MEANS

excerpted from the book

Crossing the Rubicon

The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil

by Michael C. Ruppert

New Society Publishers, 2004, paper

MEANS

p203
... many FBI agents, employees, and even military personnel did speak out, both before and after 9/11. What they said is damning. And what has happened to them remains a continued warning (though not an excuse) for those who still function within the system and keep it going. The main reason why these whistleblowers have been so thoroughly smashed is because they all threatened to expose direct US connections to the attacks of 9/11 and those who carried them out.

p204
Robert Wright

Twelve-year veteran FBI agent Robert Wright Jr. should be proud. Of all of the FBI "brick" agents who have come forward since 9/11 to describe the deliberate obstruction of investigations that could have prevented the attacks, no others have taken the risks or endured the punishment that Wright has. For good reason.

Wright is the only agent in the FBI's history to have conducted an investigation of terrorists that resulted in the seizure of financial assets. In 1998 he began an investigation - since terminated by the FBI - into terrorist money laundering

in the United States. That investigation resulted in the seizure of bank accounts and other assets of Yassin Kadi, who has "since been identified as one of the 'chief money launderers' for Osama bin Laden." Kadi is reported to have provided as much as $3 billion to al Qaeda before Wright shut him down. ' (Wright's investigations also put a major crimp in the funding for Hamas, another Palestinian-related support group that has been linked to terrorist activities in Israel).

Based in Chicago, home of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) where a great deal of 9/11-related insider trading was to take place, Wright was in one of the three most important financial centers of the United States. Nobody moves $3 billion without using exchanges such as the NYSE or CBOE. It's just too much money arid must move in financial streams where it would not stand out.

In the only real coverage of Wright's decision to come forward which was coupled with a formal complaint against the FBI for its suppression of him - the Congressional News Service told a chilling tale as it reported on a press conference held by Wright and his legal team on May 30, 2002:

 

In a memorandum written 91 days before the September 11 terrorist attacks, an FBI agent warned that Americans would die as a result of the bureau's failure to adequately pursue investigations of terrorists living in the country... Wright says that FBI management 'intentionally and repeatedly thwarted and obstructed' his attempts to expand the investigation to arrest other terrorists and seize their assets ....' As a direct result of the incompetence and, at times, intentional obstruction of justice by FBI management to prevent me from bringing the terrorists to justice, Americans have unknowingly been exposed to potential terrorists attacks for years,' he charged.

FBI Director Robert Mueller held a May 29, 2002, press conference where he stated, "It is critically important that I hear criticisms of the organization including criticisms of me in order to improve the organization." Meanwhile the FBI was landing on Wright's chest with both feet. It had issued Wright written orders not to discuss what he knew and not to disclose, either in speech or writing, the contents of an unpublished manuscript entitled Vulgar Betrayal that he had written for Congress. Wright was threatened in writing with disciplinary action, civil suits, revocation of security clearances, and even criminal prosecution if he talked. That letter was received by Wright's attorney, David Schippers, at 5:00 pm on the same day Mueller lied to the American people about his pure intentions.

The next day, Wright concluded his own press conference in tears: "To the families and victims of September 11th," he said, "on behalf of [FBI Special Agents] John Vincent, Barry Carmody, and myself - we're sorry." But the real truth of what was done to this ethical law enforcement officer is contained in a May 22 letter written by Schippers to the FBI and in the words spoken at the press conference itself.

In writing to Wright's superior, Chicago Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Thomas Krieir, Schippers described how Wright had voluntarily given a heads-up about a New York Times investigation into what had happened with his investigations. Wright was subsequently ordered not to talk to the press. He complied. Schippers wrote,

The FBI has failed seriously to address Robert Wright's work-related concerns regarding the FBI's terrorism responsibilities. In fact, we believe there has been a concerted effort by the FBI to discredit Agent Wright and minimize his concerns regarding the FBI's failures in connection with international terrorism matters prior to September 11th, 2001. In part, this effort includes providing false and misleading information to the New York Times regarding Agent Wright and his Vulgar Betrayal investigation. Even more disturbing is the fact that the FBI has prevented Agent Wright and Special Agent John Vincent from providing written responses to the New York Times to counter that false and misleading information .... Agent Wright has also filed two complaints with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in an attempt to have his concerns addressed .... To our astonishment, the DOJ employee advised that, although the allegations were extremely serious, the Inspector General's Office did not have the resources to conduct an investigation of this anticipated size and scope.

The sheer vindictiveness of a system that seeks to silence whistleblowers was most fully revealed in the press conference itself, in which it was disclosed that Wright, Schippers, and attorney Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch (a Washington, DC-based legal watchdog group) had actually met months before 9/11. They also disclosed that Wright had written most of his manuscript and decided to speak out about the repression well before the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Repeating allegations that Wright had been threatened and intimidated by the Bureau, Klayman stated that Wright's manuscript hits both Bush and Cheney "hard." That leaves little doubt about where the orders to crush Wright were coming from. Shippers added that Wright had even been ordered not to talk to Congress. John Ashcrofr was not spared in the scathing statements. Klayman said that "Ashcroft very likely had all of this information" and didn't use Wright's investigative work to pull the financial plug on al Qaeda before the attacks.

The lawyers also described how Wright had, since voicing his concerns, been demoted to performing "innocuous tasks"; his office had been moved, computer equipment had been taken away from him, and he had been forced to purchase computers with his own money (which he did, out of sheer devotion to his work). Klayman stated that his office, aware of the direct connections between Wright's work and Osama bin Laden, had called Attorney General Ashcroft immediately after the attacks. The response was terse: "We're tired of conspiracy theories."

p207
Kenneth Williams and the Phoenix memo: a CIA connection

On July 10, 2001, Kenneth Williams, the senior special agent from a Phoenix FBI terrorism task force, sent a memo to FBI headquarters. That memo, resulting from a seven-year investigation, alerted FBI headquarters that a number of Muslims, suspected of radical ties, were taking flight lessons in Arizona. It was later confirmed that Hani Hanjour, who was to be listed as the suspected pilot of the airliner the government says crashed into the Pentagon, had received his flight training in Arizona.

The memo specifically mentioned Osama bin Laden and warned that terrorists were possibly going to hijack aircraft or penetrate airport security. Williams requested that the FBI institute a nationwide survey of aviation schools to ascertain if there were large numbers of Middle Eastern students enrolled in them. The request was denied, reportedly for lack of resources.° The excuse seems weak. A list of flight schools is readily available through the Internet, and a telephone survey would have yielded fast results.

p208
Williams's memo was sent to the desk of Supervisory Special Agent Dave Frasca at FBI headquarters in Washington, where Frasca sat on it with an anvil. We may never know what is in the rest of that memo and what Richard Behar kept hidden for the interests he apparently serves. What has been documented here, however, is yet another case of senior FBI personnel deliberately suppressing information that might have prevented the attacks of 9/11 in order to protect CIA assets who were subsequently connected to those same attacks.

