The Voice of the White House

            Washington, D.C., September 11, 2008: “As a Republican, I find myself repelled by the shrill and very vicious campaign ads prepared by the staffs of Senator McCain and Governor Palin. I have never heard such desperate, hysterical lies in my entire political life. Both of them have been mindlessly attacking Senator Obama because they represent a political party that is disgrace with the American public.. Bush is loathed, the economy has tanked and will tank worse, the wars go on without end, the corruption in the present government is out of control and reminds me of some third world country. Both McCain and Palin are part and parcel of the mindsets of the Bush people. They have done everything but call Obama a nigger but if they did, it would not surprise me. Losers always play dirty.

                The inclusion of Sarah Palin on the McCain ticket was a terrible mistake. McCain was bound and determined that Joe Lieberman be his vice president but the leadership of the GOP told him repeatedly and heatedly that if he did that, he automatically would lose the election. Lieberman is viewed as a turncoat and a loud supporter of Israel and in our current political climate, no one cares about a turncoat but they do not like Israel or her loud, demanding and backstabbing supporters. Then he chose Governor Palin, about whom little is known to the electorate.

                Put forward as a maverick, she is in truth a catastrophe. She was not vetted by anyone because someone quickly had to be found to satisfy the enraged McCain. Sarah is indeed a  walking political disaster.

                 If the GOP was afraid of Joe Lieberman, they will be terrified of the damage the Devine Sarah can cause. There is much in her background that will most certainly emerge, most especially since she has savagely attacked the American media. Yammering negativity to the media is like punching a state trooper in the nose when he stops you from driving at 90 on the median strip. Problemw will certainly follow.

                All of the following material is taken from a confidential DoJ report sitting on my desk as I write.

The Republican’s unvetted choice was born Sarah Louise Heath on February 11, 1964 at Sandpoint, Idaho. Her father, Charles Heath was a science teacher and her mother, Sally Sheeran Heath was listed as a housewife. Sarah attended a number of schools and finally received a BA in journalism from the University of Idaho. Her current husband, Todd, is a Native American Yup'ik Eskimo and works for BP at one of their Alaskan oil fields and does part-time work as a fisherman.

They have five children. Their eldest son, Track, 19, is in the U.S. army and their three daughters, Bristol, 18, Willow, 14 and Piper, 7. In 2008 (April 18, 2008), a son, Trig was born. This child suffers from Mongoloidism. Their second unmarried daughter Willow, is now pregnant.

                The Palin family lives in Wasilla, about 40 miles north of Anchorage.

                Aside from a number of thoroughly unpleasant episodes concerning family members, overcharging the state, heavy involvement with corrupt local politicians, attempts to foster her personal religious beliefs (Palin is a very active and aggressive  Evangelical) there is the question of family matters she has attempted to conceal to advance her political career. Governor Palin  “proudly displays” an Israeli flag in her gubernatorial office and for a very good reason.

                Her maternal grandfather, Schmuel Sheigam, was a Lithuanian Jew, born in 1912 in Vilkaviskis, Lithuania,  91.2 miles west of Vilnius. The Sheigam  family immigrated to America, via Hamburg, Germany in 1915 because of WWI.

                At Ellis Island Immigration Centre, the name was entered as Sheeran, a standard practice of the time  when immigration officers were unable to understand the pronunciation of non-English speaking immigrants. Sheeran is a common Irish name but members of the Sheigam family are buried in the Jewish cemetery at Budezeriai near Vilkaviskis:in Lithuania  

                Further information on Governor Palin’s ancestors can easily be found in the vital records in the Lithuanian State Historical Archives in Vilnius. The Archives holds birth, marriage, divorce, and death records for the Lithuanian Jewish community from 1851 until 1915 when the Jews were required to leave the country because of World War I. They are in 18th Century Cyrillic script and Yiddish  Many of these records  include the mother's maiden name and town of registration.

The Georgian Disaster

September 12, 2008

by Brian Harring  

The Bush Administration is now having serious problems with Georgian President Saakashvili. He has always been seen as an excellent political tool, very pro-American, very anti-Putin and a man who had received over $860,000 USD from the American government for his “friendly cooperation” in permitting American and Israeli intelligence and military units to develop a striking base in his country aimed at both Russia and Iran.

                Saakashvili. has had three highly informative and secret email exchanges (on September 3,4 and 5^th) with American Vice President  Cheney and two with American Secretary of State Rice (on September 1 and 3^rd) concerning the future of Georgia. Since email privacy is impossible to maintain, the contents of these messages are certainly not secret.

• Saakashvili has reiterated repeatedly, and very forcefully, that he wants the U.S. to reequip the Georgian army to the level it was at prior to the military events with Russia in early August.

• Saakashvili insists that the U.S. develop a large naval base at Poti, the oil refinery port, to protect it from the Russians. 

• Saakashvili wants a large number of American troops stationed in Georgia for a protracted period to physically protect that country by their presence.

• Saakashvili is also asking Israel to occupy at least one air base and to station a significant number of bombing aircraft there to facilitate a planned attack on Iran or on Russian forces should they invade Georgian territory again. 

• Saakashvili stated that he planned to equip loyalist local militias in the two provinces, Abkhazia and South Ossetia ,with sufficient weapons to harass and drive out the Russian occupiers.

• Saakashvili intends to ask Israel to send tactical atomic weapons to Georgia to maintain a balance against Russian aggression..

• Saakashvili vowed on September 6 to regain control over the two independence-seeking provinces of by military force at the earliest possible opportunity..

                Major problems facing Washington include:

• The total inability of the U.S. to field a significant force of ground troops anywhere in the area due to prior needs in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Small numbers of American military personnel (there were two thousand such personnel in Georgia before that country attacked South Ossetia and then were forced to rapidly evacuate following a massive Russian military incursion) could be made available but large and determinant numbers are not possible and this is certainly well-known to the public.

• The well-publicized instability of Saakashvili who can best termed a loose cannon.  Although a bought-and-paid-for American source, the Georgian leader, cozened and flattered by the Bush White House, has come to believe that he is America’s darling who can do as he wishes with their complete support. He has pranced around the state, shouting to his fellow-countrymen and giving the finger to Vladimir Putin.

• A treacherous ally, Israel, who thinks that, like Georgia’s President, that they have the full and unconditional backing of the Bush White House (but certainly not the Ametican public) and have been working both sides of the block at the same time, swearing total allegiance to the United States while passing our military, economic and political secrets to the Russians.

• A strong reluctance on the part of Turkey to let American naval units take up residence in the Black Sea. The only entrance and exit for such units would be through Turkish territorial waters and Turkey has a very understandable desire not to provoke economic or military responses from Russia.

                A Russian GRU report, under date of September 3, 2008, concerning one aspect of the huge trove of American and Israeli intelligence documents found abandoned in Georgia by both American intelligence units as well as Israeli, disclosed that  the U.S. electronic equipment captured at Poti by Russian spesnatz units was partially manufactured, under U.S. license, at Odessa in the Ukraine. The Ukraine is not a member of NATO, but NATO-compatible sensitive military equipment is being manufactured in a non-NATO country. The Russian reports goes on to state that the Georgian military not only abandoned “significant amounts of” valuable equipment, but essentially totally compromised both the American and Israeli intelligence network set up in Georgia for the purpose of electronic spying on Iran, Russia and Turkey.

                As a matter of record, once this story was published, the American military immediately denied that anyone captured any sensitive American documents. Unfortunately, the Russians did and are now quietly releasing the results of their finds. On the other hand, the Israelis are smart enough to keep their mouths shut about what the Russians discovered about their activities.

