Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
2. The DEFENDANTS [RJR Nabisco] knowingly sell their products to organized crime, arrange for secret payments from organized crime, and launder such proceeds in the United States or offshore venues known for bank secrecy. DEFENDANTS have laundered the illegal proceeds of members of Italian, Russian, and Colombian organized crime through financial institutions in New York City, including The Bank of New York, Citibank N.A., and Chase Manhattan Bank. DEFENDANTS have even chosen to do business in Iraq, in violation of U.S. sanctions, in transactions that financed both the Iraqi regime and terrorist groups.
3. The RJR DEFENDANTS have, at the highest corporate level, determined that it will be a part of their operating business plan to sell cigarettes to and through criminal organizations and to accept criminal proceeds in payment for cigarettes by secret and surreptitious means, which under United States law constitutes money laundering. The officers and directors of the RJR DEFENDANTS facilitated this overarching money-laundering scheme by restructuring the corporate structure of the RJR DEFENDANTS, for example, by establishing subsidiaries in locations known for bank secrecy such as Switzerland to direct and implement their money-laundering schemes and to avoid detection by U.S. and European law enforcement.
This overarching scheme to establish a corporate structure and business plan to sell cigarettes to criminals and to launder criminal proceeds was implemented through many subsidiary schemes across THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY. Examples of these subsidiary schemes are described in this Complaint and include: (a.) Laundering criminal proceeds received from the Alfred Bossert money-laundering organization; (b.) Money laundering for Italian organized crime; (c.) Money laundering for Russian organized crime through The Bank of New York; (d.) The Walt money-laundering conspiracy; (e.) Money laundering through cut outs in Ireland and Belgium; (f.) Laundering of the proceeds of narcotics sales throughout THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY by way of cigarette sales to criminals in Spain; (g.) Laundering criminal proceeds in the United Kingdom; (h.) Laundering criminal proceeds through cigarette sales via Cyprus; and (i.) Illegal cigarette sales into Iraq.
--European Union indictment of RJR Nabisco - (a curiously underplayed story in the United States. Kraft ad money, anyone?)
It's October right now, so I've decided to run a special feature this week on HongPong.com: Republican drug trafficking - the long love affair among America's right-wing with illicit smuggling and narcotics operations. Barry Seal, the great CIA drug trafficker who met his end after he threatened to talk about CIA-Contra-Cocaine activities, would say:
Let's set the scene a bit. NarcoNews.com is the spot to go for the real dish on the "War on Drugs." Why not a bit of Catherine Austin Fitts report on this: I hadn't actually run into this until now, so I suggest everyone check it out. We're gonna take the narco-ball and run with it... Fitts was a top executive at Dillon, Read & Co. Inc, and saw a lot of weird shit go down there, and a vast level of fraud at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1980s.
Catherine Austin Fitts presented: A Six-Part Series for The Narco News Bulletin starting February 27, 2006: Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Prison Profits: Part I: Inside the Financial World, Government Agencies and their Private Contractors Lies a Hidden System of Money Laundering, Drug Trafficking and Rigged Stock Market Riches
“Make a Law, Make a Business”
— Old New Jersey street saying
There is a strongly held myth in America. The myth says that large corporations are efficient. They have big profits. They have lots of capital to hire the best people, the best accountants and the best law firms. Everyone looks so spiffy. Their technology is the latest. The best thing for the economy, sings the siren song, is for inefficient government to defer to corporate leaders and corporate “survival of the fittest.” Powerful corporations, the myth goes, earned their power through performance in the marketplace by providing the best services and products.
The real truth on the corporate model is far darker, however, and can be found by understanding our current central banking-warfare economic model and the resulting total economic return of activities. That means not just looking at the corporate profits and growth in stock price, but the true cost to people, the environment and government of a particular corporate activity. This necessitates understanding the economy as an ecosystem that is a dynamic living system in places. If corporate profits come from laundering narcotics trafficking used to destroy communities, and from government contracts used to build expensive prisons crammed full of small time non-violent drug distributors and customers, then they are part of a “negative return on investment” economy. This is an economy where the real cost of things is hidden behind secret black budgets, complex government finances, under-the-table deals, market manipulations and economic and military warfare, until they finally show up in the most irrefutable ways: environmental destruction and the exhaustion and death of communities. I refer to this destructive economic force as “the tapeworm” — a financial parasite that weakens and even kills its host.......
...........Bush climbed through Republican politics to become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Ford Administration. After spending four years displaced by the Carter Administration, Bush was now Reagan’s Vice President with Executive Order authority for the National Security Council (NSC) and U.S. intelligence and enforcement agencies. Bush’s new authority was married with expanded powers to outsource sensitive work to private contractors. Such work could be funded through the non-transparent financial mechanisms available through the National Security Act of 1947, and the CIA Act of 1949.
This was a secret source of money for funding powerful new weaponry and surveillance technology and operations owned, operated or controlled by private corporations.[3] Carter’s massive layoffs at the CIA had created plenty of private contractor capacity looking for work.[4] An assassination attempt on President Reagan’s life two months after the inauguration meant that Vice President Bush and his team were called on to play an expanded role. Meantime, Nicholas Brady continued as an intimate friend and collaborator from his position as Chairman of Dillon Read.[5]
........According to Dillon Read, the firm’s average return on equity for the years 1982-1989 was 29 percent. This is a very strong performance, and compares to First Boston, Solomon, Shearson and Morgan Stanley’s average returns of 26 percent , 15 percent, 18 percent and 31 percent respectively.[13] Given what we now know from the European Union’s lawsuit and other legal actions against RJR Nabisco and its executives, this begs the question of what Dillon’s profits would have been if the firm had not made a small fortune reinvesting the proceeds of — if we are to believe the European Union — cigarette sales to organized crime including the profits generated by narcotics flowing into the communities of America through the Latin American drug cartels.
To understand the flow of drug money into and through Wall Street and corporate stocks like RJR Nabisco during the 1980s, it is useful to look more closely at the flow of drugs from Latin America during the period — and the implied cash flows of narco dollars that they suggest. Two documented situations involve Mena, Arkansas and South Central Los Angeles, California.
And a little slice from Part II:
Narco Dollars in the 1980s — Mena, Arkansas (March 1, 2006)
During the 1980s, a sometime government agent named Barry Seal lead a smuggling operation that delivered a significant amount of narcotics estimated to be as much as $5 billion from Latin America through an airport in Mena, Arkansas.[1] According to investigative reporters and researchers knowledgable about Mena, the operation had protection from the highest levels of the National Security Council then under the leadership of George H.W. Bush and staffed by Oliver North. According to investigative reporter and author Barry Hopsicker, when Seal was assassinated in February 1986, Vice President George H.W. Bush’s personal phone number was found in his wallet. Through Hopsicker’s efforts, Barry Seal’s records also divulged a little known piece of smuggling trivia — RJR executives in Central America had helped Seal smuggle contraband into the U.S. in the 1970s.[2]
The arms and drug running operation in Mena continued after Seal’s assasination. Eight months later, Seal’s plane, the “Fat Lady,” was shot down in Nicaragua. The plane was carrying arms for the Contras. The only survivor, Eugene Hassenfuss admitted to the illegal operation to arm the Contra forces staged out of the Mena airport. Hassenfuss’ capture inspired Oliver North and his secretary at the National Security Council to embark on several days of shredding. The files that survived North’s shredding that were eventually provided to Congress contain hundreds of references to drugs.
Let's take a quick trip back to the 1980s and enjoy this primary source documentation. Note the part where the Attorney General says that the CIA doesn't have to tell anyone at all about narcotics activity.
These classics deserve a post of their own. Right here, full authorization for the CIA to NEVER tell the DEA or anyone else a damn thing about what the boys are doing. What more can I say? (source / zip file)
A little more context on this from Fitts: (part 2 of the series)
Mike Ruppert is a former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics investigator who was run out of LAPD after declining an offer from the CIA to protect their Los Angeles narcotics trafficking operations. After being accosted by Ruppert and the threat of his formidable evidence in support of Webb’s story in a town hall meeting in South Central Los Angeles in November 1996, then Director of the CIA, John Deutsch promised that the CIA Inspector General would investigate the “Dark Alliance” allegations.
This resulted in a two volume report published by the CIA in March and October of 1998 that included disclosure of one of the most important legal documents of the 1980s — a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the CIA dated February 11, 1982 in effect until August 1995.[8] At the time it was created, William French Smith was the U.S. Attorney General and William Casey, former Wall Street law partner and Chairman of the SEC was Director of the CIA. Casey, like Douglas Dillon, had worked for Office of Strategic Services (OSS) founder Bill Donovan and was a former head of the Export-Import Bank. Casey was also a friend of George Schultz. Bechtel looked to the Export-Import Bank to provide the government guarantees that financed billions of big construction contracts worldwide. Casey recruited Stanley Sporkin, former head of SEC Enforcement, to serve as general counsel of the CIA. When Schultz joined the Reagan Administration as Secretary of State, such linkages helped to create some of the personal intimacy between money worlds and national security that make events such as those which occurred during the Iran Contra period possible.
