MORTARDUDE
04-09-2004, 05:08 AM
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/040804_condi_rice.html
Condoleezza Rice Testifies:
LIES A SIXTH GRADER WOULD NOT ACCEPT
by
Michael C. Ruppert
? Copyright 2004, From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
April 8, 2004, 2000 PDT (FTW) ? The critical interaction in any criminal investigation of a major crime is between the detective and the suspect. It is the detective's mission to get the suspect to trip up and make statements which can then be presented in court to discredit the suspect, break down his alibis, and prove the suspect's criminal knowledge and intent. Courts and the legal system don't care what non-involved parties speculate or argue about with each other. They weren't part of the crime. They weren't there and their thoughts become hearsay or irrelevant. The only thing that matters in court is what the detective can get the suspect to state on the record which can then be corroborated or disproved. That is called direct evidence.
For independent investigators challenging the government's position on the attacks of 9/11/01, from the start our best gambit has been to maneuver the government and key officials into tripping themselves up publicly in a way that can be understood by the American people as easily as watching an episode of NYPD Blue. No expert witnesses are need. No scientific evidence needs to be presented or debated. The suspect lied. And if the suspect lied then the suspect's story is not true. And if the suspect's story is not true then the suspect is, in all probability, guilty as hell or withholding material evidence of someone else's guilt.
The hardest work involved in this process is to expose the lie in a way that the suspect cannot ignore or escape. It is much easier then to go from an admitted lie to proof of guilt and confession.
Perhaps Andy Sipowicz should have been on the September 11th Commission as Condoleezza rice hung herself today. There certainly was no one there willing to do the job that he could have done without breaking a sweat.
On no less than seven different occasions in today's long-awaited testimony before the September 11th Commission, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice insisted that there was no specific advance knowledge as to the time, place and method of the attacks, and that there was no warning of a domestic internal threat from Al Qaeda throughout the spring and summer of 2001. With these sworn statements the biggest vulnerability of the Bush administration in its criminal complicity for those attacks lies exposed and fully on the record. Ladies and gentlemen, what you witnessed today, on every major network, was perjury ? a felony. We will prove that here. But compared to the crimes of murder, conspiracy and treason it was perhaps maybe too small a crime for the major media to notice. It was not too big a crime, however, for the American people and the victim families of 9/11 to notice. The revolution may not be televised. But it may have begun as a result of what was televised today.
Another crime was revealed when Democratic commission member Richard Ben Veniste said, ?We agree?, as Rice asserted that there were no specific threats inside the United States before 9/11. The so-called independent commission has no intention of fulfilling its mandate. Ben Veniste's use of the word ?we? was the only time where any commissioner spoke for the entire panel and Ben Veniste is neither the Chair nor the Vice Chair of the commission. What prompted him to speak for the entire panel? As FTW has said from the commission's inception, everything that we have witnessed thus far has been stage-managed drama intended to convince the American people that substantive answers to 9-11 have been obtained as a result of a difficult process.
This is an insulting load of bull.
One (of many) Presidential Daily (Intelligence) Briefs (PDBs) dated August 6th 2001, and a frequent theme in Rice's Q&A -- titled ?Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US? -- is only the barest tip of a criminal iceberg. Rice's position that it was a speculative paper was beneath disingenuous and belied by the title itself. The Commission's intense focus on that PDB alone, to the exclusion of many other more damning unclassified and available records, is an indication of its deliberate unwillingness to confront Rice or the administration on the simplest points that reveal the administration's guilt. Rice's impish smile, when asked several times if the PDB would be declassified, betrayed the convenient roadblock now accepted by panel and witness as something that will never come to light -- as if it were the only piece of evidence remaining to be explored. The big ?What if??
It is not. Forget the PDB. Let's just start with the open and unclassified public record.
IS CBS NEWS CLASSIFIED MATERIAL?
Consider one CBS news story from July 26, 2001 in which it was reported:
"In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.
There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines,"?
The CBS news story is not classified and it was referring to trips made inside the Continental U.S. by the Attorney General. Therefore, Rice's statement is false on its face and while the Americans who died on 9-11 were left exposed and unprotected, the Attorney General reacted to an Al Qaeda threat in complete contradiction to Rice's sworn testimony. That question wasn't even asked today.
The totality of available and non-classified information is both infinitely more incriminating and more disturbing and we will look at some of it below.
RICE REVEALS MORE THAN SHE SUSPECTS
In her opening remarks, Condoleezza Rice stated, ?During this period, the Vice President, DCI Tenet, and the NSC's Counterterrorism staff called senior foreign officials requesting that they increase their intelligence assistance and report to us any relevant threat information.?
In the wake of 9/11, as FTW began documenting a number of direct and very specific warnings received by the United States government, a number of press stories and TV commentaries reported that these warnings had never ?trickled up? to the White House or senior management level because they had been received at lower levels. Rice's statement bypasses and nullifies that excuse in much the same way that it was impossible for Rice, Cheney and the senior White House staff to assert that they were not aware of the 2002 report from former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, indicating that documents purporting to show that Iraq was attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium Niger were forgeries. It was Cheney's office which had dispatched Wilson in the first place.
It is beyond ludicrous; beyond ?systemic? failure; beyond ?connecting the dots?; to assume that a high priority request from the White House would have been ignored by lower levels of the national security apparatus, or that a mechanism did not exist for foreign intelligence service s to get their information before the right eyes.
In repeating, ad nauseum, her assertion that ?If we had had specific information as to the time and place of the attacks, we would have moved heaven and earth to prevent them?, Rice played the administration's poker hand, bluffing to end with not even a pair of deuces to back her up.
WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING PDBs!
In this section FTW will review some of its reporting on documented foreign warnings received by the administration before 9/11. And this writer will also disclose portions of his new book, The Truth and Lies of 9/11 ? A merica's Descent into Fascism at the End of the Age of Oil, (scheduled for release this summer) for the first time publicly.
Although our first reports of specific warnings of an Al Qaeda threat inside the US were published within two weeks of the attacks, our best compendium of those warnings was published on April 22, 2002. That story, Briefing Paper: The Case for Bush Administration Advance Knowledge of 9/11 Attacks, is located at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/042202_bushknows.html.
In that article we wrote:
As reported in the respected German daily Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Sept. 13, the German intelligence service, the BND, warned both the CIA and Israel in June of 2001 that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of A merican and Israeli culture. The story specifically referred to an electronic eavesdropping system known as Echelon, wherein a number of countries tap cell phone and electronic communications in partner countries and then pool the information. The BND warnings were also passed to the United Kingdom.
