Steven Gaal

Is there a multi-personality here ?? Cause Colby admitted on another thread that there might now be out of control jihadists becoming a large part of the FSA ?? Ive posted about FSA terrorism repeatedly on the ED forum. Jake Whitney Daily Beast 2/21/13 ============================= (According to the war correspondent Michael Hastings, DoD now employs 27,000 media professionals at $4.7 billion per year and even creates phony Facebook and Twitter accounts of pro-American Afghans.) This huge PR machine has been accompanied by a strategy of public disengagement—through policies like the elimination of the draft, a refusal to raise wartime taxes, and an increasing reliance on long-range weapons like drones. All of this makes war far less impactful to most Americans.(MAYBE PEOPLE WITH MULTIPLE PERSONALITES) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Human Rights Watch: “Syrian Rebels” Guilty of Torture, Murder September 19, 2012 – US, UK, NATO, Saudi, and Israeli backed terrorists carrying out a campaign of systematic atrocities in Syria have finally been acknowledged and reported on by Human Rights Watch, who has for nearly 2 years intentionally portrayed the conflict as one-sided violence carried out by the Syrian government alone. With evidence and admissions emerging that the so-called “Syrian rebels” are in fact Libyan terrorists, armed, funded, and flown in by NATO to cross into Syria and attack government troops, organizations like Human Rights Watch have faced deteriorating legitimacy, even with watered-down admissions like their most recent report titled, “Syria: End Opposition Use of Torture, Executions.” In the report, Human Rights Watch admits that “armed opposition groups have subjected detainees to ill-treatment and torture and committed extrajudicial or summary executions in Aleppo, Latakia, and Idlib.” Continue reading → ################# ################# USA censorship on the rise as YouTube censors video critical of government; Fox News pulls Judge Napolitano's Freedom Watch Learn more: http://www.naturalne...l#ixzz2MlHdlXXW

By Press TV Global Research, March 05, 2013 An activist tells Press TV that the video-sharing site, Youtube, deliberately takes down videos depicting the war crimes perpetrated by the FSA terrorists against the people of Syria but ironically provides those terrorists with space to wage their propaganda war against the Syrian nation. The move comes as the Youtube owners refused to take down an insulting video against the prophet of Islam [PBUH] claiming that taking down such an insulting video would be against the principles of freedom of speech. Press TV has conducted an interview with Mimi Laham, activist from the Persian Gulf littoral city of Dubai to shed more light on the topic of the program. What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview. Press TV: Ms. Laham let us look at what do you think is the main reason for what we are seeing as a censorship, this attack on freedom of speech and dealing with the Iranian media? Laham: I think, you, know, it is really across the board, any media that is taking an anti-Syrian insurgent line, in particular, is getting harassed. Your journalist Maya Nasser was, actually, assassinated in Syria and of course there are too many journalists who mentioned that have experienced kidnapping and execution at the hands of the insurgents in order to suppress their word of decent against insurgency and even Youtube has been taking down many anti-Syrian channels that have been documenting the war crimes of the FSA in Syria, the FSA being the Syrian insurgents. I mean I have a play list of 60 videos that documented the war crimes and 30 of those videos are now gone along with their channels and this was within six months. Ironically Youtube publicly apologized for mistakenly shutting down a pro-rebel channel and reinstated that channel. That channel being the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. So there is a clear double standard here. Press TV: Have you been given an explanation by Youtube why your videos have been taken down? Laham: Well, for one thing, one of the videos taken down was accused of copyright infringement but it was a video of a security mercenary firm Aegis gunning down civilians in Iraq. Now this Aegis, which is similar to Blackwater but the British version, claimed copyright on a video of themselves shooting civilians in Iraq and Youtube accepted this as an excuse to take down the video and flag my channel and this is one excuse. Another flag was given to me because I posted videos of war crimes conducted by the FSA and they said that, you know, this is shocking, do they took it down even though their guideline says that you should not remove videos that document war crimes. So clearly Youtube is taking part in covering up war crimes for mercenary firms such as Aegis and for the Syrian insurgents. Press TV: There is only a minute left Ms. Laham, but I want to look at in general, what do you think can be done with these attacks of freedom of speech? Because as you said, for example like Youtube, obviously you were saying that they are taking these measures against you, so what other forms can be used? We see for the Iranian TV the satellite operators are taking off. So what is the answer in order to make sure that free speech is out there and that we can stop them from stopping the free speech? Laham: Well I just want to say that Youtube itself has admitted that it takes down videos upon request of governments internationally, in particular the US and the UK. So they admit that they censor videos. Now what some people have been doing is that just pumping out videos on many, many channels at a time this is something that Syriantube does and in case one gets shut down, there will be like hundreds to take its place. Another way is to set up your own website and put your own videos up there, as Press TV has done, and we need an alternative to Youtube and there is a new one coming out called Truetube but what we really need is something that is not controlled and that is a difficult feat but I think that is what the world is needing.

Obama Administration Says President Can Use Lethal Force Against Americans on US Soil Source: Mother Jones Yes, the president does have the authority to use military force against American citizens on US soil—but only in "an extraordinary circumstance," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) Tuesday. "The U.S. Attorney General's refusal to rule out the possibility of drone strikes on American citizens and on American soil is more than frightening," Paul said Tuesday. "It is an affront the constitutional due process rights of all Americans." Last month, Paul threatened to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan, Obama's pick to head the CIA, "until he answers the question of whether or not the President can kill American citizens through the drone strike program on U.S. soil." Tuesday, Brennan told Paul that "the agency I have been nominated to lead does not conduct lethal operations inside the United States—nor does it have any authority to do so." Brennan said that the Justice Department would answer Paul's question about whether Americans could be targeted for lethal strikes on US soil. Holder's answer was more detailed, however, stating that under certain circumstances, the president would have the authority to order lethal attacks on American citizens. The two possible examples of such "extraordinary" circumstances were the attack on Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. An American president order the use of lethal military force inside the US is "entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no president will ever have to confront," Holder wrote. Read more: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/03/obama-admin-says-it-can-use-lethal-force-against-americans-us-soil

Bank Of America Is Spying On Private Citizens Anonymous reveals Bank of America secrets. CNET BusInsider Last week Par:AnoIA, a group linked to Anonymous, released 14 GB of data implicating Bank of America and others in a massive spying operation. The data dump reveals the bank employed security firms to spy on hackers, social activists and numerous other private citizens across the web. A statement issued Feb. 27 indicates the data contains detailed information about hundreds of thousands of executives at companies around the world, including Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, TEKSystems and BofA. The group says the data was not acquired during a hack but rather was retrieved from an unsecured server in Israel. The documents leaked by Anonymous include "intelligence" reports allegedly compiled by TEKSystems on "daily cyber threats" from around the world and Internet activity related to the Occupy Wall Street movement. The data dump comes three weeks after the Federal Reserve confirmed that one of its internal Web sites had been hacked. --- The group says that Bank of America employed private IT firms such as TEKsystems to spy on hacker forums and social media networks. Special software was created to use keywords to xxxxx the internet in order to judge sentiment about BoA among other things. According to the website of TEKsystems, We have the largest global network of credentialed IT professionals to lead and support your engagements. With over 100 locations, nearly 3,500 employees throughout North America, Europe and Asia and an IT consultant network that encompasses over 81% of the IT workforce, we deploy more than 80,000 technical professionals annually to support critical engagements at more than 6,000 client sites, including 82% of the Fortune 500. --- Related Story from Another Group within Anonymous ANONYMOUS Strikes Wall Street CEOs, Releases Data The leak is associated with Operation Wall Street, a new protest launched by Anonymous hacktivists against the US government, Wall Street and the financial services industry. The operation seeks justice for those “who have lost their homes and had their lives destroyed” by “the crimes of Goldman Sachs and other firms.”

IN AND OUT IN AND OUT !! THAT'S WHAT A TERRORIST HAMBURGER IS ALL ABOUT Late October 1990-October 1992: ’Blind Sheikh’ Able to Repeatedly Leave and Reenter US Despite Being on Watch List In July 1990, the “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, was mysteriously able to enter the US and remain there despite being a well known public figure and being on a watch list for three years (see July 1990). In late October 1990, he travels to London, so he is out of the US when one of his followers assassinates the Zionist rabbi Meir Kahane on November 5, 1990 (see November 5, 1990). He returns to the US in mid-November under the name “Omar Ahmed Rahman” and again has no trouble getting back in despite still being on the watch list. [Washington Post, 7/13/1993] The State Department revokes his US visa on November 17 after the FBI informs it that he is in the US. [New York Times, 12/16/1990] In December 1990, Abdul-Rahman leaves the US again to attend an Islamic conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. He returns nine days later and again has no trouble reentering, despite not even having a US visa at this point. [Washington Post, 7/13/1993] ====================== On December 16, 1990, the New York Times publishes an article titled, “Islamic Leader on US Terrorist List Is in Brooklyn,” which makes his presence in the US publicly known. The Immigration and Nationalization Service (INS) is said to be investigating why he has not been deported already. [New York Times, 12/16/1990] Yet in April 1991, the INS approves his application for permanent residence. He then leaves the US again in June 1991 to go on the religious hajj to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and returns on July 31, 1991. INS officials identify him coming in, but let him in anyway. [New York Times, 4/24/1993; Washington Post, 7/13/1993] In June 1992, his application for political asylum will be turned down and his permanent residence visa revoked. But INS hearings on his asylum bid are repeatedly delayed and still have not taken place when the WTC is bombed in February 1993 (see February 26, 1993). [Lance, 2003, pp. 105-106] Abdul-Rahman then goes to Canada around October 1992 and returns to the US yet again. The US and Canada claim to have no documentation on his travel there, but numerous witnesses in Canada see him pray and lecture there. Representative Charles Schumer (D-NY) says, “Here they spent all this time trying to get him out. He goes to Canada and gives them the perfect reason to exclude him and they don’t.” After the WTC bombing, the US could detain him pending his deportation hearing but chooses not to, saying it would be too costly to pay for his medical bills. [New York Times, 4/24/1993] Abdul-Rahman will be involved in the follow up “Landmarks” plot (see June 24, 1993) before finally being arrested later in 1993. It will later be alleged that he was protected by the CIA. In 1995, the New York Times will comment that the link between Abdul-Rahman and the CIA “is a tie that remains muddy.” [New York Times, 10/2/1995] ########################### The CIA has remained tight-lipped about their involvement in Al-Kifah but given the timing of its development, its location and the fact that their agents posing as consular officials arranged the visas that allowed the Blind Sheikh to enter the US, it is obvious that they were at the least happy about Rahman’s growing influence there. In April and May 1989 US officials secretly met with followers of the Blind Sheikh in Egypt, including a lawyer representing the group. The cables recording these meetings were signed by Frank Wisner — the US ambassador to Egypt and the son of the veteran of CIA black ops. A year later the Blind Sheikh moved to New York permanently. #######################

JUST THROWING IN RE FOREKNOWLEDGE >>>ITS A HABIT OF MODUS OPERANDI Before September 11, 2001: FBI Squad Builds Antenna to Listen in on KSM’s Phone Calls I-49, a squad of FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors that began focusing on bin Laden in 1996 (see January 1996), is upset that the NSA is not sharing its monitoring of the phone calls of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM). The squad builds their own antenna in Madagascar specifically to intercept KSM’s calls. [Wright, 2006, pp. 344] It has not been revealed when this antenna was built or what was learned from this surveillance. However, there have been media reports that the NSA monitored some phone calls between KSM and Mohamed Atta in the summer of 2001 (see Summer 2001). Further, US intelligence monitored a call between KSM and Atta a day before 9/11 that was the final go-ahead for the attacks (see September 10, 2001). So presumably the I-49 squad should have known about these calls as well if this antenna did what it was designed to do.

It was no accident that the sheikh got a visa and that he's still in the country," replied the agent, visibly upset. "He's here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA %5BNational Security Agency%5D, and the CIA." The agent pointed out that the sheikh had been granted a tourist visa, and later a green card, despite the fact that he was on a State Department terrorist watch-list that should have barred him from the country. He's an untouchable, concluded the agent. "I haven't seen the lone-gunman theory advocated %5Bso forcefully%5D since John F. Kennedy." These are the 3 year-old supposed recollections of the LA area domestic bomber turned informant, the reference to the NSA doesn't even make sense since it deals with signals intelligence, might it have been (if anything) NSC? How would this guy have inside information regaring the Kahane case? // end COLBY **************************************************************************************************** HUH ???? SEE THE WORD AGENT <NOT AN INFORMANT.