Another major inconsistency in FBI operations is that, in 1995, after receiving warnings that al Qaeda operatives might be planning to crash hijacked airliners into CIA headquarters, the FBI "descended" immediately on flight schools all over the country. Yet in 2001 it was too busy.

p208
Colleen Rowley
On May 22, 2002, Minneapolis FBI Special Agent Colleen Rowley hand-delivered a 13-page memorandum to FBI Director Robert Mueller. In keeping with his customary practices, Mueller immediately classified the memorandum from the Minneapolis Field Office's top lawyer "Secret." That didn't help much, because Rowley, claiming protection under the federal whistleblower statute, had also delivered copies to the Senate Intelligence Committee and two of the Committee's members, Republican Richard Shelby and Democrat Diane Feinstein.

The efforts of Rowley and her fellow brick agents in Minneapolis centered on the so-called twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been in FBI custody since August 15 on immigration charges. It seems that for months before 9/11, FBI headquarters (FBIHOJ had systematically blocked every effort to investigate yet another case that - had it been supported might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

Rowley was irritated. It wasn't long before the memorandum - edited of course was published by the likes of TIME, the Associated Press, and Newsweek. Rowley's move was supremely well considered and executed in such a way that there was little else for Congress to do but embrace it. And the best thing to do with Colleen Rowley is to get out of the way and let her speak for herself.

May 21, 2002
FBI Director Robert Mueller
FBI Headquarters
Washington, D.C.

Dear Director Mueller:

I feel at this point that I have to put my concerns in writing concerning the important topic of the FBI's response to evidence of terrorist activity in the United States prior to September 11. The issues are fundamentally ones of INTEGRITY and go to the heart of the FBI's law enforcement mission and mandate

To get to the point, I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring. The term "cover up" would be too strong a characterization which is why I am attempting to carefully (and perhaps over laboriously) choose my words here. I base my concerns on my relatively small, peripheral but unique role in the Moussaoui investigation in the Minneapolis Division prior to,

during and after September 11th I feel that certain facts, including the following, have, up to now, been omitted, downplayed, glossed over, and/or mischaracterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons:...

2) (As)the Minneapolis agents' reasonable suspicions quickly ripened into probable cause, which, at the latest, occurred within days of Moussaoui's arrest when the French Intelligence Service confirmed his affiliations with radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama Bin Laden, they became desperate to search the computer lap top that had been taken from Moussaoui as well as conduct a more thorough search of his personal effects. The agents in particular believed that Moussaoui signaled he had something to hide in the way he refused to allow them to search his computer ....

... NOTES

[v.] During the early aftermath of September 11th, when I hap- I

happened to be recounting the pre-September 11th events concerning the Moussaoui investigation to other FBI personnel in other divisions or in FBIHQ, almost everyone's first question was "Why? Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage a case?" (I know I shouldn't be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert Hansen, who were actually working for Osama bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis' effort.) Along these lines, let me ask the question, why has it suddenly become necessary for the Director to "handpick" the FBI management? It's quite conceivable that many of the HQ personnel who so vigorously disputed Moussaoui's ability! predisposition to fly a plane into a building were simply unaware of all the various incidents and reports worldwide of al Qaeda terrorists attempting or plotting to do so [vi.] for the SSA continued to find new reasons to stall

[viii.] For starters, if prevention rather than prosecution is to be our new main goal, (an objective I totally agree with), we need more guidance on when we can apply the Quarles "public safety" exception to Mirandas 5th Amendment requirements. We were prevented from even attempting to question Moussaoui on the day of the attacks when, in theory, he could have possessed further information about other coconspirators. (Apparently no government attorney believes there is a "public safety" exception in a situation like this?!)18

Thus Moussaoui, who had paid the $7,000 for his flight lessons in cash; who was, according to press reports, not interested in learning how to take off or land; who wanted to know if the doors of an airliner could be opened in flight; and who was particularly interested in air traffic patterns around New York City remained totally protected until after the attacks of 9/11 had taken place.

... During my time as an LAPD officer and in the years since, I have met several FBI agents, including one former assistant director, who bragged about the FBI's ability to conduct "black bag" burglaries (surreptitious entries) during the 1960s and 1970s. Search warrants were never even a consideration. Keep this in mind as you reread the Rowley memo on the amazing refusal of FBI leadership to grant the field agents a FISA warrant. With Moussaoui's laptop in their possession for weeks before the attacks, it is very probable that they had already examined all of its contents. The reason why they needed the warrant was to make the evidence they had found admissible. Numerous press stories since 9/11 have indicated that the contents of that laptop will be used to convict Moussaoui of complicity in the attacks and most probably sentence him to death. I can only imagine the "off-the-record" conversations that took place between the brick agents in Minnesota and Washington as the brick agents - knowing of a certainty what was coming, lied in vain to get their search warrant.

And who was the supervisory special agent in Washington who brutalized the Minneapolis agents; who rewrote search warrants; who lied, obstructed, road-

p216
Dave Frasca

Before concluding that Supervisory Special Agent Dave Frasca of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters was the primary agent responsible for the deliberate, willful, and arguably harmful suppression of evidence and of investigations that could well have prevented 9/11, a couple of key questions need to be addressed. Various press reports have described FBI units with oversight in these cases as the UBL (Osama bin Laden) Unit and as the Radical Fundamentalist Unit. Are they referring to the same thing? Secondly, is there any indication that any member of Congress or of any other oversight body has noticed at least some of these connections?

Dave Frasca was, until early 2002, the chief of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit within the FBI's Counterterrorism/Counterespionage branch. In that capacity; according to press reports, he oversaw the operations of several subunits, one of which apparently was the bin Laden or UBL unit. One ABC report said, "The Bureau's Radical Fundamentalist Unit, headed by Supervisory Special Agent Dave Frasca, and its Osama bin Laden Unit first got a memo that Phoenix FBI agent Ken Williams sent in early July. "24 The UBL unit was created, according to a statement by an FBI official, in 1999.25

A description of the duties of the RFU and its chief was found on the website of the high-technology, intelligence-connected SAIC Corporation, based in San Diego, which recently hired Frasca's predecessor, retired Supervisory Special Agent Robert Blitzer. SAIC's website gave a telling description of Frasca's duties, as he followed in Blitzer's footsteps.

From 1993 to 1996, Blitzer served as chief of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit, Counterterrorism and Middle East Section at FBI Headquarters. As the leader of this unit, he was responsible for overall national coordination, oversight, and direction of all criminal and intelligence operations against the international terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center and who attempted to conduct a wave of bombings in and around New York City in early 1993.26

According to FBI spokesman Neal Schiff, Frasca's tenure in the RFU position lasted from 1999 until he was promoted in 2002. Frasca is currently the Assistant Section Chief of the International Terrorism Operations Section I. Schiff was ambiguous, at best, in describing the relationship between the RFU and the UBL units. While maintaining that the two were completely separate units, Schiff refused to confirm or deny that Frasca had supervisory responsibility for the UBL unit. At the same time he would not deny numerous press reports indicating that Frasca did work both units. The Phoenix memorandum was sent to the UBL unit, and Frasca apparently had a role in the decision not to follow up on it. As to the Wright case, and in contrast to statements given by Department of justice officials on condition of anonymity confirming the RFU's role in squashing the Wright investigation, Schiff declined to confirm or deny any relationship. "That case is still pending and I can't comment," he said.