                The Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, turned out to be an utter disaster in conducting surveillance over Russian territory prior to the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia. Russian aircraft, aided by their new radar systems, were able to shoot down all of these craft and subsequent incursions by Russian forces overran Israeli reconnaissance control bases and captured a number of intact drones of different types as well as a wealth of technical data and many reconnaissance films taken on earlier incursions of Russian air space.

                 Russian counter-intelligence units also seized copies of the computer files of the Georgian government, including highly sensitive diplomatic messaging from, and to, the following individuals and entities:

• Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the USA in Georgia John Teft

• the delegation of the EU Troika represented by Eric Fournier
• Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of France - current EU Presidency, Robin Liddell
• First Counselor of the European Commission’s Delegation to Georgia and Ivan Jestřāb
• Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Czech Republic - next EU Presidency
• Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation – State Secretary G. Karasin
• representatives of the Embassies of the New Group of Georgia’s Friends: Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Sweden and the Czech Republic accredited in Georgia
• representatives of the Embassies of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and China
• Director of the Policy Planning Division at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Estonia Tiit Matsulevitš
• Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine in Georgia Mikolas Spiss
• Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Estonia to Georgia Toomas Lukk
• delegation of the EU Troika represented by Fabienne Drout-Lozinski
• Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to Georgia Denis Keefe
• representatives of the Embassies of the Netherlands, Italy, Holy See, Turkey, France, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Ukraine to Georgia
• Deputy US Ambassador Kent Loxton and representative of the Embassy’s political division Joy Davis Kirshner
• the diplomatic corps accredited in Georgia
• Permanent Representative of Georgia to the UN, Ambassador Irakli Alasania

                Also discovered were the special bank accounts into which the United States Embassy, acting for “several” other American agencies, (CIA and DoS) paid monies for the  “personal use” of President Saakashvili:

Bank Accounts

For transactions in GEL

Beneficiary’s Bank: “Basis Bank”Bank Code : 220101956

Beneficiary: “DEVELOPMENT AND REFORM FOUNDATION” UNDER PRESIDENT OF GEORGIA

Account Number  # : 134530

Total deposits from State Department accounts: $275,000

For transactions in US Dollars

Intermediary Bank,: DEUTCHE BANK TRUST CO. AMERICAS NEW YORK, USA, SWIFT : BKTRUS33 ABA : 021001033

Beneficiary’s Bank: BASIS BANK TBILISI, GEORGIA SWIFT : CBASGE22

               Beneficiary: OBJECTIVE ACCOUNT FOUNDATION ” DEVELOPMENT AND REFORM FOUNDATION”

Account  Number # 134530

Total deposits from State Department accounts $400,000

For transactions in Euro and other convertible currency:

Intermediary Bank: DEUTCHE BANK FRANKFURT/ESCHBORN, DEUTSCHLAND, SWIFT : DEUT DE FF

               Beneficiary’s bank: BASIS BANK, TBILISI, GEORGIA SWIFT : CBASGE22

 Beneficiary: OBJECTIVE ACCOUNT FOUNDATION “DEVELOPMENT AND REFORM FOUNDATION”

Account Number #134530

Total deposits from State Department accounts: $185,000

US shrinks from arming Georgia

September 9, 2008

by Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON - As if the outgoing administration of US President George W Bush didn't already have enough on its plate, the question of whether and how to re-arm Georgia in the aftermath of its thrashing last month by Russia is moving steadily up an increasingly crowded foreign policy agenda.

                Moscow has already signaled that any move to supply the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili with the advanced weapons that he has long sought - including the powerful hand-held anti-tank rockets and Stinger surface-to-air missiles which contributed heavily to Russia's defeat in Afghanistan - will significantly increase tensions with Washington, which soared to a post-Cold War high in the wake of the Russian intervention.

                But besides pledging to continue its push for Georgia's admission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)- something with which Washington's European allies would have to go along with - the Bush administration has so far declined to make any promises in regard to military aid.

                Indeed, even Vice President Dick Cheney, who had reportedly pushed hard for sending such advanced equipment to Georgia even before last month's war, refrained from making any promises last Thursday during his high-profile visit to the Georgian capital.

                "Over time, I'm sure, people will look at what happened with the military here and what the needs are," an official who accompanied Cheney on his four-hour stay in Tbilisi told US reporters on the vice president's plane. "But I think the focus for the moment is on the humanitarian and long-term economic needs."

                The issue is nonetheless likely to loom large in the coming months, particularly if foreign policy plays a key role in the ongoing presidential election campaign, which moved into high gear on Friday with the end of the Republican National Convention.

                In his acceptance of the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday night, Senator John McCain called for "solidarity" with Georgia in a speech that was remarkably light on foreign policy issues. From the moment that hostilities between Georgia and Russia began, McCain, who considers Saakashvili a friend and who he spoke with frequently by phone during the crisis, has consistently called for stronger action against Russia than the administration has been willing to take, including expelling it from the Group of Eight (G-8) nations.

                While McCain has not explicitly endorsed filling Saakashvili's wish list, some of his key neo-conservative advisers, such as Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, have pressed the administration to take such a course. Their appeal has been supported by two of McCain's closest senate colleagues.

                "Specifically, the Georgian military should be given the anti-aircraft and anti-armor systems necessary to deter any renewed Russian aggression," wrote independent Democrat Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, in the Wall Street Journal late last month. "We avoided giving the types of security aid that could have been used to blunt Russia's conventional onslaught. It is time for that to change," according to the two senators.

                Their advice was published just as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev formally recognized the two breakaway Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, in defiance of a personal appeal by Bush for him not to do so.

                While Bush and other top administration officials strongly denounced Medvedev's move - Cheney on September 4 called it "an illegitimate, unilateral attempt to change [Georgia's] borders by force". The administration has so far moved relatively cautiously, ignoring appeals for stepped-up military aid to rebuild Georgia's battered forces and upgrade its weaponry. The emphasis instead has been on the delivery of humanitarian and economic assistance.

                "The first order of business should not be some sort of punishment," Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Daniel Fried told the Washington Times. "Russia has to decide how much it wants to isolate itself from the world. We don't want to have a bad relationship with Russia. We've never wanted that."

                So far, US actions have been largely limited to its pledge to push Georgia's and Ukraine's membership in NATO, effectively shelving Russia ascension to the World Trade Organization, and to suspend a bilateral strategic dialogue and review a number of other bilateral military cooperation agreements.

                In the immediate aftermath of the five-day war, Washington also quickly sealed a long-pending bilateral accord that would permit it to build missile defense systems in Poland. That move drew particularly harsh criticism from Moscow, which has also reiterated a vow to strongly oppose any efforts to admit Georgia and Ukraine to NATO - a military alliance which it sees as aimed at encircling and containing Russia.

                Aside from those moves the administration has focused on supplying humanitarian and economic assistance to Georgia - albeit via military transport aircraft and warships in the Black Sea. In conjunction with the European Union (EU) it has also helped arrange a US$750 million line of credit to help Tbilisi finance the repair of the substantial infrastructural damages it incurred in the war.

                In addition, Washington has pledged $1 billion in economic and reconstruction assistance, more than half of which will be sent over the next five months. That amount would make the Caucasian nation the fourth biggest US aid recipient after Israel, Iraq, and Egypt.

                The administration's relative caution, particularly with respect to military aid, appears motivated by several factors.

                Increasing tensions with Moscow further could seriously jeopardize other top foreign policy interests, according to senior officials and independent analysts, including Washington's hopes for applying additional pressure, particularly through the UN Security Council, on Iran to halt its nuclear program. It could prompt Russia to suspend an agreement that lets NATO use Russian and Central Asian bases and air space to supply its troops in Afghanistan.