No known denial by the BND of the accuracy of this story exists, and the FAZ story indicates that the information was received directly from BND sources.
According to a Sept. 14 report in the Internet newswire online.ie, German police, monitoring the phone calls of a jailed Iranian man, learned the man was telephoning USG intelligence agencies last summer to warn of an imminent attack on the WTC in the week of Sept. 9. German officials confirmed the calls to the USG for the story but refused to discuss additional details.
In August 2000 French intelligence sources confirmed a man recently arrested in Boston by the FBI was an Islamic militant and a key member of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. The FBI knew the man had been taking flying lessons at the time of his arrest and was in possession of technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals, as reported by Reuters on Sept. 13.
According to a story in Izvestia on Sept. 12, Russian intelligence warned the USG that as many as 25 pilots were training for missions involving the crashing of airliners into important targets.
In an MSNBC interview on Sept. 15, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated he had ordered Russian intelligence to warn the USG "in the strongest possible terms" of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings before the attacks on Sept. 11.
Conclusion: From just these five press stories, then, the USG had received credible advance warnings, some from heads of state, that commercial aircraft would be hijacked by as many as 25 hijackers at airports, with Boston a strong candidate, during the week of Sept. 9?
No known preventive measures were taken.
INSIDER TRADING
The documented pre-Sept. 11 insider trading that occurred before the attacks involved only companies hit hard by the attacks. They include United Airlines, American Airlines, Morgan Stanley, Merrill-Lynch, Axa Reinsurance, Marsh & McLennan, Munich Reinsurance, Swiss Reinsurance, and Citigroup.
In order to argue that the massive and well-documented insider trading that occurred in at least seven countries immediately before the attacks of Sept. 11 did not serve as a warning to intelligence agencies, then it is necessary to argue that no one was aware of the trades as they were occurring, and that intelligence and law enforcement agencies of most industrialized nations do not monitor stock trades in real time to warn of impending attacks. Both assertions are false. Both assertions would also ignore the fact that the current executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for enforcement is David Doherty, a retired CIA general counsel. And also ignored is the fact that the trading in United Airlines stock -- one of the most glaring clues -- was placed through the firm Deutschebank/Alex Brown, which was headed until 1998 by the man who is now the executive director of the CIA, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard.
One wonders if it was a coincidence then, that Mayo Shattuck III, the head of the Alex Brown unit of Deutschebank -- which had its offices in the WTC -- suddenly resigned from a $30 million, three-year contract on Sept. 12, as reported by the New York Times and other papers.
The American exchanges that handle these trades, primarily the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE) and the NYSE, know on a daily basis what levels of put options are purchased. "Put options" are highly leveraged bets, tying up blocks of stock, that a given stock's share price will fall dramatically. To quote 60 Minutes from Sept. 19, "Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market."
It is hard to believe that they missed:
- A jump in UAL put options 90 times (not 90 percent) above normal between Sept. 6 and Sept. 10, and 285 times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack. [CBS News, Sept. 26]
- A jump in American Airlines put options 60 times (not 60 percent) above normal on the day before the attacks. [CBS News, Sept. 26]
- No similar trading occurred on any other airlines. [Bloomberg Business Report, the Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT), Herzliyya, Israel citing data from the CBOE]
- Morgan Stanley saw, between Sept. 7 and Sept.10, an increase of 27 times (not 27 percent) in the purchase of put options on its shares. [ICT Report, "Mechanics of Possible Bin-Laden Insider Trading Scam," Sept. 21, citing data from the CBOE].
- Merrill-Lynch saw a jump of more than 12 times the normal level of put options in the four trading days before the attacks. [Ibid]
These trades were certainly noticed after the attacks.
"This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your entire life... This would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence," said Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg Business News, interviewed on Good Morning Texas on Sept. 20.
"I saw put-call numbers higher than I've ever seen in 10 years of following the markets, particularly the options markets,' said John Kinnucan, principal of Broadband Research, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle," reported the Montreal Gazette on Sept. 19. The paper also wrote, "Agence France Presse, on Sept. 22, reported, 'And Germany's Bundesbank chief, Ernst Weltke, said on the sidelines of the meeting that a report of the investigation showed "bizarre" fiscal transactions prior to the attacks that could not have been chalked up to coincidence.
"Weltke said the transactions, 'could not have been planned and carried out without a certain knowledge,' particularly heavy trading in oil and gold futures."
ABC World News reported on Sept. 20, "Jonathan Winer, an ABC News consultant said, 'it's absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan, to the U.S., to North America, to Europe."
How much money was involved? Andreas von B?low, a former member of the German Parliament responsible for oversight of Germanys intelligence services estimated the worldwide amount at $15 billion, according to Tagesspiegel on Jan. 13. Other experts have estimated the amount at $12 billion. CBS News gave a conservative estimate of $100 million.
Not a single U.S. or foreign investigative agency has announced any arrests or developments in the investigation of these trades, the most telling evidence of foreknowledge of the attacks. This, in spite of the fact that former Security and Exchange Commission enforcement chief William McLucas told Bloomberg News that regulators would "certainly be able to track down every trade."
What is striking is that a National Public Radio report on Oct. 16 reported Britain 's Financial Services Authority had cleared bin Laden and his henchmen of insider trading. If not bin Laden, then who else had advance knowledge?
It has been standard and established USG policy to be alert and responsive to anything even remotely resembling an attack on U.S. companies and/or the economy. The word "remote" does not apply here. The possible claim by the Bush Administration that, 'Gee, we just happened to miss this,' becomes even more implausible when considering the lengths intelligence agencies go to in order to track stock trades.
Note that the Israeli Institute for Counter-Terrorism was the first entity to release a detailed report on the insider trading. That alone is prima facie evidence of a direct relationship between the financial markets and terrorist investigations.
CIA AND THE MARKETS
We can thank Fox News on Oct. 16 for breaking post 9-11 stories disclosing the use of sophisticated PROMIS software by the FBI and the Justice Department. A multitude of court records and investigative reports have established not only the reality, but the versatility of a program initially designed to incorporate data from a variety of data bases in different languages into one readable format. PROMIS has since been refined to include artificial intelligence and "back doors" inserted by intelligence agencies to allow for surreptitious retrieval and/or removal and alteration of data.
The Fox stories clearly confirmed, especially when added to stories from last summer by the Washington Times which were based on interviews with Justice Department officials, that PROMIS was used to monitor banking and financial transactions in a virtual real-time environment.
This writer has written extensively on the software. More information can be found on the Web site at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/index.html.
