Guest Tom Scully Posted April 27, 2009 Share Posted April 27, 2009 (edited) Bill Kelly recently posted this: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...mp;#entry166390Security Before Politics By Porter J. Goss Saturday, April 25, 2009 Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can't have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets. Americans have to decide now...... I've "decided now!" I have to push back, against Porter Goss's ultimatum, as hard as I can, because: [1] Everything Porter Goss did as a member of congress, and later, as DCI, was to try to gain partisan political advantage. [2] He advocates for secrecy without provision for accountability, the chronic condition blocking the truth about the assassination of JFK for 45 years. [3] He resigned in disgrace from his DCI post, and he has a history of questionable official conduct that demands accountability via investigation. [4] By demanding and achieving clarity by thoroughly investigating the activities of CIA, FBI, DOD and their statements to the press and to our elected representatives since 2001, and via a flood of well crafted FOI requests, we can get answers to clear up the distortions documented below and by asking questions and demonstrating the critical need for answers, the results that will come from arguing for openness and clarity can finally open the JFK files, too! http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/world/th...m-will-not.htmlTHREATS AND RESPONSES: PERSPECTIVES/Senator Bob Graham; 'Victory in the War on Terrorism Will Not Be Won on the Defensive' Published: Tuesday, September 10, 2002 Following are excerpts from an interview with Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee: ...I had just come back a few days before September the 11th from a trip visiting a number of U.S. stations which have as one of their primary responsibilities international terrorism, including in Pakistan, where we had had an opportunity to visit the Khyber Pass, which was as close as Americans could get to Afghanistan in August 2001, and meeting with President Musharraf and with the head of the Pakistani intelligence service. While we were meeting with the head of the intelligence service, a general whose name was General Ahmed, he had indicated he would be in Washington in early September, we -- Porter Goss, myself -- had invited him to meet with us while he was there. It turned out that the meeting was a breakfast the day of September the 11th. So we were talking about what was happening in Afghanistan, what the capabilities and intentions of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were from the perspective of this Pakistani intelligence leader, when we got the notices that the World Trade Center towers had been attacked.... As you'll read below, the ISI Lt. General that Graham and Goss met with in August in Pakistan, and then on the morning of 9/11, the "born again muslim", General Ahmed who had executed the coup, two years, capturing the president of Pakistan and then, instead of seizing the office for himself, deferring to his senior in rank, General Musharref, less than a month later,on Oct. 8, 2001 was out of ISI, demoted after news reports stated that Indian and US officials believed Ahmad has authorized Omar Sheikh to wire $100,000 to 9/11 hijacking leader, Mohammed Atta. The main point here is not whether General Ahmad was guilty of authorizing the funding of Atta, it is about the deception that came from Goss, Graham, the Bush administation, the CIA and FBI, and from the overwhelming majority of incurious stenographers employed as if they were journalists, at the leading news gathering businesses in the US and Europe. What the hell has actually happened since "Y2K"? The material in the first quote box explains "the problem", and the second quote box provides background and support for the premise that we haven't been told what has happened or held anyone to properly explain and account: http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9610/05/taleban/Who are the Taliban of Afghanistan? taliban October 5, 1996 Web posted at: 10:45 p.m. EDT (0245 GMT) From Correspondent Anita Pratap ...The Taliban are widely alleged to be the creation of Pakistan's military intelligence. Experts say that explains the Taliban's swift military successes. They emerged as the new rulers of this war-ravaged nation when they captured the Afghan capital, Kabul, last month.... Mysterious September 11 Breakfast Meeting on Capitol Hill http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO308C.html http://911review.org/Wiki/TruthLiesOmar.shtml There's Something About Omar .....If ever there was a paper trail leading to the 9/11 conspirators, these articles provided the print-smeared paving. Taken together, they would conjure up the following plausible scenario: Omar Saeed, acting under the direction of General Ahmad and the ISI, had provided money and "training" (as reported in the Telegraph) to the hijackers while "false-flagging" himself to the hijackers as an operative of al-Qaida. The General, on the other hand, may have represented himself to Omar Saeed as acting exclusively under ISI authority, when in fact he was acting under the direction of his American-Anglo handlers. With Omar Saeed seeding the "legend" of a bona fide money trail leading back to bin Laden, the stage would then be set for Omar Saeed to take the fall as the main patsy providing the smoking gun of al-Qaida complicity for 9/11. Yet at some point, this carefully enacted "legend" began to unravel once Indian intelligence was able to establish (or just mischievously leaked) Saeed's link with General Ahmad, forcing a reluctant FBI - or, alternatively, a cooperative element in the FBI outside of the hermetically compartmentalized loop - to go along and confirm the findings. Naturally, in the light of the Times of India's Oct. 9 bombshell, somebody would have to organize a prophylactic strategy of damage control. Yet where the original money trail "legend" was carefully, even artfully, crafted, the efforts to perform a partial-birth abortion on it were piecemeal, ill-considered, and - most damaging of all- worked to highlight the participation of individual accessories in the cover-up campaign. A comprehensive cover-up strategy would entail four objectives: i) explaining General Ahmad's "sudden retirement"; ii) gradually minimizing the money trail story while subtly transforming it; iii) providing a new "smoking gun"; and iv) carving out an alternative "legend" for Omar Saeed while finding an alternative paymaster. Of the four objectives, the last one would turn out to be the most convoluted..... http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf...08/india.ressa/ India wants terror spotlight on Kashmir By Maria A. Ressa in New Delhi CNN October 8, 2001 Posted: 9:06 PM EDT (0106 GMT) ....The Pakistan-based group, Jaish-e-Mohammad, initially claimed responsibility for the attack. It was formed by Pakistani cleric Maulana Mazood Azhar, shortly after he was released from an Indian prison in 1999. Azhar was one of three jailed Islamic militants freed by Indian authorities in exchange for passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines 814. Indian and U.S. authorities now see a link between that hijacking and the September 11 attacks in the United States. Freed with Azhar was Ahmed Umar Syed Sheikh, whom authorities say used a pseudonym to wire $100,000 to suspected hijacker Mohammad Atta, who then distributed the money in the United States. Atta allegedly piloted a passenger plane into one of the World Trade Center towers almost a month ago. Both Sheikh and Azhar were members of Harkat-ul-Mujahedin, an Al-Qaeda affiliated Islamic militant group fighting for Kashmiri independence from India. Indian authorities have also said that 1999 hijacking was done with the help of Pakistan's ISI or Intelligence Service. Although Pakistan has denied that accusation, Indians believe Pakistan should also be held accountable in this war against terrorism. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/25/world/na...?pagewanted=all A NATION CHALLENGED: THE SUSPECTS; Death of Reporter Puts Focus On Pakistan Intelligence Unit This article was reported by Douglas Jehl, Celia W. Dugger and Felicity Barringer and was written by Mr. Jehl. Published: Monday, February 25, 2002 ...'We've just told the press we're going to behead you,'' said Ahmed Omar Sheikh, a 21-year-old who once studied at the London School of Economics, as Rhys Partridge, one of the hostages, remembered it. ''He was laughing,'' Mr. Partridge said in a recent interview. ''The prospect excited him.'' Mr. Sheikh's plans went awry when he was captured and his captives released. But after five years awaiting trial, he was freed, along with two other Islamic militants, in exchange for more than 160 people aboard an Indian Airlines jet that had been hijacked from Katmandu, Nepal.... http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/04...out_torture.php Lies About Torture Posted on: April 21, 2009 9:16 AM, by Ed Brayton Let's compare a few statements from CIA operatives to the information found in memos released last week on torture during the Bush administration. On the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, we were assured in the media several times by CIA sources who refused to give their names that KSM had cracked immediately while being waterboarded and that he had given up lots of useful information that helped combat terrorism. One told the New Yorker: "Waterboarding works," the former officer said. "Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It's human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you're waterboarded, you're inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It's not painful, but it scares the xxxx out of you." (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, "didn't resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick." He said, "A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn't stand toe to toe and fight it out." Not only had KSM cracked immediately, but the others did so even more quickly. KSM had been the most successful at resisting the waterboard, enduring it for a full minute and a half before cracking, as another CIA official told ABC News: Its most effective use, say current and former CIA officials, was in breaking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as KSM, who subsequently confessed to a number of ongoing plots against the United States. A senior CIA official said KSM later admitted it was only because of the waterboarding that he talked. Ultimately, KSM took responsibility for the 9/ll attacks and virtually all other al Qaeda terror strikes, including the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. "KSM lasted the longest under waterboarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again," said a former CIA official familiar with KSM's case. This former CIA official was lying through his teeth. One of the memos released last week, written by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury, cites a report by the CIA's Inspector General as saying that they used waterboarding on KSM a whopping 183 times in a single month: The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91. And as the New Yorker article notes, among the crimes KSM "admitted" under such torture techniques were crimes he almost certainly did not commit, including the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl. And not only did that false information not help catch other terrorists, it actually screwed up the prosecution of the people who actually did kill Pearl: Further confusing matters, a Pakistani named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had already been convicted of the abduction and murder, in 2002. A British-educated terrorist who had a history of staging kidnappings, he had been sentenced to death in Pakistan for the crime. But the Pakistani government, not known for its leniency, had stayed his execution. Indeed, hearings on the matter had been delayed a remarkable number of times--at least thirty--possibly because of his reported ties to the Pakistani intelligence service, which may have helped free him after he was imprisoned for terrorist activities in India. Mohammed's confession would delay the execution further, since, under Pakistani law, any new evidence is grounds for appeal. A surprising number of people close to the case are dubious of Mohammed's confession. A longtime friend of Pearl's, the former Journal reporter Asra Nomani, said, "The release of the confession came right in the midst of the U.S. Attorney scandal. There was a drumbeat for Gonzales's resignation. It seemed like a calculated strategy to change the subject. Why now? They'd had the confession for years." Mariane and Daniel Pearl were staying in Nomani's Karachi house at the time of his murder, and Nomani has followed the case meticulously; this fall, she plans to teach a course on the topic at Georgetown University. She said, "I don't think this confession resolves the case. You can't have justice from one person's confession, especially under such unusual circumstances. To me, it's not convincing." She added, "I called all the investigators. They weren't just skeptical--they didn't believe it." Special Agent Randall Bennett, the head of security for the U.S. consulate in Karachi when Pearl was killed--and whose lead role investigating the murder was featured in the recent film "A Mighty Heart"--said that he has interviewed all the convicted accomplices who are now in custody in Pakistan, and that none of them named Mohammed as playing a role. "K.S.M.'s name never came up," he said. Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer, said, "My old colleagues say with one-hundred-per-cent certainty that it was not K.S.M. who killed Pearl." A government official involved in the case said, "The fear is that K.S.M. is covering up for others, and that these people will be released." And Judea Pearl, Daniel's father, said, "Something is fishy. There are a lot of unanswered questions. K.S.M. can say he killed Jesus--he has nothing to lose." So rather than helping catch other terrorists, it actually hindered the ability to imprison the real people who killed Pearl. In fact, by claiming to have been the one who carried out a whole range of attacks around the world, KSM could well have been protecting the people who really did commit those crimes. