All of the links and quotes (below) on this page were derived from my reading of the book The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001, by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed.

"Although the USSR had been interfering in Afghan affairs long before the US, it is worth noting that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the United States appears to have begun operations in Afghanistan before the full-fledged Soviet invasion. Former National Security Adviser under the Carter Administration, Zbigniew Brzezenski, has admitted that an American operation to infiltrate Afghanistan was launched long before Russia sent in its troops on 27 December 1979. Agence France Press reported that: “Despite formal denials, the United States launched a covert operation to bolster anti-Communist guerrillas in Afghanistan at least six months before the 1979 Soviet invasion of the country, according to a former top US official.”

Brzezenski stated that “We actually did provide some support to the Mujahedeen before the invasion.” “We did not push the Russians into invading, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.” He also bragged: “That secret operation was an excellent idea. The effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap.” In other words, the US appears to have been attempting to foster and manipulate unrest amongst various Afghan factions to destabilise the already unpopular Communist regime and bring the country under US sphere of influence. This included the recruitment of local leaders and warlords to form mercenary rebel groups, who would wage war against the Soviet-backed government, to institute a new regime under American control.

In December 1979, Russia intervened to reinforce its hegemony over Afghanistan, since the PDPA was, according to Brzezenski’s testimony, being destabilised by a US operation to infiltrate Afghanistan that had commenced at a much earlier date. The US had therefore evidently also wished to bring this strategic region under its own hegemony. Anticipating this attempt by the US to destabilise the pro-Soviet PDPA and install a new pro-American regime in Afghanistan, Russia undertook a full-fledged invasion to keep the country under its own sphere of influence." -- Afghanistan, the Taliban and the United States: The Role of Human Rights In Western Foreign Policy by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
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U.S. Government support for Islamic Terrorism by Chuck Morse
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"In Afghanistan and Pakistan, fundamentalism could not have bloomed without the CIA's covert assistance--a fact that is apparent when one examines the history of the area." -- A STATE OF TERROR: How many 'terrorist' groups has your government established, sponsored or networked lately? by Ben C. Vidgen - Nexus Magazine, Volume 3, #2 (February-March 1996).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"However, many Afghanistan analysts believe that the United States has had close political links with the Taleban militia. They refer to visits by Taleban representatives to the United States in recent months and several visits by senior US State Department officials to Kandahar including one immediately before the Taleban took over Jalalabad. The Guardian commented:

"Senior Taleban leaders attended a conference in Washington in mid-1996 and US diplomats regularly travelled to Taleban headquarters. Such visits can be explained by any government's need for contact with opposition groups, but the timing raises doubts as does the generally approving line which US officials take towards the Taleban" [.TheGuardian, 9 October 1996. Also see Financial Times of the same date.].

Recent accounts of the origin of the madrasas (religious schools) which the Taleban attended in Pakistan indicate that these links may have been established at the very inception of the Taleban movement. In an interview broadcast by the BBC World Service on 4 October 1996, Pakistan's then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto stated that the madrasas had been set up by Britain, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan during the Jihad, the Islamic resistance against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. She said Pakistan alone must not be held responsible for what has come out of the madrasas." -- AFGHANISTAN: Grave abuses in the name of religion (Amnesty International, London, November 1996)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"WASHINGTON (AFP) - Afghanistan's Taliban regime, now bracing for punitive US military strikes, was brought to power with Washington's silent blessing as it dallied in an abortive new "Great Game" in central Asia.

Keen to see Afghanistan under strong central rule to allow a US-led group to build a multi-billion-dollar oil and gas pipeline, Washington urged key allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to back the militia's bid for power in 1996, analysts said.

But it was soon forced to abandon its brief and shadowy flirtation with the Islamic purists, who US officials now say are unfit to rule, as the militia began imposing its brutal version of Islamic law, sparking a violent outcry from US women's groups.

While the United States has denied supporting the Taliban's rise, experts say that at the time they seized the capital five years ago, Washington saw the militia as a strange but potentially stabilizing force.

"Now, years on, the US has to cope with the damage for which it is partially responsible starting with its role during and after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan," said Radha Kumar of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Ahmed Rashid, a leading author and expert on Afghan affairs, said it was "clear" Washington, which armed and trained the Afghan mujahedin during their battle against Soviet invaders in the 1980s, indirectly supported the Taliban.

"The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul" on September 26, 1996, he said from his base in Lahore, Pakistan. "That seems very ironic now."

One key reason for US interest in the Taliban was a 4.5-billion-dollar oil and gas pipeline that a US-led oil consortium planned to build across war-ravaged Afghanistan.

The California-based Unocal Corp. in 1996 hatched plans to stretch the pipeline from the central Asian state of Turkmenistan to Pakistan and the United States and the oil consortium wanted most of Afghanistan to be under the stable control of one government to ensure the pipeline's security, the analysts said.

In the months before the Taliban took power, former US assistant secretary of state for South Asia Robin Raphel waged an intense round of shuttle diplomacy between the powers with possible stakes in the project.

"Robin Raphel was the face of the Unocal pipeline," said an official of the former Afghan government who was present at some of the meetings with her.

The Unocal consortium also included Saudi-based Delta Oil, Pakistan's Crescent Group and Gazprom of Russia.

The project was to start with a two-billion-dollar, 890-kilometer (556-mile) gas pipeline that would channel 1.9 billion cubic feet of gas to Pakistan each day.

In addition to tapping new sources of energy, the move also suited a major US strategic aim in the region : isolating its nemesis Iran and stifling a frequently-mooted rival pipeline project backed by Tehran, experts said." -- US Gave Silent Backing To Taliban Rise To Power by Phillip Knightley (10/8/01: The Guardian)

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The CIA's sponsoring of the Taliban movement through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia has been documented extensively in Who Is Osama Bin Laden? by Michel Chossudovsky (Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa, Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------PESHAWAR (online) - "Former interior minister, Major General (Retd) Naseerullah Babar, has held American CIA responsible for fomenting terrorism. “CIA itself introduced terrorism in the region and is only shedding crocodiles tears to absolve itself of the responsibility”, he said." -- CIA responsible for terrorism, says Babar (The Frontier Post, May 5, 2000)

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"It is no secret, especially in the region, that the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have been supporting the fundamentalist Taliban in their war for control of Afghanistan for some time. The U.S. has never openly acknowledged this connection, but it has been confirmed by both intelligence sources and charitable institutions in Pakistan."

"The U.S. government has such antipathy to Iran that it is willing to do anything to prevent this. An alternate route would go through Afghanistan and Pakistan -- but this would require securing the agreement of the powers- that-be in Afghanistan.

From the U.S. standpoint, the way to deny Iran everything is for the anti-Iranian Taliban to win in Afghanistan and agree to the pipeline through their territory. The Pakistanis would also benefit from this arrangement -- which is why they are willing to defy the Iranians." -- Follow the Oil Trail - Mess in Afghanistan Partly Our Government's Fault by William O. Beeman (Pacific News Service, August 24, 1998)

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"A spokesman for the company, Unocal, said the Taleban were expected to spend several days at the company's headquarters in Sugarland, Texas."

"A BBC regional correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea."

Unocal... "...has commissioned the University of Nebraska to teach Afghan men the technical skills needed for pipeline construction. Nearly 140 people were enrolled last month in Kandahar and Unocal also plans to hold training courses for women in administrative skills." -- Taleban in Texas for talks on gas pipeline (12/4/97: BBC News)

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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Leili Helms, a spokeswoman for the Taliban in New York, told IPS that on U.S. company, Union Oil of California (Unocal), helped to arrange the visit last week of the movement's acting information, industry and mines ministers. The three officials met lower-level State Department officials before departing for France, Helms said.

Several U.S. and French firms are interested in developing gas lines through central and southern Afghanistan, where the 23 Taliban-controlled states are located, she added." -- UN Considers Arms Embargo on Afghanistan (12/16/97: Intra Press Service (IPS))

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that," said another U.S. diplomat in 1997. -- (Taliban (p. 179) by Ahmed Rashid) -- Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden and the Taliban by Phil Gasper

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"To burnish their image in the United States, the Taliban even hired a PR representative in Washington, Laila Helms. The authors say that Helms was well-versed in the arcana of U.S. intelligence agencies because her uncle, Richard Helms, is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place in August, five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington, the analysts maintain. On that occasion, Christina Rocca, at the time head of Central Asian affairs for the State Department, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad."

"Naik also claimed that Tom Simons, the U.S. representative at these meetings, openly threatened the Taliban and Pakistan. "Simons said, 'either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option'. The words Simons used were 'a military operation'," Naik claimed." -- U.S. Taliban Policy influenced by Oil by Julio Godoy (Centre for Research on Globalization)

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"Frankfurter Rundschau, asserts that Unocal has been given the go-ahead from the new holders of power in Kabul to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan. It would lead from Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea to Karachi on the Indian Ocean coast.

The article makes the point that UN diplomats in Geneva believe that behind the war in Afghanistan is a struggle among Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and the U.S. to secure access to the rich oil and natural gas reserves of the Caspian Sea." Afghanistan: Battle Deepens for Central Asian Oil by John Catalinotto (Workers World: 10/24/96)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"What convinced them the partnership was over was the announcement last May by UNOCAL that it was preparing to build a pipeline to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Western Afghanistan (a plan now preempted by the new pipeline across Iran). UNOCAL's announcement was premised on an imminent Taliban victory." -- U.S. Changes Flow of History with New Pipeline Deal by Franz Schurmann (Jinn Magazine, Pacific News Service: 08/01/97)

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"As for the US government, it wanted UNOCAL to build the oil and gas pipelines from Central Asian states to Pakistan through Afghanistan so that the vast untapped oil and gas reserves in the Central Asian and Caspian region could be transported to markets in South Asia, South-East Asia Far East and the Pacific." -- How America courted the Taliban by Ishtiaq Ahmad (Pakistan Observer: 10/20/01) (Centre for Research on Globalization)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The Clinton administration has taken the view that a Taliban victory would end a war that has killed 1.5 million Afghans; would act as a counterweight to Iran, whose Shiite Muslim leadership is fiercely opposed to the Sunni Muslims of the Taliban, and would offer the possibility of new trade routes that could weaken Russian and Iranian influence in the region." -- Analysis: In Afghanistan, Triumph of Fundamentalism by JOHN F. BURNS (New York Times: 5/26/97)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"...the Clinton administration was talking with the Taleban about potential pipelines to carry oil and natural gas out of Turkmenistan to the Indian Ocean by crossing Afghanistan and Pakistan." -- Worries Rise That Taleban May Try to Export Unrest by Joseph Fitchett (International Herald Tribune: 9/26/98)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Afghanistan figures importantly in the context of American energy security politics. Unocal's project to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan for the export of oil and gas to the Indian subcontinent, viewed as the most audacious gambit of the 1990s' Central Asian oil rush had generated great euphoria. The US government fully backed the route as a useful option to free the Central Asian states from Russian clutches and prevent them getting close to Iran. The project was also perceived as the quickest and cheapest way to bring out Turkmen gas to the fast growing energy market in South Asia. To help it canvass for the project, Unocol hired the prominent former diplomat and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and a former US ambassador to Pakistan, Robert Oakley, as well as an expert on the Caucasus, John Maresca.

Even though the wisdom of planning the project to go across war-ravaged Afghanistan was challenged by many, Unocol remained highly optimistic and opened its offices in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and even in India. Like the US government, the Unocol officials, too initially welcomed the taking over of Kabul by the Taliban in September 1996. The president of Unocol even speculated that the cost of the construction would be reduced by half with the success of the Taliban movement and formation of a single government."

"It was reported by the media that the US oil company had even provided covert material support to help push the militia northward against Rabbani's forces." -- The Afghan Conflict and Regional Security by P. Stobdan (Strategic Analysis: Journal of the Institute for Defence & Strategic Analysis [ISDA]: 8/99 Vol. XXIII, No. 5, p. 719-747)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Having been closely involved in US policy toward Afghanistan for some twenty years, I have called into question whether or not this administration has a covert policy that has empowered the Taliban and enabled this brutal movement to hold on to power. Even though the President and the Secretary of State have voiced their disgust at the brutal policies of the Taliban, especially their repression of women, the actual implementation of U.S. policy has repeatedly had the opposite effect."

"I am making the claim that there is and has been and is a covert policy by this administration to support the Taliban movement's control of Afghanistan. It is my guess, that this amoral or immoral policy is based on the assumption that the Taliban would bring stability to Afghanistan and permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan. We have a choice between believing that this administration's policy toward Afghanistan has been incompetent beyond belief, or is directed toward achieving a covert purpose. I believe the administration has maintained this covert goal and kept the Congress in the dark about its policy of supporting the Taliban, the most anti-Western, anti-female, anti-human rights regime int he world. It doesn't take a genius to understand that this policy would outrage the American people, especially America's women. Perhaps the most glaring evidence of our government's covert policy to favor the Taliban is that the administration is currently engaged in a major effort to obstruct the Congress from determining the details behind this policy. Last year in August, after several unofficial requests were made of State Department, I made an official request for all diplomatic documents concerning US policy toward the Taliban, especially those cables and documents from our embassies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. As a senior Member of the House International Relations Committee I have oversight responsibility in this area. In November, after months of stonewalling, the Secretary of State herself promised before the International Relations Committee that the documents would be forthcoming. She reconfirmed that promise in February when she testified before our Committee on the State Department budget. The Chairman of the Committee, Ben Gilman, added his voice to the record in support of my document request. To this time, we have received nothing. There can only be two explanations. Either the State Department is totally incompetent, or there is an ongoing cover-up of the State Department's true fundamental policy toward Afghanistan. You probably didn't expect me to praise the State Department at the end of this scathing testimony. But I will. I don't think the State Department is incompetent. They should be held responsible for their policies and the American people should know, through documented proof, what they are doing." -- Statement of Congressman Dana Rohrabacher - U.S. Policy Toward Afghanistan.pdf (Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on South Asia: 4/14/99)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Impressed by the ruthlessness and willingness of the then-emerging Taliban to cut a pipeline deal, the State Department and Pakistan's Inter- Services Intelligence agency agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance. As recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official,..." -- It's about oil by Ted Rall (San Francisco Chronicle: 11/2/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The truth about the Saudi silence was even more complicated. The Saudis preferred to leave Bin Laden alone in Afghanistan because his arrest and trial by the Americans could expose the deep relationship that Bin Laden continued to have with sympathetic members of the Royal Family and elements within Saudi intelligence, which could prove deeply embarrassing. The Saudis wanted Bin Laden either dead or a captive of the Taliban -- they did not want him captured by the Americans." -- Osama Bin Laden: How the U.S. Helped Midwife a Terrorist by Ahmed Rashid

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"First, the United States has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out Osama bin Laden. Until it backed off under local pressure, it went so far as to explore whether a Central Asian country would permit the use of its territory for such a purpose."