No history of the 1980s is complete without an understanding of the lawyers and legal mechanisms used to legitimize drug dealing and money laundering under the protection of National Security law. Through the MOU, the DOJ relieved the CIA of any legal obligation to report information of drug trafficking and drug law violations with respect to CIA agents, assets, non-staff employees and contractors.[8] Presumably, this included the corporate contractors who, by executive order, were now allowed to handle sensitive intelligence and national security outsourcing.
With the DOJ-CIA Memorandum of Understanding, in effect from 1982 until rescinded in August 1995, a crack cocaine epidemic ravaged the poorer communities of America and disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of poor people into prison who, now classified as felons, were safely off of the voting roles. Meantime, the U.S. financial system gorged on what had grown to an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion a year of money laundering by the end of the 1990s. Not surprisingly, the rich got richer as corporate power and the concentration of investment capital skyrocketed on the rich margins of state sanctioned criminal enterprise.
These guys were ready to party. To be continued....
"When I ran into the drugs I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me."
--Indira Singh
The 9/11 terror plot itself, intersected with the activities of a drug trafficking network of international scope, in ways that form a "crystal clear" picture of what was going on -- to quote Sibel Edmonds.
Fintan Dunne, Editor BreakForNews.com (at this link, Daniel Ellsberg's support of Edmonds is noted - Ellsberg was cool on Colbert Report this week)
SIBEL: Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one. Completely by chance, I, a lowly translator, stumbled over one piece of it. But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it. And of course a lot of people from abroad are involved. It's massive. So to do this investigation, to really do it, they will have to look into everything.
CD: But you can start from anywhere –
SIBEL: That's the beauty of it. You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people. There may be a lot of them, but it is one group. And they are very dangerous for all of us.
Now THIS is what I call a map. This comes directly from the National Drug Intelligence Center in the Department of Justice, National Drug Threat Assessment 2006, January 2006. Today I'm going to post a lot of stuff that I certainly don't consider the Gospel Truth. It's purely for your careful consideration with barrels of salt. So let's kick things off with the DOJ:
And this is just funny. I suspect the purple patches are notorious 'rebel zones' in the War on Drugs, where the federal and state government policies have split apart entirely. But they forgot eastern Tennessee... and of course everywhere else.
We will be returning to the one about the Russian-Israeli crime organizations. Florida drug money is connected to some of the loose ends around 9/11. The 9/11 drug money connection has many potential angles, but first note here that the DEA marks Miami as a key heroin and cocaine distribution area.
Now we're going into stuff that seems hard to believe, and beyond here, I don't claim that any of these people are telling the truth.
This is just a small slice of the material on the internet about how the rich & powerful skim huge amounts of cash out of the addicted masses of America through the profitable geopolitics of illicit drugs. Some people claim there is a strong connection between drug trafficking and 9/11 financing. Certainly all the players in Afghanistan since 1979 have been up to their ears in it, including the CIA and its favored contractors (who make up around half the CIA personnel these days).
This is certainly part of a trend towards the criminalization of war, which corresponds to the increasing privatization of war. We will have more on this angle in the coming days. Even if there are no operational links to the real September 11 conspiracy itself, the drug-militarization angle really needs to be investigated seriously, perhaps by a Democratic Congress with subpoena and immunity powers. Even snooping at possible loose 9/11 connections immediately reveals a world awash in drug money, with Bush and the Establishment generating vast cash flows from conflict zones - and enforcing loyalties among players from Afghanistan to South America by aligning these cash flows with military force. Sometimes privatized paramilitary forces. Why not?
"Kill the Messenger:" Sibel Edmonds is on the radar a bit more than usual, as they have apparently whipped up a documentary to expose more of her surreal role in the weird world of intelligence after 9/11, named appropriately enough, Kill the Messenger. (perhaps she shouldn't be trusted, one guy suggests) A blog supporting Edmonds' film, sibeledmonds.blogspot.com is operated by Lukery at wotisitgood4.blogspot.com, who has covered her case in detail. To recap what I have posted before, Edmonds worked as a translator at the FBI, where she discovered a conspiracy within her unit to cover up a Turkish espionage ring in the United States. One of her co-translators was spoofing the wiretaps for FBI agents, and when Edmonds tried to bring this to her superiors, they suppressed the whole thing. Also Dennis Hastert was taking big bribes from the Turks, and there is some kind of global nuclear parts trafficking conspiracy connected to the AQ Khan network and some Israeli mobster types - probably Marc Rich type guys. The guys running the secret nuclear trafficking network were enemies of the CIA's Brewster-Jennings counter-proliferation operations and Valerie Plame, adding yet another twisted concourse to that scandal. And the AIPAC stuff and Chalabi are laterally related, since so much of it revolves around the same neo-con cats in DC and their foreign allies.
Lukery summarized:
Sibel makes 2 specific related claims: a) Sibel claims that she has information which proves that senior officials knew that there were plans to attack America months before 9/11.
Specifically: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers." and "President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away."
b) Sibel claims that she has evidence of a global multi-billion dollar smuggling/dealing network of weapons and drug which is hidden in plain view. Of course, there is also the requisite money-laundering infrastructure. She claims that the network comprises senior american government officials, terrorists, and 'unsavoury regimes.'
and they merge, giving us: "drug trafficking, money laundering, foreign names and American names directly involved in the financing of the 9-11 attacks on WTC (World Trade Center) and the Pentagon."
After a mere 3 months in the FBI, Edmonds publicly claims that all this stuff was going on, covered up at numerous levels in the federal government – though Ashcroft-era gag orders prevent her from sharing many aspects of the story. A virtual hailstorm of individual criminal conspiracies, involving top neo-cons, drug trafficking, all kinds of crazy shit. She has mentioned Coleen Rowley as an ally in the whistleblower field.
There is another potential side to this: Edmonds is herself possibly a red herring, a player or a dupe in the conspiracy, posing as an opponent. Conspiracy gurus suggest she might be a "limited hangout," or a channel to expose parts of the story, and fill other parts with disinformation. Edmonds comes from a prominent family in Turkey, so perhaps she has a bit of Turkish partisanship against some groups back home. One blogger named xymphora suggested she speaks the conspiracy-ese a bit too well:
"Edmonds sometimes makes me a bit nervous as she seems overly adept with the terms and arguments of conspiracy theory for someone who is supposed to have been a lowly FBI translator (it's like she's been reading Peter Dale Scott!). Is she part of the battle in Washington between the Bush Administration enablers involved in the drugs/arms business who don't mind directly or indirectly supporting al Qaeda if it is good for business, and those old-fashioned types who still consider that dealing with American enemies is treason?"
And she gives interviews with patently crazy people like Tom Flocco. Here is a fragment tying some of the neo-cons to some nasty shit:
Although Grossman "has not been as high profile in the press" FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds cryptically told me the other day, "don't overlook him – he is very important." She was not speaking about the Plame affair, though Grossman did indeed have a key role there, as we will see.
According to her, Grossman was one of three officials – the other two, she says, are Richard Perle and Douglas Feith – who had been watched by both Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA team, and by the major FBI investigation of organized crime and governmental corruption on which she herself was working until being terminated in April 2002.
Marc Grossman has served in a number of interesting countries and positions over the past 29 years. From 1976-1983, at a pivotal point in the Cold War, he was employed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan – America's key regional ally, through which millions of dollars in weapons and other "aid" were delivered by Pakistan's ISI intelligence service to the mujahedin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Grossman is definitely part of the Valerie Plame scandal, no doubt.
Well, it all still makes her story worth adding to the mixture. Here is the documentary trailer. Please let's take some bets if this will be aired in the United States.
Florida drug money angles (and there are many!) There was this funny story about one of the flight school proprietors in Florida who trained the 9/11 hijackers. The flight school owner was caught with 43 pounds of heroin just after the 9/11 hijackers got to his school, and somehow this story never got fully explored. See MadCowProd.com for a lot of amusing tales of south Floridian drug trafficking. It's worth considering what the site's proprietor Daniel Hopsicker says, "THE 9.11 HEROIN CONNECTION" is "The Biggest Censored Story of the 21st Century." He cites Thomas Pynchon: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers."
More recently, and quite funny, is the "SkyWay Aircraft" case, where Tom DeLay's buddy + Homeland Security defense contractor accidentally getting busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine on a DC9 connected with the Titan defense contractor. Naturally, the DEA ducking and covering from obvious political pressure ensued. Good times. And perhaps this link is connected to Zacharias Moussaoui and 9/11 financing. (Bonus: MadCowProd says Adnan Kashoggi finances the 9/11 Truth Movement? Now that's what I call a conspiracy!)