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08...13fa_fact_mayerThe Black Sites A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program. by Jane Mayer August 13, 2007 In March, Mariane Pearl, the widow of the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, received a phone call from Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General. At the time, Gonzales’s role in the controversial dismissal of eight United States Attorneys had just been exposed, and the story was becoming a scandal in Washington. Gonzales informed Pearl that the Justice Department was about to announce some good news: a terrorist in U.S. custody—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who was the primary architect of the September 11th attacks—had confessed to killing her husband. (Pearl was abducted and beheaded five and a half years ago in Pakistan, by unidentified Islamic militants.) The Administration planned to release a transcript in which Mohammed boasted, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.” Pearl was taken aback. In 2003, she had received a call from Condoleezza Rice, who was then President Bush’s national-security adviser, informing her of the same news. But Rice’s revelation had been secret. Gonzales’s announcement seemed like a publicity stunt. Pearl asked him if he had proof that Mohammed’s confession was truthful; Gonzales claimed to have corroborating evidence but wouldn’t share it. “It’s not enough for officials to call me and say they believe it,” Pearl said. “You need evidence.” (Gonzales did not respond to requests for comment.) The circumstances surrounding the confession of Mohammed, whom law-enforcement officials refer to as K.S.M., were perplexing. He had no lawyer. After his capture in Pakistan, in March of 2003, the Central Intelligence Agency had detained him in undisclosed locations for more than two years; last fall, he was transferred to military custody in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There were no named witnesses to his initial confession, and no solid information about what form of interrogation might have prodded him to talk, although reports had been published, in the Times and elsewhere, suggesting that C.I.A. officers had tortured him. At a hearing held at Guantánamo, Mohammed said that his testimony was freely given, but he also indicated that he had been abused by the C.I.A. (The Pentagon had classified as “top secret” a statement he had written detailing the alleged mistreatment.) And although Mohammed said that there were photographs confirming his guilt, U.S. authorities had found none. Instead, they had a copy of the video that had been released on the Internet, which showed the killer’s arms but offered no other clues to his identity. Further confusing matters, a Pakistani named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had already been convicted of the abduction and murder, in 2002. A British-educated terrorist who had a history of staging kidnappings, he had been sentenced to death in Pakistan for the crime. But the Pakistani government, not known for its leniency, had stayed his execution. Indeed, hearings on the matter had been delayed a remarkable number of times—at least thirty—possibly because of his reported ties to the Pakistani intelligence service, which may have helped free him after he was imprisoned for terrorist activities in India. Mohammed’s confession would delay the execution further, since, under Pakistani law, any new evidence is grounds for appeal..... http://books.google.com/books?id=70pkGQXvb...stein#PPA228,M1 The Journalist and the Terrorist by Robert Sam Anson (Originally published in August 2002 Issue of Vanity Fair Magazine) ....By the time the flight to Dubai left the next afternoon, the story of Danny Pearl's disappearance was moving over the wires. No one was using the word "kidnapping" yet, but that was the suspicion. It was confirmed early Sunday morning, local time, by E-mails to The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and two Pakistani news organizations. Attached were four photographs of Danny in captivity, one showing a 9-mm. pistol pointed at his head and a message in English and Urdu announcing the capture of "CIA officer Daniel Pearl who was posing as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal." The note demanded that the U.S. hand over F-16 aircraft, whose delivery to Pakistan had been frozen by 1990 nuclear sanctions; that Pakistanis detained for questioning by the F.B.I. over the 9/11 attacks be given access to lawyers and allowed to see their families; that Pakistani nationals held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be returned to their homeland to stand trial; and that the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, now held in Afghanistan, be returned to Pakistan. Of Danny, the note said, "Unfortunately, he is at present being kept in very inhuman circumstances quite similar in fact to the way that Pakistanis and nationals of other sovereign countries are being kept in Cuba by the American Army. If the Americans keep our countrymen in better conditions we will better the conditions of Mr. Pearl and the other Americans that we capture." Sent on the account of kidnapperguy@hotmail.com, the message was signed, "The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty." Police had never heard of the group, but the name sounded a gong at the Islamabad bureau of the BBC, which in late October had received a package from the "National Youth Movement for the Sovereignty of Pakistan." Inside were an unplayable videocassette and a computer printout announcing the capture of an alleged C.I.A. operative, "one Joshua Weinstein, alias Martin Johnson, an American national and a resident of California." Also enclosed was a photograph of a male Caucasian in his 30s. Flanked by two robed and hooded men aiming AK47s at his head, he was holding up a Pakistani newspaper showing the date of his abduction — just as Danny would months later. U.S. Embassy officials said at the time that no one named Joshua Weinstein or Martin Johnson had either come to Pakistan or been reported missing, and that the letter was a hoax. When local police agencies and other Western embassies said the same, the BBC let it drop. But the release of the virtually identical Pearl materials got the BBC checking again with American diplomats. Was the first "kidnapping" truly a hoax? Why so many similarities between the October episode and Pearl's abduction? The response was a studied silence. Police, meanwhile, were focusing their suspicions on Harkat ul-Mujahedeen, the terrorist group that had hijacked the airliner to free Sheikh and Azhar. With a number of its members killed by U.S. air strikes, Harkat ul-Mujahedeen had the motive, as well as the M.O., its predecessor group, Harkat ul-Ansar. being thought responsible for the kidnapping and presumed murder of a group of backpackers in India in 1995. Trouble was, this didn't have the feel of a jihadi operation. Where were the allahu ahkbars in the note? The riffs about Palestine and infidels and Western demons? There wasn't even a mention of "Zionist conspiracy." Instead, the demands read like an A.C.L.U. press release. The English was too good, too. Usage, spelling, and grammar were virtually perfect, and the few errors seemed deliberate, as if the writer was trying to hide his education. Jihadis didn't have to feign lack of schooling; most were illiterate. One investigator, inspired, typed "foreign," "kidnapper," and "suspect" onto Google.com and clicked search. The first listing that popped up was "Omar Saeed Sheikh." No one believed it; couldn't be that easy. Within days, the elite Criminal Investigation Division determined the true identity of "Arif" and raided his house — where they found relatives in the midst of a Muslim prayer service for the dead. "Arif" had been killed fighting the Americans in Afghanistan, they claimed. No one believed that either, and a nationwide manhunt got under way. The Journal, meanwhile, was moving on several fronts. Managing editor Paul Steiger issued a statement that Danny was not now nor ever had been an employee of any agency of the U.S. government, and the C.I.A. broke long-standing policy to say the same. Foreign editor Bussey and correspondent Steve LeVine flew in to shepherd Mariane, whose Buddhist group was chanting a mantra for Danny. A media strategy was devised. Mariane made herself available for interviews, but only to outlets that had Pakistan reach, such as CNN and the BBC. Questions about what story Danny was working on were deflected, lest the truth cause him harm. Finally, a confidential appeal was made to major U.S. media organizations to not disclose that Danny's parents were Israeli. All agreed. ..... .....I never did answer the "why" of everything. Sheikh said that the reason was to strike a blow at Musharraf, while Musharraf himself said it was because Danny was "overly inquisitive." And more than a few knowledgeable Pakistanis think the ISI was involved. When asked by Vanity Fair whether it shares that view, The Wall Street Journal issued a two-word written answer: "No comment." One "why" I was able to answer: Why did Danny risk everything for a story? I didn't need to go to Karachi to find out; I could remember. http://books.google.com/books?um=1&q=b...nG=Search+Books Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from ... - Page 509 by Steve Coll - History - 2005 - 712 pages He was especially beholden to one general, Mahmoud Ahmed, who had been the frontline commander of the raid into Kargil, reporting directly to Musharraf, Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, a close ally of Musharraf, is instrumental in the success of the coup. Ahmed actually secured the capital and detained Sharif, but then honored the chain of command and stepped aside so Musharraf, as head of the military, could take over. Ahmed is rewarded by being made the new director of the ISI. http://books.google.com/books?id=1d3Y4oik9...lt&resnum=4 The 5 unanswered questions about 9/11 -page 137 By James Ridgeway ...When General Pervez Musharaff took power in a 1999 coup, he appointed his new ISI chief Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmed. Always a strong supporter of the Taliban, Mahmoud himself soon found new meaning in religion and started calling himself a "born-again-Muslim." By summer of 2000, the long-standing relationship between thee ISI and the CIA had "turned icy." http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...icle3137695.ece MY PROFILE SHOP JOBS PROPERTY CLASSIFIEDS From The Sunday Times January 6, 2008 For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets Insight: Chris Gourlay, Jonathan Calvert, Joe Lauria ...Edmonds, a fluent speaker of Turkish and Farsi, was recruited by the FBI in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Her previous claims about incompetence inside the FBI have been well documented in America. She has given evidence to closed sessions of Congress and the 9/11 commission, but many of the key points of her testimony have remained secret. She has now decided to divulge some of that information after becoming disillusioned with the US authorities’ failure to act. One of Edmonds’s main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency. A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology. “What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.” The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said. They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent. In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network. The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official. Edmonds said: “I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more.” The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief. Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachés in the Turkish embassy. Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks. The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist. Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme. Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden. “We were aware of contact between A Q Khan’s people and Al-Qaeda,” a former CIA officer said last week. “There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end.” It is likely that the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States would have been sold to a number of rogue states by Khan. Edmonds was later to see the scope of the Pakistani connections when it was revealed that one of her fellow translators at the FBI was the daughter of a Pakistani embassy official who worked for Ahmad. The translator was given top secret clearance despite protests from FBI investigators. Edmonds says packages containing nuclear secrets were delivered by Turkish operatives, using their cover as members of the diplomatic and military community, to contacts at the Pakistani embassy in Washington. Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks. Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. “A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.” The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited. Edmonds also claims that a number of senior officials in the Pentagon had helped Israeli and Turkish agents. “The people provided lists of potential moles from Pentagon-related institutions who had access to databases concerning this information,” she said. .. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=...AVBiJpmJ4PrPVzA To Track Down Bin Laden, US Subscription - Wall Street Journal Online - Dow Jones & Company - Sep 17, 2001 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000687357...l?mod=googlewsj By NEIL KING JR. and DAVID ROGERS | Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ....Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence is the military spy bureau with the deepest knowledge of the region and its terrorist roots. "If you want to do anything in the region, you have to have the ISI on your side," said one former Central Intelligence agency official who worked in the area. "These guys speak the languages, wear the clothes and walk the streets. No one knows Afghanistan like the ISI.".... ...Cooperating with the U.S. is a highly sensitive subject in Pakistan, and the CIA has had a rocky relationship with the military-led ISI over the last decade. But there are signs that their cooperation was picking up even before Tuesday's terrorist attacks. At the very moment terrorists were ramming airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the head of the ISI, Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, was meeting in the fourth floor of the U.S. Capitol with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss (R., Fla.). Mr. Ahmad was in Washington for four days of talks with U.S. intelligence officials, according to Pakistani diplomats, and also met Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Mr. Ahmad's predecessor at the helm of the ISI also visited Washington to talk about enhanced cooperation in 1999, the diplomats said. As chairman of the intelligence committee, Mr. Goss has pushed to strengthen the CIA with a special focus on human intelligence as opposed to the high-tech spy satellites of the Cold War. At the same time, he also has promoted better ties with Pakistani intelligence. He traveled to Islamabad in August with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat, to meet with government officials, including Gen. Ahmad. Rep. Goss said the visit to Pakistan has proven to be an "extremely useful trip at a very timely moment.".... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...-bin-Laden.html Pakistan's 'godfathers of the Taliban' hold the key to hunt for bin Laden By Julian West in Islamabad Last Updated: 12:19AM BST 23 Sep 2001 .....American officials are publicly enthusiastic about the offer of co-operation from Pakistan's intelligence agencies. "This is a crucial development that will change everything," one said. "Pakistan has better links to the Taliban, and knows more about them, than anyone else in the world. Its agents walk the streets and talk the talk." Lt Gen Mahmood Ahmed, the head of ISI, was co-incidentally in Washington as the terrorist attack in New York took place, having arranged to visit senior administration officials several weeks earlier. After talks with CIA chiefs, he met Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State. An administration official said: "There was an extremely candid exchange from our side, one that left little room for misunderstanding. It is safe to say the rules have changed." Porter Goss and Bob Graham, who respectively chair the House and Senate intelligence committees, met government officials in Islamabad in August to promote better ties with Pakistani intelligence. American officials are aware of the great care that must be taken in evaluating information from the ISI, an organisation that has spent much of the past 10 years supporting and encouraging the Taliban. "These guys are the only people we can use," said one administration ally, "but that doesn't mean we can rely on them." Employing a vast spy network of Pakistanis who speak Pashto and Farsi, the local languages, the ISI has also recruited many hundreds of Afghans, luring them with money and promises of sanctuary for their families in Pakistan. "It's easy to recruit Pakistanis, a hotel doorman here earns only $4 a month," said a Western intelligence officer in Islamabad. "They also use Afghans who are afraid for their families. They tell them 'work for us, we'll look after your family here and you can come and see them'." Described as "the Taliban's godfathers and parents", the ISI is credited with fostering and nurturing the Taliban movement in the mid 1990s. It is also believed to have had access to bin Laden himself in the past. It was an ISI delegation, led by its deputy chief, Gen Faiz Gilani, that flew to Kandahar and Kabul early last week in a failed attempt to pressurise Mullah Omar, the Taliban's secretive, one-eyed leader, to give up bin Laden. ISI military "consultants" are to be found on the Taliban's frontlines alongside several thousand Arabs loyal to bin Laden. The agency has covertly armed and funded the movement for many years. A Western diplomat said: "The ISI has its fingers in every pie. That's why America had to get their co-operation. America has no worthwhile agents on the ground in Afghanistan. If anyone can catch bin Laden it's the ISI." Gen Hamid Gul, the head of ISI from 1987-1989, remains bitter at the way that he was treated by America which, he claims, had him sacked from his position because of his ideological commitment to the fundamentalist cause. Gen Gul turned the organisation into a state within a state with its own Islamic agenda. Although it failed in trying to install a fundamentalist government in Afghanistan during his leadership, his influence over the organisation remained crucial when in 1994 it became responsible for turning the Taliban into a force capable of taking over Kabul. Gen Gul said: "The Americans thought they could use the fundamentalists to fight the Russians and drop them. This is what they do, they build something up and then destroy it. They did the same with ISI. "When George Bush senior felt we were becoming too independent and ideologically-motivated he said 'clip the wings of ISI' and had me sacked. Now they want the same institution to share information with them." The Pakistani intelligence organisation has long been viewed by most of its countrymen as a sinister and shadowy force. Conceived in the 1950s by Gen Ayub Khan as a means of keeping watch on politicians, its power grew after he took over the country in 1958, effectively becoming the army's political wing. In the 1970s, the Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, began using the agency against his political enemies and it became known as a "dirty tricks" brigade. It ran smear campaigns against politicians, prominent figures and journalists. Visitors to Pakistan can expect to be tailed by mysterious men, or find their telephone conversations and e-mails are tapped. The ISI only became seriously active in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan war when it helped the CIA to arm, train and fund the mujahideen. During the power vacuum created by the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 when Afghanistan was torn apart by warring mujahideen groups, the ISI grasped the chance to wield power in the region by fostering a previously unknown Kandahari student movement, the Taliban. A former CIA official said: "If you want to do anything in the region, you have to have the ISI on your side. These guys speak the languages, wear the clothes and walk the streets. He added: "No one knows Afghanistan like the ISI." http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/0...an.afghanistan3 Musharraf dismisses two Islamist generals The Guardian, Tuesday 9 October 2001 03.12 BST The president demoted the head of Pakistan's powerful ISI military intelligence agency, Lt General Mehmood Ahmed, and also pushed out his deputy chief of army staff, General Muzaffar Hussain Usmani. Both officers were regarded as hardline Islamists. Lt Gen Mehmood was previously a close ally of Gen Musharraf's. Last month he headed two delegations to Kandahar, where he tried to persuade the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, to hand over Osama bin Laden. Both missions ended in failure. Sources suggest Mehmood disagreed with Gen Musharraf's decision to dump the Taliban as an ally. "He still felt the Taliban needed to be supported," one said. Two three-star generals were yesterday appointed to crucial positions within the army. Gen Muhammad Yousaf - described by one former officer as a "decent man but no genius" was unveiled as the vice-chief of army staff, in effect Gen Musharraf's deputy. The "pious" Gen Muhammad Aziz Khan was appointed as the head of a key military committee. Both are Musharraf loyalists. Yesterday's ruthless reshuffle makes it harder for rightwing fundamentalist officers, who form a significant faction within Pakistan's powerful army, to topple Gen Musharraf in a counter-coup. The army has stayed loyal to him so far. But as Muslim casualties in Afghanistan mount, dissent from inside the ranks is likely to grow. "Gen Musharraf can't afford to have any group within the army which has a different viewpoint," Lt Gen Talat Masood, a close friend of the general's and a former minister, said. "He now has a team which is totally aligned to him both intellectually and conceptually." The changes would prevent internal bickering, he added. "Gen Musharraf is very committed to his policy (of backing the United States). He wants the whole country to be committed as well," he added. The shake-up came only a day after Gen Musharraf announced that he was extending his term as president indefinitely. The move - only hours after Tony Blair's visit to Pakistan - was "in the larger interests of the country", his military spokesman, Major General Rashid Qureshi, said. Gen Musharraf was due to retire over the weekend after serving three years as a four-star general and chief of army staff. Sitting beneath a portrait of a youthful Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's westernised founder, Gen Musharraf yesterday said his reshuffle had "no relation whatsoever" with events unfolding inside Afghanistan. He said he had been contemplating a change in the army hierarchy for several months. "I was wearing too many hats," he said. The threat to Gen Musharraf comes from a significant rightwing group in the middle-upper echelons of the army, made up of admirers of Pakistan's late hardline dictator, General Zia ul-Haq. The soldiers were junior officers during the Zia era in the 1980s but have now risen to the level of corps commanders. "At least half of the 10-12 corps commanders in Pakistan are Islamist or influenced by them," one source said last night. Gen Musharraf yesterday acted against the army's two most fundamentalist generals but has so far left the rest of his senior hierarchy unchanged. The rank and file soldiers in Pakistan's army pose less of a threat. Some sympathise with Pakistan's religious parties but others hold liberal views, and drink alcohol. Most observers believe that Gen Musharraf - who deposed Pakistan's corrupt civilian government in a coup two years ago - has played a difficult hand extremely well. He has so far managed to prevent an Islamist backlash inside Pakistan. At the same time he has renewed his relationship with the United States, Pakistan's cold war ally, by offering the US crucial intelligence on Osama bin Laden and the use of airspace. The change in his political fortunes is extraordinary. After deposing Pakistan's elected prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan was suspended by the Commonwealth and hit with fresh sanctions. Britain in particular was vocal in its protests. The sanctions have now been lifted. Both Britain and the US have offered the military regime debt relief and the generous rescheduling of loans. Mr Blair has even promised to renew defence links with Pakistan. In an interview with the Guardian in May, Gen Musharraf expressed his frustration that the new US Republican administration had not sought to pursue closer ties with his regime. "Every Pakistani wanted Bush to win. Every Pakistani would have voted Republican," he said. Now, partly through an accident of geography, but also through his own adroitness, Gen Musharraf has made Pakistan America's most important ally on the subcontinent. There was little criticism in June when Gen Musharraf appointed himself president. Despite the prospect of general elections next October, he will continue to run the country. He has few rivals for the job of leader. ... http://cgi.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0110/28/sm.04.html CNN SUNDAY MORNING Saeed Sheikh Believed to Have Abetted Terrorists Aired October 28, 2001 - 07:10 ET ...MARIA RESSA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Once a standout student at the London School of Economics, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh is the man the FBI thinks sent start-up money to the hijackers for the September terrorist attacks. BRAHMA CHELLANEY, POLITICAL ANALYST: He is supposed to be an expert in financial dealings. He reportedly is controlling certain aspects of the financial transactions of the al Qaeda network. RESSA: The British-born son of Pakistani parents, he speaks five languages, perhaps a sixth, the language of violence. Known in India as Omar Sheikh, he was jailed in 1994 for kidnapping these Western tourists whom he tried to exchange for the freedom of 10 jailed Islamic militants. AK JAIN, ARRESTING OFFICER: He's really a powerfully bright man; and it was at one stage, seven, eight of us had to pull him down on his leg. So you know, unarmed combat, he was fully trained. RESSA: Arresting officer AK Jain says under questioning, Omar Sheikh admitted he was supported by the Pakistan government's intelligence service, the ISI. JAIN: He had told me that. RESSA (on-camera): He admitted it to you? JAIN: Oh, yes, yes. RESSA (voice-over): The kidnappings came amid an increasingly violent struggle by militants to try to wrest Kashmir from a half century of Indian rule. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/08/internat...agewanted=print December 8, 2001 Pakistan Ended Aid to Taliban Only Hesitantly By DOUGLAS FRANTZ ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Dec. 7 â�� One month after the Pakistan government agreed to end its support of the Taliban, its intelligence agency was still providing safe passage for weapons and ammunition to arm them, according to Western and Pakistani officials. On Oct. 8 and again on Oct. 12, Pakistani border guards at a dusty checkpoint in the Khyber Pass waved on convoys headed into Afghanistan. Western intelligence officials said that under the trucks' tarpaulins were rifles, ammunition and rocket-propelled grenade launchers for Taliban fighters. Pakistan's premier spying agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, had long provided safe passage to armadas of truckers and smugglers who supplied a mountain of weapons to the Taliban war machine. But the policy was supposed to have changed in September after a Washington ultimatum to Pakistan. A senior Pakistani intelligence official acknowledged that the Oct. 8 shipment did contain arms for the Taliban, but he said that it was the last officially sanctioned delivery and that the Pakistanis have since been living up to their commitment to the Americans. Even around that time, there were signs of a change. Pakistani military advisers were withdrawn from Afghanistan over the following weeks, a move that Western intelligence officials say may have been a crucial factor in the surprisingly swift collapse of Taliban forces when confronted by the Northern Alliance. "We did not fully understand the significance of Pakistan's role in propping up the Taliban until their guys withdrew and things went to hell fast for the Talibs," said a Western diplomat who has monitored the region for many years. Nonetheless, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., remains what many describe as a state within a state, with independent, and worrying, political tendencies.... ...The agency and General Musharraf had specifically agreed to end support for the Taliban in a series of meetings and phone conversations right after Sept. 11. But Pakistani intelligence officers and military advisers contined helping the Taliban at least into October, providing tactical advice and helping to strengthen fortifications around Kandahar, the southern stronghold of the Taliban, diplomats and intelligence officials said. To reverse this, on Oct. 7 â�� the day the Americans started bombing Afghanistan â�� General Musharraf took the strong â�� and risky â�� step of removing the director of I.S.I., Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, who is regarded as pro-Taliban. He replaced him with a moderate, Lt. Gen. Ehsan ul-Haq. Speaking of General Musharraf, a senior American official said: "He knows he has got cells of Taliban people in intelligence and he's got a rule that he is going to kick anyone out who has been there four or five years because you don't know where the cells are." To help the purge, American officials are questioning former Pakistani officials to compile a list of intelligence officers and other government officials whose pro-Islamic sentiments make them suspect, according to people who said they were interviewed as part of the search. For many within the intelligence service, helping the Taliban was as much a religious duty as a military one. Some of the officers had trained Afghan fighters against the Soviets when I.S.I. funneled $3 billion in American funds into Afghanistan. For seven years, Pakistan's Islamic government had been the Taliban's main sponsor, alongside Mr. bin Laden. It provided military equipment, recruiting assistance, training and tactical advice that enabled the band of village mullahs and their adherents to take control of Afghanistan and turn it into a haven for terrorists. The impact was considerable because, after fattening its coffers with American money, I.S.I. was able to tilt the battle in Afghanistan.... http://web.archive.org/web/20030621153311/...0,3136680.story January 23, 2002 Deadly Shooting in Calcutta May Be Linked to Al Qaeda * Terrorism: New Delhi blames kidnapping ring for assault at U.S. center. Police suspect funds were sent to Mohamed Atta. By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer ...A Pakistani militant named Ahmad Sayed Omar Sheikh wired $100,000 of the ransom money, which he received from Ansari in Dubai, to one of Atta's bank accounts, India Today reported. The magazine said Indian investigators "have been able to decode intercepted e-mails" that point to the link between Khan, who led the kidnapping ring, and Ansari in Dubai. Sheikh is one of three Pakistani militants that India released from prison to free passengers of an Indian Airlines jet hijacked from Katmandu, Nepal, to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1999. FBI Director Mueller said Tuesday that Indian authorities had provided leads in the search for Al Qaeda members and cells, based on arrests in India. Mueller travels next to Pakistan, whose government wants to explore possible ways to cooperate against terrorism, he said. ... http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/congress/ju...ence_12-11.html Online Focus IMPROVING INTELLIGENCE December 11, 2002 ...GWEN IFILL: Senator Graham, are there elements in this report, which are classified that Americans should know about but can't? SEN. BOB GRAHAM: Yes, going back to your question about what was the greatest surprise. I agree with what Senator Shelby said the degree to which agencies were not communicating was certainly a surprise but also I was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States. I am stunned that we have not done a better job of pursuing that to determine if other terrorists received similar support and, even more important, if the infrastructure of a foreign government assisting terrorists still exists for the current generation of terrorists who are here planning the next plots. To me that is an extremely significant issue and most of that information is classified, I think overly-classified. I believe the American people should know the extent of the challenge that we face in terms of foreign government involvement. That would motivate the government to take action. GWEN IFILL: Are you suggesting that you are convinced that there was a state sponsor behind 9/11? SEN. BOB GRAHAM: I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing -- although that was part of it -- by a sovereign foreign government and that we have been derelict in our duty to track that down, make the further case, or find the evidence that would indicate that that is not true and we can look for other reasons why the terrorists were able to function so effectively in the United States. Ifill GWEN IFILL: Do you think that will ever become public, which countries you're talking about? SEN. BOB GRAHAM: It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now. And, we need to have this information now because it's relevant to the threat that the people of the United States are facing today. ... http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story...793-601,00.html CIA paid Pakistan for terror suspects Daniel McGrory | September 26, 2006 ....Pakistani intelligence chiefs are also concerned that General Musharraf may jeopardise their relationship with British intelligence agencies after claiming that a convicted terrorist was once an informer for British agency MI6. The President outlines the role played by a former London public schoolboy, Omar Sheikh, in the kidnap and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in February 2002. General Musharraf says Sheikh, who orchestrated the abduction, was recruited by MI6 while he was studying at the London School of Economics and sent to the Balkans to take part in jihad operations there. He alleges that Sheikh later double-crossed British intelligence. "At some point, he probably became a rogue or double agent," General Musharraf says. Sheikh has been detained since February 2002 and sentenced to death. He is being held in a Karachi jail but British detectives have been denied access to him. General Musharraf says he decided to disclose details of covert operations and his country's capture of 689 suspects since 9/11 to counter claims that Pakistan has not done enough to combat al-Qa'ida. A number of the men his country handed to the Americans have been held in CIA-run secret detention centres. While Mr Bush has tried to play down reports of rising tensions between Islamabad and Washington, relations will not be helped by General Musharraf's disclosures. In the book, he says he was so angered at US attempts to bully Pakistan into supporting the White House that he had his military commanders study "war games" to see if they could take on the American forces should they try to operate inside his borders without permission. ... Part one of two Edited April 27, 2009 by Tom Scully Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Tom Scully Posted April 27, 2009 Share Posted April 27, 2009 (edited) Part two of two.... and....what is this? Porter Goss's congressional intel oversight "partner", Sen. Bob Graham, protested, briefly, the FBI's concealment of the fact that one of it's San Diego informants hid from his FBI contact, the fact that he was renting rooms in his home to two Saudis later identified by the FBI as two of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. The informant also was deceptive and the FBI's reaction was to bury it's mistake by "hiding" the informant from the 9/11 Commission investigators. This makes the FBI look complicit in a 9/11 attacks conspiracy, or at the least, a cover up, which also amounts to a conspiracy. The Bush adminstration dismissed US Attorney, Carol Lam, who led the investigation, as well as investigations into the Brent Wilkes, Mitchell Wade, Randy Cunningham, and Porter Goss's CIA executive appointee, Kyle Dusty Foggo. http://www.press-enterprise.com/newsarchive/2001/10/05/http://www.press-enterprise.com/newsarchiv...1002168899.html Community leader's home a common link in terror probe Eds.: First moved for AMs. AP Photo LA104 of Oct. 3 shstfrdlsh3jr4 By SETH HETTENA Associated Press Writer LEMON GROVE, Calif. (AP) -- At the end of suburban Mount Vernon Drive sits a four-bedroom home with a basketball hoop hovering over the driveway. Only the Arabic writing on the door hints at why reporters and FBI have become regular fixtures at the home of Abdussattar Shaikh since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The FBI has said repeatedly the retired educator, who let two alleged hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, stay in his home last year, is not a suspect. Alhazmi and Almihdhar are among the five men suspected of crashing American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. More questions about Shaikh have come after reports that three other men who also rented rooms in the home -- Omer Bakarbashat, Ramez T. Noaman and Yazed Al-Salmi -- have been arrested as material witnesses in the ongoing terror investigation. Little is known about the 65-year-old, Indian-born Shaikh, who has declined several interview requests by The Associated Press, other than to deny his neighbors' reports that suspected hijacker Mohamed Atta visited his home. But the retired teacher called "the doctor" by his friends and neighbors, has a reputation within the 100,000-person San Diego Middle Eastern community as someone who will open his home to fellow Muslims. Shaikh told The San Diego Union-Tribune he met Alhazmi and Almihdhar at the Islamic Center of San Diego. They, in turn, introduced him to Bakarbashat, who later moved in with Shaikh and was living there on Sept. 11. A devout Muslim, Shaikh said he invites students to his home for companionship and to learn about other cultures, something local Muslim leaders say is common for men of his generation. "A lot of them feel a sense of obligation" to fellow immigrants, said Dr. Omaran Abdeen, an unofficial spokesman for the Islamic Center of San Diego. "When they came to this country most of them had no support. There was not much of an Islamic community so they had to go about it on their own." That's what Shaikh told the Union-Tribune for a 1994 profile, adding that he found no organized Muslim community when arrived here 31 years ago. He organized a prayer service in the back of a Chula Vista grocery store. Shaikh then helped found the Islamic Center, now the city's biggest mosque, Abdeen said. He also represented Muslims in the broader religious community. He recently finished a nine-year term on the board of the National Conference for Community and Justice, and he started a related group, the Interreligious Council of San Diego. Ron Lanoue, the conference's executive director, called Shaikh a "good, gentle soul." Shaikh, who changed his name from Abussattar Chhipa, earned a Ph.D. in leadership and human behavior from U.S. International University in San Diego in 1974, said Nancy Birdwell, vice president for development for the school, now called Alliant International University. But Shaikh couldn't interest his alma mater in a program to bring Middle Eastern students to San Diego..... http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/politics/08graham.html Senator Accuses Bush of Cover-Up By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: September 8, 2004 WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 (AP) - Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence that might have linked Saudi Arabia to the Sept. 11 hijackers. Mr. Graham made the accusation in a new book and repeated it at a news conference Tuesday arranged by Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign. Republicans called the accusations "bizarre conspiracy theories," and the Saudis said they were unsubstantiated and reckless. The accusation stems from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's refusal to allow investigators for a Congressional inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers. In his book "Intelligence Matters," Mr. Graham, the co-chairman of the Congressional inquiry with Representative Porter J. Goss, Republican of Florida, said an F.B.I. official wrote them in November 2002 and said "the administration would not sanction a staff interview with the source.'' On Tuesday, Mr. Graham called the letter "a smoking gun" and said, "The reason for this cover-up goes right to the White House." The report added to suspicions about a Saudi role in the hijacking plot. