TBR News March 4, 2012

Editor’s Note: The following study is probably one of the most informative and well-researched investigation of the 9/11 attacks we have yet seen. This is based, in the main, on official and private investigations and is well-footnoted. We are running this article uncut because of its importance.

 

ELITE GAMES: A Study in Power and Profit

 

Being a comprehensive investigation into the politics of 9/11

 

Complied from official and unofficial sources

 

By Harold L. Kreig, Lt Col AUS (ret)

 

 

FOREWORD

               

          Six days after the RMS Titanic sank after striking an iceberg in April of 1912, an American Congressional investigation was commenced, witnesses were called and evidence taken.

                Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Roosevelt quickly convened a special commission to officially investigate the circumstances leading to the disaster.

In 1963, immediately following the assassination of President John Kennedy, his successor, Lyndon Johnson set up the Warren Commission to officially investigate the circumstances leading to the murder in Dallas.

                In 2001, President George W. Bush not only did not set up such a commission but he and Vice President Cheney went to great lengths to block any attempt to officially investigate the September 11 attack by Arab terrorists on American targets. His eventual appointment, over a year later, of Washington insider, ruthless official manipulator and powerful establishment supporter, Henry Kissinger to head a weak commission is a strong commentary on the President’s opinion of the intelligence level of the American public.

                This appointment of the former Nixon Secretary of State created a great uproar and resulted in Kissinger’s abrupt resignation on December 13, 2002.

                As a direct result of the Bush Administrations’ deliberate, and very obvious, attempts to confuse and confound any substantive investigation, a great flowering of rumors, speculation and theories blossomed and has grown fruitful and multiplied.

                What happened on September 11, 2001 is well known and has received great publicity so there is no point in discussing or dissecting the actual event in detail.

                 According to official accounts, four commercial American aircraft were hijacked by Arab extremists, angered at the continued U.S. backing of their enemies, the state of Israel, and flown into the World Trade Center buildings in New York City and the Pentagon military headquarters in Washington. Another aircraft, destined for the U.S. Capitol building (or, according to some accounts, the White House) crashed in the hills of Pennsylvania under circumstances that have never been made clear.

                Rumors abound that the WTC buildings were blown up from the inside by demolition experts or that the Pentagon attack was actually carried out with a missile. All of these, and other interesting thesis founder on one concept.

                If American demolitions or military missile experts were somehow involved in the destruction created on September 11, this information would have long ago become public knowledge. Such a terrible secret would be impossible to keep for long. On the other hand, if the leadership of the United States learned of the impending attacks and simply did nothing whatsoever to prevent them, this would be nearly impossible to prove beyond any reasonable doubt using direct evidence.

                It is not possible to prove a negative.

                 Circumstantial evidence is another matter entirely.

                Given that the buildings were destroyed, would it be possible to prove that this attack was discovered and reported in advance? And if it were reported in advance, why were no steps of any kind, even the most basic taken to alert the military and local law enforcement to at least prevent such large casualties?

                One entirely reasonable conclusion would be that no one knew anything in advance and hence no advance warning could possibly have been made.

                An opposite, and equally reasonable, conclusion would be that those in power wished the attack to proceed for their own reasons and therefore said nothing and, like Franklin Roosevelt in December of 1941, waited patiently…and quietly…for events to run their course.

                The deadly attacks by a team of Saudi terrorists against American targets on September 11, 2001, was in no way a secret venture. Almost from its inception, its progress was known to, and closely followed by, the intelligence agencies of Britain, Russia, Germany and Israel. All of these countries, without exception, duly notified the American authorities about a pending attack, by aircraft, against American targets. The Israeli Foreign Intelligence agency, the Mossad, had actually penetrated the leadership of the group centered in Hollywood, Florida, and made regular reports on the pending attack to their government.   The Israeli government, in turn, made full disclosure to the highest level of authority in Washington.

Interestingly enough, the man who formulated the attack, Osama bin Ladin, was a personal friend of the American president, George Bush, and his very wealthy Saudi family had been investors in Bush’s Arbusto Energy Oil Company, founded in 1978.Another big investor was BCCI (Bank of Credit & Commerce) that later was shut down in July of 1991, charged with multibillion-dollar fraud and which had been heavily involved in drug money laundering, arms brokering, covert intelligence work, bribery of government officials and aid to terrorists.

                Several members of the Bush family were heavy investors in the Carlyle Group, a defense contractor and investment fund with numerous interests in the Middle East, run by former Reagan administration Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. Former President George H. W. Bush attended an investment meeting at the Washington, D.C. Ritz-Carlton hotel on September 10, 2001 and also a meeting with Shafiq bin Laden, representing joint interests of the Saudi Binladin Group and Carlyle.

                In addition to the question of American control of oil and natural gas deliveries, there was also an internal political issue. It should be noted that during the previous administration of William Clinton, the American right wing, personified by the Republicans, fought a long, loud and effective public relations battle against what they saw was Clinton’s left wing policies. There was a steady drumfire of attacks, mostly from the far right Evangelicals, about Clinton’s various affairs and also about alleged financial peculations when he was governor of Arkansas.

                Always extremely manipulative and often very vicious, the Republican leadership, coupled with outside business interests, manoevered George Bush into the Oval Office by a mixture of bribery, political presssure and deliberate vote fraud in Florida.

                When a narrow Supreme Court majority placed Bush into office, Dick Cheney, a fixture of the very far right Republicans, appointed himself to the office of Vice President.

                Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney was born in Nebraska in 1941, Cheney grew up in Casper, Wyoming., later attending  Yale University. Cheney dropped out during his sophomore year, and eventually earned a political science degree at the University of Wyoming in 1965.

                After winning a postgraduate fellowship that took him to Washington, Cheney was employed by the Nixon administration as a special assistant to Donald Rumsfeld, who at that time was director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and later White House counsel.   

                In August 1974, after President Nixon resigned from office in disgrace , Rumsfeld was called to join the White House staff as an assistant to Ford, and Cheney moved along with Rumsfeld. Hard-working, loyal and good-natured, Cheney made a good impression and became Ford’s chief of staff from 1975 to 1977.

                A very strong neo-conservative and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton Company, which greatly benefitted from contracts with the U.S. government, especially in the war with Iraq Cheney has ties to the Carlyle Group, is a former Senior Fellow with the American Enterprise Institute,has  served on the Advisory Board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and has been linked to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

                Cheney opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, has  an anti-abortion advocate, and supports prayer in school. While serving in Congress, he was one of 21 members opposing the sale ban of armor-piercing bullets; was one of only four to oppose the ban on guns that can get through metal detectors; opposed sanctions against the apartheid-era South Africa in the mid-1980s along with voting against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela; voted for a constitutional amendment to ban school busing; voted against Head Start; and voted against extending the Clean Water Act in 1987.

                Cheney was appointed head of Halliburton in 1995. This company was, and still is, the largest worldwide providers of equipment and services to the oil industry, Cheney was appointed to head this company solely because of his previous government employments and the contacts this supplied. During his five years as CEO, Cheney nearly doubled the size of Halliburton’s government contracts, totaling $2.3 billion.   

                Cheney continued to draw a $1,000,000 per year paycheck from Halliburton while serving as the Vice President.He stated a number of times that he saw no conflict of interest between taking this paycheck, and participating in White House decisions that have allocated billions of dollars of bids to Halliburton that have not gone to open tender.

                Since he and Bush occupied the White House, Cheney  managed to accomplish a great deal in the fields of personal enrichment and political gain. As Vice President, Cheney met with the heads of oil, gas, and nuclear power companies, asked for and got their needs and requirements and turned them into a new national Energy Plan. Cheney’s close relations with the later-convicted swindler, Ken Lay of Enron, is a case in point. Given his key role in determining the policy and practice of the Bush administration, an understanding of Cheney’s history is important

                While Cheney was running Halliburton, there was a 91`% increase in U.S. government contracts with that firm.

                In 2000, before assuming office as Vice President, Cheney’s  income from Halliburton:was $36,086,635 

                 American energy companies gave the 2000 Bush/Cheney presidential campaign $1,800,000

                He convinced the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. to lend Halliburton and oil companies another $1.5 billion, backed by U.S. taxpayers. Unfortunately some of these loans went to a Russian company with ties to drug dealing and organized crime. Under Cheney’s leadership Halliburton and its subsidiaries supported, or even ordered, human rights violations and broke international laws.
                Libya engaged a foreign subsidiary of Halliburton company, Brown & Root, to perform millions of dollars worth of work. At the time, Libya was strongly suspected of harboring and encouraging terrorist activity, Brown & Root was subsequently fined $3.8 million for violating Libyan sanctions. (Although Cheney wasn’t leading Halliburton when these sales started, subsidiaries’ sales to Libya continued throughout his tenure.)

                 Halliburton became the biggest oil contractor for Iraq, selling more than $73 million in goods and services to Saddam Hussein’s regime although there were firm U.S. sanctions on Iraq at the time. ,
                Karl Christian Rove became Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush until his sudden resignation on August 31, 2007. He once headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives..

                Rove influenced dealings with Iraq and North Korea, according to Bush administration sources. For instance, when the U.S. was notified, through formal diplomatic channels, that North Korea had nuclear technology, Congress was in the midst of discussing the Iraqi war resolution. Rove counseled the president to keep that information from Congress for 12 days, until the debate was finished, so it would not affect the vote. He was also reported to be present at a war strategy meeting concerning whether to attack Syria after Iraq. Rove said the timing was not right.

                Yet. having the political advisor involved in that decision is wrong. It was Rove who kept President Bush relentlessly adherent to his obsessive goal of a permanent Republican-controlled executive, making the argument that America is safe only in their hands – Rove, highly intelligent and extremely arrogant, firmly believed himself an expert in both policy and politics because he could see no distinction between the two.

                This matters for a number of reasons. There is always a time during any president’s administration when what is best for the future of the country diverges from what best serves that president’s political future. It was always Rove’s firm intention to push the president in the direction of reelection rather than the country’s best interests.

                What Rove always wanted to achieve, was nothing less than a major alignment in US politics, making the Republicans the sole party of government for a generation or more.

In June 2003 powerful far right wing writer, Grover Norquist wrote “In crafting its agenda for economic reform, the Bush administration has the luxury of being able to think and plan over a full eight years…This guarantee of united Republican government has allowed the Bush administration to work and think long-term….Republicans are looking at decades of dominance in the House and Senate and having the Presidency with some regularity.”  According to Norquist “every time the government gets smaller there are fewer Democratic precinct workers in the world…It is a virtuous cycle.”.

                Now that we have some background on the players, let us consider the origins of the 9/11 attacks on American targets.

                We have taken a brief look at the major players in the game and have taken even a briefer look at some of the attending circumstances behind the Saudi terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Now it is time to outline what lay behind the actual attack. High level people in the government are laboring under the misapprehension that they are speaking over secured telephone lines or email or faxing over other secure services but in the main, they are living in a fool’s paradise.

                The President does have very secure lines of communications but neither Cheney nor Rove did. Not only can our very own NSA listen in to conversations held from Cheney’s “Secret Command Post” but so can others, to include the British and Russian intelligence agencies. Our Army has been reading top secret Israeli diplomatic, military and intelligence messages for some time And even the PRC and the French are not without success in pulling messages off the air and breaking even the most complicated algorithmic encryption.

                 It is from these sources that  it has been possible to put together a plot that not even the most creative of the bloggers could possibly have imagined.

                It is well known that the far right wing of the Republican Party was determined to get control of the White House just as they then had control of Congress. They were well on their way to stacking the third branch of our government, the judicial. The main architect of this ambitious plan was Karl Rove. Very intelligent but totally amoral and personally vicious, Rove was a powerful influence over George Bush, converting him to a form of aggressive Evangelical Christianity and getting him elected to the Governorship of Texas. Rove was instrumental in convincing the power elite of the time to support Bush as the Republican candidate for President in 2000 and the manipulations to put the colorless Bush into the Oval Office have been covered extensively in the media and on the Internet. There were deliberate voter frauds including fixed voting machines, machines made and controlled by a strong Bush supporter. There was obvious and deliberate voter fraud in Florida, a state run by Bush’s brother and Rove had seen to it that there was a bare majority of the Supreme Court to, in effect, job Bush straight into the White House.

                Now, the plotters reasoned, they had control of the executive, the legislative and the judicial. There was only one more factor to take into account in the final securing of absolute power and that was the American public.

                Not even the most accomplished of the watchers can say with certainty when the final chapter was first broached but enough has been pieced together to make a thoroughly believable scenario. In all probability it was Rove, a man with a good understanding of history, who realized that a so-called wartime President could gather unto himself, and his supporters, almost unlimited powers and among these was the power to frighten the public into obeying his dictates and the excuse for establish these dictates in the first place.

                During the First World Ear, Woodrow Wilson set up a virtual dictatorship in the United States during his war with Germany and, of course, there was the seizure of power by Hitler in 1933 after he had been appointed a Chancellor with limited powers. Coupled with this burning desire for long-term, if not permanent, political control in the United States, there was also the issue of economic control but with a cowed public and control over all three branches of government, economic control would be a very easy matter to accomplish.

                It was well known that the United States was in growing need of natural gas and, most especially oil. It was also less well known that the once-enormous Saudi fields were running dry and that Iraq had more oil than Saudi Arabia. Also, the Iraqi dictator, Hussein, had physically bombarded Israel during the Gulf War and he was viewed by that country as a great menace. The strong, overly strong many asserted, influence Israel and its organs in the United States had was another factor in the plan.

                It was the gradual inclusion of top Israeli political and military leaders in the plan that allowed the Russian GRU to discover it. Rove saw a brief, Bismarckian campaign against Iraq that would gain the United States access to that country’s oil and to establish even stronger ties with Israel and its domestic support of Republican policies.

                What was lacking was a casus belli, a cause for war. It was in this area that Bush and Cheney had excellent prospects. Osama bin Ladin was the son of a very powerful Saudi businessman who had the highest-level connections in his country and whose family activities were well known to Cheney because of his tenure as head of Halliburton.

                The bin Ladins also had very good connections with George Bush and had invested heavily in his company, Arbusto. Certain favors could then certainly be asked and, if everyone could see profit in them, granted. It is known that the great bulk of the actual 9/11 terrorists were Saudi citizens (1 Egyptian, two UAE, 1 Lebanese and 15 Saudis) and they were ordered  to attack the United States, again (there had been one unsuccessful attack on the WTC on February 26, 1993, when a car bomb was detonated in the parking garage below the North Tower of the WTC. The 1,500 lb explosive device  was intended to knock the North Tower  into the South Tower , bringing both towers down and killing thousands of people.)

                The bomb was badly situated and it killed six people and injured over a thousand. Herein lay the seed for the Rovian casus belli, only this time, a more spectacular attacks needed to be launched to achieve any hoped for results in both supplying a Pearl Harbor-type excuse for war but also a power tool to be used to frighten the mass of the public into terribled obedience to the wishes of a protecting government.

                There were so many contacts with the Saudi elements that no one could possibly keep track of them but it was obvious to most foreign agencies after the attack that its origins were never in doubt. And to further assist the plot, the Israelis were brought into the fold. Their competent foreign intelligence, the Mossad, was already at work undercover in the United States, spying on anti-Israel Moslim activists so it surprised no one when the Mossad, using Yemini Jews, infiltrated the Atta group in Hollywood, Florida. The incident would be executed by people controlled by bin Ladin but supervised by the Mossad.  

                But it was all very well and good for a trio of highly-placed plotters to scheme inside a relatively secure White House but as the plans were developed and others brought into the execution of it, the chnce for serious leaks became greater.

                 Although the government quickly enlisted the aid of a legion of conspiracy people to cloak their actions with absurd rumors and distracting fictions, there were still many who questioned the attacks but as the years have passed, the subject has grown stale and so grown over by a huge jungle of lies, fictions and confusion that like the earlier Kennedy assassination, it will pass into the oblivion of history.

                The attacks went off as planned, Bush played the role of savior and in the wake of the attack, fear became the order of the day and fear was constatly being cultivated by the Bush people and harvested at the polls.

                But the Rove people failed in two areas and it was a failure that eventualy brought down their plans. The Saudi attack that was aborted in the fields of Pennsylvania was intended to crash into the Capitol building when Congress was in session, causing huge casualties and giving Bush the excuse to govern by decree until some vague future time when new elections to replace the dead or crippled members of that body could be held.

                The second area of failure was the refusal of the senior commanders of the Army to become involved in neo-Fascistic roundups of any dissident citizenry or to run any barbed wire detention centers.

                By constantly crying about the wolves, the Bush conspirators exceeded their brief and eventually, the public ignored the color coding and the exhortations to use duct tape on windows to prevent radioactive matrial from entering their homes.

                In short, the plotters could only go so far without eventually enforcing their wishes and the plot, which killed a huge number of people and bankrupted the country, fell apart.

                In any complex matter, it is useless to seek answers in expanding the entity beyond necessity; always look for the simplest common denominator and the truth is far easier to discover.

                One of the most important and basic questions would be:

                Aside from contractors and morticians, who could have benefited from these savage attacks?

                The purpose of this study is to investigate this question as fully, and reasonably, as possible. Conclusions are always entirely subjective so we will then consider various causes rather than results.

                It should be beyond belief to think that there would be even the slightest documentary proof of possible high-level complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Or at least this would appear to be beyond belief.

                In the safes of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, there are doubtlessly very concrete operational plans for the invasion of Canada and Mexico by the American military. This does not mean that the United States plans to invade either of these countries, merely that there are plans prepared in the event they might be needed.

                Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, there has been a tremendous flood of supposition, theory and very often, factual reportage on various aspects of the bloody and savage incident. Almost all of this material has come from various foreign, and limited domestic, press coverage and in the following work, much of the original work is reproduced almost in toto and duly noted.

                Much of the informative material contained in this work has not appeared in the U.S. media but has been published in the foreign press. Why reputable news sources in Europe are not reported in the American media is a matter for speculation on the part of the reader but it is noted that the Internet has supplied almost every bit of important information contained herein.

                There are those who search the world-wide information network on a daily basis, gather and disseminate reams of highly important information to interested parties. I speak specifically about Orest Slepokuoa, and the gentleman who uses the nom de plume of Treefrog.

                The one remaining independent American newspaper, the American Free Press published in the nation’s capital, is the only organ of considerable circulation that regularly prints all of the stories so carefully shunned by the American media.

                It is to these people, as well as the unfettered European press (and to include the Russian) that the author is in debt and those seeking to view both sides of the coin are urged to explore both the Internet and study the websites of the Swiss NZZ, the London Times, the Manchester Guardian, the Tom Paine website and the columns of the American Free Press.

                                                                                                                Harold L. Krieg                 

 

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CHAPTER 1

 

The Role of Oil in American Foreign and Domestic Policy

                Oil in one form or another, use and possession, can be found as a serious factor in the background of all 20^th and 21^st Century wars, major and minor, commencing in the early 1940's, when an isolationist America was inexorably drawn into what became World War Two when the oil-dependant Japanese were cut off from American and Dutch oil by specific order of President Franklin Roosevelt. This embargo led directly to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The result of this attack was the destruction of the Pacific Fleet and the attendant loss of over 3,000 military personnel and civilians in Hawaii. It also provided Roosevelt an excellent causus belli to justify America’s entry into a war that was primarily aimed at the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler.

                The federal government, which had been expanded into a giant bureaucracy under the radical Roosevelt, grew even more centralized under the protective guise of national security  It was certainly evident to many that this entry into the European war, which had now become a global conflict, was the result of machinations of the President and a number of his senior aides and advisors. By denying oil to Japan in mid-1941, Roosevelt, who was reading all the Japanese diplomatic traffic (and some of the Japanese military messages) guaranteed an attack on the United States.

There is now no question whatsoever that Roosevelt and a few close advisers were fully aware, in a general sense, that Imperial Japan was planning to strike at American, British and Dutch holdings in the pacific with the sole purpose of gaining economic autarky. Specific foreknowledge on the part of the ruthless and amoral Roosevelt of the attack on the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor is sparse but convincing.

An excellent coverage of this can be found in ‘A Century of War’ by F. William Engdahl.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing and by simply awaiting the inevitable attack, Roosevelt found an answer to his foreign policy problems   

In the 1960s, the forced withdrawal by the exhausted French colonial government of their colony of Indo-China, encouraged the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), founded by Allen Dulles, head of the CIA and a significant and powerful influence on U.S. foreign policy, to launch an American effort to supplant the French in a very resource-rich area containing rubber, large potential oil deposits and magnesium.

This policy led directly to the disastrous Vietnam War.

Redolent of Pearl Harbor, in August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson claimed to a reluctant Congress that North Vietnamese naval units had attacked the US Sixth Fleet in Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin.

                A pressured Congress then passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that in effect bypassed the U.S. Constitution and in essence proved to be an enabling act, permitting Johnson the unquestioned right to wage an undeclared war in Vietnam 

Unlike Pearl Harbor, the so-called Vietnamese naval attacks were a deliberate fraud. To this day, no evidence whatsoever has been produced that such an attack ever took place. In July of 1984, US News & World Report (July 23, 1984) wrote of the Tonkin incident that it was "The 'Phantom Battle' That Led to War.”