But the link between Robert Wright's oppressors and FBI headquarters was established only days after my office received the official statements from Schiff. On December 19, 2002, ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross aired an interview with Wright and his partner John Vincent in which Wright stated, "The supervisor who was there from headquarters was right 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."

It was made clear in the story that the Wright/Vincent investigations had stemmed from the 1998 African embassy bombings and that the money trail led to Osama bin Laden. This would have placed the investigation within the UBL, Radical Fundamentalist Unit, and under the direct control of Dave Frasca. Schiff's assertion that the two units are separate and distinct entities is belied by Senate documents, press stories, and Frasca's own conduct post-9/1 1. A May 24, 2002, letter from Senator Patrick Leahy to FBI Director Mueller said:

A press account on May 22 states that the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters had decided not to pursue the recommendations in the Phoenix memorandum before September 11, 2001, since according to "officials.., the FBI counterterrorism division was swamped with urgent matters." Another press account on May 23 contains a correction by "a senior FBI official" and [stated] that the FBI's "Osama bin Laden Unit was responsible" for the decision rejecting the recommendations ,

Leahy's letter, in conformity with press stories, shows the interconnectedness of the two units, and Frasca's roles in cases involving both units is underscored by the fact that he was the agent (and in some cases, the only agent) who provided congressional testimony on all of these matters, whether they involved the RFU or the UBL unit. Schiff was unable to resolve these contradictions and went into "no comment" mode about press stories or congressional correspondence.

Knowing all this, it is now possible to state that Frasca almost certainly had direct oversight responsibility for all five of the previously described incidents. FBI sources I contacted confirmed, on condition of anonymity, that the RFU was the control point for all of these cases and that Frasca issued the orders thwarting investigations that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Looking at Frasca's actions, both in terms of their frequency and in terms of their consistency, it stretches the imagination to accept press accounts attributing FBI "screw-ups" relevant to 9/11 to incompetence, lack of resources, or overwork. There is a pattern here, rationally explained in only one way. Someone at the FBI, or elsewhere in government, needed to make sure that al Qaeda members were left in place either to perpetrate the attacks or to take the blame for them afterwards. And the Frasca connections at least insofar as Minneapolis and Phoenix are concerned were noticed. Frasca testified before both the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence committees, and many problems followed. First, Frasca told the judiciary committee that he didn't see the Phoenix memo until after the 9/11 attacks. Later his statement was corrected to indicate that had seen the Phoenix memo before 9/11, but that the UBL unit had rejected the request for a survey of flight schools. His statement was different from press accounts which indicated that because the memo was marked routine, the deadline for response to it was 60 days, which would have been after 9/11 - so Frasca had taken no action.

Senators Patrick Leahy, Charles Grassley, and Arlen Specter were understandably miffed, especially when Leahy disclosed that he had acquiesced to a special request from Mueller to hold the secret hearing where Frasca testified without a stenographer or a transcript. Mueller didn't seem to have minded, however, when the Intelligence Committee was allowed to make a transcript of Frasca's statements for its members.

On May 24, 2002, Leahy closed a terse and eloquent letter to Mueller on the subject, signed also by Grassley and Specter:

Finally, it has been noted that Supervisory Special Agent Dave Frasca in the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) may have been involved in handling the Phoenix memorandum and the Moussaoui investigation at FBI headquarters. [This had been previously confirmed in a number of press stories. The FBI only started changing their position after people started asking questions. - MCR] Please explain his role and the role of the RFU in evaluating the requests from the Minneapolis field office in the Moussaoui case; what connection, if any, he or others drew between the two ongoing investigations; and whether he or others brought such a connection to the attention of higher level FBI officials.

If a briefing rather than a written answer would facilitate your response to the questions regarding agent Frasca, please let us know

Some senators were a bit less polite in their remarks. Senator Richard Shelby, the Republican ranking member of the intelligence committee, was quoted as saying, "The information coming from Phoenix and the information coming from Minneapolis was stifled here at FBI headquarters." Senator Grassley of Iowa decried sabotage" by FBI officials.

A secret team

To understand how someone like Dave Frasca functioned inside the FBI, one needs to understand how the CIA and other intelligence agencies place their people throughout the government. Frasca fits that pattern perfectly. For those unfamiliar with the way covert operations function within the United States government, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of two books: The Secret Team by the late Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (the Pentagon's liaison with the CIA during the 1960s), and CIA Diary by former CIA Case Officer Philip Agee. Other excellent case studies in this area are found in The (CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. Operational patterns described by all of these men are confirmed by hundreds of declassified documents that have surfaced in investigations like those conducted by the Senate's Church committee in the 1970s.

To sum up the lessons clearly explained in both books, all one needs to understand is that the CIA routinely places its deep cover agents in every branch of the US government, especially within the FBI, the DEA, and federal law enforcement agencies. They even do it with municipal police departments such as LAPD, NYPD, or the Chicago PD. The CIA attempted to recruit me in 1973 as a college senior, and the proposition was made that I become a case officer with CIA and then return to LAPD, go through their Academy, and use the LAPD position as a cover. Although I declined that offer and have never taken a penny from the CIA, I was able to find out years later that the CIA, because of my family connections to the Agency and the NSA, had actually steered several of my assignments as an LAPD intern while I was an undergraduate at UCLA. When the CIA places its agents inside the US military, the process is routinely called "sheep dipping."

Why would the CIA do this? Frasca's behavior is right out of the textbook. At LAPD I saw CIA assets and contractors with access to narcotics investigations making deliberate decisions as to who got arrested and who got away. Gary Webb documented one such instance in Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion when he looked at massive CIA-connected cocaine shipments into Los Angeles. CIA assets doing CIA's bidding are always protected. There is no way to conclusively state that Dave Frasca either worked or works for the CIA, either as a case officer or as an asset. But the role he played before 9/11 clearly served interests other than those of the FBI or the innocent Americans killed or bereaved by the attacks. The power of this secret team is that they are always able to protect their assets, no matter how badly they are exposed. And, as Colleen Rowley noted, Frasca was actually promoted right after 9/11.

p223
... a multitude of press reports, including stories from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek, all published between September 15 and 17, 2001, disclosed that at least five of the hijackers had received US military training at bases in the US, including flight lessons. Among the latter was Mohammed Atta, who apparently received his training while wanted for terrorist activities. Atta's US military training was confirmed by a separate story published by Knight Ridder at a time when many of the military training connections were causing the military to engage in some disingenuous doubletalk. Several subsequent stories indicated that while the five names matched up with 9/11 hijackers, it was apparently a case of more than one person having the same name. Yet the Department of Defense has not to this date disclosed the identities of the five people whose names matched those of 9/11 hijackers. Even more compelling is the fact that Newsweek reported three of the hijackers had received flight training at the Pensacola Naval Air Station.