"First, the United States has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out Osama bin Laden. Until it backed off under local pressure, it went so far as to explore whether a Central Asian country would permit the use of its territory for such a purpose." [This backing down by the administration exemplified the need for a local trigger to get the conflict under way.]

"Thus, while claiming to oppose a military solution to the Afghan problem, the United States is now talking about the overthrow of a regime that controls nearly the entire country, in the hope it can be replaced with a hypothetical government that does not exist even on paper."

"These shifts add up to a fundamental redirection of American policy toward the world's largest and most vexed zone of conflict. All this is occurring without public discussion, without consultation with Congress and without even informing those who are likely to make foreign policy in the next administration. Thus the Clinton State Department is preparing a kind of land mine that will explode in the face of the incoming Bush administration." -- Afghanistan Land Mine by S. Frederick Starr (Washington Post: 12/19/00)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The United States and Russia may soon launch a joint military assault against Islamic militant, Osama Bin Laden, and against the leadership of Taliban, Afghanistan's de facto ruling movement.

Such an attack would probably include US Delta Force and Navy Seals, who would join up with Russia's elite Spetsnaz and Alpha commandos in Tajikistan, the Central Asian state where Russia has military bases and 25,000 troops. The combined forces would be lifted by helicopters, and backed by air support, deep into neighboring Afghanistan to attack Bin Laden's fortified base in the Hindu Kush mountains."

"The US engineered a punishing Iraq-style embargo of war-ravaged Afghanistan at a time when many of its 18 million people are starving and homeless." -- U.S.-Russian Crusade Against Osama Bin Laden by Eric Margolis (Toronto Sun: 12/4/00)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"India is believed to have joined Russia, the USA and Iran in a concerted front against Afghanistan's Taliban regime." "Several recent meetings between the newly instituted Indo-US and Indo-Russian joint working groups on terrorism led to this effort to tactically and logistically counter the Taliban."

"Military sources indicated that Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are being used as bases to launch anti-Taliban operations by India and Russia." -- India joins anti-Taliban coalition by Rahul Bedi (Jane's Intelligence Review: 3/15/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Indian officials say that India and Iran will only play the role of "facilitator" while the US and Russia will combat the Taliban from the front with the help of two Central Asian countries, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, to push Taliban lines back to the 1998 position 50 km away from Mazar-e-Sharief city in northern Afghanistan."

"Tajikistan and Uzbekistan will lead the ground attack with a strong military back up of the US and Russia. Vital Taliban installations and military assets will be targeted. India and Iran will provide logistic support. Russian President Vladimir Putin has already hinted of military action against the Taliban to CIS nation heads during a meeting in Moscow in early June."

"Diplomats say that the anti-Taliban move followed a meeting between US Secretary of State Collin Powel and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and later between Powell and Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh in Washington. Russia, Iran and India have also held a series of discussions and more diplomatic activity is expected." -- Special Report India in anti-Taliban military plan (India Reacts: 6/26/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"...there were signs early this year that Washington was moving to threaten Afghanistan militarily from the north, via the wild former Soviet republics.

A US department of defence official, Dr Jeffrey Starr, visited Tajikistan in January. The Guardian's Felicity Lawrence established that US Rangers were also training special troops inside Kyrgyzstan. There were unconfirmed reports that Tajik and Uzbek special troops were training in Alaska and Montana.

And US General Tommy Franks visited Dushanbe on May 16, where he conveyed a message from the Bush administration that the US considered Tajikistan "a strategically significant country". On offer was non-lethal military aid. Tajikistan used the occasion to apply to join Nato's Partnership for Peace.

Shortly afterwards the Republican senator from Alabama who is vice-chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Richard C Shelby, returned from a Gulf tour to bullishly tell the Washington Post that US counterterrorism officials were winning the war against Bin Laden."
"Reliable western military sources say a US contingency plan existed on paper by the end of the summer to attack Afghanistan from the north." "By July 8, the Afghan opposition, Pakistani diplomats, and senior staff from the British Foreign Office, were gathering at Weston Park under UN auspices for private teach-ins on the Afghan situation." "And a couple of weeks later, another group gathered in a Berlin hotel. There, former state department official Lee Coldren passed on a message he had got from Bush officials" "...the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action." "The chilling quality of this private warning was that it came - according to one of those present, the Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik - accompanied by specific details of how Bush would suceed..." "The hawks in Washington could count on the connivance of Russian troops, and on facilities in such places as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, already host to US military advisers." -- Attack and counter-attack by David Leigh (Guardian 9/26/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Osama bin Laden and the Taliban received threats of possible American military strikes against them two months before the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington..."

"The Taliban refused to comply but the serious nature of what they were told raises the possibility that Bin Laden, far from launching the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon out of the blue 10 days ago, was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats."

"Mr Coldren confirmed the broad outline of the American position at the Berlin meeting yesterday. "I think there was some discussion of the fact that the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action.""

""The Americans indicated to us that in case the Taliban does not behave and in case Pakistan also doesn't help us to influence the Taliban, then the United States would be left with no option but to take an overt action against Afghanistan," said Niaz Naik, a former foreign minister of Pakistan, who was at the meeting."

"Asked whether he could be sure that the Americans were passing ideas from the Bush administration rather than their own views, Mr Naik said yesterday: "What the Americans indicated to us was perhaps based on official instructions. They were very senior people. Even in 'track two' people are very careful about what they say and don't say.""

"He said this time they were very sure. They had all the intelligence and would not miss him this time. It would be aerial action, maybe helicopter gunships, and not only overt, but from very close proximity to Afghanistan." -- Threat of US strikes passed to Taliban weeks before NY attack by Jonathan Steele (The Guardian: 9/22/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October." "...US officials told him of the plan at a UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan which took place in Berlin."

And he said it was doubtful that Washington would drop its plan even if Bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taleban." -- U.S. planned attack on Taleban (BBC News: 9/18/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Insider Trading Evidence Leads Into Heart of CIA, The Lies About Taliban Heroin - Russia And Oil The CIA Objective, Bush/Bin Laden profiteering - The Carlyle Group - Three Generations of Bushes Arm Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden, Records Show This War Was Planned for Years
Bush Cabinet Seeks "Infinite War," Iraq On The Target Menu - Will Israel Join Attacks?, Prison Stocks Soar, More Americans Going To Jail, Civil Liberties Disappearing, Official Recount Complete - Gore Won Florida -- FROM THE WILDERNESS

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"US policy was to promote the rapid development of Caspian energy... We did so specifically to promote the independence of these oil-rich countries, to in essence break Russia's monopoly control over the transportation of oil from that region, and frankly, to promote Western energy security through diversification of supply." -- THE DEADLY PIPELINE WAR: U.S. AFGHAN POLICY DRIVEN BY OIL INTERESTS by Professor Marjorie Cohn Thomas - JURIST Contributing Editor (Jefferson School of Law)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"We would like to see them reliant on western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We've made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it's very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right." -- A discreet deal in the pipeline by George Monbiot 2/15/01 The Guardian

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"To amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to target assistance to support the economic and political independence of the countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia."

The U.S. Congress noted that "The region of the South Caucasus and Central Asia could produce oil and gas in sufficient quantities to reduce the dependence of the United States on energy from the volatile Persian Gulf region. " -- Silk Road Strategy Act of 1999 (106th CONGRESS: 1st Session: S. 579)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power."

“In that context, how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.” (p.31)

"But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold." (p.124)

"The world's energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia's economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea." (p.125)

"Kazakhstan is the shield and Uzbekistan is the soul for the region's diverse national awakenings." "Uzbekistan is, in fact, the prime candidate for regional leadership in Central Asia." (p.130)

"Once pipelines to the area have been developed, Turkmenistan's truly vast natural gas reserves augur a prosperous future for the country's people. (p.132)

"In fact, an Islamic revival – already abetted from the outside not only by Iran but also by Saudi Arabia – is likely to become the mobilizing impulse for the increasingly pervasive new nationalisms, determined to oppose any reintegration under Russian – and hence infidel – control." (p. 133).

"For Pakistan, the primary interest is to gain Geostrategic depth through political influence in Afghanistan - and to deny to Iran the exercise of such influence in Afghanistan and Tajikistan - and to benefit eventually from any pipeline construction linking Central Asia with the Arabian Sea." (p.139)

"Moreover, sensible Russian leaders realize that the demographic explosion underway in the new states means that their failure to sustain economic growth will eventually create an explosive situation along Russia’s entire southern frontier." (p.141)

"Turkmenistan… has been actively exploring the construction of a new pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea…" (p.145)

“It follows that America’s primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it.” (p148)

"China’s growing economic presence in the region and its political stake in the area’s independence are also congruent with America’s interests." (p.149)

"America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe’s central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and to America’s historical legacy." (p.194)

“Without sustained and directed American involvement, before long the forces of global disorder could come to dominate the world scene. And the possibility of such a fragmentation is inherent in the geopolitical tensions not only of today’s Eurasia but of the world more generally.” (p.194)

"…the Eurasian Balkans – threatens to become a cauldron of ethnic conflict and great-power rivalry." (p.195)

“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” (p. 211)

“…The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world’s paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power… (p. xiii)

“… But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book. (p. xiv)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"...the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and CIA would have known about the plan at the latest at this time." -- Western intelligence knew of Laden plan since 1995 (Hindustan Times) Also see Agence France Press 12/7/01

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Federal investigative sources have confirmed that Murad detailed an entire plot to dive bomb aircraft in the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, VA.. They say the plot was contained on a laptop computer recovered from the Manilla apartment where Murad was arrested.

Yousef independently boasted of the plot to U.S. Secret Service agent Brian Parr and FBI agent Charles Stern on an extradition flight from Pakistan to the United States in February 1995. The agents later testified to that fact in court."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Then we found another document that discussed a second alternative to crash the 11 planes into selected targets in the United States instead of just blowing them up in the air. These included the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia; the World Trade Center in New Your; the Sears Tower in Chicago; the TransAmerica Tower in San Francisco; and the White House in Washington, DC... I submitted my findings to NBI officials, who most certainly turned over the report (and the computer) either to then Senior Superintendent Avelino Razon of the PNP [the Philippine National Police] or to Bob Heafner of the FBI... I have since had meetings with certain U.S. authorities and they have confirmed to me that indeed, many things were done in response to my report." -- Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, American and International Terrorism by John K. Cooley

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The hijacked aircraft were to be crashed into structures in the United States, including the World Trade Center, the White House, Pentagon, the Transamerica tower in San Francisco and the Sears Tower in Chicago." -- 1995 plan selected U.S.-bound airliners from E. Asia (World Tribune: 9/19/01) GEOSTRATEGY-DIRECT.COM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The plan has been masterminded by one Ramzi Youssef, who was arrested in Islamabad in the wake of Murad’s interrogation. Both Murad and Youssef were extradited to the United States, tried and convicted for complicity in the 1993 attack on the WTC.

The date of Youssef’s conviction was 11 September 1996. From that point, given the fascination terrorists have with anniversaries, 11 September should surely have become a watch date." -- A STUNNING INTELLIGENCE FAILURE.doc by Paul Monk (Australian Thinking Skills Institute)

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"In 1995, the CIA and the FBI learned that Osama bin Laden was planning to hijack U.S. airliners and use them as bombs to attack important targets in the U.S. This scheme was called Project Bojinka. It was discovered in the Philippines, where authorities arrested two of bin Laden's agents, Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad. They were involved in planting a bomb on a Philippine airliner. Project Bojinka, which Philip-pine authorities found outlined on Abdul Murad's laptop, called for planting bombs on eleven U.S. airliners and hijacking others and crashing them into targets like the CIA building.

The hijacking part of the plan got less attention than the planting of bombs. It required aviators like Japan's kamikaze pilots who were willing to commit suicide. Bin Laden had no such pilots in 1995, but he set out to train young fanatics willing to die for him to fly airliners. Abdul Murad, whose laptop had revealed the plan, admitted that he was being trained for a suicide mission. Bin Laden began training pilots in Afghanistan with the help of an Afghan pilot and a Pakistani general.

Project Bojinka was known to the CIA and the FBI. It was described in court documents in the trial in New York of Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Murad for their participation in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Since the CIA had been mentioned as one of the targets in Project Bojinka, it should have had an especially strong interest in any evidence that bin Laden was preparing to carry it out. The most obvious indicator, and one that should have been watched most carefully, was the recruitment of young, dedicated followers to learn to fly American airliners. That would require keeping a close watch on flight schools where that training is given."

"The scattered details that have emerged about the plot put this failure in stark relief: More than 50 people were likely involved, Justice Department officials have said, and the plot required extensive communications and planning to pull off. The group's size — not to mention the complexity of its endeavor — should have offered many opportunities for intelligence infiltration. Yet the conspirators proceeded unmolested. What is striking is how safe these people apparently felt, how unthreatened by law enforcement. Some of the terrorists were here for long periods. They left and entered the country unimpeded. Some were reportedly on the so-called ‘watch list,' a government catalogue of people who ostensibly are not permitted to enter the country. Yet this apparently caused them no problems." -- CATASTROPHIC INTELLIGENCE FAILURE (Accuracy in Media (AIM) Report No. 18: 9/24/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"And the 2000 edition of the FAA’s annual report on Criminal Acts Against Aviation, published this year, said that although Osama bin Laden ‘is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so,’ adding, ‘Bin Laden’s anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly to U.S. civil aviation.’" Moreover, the 1999 edition of the FAA document reported that a radical Islamic leader living in British exile warned in August 1998 that bin Laden "would bring down an airliner, or hijack an airliner to humiliate the United States." -- Could We Have Prevented the Attacks? by William Norman Grigg (The New American: Vol. 17, No. 23: 11/5/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The report recounts well-known case studies of similar plots, including a 1995 plan by al Qaeda operatives to hijack and crash a dozen U.S. airliners in the South Pacific and pilot a light aircraft into Langley.

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said." -- Aug. Memo Focused On Attacks in U.S. by Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen (Washington Post: 5/18/02 p. A01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies received warning signals at least three months ago that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture, according to a story in Germany’s daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).