However, one point is critical to this report. In fall 2000 I was visited in Los Angeles by two members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) national security staff. They were conducting a major investigation inside the U.S. to determine whether or not the RCMP's version of the software had been compromised. During discussions with the Mounties, I confirmed several times that the software was used to monitor stock trades in real time. A subsequent investigation led me to contact several people in Canada who had been interviewed in the same investigation. They were stockbrokers.
In a taped panel discussion, which aired March 14 on Canada 's Vision-TV, I faced a panel of three Canadian experts on the issue of U.S. foreknowledge of, and possible complicity in, the 9-11 attacks. Among them was Ron Atkey, former Canadian immigration minister and the former parliamentary head of the committee charged with oversight of Canada 's military and intelligence operations. Over the course of the program I made specific statements, relying not only on the RCMP interactions but also on previous investigations that it was documented that intelligence services track stock trades in real time. On camera, I produced the business cards of the two RCMP agents. Atkey, who had not hesitated to challenge me on other points during the show, went silent.
INTELLIGENCE SUCESSES
Four basic intelligence successes need to be acknowledged here. These admitted successes, while not addressing any other still secret penetrations of the Al Qaeda network, further diminish any Bush Admin istration assertion that it did not know of the attacks.
On Feb. 13 [2001] United Press International terrorism correspondent Richard Sale, while covering a Manhattan trial of one of Osama bin Laden's followers, reported the National Security Agency had broken bin Laden's encrypted communications. Even if that prompted an immediate change in bin Laden's methods of communication, just six months before the attacks, the administration has consistently maintained -- and military and covert experience dictates -- that the attacks were planned for at least several years.
The FAZ story indicates that the secret eavesdropping program Echelon had been successful in securing details of the pending attacks. Echelon employs highly sophisticated computer programs capable of both voice and word recognition to filter billions of telephone conversations and locate specific targets. Assuming, as some sources indicate, Al Qaeda stopped using encrypted communications after it was known that their system was compromised, why was the NSA not able to pick up any cell phone calls or e-mails? Mohammed Atta and other alleged hijackers were known to have used cell phones. The FAZ story establishes that as late as June, Al Qaeda operatives were being tracked in this manner.
In the trial of a former Deutschebank executive Kevin Ingram, who pled guilty to laundering drug money to finance terrorist operations linked to Al Qaeda just two weeks before the 9-11 attacks, indications surfaced that the Justice Department had penetrated the terrorists' financial network. A Nov. 16 [2001] Associated Press story by Catherine Wilson stated, "Numerous promised wire transfers never arrived, but there were discussions of foreign bankers taking payoffs to move the money to purchase weapons into the United States, said prosecutor Rolando Garcia."
Two questions are begged but unanswered. How were the wire transfers blocked and how was the Justice Department able to monitor the money flows without alerting either the bankers or the suspects?
Finally, as reported by the German paper Die Welt on Dec. 6 [2001] and by Agence France Presse on Dec. 7, Western intelligence services, including the CIA, learned after arrests in the Philippines, that Al Qaeda operatives had planned to crash commercial airliners into the WTC. Details of the plan, as reported by a number of American press outlets, were found on a computer seized during the arrests. The plan was called "operation Bojinka."
Details of the plot were disclosed publicly in 1997 in the New York trial of Ramsi Youssef for his involvement in the 1993 WTC bombing.
IZVESTIA, PUTIN AND THE CIA = RICE PUDDING
Even more damaging to Rice and the Bush administration is a story published in Russia's Izvestia which came into this writer's possession thanks to former CIA counter-terror case officer, Leutrell Osborne (see above). The story had been brought to his attention by his Russian-speaking son and had fortunately been saved in its original form before it was sanitized of several key sentences
FTW has posted a translation and copy of the original Russian story online at:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/izvestia_story_pic.html.
Portions of the story in bold indicate sentences that were removed from the Izvestia web site by late September 2001. We posted the full story in May of 2002 after commissioning a professional translation.
Here is the unedited story:
September 12, 2001 (14:15) Yesterday at the headquarters of Central Intelligence Service in Langley a confidential meeting between one of the Deputy Directors of CIA and a special messenger of Russian Intelligence Service took place. According to NewsRu sources he delivered to his American colleagues some documents including audio tapes with telephone conversations directly relating to terrorist attacks on Washington and New York last Tuesday. A ccording to these sources, Russian Intelligence agents know the organizers and executors of these terrorist attacks. More than that, Moscow warned Washington about preparation to these actions a couple of weeks before they happened.
Russian Intelligent Service states that behind the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York stand the organization of Usama ben Laden, Islamic movement of Uzbekistan and Taliban government. According to our intelligence agents among terrorists there were at least two Uzbeks, natives of Fergana who arrived in the USA on forged documents about ten months ago. A terrorist group which realized actions against the US A consisted of at least 25 people. All of them had a special training on the territories of Afghanistan and Pakistan including piloting of an aircraft.
Besides, Russian Intelligence Service warns White House that present terrorist attacks are only the beginning of the wide-scale action. Ben Laden has the plans to attack nuclear units on the territory of the US A. A mong Islamic targets are space objects and large financial centers of the USA.
The organization of the International Terrorist, according to Russian Intelligence Service agents had been planning an operation against the USA more than a year and a half. Russian Intelligence Service insists that Usama ben Laden has about 400 fanatics who are ready any minute to realize attacks against the USA all around the world.
[NOTE: The scan of the Izvestia story presented? is of the story that was originally presented by Izvestia. The story that they currently have on their website has omitted the first paragraph completely. We wonder why...]
KNOWN PENENTRATIONS OF AL QAEDA
Following are excerpts from The Truth and Lies of 9/11 ? America's Descent into Fascism at the End of the Age of Oil.
SIGINT: NSA Director Michael Hayden testified before Congress in October 2002 that the NSA had no indications that al Qaeda was planning attacks on US soil, let alone against New York or Washington. 10 This directly contradicts the fact that in the summer of 2001 the NS A had intercepted communications between the reported tactical mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mohammed Atta. The NS A did not share the information with any other agencies even at a time when Mohammed was on the FBI's most-wanted terror list. The NSA also failed to translate some messages and later offered the nonsensical excuse that they had no way to separate these calls from millions of others.11
[What do you suppose they were talking about? The best bars in South Florida?]