These are the 3 year-old supposed recollections of the LA area domestic bomber turned informant, the reference to the NSA doesn't even make sense since it deals with signals intelligence, might it have been (if anything) NSC? How would this guy have inside information regaring the Kahane case? And what evidence was there linking Rahman to Nossir at the time? According to the VV author it was the NYPD that didn't want to pry any deeper. //end Colby ++++++++++++++++++++++++ The incredible selective memory of LEN COLBY. 1996 ....1996 ......1996 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Abu Zubaydah is part of the very beginning of Al-Qaeda. British,French,CIA,NSA all monitor him. Only a clown dosent think him Al-Qaeda. It appears that Western intelligence agencies had been monitoring Zubaida’s calls as far back as 1996 (see (Mid-1996) and October 1998 and After). Late 1980s: Afghan Training Camps Forge Future Boston Al-Qaeda Cell Four men, Mohamad Kamal Elzahabi, Nabil al-Marabh, Raed Hijazi, and Bassam Kanj, meet each other in an Afghanistan training camp. All four of them take part in fighting against the Soviets. This is according to testimony by Elzahabi in 2004 (see April 16, 2004-June 25, 2004). Elzahabi will claim that while there, he met Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, later famous for allegedly attacking US soldiers in Iraq, and al-Qaeda leaders Abu Zubaida and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. This appears to be the genesis of a Boston al-Qaeda sleeper cell that will play vital roles in 9/11 and other al-Qaeda plots. The four men go their separate ways in subsequent years, but by 1998 all of them will be working as taxi drivers in Boston (see June 1995-Early 1999). [boston Globe, 6/27/2004] Late 1980s: US Intelligence Already Investigating Abu Zubaida and California Al-Qaeda Operative Khalil Deek. [source: Ali Jarekji / Reuters]In 2007, the New Yorker magazine will note, “American intelligence officials had been investigating [Khalil] Deek and [Abu] Zubaida’s activities since at least the late eighties,” but it will not explain why. Deek is a Palestinian and naturalized US citizen living in California for most of the 1990s who will later reportedly mastermind several al-Qaeda bomb plots. [New Yorker, 1/22/2007] Abu Zubaida, the nom de guerre of Saudi-born Palestinian Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein (also spelled Zein al-Abideen Muhammad Hassan) [Washington Post, 4/22/2009] , joins the Palestinian uprising in 1987, when he is only sixteen years old. He then goes to Afghanistan, presumably joins with bin Laden, and fights there before the war ends in 1989. [suskind, 2006, pp. 95] Between 1988 and 1996, Deek is apparently involved with the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), a US-based charity which the US government will later call a “front group” for the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The IAP is closely tied to the Holy Land Foundation, established near Dallas, Texas, in 1989 (see 1989), and it appears the foundation was investigated from very early on. Deek is living in Dallas that year. [Orange County Weekly, 5/31/2001] Palestinian militant activity through organizations like the IAP may explain why these two are investigated at this time, and/or the two may have engaged in other activities. Counterterrorism expert Rita Katz will later claim that the Jordanian government “knew about Deek since the early 1990s. They had a lot of interest in him. They really considered him a major terrorist figure.” [Orange County Weekly, 6/17/2004] Deek and Zubaida will later work together on a number of operations, for instance using the honey trade to ship drugs and weapons (see May 2000), and masterminding a millennium bomb plot in Jordan. [New Yorker, 1/22/2007] 1994: Al-Qaeda Helps Form Militant Training Camps in Philippines MILF forces on parade in Camp Abubakar, February 1999. [source: Romeo Gacad / AFP / Getty Images]The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a large Philippine militant group, sets up a major training camp with al-Qaeda help. According to Philippine investigators, a sprawling complex and set of camps known as Camp Abubakar is built this year in a remote part of the southern island of Mindanao. One camp within the complex called Camp Palestine trains Arabs exclusively. Another is Camp Hodeibia, and is used by Jemaah Islamiyah, the al-Qaeda-linked group based in Indonesia. [Ressa, 2003] Al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida is said to send al-Qaeda operative Omar al-Faruq with one other al-Qaeda camp instructor to help recruit and train in these camps. Al-Faruq will remain the head of al-Qaeda’s operations in Southeast Asia until his capture in 2002 (see June 5, 2002). [Time, 9/15/2002; CNN, 10/28/2002] Philipppine officials will claim that over the next few years Camp Abubakar continues to grow and over twenty other MILF camps are used and supported by al-Qaeda operatives (see February 1999). The Philippine military will raze Camp Abubakar during a brief offensive against the MILF in 2000, but the camp will be quickly rebuilt and still be used to train foreign militants. [Ressa, 2003] The Philippine government has had a series of negotiations, cease fires, and peace treaties with the MILF. The MILF has generally denied ties to al-Qaeda, but in 1999 the head of the MILF will say his group had received non-military aid from bin Laden (see February 1999). In 2003, President Bush will pledge $30 million to MILF regions of the Philippines to promote a new peace treaty with the group. [Asia Times, 10/30/2003] Mid 1995-Spring 1996: French Agent Penetrates Afghan Camps, Meets Top Al-Qaeda Managers al-Qaeda Afghan training camp. [source: Al Jazeera]A French intelligence asset called Omar Nasiri, who has previously informed on a Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) cell in Brussels (see Mid 1994-March 2, 1995), is given the task of penetrating the network of militant camps in Afghanistan. He flies to Pakistan and soon is in contact with the al-Qaeda network. He is sent to Peshawar, where he meets al-Qaeda leaders Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and Abu Zubaida. From there he is then taken to al-Libi’s Khaldan camp inside Afghanistan, where he receives physical and weapons training, as well as religious instruction. The training also includes blocks on explosives, tactics, hand-to-hand combat, surveillance, and kidnapping, and is at least partially derived from US army manuals. While at the camp he is told by Kashmiri militants that they have been trained by the Pakistani army (see (Mid 1995-Spring 1996)) and he uses money given to him by French intelligence to purchase weapons for al-Qaeda (see (Late 1995-Spring 1996)). After several months of training at Khaldan and Darunta camps, he returns to Europe via Peshawar. In Peshawar he again meets Abu Zubaida, who gives Nasiri a phone number where he can be reached and asks him to send money from Europe. Upon returning to Europe, Nasiri contacts his handler at French intelligence and tells him about the camps. [Nasiri, 2006, pp. 101-244, 253-7] June 1996: Bin Laden Meets with Pakistani Military Leaders Mushaf Ali Mir. [source: Paknews.com]According to controversial author Gerald Posner, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida meet with senior members of Pakistan’s military, including Mushaf Ali Mir, who becomes chief of Pakistan’s air force in 2000. Bin Laden moved to Afghanistan the month before, and the Pakistanis offer him protection if he allies with the Taliban. The alliance will prove successful, and bin Laden will call it “blessed by the Saudis,” who are already giving money to both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. [Posner, 2003, pp. 105-06; Time, 8/31/2003] Perhaps not coincidentally, this meeting comes only one month after a deal was reportedly made that reaffirmed Saudi support for al-Qaeda. Bin Laden is initially based in Jalalabad, which is free of Taliban control, but after the deal, he moves his base to Kandahar, which is the center of Taliban power. [Asia Times, 9/17/2003] (Mid-1996): French and British Intelligence Listen in on Al-Qaeda Communications, Asset Relays Messages for Al-Qaeda Omar Nasiri, who informs on al-Qaeda for the British intelligence service MI6 and the French service Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DSGE), makes contact with al-Qaeda logistics manager Abu Zubaida using a telephone bugged by MI6. Nasiri met Abu Zubaida in Pakistan (see Mid 1995-Spring 1996). Usually, when Nasiri calls the number, he talks to one of Abu Zubaida’s associates, but sometimes he talks to Abu Zubaida himself. The phone is used to relay messages between Abu Zubaida in Pakistan and al-Qaeda representatives in London, in particular leading imam Abu Qatada. The French will apparently make great use of this information (see October 1998 and After). [Nasiri, 2006, pp. 270-1, 273, 281] (Mid-1996 and After): French and British Intelligence Send Al-Qaeda $3,000 The British intelligence service MI6 and the French service Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) send al-Qaeda $3,000 though one of their assets, Omar Nasiri, who has penetrated al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan and its network in London (see Mid 1995-Spring 1996 and Summer 1996-August 1998). The money is sent to al-Qaeda logistics manager Abu Zubaida, whose phone calls they are listening to with Nasiri’s help (see (Mid-1996)). The money is wired to a Pakistani bank account whose number Abu Zubaida has given to Nasiri in three instalments of $1,000. At first, the British and French do not want to send the money, but Nasiri tells them it is essential for his cover and that Zubaida expects it, so they provide it. [Nasiri, 2006, pp. 271-3] May 22, 1997: Spanish Intelligence Learns Madrid Cell Is Sending Recuits to Al-Qaeda Training Camps, Takes No Action Spanish intelligence has been monitoring an al-Qaeda cell based in Madrid led by Barakat Yarkas (see 1995 and After), and they are aware that a leader of the cell named Chej Salah left Spain in late 1995 and moved to Peshawar, Pakistan. He serves there as an al-Qaeda talent scout, sending the most promising recruits to a training camp in Afghanistan. Yarkas’s cell is recruiting youths in Spanish mosques to join al-Qaeda. On May 22, 1997, the Spanish monitor a phone call in which Salah tells Yarkas that the recruits he is sending are being taken care of by al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida. Despite such knowledge, the Spanish government will not arrest any members of the Madrid cell until after 9/11. This is according to a book by Jose María Irujo, lead investigative journalist for the Spanish newspaper El Pais. [irujo, 2005, pp. 23-40] 1998-2001: Pakistani ISI Allegedly Protects Al-Qaeda Leader Zubaida from Capture By 1997, al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida is living in Peshawar, Pakistan, near the border to Afghanistan. He runs an al-Qaeda guest house there called the House of Martyrs, where all foreign recruits are interviewed before being sent to Afghanistan. As a result, Zubaida soon knows the names of thousands of al-Qaeda recruits. [Rashid, 2008, pp. 224-225] In 2006, author Gerald Posner will write that beginning in 1998, Pakistan receives several requests from US intelligence to track down Zubaida. Beginning by October 1998, the US and other countries have been monitoring Zubaida’s phone calls (see October 1998 and After), and will continue to do so through the 9/11 attacks (see Early September 2001 and October 8, 2001). But according to Posner, “Pakistan’s agency, the ISI, had claimed to have made several failed attempts, but few in the US believe they did more before September 11 than file away the request and possibly at times even warn Zubaida of the Americans’ interest.” [Posner, 2003, pp. 184] In 2008, Pakistani journalist and regional expert Ahmed Rashid will repeat the gist of Posner’s allegations, and further explain that Zubaida directly worked with the ISI. Some of the militants he directs to al-Qaeda camps are militants sent by the ISI to fight in Kashmir, a region disputed between India and Pakistan. Presumably, handing Zubaida to the US could hinder Pakistan’s covert war against India in Kashmir. [Rashid, 2008, pp. 224-225] After Zubaida is arrested in 2002, he allegedly will divulge that he has personal contacts with high-ranking officials in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (see Early April 2002). 1998-December 11, 1999: Key Al-Qaeda Operative Working with Zubaida Allegedly Monitored in Pakistan Khalil Deek, an al-Qaeda operative living in California for most of the 1990s, moves to Peshawar, Pakistan, around this time. Al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida is also operating from the same town and is a close associate of Deek. In fact, US intelligence have been investigating the two of them since the late 1980s (see Late 1980s). It appears Deek is under surveillance by this time. The Wall Street Journal will claim, “US intelligence officials had tracked the onetime California resident for years before they had tied him, [in December 1999], to [an] alleged Jordanian plot.” [Wall Street Journal, 3/8/2000] A 2005 book by counterterrorism expert Jean-Charles Brisard will similarly relate that by the spring of 1999, “For several months the Jordanian government, with the help of the American FBI, had been stepping up pressure on [Pakistan] to arrest [Deek].” [brisard, 2005, pp. 65] Deek lives in a rented villa surrounded by high walls. He runs a small computer school and repair shop. He helps encrypt al-Qaeda’s Internet communications. He exports drums of local honey to the Middle East. Deek and Zubaida apparently use the honey to hide the shipment of drugs and weapons (see May 2000). [Wall Street Journal, 3/8/2000; Orange County Weekly, 6/15/2006] Deek also creates an electronic version of an al-Qaeda terrorist manual known as the Encyclopedia of Afghan Jihad. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004] “US authorities say his house near the Afghan border also served as a way station for recruits heading in and out of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.” [Wall Street Journal, 3/8/2000] Zubaida also screens recruits and directs them to training camps in Afghanistan. Deek and Zubaida share a Peshawar bank account. [Orange County Weekly, 6/15/2006] It appears that Western intelligence agencies are monitoring Zubaida’s phone calls from 1998, if not earlier (see October 1998 and After and (Mid-1996)). Deek will be arrested on December 11, 1999, quickly deported to Jordan, and then released in 2001 (see December 11, 1999). It will later be alleged that Deek was a mole for the Jordanian government all along (see Shortly After December 11, 1999). : Taliban and Saudis Meet and Purportedly Make a Deal Taliban officials allegedly meet with Prince Turki al-Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence, to continue talks concerning the Taliban’s ouster of bin Laden from Afghanistan. Reports on the location of this meeting, and the deal under discussion differ. According to some reports, including documents exposed in a later lawsuit, this meeting takes place in Kandahar. Those present include Prince Turki al-Faisal, head of Saudi Arabian intelligence, Taliban leaders, senior officers from the ISI, and bin Laden. According to these reports, Saudi Arabia agrees to give the Taliban and Pakistan “several hundred millions” of dollars, and in return, bin Laden promises no attacks against Saudi Arabia. The Saudis also agree to ensure that requests for the extradition of al-Qaeda members will be blocked and promise to block demands by other countries to close down bin Laden’s Afghan training camps. Saudi Arabia had previously given money to the Taliban and bribe money to bin Laden, but this ups the ante. [sunday Times (London), 8/25/2002] A few weeks after the meeting, Prince Turki sends 400 new pickup trucks to the Taliban. At least $200 million follow. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9/23/2001; New York Post, 8/25/2002] Controversial author Gerald Posner gives a similar account said to come from high US government officials, and adds that al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida also attends the meeting. [Posner, 2003, pp. 189-90] Note that reports of this meeting seemingly contradict reports of a meeting the month before between Turki and the Taliban, in which the Taliban agreed to get rid of bin Laden (see June 1998). October 1998 and After: Multiple Countries Monitor Zubaida’s Phone Calls Counterterrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna will later write that after the US embassy bombings (see 10:35-10:39 a.m., August 7, 1998), surveillance of al-Qaeda is stepped up around the world. “One intelligence officer attached to the French embassy in Islamabad, [Pakistan], urged his counterparts in foreign missions in Pakistan to detail the recipients of phone calls made by… al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida, then living in Peshawar, to individuals in their various countries.” As a result, “several governments [launch] investigations of their own.” [Gunaratna, 2003, pp. 245] A close associate of Zubaida in Peshawar at this time is Khalil Deek, who is actually a mole for the Jordanian government (see 1998-December 11, 1999). One such investigation is launched by the Philippine government on October 16, 1998, after being asked by French intelligence to gather intelligence on people in the Philippines in contact with Zubaida. Code named CoPlan Pink Poppy, the investigation reveals connections between al-Qaeda and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a Philippine militant group. On December 16, 1999, Abdesselem Boulanouar and Zoheir Djalili, two French Algerians belonging to the Algerian al-Qaeda affiliate the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC), are arrested due to information learned from monitoring Zubaida’s calls to the Philippines. Boulanouar is arrested at an airport carrying a terrorist training manual he admitted writing for the MILF. Both men also are arrested carrying explosive devices. French intelligence says Boulanouar had ties to Ahmed Ressam (see December 14, 1999), and like Ressam, may have been planning to carry out attacks at the turn of the millennium. He will be deported to France and imprisoned on terrorism related charges. CoPlan Pink Poppy will be canceled in 2000 for lack of funds. [Gulf News, 3/14/2000; Ressa, 2003, pp. 132-133; Gunaratna, 2003, pp. 245] However, while details are murky, it appears other governments continue to monitor Zubaida’s calls. Around the same time as the Philippines arrests, one militant in Jordan is even arrested while still in the middle of a phone call to Zubaida (see November 30, 1999). US intelligence will remain intensely focused on Zubaida before 9/11 (see Late March-Early April 2001 and May 30, 2001), and just days before 9/11 the NSA will monitor calls Zubaida is making to the US (see Early September 2001). It appears his calls will continue to be monitored after 9/11 as well (see October 8, 2001). Late 1998 and After: US Intelligence Still Monitors Bin Laden’s Calls after He Stops Using His Satellite Phone Shortly after an August 1998 US missile strike on Afghanistan (see August 20, 1998), bin Laden stops using his satellite phone, correctly deciding that it was being monitored by US intelligence (see Late August 1998). According to counterterrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, al-Qaeda quickly “developed a system to deceive those monitoring his calls. [but] Western security and intelligence agencies were soon able to monitor the new system, which was based on transferring international calls within safe houses in Pakistan to make them seem like domestic calls.” Other al-Qaeda leaders such as Abu Zubaida will be frequently monitored as they make calls using this new system (see October 1998 and After). Gunaratna later claims to have learned this from a confidential source in a “communications monitoring agency” in Western Europe. [Gunaratna, 2003, pp. 15-16, 3291] It is not known how long it took until al-Qaeda realized this new system was compromised, but there are accounts of bin Laden and Zubaida’s calls being monitored days before 9/11 (see Early September 2001, September 9, 2001, and Early September 2001). Late 1999-2000: Alleged CIA Informant Said to Train Six 9/11 Hijackers in Turkey Majed Moqed. [source: US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division]In 2007, the London Times will report that imprisoned al-Qaeda leader Luai Sakra claims that he trained six of the 9/11 hijackers in Turkey. Sakra allegedly had links to the CIA and Syrian intelligence before 9/11 (see 2000 and September 10, 2001) and also allegedly was in contact with 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta before 9/11 (see September 2000-July 24, 2001). According to Sakra’s account, Sakra established a training and support network for radical militants in Turkey in the mid-1990s. In the Yalova mountain resort area between the cities of Bursa and Istanbul, he trained many militants heading to fight in Chechnya and elsewhere. Sakra worked with al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida to provide forged documents enabling trainees to travel to Afghanistan and elsewhere after their training was over. According to Sakra’s lawyer, in late 1999, 9/11 hijackers Ahmed Alghamdi, Hamza Alghamdi, Saeed Alghamdi, and Nawaf Alhazmi undertook Sakra’s training program. They had been planning to go to fight in Chechnya, but Sakra recommended them to Zubaida and they went to Zubaida’s training camp in Afghanistan instead. Hijackers Majed Moqed and Satam Al Suqami also later trained with Sakra in Turkey. Sakra alleges Moqed and Al Suqami were hand-picked by al-Qaeda leaders for the 9/11 plot. Sakra claims that at one point the entire group were arrested by police in Yalova, Turkey, after their presence raised suspicions. They were interrogated for a day but released because no evidence of wrongdoing could be shown. [London Times, 11/25/2007] In early 2006, Sakra made the claim that he had helped some of the 9/11 hijackers near Bursa, but he did not give specifics. [Washington Post, 2/20/2006] While Sakra’s account cannot be corroborated, it does fit with details given in the 9/11 Commission’s final report. According to that report, after 9/11, captured al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash claimed that a number of militants trying to go to Chechnya in 1999 were unable to get there and stayed at al-Qaeda guesthouses in Turkey instead, where they were to wait to make another attempt to enter Chechnya in the summer of 2000, but they ended up going to Afghanistan instead. Bin Attash mentions nine hijackers who may have been trying to get to Chechnya in this fashion, including all the ones mentioned by Sakra. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 233] The 9/11 Commission report also mentions that most of the “muscle” hijackers trained at the Al Farooq camp, except for Al Suqami and Moqed, who trained at the Khaldan camp. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 234] Also, in early 2008, an FBI document will be released that shows Al Suqami spent almost six months in Turkey, helping to corroborate Sakra’s claims (see Late 1999-2000). November 30, 1999: Jordan Thwarts Al-Qaeda Connected Millennium Plot On December 5, 1999, a Jordanian raid discovers 71 vats of bomb making chemicals in this residence. [source: Judith Miller]Jordanian officials successfully uncover an al-Qaeda plot to blow up the Radisson Hotel in Amman, Jordan, and other sites on January 1, 2000. [PBS Frontline, 10/3/2002] The Jordanian government intercepts a call between al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida and a suspected Jordanian terrorist named Abu Hoshar. Zubaida says, “The training is over.” [New York Times, 1/15/2001] Zubaida also says, “The grooms are ready for the big wedding.” [seattle Times, 6/23/2002] This call reflects an extremely poor code system, because the FBI had already determined in the wake of the 1998 US embassy bombings that “wedding” was the al-Qaeda code word for bomb. [Miller, Stone, and Mitchell, 2002, pp. 214] Furthermore, it appears al-Qaeda fails to later change the system, because the code-name for the 9/11 attack is also “The Big Wedding.” [Chicago Tribune, 9/5/2002] Jordan arrests Hoshar while he’s still on the phone talking to Zubaida. In the next few days, 27 other suspects are charged. A Jordanian military court will initially convict 22 of them for participating in planned attacks, sentencing six of them to death, although there will be numerous appeals (see April 2000 and After). In addition to bombing the Radisson Hotel around the start of the millennium, the plan calls for suicide bombings on two border crossings with Israel and a Christian baptism site. Further attacks in Jordan are planned for later. The plotters had already stockpiled the equivalent of 16 tons of TNT, enough to flatten “entire neighborhoods.” [New York Times, 1/15/2001] Key alleged plotters include: Raed Hijazi, a US citizen who is part of a Boston al-Qaeda cell (see June 1995-Early 1999). He will be arrested and convicted in late 2000 (see September 2000 and October 2000). [New York Times, 1/15/2001] Khalid Deek, who is also a US citizen and part of an Anaheim, California al-Qaeda cell. He will be arrested in Pakistan and deported to Jordan, but strangely he will released without going to trial. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He will later be a notorious figure in the Iraq war starting in 2003. [Washington Post, 10/3/2004] Luai Sakra. The Washington Post will later say he “played a role” in the plot, though he is never charged for it. Sakra apparently is a CIA informant before 9/11, perhaps starting in 2000 (see 2000). [Washington Post, 2/20/2006] The Jordanian government will also later claim that the Al Taqwa Bank in Switzerland helped finance the network of operatives who planned the attack. The bank will be shut down shortly after 9/11 (see November 7, 2001). [Newsweek, 4/12/2004] December 11, 1999: US Citizen, Alleged Mastermind of Jordanian Bomb Plot, Is Arrested but Never Charged Khalil Deek. [source: Tawfiq Deek]Khalil Deek is arrested by police in Peshawar, Pakistan, and immediately extradited to Jordan. The Jordanian government requested the arrest after tying Deek to a millennium plot to blow up hotels in Jordan that had been broken up a few days ago (see November 30, 1999). [Orange County Weekly, 6/15/2006] Deek is a naturalized US citizen who has been part of a California al-Qaeda sleeper cell for most of the 1990s. He had been investigated by US authorities since the late 1980s (see Late 1980s, March 1993-1996, and December 14-25, 1999) but was never arrested. Deek’s computer is confiscated when he is arrested, and computer files reveal the targets of the Jordanian plot. [Cooley, 2002, pp. 33] According to contemporary press accounts, Deek, who was running a computer repair shop in Peshawar, Pakistan, had helped encrypt al-Qaeda’s Internet communications and smuggled recruits to al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Some reports identify him as a former mujaheddin fighter, a US Army veteran, and a close associate of Osama bin Laden. Articles also claim he worked closely with al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida on the Jordanian plot and other things (see May 2000, Late 1980s, and 1998-December 11, 1999). [Orange County Weekly, 6/15/2006] CNN says Deek “is believed to be the mastermind” of the Jordanian plot. [CNN, 12/17/1999] But, unlike the rest of the defendants in the Jordanian case, Deek is transferred from a maximum-security prison to a minimum-security one. He alone is not charged. He will be released in May 2001 (see May 2001). [Orange County Weekly, 6/15/2006] It will later be alleged that Deek was a Jordanian intelligence mole (see Shortly After December 11, 1999). 2000: Saeed Sheikh Works with Al-Qaeda, Establishes Dubai Base After his released from an Indian prison at the end of 1999 (see December 24-31, 1999), Saeed Sheikh stays in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for several days and meets with Taliban leader Mullah Omar. He also meets with bin Laden, who is said to call Saeed “my special son.” [Vanity Fair, 8/2002] Saeed soon has a falling out with Pakistani militant leader Maulana Masood Azhar and draws closer to al-Qaeda. Based mostly in Karachi, Pakistan, he reports to al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida. Saeed is said to “soon [become] a key figure, especially in terms of fund-raising.” [Gunaratna, 2003, pp. 286] He regularly travels to Afghanistan and helps train new al-Qaeda recruits in training camps there. [New York Times, 2/25/2002; India Today, 2/25/2002; National Post, 2/26/2002; Guardian, 7/16/2002] Saeed helps train some of the 9/11 hijackers, presumably in Afghanistan as well. [Daily Telegraph, 9/30/2001] He also helps al-Qaeda develop a secure web-based communications system. His work is generally so impressive that there is talk he could one day succeed bin Laden. [Daily Telegraph, 7/16/2002; Vanity Fair, 8/2002] Saeed forged a relationship while in Indian prison with Aftab Ansari, a Pakistani gangster who has fled to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (see November 1994-December 1999). Thanks to this connection, Sheikh is able to establish an al-Qaeda base for himself in Dubai, UAE. [Gunaratna, 2003, pp. 286] Numerous 9/11 hijackers will later move through Dubai and some of the money sent to Mohamed Atta in 2001 will come from Sheikh and Ansari through Dubai (see Early August 2001). [Guardian, 2/9/2002] At the same time Saeed is strengthening his al-Qaeda ties, he is also openly working with the Pakistani ISI (see January 1, 2000-September 11, 2001). 2000: Al-Qaeda Operative Allegedly Turns Informant for CIA and Other Intelligence Agencies Al-Qaeda operative Luai Sakra apparently begins working as an informant for the CIA, Syrian intelligence, and Turkish intelligence. Sakra, a young Syrian whose parents were Turkish, attended the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan in 1997. He developed a bond with Abu Zubaida, the al-Qaeda leader who was logistics manager for the camp. Zubaida will later be captured and interrogated by the CIA and will reportedly confirm a link with Sakra. Zubaida tasked Sakra with building up an al-Qaeda network in Turkey. In 1999, the Syrian government began hunting him for his role in a revolt in a Lebanon refugee camp. [Der Spiegel (Hamburg), 8/24/2005] The Turkish newspaper Zaman will report shortly after his capture in 2005, “Sakra has been sought by the secret services since 2000.” The CIA interrogated him twice in 2000. “Following the interrogation, the CIA offered him employment. He also received a large sum of money by the CIA. However the CIA eventually lost contact with him. Following this development, in 2000 the CIA passed intelligence about Sakra through a classified notice to Turkey, calling for the Turkish (intelligence) to capture him. [They] caught Sakra in Turkey and interrogated him.” [Zaman, 8/14/2005] Sakra was then apparently let go again. He will then move Germany and assist some of the 9/11 hijackers (see September 2000-July 24, 2001), then reveal details about the 9/11 attacks to Syrian intelligence the day before 9/11 (see September 10, 2001). He also will later claim to have trained some 9/11 hijackers in Turkey starting in late 1999 (see Late 1999-2000). In 2007, former CIA Director George Tenet will write in his book “At the Center of the Storm” that “a source we were jointly running with a Middle Eastern country went to see his foreign handler and basically told him something big was about to go down.” [Tenet, 2007, pp. 160] This is very likely a reference to Sakra, since no one else comes close to matching the description of telling a Middle Eastern government about the 9/11 attacks one day in advance, not to mention working as an informant for the CIA at the same time. Tenet’s revelation strongly supports the notion that Sakra in fact accepted the CIA’s offers in 2000 and had been working with the CIA and other intelligence agencies at least through 9/11. January 2000: Musharraf Unwiling to Act on Zubaida, Who Is Living Openly in Pakistan Karl Inderfurth. [source: Harikrishna Katragadda Mint]Assistant Secretary of State Karl Inderfurth, accompanied by State Department counterterrorism expert Michael Sheehan, visits Pakistan, shortly after Pervez Musharraf took power in a coup (see October 12, 1999). Inderfurth meets with Musharraf, and is disappointed with Musharraf’s reluctance to take any action against al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida is living openly in the Pakistani town of Peshawar, and the previous month was implicated in an attempted bomb plot in Jordan (see November 30, 1999). A number of intelligence agencies are monitoring Zubaida’s communications (see October 1998 and After), and one of his top aides, Khalil Deek, appears to be a Jordanian intelligence mole (see Shortly After December 11, 1999). There are allegations that the Pakistani ISI intelligence agency has been protecting Zubaida (see 1998-2001). Musharraf indicates to Inderfurth that he is unwilling to act on US intelligence about Zubaida. [Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 295] US ambassador to Pakistan William Milam will later say: “The Pakistanis told us they could not find him, even though everyone knew where he was. The ISI just turned a blind eye to his activities.” In fact, there is evidence Zubaida was working with the ISI, helping them vet and train militants to later fight in the disputed region of Kashmir (see 1998-2001). [Rashid, 2008, pp. 48] Musharraf also tells Inderfurth that he is unwilling to support any program to capture Osama bin Laden, as his predecessor, Nawaz Sharif, had been willing to do (see October 1999). And asked to pressure the Taliban, Musharraf sends ISI Director Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed to meet Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Mahmood is well known to be a supporter of the Taliban, so his visit is considered an empty gesture. [Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 295] Robert Einhorn, a specialist on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Clinton administration, does not go on the trip. Inderfurth will later say Einhorn’s absence showed a lack of interest by the administration in non-proliferation: “The fact that Mike [sheehan] was included and Bob left out showed our priorities at that time. Our agenda was counterterrorism, al-Qaeda, and democracy. We had somehow divorced these from the nuclear threat and A. Q. Khan.” [Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 292] : Suspicious Behavior of Flight School Student Leads to Arizona FBI Investigation Zacaria Soubra. [source: Public domain]In early April 2000, Arizona FBI agent Ken Williams gets a tip that makes him suspicious that some flight students might be Islamic militants. Williams will begin an investigation based on this tip that will lead to his “Phoenix memo” warning about suspect Middle Easterners training in Arizona flight schools (see July 10, 2001) [New York Times, 6/19/2002] It appears that Lebanese flight school student Zacaria Soubra has been seen at a shooting range with Abu Mujahid, a white American Muslim who had fought in the Balkans and the Middle East. [Los Angeles Times, 10/28/2001; Arizona Monthly, 11/2004] Abu Mujahid appears to match Aukai Collins, a white American Muslim who had fought in the Balkans and the Middle East, who also goes by the name Abu Mujahid, and is an FBI informant spying on the Muslim community in the area at the time (see 1998). Collins also claims to have been the informant referred to in the Phoenix memo, which again suggests that Collins was the one at the shooting range with Soubra. [salon, 10/17/2002] On April 7, Williams appears at Soubra’s apartment and interviews him. Soubra acts defiant, and tells Williams that he considers the US government and military legitimate targets of Islam. He has photographs of bin Laden on the walls. Williams runs a check on the license plate of Soubra’s car and discovers the car is actually owned by a suspected militant with explosives and car bomb training in Afghanistan who had been held for attempting to enter an airplane cockpit the year before (see November 1999-August 2001). [Graham and Nussbaum, 2004, pp. 43-44] On April 17, Williams starts a formal investigation into Soubra. [Arizona Republic, 7/24/2003] Williams will be reassigned to work on an arson case and will not be able to get back to work on the Soubra investigation until June 2001 (see April 2000-June 2001). He will release the Phoenix memo one month later. After 9/11, some US officials will suspect Soubra had ties to terrorism. For instance, in 2003, an unnamed official will claim, “Soubra was involved in terrorist-supporting activities, facilitating shelter and employment for people… involved with al-Qaeda.” For a time, he and hijacker Hani Hanjour attend the same mosque, though there is no evidence they ever meet. Soubra’s roommate at the time of Williams’ interview is Ghassan al-Sharbi. In 2002, al-Sharbi will be arrested in Pakistan with al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida. While Williams will focus on Soubra, al-Sharbi will also be a target of his memo. [Los Angeles Times, 1/24/2003] In 2004, Soubra will be deported to Lebanon after being held for two years. He will deny any connection to Hanjour or terrorism. [Arizona Republic, 5/2/2004] Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the leader of the British militant group Al-Muhajiroun, will later admit that Soubra was the leader of Al-Muhajiroun’s branch in Arizona. [Time, 5/27/2002] May 2000: CIA Details Al-Qaeda Using Honey Trade to Move Drugs and Weapons, but No Action Taken Until After 9/11 A secret CIA report details al-Qaeda’s use of the honey trade to generate income and secretly move weapons, drugs, and operatives around the world. The CIA had been gathering information and monitoring some honey stores for almost two years before the study. Bin Laden is believed to control a number of retail honey shops in various countries, especially in Sudan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda leaders Abu Zubaida and Khalil Deek, an American citizen, are said to be particularly tied to the honey trade. One US official will later say, “The smell and consistency of the honey makes it easy to hide weapons and drugs in the shipments. Inspectors don’t want to inspect that product. It’s too messy.” But although a number of companies dealing in honey are tied to al-Qaeda (and sometimes to Islamic Jihad), the US will not make any move to freeze the assets of these companies until after 9/11. [New York Times, 10/11/2001] Counterterrorism expert Steven Emerson will later claim Deek was “running an underground railroad in the Middle East for terrorists, shuttling them to different countries,” which would fit with his alleged role in the honey network. [LA Weekly, 9/15/2005] Late March-Early April 2001: CIA Warns Al-Qaeda Leader Zubaida Planning an Attack The CIA issues repeated warnings that al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida may be planning an attack for the near future. One report cites a source indicating an attack on Israel, Saudi Arabia, or India. At this time, the CIA believes Zubaida was a major figure in the Millennium plots (see May 30, 2001). Counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke relays these reports to National Security Adviser Rice. She is also briefed on Zubaida’s activities and the CIA’s efforts to locate him. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 255; US District Court of Eastern Virginia, 5/4/2006, pp. 1 ] April 19-20, 2001: President Bush Warned ‘Bin Laden Planning Multiple Operations’ On April 19, 2001, the interagency Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) chaired by counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke discusses recent reports that al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida is planning an attack. The next day, a Senior Executive Intelligence Brief (SEIB) with the title “Bin Laden Planning Multiple Operations” is sent to top White House officials. The New York Times will later report that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were among those who received this warning. Since SEIBs are usually based on previous days’ President Daily Briefings, President Bush probably learned about this report on April 19 (see January 20-September 10, 2001). [New York Times, 4/18/2004; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 255; US District Court of Eastern Virginia, 5/4/2006, pp. 2 ] May 2001: Report Warns of Al-Qaeda Infiltration from Canada US intelligence obtains information that al-Qaeda is planning to infiltrate the US from Canada and carry out an operation using high explosives. The report does not say exactly where, when, or how an attack might occur. Two months later, the information is shared with the FBI, the INS, the US Customs Service, and the State Department, and it will be shared with President Bush in August. [uS Congress, 9/18/2002; Washington Post, 9/19/2002] This information could come from captured al-Qaeda operative Ahmed Ressam, who warns around this month that al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida has been seeking Canadian passports as part of a plot to attack the US, possibly by planting explosives in several US cities (see May 30, 2001 and May 2001). [Calgary Herald, 4/3/2002] Entity Tags: US Customs Service, George W. Bush, US Department of State, US Immigration and Naturalization Service, Ahmed Ressam, Al-Qaeda, Abu Zubaida, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline May 2001: CIA Learns Bin Laden Associates Are Heading to US, Preparing for Martyrdom The Washington Post will later report, “In May 2001, the CIA learned supporters of bin Laden were planning to infiltrate the United States; that seven were on their way to the United States, Canada and Britain; that his key operatives ‘were disappearing while others were preparing for martyrdom,’ and that bin Laden associates ‘were planning attacks in the United States with explosives.’” [uS Congress, 9/18/2002; Washington Post, 9/19/2002] This information may be related to a warning given by captured al-Qaeda operative Ahmed Ressam this month that al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida is seeking Canadian passports for himself and five other top militants in order to plant explosives in US cities (see May 30, 2001 and May 2001). [Calgary Herald, 4/3/2002] It is not known if the seven traveling to the US, Canada, and Britain refer to any of the 9/11 hijackers, but 11 of the hijackers travel to the US in May and June (see April 23-June 29, 2001), stopping in Britain along the way (see January-June 2001). Investigators will later say that they are not sure if the aliases Zubaida wanted on the Canadian passports could have been used by some of the 9/11 hijackers. [Calgary Herald, 4/3/2002] Entity Tags: Abu Zubaida, Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, Central Intelligence Agency, Ahmed Ressam Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, 9/11 Timeline May 2001: President Bush, Who Has Yet to Take Any Action Against Al-Qaeda, Is Tired of ‘Swatting at Flies’ It is claimed that after a routine briefing by CIA Director Tenet to President Bush regarding the hunt for al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida, Bush complains to National Security Adviser Rice that he is tired of “swatting at flies” and wants a comprehensive plan for attacking terrorism. Counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke already has such a plan, but it has been mired in bureaucratic deadlock since January. After this, progress remains slow. [Time, 8/4/2002; 9/11 Commission, 3/24/2004] According to Vanity Fair, when 9/11 commissioner Bob Kerrey asked Rice in 2004 exactly what flies Bush swatted before 9/11, “she fumbled embarrassingly for an answer.” [Vanity Fair, 11/2004] Entity Tags: Richard A. Clarke, Condoleezza Rice, Abu Zubaida, George W. Bush, George J. Tenet Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, 9/11 Timeline May 29, 2001: Counterterrorism ‘Tsar’ Clarke Asks for More to Be Done to Stop Expected Al-Qaeda Attacks Counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke suggests to National Security Adviser Rice that she ask CIA Director George Tenet what more the US can do to stop al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida from launching “a series of major terrorist attacks.” It is believed these attacks will probably be directed at Israeli targets, but possibly on US facilities. Clarke writes to Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, “When these attacks occur, as they likely will, we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them.” [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 256] Entity Tags: George J. Tenet, Richard A. Clarke, Abu Zubaida, Stephen J. Hadley, Condoleezza Rice Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline May 30, 2001: FBI Is Warned of Major Al-Qaeda Operation in the US Involving Hijackings, Explosives, and/or New York City Ahmed Ressam as pictured in his Canadian passport. [source: FBI]Ahmed Ressam is convicted in the spring of 2001 for attempting to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport (see December 14, 1999). Facing the likelihood of life in prison, he starts cooperating with authorities in an attempt to reduce his sentence. On this day, he details his experiences in al-Qaeda training camps and his many dealings with top al-Qaeda deputy Abu Zubaida. According to FBI notes from Ressam’s interrogation, Zubaida asked Ressam to send him six original Canadian passports to help Zubaida “get people to America” (see May 2001 and May 2001). Zubaida “wanted an operation in the US” and talked about the need to get explosives into the US for this operation, but Ressam makes it clear this was a separate plot from the one he was involved with. Notes from this day further explain that Ressam doesn’t know if any explosives made it into the US because once an operation is initiated, operators are not supposed to talk about it to anyone. [Calgary Herald, 4/3/2002; Newsweek, 4/28/2005] Zubaida told this to Ressam in 1999, but also indicated that he is willing to wait a year or more to make sure the plot comes to fruition successfully. [Tenet, 2007, pp. 146] Similarity to 9/11 Attacks - There’s no concrete evidence that Ressam knows any detail of the 9/11 attacks. [Newsweek, 4/28/2005] However, Fox News will later report that roughly around this time Ressam testifies “that attack plans, including hijackings and attacks on New York City targets, [are] ongoing.” [Fox News, 5/17/2002] Questioned shortly after 9/11, Ressam will point out that given what he’s already told his US interrogators, the 9/11 attacks should not be surprising. He notes that he’d described how Zubaida talked “generally of big operations in [the] US with big impact, needing great preparation, great perseverance, and willingness to die.” Ressam had told of “plans to get people hired at airports, of blowing up airports, and airplanes.” [Newsweek, 4/28/2005] Sharing the Warning - The CIA learns of this warning in June. [Tenet, 2007, pp. 146] Ressam will repeat some of this in a public trial in July (see July 8, 2001). Apparently, the FBI also waits until July to share the information from this debriefing with most other intelligence agencies, the INS, Customs Service, and the State Department. Ressam’s warnings will first be mentioned to Bush in his now famous August 6, 2001 briefing (see August 6, 2001), but as Newsweek will note, “The information from Ressam that was contained in [bush’s] PDB [is] watered down and seem far more bland than what the Algerian terrorist was actually telling the FBI.” Zubaida’s second plot will be boiled down to one sentence in the PDB: “Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaida was planning his own US attack.” [Newsweek, 4/28/2005] May 30, 2001: CIA Leaders Warn National Security Adviser Rice about Expected Al-Qaeda Attack During a regularly scheduled weekly meeting between National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet, CIA official Richard Blee describes a “truly frightening” list of warning signs of an upcoming terrorist attack. He says that al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida is working on attack plans. CIA leaders John McLaughlin and Cofer Black are also present at this meeting, as is counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke and Mary McCarthy, a CIA officer serving as National Security Council senior director. [Tenet, 2007, pp. 145] Just the day before, Clarke suggested that Tenet and Rice discuss what could be done to stop Zubaida from launching “a series of major terrorist attacks,” so presumably this discussion is in response to that (see May 29, 2001). Tenet will later recall: “Some intelligence suggested that [Zubaida’s] plans were ready to be executed; others suggested they would not be ready for six months. The primary target appeared to be in Israel, but other US assets around the world were at risk.” Rice asks about taking the offensive against al-Qaeda and asks how bad the threat is. Black estimates it to be a seven on a one-to-10 scale, with the millennium threat at the start of 2000 ranking an eight in comparison. Clarke tells her that adequate warning notices have been issued to the appropriate US entities. [Tenet, 2007, pp. 145-146] July 10, 2001: FBI Agent Sends Memo Warning that Unusual Number of Muslim Extremists Are Learning to Fly in Arizona FBI agent Ken Williams. [source: FBI]Phoenix, Arizona, FBI agent Ken Williams sends a memorandum warning about suspicious activities involving a group of Middle Eastern men taking flight training lessons in Arizona. The memo is titled: “Zakaria Mustapha Soubra; IT-OTHER (Islamic Army of the Caucasus),” because it focuses on Zakaria Soubra, a Lebanese flight student in Prescott, Arizona, and his connection with a terror group in Chechnya that has ties to al-Qaeda. It is subtitled: “Osama bin Laden and Al-Muhjiroun supporters attending civil aviation universities/colleges in Arizona.” [Fortune, 5/22/2002; Arizona Republic, 7/24/2003] Williams’ memo is based on an investigation of Sorba that Williams had begun in 2000 (see April 2000), but he had trouble pursuing because of the low priority the Arizona FBI office gave terror investigations (see April 2000-June 2001). Additionally, Williams had been alerted to suspicions about radical militants and aircraft at least three other times (see October 1996; 1998; November 1999-August 2001). In the memo, Williams does the following: Names nine other suspect students from Pakistan, India, Kenya, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. [Die Zeit (Hamburg), 10/1/2002] Hijacker Hani Hanjour, attending flight school in Arizona in early 2001 and probably continuing into the summer of 2001 (see Summer 2001), is not one of the students, but, as explained below, it seems two of the students know him. [uS Congress, 7/24/2003, pp. 135 ; Washington Post, 7/25/2003] Notes that he interviewed some of these students, and heard some of them make hostile comments about the US. Additionally, he noticed that they were suspiciously well informed about security measures at US airports. [Die Zeit (Hamburg), 10/1/2002] Notes an increasing, “inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest” taking flight lessons in Arizona. [Die Zeit (Hamburg), 10/1/2002; US Congress, 7/24/2003, pp. 135 ] Suspects that some of the ten people he has investigated are connected to al-Qaeda. [uS Congress, 7/24/2003, pp. 135 ] One person on the list, Ghassan al Sharbi, will be arrested in Pakistan in March 2002 with al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida (see March 28, 2002). Al Sharbi attended a flight school in Prescott, Arizona. He also apparently attended the training camps in Afghanistan and swore loyalty to bin Laden in the summer of 2001. He apparently knows Hani Hanjour in Arizona (see October 1996-Late April 1999). He also is the roommate of Soubra, the main target of the memo. [Los Angeles Times, 1/24/2003; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 521] Discovers that one of them was communicating through an intermediary with Abu Zubaida. This apparently is a reference to Hamed al Sulami, who had been telephoning a Saudi imam known to be Zubaida’s spiritual advisor. Al Sulami is an acquaintance of Hanjour in Arizona (see October 1996-Late April 1999). [Mercury News (San Jose), 5/23/2002; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 520-521, 529] Discusses connections between several of the students and a radical group called Al-Muhajiroun. [Mercury News (San Jose), 5/23/2002] This group supported bin Laden, and issued a fatwa, or call to arms, that included airports on a list of acceptable terror targets. [Associated Press, 5/22/2002] Soubra, the main focus of the memo, is a member of Al-Muhajiroun and an outspoken radical. He met with Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the leader of Al-Muhajiroun in Britain, and started an Arizona chapter of the organization. After 9/11, some US officials will suspect that Soubra has ties to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. He will be held two years, then deported to Lebanon in 2004. [Los Angeles Times, 10/28/2001; Los Angeles Times, 1/24/2003; Arizona Republic, 5/2/2004; Arizona Monthly, 11/2004] Though Williams doesn’t include it in his memo, in the summer of 1998, Bakri publicized a fax sent by bin Laden to him that listed al-Qaeda’s four objectives in fighting the US. The first objective was “bring down their airliners.” (see Summer 1998). [Los Angeles Times, 10/28/2001] Warns of a possible “effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the US to attend civil aviation universities and colleges” [Fortune, 5/22/2002] , so they can later hijack aircraft. [Die Zeit (Hamburg), 10/1/2002] Recommends that the “FBI should accumulate a listing of civil aviation universities and colleges around the country. FBI field offices with these types of schools in their area should establish appropriate liaison. FBI [headquarters] should discuss this matter with other elements of the US intelligence community and task the community for any information that supports Phoenix’s suspicions.” [Arizona Republic, 7/24/2003] (The FBI has already done this, but because of poor FBI communications, Williams is not aware of the report.) Recommends that the FBI ask the State Department to provide visa data on flight school students from Middle Eastern countries, which will facilitate FBI tracking efforts. [New York Times, 5/4/2002] The memo is addressed to the following FBI Agents: Dave Frasca, chief of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) at FBI headquarters; Elizabeth Harvey Matson, Mark Connor and Fred Stremmel, Intelligence Operations Specialists in the RFU; Rod Middleton, acting chief of the Usama bin Laden Unit (UBLU); Jennifer Maitner, an Intelligence Operations Specialist in the UBLU; Jack Cloonan, an agent on the New York FBI’s bin Laden unit, the I-49 squad; (see January 1996 and Spring 2000). Michael S. Butsch, an agent on another New York FBI squad dealing with other Sunni terrorists. [Federal Bureau of Investigation, 7/10/2001 ; US Congress, 7/24/2003, pp. 135 ] However, the memo is not uploaded into the FBI’s information system until the end of the month and is apparently not received by all these people (see July 27, 2001 and after). Williams also shares some concerns with the CIA (see (July 27, 2001)). [Mercury News (San Jose), 5/23/2002] One anonymous government official who has seen the memo says, “This was as actionable a memo as could have been written by anyone.” [insight, 5/27/2002] However, the memo is merely marked “routine,” rather than “urgent.” It is generally ignored, not shared with other FBI offices, and the recommendations are not taken. One colleague in New York replies at the time that the memo is “speculative and not very significant.” [Die Zeit (Hamburg), 10/1/2002; US Congress, 7/24/2003, pp. 135 ] Williams is unaware of many FBI investigations and leads that could have given weight to his memo. Authorities later claim that Williams was only pursuing a hunch, but one familiar with classified information says, “This was not a vague hunch. He was doing a case on these guys.” [Mercury News (San Jose), 5/23/2002] August 6, 2001: Bush Receives Briefing Titled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US’ President Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch on August 6, 2001. Advisors wait with classified briefings. [source: White House]President Bush receives a classified presidential daily briefing (PDB) at his Crawford, Texas ranch indicating that Osama bin Laden might be planning to hijack commercial airliners. The PDB provided to him is entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” The entire briefing focuses on the possibility of terrorist attacks inside the US. [New York Times, 5/15/2002; Newsweek, 5/27/2002] The analysts who drafted the briefing will say that they drafted it on the CIA’s initiative (see July 13, 2004), whereas in 2004 Bush will state that he requested a briefing on the topic due to threats relating to a conference in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001, where Western intelligence agencies believed Osama bin Laden was involved in a plot to crash an airplane into a building to kill Bush and other leaders (see April 13, 2004). The analysts will later explain that they saw it as an opportunity to convey that the threat of an al-Qaeda attack in the US was both current and serious. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 260] The existence of this briefing is kept secret, until it is leaked in May 2002, causing a storm of controversy (see May 15, 2002). While National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will claim the memo is only one and a half pages long, other accounts state it is 11 1/2 pages instead of the usual two or three. [New York Times, 5/15/2002; Newsweek, 5/27/2002; Die Zeit (Hamburg), 10/1/2002] A page and a half of the contents will be released on April 10, 2004; this reportedly is the full content of the briefing. [Washington Post, 4/10/2004] The briefing, as released, states as follows (note that the spelling of certain words are corrected and links have been added): Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US (see December 1, 1998). Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America” (see May 26, 1998). After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a -REDACTED-service (see December 21, 1998). An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told -REDACTED- service at the same time that bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike. The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of bin Laden’s first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself (see December 14, 1999), but that bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaida encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaida was planning his own US attack (see Late March-Early April 2001 and May 30, 2001). Ressam says bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation. Although bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 (see 10:35-10:39 a.m., August 7, 1998) demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Laden associates surveyed our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993 (see Late 1993-Late 1994), and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997. Al-Qaeda members—including some who are US citizens—have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks (see January 25, 2001). Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our embassies in East Africa were US citizens (see September 15, 1998), and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s (see November 1989 and September 10, 1998). A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks (see October-November 1998). “We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [REDACTED] service in 1998 saying that bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of ‘Blind Sheikh’ Omar Abdul-Rahman and other US-held extremists” (see 1998, December 4, 1998, and May 23, 2001). [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 223] According to the Washington Post, this information came from a British service. [Washington Post, 5/18/2002] Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York (see May 30, 2001). The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the US that it considers bin Laden-related (see August 6, 2001). CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group or bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives (see May 16-17, 2001). [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 223] In retrospect, the briefing is remarkable for the many warnings that apparently are not included (see for instance, from the summer of 2001 prior to August alone: May 2001, June 2001, June 12, 2001, June 19, 2001, Late Summer 2001, July 2001, July 16, 2001, Late July 2001, Late July 2001, Summer 2001, June 30-July 1, 2001, July 10, 2001, and Early August 2001). According to one account, after the PDB has been given to him, Bush tells the CIA briefer, “You’ve covered your ass now” (see August 6, 2001). Incredibly, the New York Times later reports that after being given the briefing, Bush “[breaks] off from work early and [spends] most of the day fishing.” [New York Times, 5/25/2002] In 2002 and again in 2004, National Security Adviser Rice will incorrectly claim under oath that the briefing only contained historical information from 1998 and before (see May 16, 2002 and April 8, 2004). Two apparent associates of the al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, Ismail Bin Murabit (a.k.a. Ismail Ben Mrabete) and Labed Ahmed (a.k.a. Ahmed Taleb), purchase tickets to fly to Pakistan on September 3, 2001. They will be joined on that flight by cell member Said Bahaji (see September 3-5, 2001). All three will disappear into Afghanistan thereafter. It is later discovered that Ahmed had been in e-mail contact with al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida. [Chicago Tribune, 2/25/2003] Note that these purchases occur one day before Zacarias Moussaoui’s arrest in Minnesota, suggesting the date for the 9/11 attacks was set before his arrest (see August 16, 2001). August 24, 2001: Foreign Intelligence Warns US of Al-Qaeda Plot to Attack within US The 9/11 Commission later will note that at this time, an unnamed foreign intelligence “service report that [al-Qaeda deputy leader] Abu Zubaida [is] considering mounting terrorist attacks in the United States, after postponing possible operations in Europe. No targets, timing or method of attack [are] provided.” Newsweek will suggest that most or all of this information may have come from a US debriefing of al-Qaeda bomber Ahmed Ressam in May 2001 (see May 30, 2001). Newsweek will note that it is a common occurrence for foreign intelligence agencies to “simply rereport to the CIA what it had originally learned from the FBI through separate channels.” Still, even “the multiple channels for Ressam’s warnings [do] little to change thinking within the FBI or CIA…” [Newsweek, 4/28/2005; US District Court of Eastern Virginia, 5/4/2006, pp. 6 ] However, it is possible the information could be more than a mirror of what Ressam said, since a number of Western intelligence agencies are monitoring Zubaida’s phone calls before 9/11 (see October 1998 and After). 2001: NSA Intercepts Phone Calls from Al-Qaeda Leader Zubaida to the US The NSA intercepts “multiple phone calls from Abu Zubaida, bin Laden’s chief of operations, to the United States.” The timing and information contained in these intercepted phone calls has not been disclosed. [ABC News, 2/18/2002] In 2007, author and former CIA officer Robert Baer will comment that “apparently, when Abu Zubaida was captured, telephone records, including calls to the United States, were found in the house he was living in. The calls stopped on September 10, and resumed on September 16 (see September 16, 2001 and After). There’s nothing in the 9/11 Commission report about any of this, and I have no idea whether the leads were run down, the evidence lost or destroyed.” [Time, 12/7/2007] US intelligence had just been warned about a week earlier that Zubaida may be planning an attack on the US (see August 24, 2001). Zubaida’s exact position within al-Qaeda is disputed; he will be captured in 2002 (see March 28, 2002). It appears that a number of Western intelligence agencies were monitoring Zubaida’s calls since at least late 1998 (see October 1998 and After), and continue monitoring his calls in the weeks after 9/11 (see October 8, 2001). September 10, 2001: NSA Intercepts: ‘The Match Begins Tomorrow’ and ‘Tomorrow Is Zero Hour’ At least two messages in Arabic are intercepted by the NSA. One states, “The match is about to begin” and the other states, “Tomorrow is zero hour.” Later reports translate the first message as, “The match begins tomorrow.” [Reuters, 9/9/2002] The messages were sent between someone in Saudi Arabia and someone in Afghanistan. The NSA will claim that they are not translated until September 12, and that even if they had been translated in time, “they gave no clues that authorities could have acted on.” [ABC News, 6/7/2002; Reuters, 6/19/2002] Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Bob Graham will later confirm that the messages were from al-Qaeda sources—a location or phone number—that made them a high priority, but that they were not from bin Laden or one of his top commanders. [Graham and Nussbaum, 2004, pp. 139] On the morning of September 12, 2001, the CIA will tell President Bush that a recently intercepted message from al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida referred to the 9/11 attacks as “zero hour,” but it is not clear if this is the same message or a different message (see September 12, 2001). These messages turn out to be only two of about 30 pre-9/11 communications from suspected al-Qaeda operatives or other militants referring to an imminent event. An anonymous official will say of these messages, including the “Tomorrow is zero hour” message: “You can’t dismiss any of them, but it does not tell you tomorrow is the day.” [Reuters, 9/9/2002] There will be a later attempt to explain the messages away by suggesting they referred to the killing of Afghan opposition leader Ahmed Shah Massoud the day before (see September 9, 2001). [Reuters, 10/17/2002] to President Bush Lays Out Evidence of Bin Laden Responsibility for Attacks Mike Morell. [source: Public domain]CIA Director George Tenet arrives at the White House to give the president his daily intelligence briefing. With him is Mike Morell, the president’s regular CIA briefer. They meet with Bush at 8 a.m. in the Oval Office, joined by Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. The Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) on this day is about ten to twelve pages long, and a further twelve pages includes full reports from case officers, the Directorate of Intelligence, and the National Security Agency. The PDB includes a review of the available intelligence tracing the previous day’s attacks back to Osama bin Laden and his top al-Qaeda associates. Among the evidence presented: Several reports identify Capitol Hill and the White House as intended targets of the attacks. One report says a bin Laden associate incorrectly “gave thanks for the explosion in the Congress building.” A key figure in the al-Qaeda charity front the Wafa Humanitarian Organization had initially claimed that “The White House has been destroyed,” but then had to correct himself. A report shows that al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan had said at 9:53 a.m. the previous day that the attackers were following through with “the doctor’s program” (see 9:53 a.m. September 11, 2001). This is thought to be a reference to the second-ranking member of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician often referred to as “the Doctor.” The CIA and the FBI have evidence connecting at least three of the alleged hijackers to Osama bin Laden and his training camps in Afghanistan. Hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, and Salem Alhazmi were quickly linked to al-Qaeda on the day of 9/11, as two of them were on a US watch list even before 9/11 (see 9:53 p.m. September 11, 2001). The attacks were also consistent with intelligence reports throughout the summer that indicated bin Laden was planning “spectacular attacks” against US targets. A report out of Kandahar, Afghanistan shows the attacks were “the results of two years’ planning.” Another report says the attacks were “the beginning of the wrath.” A key piece of evidence involves Abu Zubaida, who has been identified as the chief field commander for the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. A supposedly reliable report received after the 9/11 attacks stated that Zubaida had referred to September 11 as “zero hour.” It is not known is an intercepted message from before 9/11 saying “tomorrow is zero hour,” or some other message (see September 10, 2001). According to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, “For Tenet, the evidence on bin Laden was conclusive—game, set, match.” Though Tenet, along with Rice and other officials, has already spent several months working on a plan to vastly expand covert action in Afghanistan and worldwide, he tells Bush that an even more extensive plan will soon be presented for approval, and this will be very expensive. The president tells him, “Whatever it takes.” [Woodward, 2002, pp. 39-41; Washington Post, 1/28/2002; Kessler, 2003, pp. 231-233; Tenet, 2007, pp. 165] Bush will approve Tenet’s plan by the following Monday (see September 17, 2001). Entity Tags: Nawaf Alhazmi, Salem Alhazmi, Michael J. Morell, Osama bin Laden, Khalid Almihdhar, George J. Tenet, Wafa Humanitarian Organization, Abu Zubaida, George W. Bush, Al-Qaeda, Condoleezza Rice, Central Intelligence Agency, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney September 16, 2001 and After: Zubaida Continues Making Calls to US In 2007, former CIA officer Robert Baer will comment in Time magazine, “[A]pparently, when [al-Qaeda leader] Abu Zubaida was captured, telephone records, including calls to the United States, were found in the house he was living in. The calls stopped on September 10, and resumed on September 16. There’s nothing in the 9/11 Commission report about any of this, and I have no idea whether the leads were run down, the evidence lost or destroyed.” [Time, 12/7/2007] In fact, it seems likely the calls were monitored at the time by US intelligence and not just discovered after Zubaida’s capture in 2002. For instance, it has been reported elsewhere that Zubaida’s calls to the US in the week before 9/11 were being monitored by US intelligence (see Early September 2001) and 70 calls Zubaida made to operatives in Bosnia were monitored in the weeks just after 9/11 (see October 8, 2001). These calls to the US after 9/11 would suggest that al-Qaeda continues to have operatives there, but there have been no reports of any genuine al-Qaeda operatives arrested in the US in the weeks and months after 9/11 except for Nabil al-Marabh arrested on September 19, 2001 (see September 19, 2001). October 8, 2001: US Still Monitoring Zubaida’s Phone Calls; Bosnian Plot Possibly Foiled Bensayah Belkacem at Guantanamo. [source: US Defense Department]US intelligence intercepts numerous phone calls between Abu Zubaida and other al-Qaeda leaders and Bensayah Belkacem, an operative living in Bosnia. The New York Times will later report that shortly after 9/11, “American intelligence agencies, working closely with the government of neighboring Croatia, listened in as Mr. Belkacem and others discussed plans for attacks.” One US official says, “He was apparently on the phone constantly to Afghanistan, with Zubaida and others. There were dozens of calls to Afghanistan.” Belkacem, an Algerian, had moved to Bosnia to fight in the early 1990s war there, then obtained Bosnian citizenship and settled in Zenica, working for an Islamic charity. [New York Times, 1/23/2002] On October 8, 2001, Bosnian police detain Belkacem. While searching his home, they find a piece of note listing the name “Abu Zubeida” and Zubaida’s phone number. [Washington Post, 8/21/2006] It is later revealed that Belkacem made 70 calls to Zubaida between 9/11 and his arrest and more calls before then. He had repeatedly sought a visa to leave Bosnia for Germany just before 9/11. Phone transcripts show Zubaida and Belkacem discussed procuring passports. [Time, 11/12/2001] A US official will later claim that it was believed Zubaida was in Afghanistan with bin Laden at the time of Belkacem’s arrest. [New York Times, 1/23/2002] It has not been explained why this knowledge was not used to capture or kill Zubaida and/or bin Laden. It appears that Western intelligence agencies had been monitoring Zubaida’s calls as far back as 1996 (see (Mid-1996) and October 1998 and After). Belkacem and five of his associates will be renditioned to Guantanamo Bay prison in 2002 and remain imprisoned there (see January 18, 2002). Late 2001-Early 2002: Pakistani Militant Group Helps Al-Qeada Operatives Escape into Pakistan After US forces conquer Kandahar, Afghanistan, in early December 2001, al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida gets Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) to help al-Qaeda operatives escape from Afghanistan to Pakistan. LeT has already given operatives safe houses in the Pakistani cities of Peshawar and Muzaffarabad, trained them there, and helped them travel to Afghanistan to fight US troops. This is according to US government documents leaked by the nonprofit whistleblower group Wikileaks in 2011. These documents provide some details: In 2002, three suspected al-Qaeda operatives are arrested in a safe house in Lahore, Pakistan, run by a LeT member. This person had been helping al-Qaeda operatives and their families move to Lahore. Pakistani officials transfer the three al-Qaeda suspects to US custody, but they release the LeT member. [Express Tribune, 5/12/2011] On December 11, 2001, a Saudi named Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi is arrested by police at the Lahore airport. Al-Matrafi is the director of the Wafa Humanitarian Organization, a non-profit organization that the US officially designated an al-Qaeda front in late September 2001 (see September 24, 2001). Al-Matrafi had been staying at an LeT linked non-profit in Lahore, and LeT provided him with a visa and exit paperwork to leave Pakistan. Al-Matrafi is handed over to US custody several days later, and he will eventually be sent to the US-run prison in Guantanamo. [uS Department of Defense, 10/25/2007; Express Tribune, 5/12/2011] A Saudi named Jabir Hasan Mohammad al-Qahtani, a suspected al-Qaeda operative who also works for the Wafa Humanitarian Organization, is captured in Kabul, Afghanistan, in mid-November 2001. He is discovered to possess 16 $100 bills. He will later be transferred to the Guantanamo prison. An intelligence analyst will later note: “There were individuals passing out $100 notes to al-Qaeda fighters fleeing Afghanistan for Pakistan. This may have been a part of the help that LeT provided al-Qaeda members.” [uS Department of Defense, 2/11/2005; Express Tribune, 5/12/2011] When al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida is captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002 (see March 28, 2002), more than 30 other suspected al-Qaeda operatives are arrested at the same time. These arrests take place in two safe houses in Faisalabad run by LeT. The safe houses are apparently run by Hamidullah Khan Niazi, an educational professor and head of the LeT in Faisalabad. Niazi’s house is raided at the same time, and he and 11 others are arrested. According to media reports shortly after the raid, electronic intercepts show that Niazi’s home phone was used by Lashkar-e-Toiba members to help al-Qaeda. However, Niazi and the others at his house are released several days later. [Observer, 4/7/2002; New York Times, 4/14/2002; US Department of Defense, 11/11/2008] But The Observer reports that local police nevertheless say Niazi’s “apparent links to Zubaida are evidence that Pakistan’s militant Islamic fringe is providing key assistance to al-Qaeda as it tries to regroup.” [Observer, 4/7/2002] In 2003, the London Times will report, “US intelligence says [Lashkar-e-Toiba] smuggled [Zubaida] out of Afghanistan, taking advantage of the fact that police never stop their distinctive Landcruisers, which have tinted windows and Free Kashmir numberplates.” [London Times, 3/30/2003] As some of the examples above indicate, al-Qaeda operatives are often taken into US custody while LeT members are often let go, even though the US names LeT a terrorist group in December 2001 (see December 20, 2001). This may be due to ties between LeT and the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency. For instance, a 2009 diplomatic cable by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will note continued links between the ISI and LeT (see December 2009). 2002: European Intelligence Agencies Monitor Al-Qaeda Relocating in Pakistan In September 2002, shortly after the arrest of al-Qaeda leader Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Karachi, Pakistan (see September 11, 2002), the New York Times will report: “Even before Mr. bin al-Shibh’s arrest, European officials warned that al-Qaeda appeared to have shifted much of its operations in Pakistan to Karachi. A year ago, 90 percent of communications and other links between suspected al-Qaeda members in Europe and individuals in Pakistan were traced to the city of Peshawar, near the Afghan border, a European law enforcement official said. As of this spring, roughly half of intercepted communications and other links were being traced to Karachi.” A European diplomat comments, “Obviously the brains and money for the terrorists have shifted from Peshawar to Karachi.” [New York Times, 9/15/2002] Presumably many of the communications to Peshawar involve al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida, considered a key communications hub and who has been monitored by a number of intelligence agencies, including the French, since at least 1998 (see October 1998 and After). Zubaida moves from his long-time base in Peshawar to the Pakistani city of Faisalabad after 9/11 and is captured there in March 2002 (see March 28, 2002). Al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh are interviewed in Karachi around June 2002, a fact that is quickly shared with US intelligence (see June 14, 2002 and Shortly After).