The FAZ, quoting unnamed German intelligence sources, said that the Echelon spy network was being used to collect information about the terrorist threats, and that U.K. intelligence services apparently also had advance warning. The FAZ, one of Germany’s most respected dailies, said that even as far back as six months ago western and near-east press services were receiving information that such attacks were being planned.

Within the American intelligence community, the warnings were taken seriously and surveillance intensified, the FAZ said." -- Newspaper: Echelon Gave Authorities Warning Of Attacks by Ned Stafford (Newsbytes: 9/13/01) (From the Wilderness)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Meanwhile, intelligence had been streaming in concerning a likely Al Qaeda attack. "It all came together in the third week in June," Clarke said. "The C.I.A.'s view was that a major terrorist attack was coming in the next several weeks." On July 5th, Clarke summoned all the domestic security agencies—the Federal Aviation Administration, the Coast Guard, Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the F.B.I.—and told them to increase their security in light of an impending attack" -- THE COUNTER-TERRORIST by LAWRENCE WRIGHT

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Officials also said the CIA had developed general information a month before the attacks that heightened concerns that bin Laden and his followers were increasingly determined to strike on U.S. soil..."

"There was something specific in early August that said to us that he was determined in striking on U.S. soil,"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Since Bin Laden started to encrypt certain calls in 1995, why would they now be part of a court record? 'Codes were broken,' US officials said, and Venzke added that you don't use your highest levels of secure communications all the time. It's too burdensome and it exposes it to other types of exploitation.'" -- (United Press International: 2/13/01) (Re: The September 11 X-Files: From The Wilderness)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Given that US officials “believe the planning for the Sept. 11 attacks probably began two years ago," ( New York Times, October 14, 2001) this suggests that some information on the preparations for September 11 was available to electronic intercept. (Source: United Press International, February 13, 2001)"

"It is critical to consider September 11 in the context of earlier terrorist attacks on American targets, particularly the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In both these attacks, it has come to light that American agents provocateurs played a central role. This casts doubt on the claims that US intelligence was unable to penetrate al Qaeda. And it raises the question whether similar agents had some connection to September 11.

Those charged in the 1993 World Trade Center attack and for a subsequent conspiracy to blow up other targets in New York City were mostly former guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan who entered the United States with the covert assistance of US intelligence agencies. Among them was a former Egyptian intelligence agent and US government informer, Emad Salem, who was identified as a principal instigator of plans to bomb targets in the New York City area." -- Was the US government alerted to September 11 attack? Part 2: Watching the hijackers by Patrick Martin (World Socialist Web Site)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------""They have an intercept of some information that included people associated with bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit," Hatch said in an interview with The Associated Press." -- Government probe focuses on bin Laden, intelligence intercept by Karen Gullo (ASSOCIATED PRESS: 9/11/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"...ABCNEWS has learned that shortly before Sept. 11, NSA intercepts detected multiple phone calls from Abu Zubaida, bin Laden's chief of operations, to the United States." -- "Early Warnings: Pre-Sept. 11 Cautions Went Unheeded" (ABC News: World News Tonight: 2/18-20/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The pervasive Echelon surveillance apparatus and the most sophisticated intelligence machinery ever built is unlikely not to have eavesdropped on some of the very complicated organisation and plans across states and boundaries for the multi-site hijacking of planes from major security structures across the U.S. - especially since the suicide pilots were trained as pilots in the U.S., and the World Trade Centre had already been bombed in 1993 by Afghan ex-allies of the CIA. Since the prime suspect, Osama bin Laden, is himself an ex-CIA operative in Afghanistan, and his moves presumably under the intensest scrutiny for past successful terrorist attacks on two U.S. embassies in 1998, one has to reflect on the connections." -- (The Record: 9/12/01; Economic Reform: 10/01) (WHY IS THERE A WAR IN AFGHANISTAN? John McMurtry Phd, FRSC)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"During the trial a Secret Service agent testified that Yousef boasted during his extradition flight to Yew York that he would have blown up several jumbo jets within a few weeks if his plan had not been discovered. The government said the defendants even devised a name for their airline terror plot named, 'Project Bojinka'... The airlines are at risk -- They need to take all appropriate measures and counter-measures to ensure the safety of their passengers." -- Near the end of 6/01 Airjet Airline World News issued a warning regarding Project Bojinka.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies also knew that two of the hijackers were in the country, according to the Los Angeles Times. They were on a terrorist watch list. But the airlines were not notified."

"The FBI had several terrorists under surveillance, according to the Oct. 1 issue of Newsweek. They intercepted communications just prior to Sept. 11 that suggested something very big was about to happen.

Still, there were more clues.

Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested after flight trainers tipped off the feds that he wanted to learn how to fly a 747 but wasn't interested in takeoffs or landings. Zacarias was traveling on a French passport. When contacted, the French government reported that he was a suspected terrorist." --The failure of government by Joseph Farrah. 10/19/01 WorldNetDaily.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Europe 1 radio reported that U.S. police arrested a man with dual French and Algerian nationality who had several passports, technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals.

The man had been taking flying lessons, it added.

Asked for information by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, French security services provided a dossier clearly identifying him as an Islamic militant working with bin Laden." -- (Reuters: 9/13/01) (U.S. Govt. Intelligence is Purposely Lying When it Says it Was Caught by Surprise.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Also yesterday, it was reported that the FBI got a French intelligence report weeks before Sept. 11 saying Moussaoui was a dangerous Islamic extremist.

The information came from Jean-Louis Brugruiere, a French judge and terrorist hunter, CBS's "60 Minutes II" said last night.

The judge told CBS that French officials gave the FBI "everything we had" on Moussaoui." -- (New York Post: 5/9/02) (The Sierra Times: The War Room)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Moussaoui first raised eyebrows when, during a simple introductory exchange, he said he was from France, but then didn't seem to understand when the instructor spoke French to him.

Moussaoui then became belligerent and evasive about his background, Oberstar and other sources said. In addition, he seemed inept in basic flying procedures, while seeking expensive training on an advanced commercial jet simulator." -- Eagan flight trainer wouldn't let unease about Moussaoui rest by Greg Gordon (Star Tribune: 12/21/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Mr. Moussaoui wanted technical classroom training to familiarize himself with airliners. He asked questions about protocols for communicating with flight towers. He wanted to learn fast. He paid by pulling a wad of cash — roughly $6,800 — out of a small satchel. Soon, employees began whispering that he could be a hijacker.

"The cash, the Middle Eastern accent, the fact that he had very little pilot training and wanted a significant amount of training in ground school and on the simulator — all of these things together pointed to the fact that this was a significant concern," Mr. Rosengren said."

"The instructor, Mr. Rosengren said, immediately became concerned and wondered why someone who was not a pilot and had so little experience was trying to pack so much training into such a short time.

The instructor said Mr. Moussaoui knew nothing about airliners. The instructor said he seemed particularly interested in flying once the plane was in the air.

"There was discussion about how much fuel was on board a 747-400 and how much damage that could cause if it hit anything," he added. -- Flight Student's Grand Goals Led to Suspicion, Then Arrest by JIM YARDLEY (New York Times: 2/8/02)

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"An instructor at a Minnesota flight school warned the F.B.I. in August of his suspicion that a student who was later identified as a part of Osama bin Laden's terror network might be planning to use a commercial plane loaded with fuel as a weapon, a member of Congress and other officials said today.

The officials, who were briefed by the school, said the instructor warned the Federal Bureau of Investigation in urgent tones about the terrorist threat posed by the student, Zacarias Moussaoui."

"Representative James L. Oberstar of Minnesota, who received the briefing and is the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation Committee, said the instructor called the bureau several times to find someone in authority who seemed willing to act on the information.

Mr. Oberstar said the instructor's warnings could not have been more blunt. The representative said, "He told them, `Do you realize that a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb?' ""

"Congressional officials said the account by the school, the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, outside Minneapolis, raised new questions about why the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies did not prevent the hijackings."

[The Instructor]"... was a former military pilot who grew suspicious after encounters in which Mr. Moussaoui was belligerent and evasive about his background and because he was so adamant about learning to fly a 747 jumbo jet despite his clear incompetence as a pilot.

Mr. Moussaoui, 33, was arrested in August on immigration charges. But despite the urging of the school and federal agents in Minnesota and despite a warning from the French that Mr. Moussaoui was linked to Muslim extremists, F.B.I. headquarters here resisted a broader investigation until after Sept. 11." -- THE SUSPECT: Flight School Warned F.B.I. of Suspicions by PHILIP SHENON December 22, 2001

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The Newsweek article says U.S. military officials gave the FBI information suggesting that five of the alleged hijackers received training in the 1990s at secure U.S. military installations.

It says three of them listed their address on driver licenses and car registrations as 10 Radford Blvd. on Pensacola NAS, a base road on which residences for foreign- military flight trainees are located." -- Pensacola NAS link faces more scrutiny: Senator seeks answers on hijackers ties to Navy base by Larry Wheeler (New Journal Washington Bureau: 9/17/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Officials stressed that the name matches may not necessarily mean the students were the hijackers because of discrepancies in ages in other personal data."

Officials would not release ages, country of origin or any other specific details of the three individuals."

"When Newsweek's Internet site reported that three of the hijackers received training at the Pensacola Naval Station in Florida, Senator Bill Nelson faxed an indignant note to Attorney General Ashcroft demanding to know if it were true."

"In the wake of those reports we asked about the Pensacola Naval Air Station but we never got a definitive answer from the Justice Department," said a spokesman for Senator Nelson. "So we asked the FBI for an answer `if and when' they could provide us one. Their response to date has been that they are trying to sort through something complicated and difficult."

""Biographically, they're not the same people," she explained to us patiently. "Some of the ages are 20 years off." "Some" of the ages? We told her we were only interested in Atta. Was she saying that the age of the Mohamed Atta who attended the Air Force's International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base was different from the terrorist Atta's age as reported? Um, er, no, the major admitted. Still, she persisted. "Mohamed is a very common name." We asked if the registrar of the International Officer's School might provide us with the name and address of this second Mohamed Atta, so that we might call him and confirm that there were really two Mohamed Atta's of about the same age pursuing flight training in the U.S. at about the same time. "I don't think you're going to get that information," the major replied."

"On Oct. 10, FBI Agents were ordered to curtail their investigation of the Sept. 11 attack in an order describing the investigation of the terrorist hijackings as "the most exhaustive in its history." "The investigative staff has to be made to understand that we're not trying to solve a crime now," said one law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity The order was said to have met with resistance from FBI agents who believed that continued surveillance of suspects might have turned up critical evidence to prove who orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Officials said FBI Director Robert Mueller, who was sworn in last month, believed that his agents had a broad understanding of the events of Sept. 11. It was now time to move on." -- Did terrorist pilots train at U.S. military schools?.pdf by Daniel Hopsicker (HTML VER.)(ONLINE JOURNAL: 10/30/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States and abroad, according to interviews and court testimony.

Three days after the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III described reports that several of the hijackers had received flight training in the United States as "news, quite obviously," adding, "If we had understood that to be the case, we would have -- perhaps one could have averted this."

A senior government official yesterday acknowledged law enforcement officials were aware that fewer than a dozen people with links to bin Laden had attended U.S. flight schools." -- FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools by Steve Fainaru and James V. Grimaldi (Washington Post: 9/23/01: Page A24)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Authorities are probing the European business associations of a Venice flight school owner, whose school at the Venice airport trained the nucleus of foreign national terrorist pilots, looking for possible links to international organized crime groups, reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday to be laundering large sums of drug money for major terrorist organizations. Organized crime is said to launder billions for terrorists. Three of the airliners involved in the September 11 terrorist attack-two in Manhattan, and one wrested to the ground over Pennsylvania-were piloted by terrorists who had trained at two flight schools at the Venice, Florida airport." -- Death in Venice (Florida).pdf by Daniel Hopsicker (HTML Ver.) (Online Journal: 9/28/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Almost all of the terrorist pilots received their initial training in Venice, either at Kruithof's or at Dekkers' flight school. Together, these two schools trained the core cadre of foreign terrorist pilots."

"The FBI was swarming Huffman Aviation by 2 a.m., just 18 hours following the attack. They removed student files from two schools at the Venice airport: Huffman Aviation and the Florida Flight Training Center just down the street. "The FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools," reported the Washington Post a week later. It said federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States."

"Experts have been wondering how a conspiracy of such size and duration could have gone unnoticed by US intelligence agencies and law enforcement. At least 15 of the far-flung network of terrorist pilots got their money from the same (so far-unnamed) source. While in the Venice area last year, the terrorist suspects opened checking accounts during the summer.

We called someone who used to work at something like the CIA. "How could the agency not have known about 15 foreign pilots all paid from one source?" He chose his words carefully. "I would assume that they did know. It would seem almost impossible for them not to."" -- What are they hiding down in Venice, Florida?.pdf by Daniel Hopsicker (HTML Ver.) (Online Journal: 10/9/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Dekkers had purchased his aviation school at just about the time the terrorist pilots moved into town and began their lessons." Is Rudi Dekkers just an innocent aviation executive whose flight school received the most unfortunate business publicity since Ryder Trucks at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing? Or is there a darker reality lurking behind his widely promoted public persona?"

""Rudi's greedy, and when you're greedy you can be used for something," a Special Operations Commando leader from the nearby McDill Air Force Base told us. "I've always had some suspicions about the way he breezed into town out of nowhere," said one observer at the Venice Airport. "Just too many odd little things. For example, he has ly no aviation background as far as anyone can tell. And he evidently had no use for, nor knowledge of, FAA rules and regs."" -- Was the CIA running a terrorist flight school?.pdf by Daniel Hopsicker (HTML Ver.) (Online Journal: 11/7/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"...Rudi Dekkers, owner of the flight school of choice for the terrorists, has reportedly been recently indicted Holland, his native country, on financial charges that may include fraud and money laundering, according to law enforcement officials. -- Jackson Stephens active in Venice, FL.pdf by Daniel Hopsicker (HTML Ver.) (Online Journal: 11/25/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Despite Mr. Dekker's dubious background, activities and connections, in addition to his role in training most of the terrorists responsible for the 9/11th event, the FBI doesn't appear to have investigated him. -- "Forty-eight hours after the Sept. 11 attack, a flight school owner named Rudi Dekkers, known to have trained virtually the entire terrorist pilot cadre, and a possible CIA asset, seemed impervious to suspicion." -- Rudi Dekkers and the Lone (nut) Cadre.pdf by Daniel Hopsicker (HTML Ver.) (Online Journal: 11/24/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"When details of the Lynchburg controversy first reached Venice aviation executives they professed amazement. "No one here had ever heard of Britannia Aviation before," one told us. "And this is a very small airport." After our inquiry he called a DEA source of his at the airport, this aviation executive told us, to ask what he knew about Britannia Aviation. "This guy got all excited as soon as I asked," this executive stated. "He immediately wanted to know why I was so interested in Britannia. Finally he reluctantly told me that Britannia had a 'green light' from the DEA at the Venice airport, whatever that means. He also said the local Venice Police Department (which has mounted round-the-clock patrols at the airport since Sept.11) had been warned to leave them alone.""