SIGINT: For more than eighteen months Italian authorities wiretapped an al Qaeda cell in Milan.20 Starting in October 2000, FBI agents assisted Italian authorities in analyzing the tapes, and this resulted in a direct warning to the US from Italy that planes might be used as weapons against US targets.21
SIGINT/ELINT/HUMINT: Italian authorities obtained information from wiretaps of al Qaeda cells that a possible attack was planned to kill President Bush at the G8 Summit in Genoa scheduled for July. A dditional information suggested that Egyptian intelligence had achieved HUMINT penetrations of al Qaeda cells that confirmed information from the wiretaps and surveillance. Some conversations were recorded as a result of the bugging of a Citroen automobile used by Egyptian terrorists in Italy who are close to bin Laden. As a result the airspace around Genoa was closed and the conference was ringed with anti-aircraft weapons.23
SIGINT: In September 2001 the NSA intercepted multiple phone calls into the United States from Abu Zubaida, the man who is reported to be bin Laden's operations chief. No details of what was intercepted have been released, but it is obvious that the parties receiving the calls would have been identified.24
SIGINT: British sources disclosed that telephone conversations between Osama bin Laden and associates in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the weeks prior to 9/11 were monitored and that the attacks were generally discussed in those conversations.25
HUMINT/SIGINT: Jordanian intelligence had for years done a masterful job of infiltrating al Qaeda. A May 2002 story from The International Herald Tribune reported, ?Since the early 1990s, the kingdom's well-organized and efficient intelligence service, the General Intelligence Division (GID), has carefully tracked the CI A-trained or Pakistan-trained guerillas or terrorists, or freedom fighters, or whatever you choose to call them?who survived their victorious 1979?89 war to expel the Soviet invaders from Afghanistan.... Jordan 's GID hunted the returned fighters, capturing and bringing to justice several who became active terrorists. The GID aided the U.S. government in countless ways, even helping U.S. law enforcement officers to apprehend Al Qaeda and other operatives who had formed cells in the United States or Canada.? 39
The author, John K. Cooley, a veteran of ABC News and widely respected on terrorism issues, described how in the summer of 2001 the GID made an intercept deemed so important that it was relayed to the US government not only officially, most likely through the CIA station in Amman, but also personally through an Iranian-born German intelligence agent. From my experience this was a form of insurance for the Jordanian government in case the US ever denied that Jordan had delivered the message or asserted that the Jordanian government had been less than a staunch ally. Such is the fear of the Empire's wrath around the world. The message clearly indicated that a major attack had been planned inside the continental United States and that aircraft would be used. The code name for the operation was ?Al Ourush,? or ?The Big Wedding.? When this information subsequently became embarrassing to the Bush administration, Jordanian officials backed away from their earlier confirmations.40 The administration had been insisting since the day of the attacks that it had received no forewarnings.
Cooley's story also told of how both a French magazine (name not given) and a Moroccan newspaper simultaneously reported that a Moroccan agent named Hassan Dabou had penetrated al Qaeda to the point of getting close to bin Laden, who was "very disappointed" that the 1993 bombing had not toppled the World Trade Center. The agent remained in place until weeks before the attacks. He successfully delivered a message to Moroccan intelligence that al Qaeda was planning ?'large-scale operations in New York in the summer or autumn of 2001.'?
Somebody knew
Throughout the world the independent media organizations have done an outstanding job of picking up and reporting on independently published stories which the major media overlooked. One of the most outstanding examples of this was a July 16, 2002 piece posted at the web site of Portland Indymedia (www.portland.indymedia.org) that reproduced the following short article originally found at The Memory Hole.44
?NPR interview on 9-11 confirmed attack was ?not entirely unexpected.'
?It's certainly one of the most disturbing and important indications that the government knew the attacks of September 11, 2001, were coming. On that morning, National Public Radio (NPR) was presenting live coverage of the attacks on its show Morning Edition. Host Bob Edwards went to a reporter in the field?David Welna, NPR's Congressional correspondent?who was in the Capitol building as it was being evacuated. Here is the crucial portion of Welna's report:
?'I spoke with Congressman Ike Skelton?a Democrat from Missouri and a member of the Armed Services Committee?who said that just recently the Director of the CI A warned that there could be an attack?an imminent attack?on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected.'
(Audio links for this interview are located at Thememoryhole and NPR websites) www.thememoryhole.org/tenet-911.htm
THE 9/11 MOVEMENT MUST UNITE
Within the narrow window between now and the November election, it is on the point of foreknowledge, and on this point only, that the entire government position ? regardless of party or administration ? can be completely and instantly deconstructed in a manner that is easily understood by the majority of the American people. We must become Andy Sipowicz with one voice and we must make that voice be heard. Condi Rice has handed us the pivotal moment on a silver platter. We must break the suspect while she is still on the public stage (in the interrogation room). After that, the millions of other inconsistencies, lies and falsehoods of the attacks, including the physical evidence issues, can be pursued in a systematic way, hopefully with serious legal clout to eliminate wiggle room.
But for the moment, the suspect is in effect saying, look, you have a short period of time in which to book me or let me go. If we let her go, then all other discussions become academic.
EXCERPTED ENDNOTES
10. ?Terror Intercepts on Eve of Sept 11th Too Vague?NSA,? Reuters, October 17, 2002; UA Today, October 18, 2002.
11. Jonathan S. Landay, ?NSA didn't share key pre-Sept 11 information, sources say,? Knight Ridder Newspapers, January 6, 2002: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/bayarea/3416632.htm
20. Charles M. Sennott, ?Exposing Al Quaeda's European Network,? The Boston Globe, August 4, 2002. Archived at: http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/completetimeline/2002/bostonglobe080402.html
21. Sebastian Rotella and Josh Meyer, ?Wiretaps May Have Foretold Terror Attacks Investigation: Suspected Al Qaeda operatives taped in Italy in 2000 discussed airplanes, airports and strikes ?that will never be forgotten,'" The L.A. Times, May 29, 2002. Archived at: http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/completetimeline/2002/latimes052902.html; ?Bugs Recorded Chilling 9/11 Talk,? CBSNews.com, May 29, 2002: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/29/attack/main510400.shtml; The Guardian, May 30, 2002.
23. ?Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit,? The L.A. Times, September 27, 2001: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092701genoa.story
24. ?Early Warnings,? ABC News, February 18, 2002: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/DailyNews/wnt_missedsignals_1_020218.html
25. ?The Proof They Did Not Reveal,? The Sunday Times, October 7, 2001. Archived at: http://www.unansweredquestions.net/timeline/2001/sundaytimes100701.html
39. John K. Cooley, ?The U.S. Ignored Foreign Warnings,? The International Herald Tribune, May 21, 2002. Currently archived at: http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/completetimeline/2002/iht052102.html
40. Ibid.
44. ?CIA Director Warned Congress About 9/11 Attacks,? The Memory Hole.
http://www.thememoryhole.org/tenet-911.htm. As of this writing the Memory Hole Web site still had a link to the actual NPR story allowing the user to hear the actual report.