                It is doubtful if anyone can deny that Bush the Elder’s Gulf War was entirely concerned about oil. U.S. controlled oil concerns, located in Kuwait, were engaged in slant-drilling into Iraq's southern oil fields. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, had until recently had been solidly supported and financed by the CIA, who used him as a surrogate against the fundamentalist and thoroughly anti-American Islamic government of Iran. 

Hussein, cut off from official American clandestine military and economic support and heavily in debt because of the eight-year war against Iran, eventually decided to recover the lost Iraqi province of Kuwait to improve his economic base. When Hussein cautiously approached American Ambassador April Glaspie, after consultations with Washington, she advised Hussein that the US government believed that the matter of Kuwait was not of concern or interest to the United States. However, when Hussein moved his military into Kuwait, the American President, Bush the Elder, immediately raised a United Nations force against him, backed, it has been repeatedly stated, by a $4 billion fund from an apprehensive government of Saudi Arabia.

                With American troops victorious in the one-sided conflict, President Bush suddenly halted the United States forces well short of the Iraqi capital. Hussein was permitted to remain in power, albeit with a depleted military force. It should also be noted that the Israeli government viewed Hussein as a very serious enemy who had launched missiles against them during the course of the brief war. Israel had also bombed an Iraqi atomic energy facility in the years previous to the Gulf War and was most eager to see the destruction of a serious enemy.

             A well-organized group of conservative intellectuals with powerful allies in the Bush Administration has become a driving force pushing the United States to invade Iraq and is also orchestrating growing U.S. criticism of Saudi Arabia.

                These individuals first emerged in the 1960s when a group of thinkers, many of them Jewish and all passionately anti-Communist, became disillusioned with what they saw as a dangerous radical drift within the Democratic Party to which they then belonged.

                Advocating a tough policy of building up the U.S. military and confronting the Soviet Union instead of merely using nuclear deterrence to maintain a balance of power, the movement’s founders gradually shifted to the Republican Party, becoming a dominant voice in the anti-Russian foreign policy of President Ronald Reagan.

                Twenty years later, with allies like Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz in the inner circle of President George W. Bush, this radical conservatism has returned in a new guise.

                This time, its proponents inside and outside the Administration urge an invasion of Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein. This is coupled with a policy of unquestioning support for the State of Israel and growing criticism of non- democratic governments in the Arab World, notably Saudi Arabia.

                “By liberating Iraq and establishing a decent, tolerant government in Baghdad, the United States will achieve a tremendous beneficial effects in the entire Middle East,” said Ken Adelman, who was head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Reagan.

                Among these benefits, proponents argue, would be an instant strengthening of reformist forces in Iran and a weakening of radical Islamic forces throughout the Middle East, including among the Palestinians.

                “My old mentor Donald Rumsfeld taught me years ago that if a problem seems intractable, like the Israeli-Palestinian Problem does today, what you need to do is enlarge your terms of reference. By destroying Saddam Hussein, we would give peacemakers the opportunity to gain the upper hand over the suicide bombers among the Palestinians,” said Adelman.

                The arch-conservative case is pushed relentlessly by conservative magazines like Commentary, and the Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, whose parents Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb helped found the arch-conservative movement.

                Conservative think-tanks such as the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century, add weight to the cause.

                Gary Schmidt of the Project for the New American Century cast the debate over Iraq as between “old realists” who believed in working through diplomacy using the United Nations and arch-conservatives who advocated a “Reagan Policy of military strength and moral clarity.”

                “I don’t think there is any question that President Bush will come down on our side,” he said. “I firmly believe he has made up his mind to use military force to remove Saddam Hussein,” he said.

                An important voice in the movement is Richard Perle, yet another former Reagan Defense Department Hawk who serves as Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, a formerly backwater committee of foreign policy old timers that Perle has refashioned into an

important advisory group.

                The Board recently invited RAND Corporation analyst Laurent Murawiec to deliver a paper arguing that Saudi Arabia ought to be considered an adversary of the United States. The briefing was promptly leaked to the Washington Post.

                Backers of an Iraqi invasion were delighted by a Washington Post opinion piece by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who throughout his long career was a staunch advocate of a “balance of power” foreign policy.

                But in his densely-argued article, Kissinger seemed to be ready to support military force against Iraq under certain conditions.

                This is undoubtedly the reason that Bush appointed Kissinger to head a long-delayed commission to investigate the causes of the 9/11 attack. The resultant outcry over the use of the badly tainted former Secretary of State caused Kissinger to quickly resign his assignment.         

                Perhaps the Bush Administration might wish to consider convicted felon John Poindexter for the job. The disgraced former Admiral has become involved in a lunatic Orwellian project to gather computerized data on all functioning bipeds resident in the United States and certainly has the character, or more honestly the lack of it, to quickly attract him to the Administration.

                Analysts note that Bush’s father, former President George Bush, always pursued a cautious, realpolitik policy when he was in the White House and halted the advance of U.S. troops into Iraq at the end of the Gulf War in 1991.

                Opponents believe the arch-conservative doctrine is dangerously simplistic and that an invasion of Iraq, far from boosting democratic forces in the Middle East, will only fuel anti-American rage, embolden radicals, weaken U.S. Allies and lead to more terrorism.

                “The neocons have a view of the world that divides it into absolute good versus absolute evil. Their attitude towards an Iraq invasion is, if you have the ability and the desire to do it, that’s justification enough,” said James Zogby, Chairman of the Arab American Institute.

                Other critics see support for Israel as central to arch-conservative thinking.

                “A small but well-placed group of neoconservative officials and commentators is primarily interested in eliminating what they regard as a threat to Israel,” said Stephen Walt, a dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

                “Absent their activities, the United States would be focusing on containing Iraq, which we have done successfully since the Gulf War, but we would not be trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein. We would also be pursuing a more even-handed policy in the Middle East in general,” he said. [Source: August 13, 3002, Reuters]

                To address a wider spectrum of the importance of oil to the United States, let us consider a number of valid points.

                From 1991 through 1997, major U.S. oil companies including Exxon-Mobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP Amoco and Shell directly invested nearly $3 billion in cash to bribe various state officials in the oil-rich former Soviet Union area of Kazakhstan. This was done in order to guarantee Western rights to the immense oil reserves in this country.

                The oil companies further committed to make an immense direct investment in Kazakhstan of $35 billion. The underlying reason for the establishment of this policy was that the oil companies were no longer willing to expend high and increasing prices charged by the Russian Republic for the use of their pipeline system. [Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee 2/12/98]

                The former Soviet Kazakhstan is the most potentially important area for American oil interests. It has reserves of approximately 17.6 billion barrels of oil, close to the U.S. total oil reserves of 22 billion barrels.

                The majority of the $3 billions paid by U.S. oil interests to secure Kazakhstan oil was promptly banked in Swiss accounts by the President of the country, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

                This money was not well spent because in 2001, the bulk of Kazakhstan’s oil, some 250 million barrels, was shipped to market via Russian, not American, pipelines.

                On December 4, 1997 Taliban representatives were guests at the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negotiate their organization’s support for the pipeline to Pakistan and the sea.. Subsequent reports indicated that these negotiations failed, purportedly because the Taliban was extortionate in their monetary demands. [Source: The BBC, Dec. 4 1997]

                In a Feb. 12, 1998, report to the House Committee on International Relations, Unocal Corp. VP for International Relations John J. Maresca, subsequently a Special Ambassador to Afghanistan, testified that the Taliban government in Afghanistan was an obstacle to Unocal’s installing the projected oil pipeline from the Caspian region. He also made it clear that “construction of the pipeline cannot begin until a recognized government is in place in Kabul that has the confidence of governments, lenders, and our company.”

                U.S. oil firms then contemplated the construction of another pipeline that would go west through Russia instead of south through Afghanistan. Enron– the biggest contributor to the Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign and later a spectacular bankrupt, conducted the feasibility study for the proposed $2.5 billion Trans-Caspian gas pipeline, but this project failed to materialize due to Russian cash demands.

                 However, if the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan in order to put in place the desired “internationally recognized government,” the region could certainly be considered sufficiently acceptable and pacified for the Unocal pipeline project to proceed.

                If Unocal were to complete the pipeline, their projected annual revenues would approach $2 billion- sufficient to recover the cost of the project in five years [Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee. 2/12/98]

                The August 10, 2000, the Chicago Tribune reported that Vice-President Richard Cheney “was once CEO of Dallas-based Halliburton Co., the biggest oil-services company in the world. Because of the instability in the Persian Gulf, Cheney and his fellow oilmen concentrated on the world’s other major source of oil–the Caspian Sea area whose oil and gas resources are estimated at $4 trillion by U.S. News and World Report.”

                The Caspian Sea region that Cheney and the “fellow oilmen”- such as Enron, Amoco, British Petroleum, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil and Unocal-were so anxious to exploit is located immediately to the north of Afghanistan.

                “The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States…But, we go where the business is… ” Cheney said in a speech given on June 23, 1988 at the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank.

                 Currently, approximately 40% of America’s oil needs are met by OPEC, the Middle Eastern oil cartel with whom the U.S. has, at best, a sensitive relationship due in part to rising Islamic fundamentalism in the Near East oil producing areas. Friendly control of the Caspian oil and gas reserves would reduce U.S. reliance on OPEC, and thereby enable American oil interests to reap rich profits from the development and utilization of these oil areas.

                In 1996, according to a New York Times article Unocal signed an agreement with the Taliban and the Afghan Northern Alliance giving Unocal the go-ahead to build a south-bound pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea to serve the expanding Asian market.

                Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reported in 1997 articles that Unocal subsequently opened offices in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Turkmenistan in anticipation of commencing the southern pipeline. However, internal strife in Afghanistan and ensuing conflicts with the Taliban led them to withdraw from the project in 1998.

                After Cheney stepped down as CEO of Halliburton, a company that sells drilling equipment to other oil companies, in order to run for Vice-President on the Republican ticket in August of 2000, he sold 100,000 shares of Halliburton stock at $50.00 a share, which netted him a profit of $5.l million. Halliburton stock subsequently plummeted to a low of $13.00 because of CEO Cheney’s bookkeeping manipulations. Another factor for the stocks’ decline could be found in pending asbestos litigation against Halliburton. [Source: New York Times, August 1, 2002]  

                It is quite obvious that securing the Caspian Sea reserves and building the Unocal pipeline would drive up demand for drilling equipment, thereby causing a surge in the price of Halliburton stock to the benefit of stockholders…and the now-Vice President Richard Cheney.

                 Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Kellogg Brown & Root, a unit of Halliburton, has secured extremely lucrative contracts from various sections of the United States Government.

In September of 2001, KBR and several other firms, received a $5 billion contract to dismantle “weapons of mass destruction” in the former Soviet Union;

                An open-ended support contract for American military presence in various areas in Central Asia, to include Uzbekistan, was awarded to KBR in December of 2001;

                The top KBR vice president responsible for these highly lucrative governmental military contracts is retired Admiral Joe Lopez who had been a former military aide to Cheney when the latter was Secretary of Defense. (Source New York Times, July 13, 2002)

                In the wake of the collapse of major portions of corporate America, due to what is politely called “aggressive bookkeeping” but is more accurately described as “cooking the books,” it has emerged that Cheney, while CEO of Halliburton, may well have been guilty of the same fiscal manipulations as the disgraced confidence man Kenneth Lay.

                Lay’s Enron company had, before its spectacular but not surprising, collapse and subsequent bankruptcy, been involved in a Byzantine world of energy futures, massive bribery of government officials and highly questionable financial dealings. Perhaps because of his lavish gifts and donations to important state and Federal officials, Kenneth Lay has, as of this writing, been carefully ignored by various law enforcement agencies investigating what amounted to a massive Ponzi swindle.

                In May of 1998, Time magazine warned of American oil interests’ dubious intentions for the region, reporting that the CIA had “set up a secret task force to monitor the region’s politics and gauge its wealth. Covert CIA officers, among them many well-trained petroleum engineers, traveled through southern Russia and the Caspian region to locate potential oil reserves. When the policymakers heard the agency’s report, (Secretary of State Madeline) Albright concluded that ‘working to mold the area’s future was one of the most exciting things we can do.’ ”

                The combined total of reserves in the region is reliably estimated to be more than 800 billion barrels of crude petroleum and its equivalent in natural gas. By contrast, the combined total of oil reserves in the Americas and Europe is less than 160 billion barrels, most of which, energy experts say, will be exhausted in the next 25 years. In fact by 2050 the countries in the Caspian basin are expected to account for more than 80 % of America’s oil.

               

 

CHAPTER 2

               

Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush: Perpetrators or Dupes?

                 Immediately after the September 11 attacks, the federal government, aided by a sycophantic mass media, initiated a canard that a certain Osama bin Laden was the directing power behind the attacks. Osama bin Laden, had been closely connected to the financial interests of the Bush family as well as the CIA, could indeed have been the moving force or he equally might have been an extremely  convenient scapegoat for other individuals and official agencies

                As with assassination of President Kennedy, Federal authorities announced the name of the prime suspect long before any of the facts of the September 11 attacks could possibly have been ascertained by any intelligence agency.

               Bin Laden is the son of a wealthy Middle Eastern construction family. During the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, he was supplied with weapons and funds from the US Central Intelligence Agency, acting on the specific instructions of the U.S. Government.

Although bin Laden denied any knowledge of the attack at that time, he was put forward immediately by the White House and the American media.

                No evidence of any kind, saving for questionably altered videotapes, was ever produced that could directly link bin Laden to the 9/11 attacks. However, that having been said, bin Laden had long been reported as the leader behind the 1993 WTC attack and was considered a fugitive from United States justice for more than a decade.

                According to several reports, including Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne's book The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of the BCCI  New York: Random House, 1993, Bush family friend James R. Bath used money from Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem, to open a partnership with George W. Bush in Arbusto Energy, a West Texas drilling company.

                According to The Houston Chronicle, Salem bin Laden named Bath his business representative in Texas shortly after the senior Bush was named CIA director by appointed President Gerald Ford in 1975.

                Osama bin Laden had been disinherited by his father and lost his Saudi citizenship. The bin Laden family were legitimate contractors and the association of his brother, Salem, with the Bush family does not necessarily indicate a specific connection with Osama bin Ladin , although the relationship between the brothers is not specifically clarified in published accounts.

                It was the Bush family, particularly the President’s brothers, Jeb, later Governor of Florida, and Neil, who were involved in the fraudulent and very lucrative American savings and loan scandals ranging from 1989 to 1993. These manipulations by various savings and loan operators, including the notorious Charles Keating, eventually cost American taxpayers more than $500 billion.

                Through his connections to BCCI, George W. Bush eventually gained a sizable interest in a new oil company called Harken Energy.

                On January 30, 1990, a respected trade journal of the petroleum industry, Platt’s Oilgram News reported that a subsidiary of a small, Dallas-based independent oil company, Harken Energy Corporation, had just signed an agreement with the government of Bahrain. “Harken Bahrain Oil Company signed a production sharing contract today,” the article announced, “that gave the company exclusive rights to carry out exploration, development, production, transportation, and marketing of petroleum throughout most of Bahrain’s Gulf offshore areas.”

                That the government of Bahrain, and its state-owned petroleum franchise, Bahrain National Oil Company, or Banoco, should choose tiny Harken Energy to explore for oil off its coast came as something of a surprise to industry experts. Amoco, the global oil giant, had also wanted the contract, and Chevron Corporation, another multinational, had advised the Bahraini government on choosing an American company for the venture.

                Harken Energy had fewer than a thousand employees, and no experience whatsoever in international oil production. The company had confined its activities entirely to the domestic production of oil, and to expanding itself through the acquisition of troubled U.S. oil producers at bargain-basement prices. And it was so cash poor that it didn’t even have enough capital to drill for oil without bringing in well-heeled partners to finance the exploration.

                Even more surprising, Harken hadn’t even actively sought the deal.

                “It was not our intention to seek out international opportunities,” Monte Swetnam, the president of Harken Exploration Company, the Bahrain-based subsidiary of Harken, told World Oil, another industry trade publication. “However, we were introduced to officials in Bahrain and were able to present our credentials to them. And from that, a relationship developed . . . that has evolved into one of mutual respect, ultimately resulting in signing the production-sharing contract.”

                The relationship promised Harken more than respect. The offshore fields were bordered on one side by a Saudi Arabian deposit with proven reserves of about 7 billion barrels, and a field belonging to Qatar with 2 billion barrels. The Bahraini offshore reserves had the potential to be enormous.

Harken Energy was in the right place at the right time. But it had something else – the right name. In January 1991 a global coalition led by President George Bush had mobilized an enormous military force to drive Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. Another George Bush — the son of the President of the United States — was a director and shareholder of Harken Energy.

                The few press reports about the deal questioned the motives of the government of Bahrain for making the deal with Harken Energy. Even the Wall Street Journal, customarily reserved on such matters, reported in a page-one analysis of the contract in December 1991 that it “raises the question of . . . an effort to cozy up to a presidential son.”

                George W. Bush claimed at the time that family influence played no part whatsoever in securing the potentially lucrative contract, a statement that can be viewed as highly doubtful.. According to Swetnam, the Bahrainis knew that Bush was on the company’s board of directors and “were clearly aware he was the President’s son.”

                Alas for Harken, the Bush name wasn’t magical enough to ensure a strike off the coast of Bahrain. The company drilled two dry holes. As usual in his disasterous dealings,  Bush himself fared better. He sold off two-thirds of his holdings in Harken for nearly a million dollars, and bought a small share of the Texas Rangers, a deal that ultimately netted him — with a helping hand from Texas taxpayers — some $15 million.

                In early 1986, George W. Bush sold his Spectrum 7 Energy holdings to Harken Energy in return for 212, 000 shares of Harken stock and a seat on their Board of Directors.

                On December 10, 1986, Harken gave Bush an option to purchase an additional 80,000 shares of stock. Bush then secured a loan from Harken in the amount of $96 thousand at a rate of 5%.

                In December of 1988, Bush received another Harken stock purchase option for an additional 25,000 shares for which he secured a loan of $84 thousand.

                In total, Harken had loaned George W. Bush a total of $180 thousand.

                Although Harken Energy stock was not an attractive stock in 1990, Bush was approached by a broker, Ralph Smith of Sutro & Company of Los Angeles and offered $4 per share. He sold the stock on June 22, 1990.

                On August 20, 1990, Harken Energy stock fell to $2.37 a share.

                The name of the anonymous purchaser has never been made public although it is now believed that it was a branch of Harvard University.

                Mr. Bush somehow forgot to notify the Security and Exchange Commission of his transactions, stating at various times that the accountants had somehow neglected to send in the forms or, alternately, that the forms had indeed been submitted in a timely manner but the SEC had lost them.

                One of the forms had a Bush signature but no date.

                It should be noted that during the Persian Gulf War, it was Binladen Brothers Construction (now the Binladen Group) that helped build airfields for US military units.

                The bin Laden brothers were then described as good friends of the US government.. Later the bin Laden firm continued to be employed to construct an American air base in Saudi Arabia despite the fact that Osama had already been blamed for terrorist acts such as the truck bombing of the Khobar Towers at the Dhahran base which killed 19 Americans.

                 Throughout his long, disaster-crowned business career and in his six years as governor of Texas, George W. Bush relied heavily on his family’s political and economic connections in his attempt to build an economic empire. And Bush, both in private life, after becoming governor of Texas, and subsequently, President of the United States, was always more than willing to return any economic or political favors he was granted.

                George W. Bush made a great deal of his Texas childhood. He proudly boasted of his attendance at San Jacinto Junior High School in Midland, Texas. Bush had no problem using his family for economic and political advantage but in practice, preferred to depict himself as just another Texas Good Old Boy.

                The Bush family was, and is, East Coast Establishment. The exclusive Yale University, breeding ground for so many high level Central Intelligence Agency personages, became a second home for the Bush family.

                Senator Prescott Bush, a Texas oilman and grandfather of George W. Bush, graduated from Yale. He was subsequently indicted for trading with Third Reich business interests during World War II. So did his uncles, Jonathan and Prescott Jr. and when Bush was born in New Haven in 1946, his father, George H.W. Bush, was completing his college degree at that institution.

                George W. Bush entered Yale in 1964. He wasn’t the personality his father had been, but he was eventually elected the president of his fraternity and joined the highly exclusive and secretive Skull & Bones Society to which his father had also belonged.

                When Bush graduated in 1968, he faced the prospect of being sent to Vietnam, but quickly avoided the potential danger of combat by joining the Texas National Guard.

                At that time, the Guard had 100,000 applicants on its waiting list. However, George Bush was sworn in as a member of the 147th unit of the Texas Air National Guard the same day he applied. Sid Adger, a Houston businessman and close friend of Bush’s father, asked Ben Barnes, who was then the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, to give the Bush son a safe berth.

                Bush wasn’t the only son of a prominent Texan in his unit. Others included the sons of Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen and Republican Senator John Tower .

                George W. Bush, the U.S. Commander-in-Chief, who is sometimes referred to as a “former fighter pilot,” has an embarrassing military past. His records show that for months at a time during the Vietnam War, Bush could be classified as, at best, “absent without leave” (AWOL) or, at worst, as an army deserter.

                Indeed, one hardly needs to wait for Veterans’ Day to note the irony in Bush’s military fervor. The man can scarcely contain his enthusiasm for war – or at least for others going to war. As he inches closer each day to sending tens of thousands of American soldiers into Iraq, any day would be appropriate for the media to satisfy its allegedly insatiable appetite for dirt on the rich and powerful by reporting the president’s own military past.