Ruppert on Hawalas, PTECH, PROMIS, 9/11 and some heroin networks, BCCI-style. From Mike Ruppert's FromTheWilderness.com last year, "PTECH, 9/11, and USA-SAUDI TERROR: PART II" which offers some evidence that PROMIS software connected to 9/11, and possible narcotics / heroin money connections to 9/11. Ruppert himself offers a theory that advanced software like PROMIS was capable of manipulating computers throughout the financial sphere and the federal government. Ruppert's book Crossing the Rubicon suggests that Dick Cheney could have executed 9/11 himself by using PROMIS and other whizbang technologies to, for example, insert extra radar blips in air traffic control towers across America. It seems kind of like a Deus Ex Machina conspiracy argument to me, but it is still an interesting, if far-fetched hypothetical argument that raises serious questions about how PROMIS and the rest of the fed's information technology really is run. At a dense 675 pages, crossing the Rubicon is one hell of a book, summarized thusly:
"In my book I make several key points:
1. I name Vice President Richard Cheney as the prime suspect in the mass murders of 9/11 and will establish that, not only was he a planner in the attacks, but also that on the day of the attacks he was running a completely separate Command, Control and Communications system which was superceding any orders being issued by the FAA, the Pentagon, or the White House Situation Room;
2. I establish conclusively that in May of 2001, by presidential order, Richard Cheney was put in direct command and control of all wargame and field exercise training and scheduling through several agencies, especially FEMA. This also extended to all of the conflicting and overlapping NORAD drills -- some involving hijack simulations -- taking place on that day.
3. I demonstrate that the TRIPOD II exercise being set up on Sept. 10th in Manhattan was directly connected to Cheney's role in the above.
4. I also prove conclusively that a number of public officials, at the national and New York City levels, including then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, were aware that flight 175 was en route to lower Manhattan for 20 minutes and did nothing to order the evacuation of, or warn the occupants of the South Tower. One military officer was forced to leave his post in the middle of the attacks and place a private call to his brother - who worked at the WTC - warning him to get out. That was because no other part of the system was taking action.
5. I also show that the Israeli and British governments acted as partners with the highest levels of the American government to help in the preparation and, very possibly, the actual execution of the attacks."
"There is more reason to be afraid of not facing the evidence in this book than of facing what is in it."
Approach #2: Peter Dale Scott's "The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11". haven't looked through all of it, but it seems an interesting source to begin looking at how the gears really turn in Central Asia and thereabouts.
it also seems possible that the U.S. government might contemplate using Hizb ut-Tahrir and the meta-group for political changes in Russia itself, even while combating the Islamism of al-Qaeda elsewhere. This would be far from the first time that the U.S. Government had used drug-trafficking proxies as assets, and would do a lot to explain the role of the U.S. in 2001 in restoring major drug traffickers to power in Afghanistan. Dubious figures like Nukhaev, Khodorkovskii, and Khashoggi have already shown their interest in such initiatives; and western business interests have shown their eagerness to work with these allies of the meta-group.
It is fitting to think of most U.S. intelligence assets as chess pieces, moved at the whim of their controllers. That is however not an apt metaphor for the meta-group, which clearly has the resources to negotiate and to exert its own influence interactively upon the governments it works with.
Since first hearing about the meta-group's role in the Russian 9/11, I have pondered the question whether it could have played a similar role in the American 9/11 as well. At this point I have to say that I have found no persuasive evidence that would prove its involvement. The fact remains that two informed and credible witnesses, Sibell Edmonds and Indira Singh, have spoken independently of the importance of international drug trafficking in the background of 9/11.
The Bush Administration has paid Sibell Edmonds the tribute of silencing her on the grounds of national interest. She has nonetheless made it clear that what she would talk about concerns that part of the world where the meta-group has influence:
SE [Sibel Edmonds]: It's interesting, in one of my interviews, they say "Turkish countries," but I believe they meant Turkic countries – that is, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and all the 'Stans, including Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and [non-Turkic countries like] Afghanistan and Pakistan. All of these countries play a big part in the sort of things I have been talking about.
CD [Chris Deliso]: What, you mean drug-smuggling?
SE: Among other things. Yes, that is a major part of it. It's amazing that in this whole "war on terror" thing, no one ever talks about these issues.[120]
Indira Singh, who lost her high-tech job at J.P. Morgan after telling the FBI about Ptech and 9/11, was even more dramatic in her public testimony at a Canadian event:
I did a number of things in my research and when I ran into the drugs I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me.[121]
The False Dilemmas of 9/11 Theories
I said earlier that by suppressing awareness of the role of drug-trafficking in our society, we give drug traffickers a de facto franchise to exert political influence without criticism or opposition. An example of this is the discussion of 9/11 in America, which usually fails to consider the meta-group among the list of possible suspects.
I have tried to suggest in this paper that in fact the meta-group had both motive – to restore the Afghan opium harvest and increase instability and chaos along the trade routes through Central Asia – and opportunity – to utilize its contacts with both al-Zawahiri in al Qaeda and the CIA in Washington. It is furthermore the best candidate to explain one of the more difficult anomalies (or indeed paradoxes) of the clues surrounding 9/11: that many of the clues lead in the direction of Saudi Arabia, but some lead also in a very different direction, towards Israel.[122]
Here it is worth quoting again the well-informed remark of a Washington insider about the meta-group's predecessor, BCCI: "Who else could wire something together to Saudi Arabia, China, Israel, and the U.S.?"[123] The current meta-group fills the same bill, for it unites supporters of Muslim Salafism (Saidov) with at least one Israeli citizen (Kosman).
The meta-group's involvement in the Russian 9/11 of course does nothing to prove its involvement in the American one. However awareness of its presence – as an unrecognized Force X operating in the world – makes previous discussions of 9/11 seem curiously limited. Again and again questions of responsibility have been unthinkingly limited to false dilemmas in which the possible involvement of this or any other Force X is excluded.
An early example is Michael Moore's naïve question to President Bush in Dude, Where's My Country: "Who attacked the United States on September 11 – a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friends, Saudi Arabia?"[124] A far more widespread dilemma is that articulated by David Ray Griffin in his searching critique of the 9/11 Commission Report:
There are two basic theories about 9/11. Each of these theories is a "conspiracy theory." One of these is the official conspiracy theory, according to which the attacks of 9/11 were planned and executed solely by al-Qaeda terrorists under the guidance of Osama bin Laden....Opposing this official theory is the [sic] alternative conspiracy theory, which holds that the attacks of 9/11 were able to succeed only because they were facilitated by the Bush administration and its agencies.[125]
Griffin of course is not consciously excluding a third possible theory – that a Force X was responsible. But his failure to acknowledge this possibility is an example of the almost universal cultural denial I referred to earlier. In America few are likely to conceive of the possibility that a force in contact with the U.S. government could be not just an asset, but a force exerting influence on that government.
My personal suggestion to 9/11 researchers is that they focus on the connections of the meta-group's firm Far West, Ltd. – in particular those which lead to Khashoggi, Berezovskii, Halliburton and Dick Cheney, and Diligence, Joe Allbaugh, and Neil Bush.
As a grain of salt, we should remember that Florida is so thoroughly laden with drug money that it is quite likely people would catch false leads to September 11 among the huge forest of shady people getting rich from the Business. The loose end about how the DEA was tracking Israelis who lived virtually around the corner from the 9/11 hijackers is an interesting one, but perhaps the density of shady business in Hollywood, Florida is just that high, one block of criminal enterprises after another. This IS Florida we're talking about.
The Israeli 9/11 angles are still worth checking out – the supposed Mossad front company Urban Moving Systems and the rest. From one of America's most respected Jewish periodicals, Forward:
Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth: Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage
MARCH 15, 2002
By MARC PERELMAN, FORWARD STAFF
"Despite angry denials by Israel and its American supporters, reports that Israel was conducting spying activities in the United States may have a grain of truth, the Forward has learned.
However, far from pointing to Israeli spying against U.S. government and military facilities, as reported in Europe last week, the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism.
In particular, a group of five Israelis arrested in New Jersey shortly after the September 11 attacks and held for more than two months was subjected to an unusual number of polygraph tests and interrogated by a series of government agencies including the FBI's counterintelligence division, which by some reports remains convinced that Israel was conducting an intelligence operation. The five Israelis worked for a moving company with few discernable assets that closed up shop immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel.
Other allegations involved Israelis claiming to be art students who had backgrounds in signal interception and ordnance. (See related story, Page 8.)
Sources emphasized that the release of all the Israelis under investigation indicates that they were cleared of any suspicion that they had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks, as some anti-Israel media outlets have suggested.
The resulting tensions between Washington and Jerusalem, sources told the Forward, arose not because of the operations' targets but because Israel reportedly violated a secret gentlemen's agreement between the two countries under which espionage on each other's soil is to be coordinated in advance.
Most experts and former officials interviewed for this article said that such so-called unilateral or uncoordinated Israeli monitoring of radical Muslims in America would not be surprising. In fact, they said, Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation last December.
"I have no doubt Israel has an interest in spying on those groups," said Peter Unsinger, an intelligence expert who teaches justice administration at San Jose University. "The Israelis give us good stuff, like on the Hamas charities." According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front.
After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations. However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.
"The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11."
However, he added, the bureau was "very irritated because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they didn't know about it."
Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue. However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.
The five men — Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel — were arrested eight hours after the attacks by the Bergen County, N.J., police while driving in an Urban Moving Systems van. The police acted on an FBI alert after the men allegedly were seen acting strangely while watching the events from the roof of their warehouse and the roof of their van............
