with his three-year-old son, also named Ernie, to a nearby Home Depot in search of the perfect paint color for the family bathroom. Vallebuona always listens to 1010 WINS in the car, so he turned on the radio. He soon heard the incredible news that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers. Instantly, he got the call to respond.

"We're all mobilizing," his NYPD supervisor told him via cell phone. "Get to work as fast as you can."

Over in Pomona, some 36 miles away from Manhattan, 37-year-old NYPD detective John Walcott was at his suburban home, killing time before a midnight tour on the narcotics unit, where he'd worked for a dozen years. He was relaxing on the couch when a friend from St. Louis called.

"What the hell is going on in New York?" the friend asked, incredulously. Walcott had no idea what his friend meant. He flipped on the TV, only to see flames raging from the twin towers. Minutes later, he was behind the wheel of his minivan, speeding down the highway toward the World Trade Center.

Some 200 miles southeast of the Trade Center site, 49-year-old Gary Acker was working in a bomb shelter dubbed the "earth station," an undisclosed location where AT&T keeps its large satellite dishes. At the time, Acker was managing the company's disaster recovery team, which restores critical communications after catastrophes. He had long viewed the post as the crowning achievement in his 31-year career, one that suited his desire to make a difference.

When the first plane hit the north tower, he was sitting in an equipment room, four floors below ground, running emergency drills. No one had turned on the TV, so he remained oblivious to the events unfolding in Manhattan. His wife, Alison, called him.

"Look at the TV," she said, just as the second plane hit the south tower. Acker knew that New York City officials would be calling AT&T for help. "Pack up your equipment," he heard his wife say, "and get ready to ride."

Back in Manhattan, Jessy McCarthy was not about to roll anywhere. The Verizon field technician was sitting in his office on East 91st Street, listening to the news on the radio, when he heard about the planes hitting the towers. He froze in place, unable to pull himself away from the broadcast for hours that day. Only that afternoon did he manage to go to a nearby work site to repair phone lines. Sitting in his truck, he stared in disbelief at all the people doused in gray dust walking up Third Avenue from downtown. His eyes locked on the caravan of people who'd been caught in that cloud.

By the time McCarthy was taking in this ghostly scene, Vallebuona and Walcott had joined thousands of first responders at the World Trade Center. Both arrived at the site shortly after the 110-story twin towers came crashing down, and they spent the next 15 hours sifting through the wreckage. Racing to the scene from the Seventh Precinct, on Pitt Street, Vallebuona encountered a giant cloud of dust and smoke so hazy and dense, he couldn't see his hand in front of his face. He circled the periphery of what he thought was the scene, following the blaring sirens and running past pumper trucks and police cruisers twisted up like discarded tin cans. The dust caked his eyes and coated his lips. It filled his nostrils with a horrible smell, like burned plastic and flesh. Vallebuona happened to have a bandanna in his pants pocket, which he wrapped across his face. It did little to ward off the rancid odor.

Walcott was also experiencing the noxious effects of the chemical brew. While the massive cloud had dissipated, the crystalline particles hung in the air like speckles in a snow globe. He waded though mounds of pulverized dust, knee-deep, tasting it on his lips, spitting it out of his mouth. Without a mask, he was coughing immediately. First came the black mucus and ashen chunks, then the dry heaves and blood. For hours, he wiped away dark gunk dripping from his eyes. He couldn't help but think that something was wrong. But he focused on the mission at hand, on the faint hope of discovering survivors. That day, he stepped over the only human body that he would find intact—a female, burned beyond recognition, a charred bra over her face.

Acker arrived on the scene 24 hours later, after driving with 11 team members up the East Coast in a company trailer equipped with satellite transmission consoles and multiplex cables. He would spend the next 33 days in and around ground zero—first setting up a satellite at 1 Police Plaza, then manning phone lines across the street from what came to be known as the Pile. The plume enveloped the area from the moment he set foot there until he left. Many nights, he'd oversee the satellite atop 1 Police Plaza, just east of ground zero, and watch as the prevailing winds subsided and the bright-blue smoke settled in. It hung so heavily on the city that he couldn't see the guards stationed across the street.

In these early days, Acker, Vallebuona, and Walcott all struggled to protect themselves from the toxic dust. The foul odor clogged the air for the three months that Vallebuona ended up working at the site—first on the Pile, hauling rubble with buckets, then around the perimeter, providing security and escorting residents to their dust-laden homes. When he and Walcott searched the rubble as part of the initial bucket brigade, they wore nothing over their faces but surgical masks. Respirator masks came weeks into their months-long recovery work; sometimes they came with the wrong filters.

Because Walcott was a detective, he ended up spending his five-month stint not just at ground zero, but also at Fresh Kills. As much as he choked on the Lower Manhattan air, he dreaded the Staten Island landfill. Walcott knew everything in the towers had fallen—desks, lights, computers. But apart from the occasional steel beam, the detritus that he sifted through there consisted of tiny grains of dust—no furniture pieces, no light fixtures, not even a computer mouse.

At times, the detectives would take shelter in wooden sheds, in an attempt to get away from what Walcott likes to call "all that freaking bad air." One day, he was sitting in the shed with his colleagues, eating candy bars and drinking sodas, when some FBI agents entered. They were dressed in full haz-mat suits, complete with head masks, which they had sealed shut with duct tape to ward off the fumes. As Walcott took in the scene, contrasting the well-protected FBI agents with the New York cops wearing respirator masks, one thought entered his mind: What is wrong with this picture?

The same thought would cross Acker's mind only fleetingly, and only after weeks of working near ground zero, while he was hacking so hard he vomited something akin to chewed-up licorice. During his first days at the site, he wore the painter's mask that an NYPD lieutenant had given him, but it soon became too filthy from debris. By October, he was spitting up so much gunk that he called his doctor for an antibiotics prescription. But he wouldn't leave the site; when the fumes got bad, he'd sit in the company trailer and flip on the air conditioner. That had a filter, at least. AT&T had stocked its disaster trailers with almost everything—rubber boots, hard hats, rope, a first aid kit.

Funny, Acker thought, staring at the shelves. All this stuff, yet no one had ever considered respirators.

Around this time, McCarthy was just beginning to report for recovery duty. When Verizon asked for volunteers to restore phone lines near ground zero, he didn't hesitate. He arrived for his first assignment in early October and wound up staying downtown for the next 13 months, going from basement to basement, moving from Wall Street skyscrapers to Chinatown walk-ups. The first thing he saw in the company terminals was the Trade Center dust, piled on top of consoles, crammed into corners. He had to wipe down the equipment with his bare hands to see the wires. The dust had an orange hue; at times, it twinkled. And it always stunk, an unforgettable smell he struggled to get past every time. Invariably, he'd find it in his hair, on his eyelashes, in his tool belt, even under his fingernails. Sometimes, he'd gaze at the ceiling and get the sense of standing in the middle of a meadow thick with pollen. He could see the soot and dust floating in the air.