                The legwork has already been done by the Boston Globe, which dug up Bush’s military records and interviewed his former military commanders.

While the paper published its dramatic findings during the presidential campaign of 2000, the rest of the media all but ignored the story and continue to do so, even as Bush has turned himself into arguably the most hawkish president in U. S. history.

.               After completing training as a pilot, George W. Bush requested and immediately received a transfer to an Alabama National Guard unit in May, 1972. But Bush never showed up for duty there, according to the Alabama unit’s commander and the commander’s assistant, who were interviewed by the Boston Globe. Military records show that Bush’s two commanding officers back in Texas reported George W. did not show up for duty there either for a year, and that they believed he had been transferred to Alabama. Meanwhile, when Bush failed to take his required annual medical exam in August, 1972, his pilot status was removed

                It should be noted that reporting for military duty is not something that’s optional, particularly during a war. Those caught shirking National Guard duties were usually punished by being drafted into the real army – the one that landed you in Vietman, where some 350 American soldiers were killed each week. But, despite more than a year absent from duty, nothing happened to the well-connected George W. Bush. [Source: The Toronto Globe and Mail, November 18, 2002, Linda McQuaig]

                Bush later claimed that he wished to establish an identity separate from his famous father, who eventually became the chairman of the Republican National Committee, head of the U.S. Liaison Office in China, and, from January of 1976 to January of 1977, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Gerald Ford.

                After being rejected by the University of Texas law school, he subsequently enrolled in the Harvard Business School. Two years later, equipped with an MBA from Harvard, George Bush returned to Midland to attempt to make his own fortune in the oil industry, just as his father had done almost thirty years before.

                Bush had no experience whatsoever in the oil business but he was given money from his parents and automatically acquired a powerful support group of wealthy family friends, who subsequently became the principal financiers of his subsequent disastrous oil ventures.

                Before going into business, however, Bush made a foray into the Texas political arena. In 1978, he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from Midland, started a business, Arbusto Energy, Inc. (Arbusto is Spanish for Bush), married Laura Welch, a librarian from Midland and bought property in the district of retiring Representative George Mahon.

                Bush lost the election, but gained the confidence of relatives and family friends who agreed to gamble on Arbusto. Owing to the huge losses its limited partners subsequently sustained, Bush’s first venture into the business world could certainly be considered a tax shelter.

                From 1979 to 1983 nearly fifty individuals poured over $4.7 million into Arbusto and its successor, Bush Exploration. Among them were some of his father’s most reliable political supporters. These family friends and political hopefuls guaranteed that the shaky company stayed afloat.

                1. John Macomber, the chief executive officer of Celanese Corporation, invested $79,500, and William Draper III, a venture capitalist, put in $93,000. Macomber, a friend of Bush’s uncle Jonathan Bush, would go on to serve as the president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States under President Bush, the same job Draper had held under President Reagan.

                2. George Ohrstrom and his wife invested $100,000 in Arbusto. Ohrstrom had attended Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut with Bush’s father.

                3. Philip Uzielli, was a wealthy  business partner of Ohrstrom and the owner of Executive Resources, a company based first in the Dutch West Indies and later in Panama. Uzielli put $50,000 into one of the early Arbusto partnerships. In January 1982, his company bought ten percent of Arbusto’s stock for a $1 million. The investment made Uzielli Arbusto’s largest benefactor, a privilege that later cost him dearly.   

                The million-dollar purchase price was at least three times more than the stock he bought was worth. Uzielli, incidentally, had another connection to the Bush clan besides Ohrstrom. He’d been a close friend of James Baker III, who was intimately involved in the elder Bush’s political career, ever since the two had been classmates at Princeton University. Baker managed Bush’s presidential campaign in 1980 and was Secretary of State during Bush’s sole term as President.

                4. Russell Reynolds, Jr., the founder of his own executive search firm, Russell Reynolds Associates, put up $23,250.

                5. H. Leland Getz, who co-founded the firm, invested twice as much – $46,500. All of these individuals were personal friends of the Bush family.

Reynolds had attended Yale with George W.’s uncle Jonathan who was an investment manager and New York Republican Party official and who lined up most of Arbusto’s backers. Many of these unshorn sheep were already clients of his, and he charged his usual commission for recruiting them. Jonathan Bush would later serve a term on the board of Russell Reynolds Associates.           

                 Reynolds, a former finance chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party, also raised $4 million for Vice President Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign.

                 Investing in Arbusto, however, turned out to be an economic horror show. By April 1984, Arbusto had drilled ninety-five holes, with forty seven yielding oil, three yielding natural gas, and forty five that were dry. The company had returned only $1.5 million to its investors. “The bottom line is it didn’t work out very well with Arbusto,” Russell recalled. “I think we got maybe twenty cents on the dollar.”

Philip Uzielli tried to salvage the disaster by purchasing another ten percent in the company for $150,000, but to no avail. “We lost a lot of money in the oil business,” Uzielli was quoted in the Wall Street Journal in 1991. “We had a lot of dry wells. . . .Things were terrible. It was dreadful.”

                “We wrote the money off the minute we invested,” said Stephen Kass, a classmate of Bush’s at Harvard Business School. Trying to capitalize on that sentiment, Bush changed the name of the company from Arbusto to Bush Exploration in 1982. His father had been Vice President for more than a year at the time.

                But the name change was of no help. The world price of oil was in serious decline, and even the most successful independent oil companies fell upon hard times. The less competent quickly went bankrupt.

                 By 1984 the only way Bush could save his business was to find yet another solvent partner. This time he turned to an old Yale classmate of his, William DeWitt, Jr., who owned Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation, an Ohio oil exploration company. DeWitt came from a wealthy background and his father had once owned the Cincinnati Reds baseball club. DeWitt and his investment partner, Mercer Reynolds, later became significant donors to both George H.W.Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee.

                These two men also attended to the needs of the son. Rather than invest in Bush Exploration, they bought it out. Conveniently, as part of the rescue mission, Bush became Spectrum 7’s chief executive officer at an annual salary of $75,000 and was presented with 1.1 million shares of the company’s stock. Unfortunately for DeWitt and Reynolds, George W. Bush, true to form, quickly turned Spectrum 7 into an economic disaster. Two years after the merger, in 1986, world oil prices fell even further. Bush needed another bailout and he quickly found a willing savior in Harken Oil and Gas, an oil exploration company headquartered in Dallas, Texas.

                Despite the fact that Spectrum 7 had posted losses of $400,000 only six months earlier and now carried $3 million in debt, Bush and his partners received $2 million worth of Harken stock. Bush’s share was worth about $500,000. Bush also became a director, and he was paid as much as $120,000 in consulting fees plus $131,250 in stock options even though he spent much of 1987 and 1988 working on his father’s presidential campaign. That was entirely acceptable with Harken; unlike DeWitt, Bush’s new benefactor, well aware of the economic disasters that followed in his wake, was certainly not interested in him having any say in the running of the company.

                “His name was George Bush,” Phil Kendrick, Harken’s founder, said. “That was worth the money they paid him.”

                During the presidency of Herbert Hoover, his son declined to become involved in any business ventures because, as he said, “My father’s name is not for sale.”

                It is painfully obvious that George W. Bush had no such scruples but he also had less business sense than the average janitor and if he had not had a politically and economically powerful father’s name to sustain him, his economic demise would have been swift and certain.

Stuart Watson, who was a member of Harken’s board of directors at the time of the Spectrum deal, echoed that view in a 1994 interview with a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. “George was very useful to Harken,” Watson said. “He would have been more so if he had had funds, but as far as contacts were concerned, he was terrific.”

                Indeed, once the valuable Bush name was stuck on the corporation, business at Harken began to quicken..

                When Harken bought out Spectrum 7, the company was broke and desperately needed a cash infusion. As the talks with Spectrum 7 progressed, Harken officials were lining up a major new financial backer: Harvard Management Company, Inc.

                The investment firm’s only client is Harvard University and it manages the school’s multibillion-dollar endowments.

                A month after Bush joined Harken, Harvard Management agreed to invest at least $20 million in Harken. It would eventually come to own some ten million shares of Harken’s stock, making it one of the company’s largest investors.

                The Bush name obviously was the dominant factor in this arrangement.

Michael Eisenson, a partner in Harvard Management Company who also had the good fortune to be on Harken’s board of directors, stated later that he and other Harvard officials picked Harken after reviewing several proposals from energy companies. “Harken management seemed capable and honest,” Eisenson said.

                The Bush family name certainly would have made an impression on Eisenson’s boss, Robert Stone, Jr., who was one of Harvard Management’s directors. Stone was “the driving force” behind Harvard’s Southwest oil and gas investments, according to Scott Sperling, who worked with Eisenson at Harvard. Stone himself was heavily involved in the Texas oil and gas industry. At the time of the Harken flowering, he was the chairman of Kirby Exploration, an oil and gas transportation company based in Houston and he also knew the Bush family.

                His father-in-law, Godfrey Rockefeller, had invested in George H.W. Bush’s oil drilling ventures in the late 1940s. Stone’s brother, Galen L. Stone, was the U.S. envoy to Cyprus during the first Reagan-Bush Administration.

                In 1980 and 1988 he contributed to the elder Bush’s presidential campaigns. And like Bush’s uncle Jonathan, Stone had been on the board of directors of Russell Reynolds Associates.

            Harken was Harvard Management’s first major investment in Texas wildcat operations, a part of the university’s investment history it would rather forget. The investments in oil and gas would eventually generate nearly $200 million in losses for the endowment.

                The university’s commitment to Harken was surprising in view of the bad shape the company was in. By Harken executives’ own accounts, the company’s financial statements were “a mess” and “a fast numbers game.” But insiders insist that Harvard’s money mangers wouldn’t have kept pumping money into Harken if they didn’t think it would become profitable.

                For a time, they had reason to believe it would.

                The Bahrain agreement, announced on January 30, 1990, seemed to justify Harvard’s enthusiasm for Harken. While Bush said he had no role in securing the deal, and added that he had argued against it, his wealthy patrons certainly ensured that Harken could pull it off.

                Bass Enterprises Production Company put up $25 million to finance the drilling. After Bass Enterprises invested in the Bahrain operation, paying for the exploration that would eventually produce two dry wells, Harvard Management upped its stake in Harken to 30 percent.

                Bass Enterprises is part of the financial empire of the Bass brothers of Fort Worth, two of whom became members of Team 100, an elite club of big donors to the Republican National Committee, during the elder Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign.The Bass family has been generous to the son as well, having contributed more than $273,000 to him. All four Bass brothers — Sid, Robert, Edward, and Lee — attended Yale, as did their father, Perry Bass. Edward was enrolled at Yale with George W. Bush.

                In August 1990, Harken posted a $23 million loss from its consolidated operations, sending its share price down from $3 to a year-end low of $2.37. Bush, however, avoided the downturn in the company’s fortunes. Two months earlier, on June 22, 1990, he had unloaded 212,140 shares, or about two-thirds of his holdings, for $848,560.

                As a director of the company, Bush was required to promptly report the stock sale to the Securities and Exchange Commission. He did — eight months late. Bush later claimed he had indeed reported the transaction in a timely manner, but that somehow the paperwork had been lost. Whatever the case, the eight-month delay attracted the attention of SEC investigators. The timing of the transaction seemed too good to be true.

                As a member of Harken’s audit committee, Bush was completely familiar with the company’s finances and was aware that it was about to restructure its debt – a move that would immediately depress the price of its shares. In addition, he may have been alerted that the company was about to post a huge loss. In April 1991 the SEC launched an insider-trading investigation of Bush. The outcome of the probe raised more questions than it answered.

                When the investigation began, the chairman of the SEC was Richard Breeden, who had been appointed by President Bush. Before joining the SEC, Breeden had for several years been the President’s economic policy adviser. President Bush thanked Breeden by name in several speeches. Breeden’s office at the SEC was adorned with so many pictures of President and Mrs. Bush that a reporter for the New York Times observed, “George Bush is Breeden’s Mao.” Before going to the White House, Breeden had been a partner in Baker & Botts, the law firm started by the grandfather of James A. Baker III, President ‘s Secretary of State.

                The SEC’s general counsel at the time, who would be ultimately responsible for any litigation the commission would initiate, was James Doty. Doty had also worked at Baker & Botts, where he represented the younger Bush in business related to his stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team.
             In addition to collecting reams of documents, investigators for the SEC interviewed Harken’s lawyer as well as the broker who’d sold Bush’s stock. Then, in 1993, the agency dropped the investigation. William McLucas, the director of the SEC’s enforcement division, said “there was no case there.” But in a letter to George W. Bush announcing the agency’s decision, McLucas’s deputy, Bruce Hiler, wrote that the end of the probe “must in no way be construed as indicating that the party has been exonerated or that no action may ultimately result from the staff’s investigation.”

                Bush, who by then was running for governor of Texas, gave the letter his own spin. “The SEC fully investigated the stock deal,” he said in October 1994. “I was exonerated.” Since 1993, Breeden, Doty, and other lawyers at Baker & Botts have given George W. Bush $182,000.

One of the questions the SEC didn’t answer was who bought Bush’s stock.

                In his statement of intent to sell, which Bush also had to file with the SEC, he said he was putting his 212,140 shares on the open market. That was nearly twenty times the daily volume of stock that traded on average during June 1990; without a buyer willing to absorb such a large block of stock, the share price would have plummeted.

                Under questioning by SEC investigators, Ralph Smith, a Los Angeles broker with Sutro & Company, who handled the sale, said that he solicited the shares at the behest of an institutional investor whose name has never been released.

                There is considerable and convincing evidence that suggests that the mysterious institutional investor was Harvard University. The university is known to have increased its holdings in Harken at that time.

                In all of these disastrous financial dealings involving the grossly incompetent son of a President of the United States, one fact stands out with great clarity.

                George W. Bush is someone who lived off of the reputation of his father, had no sense of moral or financial integrity whatsoever and was the only one who benefited from the collapse of the various businesses he was able to persuade others to support.

                When the logical consequences of his cataclysmic ineptness became evident, George W. Bush was able to escape financial loss by selling his endangered stock and cheerfully allowing others to suffer the consequences.

                These thoroughly amoral and certainly dishonest dealings are by no means limited to a small handful of men but are certainly the norm, not the exception. And since men like the ones mentioned here have access to large sums of other people’s money, they always remain above the destruction of their cheerfully manipulated and piratical forays into the marketplace.

                While a legion of small stockholders and an even greater legion of unsuspecting employees are left holding a very empty bag, the Bushes of the world merely look for another succulent deal while their inferiors are forced to look for other employment where they can help enrich other paragons of corporate virtue.

                Let us now consider additional activities of America’s economic ruling classes.

`               There exists yet another close connection between bin Laden and the Bush family is a $12-billion private international investment firm known as the Carlyle Group. Although it has removed its web site since the Sept. 11 attacks, it is know that Carlyle directors include former Reagan Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, former Bush Secretary of State James Baker and former Reagan aide and GOP operative Richard Darman.

                The New York Times, in a 2001 article, reported that former President Bush was allowed to buy into Carlyle's investments, which involved at least 164 companies around the world.

                According to the Wall Street Journal of Sept. 28, 2001, "George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm."

                It has been confirmed by the senior Bush's chief of staff that Bush sent a thank you note to the bin Laden family after a social visit in early 2001.

                With such connections and his son as a sitting President of the United States, the senior Bush's Carlyle involvement was questioned by Larry Klayman, chairman and general counsel of Judicial Watch, who said, "Any foreign government or foreign investor trying to curry favor with the current Bush Administration is sure to throw business to the Carlyle Group. And with the former President Bush promoting the firm's investments abroad, foreign nationals could understandably confuse the Carlyle Group's interests with the interests of the United States government."

                 Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAR) noted that on Oct. 10, 2001 network executives representing ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and CNN were involved in a conference call with National Security Adviser and Council on Foreign Relations heavyweight Condoleeza Rice. The executives apparently agreed to limit how and what they broadcast regarding bin Laden or his Al Qaeda group. Bush people even tried unsuccessfully to have al Jazeera, called the "CNN of the Mideast,” broadcasting from Qatar mute its coverage of bin Laden.

                They were more successful with members of the United States Congress, when they threatened to cut off intelligence reports if they spoke offhand to the media. The next day, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, already on the record saying Americans "need to watch what they say," extended this constraint by contacting major newspapers asking that they not print full transcripts of bin Laden's interviews.

                According to a FAR news release, "The point is not that bin Laden or al Qaeda deserve 'equal time' on US news broadcasts, but that it is troubling for government to shape or influence news content.

                “When the White House insists that it's dangerous to report a news event ‘in its entirety’, alarm bells should go off for journalists and the American public alike."

In an interview on Sept. 28, according to the Pakistani newspaper Ummat, bin Laden said, "I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, not do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people.

                “Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and common people "

                In this interview, suppressed in the United States, bin Laden unsurprisingly blamed the attacks on Israel, claiming, "All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel (and) what had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya and Bosnia.

                Bin Laden went on to state, " We are not hostile to the United States. We are against the [US Government] system which makes other nations slaves to the United States or forces them to mortgage their political and economic freedom."

                .It’s common knowledge in intelligence circles that the Inter Services Intelligence Agency (Pakistan’s secret service) runs the entire country under the direct control of dictator General Pervez Musharraf. In turn, the CIA co-coordinated the activities of the ISI. This alliance gave birth to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the current war on terrorism. Osama bin Laden left Saudi Arabia in 1979 to fight the invading Soviets in Afghanistan. By 1984 he was running the front organization known as MAK, (Maktab al-Khidamar) which eventually was transformed into al-Qaeda, consisting of the more extreme members of the former group. During the war MAK was supplied by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Agency, ISI.

                The ISI was the CIA’s covert ally and conduit against Moscow’s occupation. Via the ISI the novice al-Qaeda were trained, armed and funded by the CIA. The new covert U.S. assistance began with an  increase in arms supplies — a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, as well as a “ceaseless stream” of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan’s ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels, bin Laden included. The Central Intelligence Agency, using Pakistan’s ISI, played a key role in training the Mujadeen.

                It was reported by the BBC  that the ISI aided bin Laden’s escape from Afghanistan at the end of 2001. Since the CIA are basically the administrative masters of the ISI, they mandated and approved bin Laden’s escape.

                 Furthermore, by direct order of President Bush, 5,000 members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban were rescued via cargo planes as Kunduz fell to the Northern Alliance in November 2001. Bush had ordered the United States Central Command to set up a special air corridor to help insure the safety of the Pakistani rescue flights from Kunduz to the northwest corner of Pakistan, about two hundred miles away.

It is important to note that these a preponderance of these rescued individuals were high level Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives who were then engaged in savage fighting against the United States. These secret airlifts gave these terrorists refuge primarily in Kashmir, the disputed border area between India and Pakistan and an irritant that could well lead to the outbreak of hostilities between the two countries.

                 The first incident that could have led to a nuclear war between India and Pakistan occurred on December 13th 2001, a suicide squad of five heavily armed Muslim terrorists drove past a barrier at the Indian Parliament, in New Delhi, and attacked the main building. Nine people were killed in the shoot-out. Would this have happened if the Bush administration hadn’t rescued 5,000 of these terrorists just three weeks previously?

                In January of 2001, the Moscow Times reported that British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a visit to India and Pakistan in an attempt to calm ethnic tensions between the two He was pushing the sale of a lucrative deal with arms merchant BAE Systems for 60 new jet fighters.

                The Russian newspaper stated:

                 “Blair’s minions are putting the squeeze on India to accept a $1.4 billion deal with arms merchant BAE Systems for 60 new jet fighters. This will no doubt have a very “calming influence” on the balance of power as the subcontinent teeters on the brink of nuclear war — the same kind of calming influence gasoline has on fire. Of course, if Blair can get those billion warbucks into BAE’s coffers, Master Georgie will be very pleased. For one of BAE’s business partners is — God, this is almost too easy! — our old friends the Carlyle Group. Faithful readers know that Daddy Bush — the former peddler of poison gas to Iraq — has long been feeding at the Carlyle trough, working his contacts with Saudi royalty, the bin Laden family, Asian dictators, South American junta honchos and other respectable characters to cement sweetheart deals for the Reagan-Bush retreads who skim the cream off Carlyle’s $13 billion nest egg.”

                (Source: BBC reports on these ongoing BAE-India negotiations in August 2001.)

CHAPTER 3

US Attack on Afghanistan planned before 9/11?

 

                  American officials stated in mid-July of 2001 that military action against Afghanistan would be launched by mid-October alerted former Pakistani Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik according to a July, 2001 report by BBC's George Arney

                At a UN-sponsored meeting concerning Afghanistan held for the sake of better security in Berlin, Naik was informed by U.S. spokesmen that unless bin Laden was handed over, America would take military action to either kill or capture both him and Taliban leader Mullah Omar as the initial step in installing a new government there.

                It should be noted, however, that American intervention in Afghanistan began years ago, at least six months prior to the Soviet invasion in December 1979.

                In a 1998 interview with former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in the French publication Le Nouvel Observateur, the significant portions of which never made it to the United States, he admitted that American activities in Afghanistan actually began six months prior to the Soviet action.