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/am...ook-551618.html Bush links to Saudi royals resurface in new book By Andrew Buncombe Tuesday, 7 September 2004 ....In his forthcoming book, Intelligence Matters, the Florida senator Bob Graham says President Bush and his senior officials "coddled" the Saudi authorities and pursued a war against Saddam Hussein that diverted resources from the hunt for al-Qa'ida. Senator Graham, co-chairman of a joint House/Senate investigation into the 11 September attacks, says the White House blacked out 28 pages of the report that dealt with purported links between the Saudis and the hijackers. In particular, Mr Graham alleges that a mysterious Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, who was living in San Diego before the attacks and who befriended and funded two of the hijackers, was a Saudi government spy. Mr Graham says that Mr Bayoumi was essentially a "ghost employee" of a Saudi contracting firm called Ercan, whose owner was an alleged early supporter of Osama bin Laden. He also had repeated contacts with a Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles who was later thrown out of the United States on suspicion of terrorist links.... http://www.newsweek.com/id/150025 A CASE NOT YET CLOSED TURN THE PAGE: IN A NEW BOOK, SEN. BOB GRAHAM EXAMINES THE EMBERS OF 9/11 By Michael Isikoff | NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Sep 13, 2004 In the summer of 2002, congressional investigators probing the September 11 terror attacks made a startling discovery. A college professor and longtime FBI informant in San Diego had dealt extensively with two of the 9/11 hijackers. The informant became close to the future terrorists after he'd rented them rooms in his house. The connection raised plenty of questions: What did the informant know about the activities of his housemates? And why hadn't the FBI said anything about the connection? The discovery led to a closed-door confrontation between the FBI and Florida Sen. Bob Graham, co-chair of the joint House-Senate panel investigating 9/11. Convinced that the bureau was stonewalling, Graham tried to slap the FBI's chief counsel with a subpoena to produce the informant. "With the subpoena still in hand, I approached him, holding it inches from his chest," Graham writes in his new book, "Intelligence Matters," which deals with his efforts to get to the bottom of the 9/11 attacks. "He leaned back from the subpoena as it if were radioactive." The FBI counsel asked for extra time to see if something could be worked out. In the end, the FBI refused to allow Graham and his colleagues to question a crucial witness. The congressional inquiry--which was underway long before the 9/11 Commission began its work--was a contentious investigation that led to repeated clashes with the FBI and the Bush White House. Graham and others charged that the administration was engaged in a "cover-up" to protect a key ally, Saudi Arabia. In his new book, Graham claims the president coddled the Saudis and pursued a war against Saddam Hussein that only diverted resources from the more important fight against Al Qaeda. Graham was furious when the White House blacked out 28 pages of the inquiry's final report that dealt with purported Saudi links to the 9/11 plot. Graham says much of the deleted evidence centered around the activities of a mysterious Saudi then living in San Diego named Omar al-Bayoumi, whom Graham calls a Saudi government "spy." Al-Bayoumi befriended two of the key 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, when they first arrived in the country...... http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2003/07/25...5_035_34_23.txt Report: San Diego represented best chance to foil Sept. 11 plot By:SETH HETTENA - Associated Press | Friday, July 25, 2003 6:32 AM PDT ∞ ....FBI officials in San Diego insisted that they did not have enough information to thwart the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "Even in the bright light of hindsight there simply wasn't a road map to Sept. 11," said Daniel R. Dzwilewski, the special agent who took charge of the FBI's San Diego bureau three weeks ago. Hijackers Nawaf Alhamzi and Khalid Almihdhar, who were aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon, rented rooms in 2000 at the Lemon Grove home of Abdussattar Shaikh, a local professor identified in news reports as the FBI informant. Shaikh phoned The Associated Press and denied being an informant before hanging up. The report says that the San Diego FBI concluded that the informant had no knowledge of, or role in, the Sept. 11 plot, but notes that he made numerous inconsistent statements that call his credibility into question. Steve Butler, a former San Diego FBI agent who was the informant's contact, testified before the congressional panel that he learned the names of the two hijackers only in a passing conversation during the summer of 2000. Butler lamented the CIA's failure to pass along that the two hijackers had been identified after attending an al-Qaida meeting in Malaysia in January 2000. "It would have made a huge difference," said Butler, who retired last year. "We would have done everything. We would have used all available investigative techniques. We would have given them the full-court press." FBI officials in San Diego say the hijackers, due to their limited English skills, were instructed to pose as students and rely on local Muslims to help them blend in. They did so with help from al-Bayoumi and others linked to "terrorist elements," according to the report. Al-Bayoumi found the pair an apartment, paid their first month's rent and security deposit and threw a welcoming party for them. Although he was a student in San Diego, the report states al-Bayoumi had access to "seemingly unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia," including $400,000 to fund a Kurdish mosque in the city. In January 2000, al-Bayoumi had a closed-door meeting at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles and then went to a restaurant where he picked up Alhazmi and Almihdhar and brought them to San Diego. One of the San Diego FBI's best sources believed that al-Bayoumi "must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power." The FBI says its investigation found no signs that a foreign government was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the report, al-Bayoumi also had ties to al-Qaida, but an extensive investigation after the Sept. 11 attacks resulted in no criminal charges, and he is now living in Saudi Arabia. New information emerged in the report about the owner and manager of a San Diego business that employed Alhazmi in 2000. Both men were on the FBI's radar. The business is not named, but Alhazmi briefly worked at a Texaco gas station in La Mesa. The business owner, a U.S. citizen whose name does not appear in the report, told a San Diego police officer during a 1991 traffic stop that "all Americans should be killed for what they did to the Iraqis" during Desert Storm and "that the United States needed another Pan Am 103 attack and that he would be the one to carry it out." In 2001, the man's stockbroker called the FBI to say the business owner had closed his account and was sending the money to freedom fighters in Afghanistan. The manager of the business also had connections that caught the FBI's attention. In January 2000, the brother of a known member of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network got into the manager's car in a Los Angeles parking lot. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the manager said he hired Alhazmi on the recommendation from a nearby mosque.... Much more background: http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?...r#a100902butler http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/200...e-sheriff-has-/Lead candidate to replace sheriff has fans, critics By Jeff McDonald (Contact) Union-Tribune Staff Writer 2:00 a.m. April 19, 2009 San Diego County's sheriff apparent is a native son with a master's degree in public administration who spent decades with the FBI and whose family roots in local law enforcement date to the 1940s. William Gore is widely expected to be appointed interim sheriff by the county Board of Supervisors, which will start the process of replacing retiring Sheriff Bill Kolender this week. ... ...The FBI was criticized for its actions. A dozen agents were suspended or demoted for lying about what happened. Gore was not among them. He was promoted to assistant FBI director and returned to Washington, D.C., in 1994. Still, the incident remains a rallying cry for those who say the government was out of control, and Gore's involvement could taint him. “The Ruby Ridge fiasco shows poor judgment on the part of the people involved, and my understanding is he was one of the principals,” said Ron Godwin, who manages a gun store in El Cajon and hosts a gun-rights radio show. “Putting him in as an appointee is simply so he can run as an incumbent (sheriff) and make it more easy for him.” Gore was among four agents who refused to testify at a U.S. Senate hearing on Ruby Ridge. He said his lawyer advised against it because an Idaho prosecutor was pursuing murder charges against agents. In 1997, Gore learned there was an opening to head the San Diego field office and he jumped at the chance to move home. When he got the job, he quickly focused on fighting drug smuggling along the U.S.-Mexico border, especially the Arellano Félix cartel. “To not work them as a No. 1 priority would have been negligent,” he said. The national spotlight found Gore once again after the terror attacks Sept. 11, 2001. An inspector general's office report chided the San Diego office for failing to follow a 1998 directive from headquarters to make counterterrorism – not the drug trade – its top priority. Furthermore, two hijackers on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon spent most of 2000 in San Diego, even taking flying lessons at San Diego's Montgomery Field and renting a room from a known FBI informant. Gore praised the work San Diego field agents did after the attacks and blamed a lack of communication for not identifying the threat earlier. “It's a tragic breakdown in the whole Sept. 11 scenario,” he said. “Clearly, had the CIA given that information to the FBI back in October 2000, after the bombing of the Cole (a U.S. Navy destroyer) . . . we probably could have tracked the two hijackers.” Still, Gore has a fan in Randall Hamud, the San Diego immigration attorney who defended three Muslim men held as material witnesses in the months after Sept. 11. Hamud credited the former San Diego FBI chief for balancing the needs of a nation in anguish with the civil rights of thousands of Muslim-Americans in this region. “Our communities were able to bring concerns to his office, and they were looked into,” said Hamud, who criticized the Bush administration after Sept. 11. “At the same time, when mistakes were made, (Gore) was there to accept responsibility as an individual and on behalf of the government.” Gore left the FBI after 32 years in January 2003, 16 months after the attacks, and took a job overseeing investigations for District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis. He says his departure was voluntary, and he rejects the notion that local FBI agents could have thwarted the terrorist acts. One year later, Gore moved to the Sheriff's Department, where he became a top assistant to his father's protégé – Kolender, who had been elected sheriff in 1994. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/specia...se/1048799.htmlHijackers' path to U.S. traced Most came from friendly Arab nations, officials say By MATT KELLEY Associated Press Sept. 14, 2001, 9:36PM ...Another hijacker who may have had a commercial pilot's license was Hani Hanjour, who was aboard the American Airlines flight that slammed into the Pentagon. Federal records show a Hani Hanjoor received a commercial pilot's license in 1999, listing a Saudi address.... ...Hanjour and two other hijackers -- Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi -- lived in the San Diego area during 2000, FBI spokeswoman Jan Caldwell said. http://web.archive.org/web/20021019111740/...0916/54414.html Two hijackers reportedly lived with San Diego Muslim leader BEN FOX Associated Press 09/16/2001 LEMON GROVE ---- Neighbors of a leader in San Diego's Muslim community expressed surprise Saturday that two men who shared his home are believed to have led the suicide hijacking that targeted the Pentagon. Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi rented a room last year in the home of Abdussattar Shaikh, a retired educator and founder of a San Diego Islamic center. A third suspected hijacker also lived for a time in San Diego, and a fourth man wanted for questioning in the attacks previously lived in Los Angeles. Neighbors on the rural cul-de-sac where Shaikh lives east of San Diego said he often welcomed boarders and other visitors. "People come and go at all hours," said one neighbor, Marna Adair. "We've always thought there was something strange going on there." Added her daughter, 32-year-old Denise Adair: "We thought it was a little weird, but we never thought this." Shaikh on Friday told reporters he was shocked to learn his former boarders, who said they were Saudi Arabians studying English, were involved in Tuesday's terror attacks. Neighbors had their doubts. "He's not a stupid man. He had to have a clue," Debbie Fortner said. FBI spokeswoman Jan Caldwell said Saturday that Shaikh had not been taken into custody, nor had anyone else in the San Diego area. She would not say whether Shaikh is under investigation and declined to comment further. ..... http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/...6-sdattack.html By Kelly Thornton UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER September 16, 2001 San Diego County's role as unwitting host to three hijackers was magnified Saturday as dozens of federal agents searched homes and businesses for clues about the men who seemed to live ordinary lives playing soccer, attending school and seeking girlfriends. Agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Friday night sifted through belongings left behind by Nawaf Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar, who rented a room from September through December last year in the Lemon Grove home of prominent Muslim leader Abdussattar Shaikh. Alhamzi, Al-Midhar and a third man, Hani Hanjoor – who also lived for a time in San Diego County – were among 19 individuals identified by the FBI as perpetrators of the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. The three were aboard the American Airlines jet that crashed into the Pentagon. Now it appears the FBI had been searching for Al-Midhar and Alhamzi since August because of connections to Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the attacks. Shaikh said agents searched his house for seven hours and seized a computer, handwriting samples, a comb and English-language textbooks and workbooks that once belonged to the men. The retired San Diego State University English professor said he often invites students to live in his five-bedroom house for companionship and to learn other cultures and languages. He contacted the FBI after hearing his former house guests identified as terrorists in a radio news report Friday. Bill Gore, head of the San Diego FBI office, said Shaikh is not a suspect, and he allowed his home to be searched. He also is not suspected of knowingly harboring the terrorists. FBI agents were trying to piece together the many aspects of the hijackers' lives in San Diego. It appeared the three men, with various spellings of their names, lived in a Clairemont apartment complex before two of them moved to Lemon Grove to live with Shaikh. They apparently returned to Saudi Arabia and may have lived in Arizona or elsewhere in the United States at some point. They may have returned to the Parkwood Apartments in Clairemont, moving out as recently as three weeks ago. The FBI also found a link between a Montgomery Field flight school and one of the terrorists after checking the school's records yesterday, law enforcement sources said. The FBI declined to comment. Hanjoor, 29, was a commercial pilot who attended flight school in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1996 and 1997, and may have attended school in San Diego. While living in Mesa, Ariz., he skipped out without paying a month's rent and sporadically attended flight school without studying, according to a report in the East Valley Tribune in Mesa. The state suspended Hanjoor's driver's license for driving without insurance. Shaikh said he and his two boarders prayed together five times a day, as Muslim faith requires, in a dining room converted to a prayer room. They also shared meals, but not much conversation, because the two men spoke little English. "They were nice, but not what you call extroverted people," said Shaikh, who became close to Alhamzi. As the friendship grew, Shaikh helped Alhamzi open an account at a Bank of America branch in Lemon Grove, and assisted when his houseguest wanted to post a personal ad on a Web site for a Mexican wife. Alhamzi was unable to compose a letter in English. "No one responded," Shaikh said. Shaikh had become so fond of Alhamzi that he bought matching jackets for them at Sam's Club as a parting gift. "He was very good to me. He didn't talk much, but he was peaceful. I could never know what was going on in his mind. Never in my life would I think he would do such a thing." When Shaikh heard the radio report identifying his houseguests as terrorists, his heart raced. "I was shocked. I could not believe this. It was like the strength of my heart was gone. 