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Anthony Thorne

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  1. Ray Ryan, the original owner of the Safari Club, has a colourful history, some of which bumps into the periphery of the JFK assassination.

    From the 2005 Vanity Fair article THE MAN WHO ATE HOLLYWOOD

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/11/davis200511

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    “Ryan was the ultimate high roller. According to the journalist Herb Marynell, he was one of the greatest cardsharps who ever lived. A confidant of celebrities, politicians, and mobsters, he called Texas oil baron H. L. Hunt, whom he had supposedly fleeced of several hundred thousand dollars on a cruise to Europe, his “pigeon.” His friends included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Clark Gable. A primary developer of Palm Springs, he became partners with the actor William Holden to create the Mount Kenya Safari Club, whose members included not only John Wayne and Bing Crosby but also, allegedly, high-ranking members of organized crime. In 1977, Ryan was blown up in his Lincoln Continental in an alleged Mob hit.

    In addition to being a gambler, Ryan was a wildcatter, an independent oilman searching for oil outside of known deposits, leasing mineral rights, lining up investors, and drilling oil wells on a “third for a quarter” deal, meaning that each investor paid one-third of the cost and got one-fourth of the interest—leaving the wildcatter with a one-fourth interest in the well for his promotional efforts. In 1939, when Evansville was in the midst of an oil boom, Ryan found an investor to lease acreage for $10,000 and struck oil in 20 locations, which poured out 3,000 barrels a day. After reportedly raking in $350,000, he sold his lease on the land for another $250,000 and created the Ryan Oil Company.”

     

    Ryan also pops up in Chauncey Holt’s 1992 interview with John Craig, Phillip Rogers, and Gary Shaw.

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    “But I am not as knowledgeable about Mongoose as some other operations. We (I) knew what was going on, we talked to William King Harvey. We discussed, we had seen Lansdale one time. We met down at Ray Ryan's place in Palm Springs. Ray Ryan was a big gambler, an oil man. He was friends with Licavoli and Giancana. He had a propriety interest in Palm Springs - the Bermuda Dunes Airport, which is owned by the CIA. We had a meeting down there in which time, it was the only time I participated when all those groups got together. Which was in December, 1961, when they discussed project ZR/RIFLE. How they intended to proceed, they also indicated that James J. Angleton knew about it. And that they were going to insert things into what was called, we referred to as the Central Registry. They referred to them as the 201 Files. We were referring to them as the Central Registry. Frankly I don't know the difference between the 201 File and the Central Registry. Now the Central Registry was...I don't know the difference.”

     

    Mob figure Marshall Caifano was arrested in 1963 for attempting to extort Ryan for $60,000 a year.

    https://www.desertsun.com/story/life/entertainment/2014/11/30/palm-springs-gangsters-in-paradise/19040507/

     

    Ryan died in a car bomb explosion on October 18th, 1977. A Steve Bagley and Herb Marynell article on Ryan’s unsolved murder is linked below.

    Nearly 35 years ago, fast living and a run-in with the Mob cost Evansville oilman Ray Ryan his life in a car bombing that clearly pointed to organized crime

    http://www.evansvilleliving.com/articles/his-cheating-heart

    Screen-Shot-2019-09-23-at-1-39-10-pm.png

     

  2. From Peter Dale Scott’s THE ROAD TO 9/11 (pg. 62 - 64)

     

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    OFFSHORED CIA ASSETS: THE SAFARI CLUB AND A ROGUE CIA

    The Halloween Massacre reversed another apparent victory for the public state over the deep state. Outgoing CIA director Colby had been cooperating with investigation of CIA launched by the so-called McGovernite 94th Congress that had been elected in 1974. (58)  However, the new CIA director, George H. W. Bush, found a way to avoid the newly imposed rules of congressional oversight. He accelerated the delegation of covert operations to foreign intelligence services and also to assets not only off-the-books but sometimes offshore. These offshore assets - notably the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) - were of great use to CIA director Casey and Bush himself as vice president in escaping congressional review. (59)  Above all, “Bush cemented strong relations with the intelligence services of both Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked closely with Kamal Adam, the head of Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of King Faisal and an early BCCI insider.” (60)