A retired corporate lawyer, Gerald Shea, put together all the government reports on Israeli DEA groups he could find, and corroborated the locations of Israeli groups the DEA monitored and where in Florida the 9/11 hijackers lived when they were training. The results had interesting geographic distribution (which correlates with the Russian-Israeli organizations in Florida admittedly monitored by the Department of Justice as I noted above). These maps are from the Shea's PDF file:
All righty then. That's a lot of heady stuff to consider. I'll note again that I am not a true believer in anything in today's post. I just want to offer some of the interesting things out there on the internet today. I strongly believe that the Republican establishment in America today is very complicit in international drug trafficking – especially since we've got a lot of the same guys who ran cocaine angles in Central America during the Iran-Contra affair. Past behavior is a guide towards future actions, if not ironclad proof.
Arbitrage is power: the buying and selling of goods across geographic space supports the global "shadow economy" that makes up a huge proportion of economic activity. Whoever controls the space, controls the money. Half of Afghanistan's economy is heroin production, for example. Follow the cash: it's one heck of a loose end of September 11, and the war on terror.
My perspective on Thailand is filtered by my dad's experience in Chile, when he was hitchiking after college in the summer of 1973. There were CIA guys hanging around Santiago bars, and he recalled US Navy ships stationed offshore. The evidence is pretty clear that Nixon and Kissinger were supportive of the plot. My dad, sensing trouble, cleared out of there around Sept. 3 or so, a week before the Pinochet's coup.
My point here is to wonder about the links between the Thai coup leaders today and the U.S. unified combat command of the region, AKA USPACOM. What messages went between PACOM and Thailand this week as the Prime Minister was in New York? It wouldn't be the first time that a PM was at some American-related function as gears suddenly spun to get rid of him.
As the relative influence of the State Department and ambassadors has waned, the relationship between PACOM, CENTCOM, the other COMs and various local militaries has deepened. The link between our generals and the elite generals of other nations might be seen in the neocon worldview to be the ultimate safe power link, not subject to those pesky "election" thingies. The "New World Order" could be a tier of global generals tacitly allowed to overthrow democracies, with PACOM et al. handling the details and perhaps planting pretexts and back-stories, the information operations required to slot it into American discourse.
I recall an disturbing episode of "E-Ring" that featured a South American republic overthrown by a glorified general with Swift Return to Elections Promised Right Away, leaving Dennis Hopper as a proud American who preserved our all-important bauxite concession.
I don't know much (anything) about Thai politics, so I don't know if this coup was carried out by factions with tacit American support, like Rummy's recent attempt in Venezuela. However, I suspect a major element of global securitization trend, i.e. the political-military structures set up for "the war on terror", is to create security arrangements that supercede democratic structures. A tonic of temporary military fascisms and martial laws, normalized by "war on terror" ideology. (not that they would dare try it here.... ...)
Robert Kaplan is one of the President's favorite geopolitical writers, and his piece called "Supremacy by Stealth" (Atl. Monthly, July/Aug. 2003) suggests a secretive network of self-sustaining military leadership cells in nations around the world that can intervene when local democracy makes problems for the United States. Sort of a decentralized shadow military dictatorship kinda thing. I don't know if that's Thailand now, but when they claim a "good coup," this I suspect is the implementation of the theory. Of course, the private military corporations - mercenary corporations like DynCorp and MPRI, full of retired American officers - are an ideal organizational glue for this whole approach.
Kaplan: (prolly should read all of it!)
Precisely because they foment dynamic change, liberal empires-like those of Venice, Great Britain, and the United States-create the conditions for their own demise. Thus they must be especially devious. The very spread of the democracy for which we struggle weakens our grip on many heretofore docile governments: behold the stubborn refusal by Turkey and Mexico to go along with U.S. policy on Iraq. Consequently, if we are to get our way, and at the same time to promote our democratic principles, we will have to operate nimbly, in the shadows and behind closed doors, using means far less obvious than the august array of power displayed in the air and ground war against Iraq. "Don't bluster, don't threaten, but quietly and severely punish bad behavior," says Eliot Cohen, a military historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington. "It's the way the Romans acted." Not just the Romans, of course: "Speak softly and carry a big stick" was Theodore Roosevelt's way of putting it.
..........
The United States has set up military missions throughout the formerly communist world, creating situations in which U.S. majors, lieutenant colonels, and full colonels are often advising foreign generals and chiefs of staff. Make no mistake: these officers are policymakers by another name. A Romanian-speaking expert on the Balkans, Army Lieutenant Colonel Charles van Bebber, has become well known in top military circles in Bucharest for helping to start the reform process that led to Romania's integration with NATO. Such small-scale but vital relationships give America an edge there over its Western European allies. One of the reasons that countries like Romania and Bulgaria supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq is that they now see their primary military relationship as being with America rather than with NATO as such.
..........
Rule No. 4
Use the Military to Promote Democracy
In an age of expanding democracy, military and intelligence contacts are more important than ever. Civilian politicians in weak and fledgling parliamentary systems come and go. But leading military and security men remain as behind-the-scenes props, sometimes even getting themselves elected to high office-as has happened in Nigeria, Venezuela, and Russia. "Whoever the President of Kenya is, the same group of guys run their special forces and the President's bodyguards," one Army Special Operations officer told me. "We've trained them. That translates into diplomatic leverage."
The U.S. military's bilateral relationships with foreign armies and their officer corps play a substantial role in safeguarding democratic transitions. Militaries have been the pillars of so many Third World societies for so long that the advent of elections can scarcely make them politically irrelevant, especially in Africa and Latin America. In some places, such as Turkey and Pakistan, the military and security services have at times actually enjoyed a reputation for greater liberalism than the civilian authorities. In Colombia in the mid-1990s the civilian government was tainted by drug money; the military police, who were seen to be less corrupt, helped to save our bilateral relationship.
......
Our strategy in Colombia and Yemen is unspoken but simple: establish not a totally reformed military but a self-sustaining structure of a few specialized units.That's the best we will be able to do, and it will not require a heavy American military presence.
.......
Rule No. 6
Bring Back the Old Rules
Refer to the pre-Vietnam War rules by which small groups of quiet professionals would be used to help stabilize or destabilize a regime, depending on the circumstances and our needs. Covert means are more discreet and cheaper than declared war and large-scale mobilization, and in an age when an industrial economy is no longer necessary for the production of weapons of mass destruction, the American public, burdened with large government deficits, will demand an extraordinary degree of protection for as few tax dollars as possible. Impending technologies, such as bullets that can be directed at specific targets the way larger warheads are today, and satellites that can track the neurobiological signatures of individuals, will make assassinations far more feasible, enabling the United States to kill rulers like Saddam Hussein without having to harm their subject populations through conventional combat.
.......
As shocking as some of the above may sound, much of what I advocate is already taking place. The old rules, with their accent on discretion, were on the way back even before 9/11. Witness the increasing use of security-consulting firms and defense contractors that employ-in places as diverse as South America, the Caucasus, and West Africa-retired members of the U.S. military to conduct aerial surveillance, to train local armies, and to help struggling friendly regimes. Consider Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), of northern Virginia, which during the mid-1990s restructured and modernized the Croatian military. Shortly afterward Croatian battlefield success against the Serbs forced Belgrade to the peace table.
Encouraging an overall moral outcome to the Yugoslav conflict involved methods that were not always defensible in narrowly moral terms; the Croats, too, were murderers. And moral ambiguity is even greater in protracted wars, such as the Cold War and the war on terrorism, in which deals will always have to be struck with bad people and bad regimes for the sake of a larger good. The war on terrorism will not be successful if every aspect of its execution must be disclosed and justified-in terms of universal principles-to the satisfaction of the world media and world public opinion. The old rules are good rules because, as the ancient Chinese philosophers well knew, deception and occasional dirty work are morally preferable to launching a war.
*****
Wikipedia quotes:
* "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end, utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG and American hand be well hidden..." — A communique to the CIA base in Chile, issued on October 16, 1970
* "[Military rule aims] to make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of entrepreneurs." — Augusto Pinochet
* "We didn't do it. I mean we helped them. [Garbled] created the conditions as great as possible. — Henry Kissinger conversing with President Nixon about the coup.
Just the other day I tossed in a somewhat old link about FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, who despite a gag order has offered a lot of strange hints about money laundering, Turkish spies connected to Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, WMD proliferation networks and other strange things. It is quite possible all this stuff is more red herrings, but it's all a very tantalyzing angle into how the Bush adminstration really rolls.
The reason I mention Edmonds is that she has hinted around the edges at a related complex of scandal and intrigue: namely the Riggs Bank account Feith and Perle angle - this bank account allegedly having been used to finance Islamic fundamentalists in Bosnia and perhaps operate clandestine WMD networks.