                A more aggressive stance could also harm relations with key European allies, such as Germany, France, and Italy, which are eager to ramp down tensions, in part due to their own heavy investments in Russia's economy and dependence on gas supplies.

                US officials are also reluctant to address the question of additional military aid in light of the Georgian armed forces' poor performance during the war - the army retreated in chaos at the first contact, while all of its warships were destroyed in port - and what some of them describe as the recklessness of Saakashvili himself in ordering the attack on Tskhinvali that triggered Russia's offensive.

                Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Comment:  There is, I know from my associates, much dissention in both political and military circles in the United States over the issue of Vladimir Putin vs Saakashvili.

The President of Russia is a cold, professional person and the President of Georgia is mercurial, egocentric and very, very dangerous insofar as the peace of the world is concerned. From a totally pragmatic point of view, it would be better if the CIA gave him one of their heart-attacks, for as long as Saakashvili is in power in Georgia, he will do everything in his power to launch another suicidal and very dangerous attack on Putin, whenever and wherever he can.

He believes that the United States, who flattered and stroked him (and gave him large sums of money for his personal use) will defend him. Now, the U.S. Defense Department is issuing weasel-worded statements that say everything…and nothing.

"The Department of Defense is sending an assessment team to Tbilisi later this week to help us begin to consider carefully Georgia's legitimate needs and our response," said Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman. "After assessments of these needs, we will review how the United States will be able to support the reconstruction of Georgia's economy, infrastructure, and armed forces," he told a congressional hearing on the Georgia-Russia conflict.

                The steps to help Georgia, he said, would be "sequenced" and would show US support for its security, independence, and territorial integrity. To anyone used to the language of the bureaucracy, this means that we are always friendly with Georgia but we are not interested in a war with Russia. In the end, we will send a few “advisors” to Georgia and perhaps a few trucks and Xerox machines but no anti-aircraft or anti-tank weapons the Georgian President has demanded. Since we cannot stop him, we can keep out of the way.  BH

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No, we are not all Georgians

Dick Cheney's pledge of solidarity with Georgia is all about antagonising Russia, securing oil and helping the Republicans

September 9, 2008

by Lionel Beehner

guardian.co.uk,

            Rarely does Dick Cheney venture abroad without setting off some sort of tempest in foreign policy circles. And his most recent trip to Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Georgia did not disappoint. The US vice-president offered Ukraine and Georgia Nato membership and promised the latter $1bn in humanitarian aid to put itself back together after its war with Russia.

When did Georgia become America's 51st state? I applaud moves to send humanitarian aid, but $1bn to a country of 4 million inhabitants? What makes me sick to my stomach is that the aid is not one of American generosity - it is a cold, calculated move aimed squarely at Russia. Moreover, we are rewarding the Georgian government's reckless behaviour - invading a separatist province despite reported warnings from Washington not to - and creating a moral hazard in the process.

Cheney, on his visit, called the Georgians "courageous" and said Americans "stand in solidarity with people of Georgia". Really? I bet most Americans couldn't even pinpoint South Ossetia on a map, much less pronounce the name of the province.

The reason for Americans' sudden love of all things Georgian is manifold. First, a renewed cold war-style confrontation with Russia has been in the offing for the past few years. The Yukos affair, Russia's cyber war with Estonia and the British Council row were all signs pointing in this direction. Every time Vladimir Putin clears his throat, something anti-western comes blurting out.

Second, Georgia falls on an important energy corridor. The Baku-Ceyhan pipeline runs east-west beneath its ground and is vital to keeping the paws of Iran and Russia off Caspian crude. Nobody knows this better than Cheney. Before he leaves office, he is eager to shore up energy projects for future clients - the better to pad his retirement earnings out of office. And Georgia pays handsomely, as Randy Scheunemann - who penned a $200,000 contract back in April with Tbilisi while working as John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser - surely knows.

Third, Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili has launched a charm offensive of Ahmed Chalabi-like proportions. Every neoconservative in Washington has been wined and dined by the dapper young English-speaking president. To return the favour, nearly all of Washington turned a blind eye when Saakashvili ordered his troops to fire on unarmed protestors last November and shut down independent television stations, prompting a snap presidential election.

Finally, a cold war with Russia helps the Republicans. The more American voters are twitchy on national security, the more they lean right. Even Putin has hinted that the Georgian operation was hatched in Washington to help McCain. While that idea is a bit far-fetched and conspiratorial, the beneficiary of worsened US-Russian relations is no doubt McCain (and of course Sarah Palin is a well-seasoned Kremlinologist, thanks to her state's close proximity to Russia!).

This is not to excuse Russian behaviour. It would be difficult to defend the Kremlin's actions anywhere in its near abroad over the past decade. But recklessly siding with any state that stands up to Russia or haphazardly expanding Nato eastward is neither a sound policy nor a strategic priority, what with Iran racing forward on its nuclear ambitions and Afghanistan looking more like Iraq every week. Russian cooperation on these issues is needed. That does not mean we should not criticise Moscow, but by poking the Russian bear in the eye, Cheney will only bequeath to the next president a foreign policy mess in the making.

Georgia fits neatly into the Republicans' black-and-white fiction of its foreign policy - the narrative that there is good and evil in this world and Russia falls squarely under the latter. Attempting to parse situations such as Russia's war with Georgia and find nuance is something Democrats like to do, akin to negotiating with evil, a phrase often heard last week in St Paul.

Cheney's reckless foreign policy should be reined in. Promising all sorts of handouts to Georgia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan is not a coherent policy. It is a knee-jerk response to Russian aggression that will only fan the flames.

Interestingly, if Saakashvili is a "political corpse", as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev described him in a fit of anger, then Cheney's recent meeting with the Georgian leader was just one political corpse talking to another.

Conversations with the Crow: Part 30

Editor’s note: When we ran the first conversation  in this series, there was the question of reader interest and acceptability. It is pleasant to report that our server was jammed with viewers and the only other tbrnews story that has had more viewers was our Forward Base Falcon story that had a half a million viewers in less that two days. We are now going to reprint all of the Crowley conversations, including a very interesting one on John McCain,  in chronological sequence. It is also pleasant to note that two publishers and three reporters have all expressed concrete interest in the Crowley conversations. It is even more pleasurable to note that a number of people inside the Beltway and in McLean, Virginia, have been screaming with rage!

                On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA's Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer's Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley's widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley's CIA files.

                Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

                After Corson's death, Trento and a well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson's bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled 'Zipper.' This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

                The  small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento's house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

                When published material concerning the CIA's actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA's horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA's activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious 'Regional Interrogation Centers' in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

                A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid "historians" and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

                The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley's survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of  highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by  DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton  conspired to  secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files our of the agency. Crowley did the same thing  right before his own retirement , secretly removing thousands of pages  of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

                Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in military intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

                One of Crowley’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA,  who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany. Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay.

                Crowley’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up

After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas  in 1993  when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. . In 1996, Crowley , Crowley told Douglas  that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery,  he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley’s death. These documents, totaled  an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War.

After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

                All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career senior CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy.  Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley.

                In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later.

                While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

            These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!

Date: Monday, December 30, 1996

Commenced: 8:45 AM CST

Concluded: 9:21 AM CST

RTC: Hello, Gregory. Have a nice Christmas?

GD: Wonderful. I got a sled, some bunny slippers, a silencer for my shotgun, a pornographic Bible, three pair of socks that were too small and a dead turtle. Yourself?