All told, 14 of the 19 9/11 hijackers lived and studied for a considerable period in southern Florida. No one has done a better job of investigating the connections of these hijackers to military and intelligence operations than investigative journalist Dan Hopsicker. His investigations have also produced compelling evidence linking Rudi Dekkers, the operator of the flight school attended by Atta and others, to US intelligence operations and the destruction and/or immediate confiscation of incriminating records immediately after the attacks with the hands-on involvement of Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Hopsicker, a former broadcast news producer for MS-NBC, has produced a compelling video called Mohammed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus that details many of these links. He maintains a detailed website at: <www.madcowprod.com> [inexplicably, in the summer of 2004, Hopsicker performed a startling flip-flop by choosing to agree

p227
... continuing assertions by law enforcement and intelligence executives and managers that they lacked the intelligence capabilities (both technical and legal) to have known of the attacks before they occurred are demonstrably false... Notwithstanding that the mainstream media have inexcusably tried to hammer this belief into the consciousness of the public, available evidence - most of it undisputed by the government also reveals that al Qaeda and its operatives were under minute scrutiny years before the attacks.

... an exceptionally powerful eavesdropping program called Echelon. Echelon's existence has been acknowledged by the Australian government since 1988, when it was exposed by whistleblowers who charged that it had been misused for political purposes. Building on an original post-World War II alliance between the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, Echelon had by the late 1980s been expanded to include joint operations with Germany, Japan, and China. It was initiated on the legal premise that while it is not permissible for the US government to monitor the conversations of its citizens without a warrant, it is not illegal for British intelligence to monitor American citizens, etc. Once the "take" has been pooled, the respective agencies can have safe access to their own domestic intelligence, because the Britons, Australians, or Germans did it, and not the home government.

Echelon's surveillance power resides in its ability "to tap all international and some domestic communications circuits, and sift out messages which sound interesting. Computers automatically analyze every telex message or data signal, and can also identify calls to, say, a target telephone number in London, no matter from which country they originate. '

Echelon has also been mated with computing programs and secret spy-satellite technology, including voice and "keyword" recognition that is remarkably effective in bringing critical messages to the attention of analysts on short notice. None of this, of course, diminishes the unlimited ability - which has existed since the first telephone number was issued - to intercept all communications to or from a known point. The primary operating agency for all Echelon activities worldwide is the US National Security Agency.

Even as the US government has continued to officially deny Echelon's existence, the BBC discussed it at length in 1999, saying:

Every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission can be listened to by power/Id computers capable of voice recognition. They home in on a long list of key words, or patterns of messages. They are looking for evidence of international crime, like terrorism. 4

So pervasive has Echelon become that in February 2000 the European Parliament was holding hearings on allegations that Echelon had been used to give unfair advantage to American and British companies. The French, the apparent targets, were quite upset, and the hearings made headlines across Europe for days.

Author James Bamford, a former NSA employee, has been justly praised for unearthing declassified Top Secret records - most significantly, Bamford publicized documents from Operation Northwoods, a 1960 program which the US military had approved but which President Kennedy prevented. Northwoods was a detailed plan to shoot down American aircraft and attack American military bases in the guise of Cuban forces, and then blame Fidel Castro as a pretext for a full-scale invasion of Cuba. Bamford observed, "The NSA's targets are on the front pages of the newspaper every day: Osama bin Laden, North Korea, missile transfers to Iran, nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India ...

p236
Somebody knew

Throughout the world the independent media organizations have done an outstanding job of picking up and reporting on independently published stories that the major media overlooked. One of the most outstanding examples of this was a July 16, 2002, piece posted at the website of Portland Indymedia (<www.portland.indymedia.org>) that reproduced the following short article originally found at The Memory Hole.

 

NPR interview on 9/11 confirmed attack was 'not entirely unexpected.

It's certainly one of the most disturbing and important indications that the government knew the attacks of September 11, 2001, were coming. On that morning, National Public Radio (NPR) was presenting live coverage of the attacks on its show Morning Edition. Host Bob Edwards went to a reporter in the field David Welna, NPR's congressional correspondent - who was in the Capitol building as it was being evacuated. Here is the crucial portion of Welna's report:

"I spoke with Congressman Ike Skelton - a Democrat from Missouri and a member of the Armed Services Committee who said that just recently the Director of the CIA warned that there could be an attack - an imminent attack on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected.'

(Audio links for this interview are located at The Memory Hole and NPR websites) <www.thememoryhole.org/tenet-9 11 .htm>

This one story is in diametric opposition to all officially stated US government positions about US government foreknowledge of 9/11. In the fall of 2002 I placed several calls to the office of Congressman Skelton asking for comment. I had hoped to be able to interview him during a pending trip to the Capital. None of my calls was returned.

The bottom line is that, based upon what is known about successful intelligence penetrations for years prior to the attacks of 9/11, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda could not have sneezed without the CIA or the NSA knowing about it.

p238
Outrage and a clear mission

Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the US stock options market - CBS News, September 19, 2001.

* A jump in UAL put options 90 times (not 90 percent) above normal between September 6 and September 10, and 285 times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack.

CBS News, September 26

 

* A jump in American Airlines put options 60 times (not 60 percent) above normal on the day before the attacks.

CBS News, September 26

 

* No similar trading occurred on any other airlines.

Bloomberg Business Report;2 the Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT), Herzliyya, Israel3 [citing data from the CBOE}

 

* Morgan Stanley saw, between September 7 and September 10, an increase of 27 times (not 27 percent) in the purchase of put options on its shares.

 

* Merrill-Lynch saw a jump of more than 12 times the normal level of put options in the four trading days before the attacks.

 

'It's not that farfetched,' said former SEC enforcement director William McLucas, now with the Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering law firm. 'This collection of terrorist acts has created a serious problem for our markets and a number of industry sectors. It is not as whacky or as Tom Clancy-ish as one might like to wish.'

'This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your entire life .... It's absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan to the United States to North America to Europe.'

Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg News, ABC World News Tonight, September 20, 2001.

 

 

'I saw put-call numbers higher than I've ever seen in 10 years of following the markets, particularly the options markets,' said John Kinnucan, principal of Broadband Research, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Montreal Gazette, September 19 2001

 

'When Isaw the volume of trading going up at other exchanges, I thought it was a little peculiar, 'said [Bill] Kennedy, of ING Group NV's ING TT&S (US) Securities Inc, explaining that most trading that day was on other markets. 'There had not been a lot of volume in American the previous week. You hope there was a reasonable explanation, and there may very well be, but it leaves a very had taste in your mouth.

'It's a matter of great interest to intelligence. To the extent we find this evidence, we shouldn't just focus on it as proof of insider trading but as evidence of a desire to commit murder and terrorism, 'said Columbia University law professor John Coffee.

Germany's Bundesbank chief, Ernst Weltke, said on the sidelines of the meeting that a report of the investigation showed 'bizarre' fiscal transactions prior to the attacks that could not have been chalked up to coincidence .... Weltke said the transactions 'could not have been planned and carried out without a certain knowledge, 'particularly citing heavy trading in gold and oil futures.