    In 1972, as I mentioned in chapter 2, Adham had acted as a channel between Kissinger and Anwar Sadat in negotiations for the sudden expulsion of Soviet advisors from Egypt. (61) Now, in 1976, faced with the congressional crackdown on unsupervised CIA operations, Adam, Sadat, and the shah of Iran formed their own anti-Communist coalition - the so-called Safari Club - to conduct through their own intelligence agencies operations that were now difficult for CIA. (62) A key figure in securing a formal agreement to this effect was Alexandre de Marenches, head of the French intelligence service SDECE (the service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionnage). (63) De Marenches surfaces again in connection with the 1980 Republican-CIA plots against President Carter.

    In February 2002, Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal, nephew of and successor to Adam, gave Georgetown University alumni a frank account of the Safari Club’s formation in response to post-Watergate restrictions: “In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and establishing what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran.” (64)

    The Safari Club met at an exclusive resort of the same name in Kenya, which in the same year, 1976, was visited and eventually bought by Adham’s friend Adnan Khashoggi. (65) According to investigative journalist Joseph Trento, “The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations. With the official blessing of George H. W. Bush as head of the CIA, Adham transformed a small Pakistani merchant bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a world-wide money laundering machine, buying banks around the world to create the biggest clandestine money network in history.” (66)

    Trento further charges that Adham, his successor Prince Turki, and their Saudi agency the GID, or Mukhtabarat, funded off-the-books worldwide covert operations for CIA. These included support for an alleged “private CIA” close to Bush and dominated by former CIA men like Ed Wilson, Theodore Shackley (who had served as Bush’s associate deputy director for operations), and Tom Clines. (67) Unquestionably, the brief period in which Bush served as the director of central intelligence was one of off-the-books operations by allegedly “rogue” agents like Wilson, working with Shackley. (68) “Contracting-out”, or “offshoring,” became a device to escape the new oversight procedures established after Watergate by the Senate Church Committee, which had been established by the McGovernite Congress to investigate government intelligence activities.

    These offshore events in 1976 were mirrored by a similar arrangement for off-loading former CIA agents and operations in Latin America. This was the Confederation Anticommunista Latinoamericana (CAL) and its death-squad collaboration Operation Condor. Operation Condor was a coalition of intelligence agencies of CAL countries, chiefly Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay. The CAL was funded through the World Anti-Communist League by the governments of South Korea and Taiwan and - once again - the petrodollars of Saudi Arabia. (69)

    After Carter’s election, Bush was replaced as CIA director by Admiral Stansfield Turner, who began to marginalise or fire the “Bush team” associated with Shackley. These men, notably Clines, were accused of forming a “private CIA” or “rogue CIA” from 1977 to 1980 that was loyal to Bush (and possibly involved him) and was supported by connections to BCCI and the Safari Club. (70) After the Camp David Accords were signed in 1979, Clines became partner in a lucrative shipping company, Tersam, backed by Ali Mohammed Shorafa of the United Arab Emirates, a nominee of the elite BCCI group permitted to buy out the First American Bank in Washington. (71)

    These offshore relationships gave Shackley, de Marenches, and others an offshore base for assisting active and retired CIA officers, most notably Shackley’s friend Bush, to defeat Carter in his bid for reelection. (72) The overall result of this off-loading and offshoring was not just loss of accountability, but also loss of control over major policies. A key example would soon be the 1980s CIA support of the resistance in Afghanistan, where CIA’s disastrous favouring of drug traffickers had grown directly out of the Safari Club arrangement and was partly funded through BCCI. This loss of control will emerge as a major factor in our nation’s slouching toward the tragedy of 9/11.