When it occurred to these responders that they might be sacrificing their health for the sake of the cleanup—as it did to anyone who came in contact with the foul-smelling smoke and dust—they took comfort in the official word at the time. In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, the EPA issued multiple statements on the air quality downtown. All were reassuring in nature. On September 18, the day after the New York Stock Exchange reopened for business, the EPA's Whitman said the air was safe to breathe.

It has turned out those words were, in fact, false. In August 2003, the EPA inspector general issued a scathing 155-page report concluding that the agency hadn't had the data to make such blanket declarations at that time. By then, more than a quarter of EPA samples showed unsafe levels of asbestos, and the agency had yet to complete tests for mercury, cadmium, lead, dioxin, and PCBs. The inspector general's report went on to disclose another disconcerting fact—that the White House had pressured the EPA to sanitize its warnings about ground zero. The inspector general revealed that the White House Council on Environmental Quality had taken a red pen to the agency's press releases, adding reassuring statements and deleting cautionary ones, creating the overly rosy picture that the air was clean.

In reality, the 9-11 fallout was like nothing anyone had been exposed to before. Everything in the towers had been ground into dust—concrete, steel, glass, insulation, plastic, and computers. Dust analyses would detect glass shards, cement particles, cellulose fibers, asbestos, and a mixture of harmful components, including lead, titanium, barium, and gypsum. In all, the dust contained more than 100 different compounds, some of which have never been identified. And then there were the fires that smoldered for three months. They gave off not only the putrid plume, but also a blast of carcinogens—asbestos, dioxin, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. They also emitted benzene.

In one disturbing analysis done by the U.S. Geological Survey, the dust had such high alkalinity levels it rivaled liquid Drano.

Thomas Cahill, a physicist who sent a team to analyze the plume from a rooftop a mile away from ground zero, says he got worried once he noticed the color of the smoke had turned a fluorescent blue. That's a sure sign that ultra-fine particles (which can go deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream) were coming off the Pile and permeating the air. When his team tested the plume, the scientists found higher levels of sulfuric acid, heavy metals, and other insoluble materials than anywhere else in the world, even in the Kuwaiti oil fields. "Not nice stuff," says Cahill, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California at Davis, who has published three papers on the 9-11 plume, "and it was all being liberated by that smoldering pile, so those people got the full force of it."

Today, Cahill is trying to identify what exactly the recovery workers were inhaling, but the data are incomplete. He does know one thing for certain: "You'd have to stand by a busy highway for eight years to get what these people on the site got in just four weeks." He then adds, "These poor people are part of an enormous experiment, I think."

In May 2003, John Walcott was 39 years old. He had just become a first-time father—of his daughter, Colleen—and had proudly coached a Bedford high school hockey team to the state regionals. That spring, he had noticed his energy fade. But he figured his 16-hour days juggling the narcotics beat, hockey practice, and parenthood were finally catching up to him. Still, the fatigue would consume him for weeks. He'd fall asleep at his desk or behind the wheel. Often he'd nod off in the middle of a conversation.

Then he got the diagnosis: acute myelogenous leukemia, a white-blood-cell cancer. He was ordered straight to the hospital, where he underwent chemotherapy for the next 28 days.

Eventually, a nurse would ask Walcott questions similar to those put to Valle-buona, the ones meant to pinpoint the possible causes for his cancer. Like Vallebuona, Walcott answered no to all the questions. And like Vallebuona, he didn't connect the dots between his time at ground zero and the cancer growing in his body.

Visiting him in the hospital later, his sister, Debbie, did.

"John," she said, "what the hell do you think you were around at ground zero?"

It was a question that Gary Acker would also have to confront that summer, in a visit to his own doctor's office. The AT&T manager had never shaken that World Trade Center cough, struggling with sore throats and lung infections for 18 months after completing his recovery work, suffering through all kinds of inhalers and antibiotic regimens. At one point, his doctor diagnosed him with sleep apnea and ordered him to wear a pilot-like mask strapped over his face at night, so as to reduce his roaring snores. It didn't work.

A perennial optimist, Acker ignored any hint that his health problems were 9-11 related. In September 2002, he got the first warning that his health was deteriorating from exposure to the dust cloud when he underwent a pulmonary test for the company. He was stunned by the doctor's response.

"How many packs of cigarettes do you smoke a day?" the doctor asked Acker.

"I don't smoke. I never have in my life."

"Well, you have a real breathing problem," the doctor informed him.

His second warning came in the summer of 2003, as Walcott was getting chemotherapy. In August, Acker was landscaping the backyard at his home, in Columbus, New Jersey, carrying two 50-pound buckets of stones, when his body buckled under a jolt of pain. It felt as if somebody had jabbed a fishhook into his rib cage and was slowly gutting him. He allowed for the possibility of a kidney stone and paid a trip to the doctor. Days later, he got a diagnosis that would stop his heart cold: multiple myeloma, a plasma cell cancer. Already, the super- advanced cancer had eaten its way through the bone marrow in his ribs, as well as many other bones in his body.

For a fleeting moment, Acker thought about that thick and foul plume hanging over the Pile; could it have caused his cancer? But his optimism flooded back and he focused on his treatment instead—on the chemotherapy pills that he would take twice a day for the next 28 days. Only days later, after his oncologist confirmed that his myeloma likely formed in the last two years, did he finally make the tie-in to 9-11.

By the spring of 2004, Acker and Walcott had endured not only months of chemotherapy, but also stem cell transplants. They experienced a series of life-threatening infections and trips in and out of the hospital before beating their cancers into remission.

For a fleeting moment, Gary Acker thought about that thick and foul plume hanging over the Pile; could it have caused his multiple myeloma?
photo: Scott McDermott

Meanwhile, Vallebuona had just begun noticing gout-like symptoms. They started in his big toes, which doubled in size and became hot to the touch, and then moved to his knees, joints, and chest. For six months, he went back and forth to the doctor, getting more medicine, seeking more remedies. He wouldn't doubt that diagnosis until October 2004, when the searing stomachache tipped him off to what had really been causing pain in his abdomen.

When he got the cancer diagnosis, Valle-buona was relieved about one thing. His doctor had been wrong about the gout. If nothing else, at least he wouldn't have to live with that excruciating pain for the rest of his life.

As Vallebuona was coming to grips with his cancer in the fall of 2004, Jessy McCarthy was still feeling healthy. The Verizon technician had managed to evade the kinds of respiratory problems that have afflicted so many ground zero workers—the cough, the sinusitis, the asthma—in the two years since his recovery assignment had ended. He would experience nothing to suggest the grave disease that would sneak up on him.

At least not until one day in October 2004, while taking a shower, when he saw a swelling around the glands under his arm, about the size of a marble. He thought: This is not right.

In March 2005, after a biopsy of one of his lymph nodes, Jessy McCarthy finally was given the definitive diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. By then, the recovery workers' lawsuits had been more than a year in the making.
photo: Scott McDermott

But McCarthy didn't feel sick; there were no dizzy spells or nausea. A trip to the family doctor to ask about the lump yielded little information, just something questionable about his blood. So McCarthy plodded on with his life, holding down his full-time job, taking care of his teenage son.