"The suspicion deepened when it was discovered that Britannia Aviation is a company with virtually no assets, employees, or corporate history. Moreover, the company did not even possess the necessary FAA license to perform the aircraft maintenance services for which it had just been contracted by the city of Lynchburg. At a Lynchburg City Council hearing on the dispute, there were vocal objections from observers baffled as to why a company with virtually no qualifications was being awarded a contract to take over a large regional maintenance facility designed for major carriers like Delta and USAir Express. "It was as if someone with a learner's permit from the DMV got picked to drive Richard Petty's car at Daytona," explained one local aviation executive and NASCAR fan. "It made ly no business sense that anyone could see.""

"When Britannia Aviation's financial statements were released after prodding by the local aviation community, they revealed Britannia to be a "company" worth less than $750."

"Trying to save further embarrassment, Britannia executive Marten reassured those in attendance that at Huffman's hangar at the Venice airport they had for some time been successfully providing aviation maintenance services for Caribe Air, a Caribbean carrier. And that is how the world learned that under Rudi Dekkers' FAA license Paul Marten's little dummy front company worked for a notorious CIA proprietary air carrier which, even by the standards of a CIA proprietary, has had a particularly checkered past. Caribe Air's history includes "blemishes" like having its aircraft seized by federal officials at the infamous Mena, Arkansas, airport a decade ago, after the company was accused by government prosecutors of having used as many as 20 planes to ship drugs worth billions of dollars into this country."

"The new evidence adds to existing indications that Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre's flight training in this country was part of a so-far unacknowledged U.S. government intelligence operation which had ultimately tragic consequences for thousands of civilians on September 11. Far from merely being negligent or asleep at the switch-the thrust so far of allegations expected to be aired at joint Senate and House Select Committee hearings this month-the accumulating evidence suggests the CIA was not just aware of the thousands of Arab student pilots who began pouring into this country several years ago to attend flight training, but was running the operation for still-unexplained reasons."

"It was "Islamic fundamentalist" Osama bin laden who cloaked his covert activities under the cover of religious charities. Were we now discovering that our own government intelligence agencies used the same ruse? What was going on here? Christian-linked or not, why did a transparent dummy front company like Paul Marten's Britannia Aviation have a "green light" from the DEA? A green light for what?" -- Venice, Florida, Flight School Linked to CIA: Firm has 'green light' from local DEA.pdf by Daniel Hopsicker (HTML Ver.) (Online Journal: 3/2/02)

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The military deliberately kept the public in the dark about the impending event. -- "Cetron said he warned the Pentagon that two events earlier that year — the crash-landing of a small airplane at the White House by an apparently unstable man, and French authorities' storming of a hijacked airliner that Algerian terrorists had planned to fly into the Eiffel Tower — made an airborne terrorist attack on the United States a very real possibility. "We knew that was going happen and we were scared," he told ABCNEWS.

But Cetron said Pentagon officials told him to delete the warning from the report. "I said, 'It's unclassified, everything is available,' and they said, 'We don't want it released because you can't handle a crisis before it becomes a crisis, and no one is going to believe it anyhow,' " Cetron said. Even with the warnings of an airborne attack deleted, the report was not released to the public." --Early Warnings: Pre-Sept. 11 Cautions Went Unheeded (ABC NEWS.com 2/18/02)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"PALAST: In the eight weeks since the attacks, over 1,000 suspects and potential witnesses have been detained. Yet, just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osama Bin Laden's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House.

Their official line is that the Bin Ladens are above suspicion - apart from Osama, the black sheep, who they say hijacked the family name. That's fortunate for the Bush family and the Saudi royal household, whose links with the Bin Ladens could otherwise prove embarrassing. But Newsnight has obtained evidence that the FBI was on the trail of other members of the] Bin Laden family for links to terrorist organisations before and after September 11th.

This document is marked "Secret". Case ID - 199-Eye WF 213 589. 199 is FBI code for case type. 9 would be murder. 65 would be espionage. 199 means national security. WF indicates Washington field office special agents were investigating ABL - because of it's relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, WAMY - a suspected terrorist organisation. ABL is Abdullah Bin Laden, president and treasurer of WAMY.

This is the sleepy Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia where almost every home displays the Stars and Stripes. On this unremarkable street, at 3411 Silver Maple Place, we located the former home of Abdullah and another brother, Omar, also an FBI suspect. It's conveniently close to WAMY. The World Assembly of Muslim Youth is in this building, in a little room in the basement at 5613 Leesburg Pike. And here, just a couple blocks down the road at 5913 Leesburg, is where four of the hijackers that attacked New York and Washington are listed as having lived.

The US Treasury has not frozen WAMY's assets, and when we talked to them, they insisted they are a charity. Yet, just weeks ago, Pakistan expelled WAMY operatives. And India claimed that WAMY was funding an organisation linked to bombings in Kashmir. And the Philippines military has accused WAMY of funding Muslim insurgency. The FBI did look into WAMY, but, for some reason, agents were pulled off the trail."

"MICHAEL SPRINGMAN: In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country."

"PALAST: Does the Bush family also have to worry about political blow-back? The younger Bush made his first million 20 years ago with an oil company partly funded by Salem Bin Laden's chief US representative. Young George also received fees as director of a subsidiary of Carlyle Corporation, a little known private company which has, in just a few years of its founding, become one of Americas biggest defence contractors. His father, Bush Senior, is also a paid advisor. And what became embarrassing was the revelation that the Bin Ladens held a stake in Carlyle, sold just after September 11." -- Has someone been sitting on the FBI? (BBC NEWS: News Night: 6/11/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"CBC: Does this demonstrate a relationship between the CIA and Osama Bin Laden dating back as far as 1987?

SPRINGMAN: That's right, and as you recall, they believe that this fellow Sheikh Abdurrahman who was tied to the first New York World Trade Center bombing had gotten his visa from a CIA case officer in the Sudan. And that the 15 or so people who came from Saudi Arabia to participate in the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon had gotten visas through the American consulate general in Jeddah.

CBC: So what does that suggest, that this pipeline was never rolled up, that it's still operating?

SPRINGMANN: Exactly. I thought that it had been, because I'd raised sufficient hell that I thought that they'd done it. I had complained to the Embassy in Riyadh, I had complained to diplomatic security in Washington, I had complained to the General Acounting Office, I had complained to the State Department Inspector-General's Office, I had complained to the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department and apparently the reverberations from this were heard all over the State Department.

CBC: If what you say may be true, many of the terrorists who allegedly flew those planes into those targets, got their U.S. visas through the CIA and your U.S. consulate in Jeddah. Taht suggests a relationship ongoing as recently as obviously September. But what was the CIA presumably recruiting these people for as recently as September 11th?

SPRINGMANN: That I don't know. And that's one of the things that I tried to find out through a series of Freedom of Information Act requests starting ten years ago. At the time the State Department and the CIA stonewalled my requests. They're still doing so.

CBC: If the CIA had relationship with the people responsible for September 11th, are you suggesting therein that they are somehow complicit?

SPRINGMANN: Yes, either through omission or through failure to act... By the attempts to cover me up and shut me down, this convinced me more and more that this was not a pipedream, this was not imagination...

CBC: but when you take the events of 87, when visas were being issued to people unqualified for them, it suggests that happened again to the same people responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington, that's a quantum leap. How do you justify that?

SPRINGMANN: For all I know, for all we know, this may have not been the intended consequence, it could've been a mistake, it could've been a misjudgment. Or for all we know, it could've been an effort to get the U.S. directly involved in some fashion. I mean it's only a few thousand dead and what's this against the greater gain for the United States in the Middle East?

CBC: But you're quite sure that Mohamed Atta and others had their visas issued in Jeddah?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Yet, instead of tightening visa requirements, the U.S. government made it easier for Saudi visitors to come to America. Under a program called U.S. Visa Express, introduced four months before the Sept. 11 attacks, Saudis were allowed to arrange visas through 10 travel agencies -- often without coming to the U.S. Embassy or consulate for interviews." -- Loopholes leave U.S. borders vulnerable by SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG (St. Petersburg Times: 11/25/01)

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"DS: Have you ever heard of Ysolf Bodansky (sp)?

AJ: Yes. DA: He is the guy that wrote the book about Bin Laden. He was hooked up with some Congressional leaders in the House - kind of an unofficial, for lack of a better word, a strike force, a task force on terrorism. They sent out a warning on February 19, 1995, saying there was going to be a massive attack by the terrorists in the heartland of the United States and it was going to be a federal facility. Everybody ignored it. By the way, I have seen that warning, I have seen that warning. I don't have it in front of me so I can't go into the specifics of it too heavily but at the same time, there was in that warning that there was going to be a massive attack in Washington - it took them six years to do it. The targets were going to be Washington, the White House and the Capitol Building. - And that they were going to use airliners to attack them."

"DS: Yea - and that's what started me calling. I started calling out there. First of all, I tried to see if I could get a Congressman to go to bat for me and at least bring these people out there and listen to them. I sent them information and nobody cared. It was always, "We'll get back to you", "we'll get back to you", "we'll get back to you." Then I reached out and tried to get to the Attorney General, when finally we got an attorney general in there that I would be willing to talk to. And, again, I used people who were personal friends of John Ashcroft to try to get him. One of them called me back and said, "Alright I have talked to him. He will call you tomorrow morning." This was like a month before the bombing. The next morning I got a call. It wasn't from Ashcroft. It was from somebody in the Justice Dept.

AJ: One of his handlers.

DS: Yea, and I started telling him the situation and he said, "You know we don't start our investigations at the top." I said I would like to talk to the Attorney General because this is vital. He said, "We don't start our investigations at the top. Let me look into this and I will get back to you." As I sit here today, I have never heard from him." -- Government Had Prior Knowledge, Interview of David P. Schippers on Alex Jones Show (Talk Radio, Austin, TX.: 10/10/01) (infowars.com)

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"A: I have information indicating there was going to be a massive attack in lower Manhattan. I couldn't get anybody to listen to me.

Q: When was that?

A: About a month-and-a-half before Sept. 11. The original thing that I heard – and you might ask Mr. Bodansky about that – Mr. Bodansky talked to Jayna Davis. He was one of the people behind the warning that came out Feb. 19, 1995, and this was the warning that I saw: that there was going to be an attack on the United States by bin Laden's people, that the original target – and this is the way it reads – the original target was supposed to be the White House and the Capitol building, and they were going to use commercial airliners as bombs." -- Middle East-OKC connection: David Schippers tells Metcalf feds 'ignored' warnings of WTC attacks (WorldNetDaily: 10/21/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Schippers: Five weeks before the September 11 tragedy, I did my best to get a hold of Attorney General John Ashcroft with my concerns. The best that I could do was get in touch with an underling in that office who told me that all investigations start out at lower levels such as his. Fifteen minutes before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Jayna Davis got a phone call. On the other end of the line, a voice with a Mid-Eastern accent told her, ‘Turn on your TV.’ She turned it on, and witnessed what the world saw – the World Trade Center burning and shortly thereafter, a second plane flying directly into the second tower."" -- What does nationally-renowned attorney David Schippers think of this possibility? (Eagle Forum of Illinois: 9/30/01)

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"...an active FBI Special Agent filed a complaint last week concerning FBI/Justice Department interference in and mishandling of terrorist investigations. The FBI Special Agent, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, alleges that he was retaliated against when he continued to push for and pursue certain terrorist investigations over the objections of his FBI and Justice Department supervisors. The FBI Special Agent, who is represented by Judicial Watch and David Schippers, Esq., filed the complaint last week with the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (IG) and Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).

Based on the evidence, the FBI Special Agent believes that if certain investigations had been allowed to run their courses, Osama bin Laden’s network might have been prevented from committing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks which resulted in the deaths of nearly 5,000 innocents.

Judicial Watch is requesting a full scale, independent investigation into its client’s concerns and seeks to hold accountable those responsible for preventing the full investigation of terrorist activity here in the United States and abroad." -- Active FBI Special Agent Files Complaint Concerning Obstructed FBI Anti-Terrorist Investigations (Judicial Watch: 11/14/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Three veteran federal law enforcement agents confirmed to The New American that the information provided to Schippers was widely known within the Bureau before September 11th. Because these individuals face possible personal or professional retaliation, they agreed to speak with us on condition of anonymity. Two of them, however, have expressed a willingness to testify before Congress regarding the views they have shared with us."

""This is pretty appalling," comments the first former agent. "The FBI has had access to this information since at least 1997. We're obviously not doing our job. I never expected to see something like this happen in our country, but in a way I wasn't shocked when it did. There's got to be more to this than we can see - high-level people whose careers are at stake, and don't want the truth coming out.... What agenda is someone following? Obviously, people had to know - there had to be people who knew this information was being circulated. People like [the Black Tuesday terrorists] don't just move in and out of the country undetected. If somebody in D.C. is taking this information and burying it - and it's very easy to control things from D.C. - then this problem goes much, much deeper.... It's terrible to think this, but this must have been allowed to happen as part of some other agenda."" -- Did We Know What Was Coming? by William Norman Grigg (The New American, Vol. 18, No. 5: 3/11/02)

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"FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11.

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"US lawmakers remain astounded that the Phoenix memo and Moussaoui's arrest failed to set alarm bells ringing at FBI headquarters, even after one agent speculated at a high-level meeting that Moussaoui might have been taking lessons to enable him to crash an aircraft into the World
Trade Centre in New York." -- FBI plans 'super flying squad' to combat terror by IAN BRUCE (The Herald: 5/16/02)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Just days before the attacks in early-September, FBI agents in Minnesota wrote notes that subsequently became included in an internal FBI document warning that accused terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui "might be planning on flying something into the World Trade Center." A story from the May 20 issue of Newsweek by Michael Isikoff described how a local flight instructor had reported Moussaoui had "showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer [and not land] large airliners...The [FBI] agents were 'in a frenzy, ly convinced he was planning to so something with a plane.'"