     

    (58) From 1973 to 1976, Helms testified to Congress on more than thirty separate occasions, for a total of one hundred hours or more (Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, 295)

    (59) Under Nixon, CIA was already offloading assets to former CIA officer Edwin Wilson’s Task Force 157, which Kissinger allegedly used to protect his secret China communications from Admiral Moorer (Trento, Prelude to Terror, 51 - 53). In turn, Wilson developed connections to both the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia and Tongsun Park, who was distributing money to members of Congress on behalf of the Korean CIA (Trento, Power House, 100 - 104)

    (60) Kevin Phillips, “The Barrelling Bushes,” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2004. Phillips continues: “After leaving the CIA in January 1977, Bush became chairman of the executive committee of First International Bancshares and its British subsidiary, where, according to journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin in their 1992 book ‘False Profits’ [p. 345], Bush ‘traveled on the bank’s behalf and sometimes marketed to international banks in London, including several Middle Eastern institutions.’” Trento claims that through the London branch of this bank, which Bush chaired, “Adham’s petrodollars and BCCI money flowed for a variety of intelligence operations” (Trento, Prelude to Terror, 139)

    (61) Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 120-21

    (62) Cooley, Unholy Wars, 24 - 28. The Safari Club took its name from the famous lodge on Mount Kenya, where the leaders first met. The lodge was developed by gambler and oilman Ray Ryan and later owned by Adnan Khashoggi.

    (63) Cooley, Unholy Wars, 26

    (64) Prince Turki bin Faisal is quoted in Trento, Prelude to Terror, 102. Citing the same speech, Coll adds Britain to the list (Coll, Ghost Wars, 81)

    (65) Kessler, Richest Man in the World, 239 - 41

    (66) Trento, Prelude to Terror, 104. Bush may have used CIA connections to lend a helping hand. In 1976 a law firm in the Cayman Islands, Bruce Campbell & Company, which was already the registered agent for the CIA bank Nugan Hand, “set up BCCI’s most secretive unit: International Credit & Investment Company (ICIC)” (Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 125). French customs officials, when they raided the Paris branch of the BCCI in 1991, claim to have discovered an account in Bush’s name (Trento, Prelude to Terror, 104).

    (67) Trento, Prelude to Terror, 101. Trento quotes a Wilson associate, Mike Pilgrim, as saying: “It got to the point that we were used to support GID operations when the CIA could not.” Richard Secord, discussed in chapter 10, became part of this group.

    (68) Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 130. The courts eventually conceded that Wilson had been working for Shackley in CIA: “In 1984 Wilson was found not guilty of trying to hire Raphael Quintero and other Cubans to kill a Libyan dissident. However, he was found guilty of exporting guns and conspiracy to murder and was sentenced to 52 years in prison. Wilson claimed he had been framed and claimed that he was working on behalf of the CIA. He employed David Adler, a former CIA agent, as his lawyer. Adler eventually found evidence that Wilson was indeed working for the CIA after he retired from the agency. In October 2003 a Houston federal judge, Lynn Hughes, threw out Wilson’s conviction in the C-4 explosives case, ruling that the prosecutors had ‘deliberately deceived the court’ about Wilson’s continuing CIA contacts, thus ‘double-crossing a part-time informal government agent’” (Spartacus Educational, The Biography of Edwin P. Wilson)

    (69) Marshall, Scott and Hunter, Iran-Contra Connection, 24, 48-49, 76-82; Trento, Prelude to Terror, 78-82. It is noteworthy that just as de Marenches was the man who formalized the Safari Club agreement, so his close friend Vernon Walters, Bush’s deputy director of central intelligence, became the chief U.S. contact of the CAL/Condor coalition. Operation Condor was responsible for the 1976 murder in Washington of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and young researcher Ronni Moffit. The assassins were two former CIA terrorists, whose arrest was delayed for two years, in part because Bush as CIA director did not turn over their files to the FBI.

    (70) Trento, Prelude to Terror, 138 - 44 and passim. Cf. Trento, Secret History of the CIA, 410, 467, and passim. Cf. also Loftus and Aarons, Secret War against the Jews, 397: “After Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, a number of people suddenly resigned from the CIA, went through the ‘revolving door’, and acquired connections to the BCCI.” Trento once wrote of the off-loaded agents “working for the Israelis” (Trento, Secret History, 410). Loftus and Aarons saw Bush shifting away from Israel and moving “closer to the Arabs” (Secret War against the Jews, 396). We shall see that both accounts are partially true. It was through these double contacts that “the Club was able to bring about President Sadat’s historic peacemaking visit of November 1977 to Jerusalem, leading eventually to the U.S.-Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979” (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 27)

    (71) Trento, Prelude to Terror, 249 (Clines); Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 123 (Shorafa)

    (72) Parry, Secret & Privilege, especially 136 (Clines-Shackley-Bush)

     

     

  3. THE SAFARI CLUB

    SAFARI-CLUB-pic.jpg

    The Safari Club has been discussed in just a handful of books, some of which take slightly different perspectives on what the group did during its existence. This post covers most of the available information and reprints relevant pages from the books that cover it.