This story also introduces what Madsen calls the "Russian-Ukranian-Israeli Mafia" or RUIM, which consists of organized crime operators, drug traffickers and the mythical arms trafficker Viktor Bout, who Nicholas Cage's character in "Lord of War" was loosely based on. Perhaps a stereotypical eastern-European image, the RUIM, in Madsen's story, are the guys profiting from, and carrying out, aspects of the Cheney administrations geo-political trickery around Asia and the Middle East.
So I always take what Mr. Madsen says with many grains of salt. The content of this story forces one to consider the Big Picture of the War On Terror, and it also suggests that American intelligence services under the new President Clinton failed to stop the 1993 World Trade Center bombings in shady circumstances. Who covered that up for the Grand Jury? According to Madsen, Patrick Fitzgerald and Michael Chertoff. Now that's a hell of a story.
Oh, one other thing: why did Karl Rove et. al. bring down Valerie Plame and expose the Brewster-Jennings CIA front company? Was it simply "Joe Wilson's yellowcake thing pisses us off!" Or was it a much deeper kind of secret intel war type thing, an inside-the-Beltway knives-out intelligence community fight - with the Bushistas burning Brewster-Jennings to protect very dark dealings?
In the view of this story (and to some extent, Edmonds) Brewster-Jennings got burned by the White House because the CIA was getting too close to RUIM/Marc Rich WMD proliferation networks connected with A.Q. Khan and that gang. Perhaps, even, Brewster Jennings managed to block WMDs from being planted by these RUIM cats in Iran - which would have generated the fake pretext for a war in Iran.
It's heady stuff. (and the story implies the Israelis are tapping wireless communication on Capitol Hill. So that's how AIPAC's gots everyone's nuts?) I would hope that when Democrats snag a bit more power in DC they're willing to wander down these trails with the power of subpoena, then we'll know if this is all hot air or not. For now, consider it just another possibility in the wasteland of mirrors.
Wayne Madsen Report, Sept. 17-18:
SPECIAL REPORT. On Jul. 14 and Aug. 8, WMR reported on convicted Ohio Rep. Bob Ney's longtime intelligence role for the CIA. More details are emerging about that role. The following is what WMR reported last month on the Ohio Republican:"WMR has learned that covert Iranian backchannels employed by a current member of the U.S. House of Representatives in support of [Valerie] Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates network were thoroughly compromised by the White House leak. The member of Congress, who, like Plame, had been an earlier CIA "non-official cover (NOC) energy consultant" in the Middle East during the late 1970s and early 80s, and who was familiar with the early weapons of mass destruction proliferation involving the A. Q. Khan network of Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, was compromised and he and his connections to the Brewster Jennings & Associates intelligence network and Iranian government contacts were made known to adversarial intelligence agencies. The staff of the member whose covert Iranian contact network was compromised was targeted and tainted with Jack Abramoff money, putting the U.S. Representative in extreme political jeopardy.
WMR can now report that according to congressional sources in Washington and well-placed sources in Columbus, Ohio, including high-level Democratic sources, the congressman in question is Republican Rep. Bob Ney, who yesterday announced that he was dropping out of his race for re-election. Because neo-con elements opposed to any negotiations between the United States and Iran discovered Ney's involvement in CIA backchannels to Tehran they decided to use Abramoff's illegal political money and favors conduit to steer money and non-monetary gifts to Ney's staff and eventually to Ney himself. With Ney's departure from Congress, his role as an intermediary between Washington and Tehran is severely diminished.
After Ney's stint as a CIA "NOC" in the Middle East, he returned to Ohio to run against former US Representative and then-Ohio state representative Wayne Hays . . . In May, Ney's former chief of staff Neil Volz pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy involving his role in getting Ney to support several Abramoff initiatives that benefited Abramoff's Indian casino, Israeli-connected wireless company, Northern Marianas clothing manufacturer, and other clients.
According to a Democratic Party official in Ohio, it was always well known that Ney had "special protection" stemming from his CIA past. A House of Representatives source revealed that Abramoff's interest in Ney was accentuated by Ney's involvement as a CIA Counter-proliferation Division (CPD) backchannel to Tehran. However, under General Michael Hayden's iron fist, the CIA continues to purge and put into the cold those involved with Brewster Jennings, the CPD, and questioning fanciful Bush administration weapons of mass destruction claims."
The Department of Justice, in its charges against Ney, failed to mention the name of the Syrian-born arms trader from whom Ney pleaded guilty to accepting casino chip bribes in return for getting him a U.S. visa and a sanctions waiver on the sale of U.S. aircraft parts from his front company in Larnaca, Cyprus for later sale to Iran. The reasons for the mystery surrounding Ney's Middle East interlocutors are that they point to high-level corruption within the Bush Justice Department -- corruption that is tied to covering up the role of U.S. and Russian Mafia state and non-state players in assisting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction throughout the Middle East and South Asia. The Syrian, Fouad al Zayat, whose Larnaca-based company, FN Aviation (later changed to FAZ Aviation), is based in Russian-Israeli mobbed-up Cyprus and has an office in London, is known as a high-rolling gambler called "The Fat Man" in London gambling parlors. The London gambling dens are known to act as major money laundering enterprises for arms smugglers and other mob activities. FN Aviation's British director, Nigel Winfield, a thrice-convicted felon, paid for Ney to take a three-day trip to London in February 2003, a month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. According to well-placed congressional sources, Ney was using the dodgy London arms network to determine whether neocon-supplied intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs had any merit. However, Ney had also stumbled across incriminating evidence tying top Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, to the WMD proliferation network -- the same intelligence discovered by covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates (BJ&A) network in their investigation of arms smuggling routes through Cyprus, South Africa, Turkey, and former Soviet Central Asian states. Zayat's money laundering reportedly coincided with BJ&A's investigation of WMD money laundering and sanctions-busting activities in Switzerland, Cyprus, and the Isle of Man. Ney's links to the Middle East arms bazaar also provided the CIA with an important backchannel into Tehran, Damascus, and Baghdad -- a backchannel not wanted by the neocons who were anxious to bomb all three capital cities.
Ney is said to have agreed to cooperate with Justice prosecutors in return for a sentence of 27 months in prison and a $500,000 fine. In reality, Gonzales' prosecutors are more interested in how much Ney discovered about links between top GOP and White House officials and the arms smuggling business involving Iran, Iraq, and the Zayat, Abdul Qadeer (AQ) Khan, and other shady networks connected to neocon and Russian-Israeli Mafia activities. By finding out what Ney knows, Cheney and his neocon provocateurs will be able to neutralize any embarrassing information on their proliferation activities prior to the November 7 election. In fact, during the DOJ investigation of Ney, the congressman, aware that wireless communications in the House was in the hands of Israeli-owned MobileAccess Communications (formerly Foxcom Wireless), studiously avoided communicating with sensitive sources through any member of his staff.
FN Aviation's chief lobbyists in the United States, people whose activities were of interest to Ney (and Brewster Jennings and the CIA) were Roy Coffee and David DiStefano, both of whom work for failed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers' old law firm, Locke Liddell & Sapp. According to the Jan. 24, 2006, Dallas Morning News Coffee, who was a one time deputy campaign manager for then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, and DiStefano, pressured Ney to lobby the State Department to grant an export license for the sale of U.S. spare aircraft parts by FN Aviation to Iran. Coffee has been called Bush's "eyes and ears on K Street," a reference to the lobbyist district of Washington, DC. WMR has been told that Ney was passing the information he was getting on FN Aviation's activities, as well as other intelligence, to BJ&A. After BJ&A's cover was blown by Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Richard Armitage (who was worried that the CIA would discover his own involvement in shady deals in Azerbaijan), Ney's intermediary activities also became known to the White House and the Special Prosecutor named to investigate the leak of the classified CIA information to the media -- Patrick Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald's decision not to prosecute Karl Rove and to seek the lesser charges of perjury and obstruction of justice against Cheney's former Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby stems from Fitzgerald's own conflicts-of-interest in the CIA case. Ney and BJ&A were uncovering past and embarrassing links between the Russian-Israeli mob and key players in the Bush administration. Zayat's myriad aircraft firms in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are based in the same locations as those of Russian Mafia arms smuggler (and favored Pentagon contractor) Viktor Bout. Bout's Kyrgyzstan companies -- Phoenix Aviation and Inter Transavia, both connected to U.S. private military contractors operating in Iraq and Africa -- and Zayat's Kyrgyz-based aviation company, Aqua Transit, share the same airfield in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek. Zayat's Samaya Investments Ltd. comfortably resides in Tashkent, Uzbekistan along with firms controlled by the Uzbek-speaking Bout. Bout and Zayat share more than central Asian airports and capitals in common -- they both have high level contacts in the Bush administration, contacts that reach right into the Oval Office.