.(blank firing didnt happen 5 years ago) (GAAL SAY) Huh? In your last post you said "THESE EXERCISES FIRING BLANKS OVER LARGE URBAN AREA OCCURED MORE THAN 5 years AGO ??" (COLBY SAY) (GAAL SAY) COLBY CONFUSED ON DIFFERENCE DIDNT / DID ) ************************************ Canadafreepress In July, 2012, Small Wars Journal - a mainstream military affairs publication, published an article entitled “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A Vision of the Future” by Kevin Benson and Jennifer Weber, which considered the prospect of military anti-insurgency operations on American soil; the purported “enemy” under their scenario were “’Tea Party’ insurrectionists.’” In February 2013, without warning - the Department of Defense took over a Houston-area high school for conducting urban warfare drills; alarmed local residents mistook blank training rounds for actual gunfire. Days earlier, urban warfare drills – including exercises by low-flying Blackhawk helicopters shooting blanks – took place in and over downtown Miami. Similar exercises have taken place over the last year in fourteen other American cities. ################################### Why does the military seem to be preparing for urban warfare in the United States? By Madison Ruppert Editor of End the Lie Officers of 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, "Ready First" 1st Armored Division, participate in an urban combat exercise at a training facility on Fort Bliss, Texas, May 11-12, 2011 (Photo credit: Staff Sgt. Joseph Wilbanks)Recently I published an article covering the January 22-26 multi-agency exercises being conducted in the Los Angeles area. As I outlined in the article, this is in fact part of a broader trend of joint military-police drills (which often include other agencies, hence the “multi-agency” label) that have been occurring across the United States. It seems hard to ignore the fact that the armed forces of the United States are training for urban warfare, not urban warfare in the Middle East, but instead here in our own nation. This is becoming painfully clear due to the fact that the military trains for what they think they’re going to do. If they are planning to fight in the desert, they would train in the desert and obviously if they are going to be fighting in a metropolitan setting in the United States, they would train in an American city. Unfortunately, this is exactly what we are witnessing: increasing amount of training in urban American environments. The Los Angeles drill is just a microcosmic example of this, and one of the more disturbing developments is the announcement of a “mock city roughly the size of downtown San Diego” which has been erected recently at the Twentynine Palms military base. This is located northeast of San Diego and cost the taxpayer $170 million with the intention of training American military forces to wage urban warfare. According to the Marine Corps, the facility boasts a staggering 1,560 buildings. The Corps are quick to highlight that it “will allow troops to practice and refine skills that can be used around the world,” even though it is clearly aimed at preparing troops for warfare in the United States. The reason this is quite obvious is that urban warfare is radically different depending on the country you are in. This is evidenced by similar mock cities being erected to mimic a city in Afghanistan, a training facility which would not help troops prepare for war in a large American city. In fact, the article on Military.com in which this project is detailed mentions the mock Afghan villages, while failing to point out that this is radically different than the previously erected training sites. This new mock city “is one of the largest and most elaborate” with a whopping seven separate mock city districts spanning a massive 274 acres of desert. There are fake hotels, markets and other businesses which boast actors who create scenarios to challenge the soldiers. These scenarios reportedly range from humanitarian relief to peacekeeping missions to police work and, of course, direct combat missions, according to the Marine Corps. This new facility will allow over 15,000 Marines and Sailors to simultaneously engage in training missions, which can even include operating in the nearly 1,900 feet of underground tunnels in the complex. The massive mock city also includes a manmade riverbed, dozens of courtyards and compounds which will give trainees practice searching for escape tunnels, hiding spots and weapons caches in an urban environment. The Associated Press claims that this is merely an expansion of the Mojave Viper training program, launched in 2005, which was aimed at preparing troops for deployment in Iraq. Just a few months ago in November, the Marine Corps showed off their expansion of the mock Afghan village at Camp Pendleton which cost $30 million and almost quadrupled the size of the facility. While connecting this new project with the facility at Camp Pendleton is quite inaccurate in my opinion, they do paint a bit of a different picture of the older facility by writing, “In that facility, Marines scramble through a maze of mud walls leading to mosques, schools and carpet sellers, as Hollywood-style explosions go off.” They mention that “Similar immersion training facilities are slated to open this year at Marine Corps bases in North Carolina, Hawaii and Okinawa,” however they do not make it clear which facility these new ones are similar to. Are these to be similar to the mock Afghan village with mud walls and mosques? Or will these be similar to the newer facilities which more closely relate to the environment of a large American city? I think it is much more likely that these new facilities will be closer to an urban environment in the United States, rather than the relatively undeveloped Afghan or Iraqi villages. This contention is also reflected in the more frequent nature of urban military drills as shown by the exercises in Los Angeles (about which some more specific details have emerged), along with others in major urban areas. Some other examples that come to mind are: Vibrant Response 12 conducted in August of last year at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center which involved “7,000 Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and DOD civilians responding to a simulated 10-kiloton nuclear detonation in Cincinnati,” military exercises in and around Boston in July of last year, mock night raids in Virginia on January 17, 2012, and more. These urban warfare exercises are not restricted to the United States. Indeed, similar exercises have occurred in the United Kingdom this year as well. The problem here is that downtown Los Angeles is nothing like the operational situations in Iraq or Afghanistan, although it would prepare the military for operations to be conducted in Los Angeles itself or any other large American city. Thanks to a reader, I have also become aware of something called the MUTC. The MUTC, or Muscatatuck Urban Training Center, is located in South Central Indiana’s Jennings County, which is near Butlerville. According to the official website, operated by the National Guard, it “is a secluded, self contained community, once home to the Muscatatuck State Developmental Center. The 1,000 acre site was turned over to the Indian National Guard in July of 2005 and since has been continually evolving into a full-immersion contemporary urban training environment.” The MUTC seems very similar to the new facility being erected outside of San Diego, due to the fact that it boasts a 180 acre reservoir along with an urban environment which includes some 68 major buildings including: a school, hospital, dormitories, light industrial structures, single family dwellings, a dining facility and administrative buildings. In total, there is 850,000 square feet of floor space for the military to train on along with an underground utility tunnel system and more than 9 miles of roads and streets. MUTC does not only involve the military, indeed they say that it is a consortium which includes governmental, public and private entities who work together in order to give the personnel the most realistic training experience available. Highlighting my grave concerns, which are shared by many of my readers, the MUTC website points out that this facility indeed provides, “Training that can be tailored to replicate both foreign and domestic scenarios and that can be utilized by various civilian and military organizations.” It is likely quite obvious to my readers that this is focusing on domestic scenarios, as all of the recent military drills in actual urban environments have been doing. A short list of those who use the MUTC includes: Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force and Special Operations Forces, State Emergency Management agencies, Federal Emergency Management Agencies, Federal Bureau of Investigations, State Departments of Health, National Air Patrol, Department of Homeland Security, State Counter-Terrrorism Agencies, Law Enforcement agencies and much more. Apparently pre-existing facilities like the MUTC aren’t enough for the military establishment, leading to new facilities being erected, older facilities being expanded and even more facilities to be unveiled this year. The burning question this leaves unanswered is: why? Why are they preparing to wage war with American citizens on our own turf? There has been a large push to turn the American people into the enemy and training facilities like this, drills like the one in LA along with the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA) which opens us up to indefinite military detention on nothing more than suspicion. I have previously written about the fact that all the pieces are in place which leaves me wondering: when will the hammer drop? The question is left unanswered to this day and I continue to hope that I am totally off base here and that nothing will ever happen. I hope beyond all hopes that all of this preparation, seemingly for warfare in the United States, is in fact totally innocuous and no such scenario will ever present itself. Unfortunately, the military and government have shown that they usually know what they’re doing, even if they pretend they don’t when they’re put under scrutiny. It is quite unlikely that these preparations are totally irrelevant and will not be used in any way. If you have any information on military maneuvers, exercises and drills, especially occurring in major urban areas or other training centers that replicate a city environment, please e-mail me immediately at: admin@EndtheLie.com so I can craft more complete articles in the near future. More at EndtheLie.com - http://EndtheLie.com.../#ixzz2MgH30wRg