'It's absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan to the US to North America to Europe.'

ABC News Consultant Jonathan Winer, World News Tonight, September 20, 2001

 

AMR [the parent company of American Airlines] now represents just a tiny piece of what has become a giant international paper chase.'

National Post, September 22, 2001

 

From my perspective, it is very clear that there was highly unusual and suspicious activity in airline and hotel stocks in the days and weeks leading up to this attack.' Phil Erlanger, former senior technical analyst, Fidelity investments, writing in his newsletter Erlanger Squeeze Play, November 13, 2001. Erlanger added that the inside traders might well have made off with billions of dollars from 9/11.

The Chicago Board Options Exchange, the biggest US options market, said yesterday that it is investigating trading that happened before the terrorist attacks that flattened New York's World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon.

Montreal Gazette, September 19, 2001

 

'[Investigators will] certainly be able to track down every trade, where the trade cleared, where the trade was directed from.'

Former SEC enforcement chief William McLucas in an interview with Bloomberg News.'°

 

'If these clowns really bought puts on airline stocks and financial companies the day before the attacks, then they left another incriminating paper trail that may help provide proof of who masterminded the evil.'

Bloomberg

 

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A great many people knew that the attacks of September 11th were coming. Some of those people made a great deal of money from them. They knew exactly which stocks were going to plummet as a result of the attacks, and they knew that the attacks were going to succeed. Otherwise they would not have risked the sums of money that they did. That knowledge alone demonstrates - as we shall soon see - a degree of specific knowledge about the attacks that has not yet been revealed. And if the world views the attacks themselves as evil, then the insider trading connected to them - financial transactions made before the attacks happened and which could only be successful with the death of thousands of people - require a new word to describe them. I can't find it.

No rational mind, free of medication, can fail to see that the levels of insider trading that occurred before 9/11 were beyond aberrant behavior.

And the fact that a single $2.5 million put option trade on United Airlines went unclaimed after the attacks is appallingly clear evidence of criminal insider knowledge. News accounts speculated that those responsible for that particular trade did not act quickly enough to claim their profits and did not anticipate that the financial markets would be closed for four days after the attacks. Perhaps a group of people with access to the knowledge got the idea to make trades at the same time and didn't realize it was going to be a stampede that would leave a huge dust cloud behind it. In spite of FBI statements calling such trades rumors, and New York Times assertions that there were benign explanations for the bizarre trading before the attacks, I can think of no reasonable explanation for someone leaving $2.5 million in profits unclaimed, except one: They would be arrested if they showed up and asked for it. That, as I learned when I was with LAPD, is another clue.

The massive insider trading that occurred proximal to the events of September 11 was not localized. It was, in fact, a worldwide event, and there is no chance that all or even most of the trades were made by Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda. With a high-caliber networking software program derived from PROMIS, anyone with basic knowledge of the transactions (the volume of shares, the prices paid, the times of the trades, and the financial firms that handled them) could go on to identify the traders as well as their degrees of connection.

Insider trading, or suspicious trades indicating possible 9/11 foreknowledge, were reported in the USA, Germany, Britain, Canada, Japan (8 times above normal levels on the Osaka Exchange), Switzerland, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Singapore. Official investigations were announced in eight of those countries. Details of these international trades have not been disclosed, but shares of American companies are routinely purchased through foreign exchanges.

Nor was the trading limited to American and United Airlines. Shortly after 9/11 the SEC issued a sensitive list of some 38 companies whose shares had been traded suspiciously. SEC announced that it had quietly established relationships with brokerage firms to conduct its investigation. In publishing the list - which was quickly withdrawn from public circulation - the Cleveland Plain Dealer noted that all of these firms had seen unusual levels of put option purchases right before 9/11 and almost every company's shares had fallen sharply right after the attacks. The story quoted Morningstar's airline analyst Jonathan Schrader:

While trading fluctuations happen all of the time for no apparent reason, it seems there's certainly something here. It's interesting that they thought they could get away with it.

Indeed, no one could hope to get away with it unless they controlled all the enforcement mechanisms that would be called in afterward.

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The trades could only have been made by people high enough in the US, Israeli, and European intelligence communities (including Russia) to know about the attacks and - more importantly - which of many planned attacks were going to be successful. This circle could, of course, have included key world financial and political figures who were implementing a global agenda. As we have already seen, these two camps are one and the same. There is no other explanation that encompasses all the known data, and takes notice of the incredible veil of secrecy that has fallen over the issue.

Evidently, almost all the foreign intelligence services that had penetrated al Qaeda ultimately realized that the US government was going to facilitate the attacks. That knowledge migrated to certain investors who promptly capitalized on it. To have brought these figures to justice would have revealed how much was known about the attacks in so many places before they happened.

Nine agencies - SEC, NYSE, CBOE, Department of Justice, FBI, Secret Service, CIA, Treasury, and the National Security Agency - opened investigations into insider trading immediately after 9/11 based upon initially admitted and obvious evidence that it had, in fact, taken place. Much of the major press immediately recognized the importance of the story and then shirked its obligation to follow up. Not one of the agencies involved has to this day divulged any information to the public.

All the insanity and depravity suggested by 9/11 insider trading was made clear when the Pentagon announced, and then immediately scrapped, plans for a futures market on terrorist attacks called the Policy Analysis Market. This official program constituted a frank admission that people with advance knowledge of terror attacks would always seek to capitalize on that knowledge. Although the outrage over the program forced the resignation of convicted Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter, not a single press story made any connection between the Pentagon's plans and the trades of September 11th. The CIA is Wall Street. Wall Street is the CIA.

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ISRAEL

No discussion of the events before, during, and after 9/11 is either complete or intellectually honest without looking at Israel. Since 9/11, three nations - the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel - have stood virtually alone as a tripartite alliance in complete support of the Empire's actions. One of the best questions to ask after any major event is Cui bono? "Who benefits?" And here, Israel, the largest recipient of US military and economic aid, has ranked at, or near, the top of the list in almost every world development. There is some good, and much that is bad, to be said about Israel and its actions. But almost every attempt at rational discourse on the question of the use of Israeli power has been hobbled by emotional, almost hysterical preconceptions either pro or con - that miss some very important pieces of the new, accurate map I have been trying to draw for you.

Many of the top members of the Bush administration have exceptionally close ties with the Israeli government. These include the former Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; Edward Luttwak of the National Security Study Group; Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's Chief Financial Officer on 9/11; Elliot Abrams at the National Security Council, and Press Secretary An Fleischer. Some have even worked on joint planning projects with Israeli ministries. These relationships alone make Israel a subject worthy of discussion. These and many other Israeli-connected experts formed the core group at the Project for a New American Century that had drafted plans for the invasion of Iraq long before 9/11. (This chapter is a brief effort to put some very important pieces into place. And I should say at the outset that none of my research has found any compelling data to suggest that Israel was the architect or mastermind of the attacks of September 11 (as is obvious from the preceding chapters) It would have been impossible for the Israeli government to have so compromised US intelligence, military, economic, and political systems as to have had control of the operation, not to mention the full and unquestioning cooperation of the American mid-level functionaries needed to execute it.