When she was National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice interceded with Sharjah authorities not to arrest Bout. She informed U.S. intelligence to "look but don't touch" with regard to Bout. And Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department, while convicting Ney, has yet to go after Zayat's lobbyist, Coffee, George W. Bush's former deputy campaign manager and "eyes and ears" on K Street. And there is continued Department of Homeland Security disinterest in the activities of Bout's Syrian associate Monzer al Qasser, who has been involved with his brother Ghassem in arms and drug smuggling and counterfeiting of $100 U.S. notes. Interpol has long been interested in the al Qassers' weapons smuggling and counterfeiting activities but the official U.S. Secret Service replies have echoed Rice's "look but don't touch" orders. Monzer Al Qasser's weapons smuggling activities, selling former East Bloc arms and using secret bank accounts in Luxembourg and Switzerland, cross the path of Viktor Bout's supply of weapons to the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and pro-Al Qaeda Islamist elements in the Balkans. The supply of arms from Mafia smugglers to Muslim guerrillas in Bosnia and Kosovo also involve the financial networks employed by the Bosnia Defense Fund, a 1990s weapons-purchasing slush fund set up at Riggs Bank in Washington, DC and the Central Bank of Bosnia in Sarajevo by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. WMR has learned of a significant Washington, DC-based lobbying and smuggling operation involving Al Qasser and Bout. This operation appears to be sanctioned by high-level Bush administration officials. [Dan adds: TEH SWEET]
And there is even more to this story. Bout was a supplier of logistics and arms to both the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. As WMR has reported, a classified French intelligence report obtained by WMR shows that Bin Laden remained under the operational control of the CIA and Britain's MI-6 until 1995. According to U.S. intelligence sources, Fitzgerald, working for then-US Attorney for Southern New York James Comey, failed to translate from Arabic and Farsi and present to the grand jury and jury in the trials of 1993 World Trade Center bombers several important telecommunications intercepts. The intercepts proved that Bin Laden, who was based in Sudan at the time and living on the largesse of the Saudi-backed Sudanese government, was directly involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Suspiciously, the attack took place only a few weeks after Bill Clinton was sworn in an President. Sudanese and Bin Laden involvement in the bombing was proven by NSA-decrypted messages sent between the Sudanese Mission to the UN and the Sudanese Foreign Ministry in Khartoum. According to a former Sudanese government officials, the NSA possessed a backdoor into the encryption equipment Sudan's Foreign Ministry purchased from a Hamburg, Germany firm named PK Electronics. Fitzgerald also covered up key evidence that a US Army Special Forces non-commissioned officer, Ali Mohammed, was in direct contact with Bin Laden in Afghanistan while still on active duty and reporting to the U.S. Special Forces command in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
It is believed by many legal and intelligence observers that the Washington, DC U.S. District Court grand jury's decision to indict Karl Rove last May was derailed after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales confronted Fitzgerald with his past prosecutorial misconduct in the 1993 World Trade Center trials. Therefore, an unusual "SEALED vs. SEALED" indictment of the grand jury against Rove remains sealed to this day and Rove attorney Robert Luskin maintains a veil of secrecy around a 10-page letter, dated June 12, 2006, that stated that Fitzgerald did not intend to charge Rove in the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's name and identity to a number of journalists. Nor did Fitzgerald charge either Rove or Libby with the underlying crime of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- an act cited by federal appellate Judge David Tatel in a February 2005 as having "serious" national security implications. In fact, Tatel wrote that Valerie Plame Wilson "worked for the CIA in some unusual capacity relating to counterproliferation." In fact, Mrs. Wilson and her CIA network were targeting the very same smuggling and money laundering networks that were aided and abetted by Cheney and his neocon influence network.
[this is one sweet graf, I gotta say --Dan] It is now clear that Fitzgerald has been playing what the French call a "double jeu" -- a "double game." Eager to protect his and then-New Jersey federal prosecutor Michael Chertoff's own cover-up of the U.S. intelligence links to the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Fitzgerald folded when confronted with the threat of exposure from Gonzales, who was acting on behalf of Cheney, Rove, and Bush. Cheney's and Libby's ties to Russian-Israeli mobsters like Marc Rich, a major global smuggler in his own right, and their involvement in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to form the conditions to promote a casus belli for neocon war goals were the real reasons behind the Cheney's operation to expose Mrs. Wilson and her BJ&A network and Abramoff's and Gonzales' entrapment of CIA asset Ney in a double cross sting operation.
I am minimizing entries to the old site while we get the new one up and running. Thanks to the folks who are testing it and running into inexplicable errors. Meanwhile the world keeps turning. I found this a pretty striking contribution on MSNBC, just minutes before Bush addressed the nation with more of the same. For some bizarre reason, Keith Olbermann has a lot of guts. If he's not implying Rumsfeld is a 'fascist' himself, he's throwing in 'impeachable offenses.' The field has shifted....
This hole in the groundHalf a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.
All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul -- two more in the Towers.
And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.
I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.
And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.
However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast -- of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds -- none of us could have predicted this.
Five years later this space is still empty.
Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.
Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.
Five years later this country's wound is still open.
Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.
Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.
It is beyond shameful.
At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial -- barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field -- Mr. Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."
Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.
Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground." So we won't.
Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they're doing instead of doing any job at all.
Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.
And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.
And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.
The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.
Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.
Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.
Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.
History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.
Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.
The President -- and those around him -- did that.
They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President's words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."
They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.
The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is "lying by implication."
The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."
Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.
Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.
Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.
Yet what is happening this very night?
A mini-series, created, influenced -- possibly financed by -- the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.
The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.
How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you -- or those around you -- ever "spin" 9/11?
Just as the terrorists have succeeded -- are still succeeding -- as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.
So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.
This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.
And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."
In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves."
And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."
When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:
Who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President.
You have.
May this country forgive you.
Above all, they are making a $1200 Swiss Army knife with every single tool. Yes. 85 tools including screwdrivers, a laser and a flashlight. And a "fine fork for watch spring bars."
Dig the Bush BeatBox video. Diabolical orange cat Jeff has a blog of what things he's killed.
Check out AllPeers: A new plugin for Firefox on Linux, Windows and OS X that combines buddy lists and BitTorrent, allowing people to share files at high speed with their friends. It's in beta now, and there could be security holes, but I really want to try it. I am registered at feidt@macalester.edu so shoot me a message if you want to try it. It has just been released to Public Beta. A review notes it has 'performance issues:'
As I write this, the beta is just a day old, and the company is still ironing out some server issues. Initially, I had a problem actually downloading the tool, and once I did get it installed, performance was spotty. I had trouble signing up to the service, and the service itself went down several times while I was testing it. When it did work, the speed was acceptable.
In theory, performance should eventually be quite good. AllPeers uses a customized version of BitTorrent to swap files. So if you're sending the same file with multiple people, once others receive the file—or just parts of the file—they can help you send it to everyone else. Let's say I decide to share a file to my colleagues Sean Carroll and Lance Ulanoff. Once Sean downloads the file from my machine, AllPeers can use both his copy and mine to send it quickly to Lance. Some of the bits will come from my machine even as other bits are coming from Sean.
Despite current performance I like the basic design. It's simple—and that's what you want from a tool like this. It integrates completely with Firefox, adding a toolbar and various browser "panes" that open and close as need be. Simply by keying in e-mail addresses or AllPeers user names, you add friends and family to a contacts list, and once you've chosen a name from the list, you can start sending files via drag-and-drop (or good old-fashioned dialog boxes).
Russia and Central Asian countries nervous about US military action, conducting training exercises. Michel Chossudovsky writes that Russia and Central Asian Allies Conduct War Games in Response to US Threats, including Taijikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Things are also moving with China and India. Quoted:
"The growing militarisation is connected with mutual mistrust among countries in the region, say analysts. Iranian media have speculated that the United States is using Azerbaijan to create a military counterweight to Iran on the Caspian. It is possible that the exercise conducted by the CSTO – in which Russia is dominant – represents a response to concerns about United States involvement in developing Kazakstan’s navy. Observers say Russia is leaning more and more towards the Iranian view that countries from outside should be banned from having armed forces in the Caspian Sea."
Experts say the US is trying to step up the pressure on Iran, as well as to defend its own investments in Azerbaijan and Kazakstan. It is also trying to guarantee the security of the strategically vital Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.
A military presence on the Caspian would give the United States an opportunity to at least partially offset its weakening influence in Central Asia, as seen in the closure of its airbase in Uzbekistan, the increased rent it is having to pay for the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan, and the diplomatic scandal that resulted in the expulsion of two Americans from Kyrgyzstan.
According to analysts, genuine security in the region can be achieved only if the military interests of all five Caspian countries are coordinated. At an international conference in Astrakhan in July 2005, Russia proposed the formation of a Caspian naval coordination group, but to date the initiative has not had much of a response.
And this is alarming:
The entire region seems to be on a war footing. These CSTO war games should be seen in relation to those launched barely a week earlier by Iran, in response to continued US military threats. These war games coincide with the showdown at the UN Security Council and the negotiations between permanent members regarding a Security Council resolution pertaining to Iran's nuclear program. "They are taking place within the window of time that has been predicted by analysts for the initiation of an American or an American-led attack against Iran" (see Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Global Research, 21 August 2006):
"War games and military exercises are now well underway within Iran and its territory. The Iranian Armed Forces—the Regular Armed Forces and the Revolutionary Guards Corps—began the first stage of massive nationwide war games along border areas of the province of Sistan and Baluchistan1 in the southeast of Iran bordering the Gulf of Oman, Pakistan, and NATO garrisoned Afghanistan to the east on Saturday, August 19, 2006. These war games that are underway are to unfold and intensify over a five week period and possibly even last longer, meaning they will continue till the end of September and possibly overlap into October, 2006".