-

[From _The Village Voice_, March 30, 1993] THE CIA AND THE SHEIK The Agency Coddled Omar Abdel Rahman, Allowing Him to Operate in the U.S. Now This Unholy Alliance Has Blown Up in Our Faces. By Robert I. Friedman "They were talking all the time about targeting American symbols," says the FBI undercover informant, "the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty. A few of the guys came to the mosque to pray and go home. But others gathered to conspire in small groups, talking in deep, low voices. They see the U.S. as an imperialist power, the Big Satan, the root of all the evil in the world." The FBI operative, Mamdouh Zaki Zakhary, monitored the radical activities at the El Salaam Mosque in Jersey City, which was the headquarters of the terrorist cell that allegedly planned and carried our the of the World Trade Center on February 26. Zakhary, a heavily bearded Coptic Christian from Egypt who owned an import-export firm in Jersey City, spent a year and a half spying on the local Arab American community and the mosque, beginning January 10, 1990. During this time, he watched the first two men arrested in connection with the bombing. Mohammed Salameh and Ibraham Elgabrowny, as well as the spiritual leader who may have inspired them, the fiery blind fundamentalist cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is infamous throughout the Arab world for his alleged role in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat. "The only thing they want is to establish an Islamic world," Zakhary told The Village Voice during an interview from his home in Alexandria, Egypt. "They will do anything to achieve it. You have to understand their desire to strike out, to avenge anything that hurts Islam. I asked Elgabrowny, 'Why do you stay here [in Brooklyn]?' And he told me, I want to earn their dollars so that I can stab them in the back." Zakhary reported the group's subversive activities in regular meetings with his FBI handler, Special Agent Kenneth Strange. But Zakhary, who was not able to penetrate the cell's inner circle, had no advance warning that there was a plan to commit one of the most sensational acts of foreign terrorism on American soil before the bombing of the World Trade Center: the assassination of the controversial right-wing Zionist leader Rabbi Meir Kahane. On November 5, 1990, El Sayyid Nosair, a pudgy, bearded 34-year-old Egyptian American and a core member of the El Salaam Mosque, calmly walked up to the podium of a conference room in the Halloran House, a midtown Manhattan hotel, after Kahane had finished, a one-hour speech. Moments later, Kahane was shot once in the throat at point-blank range with a .357 magnum, and Nosair bolted outside. During a running gun battle down Lexington Avenue, Nosair was wounded by an off-duty postal inspector and finally captured by New York City police. "At first, no one knew who Nosair was," recalls Zakhary, "so when I heard about it I called the FBI and identified him,' I told them he was a member of the mosque and that he was very close with the sheikh [Abdel Rahman]. I told them that, four days before, I saw with my own eyes the sheikh meeting with Nosair at a Lebanese restaurant on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. It was 7 p.m. There was Nosair, the sheikh, a person escorting the sheikh, and another person I don't know. They were deep in conversation." Shortly after police arrested Nosair they found startling evidence that the Kahane killing was just the first in a planned spree. Scrawled on a bank calendar in Nosair's home was a "hit list" that included the names of a U.S. representative, two federal judges, and a former assistant U.S. Attorney. Local police searching Nosair's Cliffside Park, New Jersey, home discovered a trove of terrorist paraphernalia: bombmaking manuals, AK-47 cartridges, a stolen New York State license plate, and a bullet-riddled target board. There were also a number of passports and driver's licenses under various names, as well as articles about the assassination of Anwar Sadat. But despite Zakhary's reports, Nosair's hit list, and the suspicious cache at his home, the authorities seemed to be downplaying all signs of a terrorist conspiracy. Within 12 hours of the shooting, New York City chief of detectives Joseph Borrelli declared the Kahane assassination was the work of a "lone gunman." Borrelli added, '"There was nothing found [at Nosair's house] that would stir your imagination." One New York City detective close to the investigation told me that the case was handled like a routine homicide. "They [the NYPD] wanted to make it as simple as possible," said the detective. "It was treated as a homicide at the precinct level. The higher-ups didn't want to take it further. The police department stated that they got the gunman and that was it. We're not equipped to investigate international terrorism." But the FBI is. On the eve of Nosair's trial, a frustrated federal investigator told me that he didn't believe Nosair had acted alone. "There's nothing to prove that Nosair took it upon himself to [kill Kahane]. There are many conspiracy theories. We hit a lot of dry wells." Yet the federal agent said that the NYPD had jurisdiction in the case and that the FBI's investigation was "superficial." What investigators would have found if they had done their job thoroughly is that Sheikh Abdel Rahman and El Sayyid Nosair were at the heart of a far-flung terrorist conspiracy. A magnet for the angry and dispossessed of the Muslim world, Abdel Rahman, through his violent preaching, has been linked to dozens of terrorist incidents in Egypt and now to the attack on the World Trade Center. an act he says he deplores. In the aftermath of the bombing, many are wondering why there wasn't a comprehensive, wide-ranging investigation of Meir Kahane's murder. One possible explanation is offered by a counterterrorism expert for the FBI. At a meeting in a Denny's coffee shop in Los Angeles a week after the Kahane assassination, the 20-year veteran field agent met with one of his top undercover operatives, a burly 33-year-old FBI contract employee who had been a premier bomber for a domestic terrorist group before being "turned" and becoming a government informant. "Why aren't we going after the sheikh [Abdel Rahman]?" demanded the undercover man. "It's hands-off," answered the agent. "Why?" asked the operative. "It was no accident that the sheikh got a visa and that he's still in the country," replied the agent, visibly upset. "He's here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA [National Security Agency], and the CIA." The agent pointed out that the sheikh had been granted a tourist visa, and later a green card, despite the fact that he was on a State Department terrorist watch-list that should have barred him from the country. He's an untouchable, concluded the agent. "I haven't seen the lone-gunman theory advocated [so forcefully] since John F. Kennedy." Why might the U.S. government protect a militant sheikh linked to numerous acts of terrorism?(Cause the demonic DOD/MIC wants war !!!) Sheikh Abdel Rahman left Egypt in 1990, in the wake of a series of bloody clashes between his militant fundamentalist group, Al Gamaat al Islamia, and the secular Egyptian government. The sheikh traveled to Pakistan, where he met with representatives of the Afghan mujahedeen, who were providing training for his underground terrorist group in Egypt, the very same mujahedeen who were receiving financial aid and training from the CIA in the war to rid Afghanistan of the Soviet Army. Even after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in February 1989, the U.S. and the Saudis continued to aid the mujahedeen through Pakistan until December 1990, in an attempt to topple the Afghan government. According to a very high-ranking Egyptian official, when the sheikh moved to Brooklyn in May 1990, he worked closely with the CIA, helping to channel a steady flow of money, men, and guns to mujahedeen bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The camps became a mecca for disaffected youth from across the Muslim world. Of course, the mujahedeen's agenda was not exactly the same as the CIA's. While Abdel Rahman was perfectly happy to accept CIA help to chase the godless Russians out of Afghanistan, it didn't stop him from teaching his recruits his revolutionary agenda. The camps, says the high-ranking Egyptian official, were "schools for jihad," or holy war. The sacred mission was to be waged on two fronts. In the Middle East, his holy warriors were to overthrow secular, pro-Western Arab regimes and replace them with austere Islamic theocracies. The main target was Egypt, the largest and most powerful nation in the Arab world. The sheikh believes, the high-ranking Egyptian official says, "that if you take Egypt, you take all the Middle East." Mamdouh Zaki Zakhary concurs: "Abdel Rahman repeatedly preached that Egypt is the hand of Satan, and that you have to cut off the hand of Satan immediately." The Great Satan itself, of course, is America, a state that, in the eyes of the sheikh and his supporters, has routinely committed atrocities against the Muslim world. (previous SAID BEFORE BROADCAST./ YOUR SOOOOO RIGHT) SAYING ANTI-AMERICAN THEMED diatribes before , then this below. SNIDE ? Show respect for your teacher.) "Americans," said the sheikh on a recent Arabic-language radio broadcast, "are descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communism, and colonialism." He advocates the destabilization of the U.S. by violent attacks on its symbols of prestige and power, while proselytizing among African Americans and other disenfranchised minorities. Abdel Rahman's "long-term goal is to weaken U.S. society and to show Arab rulers that the U.S. is not an invulnerable superpower," says Matti Steinberg, an expert on Islamic fundamentalism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. According to Western intelligence sources, Abdel Rahman has 10,000 fanatic disciples in Egypt and several hundred in America. But, as far as anyone knows, he never issues them direct orders. "He talks about the importance of jihad in the U.S. without being concrete," says Matti Steinberg. "It's a form of spiritual brainwashing called Dawa. All it takes is a few angry people to understand his message." A high-ranking Egyptian official agrees: "This man is instigating violence in a very clever way. You can't really hope to establish a direct link" between the sheikh and the World Trade Center bombing. Just four months before the bombing, Egyptian intelligence officials warned the U.S. that the sheikh's principal mosques in America, the El Salaam Mosque and the El Farouq Masjid Mosque in Brooklyn, were "hotbeds of terrorist activity," and that the fiery blind Muslim preacher was plotting a new round of terrorist attacks in Egypt. "There were many, many contacts between Cairo and Washington," says the official. The FBI received a violent reminder of the sheikh's agenda on November 12, 1992, when a terrorist hit squad linked to Abdel Rahman machine-gunned a busload of Western tourists in Egypt, injuring five Germans. In the last year, three Western tourists have been killed in Egypt and at least two dozen have been wounded, crippling the country's $2.5 billion tourist industry. When asked on an Arabic-language radio show in Washington, D.C., about terrorist attacks on foreign tourists, the sheikh replied, "Force is used with tourists. But tourists should use good manners. Tourism is not nightclubs, alcohol, gambling, fornicating. They should stay away from this behavior, the spread of AIDS and corruption with which they have filled Egypt." Some three months after the attack on the tourist bus, a rental van packed with a witches' brew of sulfuric acid, nitric acid, and urea exploded in the subbasement of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1000. "If they had found the exact architectural Achilles' heel [of the World Trade Center]," says an explosives expert who works for the FBI, "on if the bomb had been a little bit bigger, not much more, 500 pounds more, I think it would have brought her down. It's really scary." As Americans reeled from the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, the first rumors that swept the country centered on an unidentified Serbian terrorist group. The theory was abandoned only after a sharpeyed investigator from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and a New York City cop who were combing through the rubble found a tiny metal fragment with the identification number of the van rented by Mohammed Salameh. "It was a miracle that it wasn't destroyed," says the explosives expert. If it had been, the FBI might have been tracking Serbians for weeks in stead of Sheikh Abdel Rahman and hi labyrintine web of local Arab terrorists Lost in the press avalanche about the World Trade Center bombing was the new that on the same day terrorists linked to Abdel Rahman had detonated a bomb packed with rusty nails in the Wadi el-Ni cafŠ, a fashionable restaurant in Cairo, killing two tourists and two Egyptians, and wounding 16. "They wanted to show the Egyptian authorities that they could operate in the heart of the nation's capital; says the high-ranking Egyptian- government official, who adds bitterly, "We begged America not to coddle the sheikh."Jack Blum, a widely respected former special investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, puts it bluntly The CIA trained the mujahedeen in terrorism, then dumped them in 1990 as part of an agreement with Moscow, leaving behind a ragtag army of anti-Western Muslim extremists burning to vent their rage on their former patrons, America. "One of the big problems here is that many suspects in the World Trade Center bombing were associated with the mujahedeen," says Blum. "And there are components of our government that are absolutely disinterested in following that path because it leads back to people we supported in the Afghan war." The first suspect arrested in the World Trade Center bombing was Mohammed Salameh, a 25-year-old Palestinian with a thick black beard and a degree from a Jordanian university in the shariah, Islamic religious law. On February 23, he rented the Ryder van that was packed with explosives and detonated underneath the World Trade Center. When it was revealed that he had returned four times to claim a $400 refund for the vehicle, which he claims was stolen the night before the bombing, many assumed he was either a patsy or the stupidest terrorist in history. What was forgotten, of course, was that the odds against identifying the van were astronomical. "He's not a clever man, but he's not a stupid man," says Zakhary, the FBI undercover operative who met Salameh at the El Salaam Mosque. "He's an ordinary man, a working man. I think that, for him, the bombing was coming from his heart, not his brain." The seeds of Salameh's discontent were sown in Bidya, a dusty, nondescript farming village of 6000 Palestinian Arabs near the Nablus-Tel Aviv Highway, on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The squat, ramshackle, cinder-block homes line unpaved streets that are strewn with garbage. Indoor plumbing is rare, and the town doesn't have a single telephone. The gray concrete walls of Bidya's four schools are covered with pro-PLO graffiti and fierce tirades against Israel. Bidya is a glaring contrast to nearby Ariel, the gleaming suburban settlement of 15,000 secular Jews that was built on land expropriated from Bidya and other nearby Palestinian villages in the mid 1970s. Ariel has the look and feel of an American Sunbelt suburb in the midst of a boom. At the mall in the heart of town, shops sell everything from falafel for $ 1.50 to expensive clothes. A large outdoor swimming pool attracts suntanned Jewish settlers, who moved to this West Bank outpost for its front yards and scenic vistas. Bidya has a long history of violence and rebellion. In 1936, when Palestinian Arabs began a three-year revolt against the British Mandatory authorities then ruling Palestine and the Jewish minority who were struggling for statehood, Bidya became a staging base for fedayeen, or Palestinian guerrillas. The British Army was far more brutal putting down the revolt than the Israeli Army has been during the intifada. British planes strafed Arab villages, thousands of Palestinians were herded into concentration camps, and authorities passed emergency laws that made the possession of a gun or even a bullet a crime punishable by death. More than 10,000 Palestinians were killed in the fighting; Bidya suffered hundreds of casualties. After Israel's 1948 War of Independence, the Jordanian Arab Legion occupied the West Bank, and Bidya spearheaded Palestinian opposition to Jordan's King Hussein, a Hashemite originally from Saudi Arabia who treated West Bank Palestinians with high-handed contempt. In 1959, 15 high-ranking officials of the Jordanian military, including a leading notable from Bidya, plotted King Hussein's assassination. But the Jordanian mukhabarut (secret police) discovered the scheme, and the plotters were sentenced to death. Mohammed Salameh was born in Bidya in September 1967, just three months after it was occupied by Israeli troops in the June 1967 Six Day War. "When the Israelis came to our village' says Osama Odeh, a distant cousin of Salameh, "they made a gentlemen's agreement with my father and uncle, who is a lawyer. 'We know your Family is very nationalistic and won't accept occupation,' they said, 'so if the fedayeen come to Bidya, you can feed them so long as you then tell them to go. We will give you money for your new school and build roads and sewers."' But from the onset of Israeli rule, Bidya's residents waged a fierce guerrilla war against the Israeli occupation, and Mohammed Salameh's family was in the forefront of that opposition. Salameh's maternal grandfather, one of Bidya's largest landowners, was active in the 1936 Arab Rebellion and later joined the PLO. He was arrested in the early 1980s for membership in the PLO, and, in spite of his advanced age, was imprisoned by the Israelis and allegedly tortured. He died soon after his release. Salameh's uncle spent 18 years in prison for a PLO attack on Israeli civilians. Odeh told me that Salameh's "hate" comes from the "injustice" of the Israeli occupation, his uncle's and grandfather's imprisonment, and Ariel's rapid expansion. "Ariel," says Odeh, "is growing, and sucking the red blood of our land." When I last journeyed to Bidya, in the fall of 1990, the main entrance was blocked by a knot of heavily armed Israeli soldiers in riot gear. "A shooting took place," explained a soldier, who looked no more than 18. "The road is closed. If you go in, we will shoot you." Earlier in the day, students had gathered in the center of Bidya, shouting anti-Israeli slogans under a huge banner that read FATAH AND HAMAS TOGETHER. (Hamas is the large Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist group dedicated to Israel's destruction.) Then hundreds of Palestinian youth marched to the Nablus-Tel Aviv Highway, where young boys and girls began to throw stones at Israeli cars. Soldiers raced to the scene and fired into the air, trying to disperse the demonstrators. Several armed Jewish settlers got out of their cars and fanned out among the almond trees that line the side of the road and started shooting. Akhlam Abed, a 13-year-old girl, was killed. She was Bidya's first casualty of the intifada. In the wake of Israel's lightning victory in the June 1967 Six Day War, Salameh's parents left Bidya for a squalid shantytown on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan, forfeiting their home and possessions, as did tens of thousands of Palestinians. Like all Palestinian youth, Salameh passionately followed the course of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising that began in the Gaza Strip in December 1987 and quickly spread to every Arab town, village, and refugee camp in the Occupied Territories. Every day Jordanian television broadcast images of Palestinian boys, their faces swathed in black-and-white-checkered kaffiyehs, their eyes unafraid, hurling pomegranate-sized stones at Israeli troops brandishing automatic weapons. The children of the "stone revolution," as they are called, gave Palestinians around the world a collective sense of pride and determination. Salameh, one of 11 brothers and sisters, was an indifferent student with a poor self-image. According to Odeh, he became a devout Muslim in his teens. Salameh's parents have expressed surprise about his alleged role in the World Trade Center bombing. "The Jews, this is from the Jews, who have done this and blamed my son," Salameh's mother, Aysha, told The New York Times. Aysha might well blame Sheikh Abdel Rahman for leading her wayward son down the combustible path of Islamic fundamentalism. Salameh, who received a tourist visa from the American consulate in Amman in December 1987, moved to New Jersey, where he worked at menial jobs, constantly changing addresses. He met Abdel Rahman not long after the sheikh arrived in Brooklyn; he was captivated by the sheikh's call for jihad and the downfall of America, becoming his sometime gofer, according to one U.S. law- enforcement source. Salameh quickly fell into a circle of like-minded Muslims, including Nidal Ayyad, a chemical engineer of Palestinian descent who allegedly concocted the World Trade Center bomb. In Egypt, Abdel Rahman's name lives in infamy for his role in the October 6, 1981, assassination of Anwar Sadat, who was cut down in a hail of grenade and automatic-weapons fire while he reviewed a military parade. In 1980, Abdel Rahman had issued a fatwa, or religious decree, that called Sadat an infidel for turning his back on Islam and for making peace with Israel. This made Sadat a prime target for assassination, an act eventually executed by the operational arm of Abdel Rahman's organization, Al Gamaat al Islamia, which had penetrated the Egyptian army and security services. (a long history of peaceful thought,YUP) During a tumultuous trial in which the defendants publicly charged they had been tortured by police interrogators, the sheikh was acquitted. The sheikh, who continued to agitate against the Egyptian government while his followers carried on a campaign of lethal bombings, was imprisoned for three months in 1985, for one month in 1986, and for four months in 1989. He finally left his homeland in 1990, saying, "It was too much for me." (Too much heat in Egypt for him. BUT DOD/MIC thought he was perfect detonator to start terrorism in US , for later world wide so-called terror WAR $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$) After brief stays in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, the sheikh slipped into Pakistan, where he forged operational links with mujahedeen strongman Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the head of a radical Afghan Islamic fundamentalist army that was being covertly backed by the CIA. According to Stephen Van Evera, an affiliate of Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs, Hekmatyar "strongly chastised the United States and its 'immoral' society, even while Washington lavished him with aid." In Hekmatyar's guerrilla training camps, American advisers taught everything from using explosives to shooting down enemy planes with shoulder-held Stinger missiles. The mujahedeen base camps in Peshawar were also places where militant Muslims were caught up in the spirit of the two supreme moments in recent Islamic history: the revolution in Iran, which transformed the country into a self-righteous bastion of zealous fundamentalism, and the Afghan war. "Iran symbolizes the rise of the Islamic state," says the Egyptian official, "and the Afghan war was a real battlefield for these people to acquire the stamina and capabilities to wage war." And since these two events were successful, the militants "decided to pursue this march and spread their revolutionary message to other countries." In America, Abdel Rahman raised funds and recruits for the mujahedeen, many oF them first-generation Muslim immigrants. His mosques in Jersey City and Brooklyn also attracted fundamentalists expelled from the Gulf Emirates after the Gulf War. But many Muslims repudiate his radical preachings. Mosques across the country closed their doors to the rabble-rousing blind man. Local Muslims grew even more wary in March 1991 when Mustafa Shalabi, a 39-year-old Egyptian electrical contractor living in Brooklyn, was found lying face down on his kitchen floor in his pajamas. He had been shot once at close range near the left ear and stabbed in the back and stomach. Police sources say Shalabi had been running guns to the Afghan rebels, as well as raising money for the legal defense of El Sayyid Nosair before his trial on charges of assassinating Rabbi Meir Kahane. Earlier, Shalabi had helped Abdel Rahman find an apartment in Brooklyn. Police speculate that Abdel Rahman had Shalabi murdered for pocketing some of the money. Shalabi "had a lot of enemies," says a police source. "There was also a lot of intrigue and infighting at his mosque in Brooklyn." Shalabi worshipped at the El Farouq Masjid Mosque, located in a bleak storefront building at 554 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. The Friday sermons were delivered by Abdel Rahman, until the directors of the mosque expelled him soon after Kahane's assassination. The sheikh then moved entirely to the El Salaam Mosque in Jersey City. The founder of the mosque is Sultan Ibraham El Gawli, a wealthy 55-year-old Egyptian businessman who was convicted by a federal jury in July 1986 for conspiring to export 150 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives to Israel for use by the PLO in a Christmas bombing. El Gawli, who sports a full, white Santa Claus beard, served 18 months in prison before returning to Jersey City. He often marched in front of the courthouse during Nosair's trial, carrying banners with fierce anti-Israel slogans. "It's no crime praying together, is it?" El Gawli asked me when I questioned him about his friendship with Nosair. It was the infiltrator Mamdouh Zaki Zakhary who helped U.S. Customs set up the sting operation that netted El Gawli. Zakhary , a frail man afflicted with blindness in one eye and a large goiter on his neck, wore a wire into El Galwi's office at a travel agency he owned, Sultan Travel, recording five incriminating conversations. "There were some references on the tapes about doing it [transporting the explosives] for God," recalls Kevin McCarthy, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted El Gawli. "Sultan El Gawli was the brains behind the terror cell at the mosque," says Zakhary . "There were lots of meetings in his office. He also got foreign money from the PLO and Iran. Many times he entertained and was visited by officials from Saudi Arabia, the PLO, and Iran." "I always thought the El Gawli case was just scratching the surface of what was really going on [in the El Salaam Mosque]," admits a federal official who worked on the case. "First, El Gawli himself was this businessman who seemed to be trying to do things for the money, not for any grander scheme. And secondly, since Mamdouh was a [Coptic Christian], I thought he wouldn't have access to the real inner world of whatever was going on in the mosque. At the same time, I didn't have any indications that there was more stuff going on in the mosque." After testifying as the key witness in a Camden, New Jersey, courthouse, Zakhary entered a federal witness-protection program. At first, he and his new bride lived in New Orleans, before he became convinced the PLO was stalking him. He moved throughout the Southwest, driving the federal marshals responsible for him crazy with complaints about the program. Homesick and desperate for cash, Zakhary offered to return to Jersey City to spy on the Arab American community and the El Salaam Mosque, this time for the FBI, under the code name Mubarak. He stayed away from the mosque itself except for three visits gathering what information he could -- through friends and acquaintances.' "I didn't know Salameh very well," says Zakhary, who was better acquainted with Ibraham Elgabrowny, a cousin of both El Gawli and El Sayyid Nosair. "Elgabrowny was a very extreme fundamentalist. He belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In 1985, when the TWA plane was hijacked to Beirut, Elgabrowny said he was very happy. He said, 'lf I was the kidnapper, I would start executing passengers right now."' In 1991, a year and a half after he began to work for the FBI, Zakhary reported to his handler that he had overheard a plot to assassinate the two U.S. senators from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alfonse D'Amato. When incredulous FBI agents hooked him up to a lie detector, Zakhary failed the test. He blames the result on prescription medication he was taking at the time because of an automobile accident. The FBI did not believe him and terminated his employment. "Mamdouh [Zakhary] is an honest man with very good intentions," Richard Kennan, a U.S. Customs agent, told the Israeli newspaper Ma ariv. "[He] prevented a mass terror attack on Christmas 1985. Unfortunately, he didn't understand the American system. He was confused. I'm very sorry about what happened to him. We tried to get him asylum in the U.S., but his behavior didn't help." The U.S. has had a long and tortured history with the Islamic world. While most Americans see Muslims as the aggressors, Muslims view the West the same way. In fact, the U.S. and the Islamic world have been trading acts of terrorism for years. In 1986, Libyan-backed terrorists bombed the La Belle discotheque in Berlin, killing two American servicemen. In response, the U.S. bombed Libya, killing 36 civilians and wounding 92. On July 3, 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war, the U.S.S. Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger plane over the Gulf, killing 290 people. Six months afterward, Pan Am 103 disintegrated in a shower of fire and debris over Lockerbie, Scotland. No one claimed credit, but it is widely believed in intelligence circles that the Pan Am bombing was Iran's revenge. The U.S.-funded attack that killed the greatest number of innocent civilians took place on March 8, 1985, when the U.S. tried to liquidate what it believed was the very symbol of international terrorism: fundamentalist Muslim leader Sheikh Mohammed Fadlallah, the head of Hizbollah, the Party of God. On October 23, 1983, Fadlallah had sent a suicide bomber barreling into the Marine compound in Beirut, killing 241 Marines. CIA director William Casey contracted out the job of retaliation to Saudi intelligence, which sent a car packed with explosives into a Beirut slum near Fadlallah's headquarters. A city block was devastated and more than 90 people were buried under the rubble. Because of the persistent fear of Arab terror during the Gulf War, Arab Americans say they have been unfairly targeted for special surveillance by federal agencies. Actually, there has been little evidence of Arab terrorism on American soil. The PLO raises money and spreads propaganda in the U.S., but has refrained from attacking targets here -- although it has staged murderous assaults against Americans abroad. Ironically, the week the World Trade Center was bombed, a PLO official was being tried in a Brooklyn federal court for planting powerful time bombs in rented cars parked outside two Israeli banks in Manhattan and the El Al terminal at Kennedy Airport in 1973. Most Americans would be surprised to learn, however, that the terrorist group that led the hit parade through much of the 1980s was the Jewish Defense League, Rabbi Meir Kahane's fanatical right-wing Zionist organization. By 1985, the JDL was ranked by the FBI as the most lethal domestic terrorist group in America, overtaking the Aryan Nation, the American Nazi Party, and the Puerto Rican Revolution. The JDL has been linked to dozens of bombings and at least two assassinations, including the widely admired regional director of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, Alex Odeh. For years the Brooklyn-born Kahane had been calling for the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel. After moving to Jerusalem, he established the Kach Party and was elected to Israel's parliament in 1984. He drafted a slew of bills that were never passed, including one that would have made it a crime punishable by two years in prison for a Jew to have sex with an Arab. Israel's High Court banned Kahane from running for reelection in 1988 on the grounds that his party was racist and antidemocratic. It seems certain now that Kahane's fanatical ideas made him the target of terrorism himself. On November 5, 1990, he gave the last speech of his life. "My whole life has been ideas which eventually were taken up by other people and succeeded," said Kahane in his characteristic stutter, an impediment since childhood. "Today Jewish defense is an accepted thing. A patrol in a neighborhood is an accepted thing." But patrols were no longer adequate to defend Jews in a country that was becoming increasingly anti- Semitic, Kahane warned. He urged his Jewish audience to move to Israel before a new Holocaust engulfed them in America. "They hate us with a passion out there," thundered Kahane, "with a virulence that's frightening to see." Following Kahane's speech, El Sayyid Nosair approached the podium wearing a black yarmulke, as if to ask a question. Moments later, Kahane was dead. In the irony of ironies, the FBI put the New York branch of the Kach Party under surveillance to prevent it from avenging their slain leader. The FBI failed, however, to monitor activities at the radical mosques. I interviewed Nosair for The Village Voice in a tiny detention cell on Rikers Island on the eve of his trial. Nosair, who was wearing a white tunic and a white skullcap with the words ALLAH WILL BE VICTORIOUS knitted in bold blue Arabic calligraphy across the front, began our 90-minute talk by handing me a number of pamphlets showing why Islam was the true path. "I started to practice my religion as much as I can since I came to the United States," said Nosair. "Of course, I read a lot. I read about different religions -- Christianity, Judaism -- I studied all these religions that led me to believe that Islam is the true way of life. "You face many different doors" in America, continued Nosair, who had immigrated to Pittsburgh from Egypt on July 14, 1981. The true path is behind one door, he explained, while evil lurks behind the others. "Because I believe that Islam is the true way of life, I began to preach Islam, to prove to people from their own [religious] books that Islam is the correct way of life." Islam, he told me, is encoded in each of us at birth. Each person is created in submission to Allah. We pervert nature, he said, when we embrace Judaism or Christianity. "Judaism has a lot of materialistic rituals with a minimum of spiritual rituals, and that's why Allah sent Islam to mankind," Nosair said. Judaism is an abomination, he explained, not because of race or blood (the Arabs too are Semites), but because the Jews refuse to accept Mohammed as the Prophet. I asked Nosair if the Koran says there is such a thing as a just killing. "Of course, there has to be," he replied. "We have to have an Islamic state -- that's why we try to preach Islam to everybody." Nosair admitted he is a big "celebrity" in the Muslim world, where he is credited with killing Kahane. When Nosair's wife, Caren, a blue-eyed Irish Catholic convert to Islam, and three children traveled to Egypt a year after Kahane's murder, they were met at the airport by government officials and driven through Cairo in a motorcade. Caren's chaperone was none other than Nosair's cousin, Ibraham Elgabrowny. Elgabrowny had helped raise more than $250,000 for Nosair's legal defense. The trial turned out to be one of the most shocking in New York history. The Manhattan D.A.'s case against Nosair was as narrowly focused as the investigation had been. The prosecution didn't present any of the evidence police found in Nosair's apartment suggesting his terrorist connections' and never offered the jury an explanation of Nosair's motive, despite the fact that Manhattan Assistant District Attorney William Greenbaum knew that Nosair was bragging to fellow inmates at Rikers Island that "Allah chose me to kill the big Jew." At least one inmate reported Nosair's confession to the D.A.'s office, according to sources close to the investigation. After close questioning that included a lie-detector test, the inmate was deemed highly credible by the D.A. But in a catastrophic miscalculation, Greenbaum decided not to put the inmate on the stand. The D.A. believed there was ample evidence to convict Nosair without delving into his motive, which would have led the trial into the swamp of Kahane's radical ideas, 50 years of Arab-Israeli enmity, and the internal politics of Israel and Egypt. What looked to every observer like an open- and-shut case ended with Nosair's stunning acquittal; he was, however, sentenced to 22 years for related charges. "In this case the result is so jarring that has tempted people to talk about taking the law into their own hands," former U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani wrote to Manhattan U.S. Attorney Otto Obermaier after the verdict. Giuliani recommended that the FBI reopen the Nosair investigation. The Justice Department refused, and the case dimmed from public memory until the World Trade Center was bombed. The authorities are just now reopening the Kahane investigation. It is possible that Nosair will be tried in federal court for violating Kahane's civil rights, much as the police in the Rodney King case are now being tried. A new investigation may find that the bombers of the World Trade Center were also Kahane's killers. The connections seem strong. Both Elgabrowny and Salameh visited Nosair in Attica. And federal agents found forged Nicaraguan passports made out to Nosair and his family in Elgabrowny's Brooklyn brownstone. Attica officials are currently investigating whether an escape was being planned. Another suspect in the case, Mahmud Abouhalima, a New York City taxi driver and an associate of both Nosair and Salameh, fled the U.S., reportedly for Egypt. Investigators believe he may now be in Pakistan, where he had trained with the mujahedeen and later fought in the Afghan war. Investigators are also looking for links between the bombing suspects and Mir Aimal Kansi, who is being sought for the slaying of two CIA employees in front of the agency's Virginia headquarters. According to a federal prosecutor, Kansi had told his roommate that he was going to commit a violent act to protest what he perceived as Western mistreatment of Muslims. This much is certain: Just 12 hours after Kahane's killing, the government was espousing the lone-gunman theory and Nosair's terrorist connections were ignored. Had the investigation into the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane been vigorously pursued, the World Trade Center bombing may never have happened. _########################## Late 1980s and After: CIA Blocks Investigations into Al-Qaeda’s ‘Operational Headquarters’ in US In the late 1980s, Osama bin Laden and his mentor Abdullah Azzam are running a charity front called Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK)/Al-Kifah in Peshawar, Pakistan, and it has an important branch in Brooklyn, New York, called the Al-Kifah Refugee Center that is sending money and recruits to fight in Afghanistan. The CIA apparently helps the Al-Kifah Brooklyn office send up to 200 people from the US to fight in Afghanistan (see 1986-1993). Many of them are US citizens. Zalmay Khalilzad, a State Department Afghan specialist who will go on to become a prominent neoconservative, will later deny knowing of any Arab-Americans fighting with the mujaheddin. But one anonymous Congressional aide will recall occasional mentions of Al-Kifah Refugee Center or its head Mustafa Shalabi by some of the most radical mujaheddin. He will say: “Among that cabal, the extreme militant fringes, Shalabi was known.… [T]hey were asking to talk to him so he could organize some particular assistance.” The Neutrality Act prevents US citizens from fighting against countries not at war with the US, but the New York Times will note, “Yet there is no sign that a criminal investigation ever took place even though federal agents had come across broad hints about the center’s activities when they investigated the [Meir] Kahane assassination [in 1990] (see November 5, 1990) and the slaying of Mr. Shalabi [in 1991]” (see (February 28, 1991)). Kahane’s assassin, El Sayyid Nosair, was one of Shalabi’s assistants. [April 1993-Mid-2003). Robert I. Friedman, writing for New York magazine, will comment, “[W]hen the fanatical fervor [the CIA] whipped up leads to unintended consequences—the assassination of a Jewish militant leader in Manhattan, the bombing of the World Trade Center, a terror conspiracy to blow up the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and other Manhattan landmarks—[the CIA tried] to discourage local law enforcement agencies and the FBI from looking into the matter too deeply.” After Nosair assassinates Kahane, the FBI tells District Attorney Robert Morgenthau that Nosair was a lone gunman, not part of a broader conspiracy. However, the FBI had truckloads of evidence connecting to Al-Kifah strongly suggesting otherwise that it does not closely investigate. The FBI also blocks him from tying Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman to the WTC bombing (see After February 26, 1993). Morgenthau will later speculate the CIA may have encouraged the FBI not to pursue any other leads. “The FBI lied to me,” he will say. “They’re supposed to untangle terrorist connections, but they can’t be trusted to do the job.” [New York Magazine, 3/17/1995] Counterterrorism expert Steven Emerson will call Al-Kifah “al-Qaeda’s operational headquarters in the United States.” [Emerson, 2006, pp. 436] In 1994, a secret internal CIA report will conclude that the agency is “partially culpable” for the WTC bombing because of its support for radicals connected to Al-Kifah. One CIA source will say, “By giving these people the funding that we did, a situation was created in which it could be safely argued that we bombed the World Trade Center” (see January 24, 1994). But even after 1994 there is little evidence that the links from Al-Kifah were carefully explored by any US government agency. For instance, the government will not freeze Al-Kifah’s funds until shortly after 9/11, long after it ceased to exist (see September 24, 2001). ################################### _########################## ################################### November 5, 1990 and After: US Promotes Lone Gunman Theory in Kahane Assassination, Hiding Evidence of Al-Qaeda Links US government agencies cover up evidence of a conspiracy in the wake of El Sayyid Nosair’s assassination of controversial right-wing Zionist leader Rabbi Meir Kahane (see November 5, 1990). Nosair is captured a few blocks from the murder site after a police shoot-out. An FBI informant says he saw Nosair meeting with Muslim leader Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman a few days before the attack, and evidence indicating a wider plot with additional targets is quickly found. [Village Voice, 3/30/1993] Later that night, police arrive at Nosair’s house and find a pair of Middle Eastern men named Mahmud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh there. They are taken in for questioning. Additionally, police collect a total of 47 boxes of evidence from Nosair’s house, including: [Lance, 2003, pp. 34-35] Thousands of rounds of ammunition. Maps and drawings of New York City landmarks, including the World Trade Center. Documents in Arabic containing bomb making formulas, details of an Islamic militant cell, and mentions of the term “al-Qaeda.” Recorded sermons by Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman in which he encourages his followers to “destroy the edifices of capitalism” and destroy “the enemies of Allah” by “destroying their… high world buildings.” Tape-recorded phone conversations of Nosair reporting to Abdul-Rahman about paramilitary training, and even discussing bomb-making manuals. Videotaped talks that Ali Mohamed delivered at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Top secret manuals also from Fort Bragg. There are even classified documents belonging to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Commander in Chief of the Army’s Central Command. These manuals and documents had clearly come from Mohamed, who completed military service at Fort Bragg the year before and frequently stayed in Nosair’s house. A detailed and top secret plan for Operation Bright Star, a special operations training exercise simulating an attack on Baluchistan, a part of Pakistan between Afghanistan and the Arabian Sea. [Raleigh News and Observer, 10/21/2001; Raleigh News and Observer, 11/13/2001; Wall Street Journal, 11/26/2001; ABC News, 8/16/2002; Lance, 2003, pp. 34-35] Also within hours, two investigators will connect Nosair with surveillance photographs of Mohamed giving weapons training to Nosair, Abouhalima, Salameh, and others at a shooting range the year before (see July 1989). [Lance, 2003, pp. 34-35] But, ignoring all of this evidence, still later that evening, Joseph Borelli, the New York police department’s chief detective, will publicly declare the assassination the work of a “lone deranged gunman.” He will further state, “I’m strongly convinced that he acted alone.… He didn’t seem to be part of a conspiracy or any terrorist organization.” The 9/11 Congressional Inquiry will later conclude, “The [New York Police Department] and the District Attorney’s office… reportedly wanted the appearance of speedy justice and a quick resolution to a volatile situation. By arresting Nosair, they felt they had accomplished both.” [Village Voice, 3/30/1993; Lance, 2003, pp. 34-36] Abouhalima and Salameh are released, only to be later convicted for participating in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Investigators will later find in Nosair’s possessions a formula for a bomb almost identical to one used in the WTC bombing. [New York Magazine, 3/17/1995] As one FBI agent will later put it, “The fact is that in 1990, myself and my detectives, we had in our office in handcuffs, the people who blew up the World Trade Center in ‘93. We were told to release them.” The 47 boxes of evidence collected at Nosair’s house that evening are stored away, inaccessible to prosecutors and investigators. The documents found will not be translated until after the World Trade Center bombing. Nosair will later be acquitted of Kahane’s murder (though he will be convicted of lesser charges), as investigators will continue to ignore all evidence that could suggest Nosair did not act alone (see December 7, 1991). [ABC News, 8/16/2002; Lance, 2003, pp. 34-37] District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who prosecuted the case, will later speculate the CIA may have encouraged the FBI not to pursue any other leads. Nosair worked at the Al-Kifah Refugee Center which was closely tied to covert CIA operations in Afghanistan (see Late 1980s and After). [New York Magazine, 3/17/1995] ############################### December 7, 1991: US Still Refuses to Investigate Possible Conspiracy in Murder of Jewish Rabbi El-Sayyid Nosair is acquitted of killing Meir Kahane (see November 5, 1990), leader of the Jewish Defense League, but convicted of firearms offenses connected with his shooting of two witnesses during his attempt to flee. The judge will declare that the acquittal verdict “defie reason” and sentence Nosair to 22 years by applying maximum sentences to his convictions on the other charges. [Village Voice, 3/30/1993; Independent, 11/1/1998; Lance, 2003, pp. 65] The prosecution of Nosair was hobbled by the US government’s absolute refusal to acknowledge the possibility that the murder was anything other than the work of a “lone deranged gunman” despite information gained during the course of the investigation provided by an FBI operative that he had “very close” ties to the radical imam Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman. Many boxes of evidence that could have sealed Nosair’s guilt on the murder charge and also shown evidence of a larger conspiracy were not allowed as evidence. [Village Voice, 3/30/1993; Miller, Stone, and Mitchell, 2002, pp. 44-46] A portion of Nosair’s defense fund is paid for by bin Laden, but this will not be discovered until some time later. [ABC News, 8/16/2002] District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who prosecuted the case, will later speculate the CIA may have encouraged the FBI not to pursue any other leads. Nosair worked at the Al-Kifah Refugee Center which was closely tied to covert CIA operations in Afghanistan (see Late 1980s and After). [New York Magazine, 3/17/1995] After February 26, 1993: CIA Obstructs FBI Investigation of ‘Blind Sheikh’ in 1993 WTC Bombing After the 1993 WTC bombing (see February 26, 1993), New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s investigators search El Sayyid Nosair’s belongings (see November 5, 1990 and After) and find a bomb formula which was quite similar to the bomb used to attack the WTC. This discovery would link Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman’s group to the bombing. The belongings also include a taped plea from Abdul-Rahman to destroy “the towers that constitute the pillars” of the civilization of “enemies of God.” Some suspect this is a reference to the WTC. But the FBI refuses to acknowledge and follow up on the bomb formula or other leads from Nosair. Morgenthau later concludes that the CIA may have pressured the FBI to back off from evidence which led to Abdul-Rahman, as well as blocking other investigative leads (see Late 1980s and After). [New York Times, 11/21/1994; New York Magazine, 3/17/1995]