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The term "anti-Semitism" refers to a European social and political phenomenon (which, like much of European pre-World War II ideology, still lingers in some places, e.g., Japan). Anti-Jewish feeling, thought, and behavior are as old as monotheism itself and have undergone almost as many transformations. There's the anti-Judaism of late antiquity; the massacres against Jews in the Crusades and the Inquisition, the murderous pogroms by rural European peasants in the 18th and 19th centuries, the middle-class resentment, mythologizing, and persecution that led to the Dreyfuss Affair in 1890s France, and a massive wave of hatred toward Jews that came upward from European folk ideology and downward from fascist and rightist parties and governments in the first half of the 20t century. Like all forms of bigotry, "Anti-Semitism" remains a serious problem all over the world. But the phrase itself has no real anthropological basis; it dates from the 1870s, when most European writers still divided up the world's peoples according to Biblical categories - "Semites" were thought to be descended from Noah's son Shem, while everybody else came from either Ham or Japhet. In fact, Antisemitismus was invented as part of an effort by German racist authors to replace the religion-based Jew-hatred (Judenhass) of the past with a more modern, ethnicity-driven contempt. Of course, this apparently intellectual construct barely masked a deep reservoir of anti-rational, virulent hatred. It formed the basis for the pseudo-scientific racism of the Nazi movement.

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To say that Israel did not perpetrate the attacks of 9/11 is not to deny that the Israeli government was very close to those attacks and may have played a role in them. There is evidence that points both ways. On the one hand it is clear that Mossad made several attempts to warn the US government that the attacks were coming - in one case even providing the US government with a list that included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, including Mohammed Atta and that charmed pair, NawafAlhazmi and Khalid Almidhar.' Everybody knew the attacks were coming. Yet even after this information was in American hands, various agencies of the US government allowed Alhazmi and Almidhar to roam free and unmolested.

The analysis of insider trading by the Herzliya Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT) is another example of Israeli action pointing toward, rather than away from, evidence that the CIA knew what was going on and allowed the attacks to happen.

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In 2000, after a protracted court battle, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith (ADL) lost a civil suit in California federal court after it was found that the ADL had engaged, in cooperation with Israeli and South African intelligence agencies, in a massive domestic spying operation against American citizens and organizations such as Green Peace and groups opposed to US involvement in the Contra war. American officials who cooperated with the ADL were sometimes given all-expenses-paid trips to Israel, where they were introduced to representatives from the Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence services. It was found that the ADL had broken many laws by storing illegal intelligence records from local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. In ruling in favor of the plaintiffs a US District Court judge permanently enjoined the ADL from engaging in any further illegal spying against 'Arab-American and other civil rights groups." Several members of the House of Representatives were plaintiffs in the suit.

On April 25, 2002, former Congressman Pete McCloskey of California was awarded a $150,000 judgment against the ADL in a related case. McCloskey's suit was prompted by FBI and San Francisco police raids on ADL offices which discovered that the ADL had files on almost 10,000 people across the US, and that about 75 percent of the material had been illegally obtained. Two of the three victims in the case who won awards were Jewish. This ruling followed a March 31, 2001, ruling in a Denver court upholding a $10.5 million defamation judgment against the Anti-Defamation League for falsely labeling two Colorado residents as anti-Semitic.

To think of the ADL affair as something that originated solely with Israeli impetus is to overlook some key historical data. In the wake of myriad violations of US law committed by the FBI, the military, the CIA, and other government agencies in the 1960s and 1970s, and especially after the damning revelations of the Frank Church (D-ID) and Otis Pike (D-NY) congressional investigations in the mid 1970s, American agencies were forced to divest themselves of illegal records and to cease domestic spying operations. The problem, from their point of view, was how to hold on to data they deemed irreplaceable. The ADL, a nongovernmental organization connected with a foreign government, seemed an ideal solution. The solution was not without its costs.

In the 1980s the Los Angeles Police Department's Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID) was found to have been doing what was accomplished by other agencies directly through the ADL. Ultimately some ADL connections surfaced in the PDID case. Tens of thousands of illegal intelligence records were disclosed as having been stored in the private residence and storage facilities rented and maintained by LAPD Detective Jay Paul. Paul, who was later revealed to have ties to Israeli interests, maintained many of the records on computers provided by an ultra-right-wing group, Western Goals. Sitting at the time on the board of directors of Western Goals was Iran-Contra figure and retired Army General John Singlaub, a virulent anti-Communist and CIA-connected covert operative.

As the LAPD scandal was unfolding I served as one of the unnamed sources for the Los Angeles Times' reporting of the scandal. Although the Times stopped well short of stating that US intelligence agencies had supported this intelligence gathering, two decades later the pattern is very clear. The ADL was there when it was needed. Yet in using the ADL as a plausibly deniable cutout, American intelligence agencies at the state and federal level paid a price. They gave the ADL license to use the data for its own purposes and created a monster that ultimately became a liability in its own right.

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Those with experience in intelligence operations will recognize some patterns to this widespread operation. First of all, when mounting an operation of wide scope, governments usually allow the operation to be used for multiple purposes. Within the Israeli government there might be three or four different intelligence units that could benefit from a large-scale deployment of covert operatives. We have already seen how closely intertwined narcotics and intelligence operations are worldwide. Not only does drug dealing provide, in some cases, the necessary covert funding for the operations themselves, it is also a means of generating income for national economies. With the United States and the CIA as the "Alpha dog" in the worldwide drug trade, there are few areas of competition left to generate large cash flows. One area in which Israeli organized crime has excelled, however, is in controlling the largest market share of trafficking in the drug MDMA (Ecstasy). And the interfaces between intelligence agencies and organized crime are well documented.

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SILENCING CONGRESS

impressive the post-9/11 world of its own making, imperial America demonstrated an impressive new level of ruthlessness. Congress was the first and most important arena for a spectacular melodrama of political brutality. Starting within a week of September 11th the imperial power moved quickly and aggressively to silence those who threatened its interests. While some efforts were -successful, others were not.

Believing that Congress will save the day is a trap. After more than 20 years of study and interaction with it, I reached the familiar conclusion that Congress is ineffective because its power is concentrated among a very few profoundly compromised legislators. Only the committee chairpersons and the party leadership can either promote or prevent serious change. On 9/11, the major senators in this category were former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pat Leahy.

Because of their charismatic appeal and outspokenness, some members of the House of Representatives are threats to the Empire. These members take serious risks when they speak out. They pose greater dangers because they can spark popular sentiment and break (or redirect) the mass media's hypnotic hold on the public. In this category one finds Representatives Ron Paul of Texas, John Conyers of Michigan and Henry Waxman of California; former Representatives Cynthia McKinney and Bob Barr; and, in the Senate, Russ Feingold and the late Paul Wellstone.