                Brzezinski said the Jimmy Carter administration began secretly funding opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul in July of 1979 with the full knowledge such action might provoke a Soviet invasion.

                Soviet leaders at that time argued that the invasion was necessary to thwart American aggression in Afghanistan.

                By 1984, with then-Vice President George H.W.Bush overseeing the Afghan situation, bin Laden was in charge of the Maktab al-Khidamir (MAK), which funneled money, arms and manpower from the outside world into the war against the Soviets.

                He soon helped form a mixed formation of Arabic troops from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps, which the CIA found easier to deal with than the Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan.

                Little noticed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks were reports that China had signed a pact with the Afghans and was quietly inducted into the controversial World Trade Organization, action which under normal circumstances would have drawn widespread protest.

                Pakistani General Pervez Musharraf, chairman of their joint chiefs and chief of the Pakistani Army Staff, visited China as President of Pakistan in 2002 at their request and discussed matters of mutual interest.

               

 

The Israeli Connection

 

                In the history of Israeli espionage in and against the United States, the case of Jonathan Pollard was certainly the most heinous. Stanford graduate Pollard, a civilian U.S. naval intelligence analyst, provided Israeli intelligence with an estimated 800,000 pages of highly classified U.S. intelligence information. An FBI report indicates that Pollard stole more secret documents than any other American traitor. Among other things, Pollard stole a 10 volume guide to the means by which the NSA intercepted foreign intelligence messages, a thick computer file of U.S. agent reports from foreign countries that easily pin-pointed the agent and their locale. Pollard also supplied his handlers many highly classified U.S. codes.  The Israelis in turn immediately passed this stolen information to the Soviets, thereby compromising American intelligence (CIA and military) agents in the field – a significant number of whom were captured and killed as a result.

                Israel at first denied, and then, faced with overwhelming evidence, admitted, (after he was arrested in 1985, convicted and sentenced to life in prison,) that they were well aware of Pollard’s connections to the Mossad and an Israeli Air Force intelligence unit working out of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

                The case created severe strains in American-Israeli relations, and is a source of ongoing rage for many American Jews, who believe that since Pollard was spying for Israel, he had an imperative obligation to do this and that his life sentence was unduly harsh.

                Many Jewish groups in the United States, acting in concert with high level Israeli officials have constantly importuned American Presidents to pardon Pollard and permit him to emigrate to Israel where he has been promised a large sum of cash and a seat in the Israeli Knesset.

                Pollard also offered top secret U.S. government documents to other countries besides Israel (New York Times, January 16, 1999.)

                Any attempt to understand the official U.S. response to any accusations of Israeli espionage in the United States as well as to comprehend the media response must take into account both the smoke screen that states blow over incidents that could jeopardize their strategic alliances, and America’s unique and complex relationship with Israel. The Jewish state is a close if problematic ally with whom the United States enjoys a “special relationship” unlike that maintained with any other nation in the world.

But U.S. and Israeli interests do not always coincide, and spying has always been deemed to cross a line, to represent a fundamental violation of trust. According to intelligence sources, the United States might perhaps secretly tolerate some Israeli spying on U.S. soil if the American government decided that it was in our interest, such as observation and infiltration of pro-Palestine Arab groups legally resident in the United States (although it could never be acknowledged), but certain types of spying will simply not be accepted by the United States, whether the spying is carried out by Israel or anyone else.

                If England spied on the United States, as she aggressively did for years, and this was discovered, American officials would, and did, conceal it. In the case of Israel, there are far stronger reasons to hide any unseemly violations of the “special” relationship.

The powerful pro-Israel political constituencies in Congress; pro-Israel lobbies; the Bush administration’s strong support for Israel, and its strategic and political interest in maintaining close ties with the Jewish state as a partner in the “war against terror”; the devastating consequences for U.S.-Israeli relations if it was suspected that Israeli agents might have known about the Sept. 11 attack — all these factors explain why the U.S. government might publicly downplay any public accusation of Israeli espionage against the United States and forcefully conceal any investigation that might be expected to produce results unacceptable to the Israel lobby and the American Jewish community that firmly supports it.

                The pro-Israel lobby is an enormous and very powerful force in American politics; the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is the No. 1 foreign-policy lobby in Washington and the fourth most powerful lobby in Washington, according to Fortune Magazine. Other powerful and influential pro-Israel groups include the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).

                Michael Lind, a senior fellow of the New America Foundation and a former executive editor of the National Interest, has called the Israel lobby “an ethnic donor machine” that “distorts U.S. foreign policy” in the Middle East. Among foreign service officers, law enforcement and the military, there is an impression, says Lind, that you can’t mess with Israel without suffering direct and indirect smears, such as being labeled an Arabist. Lind, who himself has been virulently attacked as an anti-Semite for his forthrightness on the subject, acknowledges that the Israel lobby is no different from any other — just more effective. “This is what all lobbies do,” Lind observes. “If you criticize the AARP, you hate old people and you want them to starve to death. The Israel lobby is just one part of the lobby problem.”

                The U.S. Congress is extremely receptive to the needs of the State of Israel but wide spread congressional support is rooted in more than just a long-term relationship. It is traced to the power of the collective Jewish (or pro-Israeli) lobby, a well-organized, well-funded, extremely active, and extraordinarily connected group, according to political analysts.

“They are very savvy and sophisticated,” said Richard Semiatin, a political science professor at American University. “They are extremely knowledgeable and some of the best lobbyists in the country when they get into congressional offices.”

                Indeed, the latest crisis in the Middle East, which has been punctuated by 20 months of Palestinian uprisings that resulted in dozens of homicide bombings and the subsequent ongoing occupation of disputed Palestinian territory, has only energized this Washington lobby. The group has been hosting near-daily organizational conferences, press events, extensive advertising campaigns, and rallies — all demanding that Arafat get control of his militant supporters and reform his corrupt Parliament or resign his post.

                “It’s a little like the special forces teams who go in to fight in Afghanistan. They’re on the ground, calling in bombers. The planes overhead are the pro-Israeli supporters across the country,” who donate money to campaigns and send letters to Washington, said former Clinton political adviser Dick Morris. “It’s a very effective model and basically unequaled in the Congress.”

                “The key to AIPAC’s success is support for the only Western democracy in the Middle East,” said Josh Block, spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which boasts over 65,000 Jewish and non-Jewish members. “The members support and believe that Israel is our ally on the frontline against terrorism in the Middle East. When you are lobbying on an issue that is so clearly the right thing to do, your effectiveness is high.”

                Granted, other groups, including the National Rifle Association, the Cuban American National Foundation and the American Trial Lawyers Association, all command large audiences and ready support in the aggressive environment of Washington.

But AIPAC, along with the American Jewish Committee, the American Defense League, the United Jewish Communities, the National Jewish Democratic Council, and the Republican Jewish Coalition, all of whom conduct their own grassroots campaigns, have surpassed the partisan and political bickering that often marks policy on guns, Cuba and tort law.

                Just a sample of their influence, a number of very pro-Israeli resolutions, which included $200 million for Israeli defense activities, passed the House 352-21 and the Senate 94-2.

During the height of the spring Palestinian crisis, Israeli groups were able to rally an estimated 100,000 people to Capitol Hill, that also included several political heavyweights, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, New York Governor George Pataki and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Subsequently, congressional leaders like Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., delivered rousing speeches to AIPAC’s annual conference, the most powerful lobbying force for the Jewish-American community. DeLay’s speech was followed by instructions by Israeli lobbyists to blanket Capitol Hill with lobbying teams.

                “These groups have taken advantage of the political system to organize themselves to petition the government and they have a reputation of success not only because of their influence but because our presidents have seen their cause in the public interest,” said John Samples, a political analyst with the Cato Institute. “It gives you the notion that there is a broad coalition of people who see it as part of the national interest to support Israel very strongly.”

                “They do have a tremendous amount of clout, but I think it starts with the fact that there is an enormous amount of support for their point of view in Washington,” said political analyst Rich Galen, “They are feeding into a willing audience.”

                But not everyone is buying into the hype.

                “It is truly disturbing to see American elected officials falling over themselves in an unseemly attempt to ‘pledge allegiance’ to a foreign government and its domestic lobby,” complained the Council on American-Islamic Relations in a recent statement.

                “There are Jewish people who are opposed to Israeli policies, but they don’t get a hearing in the Congress. The pro-Israel lobby gets all the attention,” said Faiz Rehmanen, communications director for the American Muslim Council in Washington.

                “As an American, I see it as a problem. [Congressmen] aren’t addressing our interests, they are addressing the interests of a critical lobby,” he added.

                Indeed, the number of Jews in the United States Congress well surpasses the population as a whole. Seven percent of members are Jewish, while the Jewish-American population totals 2.2 percent: about 6 million people in a nation of 280 million.

                But Jewish-Americans accounted for 4 percent of total voter turnout in the 2000 elections, totaled close to 3 percent of swing voters in several key states such as Florida, New York and Illinois and their fund-raising ability is nearly unmatched, say experts.

                “It’s a big fund-raising community filled with people who are willing to give large sums of money to political parties and candidates,” said Michael Barone, author of The New Americans. “It’s money, but it is also skill, it’s the strength of their arguments.”

                In 2001, AIPAC spent $1.1 million in lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill, which Block said is typical. None of that money went directly to political campaigns. Neither does the AIPAC endorse specific candidates.

                 According to the Center for Responsive Politics, pro-Israeli donors, including PACs and individuals, gave $28.6 million to Democrats and $12.7 million to Republicans. About $17.5 million came from PACs and $24 million from individuals.

                By comparison, Arab-American and Muslim PAC contributions totaled $296,830 since 1990, with Democrats receiving $206,908 of that money.

                “The Jewish lobby is extremely influential in Washington,” said Steven Weiss, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. “If you are a candidate and you get the pro-Israel label from AIPAC, the money will start coming in from contributors all over the country.”  

                “When you have a core constituency that is so passionate about what they believe in, they are likely to open their pocketbooks,” stated Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

The Mossad in America

                After Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Muslim Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem resulted in widespread violence by Palestinians, world opinion began to shift away from uncritical support of Israel.

                It has been reported that the Bush Administration was beginning to seriously consider support for a separate Palestinian state. Israel's powerful and effective intelligence agency, the Mossad, is not beyond suspicion in the 9/11 business according to the US Army's School of Advanced Military Studies. The Washington Times on Sept.10, just 24 hours before the attacks, ran an article quoting officers of the school as describing the Mossad as "Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."

                It is generally known that the Mossad has penetrated every Arab and Muslim organization and would have had little problem in finding any number of fanatics to carry out a suicide mission in the belief they were serving Allah. Indeed, recent news reports contended that not all of the hijackers knew their mission would end in death

                One group of Israeli agents, uncovered in 2001 by Federal investigators in North Carolina, has been suspected of maintaining an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs whom the United States counterintelligence was also investigating for links to terrorism.

                Numerous classified documents released under Freedom of Information mandates, indicate that even prior to Sept. 11, as many as 140 other Israelis had been detained or arrested in a massive investigation into suspected, and in a significant number of cases, proven, espionage by Israelis in the United States.

                Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on American domestic targets, a joint intelligence working group had compiled evidence on Israeli espionage since the mid ’90s. These documents detail hundreds of incidents in cities and towns across the country that investigators say, “may well be an organized intelligence gathering activity.”

                One part of this investigation focuses on Israelis who claimed that they were art students from the University of Jerusalem and Bazala Academy. (See the section on Israeli ‘art students”)They repeatedly made contact with U.S. government personnel, the report says, by saying they wanted to sell cheap art or handiwork.

            Justice Department documents say they, “targeted and penetrated military bases.” The targets include the DEA, FBI and dozens of government facilities, and even secret offices and private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel. The majority of those Israeli citizens interrogated, “stated they served in Israeli military intelligence, electronic surveillance intercept and/or explosive ordinance units.”

                 Government investigators remain tight-lipped about a Department of Justice (DOJ) probe of possible profiteering by terrorists with advance knowledge of the attack.  Considering the volatility of the issue, it is not surprising that almost no one in officialdom wants to go on the record for a story like the art students. “In government circles,” as Insight’s Rodriguez put it, “anything that has to do with Israel is always a hot topic, a third rail — deadly. No one wants to touch it.” Intelligence officers say that to publicly air suspicions of Israeli wrongdoing was tantamount to “career suicide.” And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in one of its bloodiest and most polarizing phases, has only exacerbated sensitivities.

                U.S. investigators now believe that once again they have uncovered a “significant number” of Israelis and Israeli informants extensively engaged in domestic espionage against the U.S. Of even greater concern to U.S. domestic intelligence agencies is the strong belief by these investigators that many of these Israeli spies in the United States in all probability had specific foreknowledge of the September 11 attack on American buildings and people in Washington and New York City.

                 It is absolutely certain that the Mossad, Israeli foreign intelligence, had penetrated a number of Arab terrorist organizations, both in Europe and the United States. A highly placed American investigator said there are “tie-ins” between Arab extremist groups and Israeli intelligence. This information is also known to intelligence agencies in both Germany and France. When the Federal spokesman was asked for details, he flatly refused to respond, stating; “evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is highly classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It is considered classified information.”

                Some of the same pressures that keep government officials from criticizing Israel may also explain why the media has failed to pursue the art student enigma. Media outlets that run stories even mildly critical of Israel often find themselves targeted by organized campaigns, including form-letter e-mails, the cancellation of subscriptions, and denunciations of the organization and its reporters and editors as being anti-Semitic.

                 Given the logistics of the attack; the number of alleged participants involved, the at least twenty months of planning and the extensive networking of the terrorists in both Europe and North America, it is unbelievable that the highly proficient Mossad could not have uncovered significant information concerning the nature and time of the coordinated attack.

                American officials have stated in clandestinely released or leaked documents that are highly classified and greatly restricted as to distribution, that it is strongly believed that the only benefactor of these devastating attacks on American property was the state of Israel.

                Under the direction of Israeli Prime Minister Arial Sharon, the Israeli military forces, the IDF, have engaged in punitive actions against Arab civilians; that have horrified the rest of the world and brought against his government strong and persistent criticism from all members of the European Union.

                There was growing unhappiness in the United States as well; and it appears that the government of Israel believed that a brutal attack by persons identified with Arab extremist movements against American targets would so inflame American public opinion as to facilitate further and even more brutal IDF actions against the Palestinians.

                It has been the expressed view of Israeli extremists, that a “Greater Israel” based on the ancient state of Judea must be created and that all non-Jews, to include Arabs and Christians, should either be permanently expelled from this territory or physically destroyed.

                In the event, it transpired that the American government decided against supporting such acts of destruction. This reluctance on the part of an American Administration that was determendly pro-Israel, stemmed from the recognition that the Arab world controlled the majority of the world’s supply of oil. As the United States has to import about half of its oil requirements, any disruption of the oil flow from Arab countries was to be strongly avoided.

                 It has been clearly established that during the term of President George H.W. Bush, (once head of the CIA and admittedly very friendly towards Israel) the Israeli Mossad, or foreign intelligence agency, had gained permission to send approximately 50 of their agents to the United States in order to “observe possible Arab terrorist groups” that might be operating in the relative safety of this country. These Mossad agents worked through the various Israeli diplomatic establishments as well as the Israeli Trade Commission office in New York and such Jewish organizations as the Anti Defamation League.

                These agents, who were known to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were supposed to merely observe possible Arab terrorist groups and were required to pass on any information they discovered on suspect Arab individuals and groups to the FBI. Highly confidential reports indicate that the Mossad agents did not do so and further, were strongly suspected of using their Presidential mandate to carry out very extensive espionage against the United States.

                Top secret military hardware was a well-known target and Mossad agents had a very large stable of informants in various sensitive military and governmental agencies, the great bulk of whom were Jewish and who supplied information to the Mossad as what they conceived of as was their “sacred duty” to the state of Israel.

                These documents conclude: “Israel possesses the resources and technical capability to achieve its collection objectives.”

                A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Washington issued a routine denial saying that any suggestion that Israelis are spying in or on the U.S. is “simply not true.”

                 A very important issue concerns an Israeli-based private communications company, Amdocs for whom a half-dozen of the 60 detained suspects worked. American investigators fear information generated by this firm may have fallen into the wrong hands and had the effect of impeded the Sept. 11 terror inquiry..

                American terrorist investigators fear certain suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks may have managed to stay ahead of them, because of persons knowing who and when investigators were calling on the telephone. This is accomplished by obtaining and analyzing data that is generated every time someone in the U.S. makes a telephone call.

                Here is how the system works. Most directory assistance calls, and virtually all call records and billing inside the U.S. are done for the telephone companies by Amdocs Ltd., an Israeli-based private telecommunications company.

                Amdocs has had contracts with the 25 biggest telephone companies in America, and even more worldwide. The White House and other secure government phone lines are protected, but it is virtually impossible for any American to make a call on any American phone without generating an Amdocs record of it.

                In recent years, the FBI and other government agencies have investigated Amdocs more than once. The firm has repeatedly and adamantly denied any security breaches or wrongdoing. In 1999, the super secret National Security Agency, headquartered in Ft. George Meade in northern Maryland, issued what is called a Top Secret Sensitive Compartmentalized Information report, TS/SCI, warning that records of calls in the United States were getting into foreign hands Israel, in particular.

                Investigators do not believe such calls have been listened to, but the data about who is calling whom and when is extremely valuable in and of itself. An internal Amdocs memo to senior company executives suggests just how Amdocs generated call records could be used. “Widespread data mining techniques and algorithms…combining both the properties of the customer (e.g., credit rating) and properties of the specific ‘behavior….’” Specific behavior in this context refers to whom the targeted customers are calling.

                The Amdocs memo says the system should be publically advertised as “helping to prevent telephone fraud.” However, U.S. counterintelligence analysts say it could, and unquestionably was, also be used to spy via the records of the American telephone system. The N.S.A has held numerous classified conferences to warn the F.B.I. and C.I.A. how Amdocs records could be used.    

                At one classified NSA briefing, a diagram by the Argonne National Laboratory was used to show that if phone records are not completely secure, major security breaches are more than possible.

                Another NSA briefing document said, “It has become increasingly apparent that systems and networks are vulnerable…Such crimes always involve unauthorized persons, or persons who exceed their authorization…citing on exploitable vulnerabilities.”

                Those vulnerabilities are growing, because according to another briefing, the U.S. relies too much on foreign companies like Amdocs for high-tech equipment and software. “Many factors have led to increased dependence on code developed overseas…. We buy rather than train or develop solutions.”

                U.S. intelligence does not officially believe the Israeli government is involved in a misuse of information, and Amdocs insists that its data is secure. What U.S. government officials are worried about, however, is the possibility that Amdocs data could get into the wrong hands, particularly organized crime. And that would not be the first time that such a thing has happened. 

                In a 1997 drug trafficking case in Los Angeles, telephone information, specifically of the type that Amdocs collects, was used to “completely compromise the communications of the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEA and the LAPD.”

                There has been considerable but very quiet concern about the 60 Israelis who were detained in the anti-terror investigation, and the suspicion that some investigators have that they may have picked up information on the 9/11 attacks ahead of time and not passed it on.

                There exists a classified Justice Department report stating that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, did indeed send representatives to the U.S. to warn, just before 9/11, that a major terrorist attack was imminent. How does that leave room for the lack of a warning?

                What investigators have stated is that that warning from the Mossad was nonspecific and extremely vague and general, and they believe that it may have had something to do with the Israeli desire to protect what are called “sources and methods” in the intelligence community while at the same time attempting to convince American authorities that they were being cooperative and friendly. There is very substantive and documented evidence that those sources and methods were, and still are, taking place in the United States.

                The question arose in the Select Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill, chaired by former CIA agent, Porter Goss. Concern was expressed concerning this Mossad spying issue but nothing came of this and the matter was very quickly, and quietly, shelved

                There exists an official U.S. domestic intelligence listing of known Mossad agents and a much larger one listing Mossad informants in the United States. The latter is, perhaps, the best indicator of the degree and extent that this official Israeli organ has penetrated American security, business and military organizations. Its publication would certainly create havoc and would very adversely impact on American/Israeli diplomatic and military relations.

                Reports indicate that such established agencies as the Anti Defamation League, several identified national newspapers and one major television network also harbor and assist a significant number of active Mossad agents engaged in espionage activities.

                The concern about telephone security extends to another company, founded in Israel, that provides the technology used by the U.S. government for electronic eavesdropping. The company is Comverse Infosys, a subsidiary of an Israeli-run private telecommunications firm, with offices throughout the U.S. This company has provided wiretapping equipment for law enforcement. Investigative reports also indicate that these offices have been and are being used as bases for intelligence operations directed against the United States via the Mossad agents working in this country.

                Israeli wiretapping works in the following way in the U.S.:

                Every time a call is made in America, it passes through the nation’s elaborate network of switchers and routers run by the phone companies. Custom computers and software, made by companies like Comverse, are tied into that network to intercept, record and store the wiretapped calls, and at the same time transmit them to investigators.

                The manufacturers have continuing access to the computers so they can service them and keep them free of technical errors. This process was authorized by the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Senior government officials have reluctantly acknowledged that while CALEA made officially authorized, and unauthorized, wiretapping much easier for Federal authorities, it has led to a system that is seriously vulnerable to compromise, and may have undermined the whole wiretapping system.

                Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned on October 18, 2001, in a hand-delivered letter from 15 local, state and federal law enforcement officials, that “law enforcement’s current electronic surveillance capabilities are less effective today than they were at the time CALEA was enacted.”

                Congress insists the equipment it permits to be installed is secure. But the complaint about this system is that the wiretap computer programs made by Comverse have, in effect, a back door through which wiretaps themselves can be intercepted by unauthorized parties.

                In this case, the chief unauthorized party is the Israeli Mossad and through them, the government and commercial interests of Israel itself.

                Adding to the suspicions is the fact that in Israel, Comverse works closely with the Israeli government, and under special programs and gets reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its research and development costs by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. But investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all privately stated that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying through Comverse is considered career suicide because of the enormous political and political power wielded by the Israeli lobby, the extremely pro-Israeli American television and print media and many Jewish financial organizations in the United States.

                And sources say that while various F.B.I. inquiries into Comverse have been conducted over the years, they have been halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for leaks. A 1999 F.C.C. document indicates several government agencies expressed deep concerns that too many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap system. The FBI’s office in Chantilly, Virginia that actually oversees the CALEA wiretapping program, has been among the most concerned about the Israeli ongoing secure communications  threat.

                It is the FBI’s office in Quantico, Virginia, that has jurisdiction over awarding contracts and buying intercept equipment. And for years, it has awarded the majority of the business to Comverse. A handful of former U.S. law enforcement officials involved in awarding Comverse lucrative U.S. government contracts over the years now work for the Israeli-based company.

                Numerous sources say some of those individuals were asked to leave government service under what knowledgeable sources call “troublesome circumstances” that still remain under administrative review within the Justice Department.

                And what concerns investigators most particularly in New York City’s counter terrorism investigation of the World Trade Center attack, is that in a number of cases, suspects they had sought to wiretap and survey immediately changed their telecommunications processes. This began as soon as those supposedly secret wiretaps went into place

                There are growing and very serious concerns in a very significant number of top-level American intelligence and counterintelligence entities. Many of these agencies have begun compiling evidence, and instigating a very highly classified investigation, into the very strong probability that the Israeli government is directly involved in this matter and has been from the outset. 

                Speaking confidentially, top U.S. intelligence agencies indicate that “the last thing needed is another Pollard scandal.”

                In the months following the 9/11 attacks, Federal officials arrested or detained nearly 200 Israeli citizens suspected of belonging to an “organized intelligence-gathering operation.” The Bush administration has deported most of those arrested after Sept. 11, although some are in custody under the new anti-terrorism law. Some of these detainees are being investigated for their possible penetration of known Arab terrorist groups located in the United States, Canada and Europe and through this, having gained specific knowledge of the time and location of the September 11 attacks.

                It has been established that Amdocs generated billing data that could be used for intelligence purpose, and a recent Justice Department report describes concerns that the federal government’s own wiretapping system may be vulnerable.

                In Los Angeles, in 1997, a major local, state and federal drug investigation suddenly collapsed. The suspects: Israeli organized crime organizations, composed mostly of Russian Jews, with ongoing operations in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, Canada, Israel and Egypt.

                The allegations: cocaine and ecstasy trafficking, and sophisticated white-collar credit card and computer fraud. . A DEA report under date of December 18 stated that there existed serious security breaches in DEA telecommunications by unauthorized “foreign nationals” — and cites an Israeli-owned firm with which the DEA contracted for wiretap equipment .

                The problem: according to classified law enforcement documents, is that the Israeli-based gangsters had the Federal and State law enforcement beepers, cell phones, even home phones under constant surveillance. Some identified Israeli gangsters, who did get caught, readily admitted to having hundreds of confidential law enforcement telephone and beeper numbers and that they had been using them to avoid arrest.      

                “This compromised law enforcement communications between LAPD detectives and other assigned law enforcement officers working various aspects of the case. The Israeli-based criminal organization discovered communications between organized crime intelligence division detectives, the FBI and the Secret Service.”

                Shock spread from the DEA to the FBI in Washington, and then the CIA. An investigation of the problem, according to law enforcement documents, concluded, “The (criminal) organization has apparent extensive access to database systems used to identify pertinent personal and biographical information.”[Official LAPD intelligence report.]

                . Asked about another sprawling investigation and the detention of 60 Israeli since Sept. 11, the Bush administration treated the questions with circumspection.

                Beyond the those Israelis’ apprehended or detained, (and many deported), since Sept. 11, another group of 140 Israeli individuals were arrested and detained following the attacks in New York and Washington in what government documents describe as “an organized intelligence gathering operation,” designed to “penetrate government facilities.” Most of those individuals said they had served in the Israeli military forces, which is compulsory in Israel.

                But the majority of them also had intelligence expertise, and either worked for Amdocs or other companies in Israel that specialize in wiretapping.

                The Israeli embassy officially denied the charges of an Israeli espionage ring operating in and against the United States. “We are saying what we’ve been saying for months,” spokesman Mark Reguev stated officially: “No American official or intelligence agency has complained to us about this. The story is nonsense. Israel does not spy on the United States.” These denials are viewed by official Washington as being in the same category as the alleged “discovery” of Palestinian documents highly detrimental to the Palestinian cause.

                The general attitude (and the private beliefs) of American officials is that Israel is not truthful and is highly manipulative but may not under any circumstances be challenged because of the immense political power developed in Washington by the pro-Israel lobby, a lobby that is heavily subsidized by pro-Israel businesses and individuals in the United States.

                When this matter surfaced there was genuine and very serious concern at the FBI, the DEA and the INS.

                Further, Israeli officials have expressed considerable concern about disclosure of their activities in the United States, fearing that a full disclosure of this would “greatly enhance a strong, anti-Semitic attitude now prevalent in a large percentage of the American population as a direct result of strong Israeli countermeasures in Arab Palestinian areas.”

                At the DEA and the FBI a variety of administration reviews are currently under way, in addition to the investigation of the Israeli espionage. These agencies wish to discover how it is that any knowledge of this extensive Israeli espionage was allowed to come to public notice. At the same time, these agencies at the same time practice extraordinary caution because of the explosive nature, and political ramifications of the story itself.

                In spite of this official caution, nevertheless a significant number of very important documents concerning Israeli espionage against the United States have been, and are being, circulated in closed circles of highly concerned American officials, legislators and civic leaders.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon authorized the leak of sensitive documents which reveal that America’s spy agencies were warned about a terrorist strike weeks before September 11. That controversial move has now directly embroiled President George Bush in the ‘how-much-did-he-know?’ debate over the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

                  Sharon’s reaction was a calculated response to growing U.S. concern that the Mossad had been running spy operations within the United States and also reveals a split in the “special relationship” between the two leaders.

                 Mossad chiefs insist the Israeli spy agency was tracking Osama Bin-Laden’s terrorists in America before September 11 and that that the information was passed on to the CIA on five separate occasions before the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. As late as August 24, less than two weeks before the attacks, a Mossad warning, apparently confirmed by German intelligence, BND, said that “terrorists plan to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.”

                The warning alert was passed to the CIA.

                The warning was also passed by the Mossad to Britain’s MI6. That agency made its own checks and also informed the CIA. Frustrated by its inability to alert the CIA to an impending attack, Mossad arranged on September 1, according to Tel Aviv sources on September 23, 2001, for Russian intelligence to warn Washington “in the strongest possible terms of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings.” Mossad’s fury at the failure of the US intelligence community to act has been compounded by the revelation that the Bush administration had ordered the FBI only a week before the September attacks, to curtail investigations on two of Osama bin-Laden’s close relatives living in the state of Virginia at the time.

                 Sharon’s decision to allow the story of Bush’s prior knowledge of the attack to be leaked came at a time when Israel was smarting over what Sharon saw as Bush as pressuring the Jewish state into an accommodation with Arafat.

                Bush’s initial feelers in this direction were quickly halted by pressure from the Israeli lobby.

                The feeling in Tel Aviv was that Bush’s much hyped war on terrorism did not fit into the aggressive policy Israel wants to pursue.

                Sharon had already suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of his archrival, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as the central committee of their Likud Party ruled out the establishment of a Palestinian state.

                The party’s decision, formalized in a resolution backed by Netanyahu, directly contradicted Sharon’s own stated acceptance of a Palestinian state as the eventual conclusion of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. It came as Sharon faced mounting domestic and international pressure to find a way to stop more than 20 months of deliberate confrontation with militant Palestinians and launch talks with them.

                 According to similar documents shown to the Sunday Express in October of 2001, Mossad was running a round-the-clock surveillance operation on some of the September 11 hijackers.

                The details, contained in classified papers, reveal that a senior Mossad agent tipped off his counterpart in America’s Central Intelligence Agency that a massive terrorist hit was being planned in the US. A handful of the Israeli spies had infiltrated the al-Qaeda organization while a staggering number of others, posing as overseas art students, launched massive undercover operations throughout America.

Other documents leaked to the Sunday Express from several intelligence agencies including the Drug Enforcement Agency show that two Mossad cells of six Egyptian and Yemeni-born Jews, trained at a secret base in Israel’s Negev Desert on how to penetrate Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.

                One team flew to Amsterdam and were under the control of Mossad’s Europe Station. This is based at Schipol Airport within the El Al complex. They later made contact in Hamburg with Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on September 11.

                The second group flew directly to New York. From there they traveled south to Florida and infiltrated the Bin laden organization. In August last year, the Mossad team in Europe flew with some of the Hamburg terrorists into Boston, a month before the attack on the twin towers.

By then the Mossad team had established an attack on the US was imminent. It reported this to its Tel Aviv controller through the Israeli Embassy in Washington using a system of secure communications. In early September Mossad Chief Efraim Halevy sent a warning to the CIA of the possibility of such an attack. [Sunday Express, October 15, 2001]

This warning was noted and acknowledged.

                CIA chief George Tenet is understood to have described it as “too non-specific.” The FBI was also informed. Halevy sent a second alert to the CIA that reached Washington on or around September 7.

A spokesman for the FBI refused to discuss specific details of the Mossad operation but said: “There are Congressional hearings with regard to possible intelligence failures arising from September 11. We can’t verify your information because it is part of an ongoing investigation.”

Neither the DEA or the CIA would comment on the record, but a senior US intelligence source said: “Anyone can be wise after the event but it was extremely difficult to act on a non specific threat given in a couple of tips from Israeli intelligence. It would be interesting to know if they could have been more specific with their information. ”Their surveillance teams must have observed Atta and his accomplices going to flying schools. I guess we might never know the real truth.”

CHAPTER 4

Stock Market Manipulations prior to September 11

                Between August 26 and September 11, 2001, a group of speculators, identified by the American Securities and Exchange Commission as Israeli citizens, sold “short” a list of 38 stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as a result of the pending attacks. These speculators operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt, Germany, stock exchanges and their profits were specifically stated to be “in the millions of dollars.”

                Short selling of stocks involves the opportunity to gain large profits by passing shares to a friendly third party, then buying them back when the price falls. Historically, if this precedes a traumatic event, it is an indication of foreknowledge. It is widely known that the CIA uses the Promis software to routinely monitor stock trades as a possible warning sign of a terrorist attack or suspicious economic behavior. A week after the Sept.11 attacks, the London Times reported that the CIA had asked regulators for the Financial Services Authority in London to investigate the suspicious sales of millions of shares of stock just prior to the terrorist acts. It was hoped the business paper trail might lead to the terrorists.  

.Lynne Howard, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), stated that information about who made the trades was available immediately. “We would have been aware of any unusual activity right away. It would have been triggered by any unusual volume. There is an automated system called ‘blue sheeting,’ or the CBOE Market Surveillance System, that everyone in the business knows about. It provides information on the trades – the name and even the Social Security number on an account – and these surveillance systems are set up specifically to look into insider trading. The system would look at the volume, and then a real person would take over and review it, going back in time and looking at other unusual activity.” 

                Howard continued, “The system is so smart that even if there is a news event that triggers a market event it can go back in time, and even the parameters can be changed depending on what is being looked at. It’s a very clever system and it is instantaneous. Even with the system, though, we have very experienced and savvy staff in our market-regulations area who are always looking for things that might be unusual. They’re trained to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Even if it’s offshore, it might take a little longer, but all offshore accounts have to go through U.S. member firms – members of the CBOE – and it is easily and quickly identifiable who made the trades. The member firm who made the trades has to have identifiable information about the client under the ‘Know Your Customer’ regulations (and we share all information with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)”

                Given all of this, at a minimum the CBOE and government regulators who are conducting the secret investigations have known for some time who made the options puts on a total of 38 stocks that might reasonably be anticipated to have a sharp drop in value because of an attack similar to the 9/11 episode. The silence from the investigating camps could mean several things: Either terrorists are responsible for the puts on the listed stocks or others besides terrorists had foreknowledge of the attack and used this knowledge to reap a nice financial harvest from the tragedy.

                Adam Hamilton of Zeal LLC, a North Dakota-based private consulting company that publishes research on markets worldwide, stated that “I heard that $22 million in profits was made on these put options…”

                Federal investigators are continuing to be so closed-mouthed about these stock trades, and it is clear that a much wider net has been cast, apparently looking for bigger international fish involved in dubious financial activity relating to the 9/11 attacks on the world stock markets.

                Just a month after the attacks the SEC sent out a list of 38 stocks to various securities firms around the world looking for information. The list includes stocks of American, United, Continental, Northwest, Southwest and US Airways airlines, as well as Martin, Boeing, Lockheed the American International Group, AIG, Cigna, CAN Financial, John Hancock, MetLife, General Motors, Raytheon, W.R. Grace, Lone Star Technologies, American Express, the Bank of New York, Bank One, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns.

The Times said market regulators in Germany, Japan and the US all had received information concerning the short selling of insurance, airlines and arms companies stock, all of which fell sharply in the wake of the attacks.

                City of London broker and analyst Richard Crossley noted that someone sold shares in unusually large quantities beginning three weeks before the assault on the WTC and Pentagon.

                He said he took this as evidence that someone had insider foreknowledge of the attacks.

                "What is more awful than he should aim a stiletto blow at the heart of Western financial markets?" he added. "But to profit from it? Words fail me."

                The US Government also admitted it was investigating short selling, which evinced a compellingly strong foreknowledge of the coming Arab attack.

                There was unusually heavy trading in airline and insurance stocks several days before Sept.11, which essentially bet on a drop in the worth of the stocks.

                It was reported by the Interdisciplinary Center, a counter-terrorism think tank involving former Israeli intelligence officers, that insiders made nearly $16 million profit by short selling shares in American and United Airlines, the two airlines that suffered hijacking, and the investment firm of Morgan Stanley, which occupied 22 floors of the WTC.

                Apparently none of the suspicious transactions could be traced to bin Laden because this news item quietly dropped from sight, leaving many people wondering if it tracked back to American firms or intelligence agencies.

                Most of these transactions were handled primarily by Deutsche Bank-A.B.Brown, a firm which until 1998 was chaired by A. B."Buzzy" Krongard, who later became executive director of the CIA.

                More serious was an article in the Sept. 28, 2001 edition of the Washington Post stating that officials with the instant messaging firm of Odigo in New York confirmed that two employees in Israel received text messages warning of an attack on the WTC two hours before the planes crashed into the buildings!

                The firm's vice president of sales and marketing, Alex Diamandis said it was possible that the warning was sent to other Odigo members, but they had not received any reports of such.

                The day after, the Jerusalem Post claimed two Israelis died on the hijacked airplanes and that 4,000 were missing at the WTC.

                A week later, a Beirut television station reported that 4,000 Israeli employees of the WTC were absent the day of the attack.

                This information spread across the Internet but was quickly branded a hoax.

                On Sept. 19, 2001, the Washington Post reported about 113 Israelis were missing at the WTC and the next day, President Bush noted more than 130 Israelis were victims.

                Finally, on Sept. 22, 2001, the New York Times stated "There were, in fact, only three Israelis who had been confirmed as dead: two on the planes and another who had been visiting the towers on business and who was identified and buried."

                 Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a clandestine but official effort to resolve the market manipulations There has been a great deal of talk about the insider trading of American stocks by certain Israeli groups both in Canada and Germany between August 26 and the Sept.11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

                Government investigators have maintained a diplomatic silence about a Department of Justice (DOJ) probe of possible profiteering by interested parties with advance knowledge of the attack.

                On Sept. 6, 2001, the Thursday before the tragedy, 2,075 put options were made on United Airlines and on Sept. 10, the day before the attacks, 2,282 put options were recorded for American Airlines. Given the prices at the time, this could have yielded speculators between $2 million and $4 million in profit.

                  The matter still is under investigation and none of the government investigating bodies -including the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and DOJ -are speaking to reporters about insider trading. Even so, suspicion of insider trading to profit from the Sept. 11 attacks is not limited to U.S. regulators. Investigations were initiated in a number of places including Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Spain. As in the United States, all are treating these inquiries as if they were state secrets.                

Conclusions

 

Osama bin Laden and the Oil Cartel

 

As quiet as the media was about the evidence pointing towards Israeli involvement in 9/11, the media was quite the opposite when it came to claims of proof linking ex-CIA creation Osama bin Laden with the crimes. The reason was obvious. Before the attacks on the World Trade Towers the United States had been entertaining military plans for a war in Afghanistan to create a climate more favorable for American oil companies.

John Marcesca, as part of a Unocal working group on the Afghanistan pipeline project, had gone before Congress and stressed the necessity of replacing the Afghanistan government before a pipeline from the Caspian sea to the gulf of India could be built. The White House admits that a plan to attack Afghanistan existed certainly long prior to the September 11 attacks. Subsequently the Bush Administration, using military force, replaced the government of Afghanistan, and the pipeline long in the planning stage by Vice President Cheney and his friends in the oil industry is now capable of completion.

                 One member of the Unocal working group, Hamid Karzai, is the President of the new government in Afghanistan. Another Unocal group member, Zalmay Khalilzad, is the US special envoy to Afghanistan.

But there was a problem with the “Osama did it” story. As much evidence as exists suggesting Israeli involvement in the September attacks and certainly enough to justify high level government classification, there was no specific or authentic intelligence whatsoever to support the Bush insistence that only bin Laden could have been responsible.

The names of the nineteen suspected hijackers released by the FBI don’t point to Afghanistan. They come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates; all across the middle east without a focus in any one region. Indeed, even as the FBI was admitting that its list of 19 names was based solely on identifications thought to have been forged, Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Saudi Al-Faisal insisted that an investigation in Saudi Arabia showed that the 5 Saudi men were not aboard the four jet liners that crashed in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania on September 11. “It was proved that five of the names included in the FBI list had nothing to do with what happened,” Al-Faisal told the Arabic Press in Washington after meeting with U.S. President Bush at the White House. A sixth identified hijacker was also reported to still be alive in Tunisia.

. FBI Chief Robert Mueller admitted on September 20 and on September 27. 2001, that the FBI has no way to prove the true identities of the hijackers. Yet in the haste to move forward on the already planned war in Afghanistan, Government spokesmen have declined to take too close a look at evidence that points away from the designated suspect, Osama bin Laden.

.More than an absence of proof linking 9/11 to Osama, the proof exists of a deliberate attempt to frame Arabs for terror attacks in the United States.  The claimed proofs have all been dismissed by official U.S. government spokesmen as deliberate mistranslations bordering on frauds and in one case a (poorly) faked video tape. The Anthrax letters, written to look like they were from Arab Muslims were actually from a non-Arab source. And yet the US Government has never appeared to be interested in looking at any evidence that does not support the desired outcome, and it certainly has not publically investigated any leads that could possibly involve Israeli or ADL agents. 

 

The Mossad in the United States                

               

                It is known that Israelis willingly lay false trails to Arabs for political gain. Jewish Defense League Chairman, the late and unlamented Irv Rubin was arrested for plotting to blow up a US Congressman who refused to toe the Israel party line. Two Mossad agents were arrested inside the Mexican Congress with guns and explosives shortly after 9/11.  As the battered World Trade Towers collapsed, the very first suspects arrested, caught cheering as the towers fell, were Israelis, later identified as Mossad agents. The arrested spies worked for Urban Moving Systems, whose Israeli owner promptly fled to Israel, while others held cover jobs in mall kiosks selling “Zoom Copters,” kiosks that sat empty when their entire staffs were thrown into jail on suspicion of espionage.

                All told, the Israeli spy ring, which had been partly uncovered prior to 9/11, was the largest spy ring ever uncovered in the United States. In California, the Anti-Defamation League  was convicted of running a massive spy operation on American citizens in 1963 by the California Criminal Justice system.

This was the Roy Bullock affair in which an ADL agent subverted a member of the San Francisco police department and obtained access to confidential SFPD intelligence files on many groups and individuals, not all of them Arab but the majority of them U.S. citizens.

                In an unrelated case, another ADL agent, in this case a wealthy, left-wing California real estate developer, posed as a revisionist in order to gain access to a Los Angeles-based historical group. Pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into this group and gaining control of it, this ADL agent launched legal attacks on a well-known populist newspaper, The Spotlight, highly critical of Israel, forcing it, with the aid of sympathetic judges, into bankruptcy.

                Many Mossad agents work in close cooperation with the ADL and, in many cases, illegally with various local law enforcement and telephone company personnel.

                This extensive network depends heavily on information supplied by a network of pro-Israel informants spread throughout the population.