Suddenly, within weeks, he noticed the lump had grown, and more had developed. His lymph nodes swelled all over his body, underneath his arms, in his groin, around his neck and chest. The lumps just seemed to sprout; they grew so big that they looked like mini-baseballs. Suddenly, McCarthy found himself undergoing a battery of medical exams—CAT scans, PET scans, blood tests, and anything else that would help narrow down the possibilities. It took six months to rule out every type of lymphatic infection. In March 2005, after a biopsy of one of his lymph nodes, McCarthy finally was given the definitive diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

By then, the recovery workers' lawsuits had been more than a year in the making. Back in the winter of 2004, Walcott had just survived the worst of his hospital stays, a 17-day stretch of 106-degree fevers, and was confined to his home. Months had passed since he learned that his leukemia likely resulted from his exposure to benzene while on the Pile, but he went in search of legal advice. He started with a lawyer friend, who encouraged him to keep looking. One attorney offered to take Walcott's case, as long as he put up his modest house to cover the fees. "Forget it," he said.

Eventually, parents of the kids on his high school hockey team heard about his plight. During a visit, Walcott told some parents about his fruitless search. They had an idea. They could contact a trial lawyer whose son went to the same high school; his name was David Worby.

"I took the case as a favor," the lead attorney in the recovery workers' lawsuits says, sitting in his spacious penthouse office in White Plains. A trim man whose brown hair is graying at the temples, David Worby exudes confidence as he reclines in his chair and recalls the early days of what has become his greatest legal crusade. Long before the 9-11 suits, he had built a reputation as a gladiator lawyer on personal-injury cases; in 1989, he set a Westchester record by winning $18 million for a construction worker run down by a car. Fifteen years later, he was settling into early retirement when one of the Bedford parents told him about the ailing Walcott.

"What was I supposed to do?" Worby asks.

What started out as a case for one sick recovery worker quickly snowballed. Today, a team of 20 attorneys at his firm of Worby Groner Edelman Napoli & Bern is handling the suits, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, for the thousands of workers associated with the Trade Center cleanup—police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, iron workers, and Latino day workers. Last month, Federal District Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected the city's claim for immunity in the Worby lawsuits and recently capped its liability at $1 billion. The judge is expected to appoint a special master to settle the workers' claims.

Worby's client list continues to grow. It now includes Vallebuona, Acker, and McCarthy, all of whom came to him after he filed the first suits in September 2004. They found out about him as most of his clients do—by word of mouth, one sick recovery worker to another, one worried spouse to another. Others have called him after hearing about the cases on TV or the radio or in the papers. Most of the clients have grown ill from respiratory problems like asthma, sinusitis, and bronchitis. But some have kidney failure, and 400 people have developed cancer. So far, 83 clients have died.

The number of cancer patients has multiplied at a rate that Worby says he never anticipated. Back in 2004, he represented only 20 workers who had cancer. But by last March, he had watched that number soar to 200, and within six months after that, it had doubled. Now he gets at least several calls a week from clients who have just been diagnosed with some cancer. Or from new clients who have had the cancer for weeks or months.

Like many trial lawyers, Worby has a penchant for talking in fervent, breathless tones, as though his words were writ large, in bright, blinking letters. Convinced that the 9-11 fallout has made for a cancer explosion, he doesn't hesitate to say so. "There is going to be a cancer catastrophe the likes of which we've never seen in this country," he says. "The numbers are going to be staggering."

Perhaps it'd be easy to dismiss him as another hot-aired plaintiffs' attorney were it not for his own command of numbers. He has become something of a gumshoe epidemiologist, compiling the data on his cancer patients that are lacking in the larger worker population, tracking their diseases, ages, diagnosis dates, and their 9-11 exposures. "Look at the cancers my clients have," he says, flipping through a dozen pages of a document entitled "Seriously Ill Clients." It's updated every month; this one is dated September 13, 2006. The document outlines what he calls his "cancer clusters" and lists rare cancers often associated with the 9-11 toxins, such as thyroid (30 people), tongue and throat (25), testicular (16), and brain (10). He keeps a separate document on the 75 people with blood cancers. Two dozen of them have various forms of leukemia; the remaining four dozen have various forms of lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and other blood cell cancers.

"If I had two blood cancers, it'd be a strong coincidence," Worby argues. "But 70? That defies coincidence. The word coincidence should not be in anyone's vocabulary."

Worby contends that it wasn't just the unprecedented amount of toxins in the air that caused his clients to develop cancer; it was that the toxins worked together. Worby calls it a "synergistic effect," and cancer specialists say there is such a thing as toxic synergy, which occurs when chemicals combine. They can enhance the damage that the other ones would cause. Think of it this way: The benzene at ground zero may have caused Walcott's acute leukemia; the dioxin probably sped up its development.

"This amount of toxicological exposure is going to speed up normal latency periods," Worby argues. He makes this assertion with the same zeal that he exhibits in the courtroom, citing medical studies on animals, rattling off the findings as if they were second nature. Why would the doctors monitoring the effects of 9-11 on people's health not understand this connection, he wonders. "Why would people not make this link?"

Five years after September 11, there's no doubt that the toxic dust cloud has devastated the lungs of those who participated in the Trade Center cleanup. In September, the Mount Sinai Medical Center released data from its WTC Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, which has tested 17,500 recovery workers to date. In that analysis, doctors found that nearly 70 percent of the 9,500 subjects they surveyed experienced new or worsened respiratory symptoms at ground zero; close to 60 percent saw those symptoms persist for years. Doctors have seen chronic sinusitis, laryngitis, asthma, gastroesophageal reflux disorder, and disabling musculoskeletal conditions. Even the famous World Trade Center cough has lasted much longer than anticipated.

"All of us have been badly surprised by the persistence and the chronicity of the World Trade Center diseases," says Robin Herbert, the director of the screening program.

But at the Mount Sinai program (and at the WTC program of the FDNY, which declined to comment for this article), the link between the dust cloud and cancer is discussed more as a possibility than a reality. It's not that doctors aren't extremely concerned about the connection, Herbert says, given the cancer-causing agents and other toxins in the mix. While individual cancer cases may be attributed to 9-11 toxins, she says, the doctors, so far, lack full epidemiological proof linking the two.

"We don't know if we're seeing a spike in cancer rates," Herbert says, as they have in the rates of respiratory illnesses. Herbert confirms that the Mount Sinai doctors have seen some workers with cancer, including unusual cancers, but says they'd expect some workers to develop malignancies over the last five years anyway. Is there more incidence of cancer among Pile workers than among those who didn't toil on the Pile? "That's the key question," she says. The Mount Sinai epidemiologists have just begun to try to answer that by launching an initiative to update medical records, document new diagnoses, and track less-com mon diseases like cancer. It's a slow process, with no timeline. Still, she says, "We are now aggressively investigating every case of cancer that has been reported to us."