A multitude of sources have reported the FBI agents requested a warrant to search Moussaoui's personal computer but were denied by Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department. After the 9-11 attacks the computer was seized and found to contain information directly related to the World Trade Center attacks.

This apparent lack of support from within the administration is consistent with reports released last fall by the BBC's Gregg Palast showing that in January 2001 the Bush Administration had issued direct orders to the FBI to curtail investigations of two of Osama bin Laden's relatives, Omar and Abdullah bin Laden. The two bin Ladens had been connected to possible terrorist activities and were living in Falls Church, Va., near CIA headquarters."

""'I saw put-call numbers higher than I've ever seen in 10 years of following the markets, particularly the options markets,' said John Kinnucan, principal of Broadband Research, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle," reported the Montreal Gazette on" [9/19/01]. -- THE LIE WON'T STAND by Michael C. Ruppert (From The Wilderness Publications: 5/16/02)

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"Sept. 3-10, 2001 – MSNBC reports on September 16 that a caller to a Cayman Islands radio talk show gave several warnings of an imminent attack on the U.S. by bin Laden in the week prior to 9/11." -- Did the CIA Meet with bin Laden and Walk Away? by Michael Ruppert (Guerilla News Network: 11/8/01) - this is one of the best time lines of events surrounding the 9/11 that I've seen so far.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------""According to Arab diplomatic sources, and French intelligence services, very precise information was communicated to the CIA, regarding terrorist attacks against American interests in the world. A report of the DST [French intelligence] of Sept. 7, collected this information, specifying that the order to act would come from Afghanistan." -- Le Figaro Reports CIA/Bin Laden Contacts (Le Figaro: 10/31/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The Independent, a liberal daily in Great Britain, published an article asserting the US government “was warned repeatedly that a devastating attack on the United States was on its way.” The Independent cited an interview given by Osama bin Laden to a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, al-Quds al-Arabi, in late August. About the same time, tighter security measures were ordered at the World Trade Center, for unexplained reasons. "Bush did not heed several warnings of attack,” by Andrew Gumbel (Independent, 9/17/01))" -- Was the US government alerted to September 11 attack?: Part 1: Warnings in advance by Patrick Martin (World Socialist Web Site: 1/16/02)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Bin Laden's people had made statements three weeks ago carried in the Arab press in Great Britain that they were preparing to carry out unprecedented attacks in the U.S." -- State Department memo warned of terrorist threat by Phillip Matier, Andrew Ross
(San Francisco Chronicle: 9/14/02) (Centre for Research on Globalization)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"German police have confirmed an Iranian man phoned US police from his deportation cell to warn of the planned attack on the World Trade Centre." -- German police confirm Iranian deportee phoned warnings (Ananova: 9/14/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Egypt Leader Says He Warned America BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) - Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak says he warned the United States that "something would happen" 12 days before the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington."

""We expected that something was going to happen and informed the Americans. We told them," Mubarak said. He did not mention a U.S. response." -- Egypt Leader Says He Warned America (Associated Press: 12/7/01)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "My wife, Dr. Nancy Nicolson and I received at least three warnings of the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. The nature of these warnings (the specific site, date and source) indicated to us that they were credible. We have many contacts in the retired intelligence community, including Special Forces, and domestic and foreign intelligence services. Mostly these were individuals that we assisted with their health problems from the Gulf War, Vietnam or other conflicts.

The most dramatic source was a Head of State of a North African country. This occurred during a visit to Tunisia in July 2001. This head of state was traveling under cover and met with us at our hotel. He warned us as to the correct date and one of the targets, the Pentagon. We were not given any information as to the method or any other targets.

The information was passed on to the Director of Policy, DOD, the National Security Council, the leadership in the House of Representatives and the Inspector General of the U.S. Army Medical Corps, who happened to be visiting us a month or so before Sept. 11.

To our knowledge no action was ever taken on this information. There has been some mention in the press that others also warned the U.S. Government that on Sept. 11, 2001 there would be a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. I do not know if any of the information from our sources or other sources was ever taken seriously by the National Security Council." -- Statement by Professor Garth L. Nicolson to the Institute for Policy Research & Development (1/3/02)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"One intercept before the Sept. 11 attack was, according to two senior intelligence officials, the first early warning of the assault and it set off a scramble by American and other intelligence agencies.

In that call, Mr. bin Laden advised his wife in Syria to come back to Afghanistan. That message, which was intercepted by the intelligence services of more than one country, was passed on to the United States, officials from three countries said.

"The question mark was when and where, mainly where because we assumed it would be soon," a senior intelligence official said." -- INTELLIGENCE: Eavesdropping, U.S. Allies See New Terror Attack by RAYMOND BONNER with JOHN TAGLIABUE (THE NEW YORK TIMES: 10/21/01)

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The following report was reportedly passed to intelligence sources BEFORE the 9/11 event. -- "NBC News: "Osama bin Laden called his mother two days before the Sept. 11 terror attacks and told her, 'In two days you’re going to hear big news and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.'" -Monday, October 1st, 2001" -- Things Overheard in Osama bin Laden / Mama bin Laden Call

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Go to The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism and in the Text Search area do a search for the words, "Black Tuesday," and you will find the first article ever publicly displayed which gives many of the facts regarding the insider trading that occurred prior to the 9/11 event. It's entitled, Black Tuesday: The World's Largest Insider Trading Scam? by Don Radlauer. -- More information regarding this article and how it was created can also be found at: Michael Ruppert's: LETTER TO THE EDITOR AND FTW’s RESPONSE (From The Wilderness Publications: 7/04/02)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Ernest Welteke, president of the German Bundesbank, believes a group of speculators knew the attack was coming. According to The New York Times, he stated:

"There have been fundamental movements in these markets (the airlines-ed), and the oil price rise just ahead of the attacks is otherwise inexplicable." -- Kurt Eichenwald et al, "Doubt Intensifies That Advance Knowledge of Attacks Was Used for Profit," New York Times, September 28, 2001, p. B4" -- Dear Friend of Radio Liberty: September, 2001

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The February 2001 trial of the al-Qaeda members responsible for the 1998 US embassy bombings was based almost entirely on intercepted cell phone calls. During the trial, prosecutors describe how US intelligence used Echelon, a highly secret technical intelligence gathering system used to monitor worldwide communications. On February 13, 2001, UPI quoted multiple agencies saying that they had broken al Queda's codes.

It is inconceivable that, armed with a budget of over $30 billion, and technologies such as Echelon (which tracks nearly all electronic communication in the world), Promis (which monitors banking and financial transactions in real-time), Carnivore (which intercepts e-mail) and other tools, the CIA and other US intelligence agencies
would have "no inkling."

This lie is further exposed by the fact that Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, had been under constant CIA surveillance since January 2000. (Source: Reuters Oct 22, 2001)" -- All the desperate lies and spin don't change the fact that the Bush administration had foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks.pdf by Larry Chin (ONLINE JOURNAL: 5/19/02) (HTML Ver.)

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"It has been documented that the CIA, the Israeli Mossad, and many other intelligence agencies monitor stock trading in real time using highly advanced programs reported to be descended from Promis software. This is to alert national intelligence services of just such kinds of attacks. Promis was reported as recently as June 2001 to be in Osama bin Laden's possession and, as a result of recent stories by Fox, both the FBI and the Justice Department have confirmed its use for U.S. intelligence gathering through at least summer 2002. This would confirm that CIA had additional advance warning of imminent attacks. [Sources: The Washington Times, June 15, 2001; Fox, Oct. 16, 2001" -- A TIMELINE SURROUNDING SEPTEMBER 11TH - IF CIA AND THE GOVERNMENT WEREN'T INVOLVED IN THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS WHAT WERE THEY DOING? by Michael C. Ruppert

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------RUPPERT: Herzliyah, International Policy Institute in Israel which tracks counter-terrorism, also tracks financial trading. That's a clear cut sign about how closely the two are related. And their reports are very clear that between September 6 and 7 the Chicago Board Options Exchange, CBOE, saw purchases of 4,744 put options on UAL, but only 396 call options. On September 10, the day before the attacks, 4,516 put options were placed on American Airlines, against only 748 calls, calls being bets that the stock will go up, puts being that the stock will go down. No similar trading in any other airlines occurred on the Chicago Exchange in the days immediately preceding Black Tuesday. That means that someone had advance knowledge that only the stocks of these two airlines would be adversely impacted. Had it just been an industry-wide slump, then you would have seen the same kind of activity on every airline, not just these two. But what is also very anomalous, very out of whack here, is the fact that the number of put options placed, that the level of these trades was up by 1,200 percent in the three days prior to the World Trade Center attacks. -- The CIA's Wall Street connections: Transcript of interview with Michael C. Ruppert (Guns and Butter, The Economy Watch with Kellia Ramares and Bonnie Faulkner Aired on KPFA 94.1 FM, Berkeley, CA Friday, October 12, 2001)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Investigators from the U.S. Secret Service contacted a number of bond traders regarding large purchases of five-year Treasury notes before the attacks, according to people familiar with the probe. The investigators, acting on a tip from traders, are examining whether terrorists, or people affiliated with terrorist organizations, bought five-year notes, including a single $5 billion trade, the people say." -- Treasury Bonds Enter Purview of U.S. Inquiry Into Attack Gains by Charles Gasparino and Gregory Zuckerman (The Wall Street Journal: 10/2/01)

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"To date, there are no flags or indicators" showing that terrorists used trading strategies known as "short selling" to profit from the attacks, Dennis Lormel, chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's financial crimes unit, told a congressional committee on Oct. 3. Some experts now say they doubt that such a scheme took place. What appears to be suspicious activity in some stocks may turn out to have been legitimate trading, they say. - Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2001" - Few Answers in Terrorist Insider Trading Investigation; Securities: Agencies continue to search for evidence that some organizations may have profited from attacks. by Walter Hamilton -- The 'long list' of stories concerning insider trading before September 11th

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "German central bank president Ernst Welteke said a study by his bank strongly points to "terrorism insider trading" not only in shares of heavily affected industries such as airlines and insurance companies, but also in gold and oil." -- EU Searches for Suspicious Trading (FOX News: 9/22/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market." -- Profiting From Disaster? (CBS EVENING NEWS: 9/19/01)

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"To the embarrassment of investigators, it has also emerged that the firm used to buy many of the "put" options – where a trader, in effect, bets on a share price fall – on United Airlines stock was headed until 1998 by "Buzzy" Krongard, now executive director of the CIA." -- Mystery of terror 'insider dealers' by Chris Blackhurst (The Independent: 10/14/01) (Propaganda Matrix)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"...an internal memo was sent around Goldman Sachs in Tokyo on September 10 advising all employees of a possible terrorist attack. It recommended all employees to avoid any American government buildings." -- Aftershocks by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (counterpunch: 9/14/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Willie Brown was advised to use extreme caution if flying the next morning to New York City. Brown refuses to say exactly who gave him the prescient warning, citing only “my security people at the airport.” - Willie Brown got low-key early warning about air travel by Philip Matier (San Francisco Chronicle: 9/12/02) -- mainstream media on 9/11 foreknowledge: the government knew airplane attacks were going to occur in the us by Russ Kick - (Disinformation: 9/11/02)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"NEWSWEEK has learned that while U.S. intelligence received no specific warning, the state of alert had been high during the past two weeks, and a particularly urgent warning may have been received the night before the attacks, causing some top Pentagon brass to cancel a trip. Why that same information was not available to the 266 people who died aboard the four hijacked commercial aircraft may become a hot topic on the Hill." -- We’ve Hit the Targets’ by Michael Hirsh (NEWSWEEK: 9/13/01) (MSNBC)

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"President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11, congressional and White House sources told CNN.

The request was made at a private meeting with congressional leaders Tuesday morning. Sources said Bush initiated the conversation.

He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry that some lawmakers have proposed, the sources said."

"Some Democrats, such as Sens. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, have been calling for a broad inquiry looking at various federal government agencies beyond the intelligence community." -- Bush asks Daschle to limit Sept. 11 probes by Dana Bash, Jon Karl and John King (CNN: 1/29/02)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Yet the most amazing feature of the U.S. government’s response to these events was the almost complete absence of it. Jared Israel on his website www.tenc.net has blazed a trail with fascinating and meticulous research."

"Initial reports suggested that no aircraft were scrambled to intercept or shoot down the hijacked jets. Two days later Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, current chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told the Senate Armed Services Committee: "When it became clear what the threat was, we did scramble fighter aircraft, AWACs, radar aircraft and tanker aircraft to begin to establish orbits in case other aircraft showed up in the FAA system that were hijacked... That order, to the best of my knowledge, was after the Pentagon was struck." Marine Corps Maj. Mike Snyder, a spokesman for NORAD, echoed Myers in a Sept. 15 Boston Globe story, which stated: "[T]he command did not immediately scramble any fighters even though it was alerted to a hijacking 10 minutes before the first plane…slammed into the first World Trade Center tower... The spokesman said the fighters remained on the ground until after the Pentagon was hit..." U.S. inaction was all the more astonishing because the same story had Snyder admitting that "fighters routinely intercept aircraft.""

"So why were no fighters dispatched to intercept planes on an extraordinary day like Sept. 11? Within days the story changed and it turned out that two F-15 fighters had in fact been scrambled from Otis Air National Guard Base in Cape Cod, MA. Whether this took place before or after the first tower was struck is not clear. In any case it was too late to make a difference. When the second tower was hit the fighters were still 70 miles from Manhattan. We also learned that two F-16 fighters had been scrambled from Langley Air Force Base to try to intercept Flight 77, but they also arrived too late. In fact, they only took off from Langley two minutes before the Boeing 757 smashed into the Pentagon.

There is an even more troubling question. Why were the fighters dispatched from Langley, more than 130 miles from the Pentagon, rather than Andrews Air Force Base–a mere 10 miles away? Early media reports suggested that there were no available aircraft at Andrews that day." -- The Bunker: Scrambled Messages by George Szamuely

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Andrews Air Force Base is a huge military installation just 10 miles from the Pentagon.

On 11 September Andrews had two squadrons of fighter jets with the job of protecting the skies over Washington D.C. They failed to do their job. Despite over one hour's advance warning of a terrorist attack in progress, not a single Andrews fighter took off (or scrambled) to protect the city.

The FAA, NORAD and the military have cooperative procedures by which fighter jets intercept commercial aircraft under emergency conditions. These procedures were not followed."