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Condoleezza Rice Testifies:
LIES A SIXTH GRADER WOULD NOT ACCEPT
by
Michael C. Ruppert
? Copyright 2004, From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
April 8, 2004, 2000 PDT (FTW) ? The critical interaction in any criminal investigation of a major crime is between the detective and the suspect. It is the detective's mission to get the suspect to trip up and make statements which can then be presented in court to discredit the suspect, break down his alibis, and prove the suspect's criminal knowledge and intent. Courts and the legal system don't care what non-involved parties speculate or argue about with each other. They weren't part of the crime. They weren't there and their thoughts become hearsay or irrelevant. The only thing that matters in court is what the detective can get the suspect to state on the record which can then be corroborated or disproved. That is called direct evidence.
For independent investigators challenging the government's position on the attacks of 9/11/01, from the start our best gambit has been to maneuver the government and key officials into tripping themselves up publicly in a way that can be understood by the American people as easily as watching an episode of NYPD Blue. No expert witnesses are need. No scientific evidence needs to be presented or debated. The suspect lied. And if the suspect lied then the suspect's story is not true. And if the suspect's story is not true then the suspect is, in all probability, guilty as hell or withholding material evidence of someone else's guilt.
The hardest work involved in this process is to expose the lie in a way that the suspect cannot ignore or escape. It is much easier then to go from an admitted lie to proof of guilt and confession.
Perhaps Andy Sipowicz should have been on the September 11th Commission as Condoleezza rice hung herself today. There certainly was no one there willing to do the job that he could have done without breaking a sweat.
On no less than seven different occasions in today's long-awaited testimony before the September 11th Commission, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice insisted that there was no specific advance knowledge as to the time, place and method of the attacks, and that there was no warning of a domestic internal threat from Al Qaeda throughout the spring and summer of 2001. With these sworn statements the biggest vulnerability of the Bush administration in its criminal complicity for those attacks lies exposed and fully on the record. Ladies and gentlemen, what you witnessed today, on every major network, was perjury ? a felony. We will prove that here. But compared to the crimes of murder, conspiracy and treason it was perhaps maybe too small a crime for the major media to notice. It was not too big a crime, however, for the American people and the victim families of 9/11 to notice. The revolution may not be televised. But it may have begun as a result of what was televised today.
Another crime was revealed when Democratic commission member Richard Ben Veniste said, ?We agree?, as Rice asserted that there were no specific threats inside the United States before 9/11. The so-called independent commission has no intention of fulfilling its mandate. Ben Veniste's use of the word ?we? was the only time where any commissioner spoke for the entire panel and Ben Veniste is neither the Chair nor the Vice Chair of the commission. What prompted him to speak for the entire panel? As FTW has said from the commission's inception, everything that we have witnessed thus far has been stage-managed drama intended to convince the American people that substantive answers to 9-11 have been obtained as a result of a difficult process.
This is an insulting load of bull.
One (of many) Presidential Daily (Intelligence) Briefs (PDBs) dated August 6th 2001, and a frequent theme in Rice's Q&A -- titled ?Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US? -- is only the barest tip of a criminal iceberg. Rice's position that it was a speculative paper was beneath disingenuous and belied by the title itself. The Commission's intense focus on that PDB alone, to the exclusion of many other more damning unclassified and available records, is an indication of its deliberate unwillingness to confront Rice or the administration on the simplest points that reveal the administration's guilt. Rice's impish smile, when asked several times if the PDB would be declassified, betrayed the convenient roadblock now accepted by panel and witness as something that will never come to light -- as if it were the only piece of evidence remaining to be explored. The big ?What if??
It is not. Forget the PDB. Let's just start with the open and unclassified public record.
IS CBS NEWS CLASSIFIED MATERIAL?
Consider one CBS news story from July 26, 2001 in which it was reported:
"In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.
There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines,"?
The CBS news story is not classified and it was referring to trips made inside the Continental U.S. by the Attorney General. Therefore, Rice's statement is false on its face and while the Americans who died on 9-11 were left exposed and unprotected, the Attorney General reacted to an Al Qaeda threat in complete contradiction to Rice's sworn testimony. That question wasn't even asked today.
The totality of available and non-classified information is both infinitely more incriminating and more disturbing and we will look at some of it below.
RICE REVEALS MORE THAN SHE SUSPECTS
In her opening remarks, Condoleezza Rice stated, ?During this period, the Vice President, DCI Tenet, and the NSC's Counterterrorism staff called senior foreign officials requesting that they increase their intelligence assistance and report to us any relevant threat information.?
In the wake of 9/11, as FTW began documenting a number of direct and very specific warnings received by the United States government, a number of press stories and TV commentaries reported that these warnings had never ?trickled up? to the White House or senior management level because they had been received at lower levels. Rice's statement bypasses and nullifies that excuse in much the same way that it was impossible for Rice, Cheney and the senior White House staff to assert that they were not aware of the 2002 report from former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, indicating that documents purporting to show that Iraq was attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium Niger were forgeries. It was Cheney's office which had dispatched Wilson in the first place.
It is beyond ludicrous; beyond ?systemic? failure; beyond ?connecting the dots?; to assume that a high priority request from the White House would have been ignored by lower levels of the national security apparatus, or that a mechanism did not exist for foreign intelligence service s to get their information before the right eyes.
In repeating, ad nauseum, her assertion that ?If we had had specific information as to the time and place of the attacks, we would have moved heaven and earth to prevent them?, Rice played the administration's poker hand, bluffing to end with not even a pair of deuces to back her up.
WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING PDBs!
In this section FTW will review some of its reporting on documented foreign warnings received by the administration before 9/11. And this writer will also disclose portions of his new book, The Truth and Lies of 9/11 ? A merica's Descent into Fascism at the End of the Age of Oil, (scheduled for release this summer) for the first time publicly.
Although our first reports of specific warnings of an Al Qaeda threat inside the US were published within two weeks of the attacks, our best compendium of those warnings was published on April 22, 2002. That story, Briefing Paper: The Case for Bush Administration Advance Knowledge of 9/11 Attacks, is located at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/042202_bushknows.html.
In that article we wrote:
As reported in the respected German daily Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Sept. 13, the German intelligence service, the BND, warned both the CIA and Israel in June of 2001 that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of A merican and Israeli culture. The story specifically referred to an electronic eavesdropping system known as Echelon, wherein a number of countries tap cell phone and electronic communications in partner countries and then pool the information. The BND warnings were also passed to the United Kingdom.
No known denial by the BND of the accuracy of this story exists, and the FAZ story indicates that the information was received directly from BND sources.