But the WTC programs—funded by the federal government—have their share of critics, who wonder how interested the doctors are in the 9-11 and cancer issue. Al O'Leary, the spokesperson for the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, says that many of its members feel as if the doctors are ignoring the signs of a growing cancer cluster. "It was our impression that no one in the medical-monitoring programs believed the cancers could be happening this early," he explains.

Over the past year, the police union has fielded a steady increase in calls from members who have developed cancer since working at ground zero. Last July, the PBA started its own World Trade Center health registry for its members, listing seven cancer cases at the time. Today, there are 20 cases; they include the 35-year-old who worked on the Pile and at Fresh Kills and now has multiple myeloma, the 45-year-old who surveyed the Trade Center site for two years and now has leukemia, and the 41-year-old who manned the landfill morgue for three weeks and now has myeloma.

"Now, don't you think this is all very suspicious?" O'Leary asks. "The medical community needs to be more open-minded about what diseases can be caused by 9-11."

Some cancer specialists agree. Hesdorffer, of Johns Hopkins, still remembers the reaction to his testimony before the Victim Compensation Fund, back in 2004. He was called back about a half-dozen times to explain why he would attribute the pancreatic cancer in his two patients to the dust cloud so soon after 9-11. It was as if no one wanted to make the connection; one patient lost his claim despite the doctor's opinion.

"We're in this period where no one wants to accept the link," Hesdorffer observes. Maybe the official denial stems from economics, from a desire to limit the amount of money owed to the thousands who have lost their health. Or maybe it has to do with politics. Admitting a link, as he points out, "would mean that the fallout from 9-11 was a lot bigger than we'd thought."

What it would mean is that people got cancer from government decisions. From the decision of Whitman to lie about the air quality in Lower Manhattan, which gave the recovery workers and many other New Yorkers a false sense of security. From the decision of the White House to put Wall Street ahead of public health, which the EPA inspector general found had influenced all those rosy statements. And from the decision to let workers toil without proper respirators for weeks, or without any respirators at all.

For Gary Acker, now 54 and still undergoing monthly chemical drips to heal his bones, gone are the annual trips hunting for caribou in Canada and fishing for trout in the Adirondacks. Those years in the late '90s when he threw the javelin and shot put in the New York version of the Olympics seem like an adolescent memory. No longer working at AT&T, he devotes his time to trying to relax, watching mindless sitcoms on TV, anything to make himself laugh. "If I'm laughing, I'm not stressed," he says. His doctors tell him that no stress means less chance of a cancer relapse.

Last year, Jessy McCarthy, now 48, had to work through his chemotherapy treatment, juggling the 72-hour drips with his job and his son for six months. He didn't have much choice; otherwise he'd lose his medical benefits. He could never afford the medical bills on his $65,000 salary; some of his medications cost $5,000 a dose. Now in remission, he continues to fix phone lines, though he knows the day will come when he can't anymore. Already, he has had to call for help on assignments he used to do alone. He also knows, in the back of his mind, that his cancer is the kind that will likely return, and possibly kill him.

Walcott and Vallebuona, both retired from the force because of their cancer, continue to live with the side effects of their treatments—the lost feeling in their hands and feet and the extreme fatigue. While Vallebuona has undergone chemotherapy, radiation, and a stem cell transplant, he still hasn't been able to beat his lymphoma into remission. They also grapple with what they both like to call "chemo brain." The drugs left Walcott, now 42, too incoherent to witness or recall the first time his daughter learned to walk or talk. For Vallebuona, now 41, the littler things seem to escape him, like the weekend plans his wife mentioned earlier in the day. But even their foggy minds have not erased the memories of two planes hitting the World Trade Center on that sunny September morning, when they had woken up healthy and happy to be alive.

http://www.teamliberty.net/id284.html
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Government refuses to authenticate bin Laden “confession video”

August 11, 2006 – In response to the July 10, 2006 Freedom of Information Act request made by the Muckraker Report to the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding the authenticity of the December 13, 2001 Osama bin Laden “confession video” in which Osama bin Laden allegedly confesses his involvement and masterminding of 9/11, the FBI said:

The material you requested is located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure pursuant to Title 5, United States Code, Section 552, subsection ((7)(A).

On December 13, 2001 the United States Department of Defense released the videotape allegedly of Osama bin Laden confessing to his involvement with the events of September 11, 2001. The DoD also issued Press Release No. 630-01, which indicated that the “confession video” was obtained by U.S. forces in Jalalabad, Afghanistan in late November 2001.

In the Muckraker Report FOIA the following documents were requested:

1. Documents related to the discovery of the December 13, 2001 Osama bin Laden video

2. Documents that demonstrate chain of custody of the December 13, 2001 Osama bin Laden video from the time it was discovered in Afghanistan until it was released for media consumption

3. Documents that demonstrate an Israeli connection to the discovery of the December 13, 2001 Osama bin Laden video – whether that connection be the IDF, Mossad, Israeli mercenaries, or any other person or agency influenced or controlled by the state of Israel

4. Documents that reflect the purchase order and contract made by the U.S. government with George Michael, Diplomatic Language Services, and Dr. Kassem M. Wahba, Arabic language program coordinator, School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University - Michael and Wahba are reported in DoD Press Release 630-01 to have been responsible for the translation of the December 13, 2001 Osama bin Laden video.

5. Documents that demonstrate the authenticity process that the U.S. government undertook to authenticate the December 13, 2001 Osama bin Laden video

6. Documents that demonstrate the outcome of the U.S. government’s authenticity process. What the Muckraker Report is seeking is a copy of an original U.S. government document that reflects the U.S. government declaring the December 13, 2001 Osama bin Laden video as authentic, not authentic, or suspect of authenticity

Please note that the Information Dissemination Section of the FBI did not respond to the Muckraker Report’s Freedom of Information Act Request by indicating that the documentation requested did not exist. It said that the material you requested is located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure pursuant to Title 5, United States Code, Section 552, subsection ((7)(A).

So what does Title 5, United States Code, Section 552, subsection ((7)(A) say? According to the Explanation of Exemptions sheet included in the government response to Muckraker Report FOIA request:

((7) records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information (A) could be reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings

It’s anyone’s guess as to what ((7)(A) actually means, but it smells like more cover-up to me. One can only assume that the interfere with enforcement proceedings segment means that if the truth were to be revealed to the world regarding the circumstances and authenticity of the December 13, 2001 Osama bin Laden confession video, the neo con would have a one dickens of a time enforcing its current policies – both foreign and domestic. The truth is all hell would break loose if it was widely reported in the mockingbird mainstream media that the December 13, 2001 Osama bin Laden confession video was a fabrication.

Again it must be noted, the U.S. government did not give a line item break down of the FOIA request. For instance, in response to item 3, the FBI didn’t respond by saying “no such documents exist.” Instead, the U.S. government indicated that the documents requested where located in an investigative file that is exempt from disclosure pursuant to Title 5, United States Code, Section 552, subsection ((7)(A).