"Some of what happened on 9-11, such as planes flying into buildings, is unusual. But most of what happened, such as commercial jets flying off-course, transponder failures and possible hijackings, are everyday emergencies."

"U.S. air safety and air defense emergency systems are activated in response to problems every day. On 9-11 they failed despite, not because of, the extreme nature of the emergency. This could only happen if individuals in high positions worked in a coordinated way to make them fail."

"Such operatives would almost surely have failed if they tried to disrupt and abort routine protection systems without top-level support. The failure of the emergency systems would be noticed immediately. Moreover, given the catastrophic nature of the attacks, the highest military authorities would be alerted. Acting on their own, the operatives could expect that their orders would be countermanded and that they themselves would be arrested.

The sabotage of routine protective systems, controlled by strict hierarchies, would never have been contemplated let alone attempted absent the involvement of the supreme U.S. military command. This includes at least U.S. President George Bush, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the then-Acting Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard B. Myers.

In the following summary of evidence we will demonstrate probable cause for charging the above-named persons with treason for complicity in the murders of thousands of people whom they had sworn to protect." -- MR. CHENEY'S COVER STORY Section 1 of GUILTY FOR 9-11: BUSH, RUMSFELD, MYERS by Jared Israel and Illarion Bykov (11/14/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Moreover, Mr. Cheney's implicit argument - that there is no point in sending up an escort unless the pilot has clearance to shoot down a commercial jet - is absurd. Why would such a decision have to be made in advance of scrambling the escort? Even if an airliner has been taken over by a terrorist with a suicide mission, how could Mr. Cheney, Mr. Bush or anyone else other than God Himself possibly predict how the hijacker would respond to an intercept by military jets? Even if a hijacker were ready to die for the glory of crashing into the Pentagon, does that mean he would also be ready to die for the glory of ignoring a military pilot's order to land?

So even if the military had no authority to shoot down Flight 77, why not send up escorts planes? Isn't that in fact how police and the military routinely handle hijack situations - by mobilizing a potentially overwhelming force in the hope of getting the hijacker to surrender?" -- MR. CHENEY'S COVER STORY Section 2 of GUILTY FOR 9-11: BUSH, RUMSFELD, MYERS by Jared Israel and Illarion Bykov (11/20/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Hard Questions to Answer (IEEE Spectrum Special Report) by Elizabeth A. Bretz

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The U.S. military has their own network of radars... (NORAD). They are tied into the FAA computer to be able to get information on incoming flights..." "... if they see a target ... without flight plan..., they will call on the "shout" line to the appropriate Center sector for an ID." "... if [THE SECTOR] has no datablock or other information on it, the military will usually scramble an intercept flight." "... procedures are procedures, and they will likely find two F-18's on their tail within 10 or so minutes." -- ATCC Controllers' Read Binder...: NOTAMS, FAQs and other info for users of ATCC (8/98)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Snyder, the NORAD spokesman, said its fighters routinely intercept aircraft.

When planes are intercepted, they typically are handled with a graduated response. The approaching fighter may rock its wingtips to attract the pilot's attention, or make a pass in front of the aircraft. Eventually, it can fire tracer rounds in the airplane's path, or, under certain circumstances, down it with a missile." -- Facing Terror Attack's Aftermath: Otis Fighter Jets Scrambled Too Late to Halt The Attacks by Glen Johnson (The Boston Globe: 9/15/01, Third Edition Page A1)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[The timeline below illustrates how normal off course jets are intercepted. This normal procedure would only occur if some type of stand down order (which must have been in place on 9/11) were not in place. This is what's normal. What happened on 9/11 was anything but normal.]

"As you’ve heard in the panel discussion, a common explanation as to why no U.S. military interceptors took to the skies on September 11th until it was too late, is that it was “simple incompetence.”

Well, let me deal with the “incompetence theory.” By first taking you back to October 26th, 1999. That is the day the chartered Learjet carrying golfer Payne Stewart crashes, killing all on board. This from the official National Transportation Safety Board crash report:
9:19 a.m.: the flight departs
9:24: The Learjet’s pilot responds to an instruction from air traffic control
9:33: The controller radios another instruction. No response from the pilot. For 4 ½ minutes the controller tries to establish contact.
9:38: Having failed, the controller calls in the military. Note that he did not seek, nor did he require, the approval of the President of the United States, or indeed anyone. It’s standard procedure, followed routinely, to call in the Air Force when radio contact with a commercial passenger jet is lost, or the plane departs from its flight path, or anything along those lines occurs.
9:54 – 16 minutes later -- the F-16 reaches the Learjet at 46,000 feet and conducts a visual inspection.
Total elapsed time: 21 minutes.

So what does this prove? Well, it proves that standing routines exist for dealing with all such emergencies, for instance loss of radio contact. All personnel in the air and on the ground are trained to follow the routines, which have been fine-tuned over decades, as the Learjet incident illustrates.

For large scheduled aircraft, tracked throughout on radar, to depart extravagantly from their flight paths, would trigger numerous calls to the military, especially after two have hit the World Trade Centre and now one is speeding toward Washington, D.C." -- Canada: Vision TV 911-scepticism report (Jan-29 7:25 pm)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"But, says ABCNEWS' John Miller, "There doesn't seem to have been alarm bells going off, traffic controllers getting on with law enforcement or the military. There's a gap there that will have to be investigated..." -- Timeline of Disaster: From Flight School Training to Building Collapse (ABC News: 9/14/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Boston ATC notifies NORAD that Flight 11 has been hijacked at 8:38 (CNN, Sept 16, ibid)
eighteen minutes after the transponder signal first went silent!!" -- Part 1B Sept 11: Unanswered Questions: Flights 11,175, 93 by MalcontentX

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"That morning, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, was having a routine meeting on Capitol Hill with Sen. Max Cleland. While the two men chatted away, a hijacked jet plowed into the World Trade Center’s north tower, another one plowed into the south tower and a third one into the Pentagon. And still they went on with their meeting." "Meanwhile, in Florida, just as President Bush was about to leave his hotel he was told about the attack on the first WTC tower. He was asked by a reporter if he knew what was going on in New York. He said he did, and then went to an elementary school in Sarasota to read to children."

"According to The New York Times, air traffic controllers knew at 8:20 a.m. "that American Airlines Flight 11, bound from Boston to Los Angeles, had probably been hijacked. When the first news report was made at 8:48 a.m. that a plane might have hit the World Trade Center, they knew it was Flight 11." There was little ambiguity on the matter. The pilot had pushed a button on the aircraft yoke that allowed controllers to hear the hijacker giving orders."

"The U.S. is supposed to scramble military aircraft the moment a hijacking is confirmed. Myers’ revelation to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 13 that no fighter planes had been launched until after the Pentagon was hit was therefore surprising."

"Clearly another, more comforting, story was needed, and on the evening of Sept. 14 CBS launched it by revealing that the FAA had indeed alerted U.S. air defense units of a possible hijacking at 8:38 a.m. on Tuesday, that six minutes later two F-15s received a scramble order at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod and that by 8:56 the F-15s were racing toward New York. Unfortunately, the fighters were still 70 miles away when the second jet hit the south tower. Meanwhile, at 9:30 a.m., three F-16s were launched from Langley Air Force base, 150 miles south of Washington. But just seven minutes later, at 9:37 a.m., Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon. The F-16s arrived in Washington just before 10 a.m.

This story, which has now become the "official" version, raises more questions than it answers. F-15s can travel at speeds of 1875 mph while F-16s can travel at 1500 mph. If it took the F-16s half an hour to cover 150 miles, they could not have been traveling at more than 300 mph–at 20 percent capability. Boeing 767s and 757s have cruising speeds of 530 mph. Talk about a lack of urgency! Assuming Otis Air National Guard Base is about 180 miles away from Manhattan it should have taken the F-15s less than six minutes to get here. Moreover, since Washington, DC, is little more than 200 miles from New York, the two F-15 fighters would have had time to get to DC, intercept Flight 77 and grab breakfast on the way.

Ah, but of course the transponders were turned off. So no one could keep track of the planes. If it were true that the moment a transponder is turned off a plane becomes invisible there would be no defense against enemy aircraft. Normal radar echo return from the metal surface of an aircraft would still identify it on the radar scope." -- Bunker: Nothing Urgent by George Szamuely (New York Press Vol. 15 No. 2)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"But Snyder, the NORAD spokesman, had a different version. He said the command did not immediately scramble any fighters even though it was alerted to a hijacking 10 minutes before the first plane, American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles, slammed into the first World Trade Center tower at 8:45 a.m. Tuesday."

"The spokesman said the fighters remained on the ground until after the Pentagon was hit by American Airlines Flight 77 at 9:40 a.m..." -- Otis Fighter Jets Scrambled Too Late to Halt the Attacks by Glen Johnson (Boston Globe: 9/15/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"On Meet the Press, Sunday, September 16, Tim Russert asked Vice President Dick Cheney, "The first hijacking was confirmed at 8:20, the Pentagon was struck at 9:40, and yet, it seems we were not able to scramble fighter jets in time to protect the Pentagon and perhaps even more than that." Cheney did not dispute Russert's assertion. However, a few days later the government changed it's story to indicate that F-15 fighters had been scrambled from Otis Air National Guard Base at 8:44 a.m. Thus, almost 32 minutes passed between the confirmation of hijacking and the scrambling of interceptors - if this story is correct. This does not match earlier reports on the first few days after September 11, which include other comments from government personnel besides Cheney." (Meet the Press: 9/16/01: NBC News) -- SOP, PART 2 posted 08/25 by Donald Grbac

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"9:06 ... Washington notifies all air traffic facilities nationwide of the suspected hijacking of Flight 11." -- Air Attack on Pentagon Indicates Weaknesses by Sylvia Adcock, Brian Donovan and Craig Gordon (Newsday: 9/23/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"9:06 a.m.: Police radio broadcasts "This was a terrorist attack. Notify the Pentagon."" -- HOW THE TOWERS WENT DOWN: The Tragic Timeline (Daily News (New York): 9/12/01, SPORTS FINAL EDITION, NEWS; Pg. 24)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"EBERHART: Sir, there is one minor difference. I show it as 9:24 that we were notified, and that's the first notification that we received. I do not know, sir, why it took that amount of time for FAA. I hate to say it, but you'll have to ask FAA.

LEVIN: And do you know if that was the first notification to the DOD?

EBERHART: Yes, sir. That's the first documented notification that we have." -- Hearing on Role of Defense Department in Homeland Security.doc (Testimony of Gen. Eberhart: 10/25/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[NORAD scrambled fighters from Langley Air Force Base (130 miles from Washington), instead of from Andrews Air Force Base (10 miles away from Washington D.C.). The result is what you will read below.] --

"WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 — During the hour or so that American Airlines Flight 77 was under the control of hijackers, up to the moment it struck the west side of the Pentagon, military officials in a command center on the east side of the building were urgently talking to law enforcement and air traffic control officials about what to do.

But despite elaborate plans that link civilian and military efforts to control the nation's airspace in defense of the country, and despite two other jetliners' having already hit the World Trade Center in New York, the fighter planes that scrambled into protective orbits around Washington did not arrive until 15 minutes after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon." -- Terror in the United States -- Explanation of Events by MATTHEW L. WALD (New York Times: 9/15/01)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The District of Columbia National Guard maintained fighter planes at Andrews Air Force Base, only about 15 miles from the Pentagon, but those planes were not on alert and not deployed." -- Shoot-down order issued on morning of chaos by Jonathan Weisman (USA TODAY: 09/16/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[Fighters assigned to protect Washington D.C. did nothing for 1.5 hours even though it was known that Flight 77 was heading towards Washington D.C.]

"Air defense around Washington is provided mainly by fighter planes from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland near the District of Columbia border. The D.C. Air National Guard is also based there and equipped with F-16 fighter planes, a National Guard spokesman said.

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"as part of its dual mission, the 113th provides capable and ready response forces for the District of Columbia in the event of a natural disaster or civil emergency. Members also assist local and federal law enforcement agencies in combating drug trafficking in the District of Columbia.

At Andrews, the 113th Wing, its associated DCANG units, and their people are full partners with the active Air Force."

"Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 321, a Marine Corps Reserve squadron, flies the sophisticated F/A-18 Hornet. Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron 49, Detachment A, provides maintenance and supply functions necessary to maintain a force in readiness." -- Partner Units Summer 2001 AF Reserve Command 459th Airlift Wing (AFRC)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Within minutes of the attack American forces around the world were put on one of their highest states of alert - Defcon 3, just two notches short of all-out war - and F-16s from Andrews Air Force Base were in the air over Washington DC." -- Israeli security issued urgent warning to CIA of large-scale terror attacks by David Wastell in Washington and Philip Jacobson in Jerusalem
(The Telegraph: 16/09/01)

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"A few moments later an audible gasp went up from the rear of the audience as a large black plume of smoke arose from the Pentagon. Terrorism suddenly was at the doorstep and clearly visible through the big glass windows overlooking the Potomac River. Overhead, fighter jets scrambled from Andrews Air Force Base and other installations and cross-crossed the skies..." -- U.S. capital faces terror on own turf by Bill McAllister (Denver Post: 9/11/01, 2D Edition, page A-2)

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"It was after the attack on the Pentagon that the Air Force then decided to scramble F-16s out of the DC National Guard Andrews Air Force Base to fly cover, a--a protective cover over Washington, DC." -- Attack on America (NBC Nightly News: 6:30 PM ET: 9/11/01) (The Emperors New Clothes)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The first question, the air-defense system the North American aerospace defense command (NORAD). This system is a very sophisticated system, and it is supposed to detect any airplane that takes off." "One pilot did warn. He contacted the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and indeed informed it that there was a hijacking, and the air-defense command was informed. We have a surprising case here. The air base in Andrews: this air base, by the way, has its own defense system around the base, which consists of two jet fighters (which can scramble); they would be in the air within 2-3 minutes. The squadron in Andrews received the alert in the same moment but did not fly? This issue disappeared and nobody talked about it. This is noteworthy." -- TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRESENTATION MADE BY DR. MAHMOUD KHALAF AT THE CENTER FOR ASIAN STUDIES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAIRO, DEC. 5, 2001.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[In the transcript below Vice President Cheney gives the false impression that it takes an executive order to launch fighter jets to intercept off course aircraft in the U.S.]

"MR. RUSSERT: What's the most important decision you think he made during the course of the day?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, the - I suppose the toughest decision was this question of whether or not we would intercept incoming commercial aircraft.