    The first coverage of the Safari Club appeared when Egyptian journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal discovered materials in Tehran confirming the group’s existence. He included a handful of pages about it in his 1981 volume IRAN: THE UNTOLD STORY.

    US journalist John Cooley then featured a section on the Safari Club in his 1999 volume UNHOLY WARS: AFGHANISTAN, AMERICA AND INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM. His coverage has additional details and observations not mentioned in Heikal’s account from nearly two decades earlier.

    In 2006, Joseph Trento featured a somewhat damning description of the Safari Club in his book PRELUDE TO TERROR. The following year, Peter Dale Scott paraphrased and expanded on Trento’s overview in his own book, THE ROAD TO 9/11. Both Scott and Trento link the Safari Club to BCCI, the rogue funding network that later was involved in funding terrorism.

    Not included in this post - Paul Fitzgerald, in his book INVISIBLE HISTORY, attributes the September 24th 1978 disappearance of CIA officer John Paisley and the February 14th 1979 death of Ambassador Adolph ‘Spike’ Dubs to aggrieved Safari Club/Team B members, as Paisley and Dubs were either slowing or attempting to prevent the Safari Club’s covert Afghan war against the Soviets.

     

    From Paul Fitzgerald’s INVISIBLE HISTORY blog -

    https://www.invisiblehistory.com/part-4-how-the-safari-club-became-the-real-cia/

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    The Safari club represented the true essence of what CIA Director Allen Dulles had intended when setting up the Central Intelligence Agency following World War II; an autonomous covert action organization with global reach, beyond the jurisdiction of American democracy and responsible to no one. A spinoff of the right-wing Pinay Cercle as a secret off-the books “Private Sector Intelligence agency,” and in league with the CIA and Brian Crozier’s 6th International, the Safari Club was only formerly acknowledged in 2002 by the one-time head of Saudi Arabian Intelligence Prince Turki Al-Faisal to have come into existence in 1976.  But as revealed by John K. Cooley in his groundbreaking 1999 study, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, the Safari Club members had been active informally for years secretly protecting CIA assets and covert operations from the prying eyes of Congressional investigators following Watergate and the revelations of the Church Committee hearings on 30 years of CIA coups, cover-ups and assassinations. …the Safari Club was more than just an off-the-books spy operation doing covert operations for the CIA whose methods the Carter team adopted. The Safari Club was the real CIA, covertly funded by Saudi Arabia and run out of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by the CIA’s former director Richard Helms, U.S. Ambassador to Iran from 1973-1977.

     

    From Kevin Ryan’s ANOTHER 19 (pg. 42)

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    “Unofficial aid to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan also began in the summer of 1979. Proxy agents coordinated by the Safari Club, a private network formed by representatives from several countries, had been invading Afghanistan for about a year prior to that. The U.S. aid to the Mujahideen, a coalition of rebel groups from which al Qaeda originated, officially did not start until 1980 but went on for many years under the name Operation Cyclone.”

     

    From David Teacher’s most recent edition of ROGUE AGENTS, discussing Brian Crozier and the members of Le Cercle (pg 177)

    PDF Rogue Agents - the Cercle and the 6I in the Private Cold War ...

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    “This first contact between Crozier and Turki al-Faisal was arranged via Dan McMichael, administrator of the Scaife family's trust funds, a major source of funding for the NSIC and ISC. Crozier briefed the Saudi prince about the 6I and its initial contact with the Shah. A proposed second meeting with Prince Turki al-Faisal in the summer of 1978 would not come off, but Crozier and the Cercle would finally meet the Saudi intelligence chief again at a Cercle meeting in Bavaria in the spring of 1979 when Turki al-Faisal would accept to act as the main backer for a planned 6I radio propaganda operation in the Middle East, detailed in the next chapter.