A recently found tidbit, as per Cooperative Research 9/11 Timelines: :

August 15, 2001: Army to Limit Public Access to Bases Around Washington

The US Army is preparing to severely restrict public access to its posts in the Washington, DC area. For decades, visitors have been able to enter these bases freely. But now, as a probably permanent change, barriers will be erected across many roads leading into them, funneling traffic to a few roads staffed by guards. Drivers entering without proper registration will be sent to a visitor's center to obtain a guest pass. [Washington Post, 8/15/2001] The new measures will mean commanders know who is entering their installations 24 hours a day, and give them the capability to adjust security measures immediately if required. [MDW News Service, 8/3/2001] The changes will occur at all installations belonging to the Military District of Washington (MDW). [MDW News Service, 7/2001] These include forts Hamilton, Meade, Belvoir, Ritchie, Myer, and McNair. Several of these bases will be reported as having implemented the changes in the following weeks, prior to September 11 (see August 20, 2001)(see September 4, 2001)(see September 5, 2001). Whether the changes take place at the other MDW installations prior to 9/11 is unknown. Part of MDW's stated mission is to "respond to crisis, disaster or security requirements in the National Capital Region through implementation of various contingency plans." [Military District of Washington, 8/2000; GlobalSecurity (.org), 11/28/2001] It will therefore be much involved with the rescue and recovery efforts following the 9/11 Pentagon attack. [Army, 10/2004] The restriction of access to MDW posts stems from guidance from Army leadership and specifically from MDW Commander Maj. Gen. James Jackson. [MDW News Service, 7/2001] It is reportedly part of a nationwide security clampdown due to concerns about terrorism, following such attacks as the Oklahoma City bombing and the attack on the USS Cole. [Washington Post, 8/15/2001]

http://www.whistleblowers.org/index.html

Newly Released FBI Documents Disclose Grave Deficiencies in the War on Terrorism

Washington, D.C. December 13, 2006. The National Whistleblower Center, a nationally recognized FBI Watchdog group, has released to the public extensive sworn and documentary evidence concerning the FBI’s actual response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The documents include the sworn deposition of every major FBI manager responsible for the creation the FBI’s post September 11 counterterrorism division and the implementation of the FBI’s “War on Terror.” Sworn depositions of Director Robert Mueller, former Director Louis Freeh and numerous executive assistant directors and assistant directors for the bureau’s counterterrorism program are included.

The NWC is making this unprecedented release in order to give the American public the inside and uncensored view of the domestic response to the September 11 attacks. The NWC strongly encourages every American concerned with the prevention of the next September 11 to carefully evaluate this documentation and use the materials to insist the U.S. government defend our democracy from a new attack.

The depositions and FBI documents were obtained as a result of a lawsuit filed by Bassem Youssef, a Unit Chief currently employed in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. Prior to holding his current position, Mr. Youssef coordinated the national counterterrorism investigation into the Islamic Group (the organization responsible for the first World Trade bombing), was the recipient of the prestigious “Director of Central Intelligence” award and was tapped by former FBI Director Louis Freeh to establish the FBI’s field office serving seven Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Kuwait. Mr. Youssef is the highest ranking Arab-American agent employed by the FBI. In July, 2006 the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that the FBI illegally retaliated against Mr. Youssef because Mr. Youssef had made whistleblower disclosures to the Director of the FBI and a Member of Congress.

Click here to view the documents.

http://www.whistleblowers.org/html/inside_the_fbi.html

Interview with former Boston Center Air Traffic Controller and pilotsfor911truth.org member Robin Hordon re: 9/11:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9...38952&hl=en (audio only)

In the above interview, Mr. Hordon says:

"The bottom line is that the only way that those airliners could not have been intercepted is if there had been a major system failure, meaning a major electrical/telecommunications failure, as if _____?_____ had just dug up the cables and nobody could talk to anybody...."

"As the testimony in front of the 9/11 Commission, NORAD admits that they saw the AA11 lose its transponder."

"The whole system is notified" as soon as there is a hijack...

"insufficient tapes and testimony provided to the 9/11Commission"

"Rummy's Pentagon didn't answer the phone... I maintain they didn't answer the phone until they absolutely were embarassed into answering the phone".

'The reason we are not getting that information, that it's locked down, is because it puts the finger on the military... they knew where all of the aircraft where at all times (with the exception of the plane whose track was lost in West Virginia, AA77), and they tracked them into their targets.'

'Only certain portions of the tapes have been given; not all controllers, all supervisors, all pilot communications, all center communications, or all inter-center communications, have been released. They cherry-picked the information that were able to pain and write a story that the public could look at and say "oh, wow, this really happened"'.

Red tape' delays money to ill 9/11 responder

RAW STORY
Published: Tuesday December 19, 2006

"Red tape" is allegedly delaying money to a seriously ill Ground Zero volunteer, as FOX News' Neil Cavuto reports.

Joe Piccuro, who now suffers from chronic bronchitis among other ailments, was among the many who arrived to help at the World Trade Center on September 11. His is not the first complaint about how the workers' compensation system is not supporting Ground Zero workers who became sick after 9/11.

A court hearing determined that New York State Insurance Corporation was required to pay for the 9/11 worker's illness. Piccuro tells Cavuto that the insurance company is stalling, hoping he will die soon.

youtube video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O5ZgR0vzO0&eurl=

http://waynemadsenreport.com/

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January 3, 2007 -- Further links between Mario Scaramella and Colombia.

Italian suspect in the Litvinenko affair, Mario Scaramella, in addition to claiming he was a professor of environmental law at Externado University and the University of Nuestra Senora del Rosario in Bogota, Colombia from 1996 to 2000, has a Colombian link through his association with Incident Management Group (IMG) of Miami. IMG counts a number of former U.S. intelligence officers in Colombia, in addition to Scaramella's colleague Filippo Marino, among its ranks of consultants. In addition, IMG chief, Louis Palumbo, while with Kroll Associates at his Miami vantage point, reportedly tracked the activities of Colombia's drug cartels, including the Medellin Cartel. At Kroll, Palumbo also reportedly worked closely with Avram Shalom, a former member of Israel's Shin Beth domestic security service. Shalom was fired after a scandal involving the massacre of Palestinian civilians. Shalom then joined Kroll.

The ties that bind: Scaramella network, Russian-Israeli mobsters, Colombia, Saudi cocaine-smuggling prince, and the 9/11 hijackers.

In 2005, WMR reported the following link between the Medellin cartel and the Saudi financiers of 9/11: "In 1999, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) broke open a major conspiracy involving a Saudi prince’s Colombian cocaine smuggling from Venezuela to support some “future intention” involving Koranic prophecy. The DEA operations were contained in a “Declassification of a Secret DEA 6 Paris Country Office” memorandum dated June 26, 2000, a date which coincided with the height of Israeli art student and 9/11 hijacker activity in the United States. In June 1999, 808 kilograms of cocaine were seized in Paris. At the same time, the DEA was conducting a major investigation of the Medellin drug cartel called Operation Millennium."