Neo-cons are trying to hype up an Iran war, of course. Neo-cons looked foolish when the apocalypse didn't happen August 22nd like they predicted. Old Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan said Israel should be prepared for an attack by Iran.
Raw Story: Less than half of Americans satisfied with 9/11 investigations. The NIST is going to probe if WTC 7 was brought down by bombs.
Is Cartoon Network making light of the Illuminati? A little bit...
Moral quagmire and moral clarity, based on this good bit by James Dobbins on Moral clarity in the mideast. More on this.
From the Daily Show, Bush's desperate soundbites:
According to WWTDD.com, Saddam Hussein got a personal screening of the South Park movie.
A Lockheed Martin engineer used YouTube to put his whistleblower message out, covered by the Washington Post. Check the video:
The Israel Lobby matter churns on: with the AIPAC espionage trial around the corner and a disastrous war between Israel and Lebanon, the underpinnings of the 'special relationship' between Israel and the United States seem to be front and center.
On Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo looks at "Two Elephants in the room: Israel and its amen corner", looking at how the Washington Post's high-handed reporter Dana Milbank attacked top international politics professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt for speaking at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Mearsheimer and Walt have sparked big controversy by writing on the influence of what they termed "the Israel Lobby" on America's foreign policy. I would call it "the right-wing Israel Lobby" since there are Jewish groups like Peace Now and Tikkun who are silenced, gagged and marginalized in Washington by AIPAC and its neoconservative allies. One purpose of what they call the "Israel lobby" is to silence the more liberal Jewish lobby. (Antiwar is messed up so try this printable version)
Reporters like Milbank generally speak in favor of the corrupt neo-con foreign policy establishment, denigrating anyone looking critically at the fake Iraq war intelligence, and the role of AIPAC in influencing America's middle east policy. Milbank's mockery of Democratic hearings on the Downing Street Memo is a truly disgusting piece of reporting. For a background on AIPAC, look at AIPAC's Overt and Covert Ops by Juan Cole from 2004.
Other randomness: Israeli-style air security may head west.
Godwin's Law strikes again: Islamo-fascism: It is suddenly trendy to call America's opponents "Islamic fascists" that we can't "appease". Right now on MSNBC one of Bush's toadies is telling the Hardball host that they are basically the same as Nazis. It reminds me that political identities are shaped by words, and merging ethnic or religious words with menacing political formations is an effective way to demonize enemies. Terms like "Islamofascist" cut off critical thinking and processing actual reality, hoping to replace thought with emotional cues. This is why the real Nazis called the Jews "Judeo-Bolsheviks" – "one of the central themes of fascist ideology" as a paper on the official site of Israel's Holocaust museum puts it. "Islamofascist" is just the Judeobolshevik of the 21st century, and it serves pretty much the same purpose: to rationalize annihilation.
Local trickle-down: This is becoming a more-than-latent issue in local political campaigns, especially Keith Ellison's primary contest in Minnesota's Fifth Congressional District. Ellison is a Black Muslim, and the strongly Jewish St. Louis Park composes a large chunk of the Fifth District. While Jewish folks, like any other identified voting 'bloc', have a variety of views on the race, there were a lot of awkward stories about Ellison and the Nation of Islam, tying Ellison to the rather anti-semitic organization. I don't really know if these stories have stuck, but it certainly was a story that the anti-Ellison parts of the establishment latched onto.
Today, Ellison has been markedly more sympathetic to Lebanon than his primary opponents, which seems reasonable to me, but this promises to bring out the wrath of the hard core of the Israeli government's supporters. Stand by for what that's going to add up to by the September 12 primary...
Well that's all for now. Catch ya on the flip side. I'm going to the fair tomorrow.
I have heard there are some odd things about 9/11. I am not a big believer in the grand conspiracy theories out there, but I do think that there ought to be a fresh investigation. These days, they are going after soldiers who actually try to address the '9/11 skeptics' or '9/11 truth' movement, whatever you want to call it. It's a little bit weird, and it's tougher for the media to deal with the issue of '9/11 skepticism' than the average person. Your everyday guy still knows that politics is theater and that they should take all this shit with a grain of salt to begin with. That's why half the country thinks the government concealed something about that day:
In the telephone survey of 1200 individuals, just 47% agreed that "the 9/11 attacks were thoroughly investigated and that any speculation about US government involvement is nonsense." Almost as many, 45%, indicated they were more likely to agree "that so many unanswered questions about 9/11 remain that Congress or an International Tribunal should re-investigate the attacks, including whether any US government officials consciously allowed or helped facilitate their success."
.....
This rough balance in opinions is itself a striking finding. It suggests that doubts about the officials accounts of 9/11, far from representing an extreme fringe position, have become a standard component of anti-establishment attitudes.
When asked specificially if they thought there had been a government coverup of evidence that contradicts the official story, the results were again not far from an even split, with 48% rejecting the idea of a deliberate coverup and 42% supporting it. Belief in a coverup was the majority position among Democrats, 18-29 year olds, and a few other groups.
In an attempt to focus more specifically on the attitudes of those who were best informed about the events of 9/11, the poll asked its responders if they were aware of WTC Building 7, whose collapse on September 11 for no obvious reason was not investigated by the 9/11 Commission. Only 52% answered that they were aware of the collapse of Building 7, but out of that subgroup, 73% believed it should have been investigated.
On a related topic, those polled were asked if they felt the Bush Administration had exploited the September 11th attacks to justify the invasion of Iraq or if Bush had been right to go into Iraq because Saddam Hussein supported terrorism. Here the country was divided exactly, 44% to 44%, with the answers following party lines more closely than those to the 9/11 questions. Among Republicans, 72% felt the invasion was appropriate, while among Democrats 69% felt it was not.
A whole range of weird things have yet to be explained about the day which justified virtually everything that came after.
Perhaps all the 9/11 skepticism is more about blowback about how its meaning has stretched from Tax Cuts to threatening Syria. If the sheer evilness of 9/11 encompasses the All-Meaning of All-Politics, its been stretched too far, all the way to the Eschaton in symbolic logic. The logical break of 9/11 felt apocalyptic, but it actually wasn't the apocalypse. However, as a 'pretext,' a political object that constructs morality for the EveryDay Joe, it is like this infinite pool of power. The Bush Administration's representation of 9/11's symbolic force is supposed to overwhelm everything else.
Since this is totally impossible, everyday folks are going to nitpick at how loose a weave the official story really is.
If September 11 is supposed to be some unprecedented historical Leviathan around which all politics and morality revolve, more people are going to suspect that its innards, its Official Story of Total Victimization, might be false as well.
In any case, I think that everything should be rehashed in a complete investigation of primary evidence sources from the top down, starting with NORAD and the war games that day. There should be a bullet list of 40 things that a new investigation should specifically answer. Oh wait, that spooky list already exists.
Power is a shady thing, but people in this country aren't going to buy a really complex theory, with unclear motives and a mishmash of silly shit. Or are they? This seems to be DaVinci Code America now, anyway. The competing cases ought to be made all over again, official and the constellation of 'conspiracy theories'.
What the major media portrays as "Conspiracy theories" are often just interpretations of evidence, and naughty, improper questions. Throughout history, conspiracy theories have featured ethnic stereotypes, psychological projection of fear and chaos onto other groups, illusions of loss of autonomy, centrality, messianism, and connecting pieces that just plain aren't really connected. Oh wait, that does sound a bit like the official story...
So don't leap onto any quick and easy explanation of some event, Loose Change or otherwise. The official story came pretty quick and easy, then they stonewalled real investigations for a long time. And of course destroyed the evidence of the WTC rubble itself. But besides that, everything is Kosher as Cecil's Deli.
Loose change controls the demolition of the Man's official version of 9/11?
There is a slightly newer version of 'Loose Change', the premiere 9/11 conspiracy video, freely available now via Google Video. Or you can see it embedded below. It is the "2nd edition recut", and as an interview posted on Alternet talked about, the producers of this tiny video, done on less than $10,000, have managed to get a pretty damn amazing amount of buzz for their little Final Cut Pro project. (I recognize those FCP filters & transitions. Anyway...) They basically just put together stories that were floating around the Internet, shot a couple interviews and got some really excellent DJs. This version is different than v2-original, with some nicer map backgrounds and animated scenes. Some lines have been changed, and I think the narrator's voice might be someone else, though that may be a sound codec issue.
The spookiest addition was a little more footage of the sudden 'crimping' of the WTC structure itself, and there's a sweet new song at the end. It also has a long bit with that University of Wisconsin professor against Hannity on FOX, and a much extended version of an interview they shot with a WTC maintenance guy who talks about the continuous explosions he heard during the attack.