'Not him.' It was shocking. I am very conflicted because sometimes he was so pleasant, a very caring person." Al-Midhar stayed for only a month with Shaikh. He was a "dull" personality who never watched television and took no interest in learning English, Shaikh said. Shaikh, who is Indian and hoped to learn some Arabic from the men, was unable to communicate with Al-Midhar. Shaikh has deep ties to San Diego. He was a founder of the Islamic Center of San Diego in Clairemont. He has served as a member of the city's police review board and on a hate crimes task force, among other posts. "I've been here 42 years in this country, and my blood boiled and I got angry as much as any other American did, maybe more because I knew that guy, because he betrayed me," Shaikh said. "And still, I feel that people will think I shared their criminal will, and I didn't know that he was criminal."..... http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summa...286-6776419_ITM Neighbor says key organizer visited other hijack suspects in San Diego.(Knight Ridder Newspapers) Publication: Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service Publication Date: 28-SEP-01 Author: Bailey, Brandon SAN DIEGO, Calif. _ A man believed to be a key organizer of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks visited the home of a retired college teacher several times last fall, according to neighbors who say they have reported the sightings to the FBI. Mohamed Atta apparently did not live at the home, the neighbors said Friday, although two other suspected hijackers had rented rooms there. The teacher denied his neighbors' accounts Friday, insisting they are mistaken. The FBI, which has previously told reporters that retired teacher Abdussattar Shaikh is not a suspect in the case, declined to comment on the latest reports Friday. But next door neighbor Deborah Fortner said she is sure that Atta visited... http://web.archive.org/web/20010927120728/...92701atta.story September 27, 2001 Mainly, They Just Waited * The conspirators with borrowed names blended in, trading one seedy room for the next. They took flying lessons--and plotted. ....The Split The separate groups stayed together over the last days, in Maryland and Florida. The San Diego crew stayed intact right onto their aircraft. The three German students, Jarrah, Al-Shehhi and Atta, split up at the end, each aimed at a different plane. They are believed to have piloted three of the four hijacked jets. After spending months together in flight schools and apartments, Atta and Al-Shehhi appear to have parted company around Labor Day, when Al-Shehhi led a cohort of three men into Deerfield Beach, a placid, middle-class community by the Atlantic just south of Boca Raton..... http://web.archive.org/web/20020203115437/...tprofiles.story Multiple identities of hijack suspects confound FBI By Mitch Lipka Sun-Sentinel Posted September 28 2001 ...In San Diego, al-Midhar and al-Hazmi met Abdussattar Shaikh, a local Muslim leader and retired professor. He rented them a room in his house from September through December, although al-Midhar was gone much of that time. Shaikh told the San Diego Union-Tribune he thought he was offering shelter to two young men who were in the country to learn English. Al-Midhar, he said, could barely speak English and appeared standoffish. Al-Hazmi had a better command of the language, Shaikh said, and became quite friendly.... http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20..._7m2somali.html Somali acquitted in terror inquiry Man was accused of lying on immigration documents By Kelly Thornton STAFF WRITER June 2, 2004 ....However, prosecutors said in the indictment that Abdullah is from Yemen, and that he entered the United States using a visitor's visa he obtained with a Yemeni passport. Abdullah, who does not speak Somali, pleaded guilty a month after the arrests of Amir and Aliwe to lying on his asylum application. He was recently deported to Yemen. In court records, authorities said Abdullah regularly dined and prayed with Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid al-Midhar and Hani Hanjour, three San Diego-linked Sept. 11 hijackers, and helped them obtain Social Security cards, driver licenses, flight school information and rides from Los Angeles International Airport. Abdullah's attorneys have said he was simply trying to help fellow Muslims and had no prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 plot. He was never charged with terrorism. ..... Edited April 27, 2009 by Tom Scully Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Tom Scully Posted April 29, 2009 Share Posted April 29, 2009 (edited) Bill, In the Porter Goss and the CIA thread.....and consider that this thread was created, and the Porter Goss thread was revived because John Simkin became aware that Don Bohning had waged a politically motivated personal attack against Simkin and his web sites, you posted: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...st&p=166373 Hey Tom, I don't see how any of this Republican party crap has anything to do with Porter Goss and the CIA. Both parties are corrupt and do the same thing. Coply can take down anybody they want and have historic ties to MOCKINGBIRD, and I wouldn't trust anything Marcus Stern wrote whether about Porter Goss or Pakistan. Bill, If your point is that Copley News service cannot be a trusted source for the Cunningham-Wade-Wilkes-Foggo-Goss story because of past servitude by Copley as a willing mouthpiece for CIA propaganda, consider that this case is different....Copley reporter Marcus Stern investigated and broke the Cunningham bribery story, it could be traced to the white house and republican congressional leaders, led to the convictions of Cunningham, Wade, Wilkes, and Foggo, and to the resignation in disgrace of Porter Goss.....read the federal court documents linked in the article by Laura Rosen in my last post: To put Porter Goss's appointment as DCI into proper context, consider that Bohning described Goss as an "8 term republican congressman", Goss was an outspoken member of the house intelligence committee, and this is a saga of corruption that has as much to do with Goss as it does to do with his republican congressional colleagues and the democratic "opposition", that in reality is no opposition, at all.... The common denominators in all of this are Randy Cunningham bribers Mitchell Wade and his business partner, Brent Wilkes, best friend of Porter Goss's CIA executive appointee, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo. Porter Goss resigned as DCI because he and his colleagues ARE THIS ERA of OFFICIAL CORRUPTION's PRINCIPLES: You post about your hope and expectation that reopening an investigation of one or more of the murders in Dallas between 22 and 24 November, 1963 is a developing possibility. I submit that you do not fully appreciate the scope of the republican political corruption, gripping the one American party with two right wings, one democratic, and the other republican. IMO, membership in either party would have to be made a crime, and the CIA would have to be dismantled if the documentation in my last post is at all a close to accurate representation of where we near presently find ourselves in, vis a vis our "government"..... WE PRESENTLY FIND OURSELVES WITH OUR GOVERNMENT IN NEW HANDS, AND THE OLD GUARD OUT THE DOOR. CHENEY MUST NOW ASK FOR RECORDS RATHER THAN DEMAND THEM, AND PORTER GOSS IS OUT OF POWER, BUT CAN STILL ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT HIS COVERT OPERATIONS THAT BECAME ENTWINED WITH DEALEY PLAZA. I am pushing back, Bill...against Don Bohning's attack of Simkin and this forum for, as Bohning put it....engaging in "agitprop" instead of in honest research and discussion. Bohning quotes and represents Porter Goss as a more reliable source than John Simkin. HOW IS ATTACKING BOHNING AND GOSS HONEST RESEARCH AND DISCUSSION? I've documented through court convictions, federal court records, and news reports, that the US government and the CIA were gripped in a corrupt, republican political "coup", escalated dramatically since 2001.... SO YOU ARE NOT REALLY INTERESTED IN HONEST RESEARCH OF THE BACKGROUND OF PORTER GOSS AND DON BOHNING AND HAVE YOUR OWN BEEF WITH THE REPUBLICANS... and there is more, and in case you think this "over", look at the dates associated with the following, lower two links: BLA, BLA BLA, IT'S JUNK, IT'S ALL PARTISAN JUNK. NOBODY'S GOING TO READ THIS STUFF, ALTHOUGH I ACTUALLY DID. THE FIRST CONGRESSMAN FROM PHILADELPHIA IDENTIFIED AS BEING A CIA ASSETT WHO GOT ALL THEIR PET PROJECTS THROUGH, EVENTUALLY BECAME ENTWINED IN SCANDAL, AND THEY GOT THE GOODS ON EVERY POLITICIAN, AND CAN PULL THE PLUG ON THEM AT ANY TIME. THE ONLY PLACE I CAN FIND YOUR MENTION OF PORTER GOSS AND THE CIA, THE SUBJECT OF THIS THREAD, IS THIS: Hayden, President Bush's pick to replace Porter Goss as head of the CIA, contracted with MZM Inc. for the services of Lt. Gen. James C. King, then a senior vice president of the company, the sources say. MZM was owned and operated by Mitchell Wade, who has admitted to bribing former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham with $1.4 million in money and gifts. SO WE KNOW THEY'RE ALL GREEDY AND TAKE BRIBES, AND GIVE EACH OTHER GIFTS, AND SET UP BOGUS NON-PROFIT FOUNDATIONS AND SOMETIMES THEY GET CAUGHT, AND SOMETIMES THEY'RE SET UP FROM THE GET GO. I THINK PORTER GOSS' CONNECTIONS TO JMWAVE ARE EXTREMELY SIGNIFICANT, AND WOULD LIKE TO KNOW IF ANYBODY HAS ANYMORE INFORMATION ON THAT ANGLE? THANKS, BK ....and then, not even a day after your ppst quoted above, you posted a "Porter Goss, re-emerges from disgrace and obscurity to accuse those who REASONABLY want to hold government and it's alphabet agencies accountable, of engaging in partisanship that undermines national security.....REASONABLY in that the executive branch was exposed soliciting a trumped up legal argument....several in fact....as CYA for treaty breaking acts of torture it had already ordered and practiced"..... article that appeared in the Washington Post...... But, you think I am unreasonable or not posting honest research about Porter Goss and Don Bohning.....do I have all that about right, Bill? Who is more shrill....who provides the least and the most support for their arguments, Bill....or is it best to simply "tar" Don, Porter, and Tom up with the same brush and dismiss the arguments of all three? How do you explain the curious resume of Ted Sorenson, and that of his late wife, Barbara Olson, Bill? Can you consider that Sorenson, Olson, Bohning, and Goss, are all "political creatures", and that they are bulwarks of the establishment who have and are thwarting what you are attempting to bring about....a new climate of openness and justice? http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...st&p=166390 Edited April 29, 2009 by Tom Scully Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Tom Scully Posted April 29, 2009 Share Posted April 29, 2009 (edited) Bill, In the Porter Goss and the CIA thread.....and consider that this thread was created, and the Porter Goss thread was revived because John Simkin became aware that Don Bohning had waged a politically motivated personal attack against Simkin and his web sites, you posted: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...mp;#entry166373 Hey Tom, I don't see how any of this Republican party crap has anything to do with Porter Goss and the CIA. Both parties are corrupt and do the same thing. Coply can take down anybody they want and have historic ties to MOCKINGBIRD, and I wouldn't trust anything Marcus Stern wrote whether about Porter Goss or Pakistan. Bill, If your point is that Copley News service cannot be a trusted source for the Cunningham-Wade-Wilkes-Foggo-Goss story because of past servitude by Copley as a willing mouthpiece for CIA propaganda, consider that this case is different....Copley reporter Marcus Stern investigated and broke the Cunningham bribery story, it could be traced to the white house and republican congressional leaders, led to the convictions of Cunningham, Wade, Wilkes, and Foggo, and to the resignation in disgrace of Porter Goss.....read the federal court documents linked in the article by Laura Rosen in my last post: To put Porter Goss's appointment as DCI into proper context, consider that Bohning described Goss as an "8 term republican