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Tom Daschle and Pat Leahy

Tom Daschle was in a position of enough power to derail all of the Empire's new legislative imperatives. Though his public stance vocally supported the administration's agenda, there were indications that, in the ultra-nationalistic fervor that followed the attacks, he was having quiet reservations about the new authoritarian onslaught. Daschle is by no means a crusader. Yet by October 10th his leadership had allowed Russ Feingold of Wisconsin to block passage of the undebated (and largely unread!) US Patriot Act - a monstrosity whose immediate passage the White House demanded.

Getting Daschle (and his presidential ambitions) into line was a critical task for the Empire, because major pieces of legislation like Homeland Security, various bioterrorism measures, and a multitude of investigations were soon going to fall within his grasp. Prior to 9/11 he had not been a vocal critic of Washington's ways, but as events would show, it was imperative to make sure that he would not find his voice.

On October 15 it was disclosed that Daschle's office had received an anthrax letter, and that several members of his staff had been exposed. By the 18th of October it was disclosed that as many as 31 senate staff members had tested positive for anthrax.

The Patriot Act that eviscerated the Constitution was passed without debate on October 24th, 2001. Politically and physically frightened, a chamber full of pragmatists adapted to the new world by trading the Bill of Rights for their own political and physical security. In other words, Congress had gotten the message. The few opposition voices that remained, having been rendered ineffective, could be left in place as symbols to show that debate still existed. On January 29, 2002, CNN announced that both the president and vice president had asked Daschle to limit any congressional investigations into the attacks, arguing that they might take resources away from the war against terror. Not only did Daschle comply, he delayed public investigations until revelations from other sources, particularly rank-and-file FBI agents, dictated that they had to be held in order to maintain the credibility of American government.

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Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont was also in a position to derail many of the unconstitutional actions and the legislation coming out of the White House. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee he apparently had the power, the obligation, and the willingness to do so. He did it eloquently and with great fire until it was his turn to suffer. Throughout September, October, and November, Leahy was an open critic of the Bush administration and particularly of Attorney General John Ashcroft's moves to wiretap attorney-client conversations, to detain foreign nationals in secret and without trial, and to conduct secret military tribunals with the power of life and death where constitutional concerns had been tossed out the window.

Leahy was especially irritated at Ashcroft's imperial refusals to come and answer questions before his committee. He sent several terse letters to Ashcroft and ultimately demanded that Ashcroft appear. When that failed, Leahy demanded a written response to important questions from the committee. Ashcroft ignored Leahy, but only up to a point.

On November 16 Senator Leahy received his own anthrax letter. And the anthrax sent to Leahy's office was incredibly powerful, concentrated at a trillion spores per gram. When, on December 6, Ashcroft finally made an appearance before the Judiciary Committee he was treated with kid gloves in an utterly appalling display of total surrender. I found it hard to keep from screaming as I watched Ashcrofr enjoy his dog-and-pony show on C-SPAN.

It was not for some months that the American public and the world were to learn that the Ames strain of anthrax, which was identified as the strain sent to Congress, was solely and exclusively the product of a CIA weapons research program (involving the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRHD), the Dugway Proving Ground, and the Batelle Memorial Institute All of the anthrax sent post-9/11 had come from within the United States and had originated in CIA-run covert research programs.

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Cynthia McKinney and Bob Barr

There is no question that of these two brave former members of Congress, who are as ideologically different as night and day, Cynthia McKinney stirred the most domestic and international reaction by asking questions that needed to be asked and by directly challenging the administration on its obvious deceptions. Bob Barr had also been extremely vocal in his criticism of the administration's assault on the Bill of Rights. McKinney and Barr represented neighboring districts in Georgia until January of 2003. Both were defeated in their primary election campaigns in August of 2002.

... The demise of McKinney and Barr was, at least in part, a bipartisan operation. There is a message in this. And because McKinney had asked tougher questions, she received a special kind of treatment reserved for no other. With the exception of Paul Wellstone, she was the ultimate congressional object lesson presented by the Empire after 9/11.

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McKinney's crime

On March 25, 2002, McKinney appeared on a Berkeley; California, radio program on the Pacifica network, hosted by Dennis Bernstein. There she made the following statements:

... persons close to this administration are poised to make huge profits off America's new war. Former President Bush sits on the board of the Carlyle Group. The Los Angeles Times reports that on a single day last month, Carlyle earned $237 million selling shares in United Defense Industries, the Army's fifth-largest contractor. The stock offering was well timed: Carlyle officials say they decided to take the company public only after the September 11 attacks. The stock sale cashed in on increased congressional support for hefty defense spending, including one of United Defense's cornerstone weapons programs.

Now is the time for our elected officials to be held accountable. Now is the time for the media to be held accountable. Why aren't the hard questions being asked? We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, delivered one such warning. Those engaged in unusual stock trades immediately before September 11 knew enough to make millions of dollars from United and American airlines, certain insurance and brokerage firms' stocks. What did this administration know, and when did it know it about the events of September 11? Who else knew and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered?

We know that there were several warnings that were given prior to the events of September 11th From people in Germany to people in the Cayman Islands to people who ... even, now we learn about the owners of the pilot schools. People were calling in to the CIA and the FBI, and they were giving information that was critical. Even prior to these warnings, we had the trial itself from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And we had the trial from the American Embassy bombings. So we know that the World Trade Center bombing trial gave us a lead on the fact that U.S. embassies were being targeted. And now the United States government is being sued by survivors of the embassy bombings because it is clear that America had warning and did nothing, did nothing, to protect the lives of the people who served in our foreign service, and who serve us in other ways in our embassies around the world. Now the United States government is being sued and we're going to have to pay for that, as those families are now paying every day with the loss of their loved ones ...

There was adequate warning. There were people who failed to act on the warnings. And THAT'S what ought to be investigated. But instead of requesting that Congress investigate what went wrong and why, we had President Bush, painful for me to say that, but, we had President Bush place a phone call to Majority leader Senator Tom Daschle, asking him NOT to investigate the events of September 11th. And then, hot on the heels of the president's phone call was another phone call from the vice president asking that Tom, that Tom Daschle also NOT investigate the events that led to September 11th.

My question is: What do they have to hide? And why is it that the American people are being asked to make tremendous sacrifices now in our civil liberties, in the fact that we got this request for an unprecedented hike in ... in ... the hike alone, of $48.1 billion, is more than any one of our allies spend TOTAL in their defense.

Then, the other issue that saddens me is the fact that the former president, President Bush's daddy, sits on the board of the Carlyle Group. And so we get this presidency of questionable legitimacy requesting a nearly unprecedented amount of money to go into a defense budget for defense spending that would directly benefit his father! Where is the ... where are the brakes on transparency [sic] and corruption that I see happening as a result of the fact that the president's father stands to make money off of the very request that the president has made on what I would call a specious argument, saying that we needed to increase defense spending because of September 11th, when we now know that there were enough warnings to September 11 that we didn't even have to experience September 11th at all, at least that's the way it is now beginning to appear.