"Through an intercepted fax, the Bogota Country Office of the DEA learned of the Paris cocaine seizure and linked the drug smuggling operation to the Saudis. The DEA investigation centered around Saudi Prince Nayif al Saud, whose alias was El Principe (the Prince). Nayif's full name is Nayif (or Nayef) bin Fawwaz al-Shaalan al-Saud. In pursuit of his international drug deals, Nayif traveled in his own Boeing 727 and used his diplomatic status to avoid customs checks. The DEA report stated Nayif studied at the University of Miami, Florida, owned a bank in Switzerland, speaks eight languages, was heavily invested in Venezuela’s petroleum industry, regularly visited the United States, and traveled with millions of dollars of U.S. currency. Nayif is also invested in Colombia's petroleum industry."

"Nayif was also reported to have met with drug cartel members in Marbella, Spain, where the late Saudi King Fahd and the Saudi royal family maintained a huge palatial residence. The report states that when a group of cartel members traveled to Riyadh to meet Nayif, 'they were picked up in a Rolls Royce automobile belonging to Nayif, and driven to the Riyadh Holiday Inn hotel. The next day they were met by Nayif and his brother [believed to be named Saul [sic] [His twin brother is Prince Saud. Nayif's older brother, Prince Nawaf, is married to King Abdullah's daughter].)… The second day they all traveled to the desert in terrain vehicles [hummers]. During this desert trip they discussed narcotics trafficking. UN [The DEA informant] and Nayif agreed to conduct the 2,000 kilogram cocaine shipment, which would be delivered to Caracas, VZ, by UN’s people, where Nayif would facilitate the cocaine’s transport to Paris, France. Nayif explained he would utilize his 727 jet airliner, under Diplomatic cover, to transport the cocaine.' The Boeing 727 was operated by Skyways International, a Saudi-owned airline with past connections to the mysterious James Bath, George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard friend and later Arbusto and Harken Energy investment pass-through between the Saudis and Bush. These investors included Salem Bin Laden, Osama Bin Laden's late older brother who was killed in a 1988 plane crash in Texas. Bath was the registered agent for Salem Bin Laden."

According to the DEA Report, Nayif, asked by a DEA informant why he sold drugs, responded that "the world is already doomed and that he has been authorized by God to sell drugs. Nayif stated that 'UN' [the DEA informant] would later learn of Nayif’s true intentions for trafficking narcotics although Nayif would not comment further."

WMR also reported the following nexus between the drug cartels and the 9/11 hijackers:

"On April 10 [2006], Mexican police, acting on a tip from INTERPOL, seized a DC-9 aircraft carrying 5.5 tonnes of cocaine with an estimated street value of $100 million.

* The US-registered plane was en route from Caracas (Venezuela) which, according to French intelligence, is a known hub for cocaine shipments from Colombia to Saudi Arabia.

The DC-9 (registration number N900SA) made an emergency landing at Ciudad del Carmen in Campeche state. A Falcon aircraft that arrived at Ciudad del Carmen from Toluca airport in Mexico state in advance of the arrival of the DC-9 was also seized. The cocaine was contained in 128 suitcases. The Mexican police later claimed the unidentified DC-9's pilot managed to escape … however, the police did arrest the co-pilot.

The DC-9 was painted in the familiar blue and white colors of the US Transportation Security Administration with am official-looking seal with an American eagle bearing the inscription: 'Sky Way Aircraft — Protection of America’s Skies.'

* The registered owner of the aircraft is: Royal Sons Inc., 15875 Fairchild Drive, Clearwater, Florida.

On April 5, 2006, the plane flew from St. Petersburg/Clearwater International to Simon Bolivar International in Caracas. 'Sky Ways' has also been linked to the Saudi government and Bush family/CIA activities. Royal Sons, the name of which may indicate the involvement of Saudi princes, such as the cocaine-transporting Prince Nayif, also maintained an office at 224 East Airport Ave., Venice (Florida), at the same time lead hijacker Mohammad Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi were training at Huffman Aviation, which was located nearby at 400 East Airport Avenue."

There is evidence that Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi were drug couriers for the Latin American and Florida drug cartels, especially via their links with jailed GOP mobster Jack Abramoff. Atta, al-Shehhi, and other hijackers were guests aboard Abramoff's Sun Cruz gambling boat in Florida less than a week before 9/11. In late June 2001, Atta was busy gambling away some of his suspicious source of income in Las Vegas.

The following is from an AP story from Sept. 26, 2001: "Sun Cruz Casinos has turned over photographs and other documents to FBI investigators after employees said they recognized some of the men suspected in the terrorist attacks as customers.… Names on the passenger list from a Sept. 5 cruise matched those of some of the hijackers... Two or three men linked to the Sept. 11 hijackings may have been customers on a ship that sailed from Madeira Beach on Florida's Gulf coast."

There is another interesting link between Kroll and Enron. Frank Wisner, Jr., whose father was one of the founders of the CIA but who committed suicide over the penetration of the agency by British KGB spy Kim Philby, served on the boards of Kroll Associates and Enron.

http://www.911truth.ie/
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"Until we openly teach the power of the mind, and how tractable the average citizen is, we will be vulnerable to various forms of mind control, propaganda and simple advertising manipulation, not to mention personal prejudice. Immature people are generally control-freaks and don't understand liberty for what it really is...rather than the channeled form of "freedom" we now generally experience as the Matrix-type existence. If we don't have control of our minds and have allowed ourselves to be conditioned to be sophists, it's all over..."

"You can't understand 9/11 if you don't understand how the media worked hand-in-glove with the military to acheive their goal of public support for foreign wars. The Octopus is Tarpley's name for the rogue network of government insiders, media executives, and military industrial complex supporters who have infiltrated our military, goverment, and intelligence services. Their loyalty is not to the Constitution, but a transnational network that profited from the 9/11 attacks."

http://www.theamericanmonitor.com/articles...nia_alqadi.html

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Ptech owner's assets confiscated in Albania
Devlin Buckley, 1/16/07

The Albanian government has seized the assets of a wealthy Saudi that, for several years, reportedly maintained simultaneous connections to both al-Qaeda and the U.S. government while serving the interests of the CIA.