congressman", Goss was an outspoken member of the house intelligence committee, and this is a saga of corruption that has as much to do with Goss as it does to do with his republican congressional colleagues and the democratic "opposition", that in reality is no opposition, at all.... The common denominators in all of this are Randy Cunningham bribers Mitchell Wade and his business partner, Brent Wilkes, best friend of Porter Goss's CIA executive appointee, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo. Porter Goss resigned as DCI because he and his colleagues ARE THIS ERA of OFFICIAL CORRUPTION's PRINCIPLES: You post about your hope and expectation that reopening an investigation of one or more of the murders in Dallas between 22 and 24 November, 1963 is a developing possibility. I submit that you do not fully appreciate the scope of the republican political corruption, gripping the one American party with two right wings, one democratic, and the other republican. IMO, membership in either party would have to be made a crime, and the CIA would have to be dismantled if the documentation in my last post is at all a close to accurate representation of where we near presently find ourselves in, vis a vis our "government"..... WE PRESENTLY FIND OURSELVES WITH OUR GOVERNMENT IN NEW HANDS, AND THE OLD GUARD OUT THE DOOR. CHENEY MUST NOW ASK FOR RECORDS RATHER THAN DEMAND THEM, AND PORTER GOSS IS OUT OF POWER, BUT CAN STILL ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT HIS COVERT OPERATIONS THAT BECAME ENTWINED WITH DEALEY PLAZA. I am pushing back, Bill...against Don Bohning's attack of Simkin and this forum for, as Bohning put it....engaging in "agitprop" instead of in honest research and discussion. Bohning quotes and represents Porter Goss as a more reliable source than John Simkin. HOW IS ATTACKING BOHNING AND GOSS HONEST RESEARCH AND DISCUSSION? I've documented through court convictions, federal court records, and news reports, that the US government and the CIA were gripped in a corrupt, republican political "coup", escalated dramatically since 2001.... SO YOU ARE NOT REALLY INTERESTED IN HONEST RESEARCH OF THE BACKGROUND OF PORTER GOSS AND DON BOHNING AND HAVE YOUR OWN BEEF WITH THE REPUBLICANS... and there is more, and in case you think this "over", look at the dates associated with the following, lower two links: BLA, BLA BLA, IT'S JUNK, IT'S ALL PARTISAN JUNK. NOBODY'S GOING TO READ THIS STUFF, ALTHOUGH I ACTUALLY DID. THE FIRST CONGRESSMAN FROM PHILADELPHIA IDENTIFIED AS BEING A CIA ASSETT WHO GOT ALL THEIR PET PROJECTS THROUGH, EVENTUALLY BECAME ENTWINED IN SCANDAL, AND THEY GOT THE GOODS ON EVERY POLITICIAN, AND CAN PULL THE PLUG ON THEM AT ANY TIME. THE ONLY PLACE I CAN FIND YOUR MENTION OF PORTER GOSS AND THE CIA, THE SUBJECT OF THIS THREAD, IS THIS: Hayden, President Bush's pick to replace Porter Goss as head of the CIA, contracted with MZM Inc. for the services of Lt. Gen. James C. King, then a senior vice president of the company, the sources say. MZM was owned and operated by Mitchell Wade, who has admitted to bribing former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham with $1.4 million in money and gifts. SO WE KNOW THEY'RE ALL GREEDY AND TAKE BRIBES, AND GIVE EACH OTHER GIFTS, AND SET UP BOGUS NON-PROFIT FOUNDATIONS AND SOMETIMES THEY GET CAUGHT, AND SOMETIMES THEY'RE SET UP FROM THE GET GO. I THINK PORTER GOSS' CONNECTIONS TO JMWAVE ARE EXTREMELY SIGNIFICANT, AND WOULD LIKE TO KNOW IF ANYBODY HAS ANYMORE INFORMATION ON THAT ANGLE? THANKS, BK ....and then, not even a day after your post quoted above, you posted a http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...st&p=166390 "Porter Goss, re-emerges from disgrace and obscurity to accuse those who REASONABLY want to hold government and it's alphabet agencies accountable, of engaging in partisanship that undermines national security.....REASONABLY in that the executive branch was exposed soliciting a trumped up legal argument....several in fact....as CYA for treaty breaking acts of torture it had already ordered and practiced\"..... article that appeared in the Washington Post...... But, you think I am unreasonable or not posting honest research about Porter Goss and Don Bohning.....do I have all that about right, Bill? Who is more shrill....who provides the least and the most support for their arguments, Bill....or is it best to simply \"tar\" Don, Porter, and Tom up with the same brush and dismiss the arguments of all three? How do you explain the curious resume of Ted Olson, and that of his late wife, Barbara Olson, Bill? Can you consider that Olson, Bohning, and Goss, are all \"political creatures\", and that they are bulwarks of the establishment who have and are thwarting what you are attempting to bring about....a new climate of openness and justice? It has nothing to do with \"party politics\", because, as can easily be observed in Bohning\'s attack of John Simkin, the crux of it is right wing extremism, and that narrow range of political sentiment knows no \"party\" affiliation, because it grips both labeled American major parties. Some signs that this is an accurate assessment are that Rahm Emmanuel is white house COS, Bob Gates is Secretary of Defense, and Obama\'s justice department is pursuing all of Bush surveillance and secrecy extremism in the courts as if an election hadn\'t happened: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...,0,197958.storyBy Carol J. Williams 1:32 PM PDT, April 28, 2009 The president cannot avoid trial of a lawsuit brought by five former CIA captives, who allege they were tortured, by proclaiming the entire case a protected state secret, a federal appeals panel ruled today. Both former President George W. Bush and President Obama\'s Justice Department lawyers had argued before federal courts that a lawsuit brought by former Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed and four others should be dismissed in the interests of national security...... Edited April 29, 2009 by Tom Scully Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted April 29, 2009 Share Posted April 29, 2009 (edited) Tom thinks this is a war against right-wing extremism and is "pushing back" against Bohning's attacks on the forum How do you explain the curious resume of Ted Sorenson, and that of his late wife, Barbara Olson, Bill? Can you consider that Sorenson, Olson, Bohning, and Goss, are all \"political creatures\", ... I don't know what you're talking about. What does Sorenson and Olson have to do with it, and were they really married? and that they are bulwarks of the establishment who have and are thwarting what you are attempting to bring about....a new climate of openness and justice? If that's all I'm up against - Sorenson, Olson, Bohning and Goss, then I don't need any help, thanks It has nothing to do with \"party politics\", because, as can easily be observed in Bohning\'s attack of John Simkin, the crux of it is right wing extremism, It's NOT about political extremism, it's about the assassination of President Kennedy, which is what got Bohning's gaul and after he mentions it once, he doesn't bring it up again, but it's there, and it's not going to go away. You're about political extremism, but that's okay, you can't get any more extreme than me. and that narrow range of political sentiment knows no \"party\" affiliation, At least not Democratic or Republican because it grips both labeled American major parties. Some signs that this is an accurate assessment are that Rahm Emmanuel is white house COS, Watchdog at the door and kosher keeps out the riff raff Bob Gates is Secretary of Defense, Hey, smart move, to stave off a bay of pigs early on in his administration. Gates is pretty reasonable guy for an establishmentarian and Obama\'s justice department is pursuing all of Bush surveillance Whose under surveillance again? Al Quada and Taliban are under the Preditor's sights. And I'm sure all those who rant and rave on the internet. and secrecy extremism in the courts as if an election hadn\'t happened: Obama extremism on what? Stem cells? Interrogations? I think Obama is trying out the reigns of power, and rather than dismantle the system, he is redirecting it towards his own goals. As for his pledge on secrecy in government, the report he requested in 120 days will be due soon, sometime in May. So we'll see on that count. Rather than looking at what happened at Dealey Plaza as a battle between right and left wing extremism, I think it makes more sense to the assassination as a pivitol battle between secret intelligence agencies - a battle that has not yet been totally won or lost. Since you mention FBI in the title I thought I'd adopt some of your style, and give you somethings to read. BK Obama praises FBI, says country is counting on it http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/articl...EJTS4AD97RJH9O0 (AP) — Offering a robust endorsement for the FBI and its leadership, President Barack Obama on Tuesday praised the bureau's employees for their commitment to staying "one step ahead of all who step outside of the law." "We are counting on you," Obama said from an outdoor courtyard at FBI headquarters, where he was greeted by sustained cheers. Thousands crammed the plaza, while many other FBI workers peered down from their windows. Obama thanked them all for embracing "a profound transformation" in their mission and their capabilities. "With the attacks of 9/11, your mission became focused more than ever before on prevention, so that we have the capacity to uncover terrorist plots before they take hold," he said. "With the spread of new technologies you increasingly confronted adversaries in unconventional areas, from transnational networks to cybercrimes and espionage. And through it all, you must continue to stay one step ahead of all who step outside of the law." Obama's brief stop at the FBI was part of a broader effort in support of the crime-fighting and intelligence community. He went to the CIA last week in a morale boost for employees after controversy erupted over his decision to release Bush-era memos detailing harsh interrogations methods against terror suspects. At the start on Tuesday, Obama got a big burst of applause when he donned the FBI cap given to him by the bureau's director, Robert Mueller. On a more sober note, the president warned of a long struggle against al-Qaida terrorists. He repeatedly said the FBI protects both U.S. security and ideals, rejecting what he called a "false choice" between preserving one or the other. "We know that al-Qaida is not constrained by a constitution or by allegiance to anything other than a hateful ideology and a determination to kill as many innocents as possible," Obama said. "But what makes the United States of America so special is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals, not just when it's easy but when it's hard." Edited April 29, 2009 by William Kelly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Tom Scully Posted April 29, 2009 Share Posted April 29, 2009 (edited) .......I don't know what you're talking about. What does Sorenson and Olson have to do with it, and were they really married? .....and secrecy extremism in the courts as if an election hadn\'t happened: Obama extremism on what? Stem cells? Interrogations? I think Obama is trying out the reigns of power, and rather than dismantle the system, he is redirecting it towards his own goals. As for his pledge on secrecy in government, the report he requested in 120 days will be due soon, sometime in May. So we'll see on that count. Rather than looking at what happened at Dealey Plaza as a battle between right and left wing extremism, I think it makes more sense to the assassination as a pivitol battle between secret intelligence agencies - a battle that has not yet been totally won or lost. Since you mention FBI in the title I thought I'd adopt some of your style, and give you somethings to read. BK Obama praises FBI, says country is counting on it http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/articl...EJTS4AD97RJH9O0 (AP) — Offering a robust endorsement for the FBI and its leadership, President Barack Obama on Tuesday praised the bureau's employees for their commitment to staying "one step ahead of all who step outside of the law." "We are counting on you," Obama said from an outdoor courtyard at FBI headquarters, where he was greeted by sustained cheers. Thousands crammed the plaza, while many other FBI workers peered down from their windows. Obama thanked them all for embracing "a profound transformation" in their mission and their capabilities. "With the attacks of 9/11, your mission became focused more than ever before on prevention, so that we have the capacity to uncover terrorist plots before they take hold," he said. "With the spread of new technologies you increasingly confronted adversaries in unconventional areas, from transnational networks to cybercrimes and espionage. And through it all, you must continue to stay one step ahead of all who step outside of the law." Obama's brief stop at the FBI was part of a broader effort in support of the crime-fighting and intelligence community. He went to the CIA last week in a morale boost for employees after controversy erupted over his decision to release Bush-era memos detailing harsh interrogations methods against terror suspects. At the start on Tuesday, Obama got a big burst of applause when he donned the FBI cap given to him by the bureau's director, Robert Mueller. On a more sober note, the president warned of a long struggle against al-Qaida terrorists. He repeatedly said the FBI protects both U.S. security and ideals, rejecting what he called a "false choice" between preserving one or the other. "We know that al-Qaida is not constrained by a constitution or by allegiance to anything other than a hateful ideology and a determination to kill as many innocents as possible," Obama said. "But what makes the United States of America so special is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals, not just when it's easy but when it's hard." Bill, I'm embarrassed to admit I've been typing the name "Sorenson", when I meant "Olson" ......it's the first name, "Ted" that threw me off, I suspect..... Bohning "red baited" John by labeling John's research as "agitprop", and described John as a former member of an "extreme left" organization. Ted Olson pulled LA US Attorney Deborah Yang out of office in a clearly