    In the meanwhile, the Shah was reconsidering Crozier's offer of 6I help for psy-ops campaigns and contacted Turki al-Faisal, who put in a good word for the 6I. Turki al-Faisal's recommendation of the 6I carried a lot of weight for the Iranians; Turki al-Faisal was the Saudi representative on the Safari Club, a network for covert cooperation between the French, Saudi, Iranian, Moroccan and Egyptian intelligence services, founded by Alexandre de Marenches on 1st September 1976 with headquarters in Cairo (369). Besides Turki al-Faisal's recommendation, Cercle participant General Fraser had also been advising the Shah to accept the 6I's help: "he had raised with the Shah the question of financial assistance for our group, in return for our advice and expertise in combating the wave of subversion that threatened to sweep him off his throne" (370). Fraser advised Crozier to involve ISC Council member Sir Robert Thompson whose counter-insurgency experience during the Malayan campaign and the early stages of the Vietnam War could be useful in the Iranian context.”

     

     

  4. Here’s A FAREWELL TO JUSTICE author Joan Mellen’s comparison of the JFK assassination and 9/11 cover-ups - though I’ve never jumped 100% on board with some of the claims of whistleblower Anthony Shaffer, cited at the opening of her article.

    http://joanmellen.com/wordpress/kennedy-assassination/911-and-1122/

    and another interview where she recommends researchers can draw parallels between the two cover-ups.

    http://911blogger.com/news/2008-10-12/interview-joan-mellen-oct-4th-2008

    And dug up from Archive dot org, Alex Cox’s clever reviews of three 9/11 books from a decade ago, Paul Thompson’s THE TERROR TIMELINE, Michael Ruppert’s CROSSING THE RUBICON, and Webster Tarpley’s 9/11 SYNTHETIC TERROR. Cox has been a JFK author and researcher for a long while, and is a member of several research forums, possibly including this one. Scroll down past his discussion of the 7/7 event to read his thoughts on the books.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20070227172852/http://www.alexcox.com/blog5.7.2-5.1.6.htm

    Cox referenced 9/11 conspiracies in his Guardian review of the film UNITED 93. Receptive discussion of the topic is less common in the Guardian today.

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/may/11/september11.usa

  5. It’s disappointing, to be honest, that Jim has derailed this thread. I enjoyed the first few pages where it was on target.

    Here’s a 1995 article written by then newly installed Lockheed CEO Norm Augustine, where he notes the declining national military budget, invokes Pearl Harbor, discusses airline crashes, suggests that a crisis contains rich opportunities for profiteering, and more. Augustine was on the board of at least one company with Dick Cheney at the time, and the article feels layered with double-meanings and implication.

     

    https://hbr.org/1995/11/managing-the-crisis-you-tried-to-prevent

  6. There was a lot of British involvement with Trump, MI6 spying and the Steele document. You’re right about that and I’ve seen it covered on multiple boards and forums. 

    But the JFK section of that Chaitkin article is a bit daft, sadly. He opens his section on the JFK assassination by stating that ‘two newly discovered pieces of evidence’ help bring the story together, and those two pieces of vital evidence are a ‘membership list’ and a ‘pair of obscure photographs’.

    If those are the two, vital pieces of evidence that help finally solve the crime of the century, is there any reason that they decided not to print copies of either one in their magazine? They had nearly 70 pages or more to fill in that particular issue. Maybe the picture of JFK smiling and pointing on page 33 could have waited for another day.

    And the article suggests that the photos help prove Louis Mortimer Bloomfield’s ‘involvement in the JFK assassination plot’. Bloomfield then disappears for much of the rest of the article, until Chaitkin observes that Bloomfield published an assassination-related book (apparently) in 1975. But the role Bloomfield played in JFK’s death 12 years earlier goes unmentioned, possibly because Chaitkin thought a book published during the Ford presidency when THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW was in cinemas was more of a smoking gun than anything he could say about what Bloomfield was doing in 1963.