 

For just a moment the earth stood still. People around the world held their breath waiting for a reaction that was not long in coming. All over the major media the reaction was brutal. McKinney had lost it. She was a pushy, arrogant bitch who had lost her mind at a time of great crisis. How could anyone suggest such things about America's great president?

She got the worst treatment from FOX News, run by former GOP political strategist and Bush ally Roger Ailes. FOX stooped to less-than-covert racial slurs; it seemed to me as if they stopped just short of calling McKinney an "uppity Negro" on the air.

Of course, as time revealed, she was absolutely right. And had she made her comments just a few months later, after the revelations had come from the Phoenix and Minneapolis FBI offices, she might have held her seat. There are strong signs that she will be back in office after 2004. Yet she had been a thorn in the Empire's side for a long time, and her criticisms had not begun with the Bush presidency. She had been a vocal and daring critic of covert operations and human rights violations in the name of profit all throughout the Clinton period. She was fiercely critical of Israel's conduct. She had been a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights. She was the biggest walking bull's-eye in Washington.

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Wither Congress, Wither America? Crushing Congressional Dissent: The Fall of Hilliard, Barr and McKinney

by Wayne Madsen, From The Wilderness

Historians will one day write that the 107th Congress was the last to stand up to the constitutional encroachment by the military and monarchist policies of the Bush II administration. Just like its ancient Roman predecessor, the Congress of the United States is becoming an elite club of pathetic assenters and global elitists. Once the domain of great orators and dissenters like Cato and Cicero, the power of the Roman Senate was eventually subsumed by the Roman Army when the Emperor took on dictatorial powers. The Roman Senate could say nothing as the military dictatorship annexed Macedonia, Spain, Greece, the Middle East, and North Africa. By the time Emperors Tiberius and Septimius Severus took power, the Senate, which had grown to an elite club of 600, was a rubber stamp body that had no choice but to go along with the military's continued usurpation of power.

The United States Congress stands on the same precipice where its Roman ancestor once fell. If Bush pulls another electoral coup in 2004 and we see the presidential election thrown into the House of Representatives, the future for the country appears very dim.

The August 20 defeat of two Georgia Representatives, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, is a bellwether event that bodes ill for this November's elections.

... McKinney and Barr were both defeated handily, McKinney with the help of 25,000 crossover votes. Of course, the fact that people not authorized to vote in the Fourth District may have voted anyway would fall into the category of election fraud. But after the Florida debacle, the Ashcrofr Justice Department sees such electoral machinations as an acceptable way to remain in power - like any totalitarian regime parading before the world as an exemplary democracy.

... McKinney had incurred the wrath of the White House by her question about what George W. Bush knew in advance about the September 11 terrorist attacks. But that was only the tip of the iceberg for the Republicans and their major campaign contributors. While it is true that McKinney has championed the cause of Palestinian statehood and self-determination, thus inviting the enmity of major Zionist organizations in the United States, it was her long-time opposition to the trade of blood diamonds and other strategic minerals in Africa that earned her a major challenge from multinational corporations, including Barrick Gold, on whose board President Bush's father serves as an international adviser. Among its other misdeeds, Barrick has been accused of helping to cover up the 1996 burying alive by one of its subsidiaries of over 50 Tanzanian gold miners in Bulyanhulu, in the northwest part of the country. Of course, when it comes to the lives and welfare of non-white people, the Bushes have never really held any soft spot, whether they are blacks in Africa or America's inner cities, Afghan or Iraqi children, or even a troubled half-Hispanic daughter/niece/granddaughter in Florida.

McKinney long advocated a halt in the pilferage of blood diamonds out of African war zones. She cited, on numerous occasions,

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The next Congress will be full of complacent African-American opportunists like Majette and Davis; dangerous extreme rightists like former cockroach exterminator [Tom] DeLay and former sportscaster J. D. Hayworth of Arizona; pitiful morons like Florida's former Secretary of State and chief election rigger Katherine Harris; Republican moles and sleepers like Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman; and Democratic spineless amoebas like Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle. They will stand ready to back Bush's military campaigns into Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Colombia, or wherever Bush's economic interests are at stake. The country stands on the brink of disaster. But we cannot count on the future Congress to save us. Lacking a spine or any guts, it will surely help to bury us.

 

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Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?
by Michael C. Ruppert

Nov. 1, 2002, 15:00 PST (FTW) -The air crash deaths of Sen. Paul Wellstone, wife, daughter, three staff members, and two pilots at approximately 10:25 a.m. on October 25 in Eveleth, Minnesota have given rise to the widespread belief - shared by at least two members of the House of Representatives who spoke on condition of anonymity - that the crash was a murder.

Almost as important as the known details of the crash, which often contradict mainstream press reports, is the fact that the belief is so widely held. It says something about America that cannot and should not be ignored.

A HISTORY TOO FULL OF COINCIDENCES

From a historical standpoint Democrats are twice as likely to die in air crashes as Republicans. Frequently, those who have died were known to have been either involved in the investigation of covert operations or to have taken highly controversial positions in opposition to vested government interests.

... THE WELLSTONE CRASH

Perhaps no member of the Senate ranked higher on the Bush administration's enemies list than Minnesota Democrat Paul Welistone. And the enmity goes back years to when Bush's father was president. The November 4 issue of TIME recounts an encounter between Wellstone and the elder Bush after which he referred to Welistone as "this chickenshit." And it is known that there has been at least one prior reported attempt on Wellstone's life.

In the months before his death Wellstone had voted against several key Bush agendas including Homeland Security the Iraqi use of force resolution, and many of Bush's judicial nominees. In a Senate controlled 50-49 by the Democrats, Wellstone was perhaps the biggest one-man obstacle to Bush's fervent and stated desire to secure passage of the Homeland Security measure prior to a US invasion of Iraq...

So what happened to Paul Wellstone?

A check of more than 50 of the world's leading news organizations three days after the Wellstone crash left one clear impression: the crash had been caused by "freezing rain and snow," limited visibility, and likely icing of the wings. One CNN report on October 24 described the plane as flying in "snowy, frozen rain."

None of these conditions, which did not exist as just described, had anything to do with the crash.

... INSIDE SOURCES

FTW was able to receive comments on the crash from two Democratic members of the House of Both, who spoke on condition of anonymity, stated that they believed that Wellstone had been murdered.

One said, "I don't think there's anyone on the Hill who doesn't suspect it. It's too convenient, too coincidental, too damned obvious. My guess is that some of the less courageous members of the party are thinking about becoming Republicans right now."

It is a rare occurrence when this writer refers to a quotation from an unnamed CIA source. I have demonstrated in at least four interviews with the staffs of both the Senate and House Intelligence committees established that I know sources who have worked for the CIA in some very nasty covert operations.

The day after the crash I received a message from a former CIA operative who has proven extremely reliable in the past and who is personally familiar with these kinds of assassinations. The message read, 'As I said earlier, having played ball (and still playing in some respects) with this current crop of reinvigorated old white men, these clowns are nobody to screw around with. There will be a few more strategic accidents. You can be certain of that."


Crossing the Rubicon

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