Military drills over time are escalating in aggressiveness.(blank firing didnt happen 5 years ago) THUS DHS Preparing for Civil War In US? ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ))))))))))))))))))))))))0o0(((((((((((((((((((((((((((( Obama DHS Purchases 2,700 Light-Armored Tanks to Go With Their 1.6 Billion Bullet Stockpile March 4, 2013 Print Version Source: Gateway Pundit This is getting a little creepy. According to one estimate, since last year the Department of Homeland Security has stockpiled more than 1.6 billion bullets, mainly .40 caliber and 9mm. DHS also purchased 2,700 Mine Resistant Armor Protected Vehicles (MRAP). Modern Survival Blog reported: The Department of Homeland Security (through the U.S. Army Forces Command) recently retrofitted 2,717 of these ‘Mine Resistant Protected’ vehicles for service on the streets of the United States. Although I’ve seen and read several online blurbs about this vehicle of late, I decided to dig slightly deeper and discover more about the vehicle itself. The new DHS sanctioned ‘Street Sweeper’ (my own slang due to the gun ports) is built by Navistar Defense (NavistarDefense.com), a division within the Navistar organization. Under the Navistar umbrella are several other companies including International Trucks, IC Bus (they make school buses), Monaco RV (recreational vehicles), WorkHorse (they make chassis), MaxxForce (diesel engines), and Navistar Financial (the money arm of the company). DHS even released a video on their newly purchased MRAPs. Via Pat Dollard: The MRAP featured in this video is was in Albuquerque, New Mexico for Law Enforcement Day which was held at a local area Target Store. This MRAP is stationed in El Paso, Texas at The Homeland Security Investigations Office. MRAP is a Mine Resistant Armor Protected Vehicle. ALSO RELATED 88888888888888888888888888888888888888 FAA Releases New Drone List—Is Your Town on the Map?

THESE EXERCISES FIRING BLANKS OVER LARGE URBAN AREA OCCURED MORE THAN 5 years AGO ?? I BELIEVE THIS IS A NEW WRINKLE.

Huh?? So they were supposed to have crystal balls and have known what he would do after he arrived when they gave him his visa? // end Colby ****************************o0o***************************** February 16, 1989-December 1990: CIA Continues to Work with ‘Blind Sheikh’ and Supports Mujaheddin Despite Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan In one radio broadcast, he says that “Americans are descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communism, and colonialism.” ==================================== Your sooooo right . APES AND PIGS dont use crystal balls very well.(Ya wonder why I previously posted the above in RED ??)

meps meps unacceptable !!!!!!!!!! ISOLATE CUBA !!!! New Cuba: Beachhead for Economic Democracy Beyond Capitalism Thursday, 17 January 2013 By Keith Harrington, Truthout | Op-Ed http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13918-the-new-cuba-a-beachhead-for-economic-democracy-we-should-support meps meps unacceptable !!!!!!!!!! CANT BUT HUMAN FACE ON CAPITALISM ... I KNOW MAKE STUFF UP !! US: Cuba is a State Sponsor of Terrorism Washington refuses to lift the harsh economic embargo on Cuba by John Glaser, March 01, 2013 http://news.antiwar.com/2013/03/01/us-cuba-is-a-state-sponsor-of-terrorism/ meps meps unacceptable !!!!!!!!!!!!!! ISOLATE !! ISOLATE CUBA !! MEPS !!!!

And the evidence for these claims is? I contacted someone who graduated the same year from the same degree program as Ross he said it would NOT have especially prepared them to analyse the collapses. // END Colby ################### Golly someone doing this type of research might be termed an intelligence operative.

So do you have any evidence the CIA knew Rahman would target the US when they arranged for his visas? The rest is irrelevant. // end Colby *************************************************o0o******************************************* http://www.historyco...ar_abdul_rahman (I have only posted a small portion of this important link PLEASE VISIT AND READ THE WHOLE LINK<VERY WORTH WHILE) ============================================================ February 16, 1989-December 1990: CIA Continues to Work with ‘Blind Sheikh’ and Supports Mujaheddin Despite Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan Although the Soviets withdraw from Afghanistan in February 1989 (see February 15, 1989), the CIA continues to support the mujaheddin because the Soviet-allied Communist government stays in power in Kabul. Apparently, the CIA and the Saudi government continue to fund the mujaheddin at least until December 1990, although it could be longer because the Communist government remains in power in Kabul until 1992. The “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, reportedly has been working with the CIA in the 1980s to help unite the mujaheddin factions fighting each other (see Late 1980s). The Village Voice will later report that according to a “very high-ranking Egyptian official,” Abdul-Rahman continues to work with the CIA after moving to Brooklyn in July 1990 (see July 1990). He “work closely with the CIA, helping to channel a steady flow of money, men, and guns to mujaheddin bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But despite working with the CIA, Abdul-Rahman still considers the US the “Great Satan” and does not try to hide this. In one radio broadcast, he says that “Americans are descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communism, and colonialism.” Matti Steinberg, an expert on Islamic fundamentalism, says that Abdul-Rahman’s “long-term goal is to weaken US society and to show Arab rulers that the US is not an invulnerable superpower.” The Egyptian official will later complain, “We begged America not to coddle the sheikh.” [Village Voice, 3/30/1993] (April 25-May 1989): US Holds Secret Meetings with Egyptian Terror Group Headed by ‘Blind Sheikh’ Members of Egyptian militant group Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, whose spiritual head is the ‘Blind Sheikh,’ Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, hold a series of secret meetings with US officials at the American embassy in Cairo. The meetings are initiated by Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, which wants to co-operate with the US, because it thinks the US is co-operating with and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. At the meetings, representatives of the group tell the US: Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya has between 150,000 and 200,000 members; One of the representatives at the meetings sat on Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya’s shura, or leadership council, between 1981 and 1988. The 11 members of the group’s shura are named at the meetings, as is its operational commander; Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya thinks highly of Saudi Arabian King Fahd, but believes he should take a stronger line against Iran. However, Abdul-Rahman met an Iranian delegation in Pakistan in autumn 1988; The group will not attack US diplomats; Abdul-Rahman travels to the US yearly, and also travels to Britain; The group is not as secret and violent as represented by the Egyptian government and has undergone a “change in thinking,” becoming concerned about its radical and violent image. Embassy officials are skeptical about some of the claims, as the group’s representatives reveal more than the officials think is prudent. One year after the meetings, Abdul-Rahman will be issued a US visa by a CIA officer and move to the US (see July 1990). [uS Embassy in Cairo, 4/25/1989 ; US Embassy in Cairo, 5/3/1989 ] July 1990: ’Blind Sheikh’ Enters US Despite Being on Terrorist Watch List, Takes Over Al-Kifah Despite being on a US terrorist watch list for three years, radical Muslim leader Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman enters the US on a “much-disputed” tourist visa issued by an undercover CIA agent. [Village Voice, 3/30/1993; Atlantic Monthly, 5/1996; Lance, 2003, pp. 42] Abdul-Rahman was heavily involved with the CIA and Pakistani ISI efforts to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, and became famous traveling all over the world for five years recruiting new fighters for the Afghan war. The CIA gave him visas to come to the US starting in 1986 (see December 15, 1986-1989) . However, he never hid his prime goals to overthrow the governments of the US and Egypt. [Atlantic Monthly, 5/1996] FBI agent Tommy Corrigan will later say that prior to Abdul-Rahman’s arrival, “terrorism for all intents and purposes didn’t exist in the United States. But [his] arrival in 1990 really stoke the flames of terrorism in this country. This was a major-league ballplayer in what at the time was a minor-league ballpark. He was… looked up to worldwide. A mentor to bin Laden, he was involved with the MAK over in Pakistan.” (and the CIA didnt know he was a major terror instigator ??? , GAAL) The charity front Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) is also known as Al-Kifah, and it has a branch in Brooklyn known as the Al-Kifah Refugee Center. The head of that branch, Mustafa Shalabi, picks up Abdul-Rahman at the airport when he first arrives and finds an apartment for him. Abdul-Rahman soon begins preaching at Al Farouq mosque, which is in the same building as the Al-Kifah office, plus two other locals mosques, Abu Bakr and Al Salaam. [Lance, 2006, pp. 53] He quickly turns Al-Kifah into his “de facto headquarters.” [Atlantic Monthly, 5/1996] He is “infamous throughout the Arab world for his alleged role in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.” Abdul-Rahman immediately begins setting up a militant Islamic network in the US. [Village Voice, 3/30/1993] He is believed to have befriended bin Laden while in Afghanistan, and bin Laden secretly pays Abdul-Rahman’s US living expenses. [Atlantic Monthly, 5/1996; ABC News, 8/16/2002] For the next two years, Abdul-Rahman will continue to exit and reenter the US without being stopped or deported, even though he is still on the watch list (see Late October 1990-October 1992). =

Questions over the validity of the author's claims and analysis aside, he dates the relationship to the begining of 2012 when you date much further back. // end Colby ??????? The decision to treat the Muslim Brotherhood as a strategic partner has been on the cards ever since February 10 of last year – one day before Hosni Mubarak’s resignation ================================ The Muslim Brotherhood could be used as a strategic partner because the were coming into power. The MB had been used as an asset for decades. Asset /Strategic partner differ.