                Mossad and ADL agents come and go but the informant network remains

Coupled with the uncovering of Israeli spies was the discovery of a massive phone tapping operation carried out by Amdocs company contracted to place phone tapping equipment on the US phone system to aid US law enforcement authorities. However, those same authorities began to suspect that Israelis were using that very same system to listen in on the phone calls of Americans when high profile drug investigations into Ecstasy rings (run by Israeli organized crime in conjunction with the Mossad) were derailed using information only obtainable from police phone calls. 

In the Kenneth Starr report, it is reported that President Clinton was aware that an unnamed foreign power had made recordings of his phone sex sessions with Monica Lewinsky. 

In the end, three Israeli companies with deep penetration of the American communications infrastructure were implicated in the phone and Internet tapping scandal. One of these companies, Odigo, had an office near the World Trade Towers, and received a two hour advance warning of the impending attack. Two hours means the warning was sent before the planes that eventually crashed into the World Trade Towers had even left the ground on their final flights! Someone knew of the plan, someone who decided they needed to warn Israelis working for a company linked to Israel’s spying operation.

Taken together, there is certainly more than probable cause to investigate just what connection the Israeli spying operation has had with 9/11. Such an investigation should have happened, but instead, according to a government official, the US Government classified the evidence that links these arrested Israelis spies to the 9/11 events.

Rather than treat the arrested Israelis as Jonathan Pollard had been treated, the U.S. Government hurried to get them out of the country as quickly as possible, in one case releasing and deporting one Israeli even though he failed his polygraph examination!

Whatever else he might possess, aside from family money, the President has obviously no sense whatsoever of international political realities. For various reasons, none of which bear scrutiny, Bush the Younger wishes to attack Iraq. There is oil in Iraq and its current head of state, Saddam Hussein, once worked for a CIA that was headed by his father, Bush the Elder. In this capacity, Hussein is in possession of cases full of ugly papers that clearly show his intimate relationship with various US agencies.

Hussein’s fall from power would not only open up Iraqi oilfields to Bush’s American oil developing friends and supporters, it would also result in the guaranteed incineration of reams of very ugly proofs of complicity, bribery and murder that might cause people in America to lose what small, and diminishing, faith they have left in their government and its agencies.

                Further, a short, dramatic war against Iraq would, with the eager aid of a subservient American media, prove to be a marvelous distraction to the major economic collapse of a significant portion of the American stock market and technological industry.

                Another beneficiary of an attack on Iraq would be Israel who fears and hates Hussein but would much prefer to have someone else pull its chestnuts out of the fire for them.

                But Bush cannot invade and conquer Iraq without allies.

                By his obvious and through lack of understanding of either past or present history, Bush has pressed his extreme political and personal religious views on any potential ally with the result that he has antagonized nearly everyone except the embarrassingly sycophantic British Prime Minister, Blair.

That having been said, any attempt on his part to gain Arab support at the expense of Israel would certainly cost him vital evangelical Christian support as well as bring down the wrath of the powerful Israeli lobby and their many and very influential friends and co-religionists in the American media upon his uncomprehending head.

                In order to maintain some stability in what is now a highly dangerous and volatile geo-political situation, official Washington needs to develop a neutral and even-handed Middle Eastern policy that advances the interests of America, not one that advances a peculiar interpretation of Christian theology or espouses a blind adherence to the very narrowly focused needs of the ultra right Israeli Prime Minister and his adherents.

                Unfortunately, a small handful of fanatics from the Israeli and Christian right captured the limited attention of the President and the end results could prove, without question, a complete disaster for the American people as well as many innocent citizens, Jewish and Arab, of the Middle East.

                Prime Minister Sharon is a man who very obviously hates all Arabs and who has, in his career, done everything he can to exterminate them physically. That his views certainly do not represent the views of the Jewish community as a whole is immaterial. Sharon is in power and very obviously uses this power to control the actions and words of the American President and a significant number of members of the American Congress.

                George W. Bush is not noted for either his eloquence or his intelligence but probably the most irrational and idiotic statement he ever made was to refer to the savage Sharon as a Man of Peace.

                Sharon is certainly not a man of peace. He is a military and militant man who is determined to establish a Greater Israel, based on erroneous historical perceptions, and an expanded state that will not include either Christian or Moslem.

                Obviously a far more capable and focused leader than the American President, the Israeli prime minister has no difficulty in forcing his will on a greedy and responsive American administration and legislature.

                One cannot blame Sharon for wishing to protect his population from Arab terror attacks (which he himself deliberately provoked by repeated, disruptive acts) but one can certainly blame the leadership of the United States for permitting itself to become subservient to a foreign government’s religious and political needs.

                If Sharon had his way, all of Jordan, parts of Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia would become part of the state of Greater Israel, a title redolent of Adolf Hitler’s Grossdeutschland.

                It should be noted that Adolf Hitler’s attempts to found a Greater German Reich based upon previous territorial ownership led to a major war and terrible destruction. The pre-Versailles Wilsonian plan for the self-determination of various ethnic groups to found their own nations was utopian and led, directly, to the collapse of stable European governments and the quick rise of both Mussolini and, especially, Hitler.

   Morals and ethics are excellent norms but not effective techniques

   A definitive study prepared by the CIA for the National Security Council on July 12, 2001, contains a number of very informative sections, several of which will be quoted here.

                   “…Israeli intelligence organs have proven to be less than cooperative with their U.S. counterparts in the matter of their agents’ surveillance of Arab groups resident in the United States. An agreement whereby the Israeli Mossad was to keep…these agencies informed of their findings had proven to be observed more in the breach than the performance.”

 “Extraordinary difficulties in keeping these (Israeli) agents under control means that their penetration of many levels of security-related areas has mostly gone completely unchecked.”

“…the Pollard case is an excellent case in point. Great pressure for his release has been made by the Israeli government, who appear to be completely unrepentant about Pollard’s extensive espionage. The matter of a pardon for Pollard has been repeatedly and vigorously brought forward by Israeli diplomats as well as the very powerful and all-pervasive Israel lobby groups.”

 “…and the stated determination of the Sharon regime to drive the Arab population out of Palestine renders effective American bargaining power to an absolute minimum.”

 

Warfare as a Political Act

 

 The American public is well aware of many historical facts that clearly show deception on the part of the US Government. Secret German radio-telephone intercepts discovered in CIA files and published in 1994 prove beyond a doubt that President Franklin Roosevelt not only knew Pearl Harbor would be attacked but that he and his top officials kept their silence and allowed it to happen for political, not military, reasons.

The public is well aware that the present government may be as eager to get the US into a major war for the oil wealth of central Asia and the Middle East as Roosevelt was to get this nation into the war against the Axis.

The public is now also aware of “Operation NORTHWOODS”, (a Joint Chiefs of Staff plan to stage fake terror attacks to ignite a war against Cuba in 1962.) The WTC/Pentagon attacks appear to provide a convenient excuse to launch the pre-laid plans for military action against Afghanistan.

The thesis of a growing number of doubts about the authenticity of fanatical Arab attacks on the United States is that various agencies, and in more than one case, foreign governments, had full prior knowledge of these attacks, in advance, and promptly warned American officials, including the President

But were these attacks merely allowed to happen or were they contrived? Would any American leader permit an attack on fellow Americans just to further his own political agenda or that of another country?

The answer to this terrible question may well prove to be positive.

                There is a well-authenticated parallel between the 9/11 attacks and certain plans prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 which show very clearly that the US military, at the highest levels, proposed making terrorist attacks in the United States and blaming them on Fidel Castro.

                These proposals were accepted and signed off on by the entire JCS as well as the Secretary of Defense, Robert MacNamera.

                “NORTHWOODS” is thoroughly discussed in Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency by James Bamford.

                These home-grown terrorist plans were drawn up beginning in late 1961 following the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that spring. President John F. Kennedy, angered by the grossly inept actions of the CIA during the disastrous attempt to invade Cuba, had sacked the head of the CIA and his chief deputies and had passed responsibility for Cuba from that agency to the Department of Defense.

                Here, military strategists considered plans to create terrorist actions that would alarm the American population and stampede them into supporting a military attack on Cuba.

                Under consideration in "Operation NORTHWOODS" were plans:

                1. To create a series of well-coordinated incidents in or around the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to include inciting riots, blowing up ammunition stores, aircraft and U.S. Navy units in harbor

                2. To develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area and in other areas of Florida and even in Washington;

                3. To sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida;

4. To assassinate prominent Cuban refugees resident in the United States;

                5. To detonate bombs in carefully chosen locations in the United States and to counterfeit documents pointing to Cuban complicity;

                6. To use US military acquired Russian MiG fighter aircraft in false Cuban markings to harass civilian American flag airliners in the Caribbean

                7. To make hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft to include the simulation of shooting down of a civilian airliner;

                Kennedy rejected “Operation NORTHWOODS”, a fact that contributed to his subsequent assassination and senior military officers ordered the documents destroyed. But General Lemnitzer’s aide deposited his notes in the National Archives where they are now available for the public.

                These appalling and murderous official plans were drawn up, and nearly executed in 1962 but the parallels between the JCS’s causus belli and the September 11 attacks have an eerie resonance.

                The basic difference between “NORTHWOODS” and 9/11 is that the U.S. government planned the attack on American targets but was thwarted by the President whereas in the September 11 attacks, the attacks came from outside the United States but were permitted to proceed because they served the purposes of those in ultimate control of the government.

                Following the 1962 plots, according to the New York Times of October 28, 1993, a government informant named Emad Salem was involved early in 1993 with Arab terrorists connected to Osama bin Laden and involved in a plan to develop a bomb for use against New York's World Trade Center.

                Salem, a former Egyptian Army officer, wanted to substitute a harmless powder for the explosive but his plan to thwart the attack was blocked by an FBI official who apparently did not want to expose their important informant.

                The attack was allowed by U.S. intelligence officials to go forward without let or hindrance.

It should be noted that the February 26, 1993 explosion in the underground parking garage of the WTC resulted in six deaths, more than 1,000 casualties and damage in excess of half billion dollars.

It can be clearly seen that committing acts of violence aimed at innocent American citizens to further political and military goals did not commence on September 11, 2001.

There are other questions that are not addressed either by the American media or the political leadership of the United States:

Why was there a discrepancy of 35 names between the published passenger lists and the official death toll on all four of the ill-fated flights?

Why did the United States immediately begin bombing Afghanistan when apparently none of the listed hijackers were Afghans, but instead were identified as Arabs from various Middle Eastern nations, primarily from Saudi Arabia? Since Iraq was implicated in the 1993 WTC attack, why did we not attack that nation?

And, most interestingly, how could the terrorists obtain top-secret White House and Air Force One codes and signals? This official lie was used as the reason why a forewarned President was safely hidden until it was determined that it was safe for him to return to Washington and assume the mantel of Defender of Freedom and become a guaranteed candidate for the next elections.

Why has there been no mention of Israeli stock market manipulators who sold key stock short before the attack, stocks that would certainly drop in value when the attack became public?

                If Osama bin Laden and his group were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, why has no credible evidence for this ever been produced? An obviously altered videotape of bin Laden speaking to his associates was shown on American television after a “reluctant President” decided that America should see it. It would have been better for him to have produced a patriotic speech by the Easter Bunny instead for all, except the denizens of Peoria, Illinois, believed the crudely doctored mumbling.

               Surely with all the tax money available to the government, couldn’t really high quality evidence be faked? The leadership’s signal failure to accomplish this speaks strongly to their complete contempt for the intelligence of the American public.

                What is possible is to gather together as many facts that can be located in the public arena and set them forth to see how the questioned intelligence data fares.

                Any competent trial lawyer will acknowledge that circumstantial evidence is far stronger than direct evidence and in the end, it must be left to the reader to arrive at their own conclusions.

                The main point under discussion is whether or not George W. Bush, President of the United States, had been specifically warned about an Arab terrorist attack on American targets.

                The 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]

                There is a considerable body of other evidence, stemming from U.S. and foreign news reports that has been assembled herein that does support the allegations of the German report.            

                Let us now consider a number of the more significant of these published reports.

                In the time since the attack, there has been a growing chorus of doubters concerning this issue. Perhaps a chronology of warnings might prove instructive and, perhaps also, conclusive.

                The 1993 World Trade Center bombing resulted in intelligence that indicated that al-Qaeda had planned the attack and was planning further attacks on bridges and tunnels in New York City.

                In 1995, an al-Qaeda group headed by one Ramzi Youssef, was planning to seize and blow up 12 commercial aircraft over the Pacific. One Abdul Hakim Murad, a co-conspirator of Youssef, admitted to U.S. authorities that he had been trained at American flight schools and had been involved in a plot to crash a commercial aircraft into the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia.

                In 1998, U.S. investigators discovered that al-Qaeda personnel involved in the Embassy bombings in Africa were part of a larger plan involving the training of terrorist members at American flight schools for attacks on American targets.

                In 1999, a plot was uncovered that indicated that al-Qaeda personnel were plotting to blow up the Los Angeles International airport and selected targets in Jordan. Following the trial of an al-Qaeda man, Ahmen Ressam who was caught smuggling explosives into the United States, the FAA issued an official warning that al-Qaeda was expected to conduct explosive outrages against commercial aircraft or American airports.

                There was then, an impressive background of actual al-Qaeda threats against targets in the United States, often involving aircraft and aircraft facilities.

                In the period just prior to the September 11 aircraft attack on American targets, there were numerous specific reports from what can only be termed entirely reliable foreign sources (as distinct from domestic intelligence reporting).

                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]

                On 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] On June 19, 2002, CNN reported the contents of these two National Security Agency intercepts. Other news outlets, including The Washington Post, also reported on the intercepts.  [Source: New York Times, August 10, 2002]

                 The FBI intensified their investigation into a Sept. 11-related classified intelligence leak and specified that 17 senators were required to turn over telephone records, appointment calendars and schedules that might reveal possible contact with reporters                      

                In an August 7 memo sent through the Senate general counsel’s office, the FBI asked all members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to hand over records from June 18 and 19, 2002, according to an article in the Washington Post
                Those dates are the day of and the day following a classified hearing in which the director of the National Security Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, spoke to lawmakers about the two highly sensitive messages hinting at an impending action that the agency intercepted on the eve of Sept. 11 but purportedly did not translate until Sept. 12.
                It became evident that the FBI began to focus on a number of senior senators who are members of a Senate-House panel investigating Sept. 11 and who have attended most classified meetings and read all the most sensitive intelligence agency communications.. A similar request did not go to House intelligence committee members.
                The request came at a time when some legal experts and members of Congress were already disgruntled that an executive branch agency, such as the FBI — headed by a political appointee – were probing the actions of legislators whose job it is to oversee FBI and intelligence agencies.
                Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who heads the Senate intelligence committee, stated that he was cooperating with the investigation and had asked staff members to gather the requested records.
                In the month of August, 2002, FBI agents interrogated nearly 100 people, including all 37 members of separate House and Senate intelligence committees and some 60 staff members. At the conclusion of their interviews with members and staff, FBI agents typically asked them if they would be willing to take polygraph tests. The majority declined.

                When public pressure forced the President to relent and permit a widening of the investigative procedure, the reason for his fears quickly became evident at example after example of gross and incomprehensible bungling emerged.
                The NSA, based at Fort Meade, Maryland, is one of the government’s most secretive intelligence agencies. Much of its information carries a higher classification than other sorts of intelligence.
                Neither congressional historians nor legal experts could recall any situation in which the FBI was probing a leak of classified information in this way, the Post said.  [Reuters, August 24, 2002]

                In all of the speculations concerning pre-knowledge of this attack, one concept stands out above all the denials and accusations:

                How could an obviously sophisticated terrorist plan involving perhaps as many as 50 identified persons and in train for at least two years possibly escape the notice of our intelligence services, especially the CIA or the NSA? When one considers the number of people involved in this plot, the wide-spread geographical locations of the plotters, the fact that most of them used telephone system, long known to be thoroughly and completely compromised by the US NSA, for international calls and that large amounts of cash were transferred from foreign banks to American accounts, the idea that none of the American intelligence and counter intelligence agencies had the slightest warning of impending disaster is completely impossible to believe.

                This knowledge, coupled with reports from foreign intelligence sources and governments, makes it more than clear that such attacks were not only suspected but anticipated.

                The question of the foreknowledge of President Bush and his top aides is not as easy to establish but the great mass of direct and, especially, circumstantial evidence now available, points to this appalling conclusion with considerable clarity and logic.

                The White House has made great play with what they term the failure of American intelligence agencies to detect the coming attack. The FBI has most especially been blamed for this failure but in fact, it is clearly evident that the FBI, as well as the CIA, passed their informed concerns to the White House well in advance of September 11.

                 Much has been said about a report from SA Williams of the FBI’s Phoenix office dealing with suspect Arabs at flight schools but this pales into insignificance beside the flood of other and much more specific intelligence that clearly reached the White House and, by inference, the President himself.

                And in defense of the FBI against attacks from above, it should be noted that over a four year period, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) allowed over 500,000 persons of Arab persuasion to enter the United States…and promptly lost sight of them. It is now up to the FBI to attempt to track down these missing Arabs, a job that is extremely difficult for an agency that is undermanned and overworked.

                Had the intelligence information from the INS been in the hands of the FBI in a timely manner, it is not impossible that this agency might have effectively broken up the terrorist ring that eventually launched the 9/11 attacks.

                It is standard official practice everywhere to move the blame for misfeasance downwards.

                Franklin Roosevelt, who certainly was aware that the Japanese were planning to attack the United States in December of 1941, quickly scapegoated the military commanders at Pearl Harbor following the attack for dereliction of duty.

                 It should be noted that these commanders, Admiral Kimmel and General Short, had not been given a fraction of the contents of the important Japanese military and governmental codes that were intercepted, decoded and passed to the President and his top military and political aides in Washington but not to the vital Hawaiian commanders.

                There is an eerie parallel between the Pearl Harbor attack, the September 11 attacks and the planned and approved “Operation NORTHWOODS” of 1962.

                In more innocent and trusting times, the idea that the political and military leadership of the United States would actively plot to encourage attacks on their own nation and people for the furtherance of their political and business objectives was something that the average American would have shuddered at considering, let alone acknowledging!

                For competent American officials to have foreknowledge of such acts is nothing less than high treason against the United States.

                But the quandary with which we are presented here resists a clear resolution. The intelligence data and the prior-knowledge question surrounding the 9-11 events, the American oil industry ongoing strategies, various advocacy groups activities in Washington, the personal political and economic relationships involved, the timing and significance of specific events, the strange reluctance of the government to address certain espionage and business activities- all of these factors make it exceedingly difficult to resolve this horrific predicament.

                It is also to be considered that in light of the significant number of warnings admittedly received in official Washington, it should be noted that there were no official warnings of any kind issued to either U.S. military or civilian authorities concerning even the possibility of terrorist attacks. No military aircraft units were alerted and no security forces were placed on standby status.

                When one considers the hysterical flood of jumbled terrorist attack warnings pouring out of the mouth of the Attorney General and other administration officials in the months following the 9/11 attacks, the utter silence preceding them is a classical example of the dog that did not bark in the night.

                It is for the reader, then, to study the assembled investigative material herein set forth and come to whatever conclusion he wishes.

Author’s Comments

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

                Was the President of the United States made fully aware of the attacks executed on American property on September 11, 2001?

                Was the American leadership aware of this attack prior to September 11?

                Who else besides the attackers had pre-knowledge of the attack?

                Did the Israeli Mossad, their foreign intelligence agency, operate in the United States and were they involved in surveillance of American government of criminal activity concerning Israeli citizens in America?

                What role, if any, did the American oil industry play in this devastating assault?

This has been an investigation into the points raised above and the sources are official American and foreign governmental reports and extensive reportage from reliable foreign and domestic press sources.

                The known facts of the attacks against American property on September 11, 2001, are well enough known not to be covered in any detail.

                Two commercial aircraft, alleged to have been hijacked by Arab terrorists, were flown into the two World Trade towers in New York City and one was flown into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. A fourth aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania, purported to also have been hijacked by Arab terrorists.

                The flaming carnage was well covered by the American media.

                Immediately after these attacks, a number of questions were raised by various news organs both in the United States and Europe.

                The Bush White House staff stated that President Bush had been forced into hiding because Arab terrorists had the coded for the Presidential aircraft’s transponder, thereby bypassing his security.

                This statement was later completely retracted.

                In the months following the attack, a great number of questions have been, and still are being, asked. The answers of official Washington are, at best, erratic and at worse, unbelievable.

                In the preparation of this work, the author has used official American papers, published material found in the foreign and domestic press, in addition to copies of studies of various aspects of the background for the September 11 attacks.

                A significant amount of this illuminating information can be found on the Internet. This is probably the most cogent reason why the Internet is so loathed by official policy makers and senior political spin doctors.

                Until the advent of the personal computer and the Internet, the American media was tightly controlled and only printed the information given to it.

 In viewing the performances of this media, one can say with great sincerity that the only reason that the Fourth Estate can stand up without a spine is because their skin is so thick.

Since the September 11 attacks a significant number of important questions have been raised in various circles. The foreign media is a primary one but since the attacks, the American public has been circulating many questions that they feel have never been addressed fully in the media, let alone answered.

Here are a number of the questions and answers that might or might not satisfy.