“The Finance Ministry said it ordered authorities to block four apartments, a house, four bars and shops, and more than 2 hectares (about 5 acres) of land belonging to Yasin al-Qadi,” the Associated Press reports, citing the Official Gazette.1

Yasin al-Qadi, the owner of the property, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, “heads the Saudi-based Muwafaq Foundation…an al-Qaeda front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen.”2 The Treasury has thus identified the prominent entrepreneur as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT).3

Despite his alleged affiliations to terrorism, al-Qadi has maintained concurrent contacts within influential Washington circles.4 In fact, prior to being publicly connected to money laundering and terrorist financing, al-Qadi regularly spoke of his relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney.5

Al-Qadi, who has been identified as one of Osama bin Laden’s “chief money launderers,”6 owned a prominent U.S. technology firm and alleged CIA front known as Ptech.7 He also escorted U.S. officials around during their visits to Saudi Arabia.8

As reported by the Associated Press, al-Qadi “allegedly worked with Osama bin Laden to provide support to terror networks in Albania,” prompting the recent confiscation of his assets in that country.9

According to the Associated Press, al-Qadi used six different names for the recently seized assets, all of which were in the Tirana area, Albania’s capital city.10

The confiscation comes approximately 14 months after the Albanian government made a similar seizure of property belonging to al-Qadi,11 who is suspected of laundering about $10 million in Albania alone for the al-Qaeda network.12

As documented in a report issued by the Library of Congress, “In December 2001, Albanian authorities announced the discovery of a major instance of terrorist support money being concealed behind the facade of a legitimate business operating in Albania.”13

“Yasin al-Qadi,” the report states, “the Saudi Arabian head of a company called Karavan Construction, has been accused of using a twin-tower construction project being built by that company in Tirana to launder money for al Qaeda.”14

“In 2004 the government confirmed that the location was being used to launder financial activities for al-Qaeda,” and in October 2005 “the Albanian authorities took possession of office space at the so-called Twin Towers of central Tirana,” the Southeast European Times recently noted.15

Al-Qadi has a history of using legitimate businesses to reportedly launder money for terrorist activities.

Most notably, he once owned a Quincy, Massachusetts-based technology company known as Ptech,16 which he allegedly used to funnel cash to Islamic militants.17

Raided by federal authorities in 2002, Ptech marketed highly sophisticated software to numerous U.S. government agencies,18 maintained a security clearance with the military,19 and held several sensitive contracts.20

Intelligence officials have privately confided to 9/11 whistleblower Indira Singh that Ptech served as a front for the CIA, apparently laundering mob-linked drug money for covert operations.21

A similar pattern is apparent in Albania, where Yasin al-Qadi, according to federal law enforcement officials, assisted the CIA with efforts to provide underground support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).22

As author Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed documents in his book, The War on Truth, “Extensive military training and assistance was provided to the KLA during the Kosovo conflict in the late 1990s by both American and British forces.”23

“This training continued,” Ahmed writes, “despite the fact that it was documented in a 1999 Congressional report by the US Republican Party Committee that the KLA is closely involved with

The extensive Albanian crime network that extends throughout Europe and into North America, including allegations that a major portion of the KLA finances are derived from that network, mainly proceeds from drug trafficking; and Terrorist organizations motivated by the ideology of radical Islam, including assets of Iran and of the notorious Osama bin-Ladin -- who has vowed a global terrorist war against Americans and American interests."24

Indeed, according to Fatos Klosi, the head of Albanian intelligence, “a major network of bin Laden supporters was established in 1998 in Albania under the cover of various Muslim charities.”25

One charity to allegedly launder money in Albania for the al-Qaeda network was Yasin al-Qadi’s Muwafaq Foundation.26

Khalid bin Mahfouz, an extremely influential and wealthy Saudi who “established and funded” the Muwafaq Foundation, was once the principal shareholder and director of BCCI,27 a criminal enterprise used by the CIA during the 1980s to funnel cash to Osama bin Laden for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.28

As former DEA undercover agent Michael Levine explained to The New American in 1999, the U.S. armed and funded “the worst elements of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan — drug traffickers, arms smugglers, anti-American terrorists. We later paid the price when the World Trade Center was bombed [in 1993], and we learned that some of those responsible had been trained by us. Now we’re doing the same thing with the KLA.”29

“These guys,” Levine said, referring to the KLA, “have a network that’s active on the streets of this country. ... They’re the worst elements of society that you can imagine, and now, according to my sources in drug enforcement, they’re politically protected.”30

According to Yossef Bodansky, Director of Research of the International Strategic Studies Association, “The role of the Albanian Mafia, which is tightly connected to the KLA, is laundering money, providing technology, safe houses, and other support to terrorists within this country.”31

“In any case,” Bodansky told The New American, “a serious investigation of the Albanian mob isn’t going to happen, because they’re ‘our boys’ — they’re protected."32

This may help explain why, according to FBI whistleblower Robert Wright, his investigation into Yasin al-Qadi during the 1990s was "intentionally and repeatedly thwarted and obstructed" by higher ups at the FBI.33

According to Agent Wright, who seized $1.4 million directly linked to al-Qadi in 1998,34 “FBI intelligence agents lied and hid vital records from criminal agents for the purpose of obstructing his criminal investigation of the terrorists in order to protect their ‘subjects,’ and prolong their intelligence operations,” as reported by the group representing Wright, Judicial Watch.35

"The supervisor who was there from headquarters was right straight across from me and started yelling at me: 'You will not open criminal investigations. I forbid any of you. You will not open criminal investigations against any of these intelligence subjects,'" Agent Wright told ABC News in 2002.36

According to Agent Wright and other members of his former unit, the money trails of the 1998 African embassy bombings led back to al-Qadi, but even after the bombings, FBI headquarters wanted no arrests.37

According to Agent Wright, it is very likely that 9/11 would have been prevented if he had simply been allowed to do his job.38

Yasin al-Qadi, in addition to crossing paths with the CIA in Albania, Kosovo, and the United States, may have also been involved with covert operations in Bosnia during the mid-1990s.39

Al-Qadi’s charity, the Muwafaq Foundation, which was established by former BCCI head Khalid bin Mahfouz,40 provided support to Islamic militants in Bosnia,41 where the CIA conducted operations of mutual interest.42

As London’s The Spectator has noted, “If Western intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahadeen, Western intervention in Bosnia appears to have globalised it.”43

“From 1992 to 1995,” according to The Spectator, “the Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of mujahadeen and other Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs.”44

During the civil war, Alija Izetbegovic, Bosnia’s then president, invited Mujahideen fighters into the region and incorporated them into the Bosnian army.45

As Adrian Morgan recently reported for Spero News, “Izetbegovic was portrayed by the Clinton administration as a moderate, though it was recently revealed that he was in the pay of a Saudi Al Qaeda operative, Yassin al-Khadi (Yassin al Qadi).”46

Izetbegovic reportedly received $195,000 from al-Qadi in 1996,47 the same year the wartime president earned the "International Democracy Award" from the Center for Democracy.48



1. “Albania seizes assets of alleged bin Laden associate,” The Associated Press, December 22, 2006, <http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/12/22/europe/EU_GEN_Albania_Terror_Financing.php>.

2. Lee S. Wolosky, "An Assessment of Current Efforts to Combat Terrorism Financing,"Statement before Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, June 15, 2004, <http://hsgac.senate.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Hearings.Testimony&HearingID=181&WitnessID=657>.