According to a Sept. 14 report in the Internet newswire online.ie, German police, monitoring the phone calls of a jailed Iranian man, learned the man was telephoning USG intelligence agencies last summer to warn of an imminent attack on the WTC in the week of Sept. 9. German officials confirmed the calls to the USG for the story but refused to discuss additional details.
In August 2000 French intelligence sources confirmed a man recently arrested in Boston by the FBI was an Islamic militant and a key member of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. The FBI knew the man had been taking flying lessons at the time of his arrest and was in possession of technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals, as reported by Reuters on Sept. 13.
According to a story in Izvestia on Sept. 12, Russian intelligence warned the USG that as many as 25 pilots were training for missions involving the crashing of airliners into important targets.
In an MSNBC interview on Sept. 15, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated he had ordered Russian intelligence to warn the USG "in the strongest possible terms" of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings before the attacks on Sept. 11.
Conclusion: From just these five press stories, then, the USG had received credible advance warnings, some from heads of state, that commercial aircraft would be hijacked by as many as 25 hijackers at airports, with Boston a strong candidate, during the week of Sept. 9?
No known preventive measures were taken.
INSIDER TRADING
The documented pre-Sept. 11 insider trading that occurred before the attacks involved only companies hit hard by the attacks. They include United Airlines, American Airlines, Morgan Stanley, Merrill-Lynch, Axa Reinsurance, Marsh & McLennan, Munich Reinsurance, Swiss Reinsurance, and Citigroup.
In order to argue that the massive and well-documented insider trading that occurred in at least seven countries immediately before the attacks of Sept. 11 did not serve as a warning to intelligence agencies, then it is necessary to argue that no one was aware of the trades as they were occurring, and that intelligence and law enforcement agencies of most industrialized nations do not monitor stock trades in real time to warn of impending attacks. Both assertions are false. Both assertions would also ignore the fact that the current executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for enforcement is David Doherty, a retired CIA general counsel. And also ignored is the fact that the trading in United Airlines stock -- one of the most glaring clues -- was placed through the firm Deutschebank/Alex Brown, which was headed until 1998 by the man who is now the executive director of the CIA, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard.
One wonders if it was a coincidence then, that Mayo Shattuck III, the head of the Alex Brown unit of Deutschebank -- which had its offices in the WTC -- suddenly resigned from a $30 million, three-year contract on Sept. 12, as reported by the New York Times and other papers.
The American exchanges that handle these trades, primarily the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE) and the NYSE, know on a daily basis what levels of put options are purchased. "Put options" are highly leveraged bets, tying up blocks of stock, that a given stock's share price will fall dramatically. To quote 60 Minutes from Sept. 19, "Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market."
It is hard to believe that they missed:
- A jump in UAL put options 90 times (not 90 percent) above normal between Sept. 6 and Sept. 10, and 285 times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack. [CBS News, Sept. 26]
- A jump in American Airlines put options 60 times (not 60 percent) above normal on the day before the attacks. [CBS News, Sept. 26]
- No similar trading occurred on any other airlines. [Bloomberg Business Report, the Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT), Herzliyya, Israel citing data from the CBOE]
- Morgan Stanley saw, between Sept. 7 and Sept.10, an increase of 27 times (not 27 percent) in the purchase of put options on its shares. [ICT Report, "Mechanics of Possible Bin-Laden Insider Trading Scam," Sept. 21, citing data from the CBOE].
- Merrill-Lynch saw a jump of more than 12 times the normal level of put options in the four trading days before the attacks. [Ibid]
These trades were certainly noticed after the attacks.
"This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your entire life... This would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence," said Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg Business News, interviewed on Good Morning Texas on Sept. 20.
"I saw put-call numbers higher than I've ever seen in 10 years of following the markets, particularly the options markets,' said John Kinnucan, principal of Broadband Research, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle," reported the Montreal Gazette on Sept. 19. The paper also wrote, "Agence France Presse, on Sept. 22, reported, 'And Germany's Bundesbank chief, Ernst Weltke, said on the sidelines of the meeting that a report of the investigation showed "bizarre" fiscal transactions prior to the attacks that could not have been chalked up to coincidence.
"Weltke said the transactions, 'could not have been planned and carried out without a certain knowledge,' particularly heavy trading in oil and gold futures."
ABC World News reported on Sept. 20, "Jonathan Winer, an ABC News consultant said, 'it's absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan, to the U.S., to North America, to Europe."
How much money was involved? Andreas von B?low, a former member of the German Parliament responsible for oversight of Germanys intelligence services estimated the worldwide amount at $15 billion, according to Tagesspiegel on Jan. 13. Other experts have estimated the amount at $12 billion. CBS News gave a conservative estimate of $100 million.
Not a single U.S. or foreign investigative agency has announced any arrests or developments in the investigation of these trades, the most telling evidence of foreknowledge of the attacks. This, in spite of the fact that former Security and Exchange Commission enforcement chief William McLucas told Bloomberg News that regulators would "certainly be able to track down every trade."
What is striking is that a National Public Radio report on Oct. 16 reported Britain 's Financial Services Authority had cleared bin Laden and his henchmen of insider trading. If not bin Laden, then who else had advance knowledge?
It has been standard and established USG policy to be alert and responsive to anything even remotely resembling an attack on U.S. companies and/or the economy. The word "remote" does not apply here. The possible claim by the Bush Administration that, 'Gee, we just happened to miss this,' becomes even more implausible when considering the lengths intelligence agencies go to in order to track stock trades.
Note that the Israeli Institute for Counter-Terrorism was the first entity to release a detailed report on the insider trading. That alone is prima facie evidence of a direct relationship between the financial markets and terrorist investigations.
CIA AND THE MARKETS
We can thank Fox News on Oct. 16 for breaking post 9-11 stories disclosing the use of sophisticated PROMIS software by the FBI and the Justice Department. A multitude of court records and investigative reports have established not only the reality, but the versatility of a program initially designed to incorporate data from a variety of data bases in different languages into one readable format. PROMIS has since been refined to include artificial intelligence and "back doors" inserted by intelligence agencies to allow for surreptitious retrieval and/or removal and alteration of data.
The Fox stories clearly confirmed, especially when added to stories from last summer by the Washington Times which were based on interviews with Justice Department officials, that PROMIS was used to monitor banking and financial transactions in a virtual real-time environment.
This writer has written extensively on the software. More information can be found on the Web site at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/index.html.