MR. RUSSERT: And you decided?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: We decided to do it. We'd, in effect, put a flying combat air patrol up over the city; F-16s with an AWACS, which is an airborne radar system, and tanker support so they could stay up a long time. It doesn't do any good to put up a combat air patrol if you don't give them instructions to act, if, in fact, they feel it's appropriate." -- Meet The Press: Dick Cheney (NBC News: 9/16/01) (Unanswered Questions)

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"No Air National Guard or other military planes were scrambled to chase the fourth hijacked airliner, United Airlines Flight 93, which took off at 8:10 a.m. from Newark International Airport in New Jersey, Weaver said." -- FAA gave 12-minute warning (Seattle Times: 9/16/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"While in an outer office, he said, he saw a television report that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. "They thought it was a small plane or something like that," Myers said. So the two men went ahead with the office call." -- Myers and Sept. 11: "We Hadn't Thought About This" by Sgt. 1st Class Kathleen T. Rhem, (USA American Forces Press Service: 10/23/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"He got out of his hotel suite this morning, was about to leave, reporters saw the White House chief of staff, Andy Card, whisper into his ear. The reporter said to the president, 'Do you know what's going on in New York?' He said he did, and he said he will have something about it later. His first event is about half an hour at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida." -- Planes crash into World Trade Center (ABC News Special Report: 9/11/01)

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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Throughout the northeastern United States are many air bases. But that morning no interceptors respond in a timely fashion to the highest alert situation. This includes the Andrews squadrons which have the longest lead time and are 12 miles from the White House.

Whatever the explanation for the huge failure, there have been no reports, to my knowledge, of reprimands. This further weakens the "Incompetence Theory." Incompetence usually earns reprimands.

This causes me to ask - and other media need to ask - if there were "stand down" orders." -- What really happened on Sept. 11th? - Part 2 by Barrie Zwicker (1/27/02) (Propaganda Matrix)

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"The multiple hijackings are unprecedented. The first occurs at 7:45 in the morning. It's a full hour before the first plane hits the World Trade Center. But it's an hour and 20 minutes -- and after the second plane hits that the President allegedly becomes informed. Think about that. Then, he gives no orders. Why? He continues to listen to a student talk about her pet goat. Why?

It's another 25 minutes until he makes a statement, even as flight 77 is making a bee-line for Washington, DC. In the almost two hours of the total drama not a single U.S. Air Force interceptor turns a wheel until it's too late. Why? Was it total incompetence on the part of aircrews trained and equipped to scramble in minutes?

Well, unlike the U.S. Air Force, I'll cut to the chase. Simply to ask these few questions is to find the official narrative frankly implausible. The more questions you pursue, it becomes more plausible that there's a different explanation: namely, that elements within the top U.S. military, intelligence and political leadership which are closely intertwined are complicit in what happened on September the 11[th.]" -- What really happened on Sept. 11th? "9/11 -- Part 1.".pdf - Transcript of Mon., Jan. 21 2002 Broadcast - Vision TV Insight (HTML Ver.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[The interview below points out that the contravening of normal automated intercept procedures came directly from the top.]

""VICE PRES. CHENEY: We decided to do it. We'd, in effect, put a flying combat air patrol up over the city; F-16s with an AWACS, which is an airborne radar system, and tanker support so they could stay up a long time...

"It doesn't do any good to put up a combat air patrol if you don't give them instructions to act, if, in fact, they feel it's appropriate.

"MR. RUSSERT: So if the United States government became aware that a hijacked commercial airline[r] was destined for the White House or the Capitol, we would take the plane down?

"VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yes. The president made the decision...that if the plane would not divert...as a last resort, our pilots were authorized to take them out. Now, people say, you know, that's a horrendous decision to make. Well, it is. You've got an airplane full of American citizens, civilians, captured by...terrorists, headed and are you going to, in fact, shoot it down, obviously, and kill all those Americans on board?

"...It's a presidential-level decision, and the president made, I think, exactly the right call in this case, to say, "I wished we'd had combat air patrol up over New York."
--NBC, 'Meet the Press' 16 September 2001" -- Was Flight 93 Shot Down?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"FBI agents in the United States probing relatives of Saudi-born terror suspect Osama Bin Laden before September 11 were told to back off soon after George W Bush became president, the BBC has reported. The BBC's Newsnight current affairs programme on Tuesday said that Bush at one point had a number of connections with Saudi Arabia's prominent Bin Laden family.

It added there was a suspicion that the US strategic interest in Saudi Arabia, which has the world's biggest oil reserve, blunted its inquiries into individuals with suspected terrorist connections -- so long as the US was safe.

Newsnight reported it had seen secret documents from an FBI probe into the September 11 terror attacks that showed that at least two other US-based members of the Bin Laden family are suspected to have links with a possible terrorist organisation." -- Bush thwarted FBI probe against bin Ladens (Hindustan Times: 11/7/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------PALAST: "Now there is one exception. The FBI, the CIA and all the rest of the agencies are allowed to investigate Osama, the so-called black sheep of the family. But what we were finding was that there was an awful lot of gray sheeps in this family – which is a family of billionaires which is tied in with the Saudi royal household which appears to be involved in the funding of terrorist organizations or organizations linked to terrorism...." "Now the problem was the investigations were shut down. There were problems that go back to Father Bush - when he was head of the CIA, he tried to stop investigations of the Saudis, continued on under Reagan, Daddy Bush’s president, and it continued under Clinton too..." "I have to add it was also CIA and all the other international agencies." "But I can say that the sources are not just FBI trying to get even with the other agencies, but in fact other agencies. The information was that they were ly prohibited, until Sept. 11, at looking at the Saudi funding of the Al-Qaeda network and other terrorist organizations.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"And they have frozen his assets, supposedly. But the information I am getting from other sources is that they have given tens of millions of dollars to his networks. This is being done as much as a protection racket as anything else."

"Osama is often compared to Hitler but he should be seen as John Gotti times one hundred. He is running a massive international protection racket: Pay me or I will blow you up. The fact these payments are made is one of the things the Bush administration is trying very hard to cover-up." -- Is The Bush Family Above The Law? Excerpt from an interview with Greg Palast - Part 1

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Now whether these payments were paid because they want to or it is coercion the Bush administration does not want to make a point of it. I have to tell you the Clinton administration was not exactly wonderful on this either. One of the points I made on the BBC was there was a Saudi diplomat who defected. He had 14,000 documents in his possession showing Saudi royal involvement in everything from assassinations to terror funding. He offered the 14,000 documents to the FBI but they would not accept them. The low-level agents wanted this stuff because they were tremendous leads. But the upper-level people would not permit this, did not want to touch this material. That is quite extraordinary. We don’t even want to look. We don’t want to know. Because obviously going through 14,000 documents from the Saudi government files would anger the Saudis. And it seems to be policy number one is we don’t get these boys angry. Unfortunately, we see the results. We are blowing up Afghanistan when 15 of the 19 bombers were from Saudi Arabia." -- Guerrilla of the Week: Guerrilla News Network Speaks With Greg Palast (Guerrilla News Network: 11/16/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Generally accepted, too, is the idea that the monarchy boosted al Qaeda through its funding of the Wahhabi movement, a militant Islamist sect." "...the FBI was hamstrung prior to September 11 not only because U.S. officials were unwilling to make an issue of al Qaeda's connections to wealthy Saudis..." "Even after bin Laden turned his wrath on the U.S. in the 1990s, he maintained close contact with key Saudi figures including Prince Turki al-Faisal, the powerful intelligence chief and brother of King Fahd."

""(FBI investigators) were pursuing these matters, but were told to back off," said David Armstrong, an intelligence expert at the Washington, D.C.-based Public Education Center, a nonprofit investigative organization that helped the BBC research its report." -- U.S. SAUDI SCANDAL: DID FBI CALL OFF PROBE OF SAUDIS TO PROTECT OIL TIES? by ALEX ROSLIN

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Taliban authorities also opened the country's airstrips to high-ranking Persian Gulf state officials who routinely flew in for lavish hunting parties. Sometimes joined by Bin Laden and Taliban leaders, the dignitaries, who included several high-ranking officials from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates--left behind money, vehicles and equipment with their hosts, according to U.S. and Afghan accounts."

"According to U.S. and former Afghan civil air officials, the hunters included Prince Turki al Faisal, son of the late Saudi King Faisal. He headed that nation's intelligence service until late August, maintaining close ties with Bin Laden and the Taliban. Another visitor, officials said, was Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, the Dubai crown prince and Emirates defense minister." -- Long Before Sept. 11, Bin Laden Aircraft Flew Under the Radar by Stephen Braun Judy Pasternak (Los Angeles Times: 11/18/01)

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"A former US intelligence agent has alleged that the CIA ignored detailed warnings he passed on in 1998 that a Gulf state was harbouring an al-Qaeda cell led by two known terrorists.

When FBI agents attempted to arrest them, the Gulf state's government provided the men with alias passports, the former agent claims. "

"Mr Baer said he also provided him a computer record of "hundreds" of secret al-Qaeda operatives in the Gulf region, many in Saudi Arabia. Mr Baer said that in August 2001, at the military officer's request, he offered the list to the Saudi Arabian government. But an aide to the Saudi defence minister, Prince Sultan, refused to look at the list or to pass them (the names) on."

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"At a time when terrorist threats were compounding globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being scrubbed clean instead. Americans were making too much money to bother. Life was good. The White House and the National Security Council became cathedrals of commerce where the interests of big business outweighed the interests of protecting American citizens at home and abroad. Defanged and dispirited, the CIA went along for the ride. And then on September 11, 2001, the reckoning for such vast carelessness was presented for all the world to see." -- (Editor's Picks) -- See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism by Robert Baer

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Vassar College's: 9/11: A Resource Guide

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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Bin Laden and his gang are just the tentacles; the head lies safely in Saudi Arabia, protected by US forces."

"The hijackers responsible for the 11 September outrage were not illiterate, bearded fanatics from the mountain villages of Afghanistan. They were all educated, highly skilled, middle- class professionals. Of the 19 men involved, 13 were citizens of Saudi Arabia."

"Regardless of whether Osama Bin Laden gave the order or not, it is indisputable that the bulk of his real cadres (as opposed to foot soldiers) are located in Egypt or Saudi Arabia - America's two principal allies in the region, barring Israel. In Saudi Arabia, support for Bin Laden is strong. He was a close friend of the Saudi intelligence boss Prince Turki Bin Faisal al-Saud, who was dismissed in August apparently because of his failure to curb attacks on US personnel in Riyadh. The real reason, however, was probably his refusal to take sides in the fierce faction fight to determine the succession after the death of the paralysed King Fahd. Both sides are aware that too close an alignment with the US could be explosive. That is why, despite its support for the US, the Saudi regime is not "allowing its bases to be used"."

"The religious schools in Pakistan where the Taliban were created were funded by the Saudis, and Wahhabi influence was very strong. Last year, when the Taliban threatened to blow up the old statues of Buddha in Afghanistan, there were appeals from the ancient seminaries of Qom in Iran and al-Azhar in Eygpt to desist on the grounds that Islam is tolerant. A Wahhabi delegation from Saudi Arabia advised the Taliban to execute the plan. They did."

"The expeditionary force being despatched to Pakistan to cut off the tentacles of the Wahhabi octopus may or may not succeed, but its head is safe and sound in Saudi Arabia, guarding the oil wells, growing new arms, and protected by US soldiers and the US air-force base in Dhahran. Washington's failure to disengage its vital interests from the fate of the Saudi monarchy could well lead to further blow-back." -- The Real Muslim Extremists by Tariq Ali ( New Statesman: 10/1/00, (1996), v. 130, i4557) (globalissues.org)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"When President Bush announced he is hot on the trail of the money used over the years to finance terrorism, he must realize that trail ultimately leads not only to Saudi Arabia, but to some of the same financiers who originally helped propel him into the oil business and later the White House. The ties between bin Laden and the White House may be much closer than he is willing to acknowledge." -- QUESTIONABLE TIES: Tracking bin Laden's money flow leads back to Midland, Texas by Wayne Madsen

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------U.S. ties to Saudi elite may be hurting war on terrorism by Jonathan Wells, Jack Meyers and Maggie Mulvihill (Boston Herald: 12/10/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Saudi elite linked to bin Laden financial empire by Jonathan Wells, Jack Meyers and Maggie Mulvihill (Boston Herald: 10/14/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"His new friends back home in California took for granted that Mr. Mohamed was helping the Central Intelligence Agency in its proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. At the time, the anti-Soviet jihad was a worldwide cause among Muslims. "Everyone in the community knew he was working as a liaison between the CIA and the Afghan cause, and everyone was sympathetic," says Ali Zaki, a San Jose, Calif., obstetrician who was close to Mr. Mohamed and his American wife, a medical technician named Linda Sanchez. The CIA declines to comment." -- The Infiltrator: Ali Mohamed Served in the U.S. Army — and bin Laden's Circle by Peter Waldman (The Wall Street Journal: 11/26/01)

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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"...it was highly irregular, if not illegal, for an active-duty U.S. soldier to fight in a foreign war." -- OSAMA BIN LADEN'S U.S. ARMY RECRUIT

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"He returned to Fort Bragg as an enlisted man in 1987, working as a supply sergeant for Special Forces. He never became a Green Beret or received security clearance, but he gave briefings on Islamic fundamentalism and the Middle East at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. During one lecture, he told soldiers they had nothing to fear from devout Muslims, court records show. "The word fundamentalism scares people in the West," he said. "The word fundamentalism does not mean extremism." At the same time. Mohamed was moonlighting as a trainer for soldiers of a different stripe: militant Muslims in Brooklyn hoping to join the fight against a Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan.”

One member of the group, Khafid Ibrahim, testified at a 1995
Trial that Mohamed trained them to fire AK47 assault rifles at
a Connecticut shooting range. The witness also told how Mohamed gave classes in a Jersey City. N.J., apartment on
"how to find your way by looking at the stars" and "how to recognize some of the weapons if you see them. like tanks."

Some of Mohamed's students were later found guilty of plotting terrorist attacks, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and a plot to blowup New York City landmarks.

Seized from the apartment of one of the convicted terrorists were manuals from the Kennedy school swiped by Mohamed, including an "enemy weapons guide" describing the Soviet arsenal, according to court testimony. Defense lawyers have said other documents included "top secret" plans for a Special Forces training exercise for an attack on a section of Pakistan.