LOL LEN COLBY IS A CONSTANT CHANNEL OF ESTABLISHMENT INFORMATION AND PROPAGANDA. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ A few years on, the military continues to step up exercises focused on urban deployment and as recently as last month held live exercises in heavily populated US metropolitan areas. Residents of Miami and Houston were treated to troop mobilizations, machine gun fire, and gunships flying over their cities. After concerned callers reported the activities to local news stations, the media quickly moved to calm fears of a terrorist attack or invasion. They smiled while they did it and shrugged off the unprecedented displays as just your average, everyday military exercise. Except, of course, the US military, up until recently, has never openly trained in U.S. cities, and especially not in scores of cities with training spread over such a short period of time. Which begs the question, why are the military and local law enforcement holding realistic urban training exercises on the streets of America when they could do it at any of the hundreds of training facilities around the world? Via: The Daily Crux, Burning Platform (blue underlined RED links) I was once stationed at Camp Lejuene, NC. As a Navy Corpsman, I helped care for Marines. I tell you this because inevitably there will be those that assume I hold some anti-military motive. … At no time during my time there were “realistic urban training” exercises conducted in towns and cities. This is a recent development. … The training has been coordinated with local, county and state agencies and officials, including the Ridgeland police and fire departments, according to a Marine Corps news release. Although there is no danger, Farao said residents should stay away if they see training under way or uniformed personnel. Realistic Urban Training is happening all over the U.S. on January 26, 2013, Army Backhawk helicopters swooped through the city at night, firing door-guns and chasing make-believe bad guys like something out of an action movie. The fired blanks echoed off of the buildings, scaring many residents into taking cover. The local news reported excitedly about the exercise, stating it was only a drill and for residents not to be concerned. However, there was no journalistic follow up asking hard questions. Such as, who authorized an exercise without informing the public? Why conduct this type of training in a populated U.S. city and put citizens at risk? Isn’t this a violation of Posse Comitatus? No hard follow up questions were asked, and to my knowledge, have not been since. Not even when the same exercise occurred in Houston, Texas on January 29, 2013. The U.S. Army along with other agencies took over the Carnegie Vanguard High School in Houston on Monday. Alarmed residents called police and complained about gunshots and helicopters. No details were provided about the training. Watch the KTRK-TV Houston report and hear how alarmed residents responded after hearing gunshots and seeing military helicopters flying over their homes. … According to Sgt. 1st Class Michael Noggle, an Army spokesman based at Fort Bragg, N.C., “We were invited by the city of Galveston to conduct joint training exercises to enhance the effectiveness of both services in order to better protect the residents of Galveston.” He went on to say in an email that “The purpose of the realistic urban training is to give our Special Operators an opportunity to hone their skills in a controlled, but unfamiliar, realistic urban environment that cannot be replicated with the bare-boned facades found on military installation ranges.” I’ve highlighted a few examples, but there are more. In a search I came upon these others. Los Angeles, CA, Plainville and Worchester, Massachusetts. As reported in the other stories, residents were unaware of the drills until helicopters swooped over their neighborhoods. And here’s more: Minneapolis, MN, and this in East Saint Louis, MO. There are many more, but these links provide a foundation for further research. I spoke with a high-ranking, military source in DHS. Preferring to remain unnamed for obvious reasons, he told me, “DHS and DOD are conducting desensitizing exercises all across the U.S.,” he paused, then added, “we’re being prepared for mass civil unrest in major U.S. cities. DOD will be expected to help – when we’re requested.” I asked if there was a timeline for expecting civil unrest in our cities and why should we expect it to begin with. I was told that there were many reasons, but that the continued devaluation of our currency, the predicted history-setting prices for gasoline this summer and the continued gun control debate are forming a perfect storm of civil discontent. When this storm hits, it will most assuredly produce mass casualties. When does DHS expect this to happen? This summer. From a high-ranking source deep within DHS, who has strong DOD ties, we are being told that joint DOD-local law enforcement exercises are to desensitize us to military occupation. When asked if there was any concern about violating Posse Comitatus, he stated “no concern at all,” and added, “That’s been a non-issue for a long time.” Source: The Allegiant

In a quote in his obituary, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, characterized as “Du Bain’s longtime friend,” calls him a man of “boundless optimism, tremendous buoyancy and patriotism.” Myron Du Bain head of SRI TWICE ,once during MKULTRA work and second time during psychic warfare research times. Today SRI connected to HAARP. And what;s this irrelevant Haarp karapola // END COLBY ============================================== Why does Colby disrepect the US NAVY ?? About the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is the Navy's full-spectrum corporate laboratory, conducting a broadly based multidisciplinary program of scientific research and advanced technological development. The Laboratory, with a total complement of nearly 2,500 personnel, is located in southwest Washington, D.C., with other major sites at the Stennis Space Center, Miss., and Monterey, Calif. NRL has served the Navy and the nation for over 85 years and continues to meet the complex technological challenges of today's world. For more information, visit the NRL homepage or join the conversation on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. ================================================================= NRL Scientists Produce Densest Artificial Ionospheric Plasma Clouds Using HAARP U.S. Naval Research Laboratory research physicists and engineers from the Plasma Physics Division, working at the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) transmitter facility, Gakona, Alaska, successfully produced a sustained high density plasma cloud in Earth's upper atmosphere. "Previous artificial plasma density clouds have lifetimes of only ten minutes or less," said Paul Bernhardt, Ph.D., NRL Space Use and Plasma Section. "This higher density plasma 'ball' was sustained over one hour by the HAARP transmissions and was extinguished only after (Photo: SRI International—Elizabeth Kendall) termination of the HAARP radio beam." Sequence of images of the glow plasma discharge produced with transmissions at the third electron gyro harmonic using the HAARP HF transmitter, Gakona, Alaska. The third harmonic artificial glow plasma clouds were obtained with HAARP using transmissions at 4.34 megahertz (MHz). The resonant frequency yielded green line (557.7 nanometer emission) with HF on November 12, 2012, between the times of 02:26:15 to 02:26:45 GMT. These glow discharges in the upper atmosphere were generated as a part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored Basic Research on Ionospheric Characteristics and Effects (BRIOCHE) campaign to explore ionospheric phenomena and its impact on communications and space weather. Using the 3.6-megawatt high-frequency (HF) HAARP transmitter, the plasma clouds, or balls of plasma, are being studied for use as artificial mirrors at altitudes 50 kilometers below the natural ionosphere and are to be used for reflection of HF radar and communications signals. Past attempts to produce electron density enhancements have yielded densities of 4 x 105 electrons per cubic centimeter (cm3) using HF radio transmissions near the second, third, and fourth harmonics of the electron cyclotron frequency. This frequency near 1.44 MHz is the rate that electrons gyrate around the Earth's magnetic field. The NRL group succeeded in producing artificial plasma clouds with densities exceeding 9 x 105 electrons cm3 using HAARP transmission at the sixth harmonic of the electron cyclotron frequency. Optical images of the artificial plasma balls show that they are turbulent with dynamically changing density structures. Electrostatic waves generated by the HAARP radio transmissions are thought to be responsible for accelerating electrons to high enough energy to produce the glow discharge in the neutral atmosphere approaching altitudes of nearly 170 kilometers. The artificial plasma clouds are detected with HF radio soundings and backscatter, ultrahigh frequency (UHF) radar backscatter, and optical imaging systems. Ground measurements of stimulated electromagnetic emissions provide evidence of the strength and frequency for the electrostatic waves that accelerated ambient electrons to ionizing velocities. The NRL team is working with collaborators at SRI International, University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Florida, and BAE Systems on this project to synthesize the observations with parametric interactions theory to develop a comprehensive theory of the plasma cloud generation. The next HAARP campaign, scheduled for early 2013, will include experiments to develop denser, more stable ionization clouds.

FROM THE DU *****************o0o**************** Edited on Mon Jun-19-06 08:57 AM by DrDebug Florida Air and Krause Dekkers bragged in an interview that he wanted to start Florida Air as well and Dale Krause would become the general manager with a staff of 160 employees (1). This never happened of course. Dale Krause had several airlines known as Krause Aviation, KRS Aviation and Venice Jet. During the hearing of Dekkers, he was asked about the Warrior (N555HA) from Huffman Aviation which Mohammed Atta and Alshehhi abandoned in Miami on December 24, 2000. (2) Currently that airplane is registered to Krause Avaition. Britannia and Caribe Air are interesting as well. They keep on changing companies, airplanes. It is one huge pile of planes going back and forth among the same players under different names. The continuous saga of Khashoggi Hopsicker says that N900SA a.k.a. Cocaine One was once owned by Genesis Aviation. Can't find a verification, however it was owned by Ramy El-Batrawi (4), who was running Genesis Intermedia for Khashoggi as well. The Khashoggi links: 1. Fact: Khashoggi was connected to Huffman Aviation. 2. Fact: Khashoggi was connected to Genesis Intermedia. 3. Fact: Genesis Intermedia was making lots of money on 9/11. 4. Fact: Khashoggi was involved in BCCI. 5. Fact: Khashoggi was involved in Iran/Contra and a partner of Oliver North. 6. Indirect: Khashoggi is a possible client of Red Sea Management. 7. Indirect: Khashoggi is connected to Pastrana's scams. 8. Unknown: Genesis Aviation owned N900SA. 9. Unknown: Genesis Aviation was a proxy of Khashoggi. Open question: Did Genesis Aviation own N900SA before it was transfered to Skyway via the non-existing DuPont Investment? Skyway - Royal Sons The sister plane did get transfered from Skyway to Royal Sons on January 13, 2005 (5): Levine-Texar and the Lear Jet Diego Levine-Texar was the pilot of the Lear Jet. It turns out that he is pilot for the equivalent of Air Force One of Venezuela. A Swiss website (sadly unsourced) alledges that Mike Brassington, the co-pilot during the heroin bust, was also working part-time for as a DEA-Agent. (6) The inconsistency of the amounts on various website is because 35 pounds was discovered, however another 8 pounds was found stuffed in old shoes in the airplane. (7) Both pilots and the owner were not charged because of "lack of evidence." The same Swiss site also mentions that even though it was mainly Arabs at Huffmann aviation, there was also a group of Russian and Israeli art students who alledgely are connected to the Ecstasy trade.(7) The other flight schools There is far less in known about Florida Flight Training operated by Arne Kruithof. According to Amanda Keller, Atta's girlfriend, it was their stash. The two flight school owners enjoyed to talk in private and usually went inside a plane if they had something to say with one-another. (8) Sadly this one of things which only single sourced. The FBI immediately knew what flight schools were involved with the terrorists and managed to get to scene within a few hours after the attacks, because "they got lucky" (8) It is equally cool that Jeb Bush even though he is the Governor of Florida still can find the time to help the federal agents seize the records from Huffman Aviation in the middle of the night following the attacks of September 11th and load them onto a C-130 (10) The INS case into Rudi Dekkers being an illegal alien and subject to deportation (13) was canceled, because it is alledged that he is convicted for fraud and drug running and possibly connected to sexual harrassment and another fraud case (6), and he was a great help in Venice. Mind you, this really needs source documents. Amanda Keller, Atta's girlfriend, did call him an "old pervert." (14) Sibel Edmonds Intelligence is also gathered by certain semi-legitimate organizations - to be used for their activities. It really does not boil down to countries anymore.... When you have activities involving a lot of money, you have people from different nations involved.... It can be categorized under organized crime, but in a very large scale.... (12) There are certain points..., where you have your drug related activities combined with money laundering and information laundering, converging with your terrorist activities (12) Way does this sound so familiar? 9/11 Commission Ben-Veniste Ben-Veniste who defended Barry Seal during the Mena drug running (Iran/Contra) was part of the 9/11 Commission. (9) N911UN Willy Hilliard used to own the Falcon N911UN as well. Hopsicker called it very peculiar because of the UN (United Nations) extension (7), however I liked the 911 part as well. The Falcon was bought from Sky Bus Inc. and is currently owned by Freedom Flotilla aviation. I love that name as well, since on March 28, 1980 Fidel Castro unleashed spies and thugs against America and that event was called Freedom Flotilla. (11) Venezuela Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela. Everywhere you see the same country appearing over and over again and yet Colombia is hardly ever mentioned anywhere. There are four possibilities: 1. It is the blame Venezuela game. 2. It is a Venezuela-Contra game as well. 3. It is a coincidence. 4. They are allies. During Iran-Contra, Israel and Iran were allies as well even though they pretended to be arch-enemies to the outside world. 5. Move on. There is nothing to see here. Sources: 1. http://tampabay.bizj...mpabay/conte... 2. http://www.house.gov...kkers031902.htm 3. http://162.58.35.241...?NNumbertxt=... 4. http://www.sunbiz.or...=DETFIL&n1=P... 5. http://www.madcowpro...m/ROYALSONS.htm (Source document) 6. http://www.us-politik.ch/teil14.htm 7. http://www.madcowpro...x/appendix6.htm (Source document) 8. http://www.madcowpro...m/mc332004.html 9. http://www.911citize...rint.php?sid=82 10. http://www.scoop.co....0212/S00058.htm 11. http://www.newsmax.c...02/10/10/160... 12. http://www.breakforn...bel-Edmonds.htm 13. http://www.scoop.co....0212/S00058.htm 14. http://www.madcowprod.com/videos.html ################################################## DrDebug Mon Jun-19-06 08:59 PM Response to Reply #36 38. Guantanamo Bay, Rum Cay and CIA Rendition Flights Edited on Mon Jun-19-06 09:00 PM by DrDebug Willy Hilliard's N35NK airplane was used for flights to Rum Cay, 375 miles to southeast of Fort Lauderdale in the remote southeastern Bahamas and once served as a refuge for pirates, was a center of gun-running during the American Civil War and grew to full prominence during Prohibition as a port used for boot-legging. (2) Coincidently after Hilliard started flying to that remote location, there were strange new headlines in the newspaper like: “Bahamian and U.S. drug-enforcement officials confiscated $50 million in cocaine that was being smuggled aboard an unlicensed catamaran in Bahamian waters, officials said. Acting on police intelligence, authorities seized the 2,190 pounds of the drug aboard an unnamed 44-foot catamaran less than two miles off Rum Cay.” (2) N35NK in Santa Maria, PT (Feb 17, 2005) airport used for rendition (4) In April 2004 the plane made a flight to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and numerous flight to numerous small islands before being sold in June 2004 to Aircraft Guaranty Corporation for the infamous CIA rendition flights. Despite operating for the CIA now, the plane still regularly flew to known drugs transfer points like Venice, Florida, Bahamas Treasure Cay, Bahamas San Salvador, Bahamas Marsh Harbour, Netherlands Antilles St. Maarten, Toluca, Mexico (3), Antigua and Barbuda Antigua, Bermuda etc. (1) I hope that they clean the drugs out of the planes during those rendition flights... Sources: 1. http://www.waynemadsenreport.com / (June 10, 2006) 2. http://www.williambo...ht_schools.html 3. You know, the destination of the 5.5 tons cocaine flight. 4. http://web.amnesty.o...ENGAMR510512006

Myron DuBain FRIEND OF HENRY K ,,,,,,,HOW SWEET !!! http://www.madcowpro...MyronDuBain.htm "Hilliard did have connections, however. Not with the Mob, perhaps, but with the CIA, through Myron DuBain, a World War II OSS/CIA operative who became the chairman of Fireman's Fund Insurance, which announced plans to acquire the insurance company founded by Hilliard back in 1982. DuBain later founded a San Francisco supper club with oilman Gordon Getty and Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz; his "Pacific Institute" kept former Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld busy in the 1990s." ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Lost in Virginia As the term of my relief from Washington approaches, it’s drudgery becomes more nauseating and intolerable, and my impatience to escape increases daily. October 17, 2009 The Man who PAID The Men Who Stare at Goats This piece is a bit of background on Wally Hilliard - one of the key figures behind “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” Continue at your own risk. The Man Who Paid the Men Who Stare at Goats October 15, 2009 by Daniel Hopsicker The man who owned the flight school that taught Mohamed Atta to fly got rich selling his insurance company, we have learned, to the man who PAID “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” Wally Hilliard’s links to American intelligence go back (at least) to November of 1981, when his insurance company, Wisconsin Employer’s Group, was bought out by Myron Du Bain, a World War II OSS/CIA operative and the Chairman of Fireman’s Fund of San Francisco. We discovered the connection in a trip to Green Bay several years ago. But only recently did we learn that Myron Du Bain’s life-long ties to the CIA included two stints at the helm of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), famous for its classified research into psychic viewing. the results of which are currently on display in “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” Psychic Research with wartime applications DuBain became chairman of SRI International in 1985, at a crucial time when the U.S. Defense Dept. was growing increasingly concerned with advances in psychic research behind what was then called the “Iron Curtain.” A January 10, 1984 headline in the New York Times read “PENTAGON IS SAID TO FOCUS ON ESP FOR WARTIME USE.” “THE Pentagon has spent millions of dollars, according to three new reports, on secret projects to investigate extrasensory phenomena and to see if the sheer power of the human mind can be harnessed to perform various acts of espionage and war - penetrating secret files, for example, locating submarines or blowing up guided missiles in mid-flight. “Further, one of the reports says concern about a psychic arms gap has reached as high as the White House in at least one instance. In 1977, by this account, President Carter ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct a high-level review of psychic research behind the Iron Curtain in an attempt to assess a possible Soviet threat.” Columnist Jack Anderson followed the story closely for years. “U.S. intelligence agencies won’t talk about it, but they are rushing to catch up to the Soviet Union in what one scientist called “The race for inner space—psychic research.” White knight talking backwards… and out of the side of his mouth Du Bain’s first stint running SRI was also tumultuous. As President of SRI during the late 60’s, he faced regular protests over the institute’s controversial military contracts, including studies on chemical warfare and LSD. The Stanford campus was up in arms over SRI’s involvement in LSD experiments being conducted at the Veterans Hospital in Redwood City (where author Ken Kesey first took LSD) resulting in Stanford University issuing a statement in 1970 cutting it’s ties to the institute which bore its name. “The university outlawed secret research in 1969 and there is no evidence that current faculty is involved,” the statement said. That wasn’t the end of it, of course. In 1977, the University admitted a few (seven) experiments done for the CIA, with quaint names like “Project Knockout.” Residents of La Honda, CA who remember Kesey have told interesting stories to researchers. One who lived there in the early ’70s worked for five years testing LSD on monkeys in experiments commissioned by SRI. And writer Robert Stone, who won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship to Stanford University, has said, “The Stanford Research Institute was funding breakthrough research in circuitry at the same time as it was producing CIA-funded lovely liberating drugs.” Myron, We Hardly Knew Ye With oilman Gordon Getty and Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz, DuBain founded an exclusive private San Francisco supper club. He was also influential at the Pacific Institute, which kept former Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from starving while Clinton was President in the 90’s. In addition to belonging to the exclusive Bohemian Club, whose annual retreats provide grist for innumerable conspiracy mills worldwide, Du Bain served as chairman of the United Way of the Bay Area, a director of the San Francisco Opera, and a governor of the San Francisco Symphony. In a quote in his obituary, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, characterized as “Du Bain’s longtime friend,” calls him a man of “boundless optimism, tremendous buoyancy and patriotism.” Du Bain’s importance in American geo-politics was reflected in several early initiative in China with which he was involved. Du Bain was into China before being into China was cool. “Insurer, China Sign Agreement” read a press release from May 14, 1980. “Fireman’s Fund Insurance Companies and the People’s Insurance Company of China have established a working business relationship and a joint commitment to “explore other areas of mutual interest.” “The Stanford Research Institute, a noted research organization of the United states, has been invited to conduct a comprehensive study on the Hong Kong,” read a Chinese wire service report from the early 1980’s. “A contract was signed here today by Myron Du Bain, Chairman of the board of the U.S. institute, and Peter Wrangham, Executive Director of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.” A portal into the abyss Wally Hilliard’s connection with Myron Du Bain may shed light on Hilliard’s curious metamorphosis after retiring to Florida in 1996. Hilliard went from being a wealthy Green Bay WI insurance executive whose official corporate slogan was “Love God & Back the Pack” to fronting for clandestine operations bearing the almost unmistakable mark of the CIA. His two flight schools trained dozens of Arabs, several later made infamous for having killed thousands in New York and Washington D.C., and others less well known but who are today nonetheless considered terror suspects. Hilliard also served duty as the “paper” owner of record on FAA registrations for dozens of airplanes. that some of them were used in CIA renditions and international drug trafficking. On July 25, 2000, Wally Hilliard’s LearJet was surrounded by machine-gun-toting DEA agents at Orlando Executive Airport. They found 43 lbs. of heroin aboard. Although Hilliard claimed innocence, saying the plane had been leased to others, DEA Agents testified that Hilliard’s planes made 39 weekly trips to Venezuela before being busted, and Federal prosecutors argued Hilliard was not an “innocent owner,” and therefore should get back the plane. A federal judge agreed; and, as court documents show, Hilliard lost the LearJet in government forfeiture proceedings. “Being connected means never having to say you’re sorry.” Neither Hilliard nor his business partner in American Jet Charters, who was also the pilot on the flight that got busted, were ever charged with any crime. A third partner in the venture, Venezuelan Edgar Valles-Diaz, did go to prison, however. The list of individuals that Wallace J. Hilliard is associated with who are involved in America’s “Clandestine Services” and who can fairly be described as “covert operatives” is a long one. Another example is Farhad Azima, who leased his plane to Ollie North so he could go to Iran, was implicated in the S & L scandal ( specifically Indian Springs S & L out of Kansas City), named in the Lincoln Bedroom scandal, and has run CIA affiliated airlines going all the way back to the 70’s with Egyptian-American Air Transport. He and Hilliard are partners in a venture called Spatialight. See an SEC filing here. Almost eight years had passed since terrorists practiced ‘touch & go’s’ on the airport’s runways. It is an open secret in aviation circles in Southwest Florida that the two men who had had direct business dealings with terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta—Dutch national Rudi Dekkers and American financier Wally Hilliard—have personal and business histories that cannot withstand close scrutiny. At least we’re doing our part. Stay tuned. ################# DUBain later of SRI International, the former Stanford Research Institute. ... He was a member of the Bohemian Club..." *) October 14, 1981, Associated Press, 'Fireman's Frim to Acquire Wisconsin Firm': "Fireman's Fund Inc. of New York will acquire the Wisconsin Employers Group insurance company under an agreement in principle reached by the two firms, a Wisconsin Employers spokesman said Tuesday. The acquisition must be approved by Wisconsin's insurance commissioner and the directors of both firms, the spokesman said. Terms of the sale were not released. All Wisconsin Employers stock is held by Ronald A. Weyers, president, and Wallace J. Hilliard, chairman of the board. They founded the firm in 1969 [by Hilliard]." *) 2012, Sander Hicks, 'Slingshot to the Juggernaut', p. 85: "In the mid-2000s, when we were still friends, Battuello often bragged that she was a financial researcher who had been trained inside a “CIA bank.” She had cut her teeth at the United California Ban (UCB), right after former CIA director John McCone served as chairman. “UCB had been on the brink of collapse, under the weight of highly irregular loans,” Battuello told me then. UCB had been known as John McCone’s “piggy bank,” and, with businessman Myron DuBain on the board, it allegedly “attempted to recover monies looted and missing” by Saudi arms dealers, like Adnan Khashoggi and former CIA personnel." ################# SRI TODAY hang the bankers U.S. Naval Research Laboratory confirms HAARP’s ability to manipulate atmosphere 02 Mar 2013 by Clark Kent Few government research programs have produced as many questions and as much speculation as the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). From the potential of HAARP to disrupt and control communications to the possibility of controlling the weather and creating natural disasters, the sophistication of HAARP and the extent to which it is being used is the subject of much debate. However, while many may speculate over just what the good folks working at the HAARP stations are up to, the fact is that an overwhelming majority are incapable of admitting that the facilities even exist in the first place. Yet, while denial might placate those who do not prefer to confront unpleasant facts, truth does not mold itself to the wishes and desires of the willfully ignorant. Matters concerning the existence of HAARP and its ability to produce quite amazing phenomena are clearly documented in scientific literature as well as by those who have researched the program independently for years. For instance, the research paper “Geometric modulation: A more effective method of steerable ELF/VLF wave generation with continuous HF heating of the lower ionosphere” published in Geophysical Research Letters, listing three methods of geometric modulation – line sweep, saw-tooth sweep, and circle sweep – not only examines the fact that HAARP is capable of generating and bathing regions of the country in ELF/VLF waves, but demonstrates that it is currently doing so. This information thus confirms the findings presented by independent researchers like those at Sincedutch who have, for some time, described HAARP wave modulation using similar terminology such as HAARP rings, Stairstep Patterns, and Scalar Squares. Recently, however, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has added more evidence to the claims that HAARP is capable of affecting and controlling weather. This is because researchers from the Plasma Physics Division at the HAARP transmitter facility in Gakona, Alaska, have recently announced that they have been able to produce a “sustained high density plasma cloud in Earth’s upper atmosphere.” The cloud, which Paul Bernhardt, Ph.D of the Space Use and Plasma Section describes as a “higher density plasma ball,” was able to be sustained for a full hour, where most of the previous plasma clouds (that the project is admitting to creating) have only lasted for around ten minutes. This new plasma cloud creation, however, was only terminated after the HAARP radio beam itself was terminated, so it is highly possible that the cloud could have been maintained for much longer than the mere one hour reported by the NRL. The Naval Research Laboratory News website describes the project as follows: Using the 3.6-megawatt high-frequency (HF) HAARP transmitter, the plasma clouds, or balls of plasma, are being studied for use as artificial mirrors at altitudes 50 kilometers below the natural ionosphere and are to be used for reflection of HF radar and communications signals. Past attempts to produce electron density enhancements have yielded densities of 4 x 105 electrons per cubic centimeter (cm3) using HF radio transmissions near the second, third, and fourth harmonics of the electron cyclotron frequency. This frequency near 1.44 MHz is the rate that electrons gyrate around the Earth’s magnetic field. The NRL group succeeded in producing artificial plasma clouds with densities exceeding 9 x 105 electrons cm3 using HAARP transmission at the sixth harmonic of the electron cyclotron frequency. The article continues by saying, Optical images of the artificial plasma balls show that they are turbulent with dynamically changing density structures. Electrostatic waves generated by the HAARP radio transmissions are thought to be responsible for accelerating electrons to high enough energy to produce the glow discharge in the neutral atmosphere approaching altitudes of nearly 170 kilometers. The artificial plasma clouds are detected with HF radio soundings and backscatter, ultrahigh frequency (UHF) radar backscatter, and optical imaging systems. Ground measurements of stimulated electromagnetic emissions provide evidence of the strength and frequency for the electrostatic waves that accelerated ambient electrons to ionizing velocities. The Naval Research Laboratory claims that its researchers are working on this project in order to “synthesize the observations with parametric interactions theory to develop a comprehensive theory of the plasma cloud generation.” In this goal, the NRL will be collaborating with SRI International, University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Florida, and BAE Systems. It should also be noted that the experiment which produced the results mentioned above (the creation of the hour-long plasma cloud), was itself part of the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) campaign known as Basic Research on Ionospheric Characteristics and Effects (BRIOCHE). BRIOCHE is a project that exists, according to the NRL, for the purposes of exploring “ionospheric phenomena and its impact on communications and space weather.” Indeed, the fact that the HAARP-based project is not one that will prove beneficial to mankind is evidenced by the involvement of not only DARPA but also of BAE Systems, a British multinational defense contractor, which only recently began negotiations with European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company N.V. (EADS) to create a merger between the two companies. The resulting defense and security group, if the negotiations go through as planned, would produce the world’s largest aerospace and defense corporation, even bigger than Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing. SRI International also has a history of acting as a defense contractor and defense and security development firm, with a special knack for Earth and Space research. The SRI International website even states that the organization “examine(s) the fundamental processes governing the upper atmosphere and space.” While the true nature of the HAARP tests reported by the NRL and currently taking place are shrouded in mystery, one thing is for certain: not only does the program exist, it is capable of creating some truly amazing and seemingly natural occurrences. That is, natural to those who are unaware of the capabilities of the technology. Source: http://www.activistp...y-confirms.html