However, one point is critical to this report. In fall 2000 I was visited in Los Angeles by two members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) national security staff. They were conducting a major investigation inside the U.S. to determine whether or not the RCMP's version of the software had been compromised. During discussions with the Mounties, I confirmed several times that the software was used to monitor stock trades in real time. A subsequent investigation led me to contact several people in Canada who had been interviewed in the same investigation. They were stockbrokers.
In a taped panel discussion, which aired March 14 on Canada 's Vision-TV, I faced a panel of three Canadian experts on the issue of U.S. foreknowledge of, and possible complicity in, the 9-11 attacks. Among them was Ron Atkey, former Canadian immigration minister and the former parliamentary head of the committee charged with oversight of Canada 's military and intelligence operations. Over the course of the program I made specific statements, relying not only on the RCMP interactions but also on previous investigations that it was documented that intelligence services track stock trades in real time. On camera, I produced the business cards of the two RCMP agents. Atkey, who had not hesitated to challenge me on other points during the show, went silent.
INTELLIGENCE SUCESSES
Four basic intelligence successes need to be acknowledged here. These admitted successes, while not addressing any other still secret penetrations of the Al Qaeda network, further diminish any Bush Admin istration assertion that it did not know of the attacks.
On Feb. 13 [2001] United Press International terrorism correspondent Richard Sale, while covering a Manhattan trial of one of Osama bin Laden's followers, reported the National Security Agency had broken bin Laden's encrypted communications. Even if that prompted an immediate change in bin Laden's methods of communication, just six months before the attacks, the administration has consistently maintained -- and military and covert experience dictates -- that the attacks were planned for at least several years.
The FAZ story indicates that the secret eavesdropping program Echelon had been successful in securing details of the pending attacks. Echelon employs highly sophisticated computer programs capable of both voice and word recognition to filter billions of telephone conversations and locate specific targets. Assuming, as some sources indicate, Al Qaeda stopped using encrypted communications after it was known that their system was compromised, why was the NSA not able to pick up any cell phone calls or e-mails? Mohammed Atta and other alleged hijackers were known to have used cell phones. The FAZ story establishes that as late as June, Al Qaeda operatives were being tracked in this manner.
In the trial of a former Deutschebank executive Kevin Ingram, who pled guilty to laundering drug money to finance terrorist operations linked to Al Qaeda just two weeks before the 9-11 attacks, indications surfaced that the Justice Department had penetrated the terrorists' financial network. A Nov. 16 [2001] Associated Press story by Catherine Wilson stated, "Numerous promised wire transfers never arrived, but there were discussions of foreign bankers taking payoffs to move the money to purchase weapons into the United States, said prosecutor Rolando Garcia."
Two questions are begged but unanswered. How were the wire transfers blocked and how was the Justice Department able to monitor the money flows without alerting either the bankers or the suspects?
Finally, as reported by the German paper Die Welt on Dec. 6 [2001] and by Agence France Presse on Dec. 7, Western intelligence services, including the CIA, learned after arrests in the Philippines, that Al Qaeda operatives had planned to crash commercial airliners into the WTC. Details of the plan, as reported by a number of American press outlets, were found on a computer seized during the arrests. The plan was called "operation Bojinka."
Details of the plot were disclosed publicly in 1997 in the New York trial of Ramsi Youssef for his involvement in the 1993 WTC bombing.
IZVESTIA, PUTIN AND THE CIA = RICE PUDDING
Even more damaging to Rice and the Bush administration is a story published in Russia's Izvestia which came into this writer's possession thanks to former CIA counter-terror case officer, Leutrell Osborne (see above). The story had been brought to his attention by his Russian-speaking son and had fortunately been saved in its original form before it was sanitized of several key sentences
FTW has posted a translation and copy of the original Russian story online at:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/izvestia_story_pic.html.
Portions of the story in bold indicate sentences that were removed from the Izvestia web site by late September 2001. We posted the full story in May of 2002 after commissioning a professional translation.
Here is the unedited story:
September 12, 2001 (14:15) Yesterday at the headquarters of Central Intelligence Service in Langley a confidential meeting between one of the Deputy Directors of CIA and a special messenger of Russian Intelligence Service took place. According to NewsRu sources he delivered to his American colleagues some documents including audio tapes with telephone conversations directly relating to terrorist attacks on Washington and New York last Tuesday. A ccording to these sources, Russian Intelligence agents know the organizers and executors of these terrorist attacks. More than that, Moscow warned Washington about preparation to these actions a couple of weeks before they happened.
Russian Intelligent Service states that behind the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York stand the organization of Usama ben Laden, Islamic movement of Uzbekistan and Taliban government. According to our intelligence agents among terrorists there were at least two Uzbeks, natives of Fergana who arrived in the USA on forged documents about ten months ago. A terrorist group which realized actions against the US A consisted of at least 25 people. All of them had a special training on the territories of Afghanistan and Pakistan including piloting of an aircraft.
Besides, Russian Intelligence Service warns White House that present terrorist attacks are only the beginning of the wide-scale action. Ben Laden has the plans to attack nuclear units on the territory of the US A. A mong Islamic targets are space objects and large financial centers of the USA.
The organization of the International Terrorist, according to Russian Intelligence Service agents had been planning an operation against the USA more than a year and a half. Russian Intelligence Service insists that Usama ben Laden has about 400 fanatics who are ready any minute to realize attacks against the USA all around the world.
[NOTE: The scan of the Izvestia story presented? is of the story that was originally presented by Izvestia. The story that they currently have on their website has omitted the first paragraph completely. We wonder why...]
KNOWN PENENTRATIONS OF AL QAEDA
Following are excerpts from The Truth and Lies of 9/11 ? America's Descent into Fascism at the End of the Age of Oil.
SIGINT: NSA Director Michael Hayden testified before Congress in October 2002 that the NSA had no indications that al Qaeda was planning attacks on US soil, let alone against New York or Washington. 10 This directly contradicts the fact that in the summer of 2001 the NS A had intercepted communications between the reported tactical mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mohammed Atta. The NS A did not share the information with any other agencies even at a time when Mohammed was on the FBI's most-wanted terror list. The NSA also failed to translate some messages and later offered the nonsensical excuse that they had no way to separate these calls from millions of others.11
[What do you suppose they were talking about? The best bars in South Florida?]