RTC: Somehow, I don’t believe you. Christmas was fine here. I take it you did not have an extensive Christmas.

GD: The rabbit died and we were in deep mourning. But then we ate it and felt much better.

RTC: I could send a sympathy card.

GD: Just flush it down the loo. It might meet up with what’s left of the rabbit. Robert, to be serious, you said that Corson did not like Mark Lane. He represented Carto in a lawsuit and I was wondering what was the reason for the bad feeling?

RTC: My God, Gregory, this is like an old auntie’s sewing circle. Everyone here hates everyone else, tells lies, sticks out their tongues at each other and acts like small children. There was a lawsuit of the Keystone Cops type. Victor Marchetti, who used to be one of ours but got booted out, wrote an article for the Spotlight paper saying that Hunt had been in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot. He was. Hunt sued the paper and got a judgment. The paper fought back and got Mark Lane to defend them.

GD: The Oswald lawyer?

RTC: The same. So they went back and forth. Marchetti is a fat slob who thinks he is very important when we who really know him consider him to be a chattering nut. Hunt is grossly incompetent but the reason why Corson hates Lane and everyone else, is that Marchetti claimed he got this information about Hunt in Dallas on November 22^nd from Corson. Corson got dragged over the coals by Lane and clearly was proved to be a liar. However, there was a third person there when Corson told his little story to Marchetti and that’s what nailed him. Poor Bill. He always has to put his oar in, needed or not.

GD: Well, he told Kimmel that he knew some secret British soldier who told Corson about the Roosevelt/Churchill conversation. Corson claimed he backed it up. Kimmel went for this like a duck after a June bug but I can’t believe it. Who was this mysterious witness? Corson said his lips were sealed.

RTC: Too bad that isn’t true.

GD: Back and forth. I know Corson has lectured me on a subject that I knew far better that he did but I just kept quiet and acted impressed. Didn’t he get court-martialed?

RTC: My God, Gregory, don’t ever go into that one. Look, these people like Bill and Trento, Marchetti and the rest of them, are like squirrels in the park running around begging nuts from the public. This is the Beltway, Gregory. It’s a hot house. Someone sees the President from about two hundred feet away, driving past in his armored limousine and then tells his friends that he had a chance to talk to the President that afternoon and the President told him….and that’s how it goes. Trento thinks he is a brilliant writer, Bill thinks he’s a mover and shaker, Marchetti sees himself as a secret agent and Hunt has just enough sense to put on his pants before going outside to get the paper. These are the hangers-on, Gregory, the wannabes as the current generation calls them.

GD: Ah, Robert, but you were actually there, you knew from doing it. The sun versus the moon. The moon reflects the glory of another. Does that role make you happy?

RTC: It makes me sad sometimes. And they run around acting like old women. Chatter, chatter, boast, back-stab, strut and eventually die. We all die, Gregory, but some take a long time to do it. I’m pleasant with them because perhaps they can help me but I am giving up with most of them. I thought Costello would be a good outlet but I gave up on him long before he died last year. Trento thinks he’s a great intelligence writer but he reminds me of a wino rooting around in old dumpsters for chicken bones. Bill hints at great secrets that only he knows and Hunt is a bumbling idiot and we should have done him instead of his wife. Marchetti is a little bit of all of them. If you listen to them, Gregory, they will convince you that big black cars drive up in front of their homes, every evening, and give them briefcases full of very secret papers. You know the types.

GD: I do, Robert, I really do. I love it when one of your pinheads starts telling me about German intelligence. Oh yes, and what about Nosenko?

RTC: A Russian double agent that Angleton mismanaged.

GD: Was Angleton Italian?

RTC: No half Mexican. He spoke wop from his father having lived there and sold cash registers but he was a Mexican. He was well-connected with the mob, though.

GD: Mueller told me about Boris Pash…

RTC: That asshole. A gym teacher with more dreams of glory.

GD: Heini said that Pash tried to kill the Italian Communist leader.

RTC: Togliatti. Yes, but he missed. They always miss, Gregory.

GD: I have an Irish friend who never does. He prefers a knife but bombs will do very well.

RTC: I think you mentioned him. Mountbatten?

GD: The same. Now that’s a professional. And he doesn’t talk like the rest of them.

RTC: Real professionals never do.

GD: So if we both agree on what constitutes a professional agent, how do you analyze Corson, Kimmel, Marchetti, Trento and the others? Are they agents? Kimmel works for the FBI, Marchetti used to work for your people and the others?

RTC: What we have there is the wannabe club, Gregory. All of them think they are important people and, because they have, or have had, connections with the intelligence community, they begin to feel, somehow, that they are possessors of the secrets that others do not have. This elevates them from boredom and real obscurity and makes them believe that they are privy to those who really do walk in the corridors of power. I am the one, pardon the vanity, with the secrets and I am the one who walked once in the corridors of power so they gather around me, snapping up any little bit of information I choose to drop. There are many things I would like people I know, such as my family, to know about. I would like not to leave a legacy of mystery and negativity behind me. I know Corson and the others would like to have a private club type of inner knowledge, to sit around the fire solemnly talking about great secrets they have known. Never happen. When I go, they go. It’s that basic. I had thought once to cultivate Costello and let him speak for me but I gave up on him after his visit with you. The man was brittle, opinionated and as blind as a bat. Kimmel is an establishment man with no creative juices, Corson runs around barking like one of those obnoxious little Mexican dogs that were once raised for food, Marchetti reminds me of a drunken little rat running around in a barn, trying to get out. And when he does get out, he runs around outside trying to get back in. Trento and his wife are delusional and self important and love to mix it up with losers and never-could-have-beens.

GD: Basking, like the moon, in reflected glory.

RTC: Absolutely. And these are at the top of the rank amateur clubs. Down below them, we find the “experts” and the “researchers” who represent the bottom of the pyramid. They are the ones who scribble, jabber and strut. They look upwards to the top for the voices of the masters. They all feed on each other, Gregory. Their little worlds are all they have and if someone like you, especially someone like you, comes along, they loathe, fear and despise you. You see, you are the real thing and they are just wearing Halloween costumes and they know it. After Costello returned from his visit with you and spent hours telling me how terrible and unpleasant you were, I put this down to simple jealousy and thought that perhaps I might look into you myself. And that’s why we’re talking right this very moment.

GD: Thank you for your approval, Robert. I agree with you but they are wearing the gold-braided clown suits and go to clubs and meetings and, like old peacocks, preen endlessly. What you tell me I already know, Robert, but short of grabbing them by their throats and banging their heads against the wall, there isn’t much I can do…

RTC: Except to out-produce them, Gregory. And they know you can do it and they hate you for it. A week does not go by without my getting some kind of a phone call about what a terrible, evil person you are and warning me never to talk with you. Notice how impressed I have been with these dire warnings. But please make my life a little easier in my old age by not quoting me to any of these cheap hustlers. If they really get it into their heads that I am being informative to you, they will call me every other day, warn Greg and Emily to protect me from you and then do everything in their shabby little power to trash you. Do not, and I repeat, do not, trust any of them, ever. I think we understand this all, don’t we?

GD: Oh yes. I never trusted these sort anyway. They remind me of old aunties or, even worse, academics. Both of them gossip, chatter, denigrate everyone not present and can’t sleep well at night unless they feel they have damaged someone else that day. They see themselves as giants and in fact, they are small, chattering mice. But, and I am sure you know all about this, we have to put up with them in order to get along with the really important matters. Don’t worry about making myself vulnerable to these types. It ends up that they make themselves vulnerable to me in the end. What is the saying? Out of nothing, nothing is made.