3. “Treasury Department releases list of 39 additional Specially Designated Global Terrorists,” United States Treasury Department Office of Public Affairs press release, October 12, 2001, <http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/po689.htm>.

4. Merrie Najimy, “Support Ptech Employees,” The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee- Massachusetts, March 2003, <http://www.adcma.org/campaigns/fleetbank-fax-march-2003.html>.

5. Dan Verton, “Ptech workers tell the story behind the search,” Computer World Magazine, January 17, 2003, quoting Ptech Chairman and CEO Oussama Ziade, <http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,77682,00.html>; “Treasury action smacks of arrogance, violates human rights, says Al-Qadi,” Arab News, October 14, 2001, <http://www.saudia-online.com/newsoct01/news30.shtml>.

6. Jeff Johnson, “Tearful FBI Agent Apologizes To Sept. 11 Families and Victims,” Cybercast News Service, May 30, 2002, <http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200205/NAT20020530d.html>.

7. "Customs searches software firm near Boston," CNN, December 6, 2002, <http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/Northeast/12/06/ptech.raid/>; Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, "Dollars of Terror," Front Page Magazine, April 18, 2005, <http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17730>; Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, "The Business of Terror," Front Page Magazine, June 17, 2005, <http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18450>.

8. Ibid., 4; Lynn Grant, “Hastert’s Turkish Allies Tied to Bin Laden,” International Post, August 15, 2005, quoting The Boston Globe, <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9775.htm>.

9. Ibid., 1.

10. Ibid., 1.

11. Erlis Selimaj, “Albania moves against terrorists' assets,” Southeast European Times, October 24, 2005, <http://www.setimes.com/cocoon/setimes/xhtml/en_GB/features/setimes/features/2005/10/24/feature-02>.

12. Alban Bala, “Albania: Officials Crack Down On Terror Suspects,” Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty,” January 27, 2002, <http://www.balkanpeace.org/index.php?index=article&articleid=9389>.

13. “A Global Overview of Narcotics-Funded Terrorist and Other Extremist Groups,” Library of Congress, Report Prepared by the Federal Research Division, Library of Congress under an Interagency Agreement with the Department of Defense, May 2002, page 90, <http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/pdf-files/NarcsFundedTerrs_Extrems.pdf>.

14. Ibid.

15. Erlis Selimaj, “Alleged terrorist's assets seized in Albania,” Southeast European Times, January 2, 2007, <http://www.setimes.com/cocoon/setimes/xhtml/en_GB/features/setimes/features/2007/01/02/feature-03>.

16. Ibid., 7.

17. Thanasis Cambanis and Ross Kerber, "Ptech CEO Says Probe Put Firm on Ropes," Boston Globe, September 13, 2002.

18. Joe Bergantino and the I-Team, “The I Team Investigates P-Tech,” CBS4 Boston, December 9, 2002, <http://cbs4boston.com/iteam/local_story_343143121.html>.

19. Jerry Guidera and Glenn R. Simpson, “U.S. probes terror ties to Boston software firm,” The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2002, <http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=static&page=ptech>.

20. Citizens’ Complaint and Petition to Attorney General of the State of New York for an Independent Grand Jury Investigation, Appendix A7, Reference 28, compiled by Indira Singh, November 19, 2004, <http://www.justicefor911.org/iiA7_PtechPress_112204.php>; Matthew Levitt, “Subversion from Within: Saudi Funding of Islamic Extremist Groups Undermining U.S. Interests and the War on Terror from within the United States,” Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security, September 10, 2003, <http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC07.php?CID=13>.

21. Indira Singh, Testimony at the 9/11 Citizens’ Commission Hearing, September 9, 2004, <http://www.911citizenswatch.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index&req=getit&lid=15>, <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-368745798563225089&q=indira+singh>.

22. Wayne Madsen, Wayne Madsen Report, January 10, 2007, <http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/>.

23. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Olive Branch Press, 2005) pages 39-45.

24. Ibid.; “The Kosovo Liberation Army: Does Clinton Policy Support Group with Terror, Drug Ties?,” United States Senate Republican Policy Committee, March 31, 1999, <http://www.senate.gov/~rpc/releases/1999/fr033199.htm>.

25. Jamie Dettmer, “Al-Qaeda's links in the Balkans; Macedonian officials contend the Bush administration largely is ignoring intelligence information that has connected al-Qaeda elements to Albanian separatists - World: war on terror,” Insight on the News, July 22, 2002, <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_26_18/ai_90041160/pg_1>.

26. Jonathan M. Winer, Origins, Organization and Prevention of Terrorist Finance, Testimony before U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, July, 31, 2003, <http://www.iwar.org.uk/cyberterror/resources/terror-financing/073103winer.htm>; David Pallister and Jamie Wilson, “Muslim relief groups caught in crossfire,” The Guardian, September 26, 2001, <http://society.guardian.co.uk/disasterresponse/story/0,,558348,00.html>.

27. Rachel Ehrenfeld, “The Saudi Buck Stops Here,” Front Page Magazine, March 3, 2005, quoting New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, <http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17215>.

28. Lucy Komisar, “The Case That Kerry Cracked,” AlterNet, October 22, 2004, <http://www.alternet.org/election04/20268>.

29. William Norman Grigg, “Behind the Terror Network,” The New American, Vol. 17, No. 23, November 5, 2001, <http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2001/11-05-2001/vo17no23_network.htm>.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., 6.

34. Ibid.

35. “FBI AGENT ROBERT WRIGHT SAYS FBI AGENTS ASSIGNED TO INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS CONTINUE TO PROTECT TERRORISTS FROM CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS AND PROSECUTIONS,” Judicial Watch press release, September 11, 2002, <http://www.judicialwatch.org/printer_2469.shtml>.

36. Brian Ross and Vic Walter, “FBI Called off Terror Investigations,” ABC News, December 19, 2002, <http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=131907&page=1>.

37. Ibid.

38. Transcript of Judicial Watch press conference, National Press Club, May 30, 2002, <http://www.infowars.com/jw_transcript.htm>.

39. Devlin Buckley, “Scratching the Surface,” The American Monitor, November 16, 2006, <http://www.theamericanmonitor.com/scratching.html>.

40. Ibid., 27.

41. Ibid., 26.

42. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Olive Branch Press, 2005) pages 32-34.

43. Brendan O'Neill, “How we trained al-Qa'eda,” The Spectator, September 13, 2003, archived online by Findarticles.com, <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_200309/ai_n9253533>.

44. Ibid.

45. Adrian Morgan, “Bosnia: Muslims upset by Wahhabi leaders,” Spero News, November 13, 2006, <http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?id=6540>.

46. Ibid.

47. “Terrorism: Weekly Claims Wartime Bosnian President Linked to al-Qaeda,” VPR/AKI, September 8, 2006, <http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level_English.php?cat=Terrorism&loid=8.0.338134636&par=>.

48. United Nations photo highlights of 1997, March 27, 1997, <http://www.un.org/Photos/current.html>.