 

                Q. There have been extensive and ongoing questions about the United States government and its top officials having knowledge well in advance of 9/11 that Arab terrorist attacks involving hijacked commercial aircraft that were to be flown as a weapon into important American cultural icons such as the previously targeted WTC. If these charges are true, why did the thoroughly alerted Bush administration do nothing to either warn the American public nor, more importantly, take no steps to halt the attacks, at the least by notifying the FAA of possible misuse of commercial aircraft?  And why did the Bush administration subsequently attempt to blame failures upon the Federal Bureau of Investigation when it should be obvious that the FBI was not notified by any other agency, specifically the CIA, that such attempts might happen?

                A. Any admission that either the President or his administration had any foreknowledge of the attacks would be tantamount to committing political suicide. It is an easy matter to push the blame off on an agency that has no public means of refutation.

                Q. Isn’t this a political issue? During an election year, isn’t it standard practice for the party out of power to attempt to return to it by destroying public confidence in the sitting President?

                A. There is certainly truth in this observation but in fact there exists a significant amount of documentation to more than establish that the Administration was made entirely and fully aware that a major attack against the United States on its own territory could be expected by the Arab extremist organization al-Qaeda, by aircraft assault and directed at prominent structures in the United States. Among probable targets well known to the American intelligence community were: the World Trade Center, which had been attacked by Arabs previously, the White House, the Pentagon, Congress and also the famous Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

                Q. If the competent intelligence agencies, and through them, the Administration itself, was aware well in advance of the probability of such attacks, why did the Administration do nothing? Considering the repeated, and always wrong, post-9/11 warnings issuing from the office of the Attorney General and its FBI about the probability of attacks being launched on specific dates, why did the Bush people not issue similar warnings, specifically to the FAA, about the real attacks?

                A. The best explanation in answer to this question is that the President and his close associates have accused the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (although significantly not the CIA whose mandated duties cover specifically foreign intelligence) of gross dereliction of duty. Mueller, Director of the FBI, has accepted these rebukes and acknowledged that he would certainly improve his agencies performance in the future. The President has thankfully accepted the Director’s acknowledgement of failure and graciously permitted him to remain in his post.

                Q. But please state the reason why the President would permit such attacks, and do nothing to stop them although it seems obvious that such attacks could, and did, result in horrific loss of life and astronomical financial losses?

                A. The reason is simple. Always look for the simplest answer, not the most obscure. If, as we strongly believe, the Administration was aware of the probability of such attacks, the only reason to make no preventive measures is that these attacks could only benefit the goals of the Administration. If this unpleasant assumption is true, there were both internal political benefits in permitting these attacks to happen as well as financial benefits, why should anything be said?

                Politically, the plutocratic Administration could easily justify increasing internal police policies that would benefit many of its unpopular ideological programs and that such an attack, if it could be blamed on a desired enemy, would entirely justify military action against that enemy. An oil pipeline through a hostile Afghanistan might be more possible if the then-current government of that country could be justifiably be replaced with one that would be obedient to American business interests. This sort of a program has been utilized by American business and their friends in the CIA for decades and often with some success.

                Q. If this is true, it is outrageous and indefensible. Thousands of people in the United States and many more in the attacked Afghanistan were killed. It is disgusting to even consider that any civilized person would countenance such criminal actions in the name of power and profit.

                A. This explains the rationale as to why Bush and his top people are frantic to prevent any kind of an official, public inquiry into the backgrounds of the attacks. Do not forget, Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated such a commission immediately after Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Lyndon Johnson did the same expedient action following the killing of President John Kennedy in 1963.  It should be carefully noted that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have frantically lobbied Congressional leaders, demanding that they cease attempts to institute public investigations into the period just before the September 11 attacks. Because of intense public interest in the backgrounds of these attacks both in the United States and elsewhere, no one, not even the President or his Republican legislators, could know what information might be made public. If it emerged that the President had specific prior knowledge of this attack and did nothing to halt it, in all probability both he and his Presidency would be very short-lived.

                  Q. The White House has made it very clear that the reason for the success of these vicious attacks is that the FBI failed in their duties to detect the terrorists or ascertain their plans. The implication very prominent in the media is that the FBI was to blame by its bureaucratic bunglings.                  

                A There are always bureaucratic bunglings and there always will be. Many, if not most, of the so-called great conspiracies so beloved of some writers are actually due to bureaucratic stupidity and subsequent attempts to conceal it. What certainly is true, and has been aired, is that many FBI agents throughout the United States, who were involved in investigations into domestic terrorism, made many urgent requests for expanded anti-terrorism investigations, but these requests were repeatedly and firmly rejected by Attorney General Ashcroft.  Ashcroft is a very active member of the religious right wing that had its own agendas and he further made serious cuts in the FBI’s budget for counter-terrorism. That Ashcroft has his own agenda has become very evident. He wishes to establish a strong police state under the control of the U.S. Attorney General’s office and by so doing, further an agenda that calls for containment of any dissident element in American society that he feels is, or could be, opposed to his personal and very strong religious views. Ashcroft is a clearly defined fanatic and such people only tolerate those whose views are identical with theirs.

                The Bush Administration’s Attorney General has been called the worst Attorney General since Woodrow Wilson’s radical-baiting Mitchell Palmer who used the clauses of the U.S. Constitution to light his cigars with.

                  Incompetence in intelligence collection and analysis cannot be blamed for the successes of the 9/11 attackers. The President’s top security advisor, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the former Dean of Women at Stanford University, known for her aggressive feminist activities as the “Date Rape Queen” officially claimed that there had been no prior knowledge of the attacks and that the many substantive warnings from reliable foreign and domestic were only unimportant chatter, dealing solely with attacks committed outside the U.S. and this in the face of the fact that all of these reports from reliable foreign, and domestic,  intelligence sources were absolutely specific in issuing warnings about attacks against targets located inside the continental United States.

                . By the summer of 2001, warnings were pouring in to U.S. intelligence and military agencies from Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Israel, and other Middle East and South Asian intelligence sources, along with Russia, France, Germany, Britain and the Philippines, all saying, with different degrees of specificity that a major attack on the U.S. mainland was pending which specifically warned about t the use of domestic commercial aircraft as weapons of mass destruction

                And as additional powerful circumstantial evidence in support of the idea that the Bush administration was fully aware of the attacks there is the well-known and proven information about the so-called “put” or short-sell options, the anticipation that a certain stock’s price will fall that were executed in huge amounts against such stocks as United Airlines and American Airlines, the two carriers utilized by the terrorists. These stock market manipulations were carried out from August 26 through September 11 of 2001.

                Newsweek magazine reported that on September 10, 2001, “a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.” In July, Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airliners and traveled only by private plane, and Bush, announced he was spending the month of August on his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

                 And on the day of the attack, Bush flew with some of his top aides to Florida so that he could interact with a kindergarten class while Vice President and former oil company CEO, Dick Cheney quickly vanished. The disappearance of the Vice President is certain but his hiding place is not. Mr. Cheney has the reputation, self-cultivated, of being an individual cloaked in great mystery and in fact, no one knows for certain where he might be concealed at any given time.    

                Q: The attack on Afghanistan had been planned before the September 11 attacks?

                A: By the middle of summer, 2001, it was certainly evident to the President that a definite attack against targets in the United States would be affected by Arab terrorist groups. It then became evident that the notorious bin Laden and the Afghanistan government could quickly be blamed for fathering this attack. Note that immediately following the attack, the President’s party immediately rushed the Patriot Act through a thoroughly frightened Congress.

                This act, which was ready for presentation when the occasion arose, contained various “emergency” bypassings of Constitution and in fact was nothing more than the kind of enabling act that Adolf Hitler pushed through his legislature immediately after the burning of the Reichstag.   The reality of the 9/11 attack guaranteed the Bush people the opportunity for the implementation of long-delayed plans for the replacement of the hostile Afghanistan government, a government that adamantly stood in the way of Unocal’s pipeline.

                 These plans were quickly taken from the files and executed under various exciting and patriotic names.

                 Samuel Johnson once said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel and this observations is as applicable today as it was in eighteenth century England.

                 It should be noted that having killed off or otherwise disposed of the obstructionist but legitimate government of Afghanistan, the new pro-American puppet government has so quickly and fortunately approved the pipeline project. It also is of interest to note that this pipeline will terminate in close proximity to a power plant built by the fraudulent and corrupt Enron company that has been in hibernation for a number of years, only awaiting easily available oil for its operations.

                It also should be noted that the highly vocal and pious official statements that American troops were “bringing freedom to the Afghan people” do not appear, in retrospect, to have been realized. A significant number of non-combatant Afghani civilians have been killed by American forces and a smaller number have died by being struck by heavy packages of relief supplies dropped at altitude from American military aircraft.

                The American authorities have apparently not bothered to read history for if they had, they would have very quickly learned that Afghanistan is not a country that welcomes conquerors as Alexander the Great, the British raj and, more recently, the powerful Soviet Union have learned to their dismay.

                The various tribes of Afghanistan are highly skilled guerrilla fighters and when they are not killing invaders, they practice on each other.

                The painful lessons of Vietnam have apparently been forgotten by a new generation of  military leaders, eager for command and battle honors.

                They lead from safe rear area bunkers or the comforts of the Pentagon while the young men pay their bills with death and disfigurement.

                There never was such a thing as a good war nor a bad peace.

                Faced with a collapsing economy, thousands of major bankruptcies, exposure of massive criminal actions on the parts of leaders of most major American corporation, the complete destruction of the once-dynamic communications technology sector, rising unemployment and vanishing pensions and medical programs, the President has very obviously determined upon a military adventure to delight the media and deflect rapidly mounting public concerns.

                The President, his war party and the government of Israel would have the American public believe that evil Arab terrorists are engaged in ongoing terrorist attacks against American targets for fanatic religious motives.

                The actual truth is that the Arabs, long and increasingly impoverished and exploited, have turned to religious fundamentalism and violence because they have no other avenue for survival.

                American and European oil money goes to the perpetuation of various royal families or heads of state and not to the population of the countries from which the oil is pumped out.

                 The Palestinian people are firmly in the grip of the state of Israel that seeks only to drive them from their ancestral homes and take their abandoned property for their own use.

                When Palestinian Arabs quite naturally protest this despoiling and display their anger in throwing stones and finally, bombs, the government of Sharon eagerly seizes upon this as an excuse for slaughtering as many Arabs as they can and destroying their homes, but carefully outside the range of the media’s cameras.

                The fact that young  men and women willingly become suicide bombers is a clear indication of the desperation of the Palestinians and bodes very badly for the future survival of the occupying forces.

                The entire problem of the intafada is economic in nature, as are most serious societal problems. In order for terrorism, or resistance, to cease, it is only necessary to financially empower the Palestinians. This could easily be accomplished by the wealthy Arab oil-producing states and it should be noted that a productive Palestine Arab population would have greatly diminished interest in attacking anyone.

                Additionally, the blatantly pro-Israel American policy, created in the main by Israeli political pressure on the American executive, legislative and media entities, is another major reason for Arab attacks on the United States.

                This country is seen, quite rightly, as the mighty and unquestioning supporter of Israel.

                If, it is obviously reasoned by Arab militants, the United States is a strong financial and military supporter of our oppressors, they then become a legitimate target for retaliation.

                George Washington said that America should hold itself above involvement in the struggles of other nations, maintain neutrality and sell evenly to all sides.

                This practical advice has been ignored by an American President who openly embraces the savage Israeli leader, Sharon, and calls him a “Man of Peace.” This is akin to embracing Josef Stalin (as President Roosevelt eagerly did) and calling him a “noble man and wonderful leader of his people.”

                For many, it is an inescapable conclusion that the 9/11 attacks were plainly anticipated and later cynically used for political and economic gain by the President and his Administration.

                A mixture of political and religious fanaticism, felonious greed and appalling stupidity are the hallmarks of this oligarchy that certainly will, in their blind thrashings for the empowerment of their corrupt concepts, bring down terrible consequences on the heads of a trusting public they allege to serve but in actuality, hold in derisive contempt.

ENVOY

                The collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 has a parallel in the collapse of the American economy that was nearly simultaneous with it.

                In this study, some of the factors in this disastrous plummet are clearly evident. Partially hubris, partially the perpetual swings of a capitalist economy, partially the criminal greed of the chief executives of almost all major American business entities, the fall, like that of Icarus who dared to venture too close to the sun, has been long and frightening.

                In one sense, the great collapse of the stock market in October of 1929 has direct parallels with the economic collapse of the first years of the Millennium.

                The economy had grown too large and rose too quickly. Taking advantage of the ascent, businesses expanded, loading themselves with debt that could be repaid only so long as the ascent and expansion continued.

                Gravity is also applicable to economies and what goes up must certainly come down and the higher and faster it rises, the more rapid and deeper is the descent.

                As we are taught by history, it is always those at the bottom ranks of the economic society that pay the largest bill. CEOs who gleefully engaged in unrestrained greed and deliberate criminal fiscal manipulations have, with rare exception, left their looted companies with huge financial rewards.

                They have left tens of thousands of workers without employment and destroyed the savings and pensions of hundreds of thousands of former employees. And throughout all of this, none of these rapacious, amoral creatures show even the slightest sign of concern for the ruins they have left behind them.

                Their criminal greed has created such a reservoir of disgust and distrust that it will be a long day’s journey into night before the deflated economy raises its head once more.

                Most of them have no worries whatsoever about being dragged before the bar of public justice because it is a well known truism that all American legislative bodies contain the finest men money can buy.

                The largesse of such creatures as Kenneth Lay was lavishly stuffed into the pockets of such exalted public figures as the President of the United States and his Attorney General.

                Small wonder that while lesser men might serve as scapegoats, those above them can retire in comfort and safety to their ranches in Texas, their beachfront homes in Florida or their immense country homes in whatever foreign countries the United States has not antagonized, threatened or subjugated.

                In many ways, the tragedy of 9/11 will doubtlessly prove to be a major watershed in the history of the American people.

                James Watt discovered steam power by blocking the spout of a boiling tea kettle.

                The lid blew off.

                “Be not deceived: God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Galatains 6:7

 

Appendix

 

Chronology

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing resulted in intelligence that indicated that al-Qaeda had planned the attack and was planning further attacks on bridges and tunnels in New York City.

                1993: An expert panel commissioned by the Pentagon raises the possibility that an airplane could be used to bomb national landmarks. [Source: Washington Post 10/2/01]

                1991-1997 — Major U.S. oil companies including ExxonMobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP Amoco and Shell directly invest almost $3 billion in cash bribing heads of state in Kazakhstan to secure equity rights in the huge oil reserves in these regions. The oil companies further commit to future direct investments in Kazakhstan of $35 billion. Not being willing to pay exorbitant prices to Russia to use Russian pipelines the major oil companies have no way to recoup their investments. [Sources Testimony before the House International Relations Committee 2/12/98]

In 1995, an al-Qaeda group headed by one Ramzi Youssef, was planning to seize and blow up 12 commercial aircraft over the Pacific. One Abdul Hakim Murad, a co-conspirator of Youssef, admitted to U.S. authorities that he had been trained at American flight schools and had been involved in a plot to crash a commercial aircraft into the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia.

December 4, 1997 — Representatives of the Taliban are invited guests to the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negotiate their support for the pipeline. Subsequent reports will indicate that the negotiations failed, allegedly because the Taliban wanted too much money. [Source: The BBC, Dec. 4, 1997]

February 12, 1998 — Unocal Vice President John J. Maresca — later to become a Special Ambassador to Afghanistan — testifies before the House that until a single, unified, friendly government is in place in Afghanistan the trans-Afghani pipeline needed to monetize the oil will not be built. [Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee.]

In 1998, U.S. investigators discovered that al-Qaeda personnel involved in the Embassy bombings in Africa were part of a larger plan involving the training of terrorist members at American flight schools for attacks on American targets

1998 — The CIA ignores warnings from Case Officer Robert Baer that Saudi Arabia was harboring an al-Q’aeda cell led by two known terrorists. A more detailed list of known terrorists is offered to Saudi intelligence in August 2001 and refused. [Source: Financial Times January 12, 2001]

                1998: An Oklahoma City FBI agent sends a memo warning that “large numbers of Middle Eastern males” are getting flight training and could be planning terrorist attacks. [Source: CBS, 5/30/02] A separate CIA intelligence report asserts that Arab terrorists are planning to fly a bomb-laden aircraft into the WTC. [Sources: New York Times, 9/19/02, Senate Intelligence Committee (Witness Hill, 9/18/02]

                December 1998: A Time magazine cover story entitled “The Hunt for Osama,” reports that bin Laden may be planning his boldest move yet – a strike on Washington or possibly New York City. [Source  Time, 12/21/98]

                1998 and 2000 — Former President George H.W. Bush travels to Saudi Arabia on behalf of the privately owned Carlyle Group, the 11th largest defense contractor in the U.S. While there he meets privately with the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family. [Source: Wall Street Journal, Sept. 27, 2001.

                1999, a plot was uncovered that indicated that al-Qaeda personnel were plotting to blow up the Los Angeles International airport and selected targets in Jordan. Following the trial of an al-Qaeda man, Ahmen Ressam who was caught smuggling explosives into the United States, the FAA issued an official warning that al-Qaeda was expected to conduct explosive outrages against commercial aircraft or American airports.

                There was then, an impressive background of actual al-Qaeda threats against targets in the United States, often involving aircraft and aircraft facilities.

In the period just prior to the September 11 aircraft attack on American targets, there were numerous specific reports from what can only be termed entirely reliable foreign sources (as distinct from domestic intelligence reporting).

                September 1999: A US intelligence report states bin Laden and Al-Qaeda terrorists could crash an aircraft into the Pentagon. The Bush administration claims not to have heard of this report until May 2002, though it was widely shared within the government. [Sources: CNN, 5/18/02, Associated Press, 5/18/01, Guardian, 5/19/02]

                1999: MI6, the British intelligence agency, gives a secret report to the London US embassy. The report states that al-Qaeda plans to use commercial aircraft “possibly as flying bombs.” [Source: Sunday Times, 6/9/02]

2000

 

October 24-26, 2000: Pentagon officials carry out a “detailed” emergency drill based upon the crashing of a hijacked airliner into the Pentagon. [Source Military District of Washington News Service, 11/3/00] The White House later asserts that no one in government had envisioned a suicide hijacking. [Source: Associated Press report, May 18, 2002]

 

2001

January, 2001 — The Bush Administration orders the FBI and intelligence agencies to “back off” investigations involving the bin Laden family, including two of Osama bin Laden’s relatives (Abdullah and Omar) who were living in Falls Church, VA — right next to CIA headquarters. This followed previous orders dating back to 1996, frustrating efforts to investigate the bin Laden family. [Source: BBC Newsnight, Correspondent Gregg Palast — Nov 7, 2001].

Feb 13, 2001 — UPI Terrorism Correspondent Richard Sale — while covering a trial of bin Laden’s Al Q’aeda followers — reports that the National Security Agency has broken bin Laden’s encrypted communications. Even if this indicates that bin Laden changed systems in February it does not mesh with the fact that the government insists that the attacks had been planned for years.

May 2001 — Secretary of State Colin Powell gives $43 million in aid to the Taliban regime, purportedly to assist hungry farmers who are starving since the destruction of their opium crop in January on orders of the Taliban regime. [Source: The Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2001].

May, 2001 — Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a career covert operative and former Navy Seal, travels to India on a publicized tour while CIA Director George Tenet makes a quiet visit to Pakistan to meet with Pakistani leader General Pervez Musharraf. Armitage has long and deep Pakistani intelligence connections and he is the recipient of the highest civil decoration awarded by Pakistan. It would be reasonable to assume that while in Islamabad, Tenet, in what was described as “an unusually long meeting,” also met with his Pakistani counterpart, Lt. General Mahmud Ahmad, head of the ISI. [Source The Indian SAPRA news agency, May 22, 2001.]

May 2001: The US introduces the “Visa Express” program allowing any Saudi Arabian to obtain visas through their travel agent instead of appearing at a consulate in person. Three to five hijackers use Visa Express over the next month to enter the US. [Sources: US News & World Report, 12/12/01, Congressional Intelligence Committee, 9/20/02, Witness Hill]

                June 2001 — German intelligence, the BND, warns the CIA and Israel that Middle Eastern terrorists are “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.” [Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 14, 2001.]

 June 13, 2001:  Egyptian President Mubarak through his intelligence services warns the US that bin Laden’s Islamic terrorist network is threatening to kill Bush and other G8 leaders at their July economic summit meeting in Italy. The terrorists plan to use a plane stuffed with explosives. [Source:  New York Times, 9/26/01]

                July, 2001 — Three American officials: Tom Simmons (former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan), Karl Inderfurth (former Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian affairs) and Lee Coldren (former State Department expert on South Asia), meet with Pakistani and Russian intelligence officers in Berlin and tell them that the U.S. is planning military strikes against Afghanistan in October. A French book released in November, “Bin Laden — La Verite´ Interdite,” discloses that Taliban representatives often sat in on the meetings. British papers confirm that the Pakistani ISI relayed the threats to the Taliban. [Source: The Guardian, September 22, 2001; the BBC, September 18, 2001.]