(Concluded at 9:21 AM CST)

The Campaign:If Youth Knew and Age Could!

She’s Clueless, He’s Worse

September 10, 2008

by Robert Scheer

TruthDig.com

Ignorance is bliss, which perhaps explains Gov. Sarah Palin being so confidently wrong about the root cause of the federalization of most of the nation's mortgage market. But what is Sen. John McCain's excuse? Both act as if the financial meltdown of the U.S. economy has nothing to do with the policies of the political party they represent -- but she at least may not know any better.

Distracted momentarily from her campaign revelries of maverick opposition to the "bridge to nowhere," which she had supported until it became a public relations debacle, and congressional earmarks for which she, as a small-town mayor, had hustled piggishly at the federal trough, Palin made the mistake of dealing with an unscripted subject.

Referring to the government's bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Palin opined that the two had "gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers," displaying abysmal ignorance of the fact that only now will those privately owned banks become a huge taxpayer obligation, as the federal government takes them over. Nor can the meltdown of home values be traced to those two beleaguered institutions, because they did not make the original subprime mortgage commitments.

The housing bubble was the result of the Ponzi-scheme antics of those other financial entities: commercial banks, stockbrokers and hedge funds, which were allowed in a GOP-deregulated market to get into the "swap" business. Through the rampant reselling of loans, the obligation to collect on a loan was divorced from the act of selling it in the first place, so who cared if the recipient of the loan was not at all qualified or the appraisal of the property value was inflated, as long as the paper was traded away, or insured, before the moment of foreclosure?

As with any Ponzi scheme, the perps, who included the legislators as well as the bankers who exploited the loopholes they provided, expected to bail long before the bubble burst. The role of the legislators, Republican-led but with far too many Democratic running dogs, was critical to the success of the scam.

The mortgage swaps distancing the originator of the loan from the ultimate collector were made legal only as a result of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, pushed through Congress just hours before the 2000 Christmas recess. Gramm, until recently co-chair of the McCain campaign, also had co-authored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which became law in 1999 with President Bill Clinton's signature. That gem, which Gramm had pushed for years with massive financial industry lobbying, destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies. Those two acts effectively ended significant regulation of the financial community, and no wonder we have witnessed an even more rapid and severe meltdown in housing values than during the Great Depression.

Not surprisingly, Gramm was rewarded for his service upon retirement as a senator and as head of the Senate Banking Committee with a top position at the Swiss-based UBS bank, which is close to drowning in the subprime mortgage nightmare he helped create. These folks have no shame, as was evidenced when the senator's wife, Wendy, was named a director of Enron, whose roiling of the energy market had been made possible only through yet another provision of Gramm's Commodity Futures Modernization Act.

While neophyte Palin can claim ignorance of such matters, that would be particularly difficult for McCain, who as a senator consistently lined up with Gramm in his deregulation crusade. Clearly McCain had not learned much from his previous involvement with the savings-and-loan debacle about the risks to consumers in unregulated banking.

McCain served as chair of Gramm's abortive 1996 presidential campaign, and Gramm returned the favor, providing critical support for McCain with the hard-line Republican base, including the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. It was assumed in the business press that Gramm was the front-runner to be Treasury secretary in a McCain administration. Gramm left his role as the top economic person near McCain only after he made an embarrassing statement blaming the current economic downturn on "whiners," an awkward reference to the victims of his disastrous legislation.

Amazingly, the turmoil in the housing market, which has led to the socializing of the nation's revered homeownership market in a massive expansion of the role of big government, has apparently not troubled McCain's conservative supporters. As I said, ignorance is bliss, and evidently not just for the newbie Palin.

9/11 Plus Seven

September 9, 2008

by Andrew J. Bacevich

TomGram

The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of 9/11 to wage its so-called Global War on Terror. That strategy has failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and sustainable -- a task that, alas, neither of the presidential candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.

On September 30, 2001, President Bush received from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a memorandum outlining U.S. objectives in the War on Terror. Drafted by Rumsfeld's chief strategist Douglas Feith, the memo declared expansively: "If the war does not significantly change the world's political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim." That aim, as Feith explained in a subsequent missive to his boss, was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally."

Rumsfeld and Feith were co-religionists: Along with other senior Bush administration officials, they worshipped in the Church of the Indispensable Nation, a small but intensely devout Washington-based sect formed in the immediate wake of the Cold War. Members of this church shared an exalted appreciation for the efficacy of American power, especially hard power. The strategy of transformation emerged as a direct expression of their faith.

The members of this church were also united by an equally exalted estimation of their own abilities. Lucky the nation to be blessed with such savvy and sophisticated public servants in its hour of need!

The goal of transforming the Islamic world was nothing if not bold. It implied far-reaching political, economic, social, and even cultural adjustments. At a press conference on September 18, 2001, Rumsfeld spoke bluntly of the need to "change the way that they live." Rumsfeld didn't specify who "they" were. He didn't have to. His listeners understood without being told: "They" were Muslims inhabiting a vast arc of territory that stretched from Morocco in the west all the way to the Moro territories of the Southern Philippines in the east. Yet boldly conceived action, if successfully executed, offered the prospect of solving a host of problems. Once pacified (or "liberated"), the Middle East would cease to breed or harbor anti-American terrorists.

 Post-9/11 fears about weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of evil-doers could abate. Local regimes, notorious for being venal, oppressive, and inept, might finally get serious about cleaning up their acts. Liberal values, including rights for women, would flourish. A part of the world perpetually dogged by violence would enjoy a measure of stability, with stability promising not so incidentally to facilitate exploitation of the region's oil reserves. There was even the possibility of enhancing the security of Israel. Like a powerful antibiotic, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation promised to clean out not simply a single infection but several; or to switch metaphors, a strategy of transformation meant running the table.

When it came to implementation, the imperative of the moment was to think big. Just days after 9/11, Rumsfeld was charging his subordinates to devise a plan of action that had "three, four, five moves behind it." By December 2001, the Pentagon had persuaded itself that the first move -- into Afghanistan -- had met success. The Bush administration wasted little time in pocketing its ostensible victory. Attention quickly shifted to the second move, seen by insiders as holding the key to ultimate success: Iraq.

Fix Iraq and moves three, four, and five promised to come easily. Writing in the Weekly Standard, William Kristol and Robert Kagan got it exactly right: "The president's vision will, in the coming months, either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq."

The point cannot be emphasized too strongly: Saddam Hussein's (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction and his (imaginary) ties to Al Qaeda never constituted the real reason for invading Iraq -- any more than the imperative of defending Russian "peacekeepers" in South Ossetia explains the Kremlin's decision to invade Georgia.

Iraq merely offered a convenient place from which to launch a much larger and infinitely more ambitious project. "After Hussein is removed," enthused Hudson Institute analyst Max Singer, "there will be an earthquake through the region." Success in Iraq promised to endow the United States with hitherto unprecedented leverage. Once the United States had made an example of Saddam Hussein, as the influential neoconservative Richard Perle put it, dealing with other ne'er-do-wells would become simple: "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" Faced with the prospect of sharing Saddam's fate, Syrians, Iranians, Sudanese, and other recalcitrant regimes would see submission as the wiser course -- so Perle and others believed.

Members of the administration tried to imbue this strategic vision with a softer ideological gloss. "For 60 years," Condoleezza Rice explained to a group of students in Cairo, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East -- and we achieved neither." No more. "Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people." The world's Muslims needed to know that the motives behind the U.S. incursion into Iraq and its actions elsewhere in the region were (or had, at least, suddenly become) entirely benign. Who knows? Rice may even have believed the words she spoke.