Here are direct links to some good bits of the movie using Google Video time-bookmarks: the animation of the plane intersecting the Pentagon. Even better, spotting the 'controlled demolition' of the WTC, marked by nifty little brackets. This is the new bit with 9/11 skeptic U/W prof Barrett vs Hannity. Conclusion with sweet new song. Not that I am a believer, but it is all presented quite well. Embedded here for ya:
SFC Buswell:
I mean how are Arabs benefiting from pulling off 911? They have more war, more death and dismal conditions, so, how did 911 benefit them? Answer: It didn’t. So, who benefited from 9-11? The answer is sad, but simple; The Military Industial [sic] Complex.
The Lone Star Iconoclast Online: (nice name for a site!) Under Fire! U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst Targeted For Suggesting New Independent 9/11 Investigation
Monday, August 21, 2006 - By Stephen Webster, Investigative Reporter
Army: Doubting Official 9/11 Story Is ‘Disloyal To The United States’
FT. SAM HOUSTON, Texas — Forty-one-year-old Sergeant First Class Donald Buswell is a hero. Having served over 19 years in the United States Army, Buswell has seen a lot of terrain. On April 15, 2004, he was injured in a rocket attack while serving a tour in Iraq. For this, SFC Buswell was given a Purple Heart. And until recently, Buswell was an Intelligence Analyst stationed at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas.
But if one were to ask Buswell’s Commanding Officer what he thinks of the Sergeant, the response would likely sound a little bit more like, "No comment."
Such were the words given to The Iconoclast by Lieutenant Colonel Jane Crichton after inquiring why SFC Buswell is the focus of an investigation initiated by Colonel Luke S. Green, Chief of Staff at Fifth Army in Ft. Sam Houston.
According to unnamed military sources contacted by The Iconoclast, SFC Buswell "used his Government issued email account to send messages disloyal to the United States …" Because of these statements, SFC Buswell could soon find himself dishonorably discharged, court marshaled, or worse.
It all started as a simple response to a common, unsolicited mass email, sent to 38 individuals at Ft. Sam Houston on Aug. 2, 2006. The message, as well as Buswell’s response, is among documents obtained by The Iconoclast. The sender of the first message is identified as "Anderson, Larry Mr JMC". It reads:
This is being sent more as assurance for what happens when a plane hits a nuclear site more so than in response to that German website alleging a government conspiracy related to the 9/11 Pentagon plane crash (though the website does present an interesting perspective) – LarrySubject: F-4 vs. Concrete Wall
Take a look at this clip [not included] and you’ll get a good feel for what happens to an airplane when it hits a concrete wall. Many of you have seen the produced (but not factual), Michael Moore-esque website that asks the question; "If it’s true that a Boeing airliner hit the Pentagon, what happened to all the parts of it? Why do we not find more pieces of it?
Where did all that mass GO???" (Therefore, the paranoid loony liberal reasoning, 9-11 must have been a US gov’t conspiracy!) Well, for those who question what happened to "all the mass of that airplane".......watch this clip.
It’s the old Air Force engineering tests of the concrete barrier that surrounds nuclear reactor domes —tests to see if it will indeed survive an aerial attack. With the hi-speed cameras rolling, they accelerated an F-4 Phantom to 500mph and.........
Recall: "What happens when an ‘Unstoppable Force’ meets an ‘Immovable Object’???" (Remember, as you watch in slow motion as the F-4 turns to vapor, the Phantom was one of the toughest airplanes ever built).
SFC Buswell responded later that day, saying:
Subject: F-4 vs. Concrete Wall Hello,
I receive many unsolicited e-mails daily, this one I chose to respond to. The below mentioned premise that an F4 Phantom fighter jet hitting that hardened concrete barrier is akin to the alleged 757 hitting the Pentagon is like oil and water; they don’t mix, and they serve to muddy the issue. The issue is 911 was filled with errors in the ‘official report’ and ‘official story’ of that day, and, what happened that day. We all know and saw 2 planes hitting the WTC buildings, we didn’t see the 757 hit the Pentagon, nor did we see the plane crash in Shanksville PA. Both the PA and Pentagon ‘crashes’ don’t have clues and tell-tale signs of a jumbo-jet impacting those zones!
The Pentagon would have huge wing impacts in the side of the building; it didn’t. Shanksville PA would have had debris, and a large debris field; it didn’t.
Getting back to the F4...The Pentagon isn’t a nuclear hardened structure, so I can’t follow your weak logic that since an F4 vaporized itself in a test impact on a nuclear hardened structure that the alleged 757 hitting the Pentagon should have exhibited the same characteristics!
I say Occums razor is the best way to deduce this ‘day of infamy’; if you weigh all options, do some simple studying you will see 911 was clearly not executed by some arabs in caves with cell phones and 3 day old newspapers! I mean how are Arabs benefiting from pulling off 911? They have more war, more death and dismal conditions, so, how did 911 benefit them? Answer: It didn’t. So, who benefited from 9-11? The answer is sad, but simple; The Military Industial [sic] Complex.
It’s not a paranoid conspiracy to think there are conspiracies out there...and, it’s not Liberal Lunacy either, nor is it Conservative Kookiness! People, fellow citizens we’ve been had! We must demand a new independent investigation into 911 and look at all options of that day, and all plausabilities [sic], even the most incredulous theories must be examined.
Upon returning to his office the next day, Buswell discovered the locks had been changed, his security clearance was revoked, and an investigation had been launched. Buswell’s commanding officer, Colonel Luke Green, drafted a letter assigning Major Edwin Escobar to the investigation. According to sources, Colonel Green has asserted that SFC Buswell failed to obey Army regulations when he used his government issued email account to send what have been termed as messages disloyal to the United States with the intent of stirring up disloyalty, in a manner that brings discredit upon the United States Army.
It has been reported that Colonel Green also wrote that SFC Buswell claims to have information proving a conspiracy on the part of the United States Military Industrial Complex to attack targets within the United States, e.g., The Pentagon. Officials have suggested that the email response sent by SFC Buswell may be in violation of CFR 2635.705(a ), DoD-R 5500.7, and Joint Ethics Regulation paragraph 2-301b. These rules SFC Buswell is said to have perhaps violated regulate how soldiers utilize government resources, how they use their off-duty time, and how they use their official time.
[........]
"That is so ridiculous," said Winthrop Buswell. "[To say he is disloyal to the United States] is totally ridiculous. And the discourtesy was, ah, very apparent at that particular time. … I’ve always thought the American way is this: to disagree is important. To dissent is important. And my son simply said, without any fanfare, ‘Look, let’s take a look at the whole picture. If you want to take a look at that, maybe there are a few paragraphs that a Michael Moore might want to emphasize.’ That is all that my son has said. Never, however, to at all disparage the country and the patriotism that is so necessary for all of us. But, patriotism, as suggested by FOX News’ [Bill O’Reilly], is following the line of George W. Bush and cohorts completely! All my son is saying is, ‘Hey, maybe there’s a what if.’ Never, though, did he get sidetracked from the fact that [he loves his] country."
"What disturbed him more than anything else, I think, was the fact that the Iraqi citizens suffered so much and are suffering so much now," said Winthrop Buswell. "The time that he was injured, there were several Iraqis burning to death in front of him. He tried to put out the fire. It was a traumatic experience for him. … He spoke about that a number of times, and how terrible that was to see the citizenry being killed and suffering so much."
"One of his heroes is Abraham Lincoln," Winthrop Buswell continued. "And Abraham Lincoln said many things, but one of the things he said - and I’m paraphrasing - was, ‘I may disagree with the fellow who’s speaking, but I will stand and defend his right to speak.’ That’s my son’s position. He does look at the what if’s. But that doesn’t take away from his dedication and his patriotism. I don’t know a fellow who gets more chills running up and down his spine when he sees the flag flying."
"As a boy, [Donald was] always a very curious fellow," he added. "Very daring, but never risking anything or stepping over the line. He loved motorcycles, but was always very cautious about it, always wearing proper clothing, always wearing a helmet. Also, he was very active in little model racing cars. He was in Cub Scouts. I remember walking to the gymnasium with him and having wonderful conversations with him years ago. His mother and I went through a divorce, and that is never easy for anyone. My son was also very close to his grandfather on his mother’s side, and also his grandfather and grandmother on my side. Donald loves railroading, and my father has the best job that anyone could ever have. He’s a locomotive engineer, and my son related to that. My son also has a strong belief in a power greater than ourselves."
"But one of the things that stands out … is his love and his caring," said Winthrop, choking back tears. "He loves children. He’s just the greatest guy, as far as I am concerned. He walks into a room with a big smile on his face. … He’s like my dad – he makes you feel like, you know … I … I care for you. Ah, he’s … He’s my son …"
Via the Loose Change official blog, a sweet flyer. Click the thumbnail for high-resolution, print quality. There will obviously be a big event at ground zero, so these guys are gonna paste flyers and all that, all over NYC. Is that guy towards the right supposed to be Alex Jones?
The next three paragraphs are horror incarnate. It's like we wrapped everything wrong about the whole last six years into one little ball and fucking nuked the world. Seymour Hersh's latest:
Cheney’s office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”
Cheney’s point, the former senior intelligence official said, was “What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it’s really successful? It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.”
The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and