Army officials and prosecutors declined to discuss the specifics of the documents that ended up in the hands of America's future enemy. But a Special Forces spokesman, Maj. Gary Kolb, called the value of a late-1980s training manual in today's Afghanistan "debatable."

Back then, no breach of security was evident at Fort Bragg. Kolb said an officer who worked with Mohamed "did have some suspicions about what he did, but nothing came as a result of it. It really depended on who you believed."

Mohamed received at least two medals for "meritorious achievement" before being honorably discharged in 1989.
After he left the US. Army, Mohamed took up al-Qaida's cause, Ibrahim recalled encountering a westernized Mohamed at a mountain training camp in Afghanistan in 1992. L'Houssain Kherchtou - a former bin Laden follower who testified in the embassy bombings trial - remembered meeting Mohamed at a training session in Pakistan in the early 1990s. Known as
"Amriki," or "the American," Mohamed was "very, very strict and not gentle" while giving explosives and reconnaissance training.

Trainees were warned in advance that Mohamed "was a severe man" who was "not a good practitioner of Islam," Kherchtou said through an interpreter. "You can hear from him some bad words."

Mohamed, during his plea, admitted teaching al-Qaida foot soldiers how to create cell structures that could be used for operations. He also trained bin Laden's security detail.

The plea provided one of the most direct links between bin Laden and the bombings that killed 331 people - 12 Americans and 219 Africans - at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Mohamed claimed bin Laden in late 1993 asked him to conduct
surveillance of American, British, French and Israeli targets in
Nairobi. His diagrams and photographs were reviewed by bin Laden, who “looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber,”
he said.

Returning to California in the mid-1990s, Mohamed helped a top aide to bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, raise money for the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He also monitored the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman – the blind Egyptian cleric convicted in the 1995 New York terrorism trials - for bin Laden.

Once terrorists had struck the embassies. Mohamed said he planned to return to Egypt and then join bin Laden in Afghanistan. But prosecutors have said he also contacted the FBI, telling agents that bin Laden was responsible for the attacks.

Mohamed was subpoenaed to testify before a New York grand jury before being indicted on conspiracy charges, He pleaded guilty in October 2000.

`Abu Mohamed ali Amriki" has not been seen in public since.

It remains unclear how Mohamed managed to enter the United States and join the Army in the 198Os, despite the CIA'S misgivings. Equally unclear is how he was able to maintain his terror ties in the 1990s without being banished by either side, even after the Special Forces documents he stole turned up in the 1995 New York trial.

The State Department, CIA and FBI declined to answer questions about Mohamed. Officials have refused to discuss how much he has helped in their investigations as he awaits sentencing, which has been postponed indefinitely.

Given what's known, Mohamed fits the profile of a double agent, said Larry Johnson, former deputy chief of counter terrorism for the State Department. He believes Mohamed was an FBI informant before the embassy bombings. "I just see it as the FBI screwed up," Johnson said. "They didn't do a good job of information management."

Rusty Capps, a retired FBI agent and president of the center for Counter-intelligence and Security Studies, said Mohamed seemed too interested in "trying to impress people" to be reliable." If I were al-Qaida, if I were the CIA, if I were the FBI, I would not want to have a person like this anywhere within a thousand miles of me," Capps said." -- U.S. relying on double agent for details of Al-Qaeda.pdf by Tom Hays and Sharon Theimer (Stamford Advocate: 12/30/01) (HTML Ver.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"For example, one such group about which details have come to light is the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), a Sudan-based, phoney humanitarian organization which has been a major link in the arms pipeline to Bosnia."

"TWRA is believed to be connected with such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the convicted mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) and Osama Binladen, a wealthy Saudi emigre believed to bankroll numerous militant groups." -- Clinton-Approved Iranian Arms Transfers Help Turn Bosnia into Militant Islamic Base

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The KLA members, embraced by the Clinton administration in NATO's 41-day bombing campaign to bring Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to the bargaining table, were trained in secret camps in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere, according to newly obtained intelligence reports.

The reports also show that the KLA has enlisted Islamic terrorists -- members of the Mujahideen --as soldiers in its ongoing conflict against Serbia, and that many already have been smuggled into Kosovo to join the fight." -- KLA rebels train in terrorist camps by Jerry Seper (THE WASHINGTON TIMES: 5/4/99)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Moreover, according to the highly reputable 'Jane's Intelligence Review:'

"In February 1995, US authorities named bin Laden and his Saudi brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, among 172 unindicted co-conspirators with the 11 Muslims charged for the World Trade Center bombing and the associated plot to blow up other New York landmarks." ('Jane's Intelligence Review,' 1 October 1995)

So bin Laden had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator a year before Sudan offered to extradite him.

Why couldn't the U.S. government have accepted the Sudanese offer to extradite bin Laden? Why couldn't they have jailed him, gotten together their best case and put him on trial? What exactly did the U.S. government have to lose? The worst that could have happened would have been that they failed to convict him and had to let him leave the country... " -- Gaping Holes in the 'CIA vs. bin Laden' Story by Jared Israel (The Emperors New Clothes: 11/8/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The Sudanese security services, he said, would happily keep close watch on bin Laden for the United States. But if that would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over, though to whom was ambiguous. In one formulation, Erwa said Sudan would consider any legitimate proffer of criminal charges against the accused terrorist." -- U.S. Was Foiled Multiple Times in Efforts To Capture Bin Laden or Have Him Killed: Sudan's Offer to Arrest Militant Fell Through After Saudis Said No by Barton Gellman (Washington Post: 10/3/01, P. A01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"They were offered thick files, with photographs and detailed biographies of many of his principal cadres, and vital information about al-Qaeda's financial interests in many parts of the globe.

On two separate occasions, they were given an opportunity to extradite or interview key bin Laden operatives who had been arrested in Africa because they appeared to be planning terrorist atrocities.

None of the offers, made regularly from the start of 1995, was taken up. One senior CIA source admitted last night: 'This represents the worst single intelligence failure in this whole terrible business. It is the key to the whole thing right now. It is reasonable to say that had we had this data we may have had a better chance of preventing the attacks.'"

"'We know them in detail,' said one Sudanese source. 'We know their leaders, how they implement their policies, how they plan for the future. We have tried to feed this information to American and British intelligence so they can learn how this thing can be tackled.'

In 1996, following intense pressure from Saudi Arabia and the US, Sudan agreed to expel bin Laden and up to 300 of his associates. Sudanese intelligence believed this to be a great mistake.

'There we could keep track of him, read his mail,' the source went on.'"

"Last year the CIA and FBI, following four years of Sudanese entreaties, sent a joint investigative team to establish whether Sudan was in fact a sponsor of terrorism. Last May, it gave Sudan a clean bill of health. However, even then, it made no effort to examine the voluminous files on bin Laden." -- Resentful west spurned Sudan's key terror files by David Rose (The Observer: 9/30/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Jean-Charles Brisard, who wrote a report on bin Laden's finances for the French intelligence agency DST and is co-author of Hidden Truth, met O'Neill several times last summer. He complained bitterly that the US State Department -- and behind it the oil lobby who make up President Bush's entourage -- blocked attempts to prove bin Laden's guilt.

The US ambassador to Yemen, Ms Barbara Bodine, forbade O'Neill and his team of so-called Rambos (as the Yemeni authorities called them) from entering Yemen. In August 2001, O'Neill resigned in frustration and took up a new job as head of security at the World Trade Centre. He died in the September 11th attack."

"But US diplomats shrank from offending the Saudi royal family. O'Neill went to Saudi Arabia after 19 US servicemen died in the bombing of a military installation in Dhahran in June 1996. Saudi officials interrogated the suspects, declared them guilty and executed them -- without letting the FBI talk to them. "They were reduced to the role of forensic scientists, collecting material evidence on the bomb site," Brisard says.

O'Neill said there was clear evidence in Yemen of bin Laden's guilt in the bombing of the USS Cole "`in which 17 US servicemen died', but that the State Department prevented him from getting it."" -- US efforts to make peace summed up by `oil' by Lara Marlowe (The Irish Times: 11/19/01) (ratical.org)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"They knew that once we started asking for a few traces the list would grow," one former official said. "It's better to shut it down right away." He pointed out that thousands of disaffected Saudis have joined fundamentalist groups throughout the Middle East. Other officials said that there is a growing worry inside the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. that the actual identities of many of those involved in the attacks may not be known definitively for months, if ever. Last week, a senior intelligence official confirmed the lack of Saudi coöperation and told me, angrily, that the Saudis "have only one constant-and it's keeping themselves in power." -- King's ransom: How vulnerable are the Saudi royals? by Seymour M. Hersh (The New Yorker: 10/22/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Dubai, one of the seven emirates of the Federation of the United Arab Emirates, North-East of Abi-Dhabi. This city, population 350,000, was the backdrop of a secret meeting between Osama bin Laden and the local CIA agent in July. A partner of the administration of the American Hospital in Dubai claims that public enemy number one stayed at this hospital between the 4th and 14th of July."

"Each floor of the hospital has two "VIP" suites and fifteen rooms. The Saudi billionnaire was admitted to the well-respected urology department run by Teerry Callaway, gallstone and infertility specialist. Dr Callaway declined to respond to our questions despite several phone calls."

"While he was hospitalised, bin Laden received visits from many members of his family as well as prominent Saudis and Emiratis. During the hospital stay, the local CIA agent, known to many in Dubai, was seen taking the main elevator of the hospital to go to bin Laden's hospital room.

A few days later, the CIA man bragged to a few friends about having visited bin Laden. Authorised sources say that on July 15th, the day after bin Laden returned to Quetta, the CIA agent was called back to headquarters."

"According to Arab diplomatic sources as well as French intelligence, very specific information was transmitted to the CIA with respect to terrorist attacks against American interests around the world, including on US soil. A DST report dated 7 September enumerates all the intelligence, and specifies that the order to attack was to come from Afghanistan.

In August, at the US Embassy in Paris, an emergency meeting was called between the DGSE (French foreign intelligence service) and senior US intelligence officials. The Americans were extremely worried, and requested very specific information from the French about Algerian activists, without advising their counterparts about the reasons for their requests. To the question "what do you fear in the coming days?", the Americans kept a difficult-to-fathom silence.

Contacts between the CIA and bin Laden began in 1979 when, as a representative of his family's business, bin Laden began recruiting volunteers for the Afghan resistance against the Red Army. FBI investigators examining the embassy bombing sites in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam discovered that evidence led to military explosives from the US Army, and that these explosives had been delivered threee years earlier to Afghan Arabs, the infamous international volunteer brigades involved side by side with bin Laden during the Afghan war against the Red Army.

In the pursuit of its investigations, the FBI discovered "financing agreements" that the CIA had been developing with its "arab friends" for years. The Dubai meeting is then within the logic of "a certain American policy"." -- CIA AGENT ALLEGEDLY MET BIN LADEN IN JULY From 'Le Figaro' [1 November 2001] by Alexandra Richard (Page 2, October 31st, 2001)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Two months before September 11 Osama bin Laden flew to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by the local CIA agent... The disclosures are known to come from French intelligence... Intelligence sources say that another CIA agent was also present; and that Bin Laden was also visited by Prince Turki al Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence, who had long had links with the Taliban, and Bin Laden." -- CIA agent alleged to have met Bin Laden in July by Anthony Sampson (The Guardian: 11/1/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[Judicial Watch accuses the IRS of...] "...you looked the other way when it came to investigating and taking action against radical Islamic front groups which reportedly launder money to fund terrorist operations on American soil."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Reuters reported on 11-7-2001 that the Treasury Department added 61 additional people and organizations to the President's original Executive Order of September 23 -- including banks in Somalia and Nassau, The Bahamas. But mysteriously, no banks in Bahrain, Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia were named in either the original order or its expansion.

Moreover, the President's lack of effective direction and oversight of terrorist finance appears to be abetted and endorsed by the U.S. Congress."

"In another curious disclosure, the FBI also says al Shamal Islamic Bank -- Osama bin Laden's personal bank -- headquartered in Khartoum, Sudan -- which the terrorist leader helped capitalize with $50 million in private funds, "is being investigated by U.S. or overseas authorities." According to U.S. News (10-8-2001), the Bureau won't say which authority. President Bush, however, has failed to place Osama bin Laden's al Shamal Islamic Bank in his Executive Order -- freezing all of its correspondent transactions with other banks of the world." -- THE PROFITS OF DEATH - Part III in a Special FTW: Series on Insider Trading and September 11th by Tom Flocco and Michael C. Ruppert (From The Wilderness)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"What are we to make of all of this? One possible conclusion is that the bin Laden terror problem was allowed to get out of hand because bin Laden, himself, had powerful protectors in both Washington and Saudi Arabia" -- Did bin Laden have help from U.S. friends? by Thomas Walkom (Toronto Star: Nov. 27, 2001)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"There was consternation among European security agencies last week when the FBI announced that it had exhausted most of its leads and was convinced that the key to al-Qaeda’s operations lay in Germany. But arrests made in Britain, France, Belgium, Spain and Germany showed that in almost every case these cells knew nothing about the September 11 hijacks." -- FBI arrogance and secrecy dismays US BY DOMINIC KENNEDY AND DANIEL McGRORY (London Times: 11/03/01)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The US-led ‘proxy war’ model was based on the premise that Islamists made good anti-Communist allies. The plan was diabolically simple: to hire, train and control motivated Islamic mercenaries. The trainers were mainly from Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, who learnt their craft from American Green Beret commandos and Navy SEALS in various US training establishments. Mass training of Afghan mujahideen was subsequently conducted by the Pakistan Army under the supervision of the elite Special Services Group (SSG), specialists in covert action behind enemy lines and the ISI."

"According to intelligence estimates over 10,000 Islamic mercenaries, trained in guerrilla warfare and armed with sophisticated weapons, are unemployed in Pakistan today, waiting to be transported to the next jihad."

"In 1988, with US knowledge, Bin Laden created Al Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells in countries spread across at least 26 countries..."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The Taliban are a creation of America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in cooperation with Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI)..."

"After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA had encouraged militant Islamic groups from around the world to come to Afghanistan. The USA and its allies provided 3 billion dollars for building up the largest ever funded "resistance movement"."

"Pakistan played a central role in the operation. Not only that most of the militants had been prepared and trained in Pakistani madrassas (Islamic religious schools) and camps, Pakistan provided also money and arms. The CIA had left much of the decision how to use the US funds to Pakistani specialists." -- Creating the Taliban: "CIA Made a Historic Mistake" (Rationalist International Bulletin Nol. 68: 3/19/01)

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