SIGINT: For more than eighteen months Italian authorities wiretapped an al Qaeda cell in Milan.20 Starting in October 2000, FBI agents assisted Italian authorities in analyzing the tapes, and this resulted in a direct warning to the US from Italy that planes might be used as weapons against US targets.21
SIGINT/ELINT/HUMINT: Italian authorities obtained information from wiretaps of al Qaeda cells that a possible attack was planned to kill President Bush at the G8 Summit in Genoa scheduled for July. A dditional information suggested that Egyptian intelligence had achieved HUMINT penetrations of al Qaeda cells that confirmed information from the wiretaps and surveillance. Some conversations were recorded as a result of the bugging of a Citroen automobile used by Egyptian terrorists in Italy who are close to bin Laden. As a result the airspace around Genoa was closed and the conference was ringed with anti-aircraft weapons.23
SIGINT: In September 2001 the NSA intercepted multiple phone calls into the United States from Abu Zubaida, the man who is reported to be bin Laden's operations chief. No details of what was intercepted have been released, but it is obvious that the parties receiving the calls would have been identified.24
SIGINT: British sources disclosed that telephone conversations between Osama bin Laden and associates in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the weeks prior to 9/11 were monitored and that the attacks were generally discussed in those conversations.25
HUMINT/SIGINT: Jordanian intelligence had for years done a masterful job of infiltrating al Qaeda. A May 2002 story from The International Herald Tribune reported, ?Since the early 1990s, the kingdom's well-organized and efficient intelligence service, the General Intelligence Division (GID), has carefully tracked the CI A-trained or Pakistan-trained guerillas or terrorists, or freedom fighters, or whatever you choose to call them?who survived their victorious 1979?89 war to expel the Soviet invaders from Afghanistan.... Jordan 's GID hunted the returned fighters, capturing and bringing to justice several who became active terrorists. The GID aided the U.S. government in countless ways, even helping U.S. law enforcement officers to apprehend Al Qaeda and other operatives who had formed cells in the United States or Canada.? 39
The author, John K. Cooley, a veteran of ABC News and widely respected on terrorism issues, described how in the summer of 2001 the GID made an intercept deemed so important that it was relayed to the US government not only officially, most likely through the CIA station in Amman, but also personally through an Iranian-born German intelligence agent. From my experience this was a form of insurance for the Jordanian government in case the US ever denied that Jordan had delivered the message or asserted that the Jordanian government had been less than a staunch ally. Such is the fear of the Empire's wrath around the world. The message clearly indicated that a major attack had been planned inside the continental United States and that aircraft would be used. The code name for the operation was ?Al Ourush,? or ?The Big Wedding.? When this information subsequently became embarrassing to the Bush administration, Jordanian officials backed away from their earlier confirmations.40 The administration had been insisting since the day of the attacks that it had received no forewarnings.
Cooley's story also told of how both a French magazine (name not given) and a Moroccan newspaper simultaneously reported that a Moroccan agent named Hassan Dabou had penetrated al Qaeda to the point of getting close to bin Laden, who was "very disappointed" that the 1993 bombing had not toppled the World Trade Center. The agent remained in place until weeks before the attacks. He successfully delivered a message to Moroccan intelligence that al Qaeda was planning ?'large-scale operations in New York in the summer or autumn of 2001.'?
Somebody knew
Throughout the world the independent media organizations have done an outstanding job of picking up and reporting on independently published stories which the major media overlooked. One of the most outstanding examples of this was a July 16, 2002 piece posted at the web site of Portland Indymedia (www.portland.indymedia.org) that reproduced the following short article originally found at The Memory Hole.44
?NPR interview on 9-11 confirmed attack was ?not entirely unexpected.'
?It's certainly one of the most disturbing and important indications that the government knew the attacks of September 11, 2001, were coming. On that morning, National Public Radio (NPR) was presenting live coverage of the attacks on its show Morning Edition. Host Bob Edwards went to a reporter in the field?David Welna, NPR's Congressional correspondent?who was in the Capitol building as it was being evacuated. Here is the crucial portion of Welna's report:
?'I spoke with Congressman Ike Skelton?a Democrat from Missouri and a member of the Armed Services Committee?who said that just recently the Director of the CI A warned that there could be an attack?an imminent attack?on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected.'
(Audio links for this interview are located at Thememoryhole and NPR websites) www.thememoryhole.org/tenet-911.htm
THE 9/11 MOVEMENT MUST UNITE
Within the narrow window between now and the November election, it is on the point of foreknowledge, and on this point only, that the entire government position ? regardless of party or administration ? can be completely and instantly deconstructed in a manner that is easily understood by the majority of the American people. We must become Andy Sipowicz with one voice and we must make that voice be heard. Condi Rice has handed us the pivotal moment on a silver platter. We must break the suspect while she is still on the public stage (in the interrogation room). After that, the millions of other inconsistencies, lies and falsehoods of the attacks, including the physical evidence issues, can be pursued in a systematic way, hopefully with serious legal clout to eliminate wiggle room.
But for the moment, the suspect is in effect saying, look, you have a short period of time in which to book me or let me go. If we let her go, then all other discussions become academic.
EXCERPTED ENDNOTES
10. ?Terror Intercepts on Eve of Sept 11th Too Vague?NSA,? Reuters, October 17, 2002; UA Today, October 18, 2002.
11. Jonathan S. Landay, ?NSA didn't share key pre-Sept 11 information, sources say,? Knight Ridder Newspapers, January 6, 2002: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/bayarea/3416632.htm
20. Charles M. Sennott, ?Exposing Al Quaeda's European Network,? The Boston Globe, August 4, 2002. Archived at: http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/completetimeline/2002/bostonglobe080402.html
21. Sebastian Rotella and Josh Meyer, ?Wiretaps May Have Foretold Terror Attacks Investigation: Suspected Al Qaeda operatives taped in Italy in 2000 discussed airplanes, airports and strikes ?that will never be forgotten,'" The L.A. Times, May 29, 2002. Archived at: http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/completetimeline/2002/latimes052902.html; ?Bugs Recorded Chilling 9/11 Talk,? CBSNews.com, May 29, 2002: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/29/attack/main510400.shtml; The Guardian, May 30, 2002.
23. ?Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit,? The L.A. Times, September 27, 2001: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092701genoa.story
24. ?Early Warnings,? ABC News, February 18, 2002: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/DailyNews/wnt_missedsignals_1_020218.html
25. ?The Proof They Did Not Reveal,? The Sunday Times, October 7, 2001. Archived at: http://www.unansweredquestions.net/timeline/2001/sundaytimes100701.html
39. John K. Cooley, ?The U.S. Ignored Foreign Warnings,? The International Herald Tribune, May 21, 2002. Currently archived at: http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/completetimeline/2002/iht052102.html
40. Ibid.
44. ?CIA Director Warned Congress About 9/11 Attacks,? The Memory Hole.
http://www.thememoryhole.org/tenet-911.htm. As of this writing the Memory Hole Web site still had a link to the actual NPR story allowing the user to hear the actual report.
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