September 26 2001 — “U.S. department of defense official, Dr. Jeffrey Starr, visited Tajikistan in January. The Guardian’s Felicity Lawrence established that US Rangers were also training special troops in Kyrgyzstan. There were unconfirmed reports that Tajik and Uzbek special troops were training in Alaska and Montana.” [Source: The Guardian, September 26, 2001]

Summer 2001— Pakistani ISI Chief General Ahmad (see above) orders an aide to wire transfer $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, who was according to the FBI, the lead terrorist in the suicide hijackings. Ahmad recently resigned after the transfer was disclosed in India and confirmed by the FBI. [Source: The Times of India, October 11, 2001.]

Summer 2001 — An Iranian man phones U.S. law enforcement to warn of an imminent attack on the World Trade Center in the week of September 9th. German police confirm the calls but state that the U.S. Secret Service would not reveal any further information. [Source: German news agency “online.de”, September 14, 2001,.]

June 26, 2001 — The magazine indiareacts.com states that “India and Iran will `facilitate’ US and Russian plans for `limited military action’ against the Taliban.” The story indicates that the fighting will be done by US and Russian troops with the help of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. [Source: indiareacts.com, June 26, 2001.]

                June 2001: German intelligence warns the CIA, Britain’s MI6, and Israel’s Mossad that Middle Eastern terrorists are training for hijackings and targeting US and Israeli symbols. [Source: Fox News, 5/17/02]

                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.

                Summer 2001 — Russian intelligence notifies the CIA that 25 terrorist pilots have been specifically training for suicide missions.

                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)

                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

                July 4-14, 2001 — Osama bin Laden receives treatments for kidney disease at the American hospital in Dubai and meets with a CIA official who returns to CIA headquarters on July 15th. [Source: Le Figaro, October 31st, 2001.]

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

                July 10, 2001: A Phoenix FBI agent sends a memorandum warning about Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons. He suspects bin Laden’s followers and recommends a national program to check visas of suspicious flight-school students. The memo is sent to two FBI counter-terrorism offices, but no action is taken. [ Source: New York Times, 5/21/02] Vice President Cheney says in May 2002 that he opposes releasing the memo to congressional leaders or to the media and public. [Source:  CNN, 5/20/02]]

               July 26, 2001: Attorney General Ashcroft stops flying commercial airlines due to a threat assessment. [Source: CBS, 7/26/01]  He later walks out of his office rather than answer questions about this. [Source: Associated Press, 5/16/02] 

                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

                Late July 2001: The US and UN ignore warnings from the Taliban foreign minister that bin Laden is planning an imminent huge attack on US soil. The FBI and CIA also fail to take seriously warnings that Islamic fundamentalists have enrolled in flight schools across the US. [Source: Independent, 9/7/02]  

                August 2001 — Russian President Vladimir Putin orders Russian intelligence to warn the U.S. government “in the strongest possible terms” of imminent attacks by suicide pilots on airports and government buildings. [Source: MS-NBC interview with Putin, September 15., Fox, September 17]

                August 2001 — The FBI arrests an Islamic militant linked to bin Laden in Boston. French intelligence sources confirm that the man is a key member of bin Laden’s network and the FBI learns that he has been taking flying lessons. At the time of his arrest the man is in possession of technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals. [Source: Reuters, September 13 2001]

                Late summer 2001: Jordanian intelligence agents go to Washington to warn that a major attack is planned inside the US and that aircraft will be used. Christian Science Monitor calls the story “confidently authenticated” even though Jordan later backs away from it. [Source: Christian Science Monitor, 5/23/02]

                August 6, 2001, the CIA also presented a warning to the President, explicitly concerned with terrorism inside the United States.,indicating that bin Laden might be planning to hijack commercial airliners The actual content of this message has been the subject of considerable debate, with White House officials understandably downplaying its significance.[Sources: Time May 16; New York Times, May 16, 2002]

                August 6, 2001,  a document surfaced in 2002, dated in April of that year, that purports to be a lengthy intelligence survey by the Federal German BND. A portion of it sates that German Ambassador Manfred Issinger personally warned President Bush at his Texas ranch about the attack by Arab terrorists “about September 10-11.” The Federal German government will neither confirm or deny the authenticity of this document.

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

                August 8-23, 2001: Two high ranking Israeli Mossad agents come to Washington to warn the FBI and CIA that up to 200 terrorists have slipped into the US and are planning an imminent major assault in the US. Indications point to a highly visible target. [Sources: Telegraph, 9/16/01, Los Angeles Times, 9/16/01, Fox News, 5/17/02] The Mossad gives the CIA a list of terrorists. A major Israeli spy ring was hard on the heels of at least four members of the 9/11 hijackers, including lead hijacker Mohammed Atta. [Source: BBC, 10/2/01]

                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.

                August 24, 2001: Frustrated with lack of response from FBI headquarters about detained suspect Moussaoui, the Minnesota FBI begins working with the CIA. The CIA sends alerts calling him a “suspect 747 airline suicide hijacker.” Three days later an FBI Minnesota supervisor says he is trying keep Moussaoui from “taking control of a plane and fly it into the WTC.” [Source: Senate Intelligence (Hill #2), 10/17/02}] FBI headquarters chastises Minnesota FBI for notifying the CIA. [Source: Time, 5/21/02]

                 August 2001: Britain gives the US another warning about an al-Qaeda attack. The previous warning was vague. This one specifies imminent multiple airplane hijackings by al-Qaeda. [Source: Sunday Herald, May 19, 2002]

                August/September, 2001 — The Dow Jones Industrial Average drops nearly 900 points in the three weeks prior to the attack. A major stock market crash is imminent.

Sept. 3-10, 2001 — MS-NBC reports on September 16 that a caller to a Cayman Islands radio talk show gave several warnings of an imminent attack on the U.S. by bin Laden in the week prior to 9/11.

September 1-10, 2001 — In an exercise, Operation “Swift Sword” planned for four years, 23,000 British troops are steaming toward Oman. Although the 9/11 attacks caused a hiccup in the deployment the massive operation was implemented as planned. At the same time two U.S. carrier battle groups arrive on station in the Gulf of Arabia just off the Pakistani coast. Also at the same time, some 17,000 U.S. troops join more than 23,000 NATO troops in Egypt for Operation “Bright Star.” All of these forces are in place before the first plane hits the World Trade Center. [Sources: The Guardian, CNN, FOX, The Observer.]

September 7, 2001 — Florida Governor Jeb Bush signs a two-year emergency executive order (01-261) making new provisions for the Florida National Guard to assist law enforcement and emergency-management personnel in the event of large civil disturbances, disaster or acts of terrorism. [Source: State of Florida web site listing of Governor’s Executive Orders.]

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. [Source: The New York Times; The Wall Street Journal.]

September 10, 2001 — 4,516 put options are purchased on American Airlines as compared to 748 call options. [Source: above]

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.

It has been documented that the CIA, the Israeli Mossad and many other intelligence agencies monitor stock trading in real time using highly advanced programs reported to be descended from Promis software. This is to alert national intelligence services of just such kinds of attacks. Promis was reported, as recently as June, 2001 to be in Osama bin Laden’s possession and, as a result of recent stories by FOX, both the FBI and the Justice Department have confirmed its use for U.S. intelligence gathering through at least this summer. This would confirm that CIA had additional advance warning of imminent attacks. [Sources: The Washington Times, June 15, 2001; Fox News, October 16, 2001]

 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] On June 19, 2002, CNN reported the contents of these two National Security Agency intercepts. Other news outlets, including The Washington Post, also reported on the intercepts.  [Source: New York Times, August 10, 2002]

September 10, 2001: A particularly urgent warning may have been received the night before the attacks, causing some top Pentagon brass to cancel a trip. “Why that same information was not available to the 266 people who died aboard the four hijacked commercial aircraft may become a hot topic on the Hill.” [Source: Newsweek, 9/13/01] “A group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.” [Source: Newsweek, 9/12/01]

                September 11, 2001 — Gen Mahmud of the ISI (see above), friend of Mohammed Atta, is visiting Washington on behalf of the Taliban. [Source: MS-NBC, Oct. 7.]

September 11, 2001 — Employees of Odigo, Inc. in Israel, one of the world’s largest instant messaging companies, with offices in New York, receive threat warnings of an imminent attack on the WTC less than two hours before the first plane hits the WTC. Law enforcement authorities have gone silent about any investigation of this. The Odigo Research and Development offices in Israel are located in the city of Herzliyya, a ritzy suburb of Tel Aviv which is the same location as the Institute for Counter Terrorism which breaks early details of insider trading on 9-11. [Source: Ha’aretz, 9/26/01.].

                September 11, 2001 — For 35 minutes, from 8:15 AM until 9:05 AM, with it widely known within the FAA and the military that four planes have been simultaneously hijacked and taken off course, no one notifies the President of the United States. It is not until 9:30 that any Air Force planes are scrambled to intercept, but by then it is too late. This means that the National Command Authority waited for 75 minutes before scrambling aircraft, even though it was known that four simultaneous hijackings had occurred — an event that has never happened in history. [Sources: CNN, ABC, MS-NBC, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times.]

                September 11, 2001: Did the Air Force send up planes after the hijacked aircraft? The Air Force won’t say. It says they keep about 20 F-15 and F-16 fighters on duty with Air National Guards along the nation’s coastline, ready to inspect unknown aircraft entering U.S. airspace. “We can scramble and be airborne in a matter of minutes,” said an Air Force spokesperson. Some airline pilots are wondering whether the FAA did enough to try to prevent the crashes.[Source: Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2001]

                Department of Defense (6/1/01) and FAA (7/12/01) procedure: In the event of a hijacking, the FAA hijack coordinator on duty at Washington headquarters requests the military to provide escort aircraft. Normally, NORAD escort aircraft take the required action. The FAA notifies the National Military Command Center by the most expeditious means. [Sources: DoD..6/1/01, FAA, 7/12/01, FAA, 7/12/01] If NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) hears of any difficulties in the skies, they begin the work to scramble jet fighters [take off and intercept aircraft that are off course]. Between Sep 2000 and June 2001 fighters were scrambled 67 times. [ Source: AP, 8/12/02] When the Lear jet of golfer Payne Stewart didn’t respond in 1999, F-16 interceptors were quickly dispatched. According to an Air Force timeline, a series of military planes provided an emergency escort to Payne’s stricken Lear about 20 minutes after ground controllers lost contact with his plane.[Source: Dallas Morning News, 10/26/99

8:20 AM (approx.): Air traffic controllers suspect Flight 11 has been hijacked. [Source:  New York Times, 9/15/01]

8:40 AM: NORAD is notified of hijacking. [Sources: New York Times, 10/16/01, Washington Post, 9/15/01]

8:46 AM: Flight 11 crashes into the World Trade Center north tower. [approximately 26 minutes after controllers lost contact] [Source:  New York Times, 9/12/01]    

8:46 AM: Bush later states, “I was sitting outside the classroom and I saw an airplane hit the tower. The TV was on.” [CNN, 12/4/01] “When we walked into the classroom, I had seen this plane fly into the first building.” [Source:  White House, 1/5/02] 

8:52 AM: Two F-15s take off from Otis Air Force Base. [ Source: Washington Post, 9/15/01]  They go after Flight 175. Major General Paul Weaver, director of the Air National Guard, states “the pilots flew like a scalded ape, topping 500 mph but were unable to catch up to the airliner. We had a nine-minute window, and in excess of 100 miles to intercept 175,” he said. ”There was just literally no way.” [ Source: Dallas Morning News, 9/15/01] F-15’s fly at up to 2.5 times the speed of sound [1875 mph or 30+ miles a minute or 270+ miles in nine minutes] and are designed for low-altitude, high-speed, precision attacks. [ Source: BBC]

8:56 AM: By this time, it is evident that Flight 77 is lost. The FAA, already in contact with the Pentagon about the two hijackings out of Boston, reportedly doesn’t notify NORAD of this until 9:24, 28 minutes later. [Source: New York Times, 10/16/01]

9:03 AM: Flight 175 crashes into the south WTC tower. [23 minutes after NORAD notified, 43 minutes after air traffic control lost contact with pilots] [Sources: New York Times, 9/12/01, CNN, 9/12/01]

9:10 AM: Major General Paul Weaver states Flight 77 came back on the (radar) scope at 9:10 in West Virginia. [ Source: Dallas Morning News, 9/15/01] Another report states the military was notified of Flight 77 several minutes after 9:03. [Source:  Washington Post, 9/1/01]

9:24 AM (? – see above): The FAA, who 28 minutes earlier had discovered Flight 77 off course and heading east over West Virginia, reportedly notifies NORAD. A Pentagon spokesman says, “The Pentagon was simply not aware that this aircraft was coming our way.” [Sources: Newsday, 9/23/01, New York Times, 9/23/01]Yet since the first crash, military officials in a Pentagon command center were urgently talking to law enforcement and air traffic control officials about what to do. [Source: New York Times, 9/1/01]

9:28 AM: Air traffic control learns that Flight 93 has been hijacked. [Source:  MSNBC, 7/30/02]

9:38 AM: Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon. [42 minutes or more after contact was lost, one hour after NORAD notification of first hijacking] [Sources: New York Times, 10/16/01, CNN, 9/12/01]

10:10 AM: Flight 93 crashes in Pennsylvania. [42 minutes after contact was lost][Source:  CNN, 9/12/02]

September 12, 2001: Senator Orrin Hatch says the US was monitoring bin Laden supporters and overheard them discussing the attack. [Sources:  ABC, 9/1/01,  AP, 9/12/01]

September 13-19, 2001: Members of bin Laden’s family are driven or flown under FBI supervision to a secret assembly point in Texas and then to Washington, where they leave the country on a private charter plane when airports reopen three days after the attacks.[Source: New York Times, September 30, 2001]

September 19, 2001: The FBI claims that there may have been six hijacking teams on the morning of 9/11. [Sources: New York Times, 9/19/01, CBS, 9/14/01, Guardian, 10/13/01] Authorities have identified teams that total as many as 50 infiltrators who supported or carried out the strikes. About 40 of the men have been accounted for. [Source: Los Angeles Times, 9/13/01]

September 29, 2001 — $2.5 million in put options on American Airlines and United Airlines are unclaimed. This is likely the result of the suspension in trading on the NYSE after the attacks which gave the Securities and Exchange Commission time to be waiting when the owners showed up to redeem their put options. [Source: The San Francisco Chronicle]

October 10, 2001 — reports that U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain has paid a call on the Pakistani oil minister. A previously abandoned Unocal pipeline from Turkmenistan, across Afghanistan, to the Pakistani coast, for the purpose of selling oil and gas to China, is now back on the table “in view of recent geopolitical developments.” [Source: Pakistan The Frontier Post]

December 18, 2001: Recovery experts extract data from 32 WTC computer drives revealing a surge in financial transactions just before the attacks. Illegal transfers of over $100 million may have been made through some WTC computer systems immediately before and during the disaster. [Source: Reuters, December 18, 2001]

December 25, 2001 — Newly appointed Afghanistan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai is revealed as being a former paid consultant for Unocal. [Source: Le Monde. December 25, 2001]

                2002

January 3, 2002 — President Bush appoints Zalamy Khalilzad as a special envoy to Afghanistan. Khalilzad, a former employee of Unocal, also wrote op-eds in the Washington Post in 1997 supporting the Taliban regime. [Source: Pravda, 1/9/02]

February 6, 2002: CIA Director Tenet tells a Senate hearing that there was no 9/11 intelligence failure. When asked about the CIA on 9/11, he states that the 9/11 plot was “in the heads of three or four people.” He rejects any suggestion that the CIA failed to do its job. [Source: USA  Today, 2/7/02]

February 9, 2002 — Pakistani leader General Musharraf and Afghan leader Hamid Karzai announce their agreement to “cooperate in all spheres of activity” including the proposed Central Asian pipeline. Pakistan will give $10 million to Afghanistan to help pay Afghani government workers. [Source: The Irish Times, February 9, 2002]

April 19, 2002: FBI Director Mueller: “We have not uncovered a single piece of paper that mentioned any aspect of the 9/11 plot. The hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any kind.” [Sources: FBI, 4/19/02, LA Times, 4/30/02] Yet investigators have amassed a ”substantial” amount of e-mail traffic among the hijackers. [ Source: USA Today, 10/1/01] The laptop computer of Moussaoui, the alleged 20^th hijacker, was confiscated weeks before 9/11, yet FBI headquarters systematically dismissed and undermined requests by Minneapolis FBI agents to search the computer. [Sources: Time, 5/21/02, CNN, 5/27/02]

May 8, 2002: FBI Director Mueller: “there was nothing the agency could have done to anticipate and prevent the [9/11] attacks.” [Source: Senate Intelligence Committee (Witness Breitweiser} ]

May 21, 2002: A memo is released in which Minnesota FBI agent Coleen Rowley writes to FBI Director Mueller, “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.” [Source: Time, 5/21/02]  CNN calls the memo a “colossal indictment of our chief law-enforcement agency.” [Source: CNN, 5/27/02]   Time magazine later names Rowley one of three “Persons of the Year” for 2002. [Source: Time, 12/22/02] 

May 23, 2002: President Bush says he is opposed to establishing a special, independent commission to probe how the government dealt with terror warnings before 9/11. [Source:  CBS, 5/2/02]  

May 30, 2002: FBI Agent Robert Wright formally accuses the FBI of deliberately curtailing investigations that might have prevented 9/11. Wright is under threat of retribution should he talk to members of Congress about what he knows. [Source: Fox News, 5/30/02] He also accuses the agency of shutting down his 1998 criminal probe into alleged terrorist-training camps in Chicago and Kansas City. Wright has written a book, but the agency won’t let him publish it or even give it to anyone. [Source: LA Weekly, 8/2/02]

July 23, 2002: The New York City government decides that many of the audio and written records of the Fire Department’s actions on 9/11 should never be released. The New York Times had filed a lawsuit seeking numerous records concerning the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, including firsthand accounts by scores of firefighters and chiefs. [Source: New York Times, 7/23/02]         

October 5, 2002: Congressional investigators say the FBI’s efforts to block their inquiry makes them skeptical of FBI assertions. They also say the Justice Department has joined the FBI in fighting congressional requests for information, while the CIA has been antagonistic. [Source: New York Times, 10/5/02]

Additional references

 

National Commission on the Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, July 2004, p 172, and Chapter 5, footnote 130, http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf

                 9/11 Commission memorandum entitled “FBI Briefing on Trading”, prepared by Doug Greenburg, 18 August 2003, http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00269.pdf

Dave Carpenter, Exchange examines odd jump: Before attack: Many put options of hijacked planes’ parent companies purchased , The Associated Press, 18 September 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11/cjonline_oddjump.html

BBC News, Bin Laden ‘share gains’ probe, 18 September 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1548118.stm

 http://web.archive.org/web/20011114023845/http://fyi.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/09/24/gen.europe.shortselling/

                James Doran, Insider Trading Apparently Based on Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks, The

London Times, 18 September 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11/londontimes_insidertrading.html

Associated Press, EU Searches for Suspicious Trading , 22 September 2001, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34910,00.html

World News Tonight, 20 September 2001

Erin E. Arvedlund, Follow The Money: Terrorist Conspirators Could Have Profited More From Fall Of Entire Market Than Single Stocks, Barron’s (Dow Jones and Company), 6 October 2001

Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: the decline of the American empire at the end of the age of oil, New Society Publishers, 2004

Kyle F. Hence, Massive pre-attack ‘insider trading’ offer authorities hottest trail to accomplices, Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), 21 April 2002, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HEN204B.html

Grant Ringshaw, Profits of doom, The London Telegraph, 23 September 2001,

Christian Berthelsen and Scott Winokur,  Suspicious profits sit uncollected:  Airline   investors seem to be lying low, San Francisco Chronicle, 29 September 2001,

 Charles Gasparino and Gregory Zuckerman, Treasury Bonds Enter Purview of U.S. Inquiry Into Attack Gains, The Wall Street Journal, 2 October 2001, http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001/wallstreetjournal100201.html

 The 9/11 Commission memorandum that summarized the FBI investigations refers to the traders involved in the Stratesec purchase.  From the references in the document, we can make out that the two people had the same last name and were related.  This fits the description of Wirt and Sally Walker, who are known to be stock holders in Stratesec.  Additionally, one (Wirt) was a director at the company, a director at a publicly traded company in Oklahoma (Aviation General), and chairman of an investment firm in Washington, DC (Kuwam Corp).

Sourcewatch, Mansoor Ijaz/Sudan, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mansoor_Ijaz/Sudan

History Commons, Complete 911 Timeline, Bin Laden Family, http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?financing_of_al-qaeda:_a_more_detailed_look=binladenFamily&timeline=complete_911_timeline

Kevin R. Ryan, The History of Wirt Dexter Walker: Russell & Co, the CIA and 9/11, 911blogger.com, 3 September 2010, http://911blogger.com/news/2010-09-03/history-wirt-dexter-walker-russell-company-cia-and-911

Michael Moran, Bin Laden comes home to roost : His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful story, MSNBC, 24 August 1998, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340101

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E4DB143BF936A15756C0A9649C8B63

History Commons, Complete 911 Timeline, Saudi American Bank, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=saudi_american_bank

Erik Kirschbaum, German Firm Probes Final World Trade Center Deals, Reuters, 16 December 2001,

                Marc Chesney, et al, Detecting Informed Trading Activities in the Options Markets, Social Sciences Research Network, 13 January 2010,