Eurozone unemployment hits record-high 11.9% hang the bankers 02 Mar 2013 by Clark Kent Unemployed workers wait outside a government job centre in Madrid. Unemployment has hit unprecedented levels across Europe, with youth joblessness particularly high, according to a new EU report. Spain was hardest-hit: Overall unemployment was measured at over 20 percent, and youth joblessness was over 55 percent. The number of those out of work in the eurozone spiked to 11.9 percent in January, up from 11.8 percent the previous month – a marked rise from the previous year. In January 2012, it stood at 10.8 percent; nearly 19 million people are now out of work across the eurozone. The EU27 unemployment rate also collectively rose, standing at 10.8 percent, a rise from 10.7 percent in the previous month. Some 26.2 million are now jobless across Europe, according to figures released in a new Eurostat report made public on Friday. The highest unemployment rate – 26.2 percent – was in Spain, which has recently seen mass anti-austerity protests, some of which have turned violent. The report did not provide updated figures for Greece, but as of November, 27 percent of Greek workers are jobless. Large decreases in joblessness were seen in Estonia (11.1 percent to 9.9 percent between December 2011 and December 2012), Latvia, Romania and the UK, while the overall lowest unemployment rates were Austria at 4.9 percent, Germany and Luxembourg at 5.3 percent each, and the Netherlands at 6 percent. Denmark’s jobless rate remained unchanged. People reach out for a bag of oranges during a free distribution of fruit and vegetables by Greek farmers in Athens. Wide-scale youth unemployment Levels of youth unemployment Europe-wide are also at record levels: The youth jobless rate in hard-hit Spain was the highest-ever at 55.5 percent. Overall, youth unemployment stood at 23.6 percent in the EU27 – meaning 5.732 million young workers are unemployed – compared to 24.2 percent in January 2012. In the euro area, youth joblessness rose from 21.9 percent to 22.4 percent, (3.642 million). Economic woes in Greece, Spain and Italy contributed heavily to these figures. Regional labor ministers warned earlier this week that action needs to be taken, as joblessness among the under-25s could potentially threaten the European Union as an institution. “Europe needs the courage to respond to the major financial and economic crisis that it is experiencing with social and employment policies that make a real change to people’s working and living conditions,”the paper said, which was circulated in Brussels earlier this week, according to Reuters. The rate of price increases across the eurozone dropped to 1.8 percent in February, placing it below the European Central Bank’s target inflation rate for the first time in more than two years. Inflation stood at 2.0 percent, according to Eurostat, and hasn’t been below this level since last November. Low inflation is usually considered a positive sign, meaning price pressures are contained. However, it can also be reflective of the state of consumer demand, which frequently falls during periods of high unemployment. Europeans are spending less and saving more, as they are likely concerned for their job security. Protesters rest in their sleeping bags at the Puerta del Sol square in Madrid on May 22, 2011 during a protest against Spain’s economic crisis and its sky-high jobless rate. Source:http://rt.com/news/unemployment-rise-europe-eu-680/

PLEASE LET ME ADD ******************************************** Jake Whitney Daily Beast 2/21/13 ============================= (According to the war correspondent Michael Hastings, DoD now employs 27,000 media professionals at $4.7 billion per year and even creates phony Facebook and Twitter accounts of pro-American Afghans.) This huge PR machine has been accompanied by a strategy of public disengagement—through policies like the elimination of the draft, a refusal to raise wartime taxes, and an increasing reliance on long-range weapons like drones. All of this makes war far less impactful to most Americans. ############################ The Great Cyber-Warfare Scam China-bashing made easy by Justin Raimondo, February 20, 2013 The War Party never sleeps: there are always new variations of war propaganda coming ’round the bend. With the coming of the internet, the latest manufactured "threat" to rear its head is "cyber-warfare," which is now being touted by the Obama administration and its media fan club as the Next Big Scary Thing – but what are the facts? The first fact we need to integrate into our analysis is that "cyber-security" isn’t a science, it’s an industry: that is, the entities issuing alarming reports of this lurking threat are for profit companies mainly if not exclusively concerned with selling a product. And while the "threat landscape," as the jargon phrases it, is potentially very diverse, with a number of countries and non-state actors potential combatants, our cyber-warriors have targeted China as the main danger to our cybernetic security – the Yellow Peril of the Internet Age. They’re stealing our technology, our secrets, and infiltrating our very homes! This is largely baloney, as Jeffrey Carr, founder of Project Grey Goose and Taia Global, a cyber-security firm, and author of Inside Cyber Warfare, points out: "t’s good business today to blame China. I know from experience that many corporations, government and DOD organizations are more eager to buy cyber threat data that claims to focus on the PRC than any other nation state. When the cyber security industry issues PRC-centric reports like this one without performing any alternative analysis of the collected data, and when the readership of these reports are government and corporate officials without the depth of knowledge to critically analyze what they’re reading (i.e., when they trust the report’s authors to do the thinking for them), we wind up being in the position that we’re in today – easily fooled into looking in one direction when we have an entire threat landscape left unattended. We got into that position because InfoSec vendors have been left alone to define the threat landscape based upon their product offerings. In other words, vendors only tell customers to worry about the threats that their products can protect them from and they only tell them to worry about the actors that they can identify (or think that they can identify). This has resulted in a security awareness clusterxxxx of epic proportions." The "cyber-threat" from China has been much in the news lately, and any number of self-proclaimed "experts" with a financial stake in hyping this latest bogeyman have been pointing an accusing finger at Beijing whenever some government agency or big corporation discovers cyber-vandals in its domain. The latest is a report issued by a private cyber-security firm, Mandiant, which claims these attacks are occurring under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). It is, of course, just a coincidence that this accusation limns a recent National Intelligence Estimate, which – according to the New York Times, itself supposedly victimized by Chinese hackers – "makes a strong case that many of these hacking groups are either run by army officers or are contractors working for commands like [PLA] Unit 61398." Yet, as Carr discusses here, the Mandiant report has several analytic flaws. To begin with, the "mission area," i.e. the nature and alleged goal of these intrusions, is supposed to identify China as the culprit because the latest APT (cyber-security jargon for "advanced persistent threat") "steals intellectual property from English-speaking organizations," and that these thefts coincide with the technical requirements of China’s current Five-Year Plan. This kind of "logic" ought to make your BS-detector go haywire, recalling Carr’s warning that there’s a bad case of perception bias at work here: that’s because other nations, and non-state actors such as criminal gangs, also launch cyber-attacks on English-speaking organizations, which in many instances parallel the interests contained in China’s Five-Year Plan. Russia, France, Israel, and a number of other countries have advanced cyber-warfare capabilities, and haven’t hesitated to use them for purposes of industrial espionage, among other reasons: Eastern European gangsters are also players in this game. Yet there is no mention of these alternatives in the Mandiant report: according to them, it’s all about China. Mandiant claims that because the rash of recent intrusions have involved operations requiring hundreds of operators, that only a nation-state with "military-grade operations" could possibly have carried them out. Yet more than 30 nations are currently running "military-grade" operations, as Carr informs us: why pick on China? Well, says Mandiant, because the intrusions they analyzed used a Shanghai phone number to register an email account, for one. Yet this proves exactly nothing. Okay then, what about the fact that "two of four network ‘home’ Shanghai blocs are assigned to the Pudong New Area," where the PLA’s Unit 61398 is located? This also proves exactly nothing: the Pudong New Area has over 5 million inhabitants. It is smack dab in the center of China’s booming commercial and hi-tech metropolis. Ask yourself how many IP addresses originate from this area. Oh, but one of the "PLA" hackers’ "self-identified location is the Pudong New Area." Really? So what? Aside from the demographic information supplied above, one has to wonder if these people really believe everything they see on the Internet is true. C’mon, guys! The New York Times has been pushing the Yellow Cyber-Peril theme ever since their computer system was hacked, but the question of who exactly was responsible for that intrusion is by no means proved. In a Times piece on the subject – with the rather whiney headline "Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months" – we again come across Mandiant pointing to the Chinese military as the culprit, but their case against the PLA falls apart under the most cursory inspection. For example, Mandiant’s "analysis" is based in part on the observation that these alleged Chinese "Hacker teams regularly began work, for the most part, at 8 a.m. Beijing time. Usually they continued for a standard work day, but sometimes the hacking persisted until midnight. Occasionally, the attacks stopped for two-week periods, Mandiant said, though the reason was not clear." Bull hockey. There are a number of other countries in the same time zone that have active hacker communities. The idea that the timing of these attacks somehow pinpoints "Chinese hackers" associated with the PLA is laughable. As Carr puts it: "The hackers could have been from anywhere in the world. The time zone that Mandiant imagines as a Beijing workday could easily apply to a workday in Bangkok, Singapore, Taiwan, Tibet, Seoul, and even Tallinn – all of whom have active hacker populations." Mandiant – hired by the Times to investigate the intrusion, and currently in negotiations with the New York Times Company over a possible ongoing business relationship – cites the fact that the intrusions supposed originated at some of the “same universities used by the Chinese military to attack U.S. military contractors in the past.” Yet there are many universities located in the Jinan area Mandiant homes in on, and geolocation in this instance, as Carr says, "means absolutely nothing." He also raises an important point: if the Chinese military was behind the Times hack, then why would they launch these attacks from a location previously identified with the PLA? That’s seems rather too obvious, especially in view of the lengths to which hackers go to cover their tracks. Wouldn’t China’s Ministry of State Security, their official intelligence agency, be assigned that task? Yet their facilities are located in Beijing, over 200 miles away from Jinan. Most people are ignorant of the technical details utilized by commercial enterprises like Mandiant to gin up an alleged "threat." One supposedly scary tool used by the "Chinese" hackers is a Remote Access Tool, and we are told that the specific methods used in the past by alleged Chinese hackers are matched to the Times intrusion. This is just plain wrong, however, as Carr explains: "The article mentioned the hackers use of a Remote Access Tool (RAT). One such widely used tool is called GhostRAT. The fact that it was used in an attack against the Dalai Lama in 2008 (GhostNet) doesn’t mean that all of the later attacks which used this tool originated with the same group. In fact, even the GhostNet researchers refrained from attributing this attack to China’s government. "Another tool whose use is often blamed on Chinese hackers is the ‘xKungFoo script.’ Like GhostRAT, the xKungFoo script is widely available for anyone to use so even if it was originally created by a Chinese hacker, it doesn’t mean that it is used by Chinese hackers in all instances. I personally know Russian, English, and Indian hackers who write and speak Chinese." This is simple logic: you don’t have to be a cyberwarfare "expert" to realize there are many possibilities when it comes to identifying the people behind the methods. If you’ve already decided who is the perpetrator, however, then Mandiant’s accusations directed at Beijing fit neatly into the available "evidence." That’s how confirmation bias works. The major piece of "evidence" supposedly pointing to the Chinese government is the timing of the intrusion: just as research for a Times story on the financial dealings of a top Chinese government official, Wen JaiBo, was "nearing completion." According to the Times, the hackers gained access to email accounts belonging to Shanghai bureau chief David Barboza, author of the Wen expose, as well as Jim Yardley, bureau chief covering South Asia. Yet the Wen connection is contradicted in the very next paragraph of the Times‘s own account, which says: "’Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,’ said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times." So what’s the connection to the Wen story? In addition, Yardley had nothing to do with the Wen story, and yet his email was also breached, along with the passwords of 53 employees who are not in the Times newsroom. So what does this add up to? A big fat zero, as far as evidence of China’s involvement is concerned. China is merely the go-to cyber-villain of the moment, and this is certainly true where Mandiant is concerned. The same kind of dicey "evidence" is being used to accuse Iran – you saw this coming, didn’t you? Again, the tech-ignorant New York Times is in the lead, with a story echoing the claims of US officials that Tehran was behind the recent cyber-attacks launched against several American banks. You can almost hear the spooky music in the first two paragraphs of the piece, by Nicole Perlroth and Quentin Hardy, which gives an account of how the hackers slowed down and disabled banking sites, and then goes on to say: "There was something disturbingly different about the wave of online attacks on American banks in recent weeks. Security researchers say that instead of exploiting individual computers, the attackers engineered networks of computers in data centers, transforming the online equivalent of a few yapping Chihuahuas into a pack of fire-breathing Godzillas." Godzilla’s on the loose! And it’s an Iranian Godzilla! Yikes! "The skill required to carry out attacks on this scale has convinced United States government officials and security researchers that they are the work of Iran, most likely in retaliation for economic sanctions and online attacks by the United States. "’There is no doubt within the U.S. government that Iran is behind these attacks,’ said James A. Lewis, a former official in the State and Commerce Departments and a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington." The skill required to carry out these attacks was minimal. As Roel Schouwenberg, senior researcher at Kaspersky Labs, put it: "We can confirm that the attacks being reported are happening; however, the malware being used, known as ItsOKNoProblemBro, is far from sophisticated. It’s really rather simple. It’s also only one part of the puzzle but it seems to be effective, which is all that matters to the attackers. Going strictly by the publicly known technical details, we don’t see enough evidence that would categorize this operation as something only a nation-state sponsored actor could pull off." More "evidence" offered in support of the "Iran-did-it" theory is that these attacks did not garner any information: no data systems were breached. It was, in short, pure cyber-malice directed at American banks. If this is supposed to somehow prove the Iranians are the culprits, then it is weak tea indeed: because there are any number of groups who hate American bankers, including, I would venture, the vast majority of the American people. These DDOS attacks seem more like the sort of thing we might expect from a group like "Anonymous" than from a state actor such as Iran. Of course, the paucity of evidence didn’t stop Sen. Joe Lieberman from declaring: "I don’t believe these were just hackers who were skilled enough to cause disruption of the websites. I think this was done by Iran … and I believe it was a response to the increasingly strong economic sanctions that the United States and our European allies have put on Iranian financial institutions." As is the case with Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, which our own spooks have said does not presently exist, the technical details are obscure to most of us, and therefore this realm is given over to "experts," both real and imagined. To Sen. Lieberman and all too many in the media, it’s just a matter of picking and choosing your "experts," and making the "facts" fit your preconceived notions. Aside from ginning up conflict with the War Party’s chosen targets, the whole cyber-war scare-mongering campaign, whether the alleged "threat" is said to be emanating from China, Iran, or wherever, is also very convenient for proponents of Internet regulation who want to install back doors on every web site, and every software system, so the feds can "trace" these alleged "cyber-terrorists." It is, in short, a scam, part and parcel of a political campaign to rein in the wild and wooly – and largely unregulated – Internet, and make it more amenable to the interests of our wise rulers. The mystification of science, and the culture of "expertise," has greatly aided the War Party in their propaganda efforts. Instead of making up stories about babies being bayoneted in their cribs – although there is still some of that – we are given mind-numbingly technical explanations that point to purported acts of "cyber-terrorism" carried out by China, Iran, or the villain-of-the-moment. Except that the supposed "evidence" turns out to based on non-credible assumptions and faulty technical analysis. Remember, we’ve been through this sort of thing before: all the "intelligence" supposedly pointed to the irrefutable "fact" that Iraq "weapons of mass destruction," which it was about to launch against its neighbors. That turned out to be a lie. Much of this baloney came wrapped up in impressive-sounding technical jargon, and was validated by the media’s chosen "experts."Has anybody learned anything from that experience? I’m thinking in particular of the members of the Fourth Estate, otherwise known as "journalists." The answer, unfortunately, seems to be no.

Wednesday, 27 February 2013 15:00 Feds Requested Targets With Children and Pregnant Women Written by Alex Newman Even as the Obama administration continues to stockpile enough ammunition to kill every American multiple times, law-enforcement agencies were reportedly caught requesting so-called “no more hesitation” targets featuring pictures of children, pregnant women, mothers at playgrounds, and elderly people. The company behind the controversial scheme, which has received millions of taxpayer dollars from the Department of Homeland Security, said the images were specifically requested by government officials. After first being exposed by Infowars.com editor Paul Joseph Watson last week, an immediate, nationwide uproar erupted, with the news quickly going viral across America and even the world. Conservative, liberal, and libertarian activists all pointed to the latest scandal as further evidence that the Obama administration is wildly out of control and needs to be restrained before a tragedy happens — after all, federal agents have already murdered women and children during the now-infamous assaults on Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, for example. Following the most recent explosive revelations, critics wondered, among other disturbing questions, why the Obama administration would be training its legions of heavily armed enforcement agents to shoot at young children, mothers with kids in tow, pregnant women, and elderly people without hesitating. The target line in question — dubbed “No More Hesitation” by the company, Law Enforcement Training, Inc. — features a range of images with what the company describes as “non-traditional threats.” The products that sparked worldwide outrage include seven separate targets as part of the series. As described by the company, those are: “pregnant woman threat,” “older man with shotgun,” “older man in home with shotgun,” “older woman with gun,” “young school aged girl,” “young mother on playground,” and “little boy with real gun.” You can view a slideshow of the images here. According to the firm, the controversial target line was “designed to give officers the experience of dealing with deadly force shooting scenarios with subjects that are not the norm during training.” The women and children cardboard cutouts were also “meant to help the transition for officers who are faced with these highly unusual targets for the first time,” the firm said. The company involved, Minnesota-based Law Enforcement Training, boasts about its ties to the U.S. Justice Department, Homeland Security, and thousands of local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies nationwide. According to official data compiled on a federal website, the firm has landed close to $6 million worth of federal contracts alone, with almost $2 million coming from the Department of Homeland Security. Even more alarming, perhaps, the widely ridiculed and loathed Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has awarded the company almost $1 million in contracts. The precise purpose remains unclear. In a statement sent to the libertarian-leaning Reason magazine, a spokesperson for the company tried to downplay the seriousness of the issue and justify its production of the widely criticized products. “The subjects in NMH targets were chosen in order to give officers the experience of dealing with deadly force shooting scenarios with subjects that are not the norm during training,” the company said. “I found while speaking with officers and trainers in the law enforcement community that there is a hesitation on the part of cops when deadly force is required on subjects with atypical age, frailty or condition.” It was not immediately clear why government officials were expecting targets of this nature to become a threat, or how an officer desensitized to shooting children would be able to show restraint if, for instance, a child happened to be carrying a BB gun. “This hesitation time may be only seconds but that is not acceptable when officers are losing their lives in these same situations,” the statement continued. “If that initial hesitation time can be cut down due to range experience, the officer and community are better served.” However, despite the ham-handed justifications, following the outrage in the wake of the worldwide publicity, the firm seems to have removed all of the pictures and descriptions from its website, though screenshots of the images can still be found all over the Internet. In a February 21 statement released on its Facebook page, the company apologized for the scandal and confirmed that it had taken the controversial targets off its website. “We apologize for the offensive nature of our ‘No More Hesitation’ products. These products have been taken offline due to the opinions expressed by so many, including members of the law enforcement community,” Law Enforcement Training said. “This product line was originally requested and designed by the law enforcement community to train police officers for unusually complex situations where split-second decisions could lead to unnecessary loss of life.” The company also said that, consistent with its mission as a “training supplier” as opposed to a “training-methods firm,” it would continue to seek input from law-enforcement professionals to better serve their needs. “We sincerely appreciate law enforcement professionals for the risks they take in providing safety and defending freedom,” the statement concluded. In comments underneath the post, however, critics lambasted the company, accusing it of continuing to sell the products as part of its inventory. Some commentators also claimed the firm was helping desensitize federal functionaries to the horror of killing American women and children. Others pointed out, like critics from across the political spectrum, that the Obama administration’s domestic agencies have stockpiled massive numbers of rounds of ammunition — enough to wage a decades-long war. Amid the controversy, members of the law-enforcement community have also been speaking out. “There’s something wrong, seriously wrong here. If we start to desensitize law enforcement officers, have them disregard humanity, to feel nothing’s wrong in shooting a pregnant lady or an old man with a shotgun inside his own home ... then what kind of society have we become?” wondered retired Houston police officer T.F. Stern in a post on The Moral Liberal. “How will police officers react after they no longer believe they are part of the society which they have been charged with policing, when they have become used to shooting pregnant ladies and old men?” The reporter who first broke the story had some serious questions, too. “Why are top training target suppliers for the government supplying the likes of the DHS with ‘non-traditional threat’ targets of children, pregnant women, mothers in playgrounds, and elderly American gun owners unless there is a demand for such items?” wondered Infowars’ Watson in the first article exposing the scheme, which features screenshots of the targets and attracted attention around the globe. The trends are troubling, he added. “The fact that targets of armed pregnant women, children, mothers in playgrounds, and American gun owners in general are being represented as ‘non-traditional threats’ ‘for the first time’ is deeply concerning given the admitted preparations for civil unrest undertaken by Homeland Security as well as other federal agencies,” Watson wrote, echoing concerns expressed by increasing numbers of Americans. Indeed, as The New American has documented extensively in recent years, the federal government is increasingly portraying regular Americans as the primary terror threat facing the “Homeland.” Gun owners, pro-life activists, veterans, supporters of the U.S. Constitution, opponents of U.S. government membership in the United Nations, and more have all been painted as potential domestic terrorists in official federal reports and training programs. The Justice Department, for example, was recently exposed training local police to consider popular bumper stickers as indicators of possible terrorism. Homeland Security and its out-of-control “fusion centers,” meanwhile, have targeted veterans and even supporters of certain popular political figures, such as the GOP’s Ron Paul and Pastor Chuck Baldwin with the Constitution Party. More recently, a U.S. military think tank at West Point painted “far right” conservatives — those who support individual liberty and constitutional limitations on federal power — as a major terror threat. Critics of the “No More Hesitation” targets said the controversy was especially troubling in light of the recent assault on the Second Amendment being waged by Obama, some extremist Democrat lawmakers, and their increasingly discredited anti-gun rights allies in the press. Several prominent Democrats, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, have openly discussed gun confiscation, which would necessarily require armed bureaucrats and would undoubtedly meet fierce resistance among citizens. For now, however, the true motivation behind the government’s request for the controversial targets remains unclear.