In either case -- whether the strategy of transformation aimed at dominion or democratization -- today, seven years after it was conceived, we can assess exactly what it has produced. The answer is clear: next to nothing, apart from squandering vast resources and exacerbating the slide toward debt and dependency that poses a greater strategic threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden ever did.

In point of fact, hardly had the Pentagon commenced its second move, its invasion of Iraq, when the entire strategy began to unravel. In Iraq, President Bush's vision of regional transformation did die, much as Kagan and Kristol had feared. No amount of CPR credited to the so-called surge will revive it. Even if tomorrow Iraq were to achieve stability and become a responsible member of the international community, no sensible person could suggest that Operation Iraqi Freedom provides a model to apply elsewhere. Senator John McCain says that he'll keep U.S. combat troops in Iraq for as long as it takes. Yet even he does not propose "solving" any problems posed by Syria or Iran (much less Pakistan) by employing the methods that the Bush administration used to "solve" the problem posed by Iraq. The Bush Doctrine of preventive war may remain nominally on the books. But, as a practical matter, it is defunct.

The United States will not change the world's political map in the ways top administration officials once dreamed of. There will be no earthquake that shakes up the Middle East -- unless the growing clout of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas in recent years qualifies as that earthquake. Given the Pentagon's existing commitments, there will be no threats of "you're next" either -- at least none that will worry our adversaries, as the Russians have neatly demonstrated. Nor will there be a wave of democratic reform -- even Rice has ceased her prattling on that score. Islam will remain stubbornly resistant to change, except on terms of its own choosing. We will not change the way "they" live.

In a book that he co-authored during the run-up to the invasion, Kristol confidently declared, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there." In fact, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation has ended. It has failed miserably. The sooner we face up to that failure, the sooner we can get about repairing the damage.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His bestselling new book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

Saudi Arabia, Israel and 9/11

by Brian Harring 

                    There are two major suspects in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

The first suspect is Saudi Arabia.

                    A Saudi connection to the 9/11 hijackers is only partially known.  There is , of course,  the inescapable fact that that 17 out of 19 of the hijackers were Saudi nationals and that after their martyrdom, the government of Saudi Arabia has been paying pensions to their survivors.. There is also the strong suspicion in American intelligence circles that the hijackers were supported by an older faction  of the Saudi royal family. It is known in both CIA and Russian intelligence circles that Osama bin Ladin, also a Saudi citizen, has been seen in that country post-911, has visited with his family, who are Saudi citizens, and has undergone medical treatment for his serious kidney problem in a Saudi clinic that treats members of the Saudi royal family. This was made known to the Bush administration  by the CIA but any further mention of this was strictly forbidden.

The second suspect is the state of Israel,

                    The highly nationalistic state of Israel, following the expansionist aims of Theodor Herzl, have long sought American help in dealing militarily with their hostile Muslim neighbors. A number of American administrations have been subjected to considerable Israeli pressure, pressure that was enhanced and duplicated by segments of the American Jewish community.  In the diplomatic world, there are no secrete. Long ago, the CIA was clandestinely opening the diplomatic bags and both the United States, Russia and Israel have been decoding and reading everyone’s supposedly secret diplomatic electronic traffic. It was certainly to Israel’s advantage to have a casus belli that would involve the United States and have American public opinion support military measures by the United States in areas of Israeli interest. An attack by Muslim fundamentalists, clearly defined as such, on American soil and resulting in a significant number of American deaths, was a very strong motivator in the events leading up to, and away from, the 9/11 attacks by clearly identified “Arab terrorists.”  

                    It is now very clearly known that the Israelis had a very detailed amount of foreknowledge of the pending attacks on the Pentagon, the World Trade Center (which they had attacked before), the Pentagon and, from Israeli intercepted messages, the White House.

                    A French government intelligence report into their investigations into the 9/11 attack and possible connection with known Arab terrorist groups that might have residence in France stated very clearly that: “according to the FBI, Arab terrorists and suspected terror cells lived in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami and Hollywood, Florida from December 2000 to April 2001 in direct proximity to the Israeli spy cells.,” and further, that  “ (Israeli) Mossad agents were interested in the leader of the terrorists, Mohammed Atta and his key accomplice, Marwan al-Shehi. Both lived in Hamburg before they settled in Hollywood, Florida in order to plan the attacks. A Mossad team was also operating in the same town. The leader, Hanan Serfati, had rented several dwellings. Everything indicates that the terrorists were constantly observed by the Israelis. The chief Israeli agent was staying right near the post office where the terrorists had a mailbox. The Mossad also had its sights on Atta's accomplice Khalid al-Midhar, with whom the CIA was also familiar, but allowed to run free.'" Hollywood is a town of 25,000 inhabitants to the north of Miami, close to Fort Lauderdale. At least 10 of the 19 terrorists of 9/11 were residing in Florida.                  

                    "Four of the five members of the group that diverted American Airlines flight number 11 – Mohammed Atta, Abdulaziz Al-Omari, Walid and Wahd Al-Shehri, as well as one of the five terrorists of United flight 175, Marwan Al-Shehhi , resided all at various times in... Hollywood, Florida. As for Ahmed Fayez, Ahmed and Hamza Al-Ghamdi and Mohand Al-Shehri, who took over United flight 75, like Said Al-Ghamdi, Ahmed Al-Haznawi and Ahmed Al-Nami, of United flight 93 which crashed September 11 in Pennsylvania, and Nawaq Al-Hamzi, of AA flight 77 (crashed in Pennsylvania because of passenger resistance)”

Muslim extremists in US

                Because of very lax, almost incompetent, enforcement of American immigration laws, many Muslim terrorists go to America to conduct their plotting, secure in the knowledge that unless they commit a crime, no one in authority will bother with them. They are free to enter, overstay their short-term visas and go to ground without fear of detection. Because many of these individuals and groups are a distinct threat to us, we have sought and obtained permission from the American authorities to send our counter intelligence people into their country and keep these potential terrorists under close surveillance.

Part of the agreement permitting this is that we were to keep the FBI fully appraised of anything we might find. They also agreed to supply us with information. This was rarely fully forthcoming so we set up our own surveillance, using telephonic systems we controlled. Also, we have been able to track bank records without any difficulty and can immediately locate funds coming into the United States from suspect foreign banks, known to act as conduits for terrorist funding. Because the FBI is often not particularly responsive or cooperative, we, in turn, only inform them of matters of common interest when absolutely necessary.

Mossad Observations

Due to our investigations, we early on learned that known Muslim terrorists and suspected terror cells were primarily located in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in both the Miami and Hollywood, Florida  areas and once this had been ascertained, these groups were kept under close local surveillance from December 2000 to April 2001. The terrorists were watched daily and all telephone usage was closely observed. They often used codes when talking both inside the United States and overseas but these were fairly easily broken.

Specific Activities of Mossad in US against terrorists

                We were aware that several terrorist cells were operating in Germany, thanks to cooperation with the German BND and another agency.  In 1996 and 1997, we were watching a number of suspected terrorists, specifically one Mohammed Atta and his lieutenant, Marwan al=Shehi were located at 54 Maarienstrasse in Hamburg  We learned from telephone intercepts and one of our undercover people, a Yemeni , that the Muslims were planning to attack American naval units ported in Yemen. This was the attack on the USS Cole on October 12, 2000.