    But I think anyone seeing these repeated ‘it was British royalty that dunnit’ posts of yours will know what to do when they see more of them. I’ve learned my lesson for now.

  7. Another recommended resource. UK blogger Matthew Everett has been writing an investigative blog - Shoestring 9/11 - about aspects of the 9/11 attacks for more than a decade. Each of his articles is detailed and heavily footnoted enough to be a solid chapter in a book on the subject, but for the moment they can only be read online. I once assembled a PDF of his articles on my own to print them out - and I no longer have that PDF - but anyone can do the same over a few hours with a Word doc and cut and paste.

    The blog is at 

    https://shoestring911.blogspot.com

    with archives running back to 2007. Here's some examples of his work.

     

    The Inexplicable Calls From a Hijacked Plane Made by the Solicitor General's Wife on 9/11

    https://shoestring911.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-inexplicable-calls-from-hijacked.html

     

    Why Did the Secret Service Report That a Plane Had Crashed into the White House on 9/11?

    https://shoestring911.blogspot.com/2018/10/why-did-secret-service-report-that.html

     

    Security Alerts, Disabled Fire Alarms, and Unused Elevators: Suspicious Events at the World Trade Center Before 9/11

    https://shoestring911.blogspot.com/2018/06/security-alerts-disabled-fire-alarms.html

     

    Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on 9/11: The Mysterious Plane Crash Site Without a Plane

    https://shoestring911.blogspot.com/2013/02/shanksville-pennsylvania-on-911.html

     

    The Mystery of the Helicopter Flying Around the Pentagon Before the Attack There on 9/11

    https://shoestring911.blogspot.com/2011/06/mystery-of-helicopter-flying-around.html

     

    "Shockingly Calm": The Phone Calls From the Planes on 9/11

    https://shoestring911.blogspot.com/2008/07/shockingly-calm-phone-calls-from-planes.html

     

    And so on. The whole archive of articles is worth browsing through. FWIW, the issue discussed in the final article, about 'shockingly calm' phone calls from many people that day, is addressed at length by Elias Daviddson in his book linked earlier in this thread. 

  8. Ron, with 9/11, I had an office job in 2001, and read a couple of articles online just two or three weeks after the attacks that asked a couple of questions about oddities surrounding the event. So, I began to keep an eye on the websites and literature and - eventually - documentaries that covered it, and went from there. But it's a very big subject, the same as the JFK assassination.

    And with JFK, I sporadically read up on books, followed the work of James DiEugenio and a few other writers online, visited a couple of forums, including this one, and had the benefit of a friend in Melbourne who was also well briefed with both subjects, so we'd catch up for coffee and discuss.

  9. Side note. In the Scott/Marshall/Hunter volume THE IRAN-CONTRA CONNECTION, published in the late 80's, there's a chapter on the Israeli aspect of the Contragate story. Jane Hunter (who I think wrote that particular chapter, though I could be wrong) ends the chapter with the comment that Israel's 'immunity to U.S. law' and trusted status as an occasionally covert partner will likely make it "the vehicle of choice for the next tragic and avoidable essay in covert foreign policy". So I don't buy the argument pushed by some writers - some of them good, some bad - that Israel was the architect of the event, and the stuff I've posted in the Gladio thread should give a clearer picture of some of the US figures that were pushing things forward, but having a partner working on some of the most covert events of the day was clearly a useful thing for the planners. It's a  bit like the anti-Casto Cubans floating around the JFK assassination, a group that wasn't running the show, but did some important work in collaboration with those that were on the ground.

  10. David. Yep, that's part of the same story. Dominik Suter, Urban Moving Systems, and all those guys. In its totality it's definitely one of the lesser reported stories from the day.

    Wayne Madsen's essay on the subject, which you've probably already read.

    https://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/2007/06/israeli-art-students-and-movers-story.html

    The one part of the common alternative reading of all that stuff that I don't currently go along with is the frequently-reprinted story that those guys later confessed on Israeli TV about being sent to 'document the event'. I've seen the clip going around from the show in question, and it is the same guys (as confirmed by an exculpatory BBC or Channel 4 documentary where they portrayed themselves as innocent tourists caught up in an awful news story for no reason). But I don't speak Hebrew, and the only source translating the original clip is a brief Youtube video, originating from parts unknown, where over the clip of the guys speaking, we get an anonymous narrator telling us what they said. Who translated it? Is it an accurate translation? Did they just go on a show and say, wow, we're so glad to be back home again etc? No idea. So I usually leave the 'we were sent to document the event' note out whenever I discuss this angle.