                 Our informant said that the Hamburg people were talking about the idea of launching a “massive and impressive” attack on American territory that would be planned to achieve the maximum public relations effect. In 2000, we learned that Atta and others had left Germany for the United States and that they were specifically preparing to launch a spectacular terrorist attack somewhere inside the United States. We had notified the FBI headquarters about this and then learned from them that Atta and others were now resident in Hollywood, Florida.

                We sent a team of Arab-speakers led by Hanan Serfati, into the area and they were able to lease apartments had rented several dwellings near the corner of 701st St. and 21st St. in Hollywood,  in direct proximity to the terrorist cell. Initially, we kept them under constant surveillance and when they had left their residence, conducted a break-in and planted listening devices.  Also, one of our people, speaking perfect Arabic, made personal contact with the Atta people. The team leader himself kept a residence in proximity to the American Postal Service office where it had been determined that they had a drop box. At this point, we had kept both the FBI and the CIA fully informed of our actions and they, in turn, were able to help us with mail covers and other information. .

                We observed that several of the terrorists began to take flight training.  Mohammed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi took jet flying lessons at  Huffman Aviation, a flight school in nearby Venice. Again, we notified the FBI and CIA of this training because it indicated a probable aerial assault but neither agency expressed any genuine interest in the information.

                    Editorial comment: The Arab extremist plot that led to the attacks of September 11 was hatched in Hamburg, Germany.                  

                    The main movers in this plot, Mohammed Atta, Ramzi bin al Shibh and Said Bahaji, moved into an apartment at 54 Marienstrasse in the German port city. In 1999 these men, and others, went to an al Quaeda camp in Afghanistan for training purposes. In 2000, they were back in Hamburg, boasting about planned attacks against American targets. In the same year, a number of the Hamburg Arab plotters went to the United States to attend flight training schools.

                    From this time onwards, until the date of the actual attacks, the Hamburg terrorist cell was in constant telephonic and fax communication with their members in America.

               Shortly before the attacks, most of the Hamburg terrorists left Germany for Afghanistan and Pakistan. [Source: New York Times, August 30, 2002]

The Actual Terrorist Plan revealed

                    Our undercover agent with the Atta group had proven to be of great value to them by giving them information we supplied him. As they grew more confident of him, they confided to him, and we had made tapes of these conversations, that they planned to launch a massive aerial attack against targets inside the United States. The USS Cole incident, they felt, had had very little impact on the American public. It was then that an enlargement of the 1993 car bomb attack on the World Trade Center in New York was put forward They developed the idea that if they crashed their planes into both buildings, the results would be far more dramatic than the initial attack. Later, our man also suggested a possible attack on other targets in Washington. They discussed attacks on the White House, the Capitol building and the Pentagon. 

The number of terrorists to fly commercial planes into targets was limited by the number of men who were available and could be trained. It was then decided to rule out the White House because it was such a small target and concentrate on the Pentagon and the Capitol building. Once that had been settled, the actual planning began in earnest. Our man kept us advised at all times of the progress and we, in turn, immediately notified the (Israeli) Embassy in Washington and our own agency, both in Tel Aviv and the United States.

Reports to Department of Justice (FBI)  and CIA to White House in re coming attacks: The President notified.

                    As it appeared that there would be such attacks for a certainty., our Embassy first of all contacted both the American Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency and appraised them of the seriousness of the situation. Eventually, the office of the Ambassador made contact with top aides of the Vice President Cheney.

It was felt at the time that Mr. Cheney would understand this matter and be able to make a presentation to the President. In a number of substantive talks with Mr. Cheney, it was mutually decided that the attacks should proceed. The reasons agreed upon were that it would at once give the President the opportunity of securing great domestic power with the legislature and the public. It would also permit, and most important, that the  U.S. could attack Saddam Hussein. He was then one of our top enemies and had, in fact, bombarded us with missiles during the Gulf War.

It was felt strongly that if Hussein were removed, the country invaded by American troops and occupied, not only would the United States have secure rights to the huge Iraqi oil reserves but could set up a large, permanent military base in Iraq. This would act as a buffer for Israel  and a constant threat to other Arab states plus set up a vital block between Iran, who has threatened Israel many times, and our state. Mr. Cheney, who has excellent connections with the American oil business, was entirely in favor of this on both counts.

He then made a presentation, with our people present, to the President who at once accepted all the aspects of it. The decision was made not to interdict the attack in any way and allow it to happen as it would and to await the outcome. Both the CIA and FBI were to be listened to but forbidden to act “until informed to do so.”

                    Mr. Cheney remarked that he did not want an attack on the Pentagon to emasculate its military leadership so he suggested that since a part of the building was empty due to interior renovations, that our man with the Atta group  inform them that this empty side was where the important people worked.

                    When the subject came up of the air attack on the Capitol building, an enormous and easily hit target, the President remarked that if the Congress was sitting at the time of the attack, the death or injury of many of its members would not only add to national outrage but also strengthen his powers as a President during a wartime. There was at this point in time, no doubt that a subsequent American military attack on Iraq with ground troops would be made as discussed above.

Influx of Foreign Intelligence Warnings

Since well before the target date, a number of high-level warnings were received by American governmental agencies concerning news of a pending terrorist attack. Because, at the highest level, it was wished not to interfere with the probability of such an attack, all such information was sent to either the Vice President or the President himself. Of course, nothing was done in fact but there were many worried conversations back and forth. The most persistent were the Germans who had developed inside information and on a number of occasions sent their finding on to the Americans. All were ignored.

Editorial comment:

·         In mid-August, 2001, President Vladimir Putin of Russia made a report about possible Arab attacks against domestic American targets.. 

·         On August 20, 2001, the French government made a similar report. 

·         On August 24, 2001, the head of the Israeli Mossad reported the imminence of an Arab attack against American targets and a similar report was made by the same agency on September 7, 2001. 

                                    Domestically, the picture is not as clear but it is known that: 

·         On June 26, 2001, the CIA informed the White House that they had intercepted foreign intelligence traffic concerning possible al-Qaeda strikes in America on July 4. 

·         On July 1, 2001, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee stated that her staff had advised her that there was a “major probability of a terrorist incident within the next three months.” (emphasis added)      

·         On July 2, 2001, the FBI reported to the White House that al-Qaeda terrorist attacks outside the United States were very possible and that domestic attacks could not be discounted. 

·         On July 5, 2001, the CIA informed the President that al-Qaeda attacks against American targets were entirely possible during the summer of that year. 

·         On July 28, 2001, authorities in Dubai arrested one Djamel Beghal who revealed information about a planned al-Qaeda explosive attack on the U.S. Embassy in Paris 

·         On August 6, 2001, the CIA also presented a warning to the President, explicitly concerned with terrorism inside the United States. The actual content of this message has been the subject of considerable debate, with White House officials understandably downplaying its significance.[Sources: Time May 27, 2002]

Mossad agrees to provide special services to US in addition to updates on Atta people

After many discussions, it was determined that the American authorities could not be seen to have had real knowledge and specific information on this attack. It was also reasoned that for the attack to achieve its geo-political goals, the targets would have to be destroyed. Of course they could not destroy the Pentagon nor would this be wished. As stated above, the damage was to be in a so-called “safe” area. Our man in Florida did give to the Atta people his ‘inside” information as to which part of the building to attack and thereby save the lives of top military officials. Because the main public relations targets were the two tall buildings, it was imperative that they be either badly damaged or destroyed in full view of the cameras and the American public. Heavy loss of life was expected but mention was made of an air accident previously in which an American bomber got lost in the clouds and rammed into the Empire State building. Damage to the building was not great. It was finally agreed that we would supply certain technical assistance to absolutely insure the very visual and dramatic damage.

The Americans would have no provable connection with this. To achieve this, first a study of both buildings was made that showed they were very cheaply erected and that it would be very possible to “assist” the terrorists in their work. To do this, three teams of our people were selected with the idea that they would leave the country right away and that no one would attempt to interdict or block their exit.

The actual plan was to enter the big buildings at night as maintenance people, to proceed to the part of the buildings most likely to be struck. We knew approximately where this would happen but not certainly. Then, entering the office spaces, quick access through the false ceilings allowed the team to use locally-made thermite bombs with magnetic attachments which  would  easily and quickly be placed against a strategic number of the horizontal steel beams that held up each floor.

They were to be triggered by a specific rise in heat and were placed against each beam at an angle so as to insure burring the beam through sufficiently to materially weaken it. Our engineers calculated that first the plane would strike the building and start big fires. The fires would weaken the beams and when the heat had reached a certain point, the thermite hidden up above the false ceilings would ignite and burn through the beam. The weight of the building above would press down below and it was then hoped that everything would crash down.

As we did not know just on what floor the plane would strike, these heat bombs were placed, five to a floor, for five floors, up and down. These bombs were small enough, and safe enough, to conceal in maintenance equipment. And, in the event that the attacks were aborted for any reason, our people could easily return to the buildings afterwards and retrieve the bombs without leaving a trace. The thermite would certainly eat into the steel but would not explode and reveal its presence.

The attack

About three weeks prior to the actual attack, the special code words were developed by Atta. In that case, the Pentagon was called  ‘The Faculty of  Fine Arts”, the Capitol was termed “The Faculity of Law;” and the Trade Building tower was termed, as "The Faculty of Town Planning."  This, of course was part of the cover story that Atta and his people were students, following an educational career in America and used these for international telephone calls to their superiors in Saudi Arabia.

As soon as the date was fixed for the attack, the White House warned very senior American officials like the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense and his staff, not to fly on commercial aircraft because of “rumors of possible hijackings” . No one outside of a very small circle was told the truth. And because of the possibility that the White House might still be a target of opportunity, the President went in early October, well before the projected attack date, to Texas and then later went to Florida where he and his staff remained in safety until after the attack was over.

Editorial comment:

                    July 26, 2001: Attorney General Ashcroft stops flying commercial airlines due to a threat assessment but “neither the FBI nor the Justice Department … would identify [to CBS] what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.”. [Source: CBS, 7/26/01]  He later walks out of his office rather than answer questions about this. [Source: Associated Press, 5/16/02]

                    August 4-30, 2001: President Bush spends most of August 2001 at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, nearly setting a record for the longest presidential vacation. While it is billed a “working vacation,” ABC reports Bush is doing “nothing much” aside from his regular daily intelligence briefings. [ABC 8/3/01; Washington Post 8/7/01; Salon 8/29/01] One such unusually long briefing at the start of his trip is a warning that bin Laden is planning to attack in the US, but Bush spends the rest of that day fishing (see August 6, 2001). By the end of his trip, Bush has spent 42 percent of his presidency at vacation spots or en route. [Washington Post 8/7/01] At the time, a poll shows that 55 percent of Americans say Bush is taking too much time off. [USA Today, 8/7/01] Vice President Cheney also spends the entire month in a remote location in Wyoming. [Jackson Hole News and Guide 8/15/01]

                    September 6-7, 2001: 4,744 put options (a speculation that the stock will go down) are purchased on United Air Lines stock as opposed to only 396 call options (speculation that the stock will go up). This is a dramatic and abnormal increase in sales of put options. Many of the UAL puts are purchased through Deutschebank/AB Brown, a firm managed until 1998 by the current Executive Director of the CIA, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard. [New York Times; Wall Street Journal] 

                    September 10, 2001: 4,516 put options are purchased on American Airlines as compared to 748 call options. [New York Times; Wall Street Journal.] 

                    September 6-11, 2001: No other airlines show any similar trading patterns to those experienced by UAL and American. The put option purchases on both airlines were 600% above normal. This at a time when Reuters (September 10) issues a business report stating "airline stocks may be poised to take off."

                    September 6-10, 2001: Highly abnormal levels of put options are purchased in Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, AXA Re (insurance) which owns 25% of American Airlines, and Munich Re. All of these companies are directly impacted by the September 11 attacks.

                    September 10, 2001, the NSA intercepted two messages in Arabic. One message read:

“Tomorrow is zero hour” and the second “The match begins tomorrow.” [Source: New York Times, August 10, 2002]

                     September 10, 2001: Bush flew to Florida from Texas to visit with his brother Governor Jeb Bush. Attorney General Ashcroft rejected a proposed $58 million increase in financing for the bureau's counter-terrorism programs. On the same day, he sent a request for budget increases to the White House. It covered 68 programs, but none of them relate to counter-terrorism. He also sent a memorandum to his heads of departments, stating his seven priorities—none of them relating to counter-terrorism. This is more than a little strange, since Ashcroft stopped flying public airplanes in July due to terrorist threats (see July 26, 2001) and he told a Senate committee in May that counter-terrorism was his“highest priority.” [New York Times, 6/1/02, Guardian, 5/21/02]

Final Observations

The final attack varied very little from the last planning stage. One of the hijacked planes, the one intended to hit the Capitol building, was crashed by action of its passengers but the other three struck their targets as anticipated. The flames, smoke and general confusion were indeed a public spectacle, seen by all of America and the buildings, beams severed when the heat reached a certain point, did collapse in great clouds. A third building was tended to from the inside, not struck by an aircraft, and because great tanks of fuel were ignited, burned until it collapsed some time later.

The carnage was not to believe and everyone involved in this felt is was a most profitable operation. As we know, the President was acclaimed as a great leader and he was then able to marshal national support into his attack on Iraq. The military campaign, as foreseen, has proven to be quick and decisive, Hussein and his henchmen were swept away and now the American military and civilian forces are in complete control of Iraq. Iran has been put on notice and we expect a large, permanent American military base in the area to act as a deterrent to any future manifestation of Arab nationalism. All of our technicians, as opposed to our intelligence people, were immediately evacuated and aside from several who were temporarily detained by American authorities, eventually all were released and returned safe home.

Now, we have moved from a defensive to an offensive posture and, with American support and a large military presence, the ever-present fears of attacks have been neutralized, hopefully for a very long time.”

Conclusions:

            There is no question that in the intervening years, the U.S. government has unleashed an enormous, and often very entertaining, propaganda campaign around the 9/11 attacks. A sprawling flood of rumor, fantasy, rampant lunacy and senseless lies has poured out onto the internet, some from the well-meaning but unhinged, but even more can be found, deliberately encouraged (and often paid for)  by the government itself.               

                After sifting all of the known, and factual, evidence carefully, the most reasonable conclusion seems to be that the plot was hatched in Saudi Arabia, probably with the knowledge and assistance of an individual or group very high up in the Saudi royal family. At some point, not only foreign intelligence agencies such as those of Germany, France and Russia, learned of this but so also did the Israeli  Mossad.. The Israelis did, in fact, eventually penetrate the group of Saudi terrorists at work in the United States and were fully aware of the pending strike.

                Here we have two schools of thought:

                The Israelis, for their own reasons, said nothing about their first-hand knowledge and let the plot proceed or they duly notified the proper authorities in the United States government who did absolutely nothing to prevent it and let it proceed for political reasons. 

                If the former is true, the Israeli government has the blood of over 3,000 people on its hands and if the latter, President Bush and his crime partners should be tried for acts of murder.