  11. Peter Dale Scott - and I'm referring to him continually in this instance, as he was one of the first guys to publish thoughts along these lines - suggested that 9/11 might have been the same. The hijacking might have been one op, known by some. Having the planes crash into the buildings might have been a second stage, known only by a smaller group. And having those buildings all collapse to the ground right afterwards may have been a third stage known only by a few. So for some people, they may have got on board the conspiracy with the notion that only hijackings were occurring. Others might have understood that planes were crashing, but they weren't aware that the buildings would be taken down. And the third, obviously very determined group understood the full breadth of what was going to occur. So one op might have been piggybacked on top of another

    I believe Scott is on the right track with that argument. I don't have time this morning (Oz time here) to provide all the links and context, but there were unusual arrests in NYC the afternoon of the attacks that suggest further events were planned, but didn't occur. In particular, a van load of guys were arrested near the George Washington bridge. The van was found to contain explosives. And when cops radioed through the details, someone advised that the suspects 'looked Palestinian', which suggests that an attempt was temporarily pushed, and then discarded, to blame or frame a Palestinian element for attacks that day.

    Journalist Robbie Martin - the brother of prominent alt media host Abby Martin - dug up interview audio from a day or so after the attacks, where father-and-son neocons Robert and Fred Kagan suggested on air that Palestine was a possible sponsor of the 9/11 attacks, and that the US military should send a Delta Force team into Palestine to kill terrorist forces there immediately. Robert's other son, Donald Kagan, was the editor of the 2000 volume PRESENT DANGERS, which offered a forum for neocons like Wolfowitz to offer in essay form all the agendas they would imminently be pushing after the 9/11 attacks, and in Kagan's opening essay he references the possibility of a Pearl Harbor event on the first or second page. So clearly, there was a lot going on with these guys. I suspect that among the plotters, there was a private agenda among a few to push things even further than what actually happened. 

    References to the aborted George Washington Bridge plot

    https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/9-11/George_Washington_Bridge_plot

    https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/91101-israeli-men-attempted-to-explode-george-washington-bridge/#

    Dan Rather announcing the arrest of the guys from the van.

    Article on the 9/12/2001 statement by the Kagans.

    https://mondoweiss.net/2015/08/kagan-father-palestine/?utm_te

    And audio of the relevant section from their interview.

     

  12. Ikle worked in conjunction with a few others, and he's linked professionally with Richard Perle, Wolfowitz and 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman. Several of that group were pushing, continually, for an increase in US military budgets, and all that kind of links in with the infamous Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that Andrew Marshall, Ikle's DISCRIMINATE DETERRENCE co-author and fellow RAND consultant Albert Wohlstetter, Rumsfeld and others pushed from just before the first Gulf War, through the 90's and, for some of them, into and past 9/11. But Ikle's comments are among the earliest I've come across where the general notion is, hey folks, maybe a big crisis can help us achieve all this stuff.

     

  13. Jim, I had no response to what you said about the UK’s sponsorship of terrorist groups, because I first read about that detail in Webster Tarpley’s book on 9/11, 14 years ago. And then further in Nafeez Ahmed’s book, published around the same time. And then most recently in David Teacher’s book on Le Cercle, which documents all the disparate elite US and UK and European deep political figures who would run off and hold exclusive meetings at various places before returning home to push various fascist and right-wing causes in their home countries.

    But you won’t get much more commentary on that particular angle out of me.

  14.  Jim, respectfully, very few Aussies, myself included, really care that much about the British monarchy.

    I’ll post more links and thoughts over the next day or two. FWIW, Joan Mellen and James W. Douglass are also 9/11 truth supporters - Mellen expresses her thoughts on the matter in some articles, while Douglass has endorsed (from memory) some recent David Ray Griffin books.

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