unethical, if not illegal maneuver, so that her office's investigation of Rep. Jerry Lewis could be thwarted with her help, since Olson was a partner at the firm defending Lewis, or at least so Deborah Yang would no longer be leading the investigation against Lewis, which was an investigation also of Wilkes, his best friend Foggo, and his boss at CIA, Goss..... In 2006, US Attorney Carol Lam in San Diego, and Deborah Yang in LA were the heads of DOJ prosecutorial officers conducting overlapping investigations of Brent Wilkes, Mitchell Wade, Dusty Foggo and Rep. Jerry Lewis. These investigations were an outgrowth of the investigation and conviction on bribery charges in 2005, of Rep. Randy Cunningham Just five months after the disclosure of an investigation of Rep. Jerry Lewis, the US Attorney in charge of the LA office investigating Rep. Jerry Lewis, Deborah Yang, accepts a job offer at the law firm providing criminal defense legal services to......Rep. Jerry Lewis: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...st&p=166515 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6051101881.htmlHouse Appropriations Chairman Is Facing Federal Investigation By Charles R. Babcock Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, May 12, 2006; Page A03 The Justice Department has begun investigating the activities of Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, focusing in part on his dealings with a lobbying firm that hired some of his former staff members, sources familiar with the inquiry said...... .......The Lewis inquiry is at least tangentially connected to an ongoing congressional bribery case centered in San Diego and Washington, one source said. In that case, former representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) admitted he had accepted $2.4 million in bribes. Brent Wilkes, a San Diego defense contractor, is under investigation for allegedly bribing Cunningham. Cunningham, a longtime colleague of Lewis's and, like him, a member of the Appropriations Committee, pleaded guilty and resigned in November. He was sentenced to more than eight years in prison. Wilkes has been identified as a co-conspirator in that case but has not been charged. Another contractor, Mitchell J. Wade, of Washington, pleaded guilty early this year for his role in bribing Cunningham........ http://www.gibsondunn.com/News/Pages/USAtt...LosAngeles.aspx U.S. Attorney Debra Wong Yang Joins Gibson Dunn in Los Angeles October 17, 2006 Los Angeles. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP is pleased to announce Debra Wong Yang, the United States Attorney for the Central District of California in Los Angeles, will join the firm as partner in the Los Angeles office. At Gibson Dunn, Yang will co-chair the firm’s Crisis Management Practice Group, along with Washington, D.C. partner Theodore B. Olson, the former Solicitor General of the United States, and New York partner Randy Mastro, the former New York Deputy Mayor of Operations. In addition, Yang will play a central role in the Business Crimes and Investigations Practice Group. “Debra Wong Yang is one of the most respected U.S. Attorneys in the country. She has done a remarkable job in leading the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, which handles some of our Nation’s largest and most difficult cases,” said Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. “She was selected to serve on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee, a small group of U.S. Attorneys that I consult on policy matters, and she served in this and other capacities with great distinction. She is an energetic leader and has an amazing ability to build connections with community leaders at all levels.”.... http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/20...feinstein_N.htm Senator eyes another attorney departure Updated 3/20/2007 10:04 PM ....Feinstein noted Tuesday that there are numerous names blacked out in documents the Justice Department has released in recent days in response to the controversy. Feinstein did not specify what her concerns were about Yang, but she has complained repeatedly that six of the eight U.S. attorneys dismissed last year were in the midst of prosecuting public corruption cases, mostly focused on Republicans. About five months before Yang's departure, her office had opened an investigation into ties between Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., and a lobbyist. Gibson Dunn, the firm that hired her, is also the firm where Lewis' legal team works, but government rules required that she step aside in that case or any other she was involved with while a government prosecutor. The Lewis case is connected to the corruption investigation in San Diego that began with the 2005 conviction of former GOP Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who is serving jail time for bribery. Former U.S. Attorney Carol Lam in San Diego, who was among those dismissed last year, was prosecuting that case. Feinstein contends that Lam's dismissal had something to do with her role in the Cunningham investigation, though the Justice Department denies it.... http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...;type=polititcs ..."The fact is there are additional investigations that have come from that. The fact is that the day before she left office she filed two additional indictments," Feinstein said, referring to charges Lam filed last month against an ex-CIA official and a defense contractor tied to Cunningham. "Now they weren't of members of Congress," Feinstein added. "But whether this has had a chilling effect over that investigation I don't know. But I'm concerned about it."... ...Lam, who is now working as a lawyer for San Diego-based wireless technology company Qualcomm Inc., declined to comment Tuesday. In testimony March 7 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she said she had never been told the reason she was told to resign last December. Lam's office began investigating Cunningham and his associates on bribery allegations in July 2005. Cunningham pleaded guilty and was sentenced in March 2006 to more than eight years in federal prison for taking more than $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. Last month, actually two days before Lam left her post, her office obtained indictments of one of the defense contractors and a former top CIA official accused of fraud in the expanding corruption investigation. Lam, who was appointed in 2002, also tightened prosecution guidelines at the border during her tenure, raising the violation requirements in an effort to manage the flood of immigration cases referred to her office. Later e-mails between Sampson and Bill Mercer, the associate attorney general, indicated concern over the drop in border prosecutions in San Diego. "Has ODAG (Office of the Deputy Attorney General) ever called Carol Lam and woodshedded her re immigration enforcement? Has anyone?" Sampson wrote Mercer in May 2006. White House adviser Karl Rove has said Lam was removed for failing to file immigration cases. William Moschella, an associate deputy attorney general, has said she was let go because her prosecution of gun crimes and immigration violations "just didn't stack up." Feinstein wrote to Gonzales last June questioning border prosecution guidelines in Lam's district, but received a reply from Moschella in which he described Lam's immigration smuggling caseload as rising "favorably" in 2006. http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_12203119 Statement reveals high legal fees for Rep. Jerry Lewis Joe Nelson, Staff Writer Posted: 04/22/2009 "He has to pay forward to continue to ensure this firm continues to represent him," Specht said. In February and March, Lewis also paid a total of $18,530.44 in retainers to the Washington D.C.-based government affairs law firm Williams & Jensen, which handles all of Lewis' campaign filing, Specht said. Though Lewis has not been contacted by authorities, Specht said the Congressman is still taking every precaution necessary. "He feels he needs to retain a law firm for a defense in case anything comes of this," Specht said. Some believe Lewis and his flak aren't being forthright. "I don't think anybody will ever agree that Congressman Lewis has been forthright about what his more than $1 million in legal fees are for," said Patrick Kahler, vice chairman of the San Bernardino County Democratic Central Committee. "With a new administration, maybe they're taking a harder look at his activities and shenanigans." Lewis spent even more money on tax payments in the first quarter of this year. On March 13, he paid a whopping $134,521 to the IRS, campaign records show. Lewis invested campaign account funds in the Bank of San Bernardino, which had been bought and sold a couple of times over the years. Lewis cashed out on the bank stock in December for $388,355, and the $134,521 he paid the IRS was capital gains tax on that transaction, Specht said. Seth Hettena is a former news reporter with an AP byline in his October, 2001 reporting of the FBI informant who housed two of the 9/11 hijackers without telling his FBI contact, and without the FBI noticing....the FBI claimed. http://sethhettena.com/blog/?p=362...I was reading the Foggo appendix and found something pretty interesting. Om page 60, we learn that Wilkes and Foggo apparently dined with Lewis and DeLay(!). Of course, a dinner is just a dinner and doesn’t prove anything. But, still, it’s pretty interesting given Lewis’ claim that he had not seen Wilkes for 10 years or so… http://sethhettena.com/blog/?p=359 “I felt deceived and betrayed by Mr. Foggo,” Goss concludes. A source tells Laura Rozen that Goss is lying, but I’m taking Goss at his word. He’s out of public life now, and I don’t think he would expose himself to perjury charges. At any rate, it’s more than apparent that he was absolutely the wrong man for the job of CIA director. How out of the loop was Goss if it fell to public affairs to inform him of the problems with Foggo? As the documents make clear, were already well known to his supervisors and were included in his agency file. Foggo was not the only staff member who was unworthy of Goss’ trust. Equally suspect was Goss’ choice of Murray and the other “Gosslings” he brought over from Capitol Hill. As Ken Silverstein noted back in 2006, the Gosslings arrived at Langley with a “lengthy list of names of people to be purged and went about removing them.” One was Stephen Kappes, who eventually returned to the agency and is now serving as deputy director under President Obama. A man who can’t tell the difference between the Foggos and the Kappeses shouldn’t be in charge of the Central Intelligence Agency. Period. http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/st...,671089,00.htmlWidow blames US officials for Guatemala dirty war death Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles Thursday March 21, 2002 The Guardian .........The US knew at the time of her husband's kidnapping who had carried it out but, Ms Harbury says, it chose to tell her that it had no information. The government's lawyers argue that the case should not proceed, on the grounds that government officials are entitled to give misleading information. "There are lots of different situations when the government has legitimate reasons to give out false information," the solicitor general, Theodore Olson, told the supreme court this week. ........ http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?p...p;notFound=true The Two Theodore Olsons Although Conservatives Love Him, Some Doubt Solicitor General Nominee's Candor By Robert G. Kaiser and Thomas B. Edsall Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, May 17, 2001; Page A01 ...........Olson has done legal work for Ronald Reagan, Monica Lewinsky and Jonathan Pollard, an American who spied for Israel. He has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court, and won several historic ones, most notably last year's Bush v. Gore.............. ...............He has been not only an architect of the conservative legal movement but a significant political player as well, advising Paula Jones's legal team when she sued President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment, and defending his friend Kenneth W. Starr during the Whitewater investigation............... ...............Olson's nomination was held up at the Judiciary Committee last week, after Democrats expressed concern that the nominee was less than candid in testimony about his role with the American Spectator magazine and its "Arkansas Project," a $2.3 million effort to report on Bill and Hillary Clinton that was funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, a conservative philanthropist.................. ................Fifteen years ago, Justice Department lawyers found "significant evidence" that Olson had given carefully worded testimony to Congress that "was knowingly false." An independent counsel cleared him of criminal wrongdoing in that episode............... ................ Olson and his wife, Barbara, have made no secret of their political predilections. Barbara Olson worked for House Republicans investigating Clinton, became a prominent anti-Clinton television commentator and wrote a gleefully hostile bestseller about Hillary Clinton, "Hell to Pay." Olson himself wrote a long article for American Spectator denouncing Janet Reno's Justice Department as politically corrupt, and co-authored an article for the magazine enumerating, with sarcasm, the federal and Arkansas laws the Clintons might have violated. When R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., the Spectator's combative editor, got married in 1998, Olson was his best man. ............... ................. Olson entered the public arena in the early months of Reagan's presidency, when he provided the legal reasoning for Reagan's decision to fire the nation's air traffic controllers, an unexpected, forceful display of leadership that set the tone of the new administration. At the time Olson was assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel, the branch of the Justice Department sometimes described as the president's law firm. Olson came to that position as a 40-year-old protégé of William French Smith, with whom he had worked in the Los Angeles law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Smith, Reagan's first attorney general, brought two bright young lawyers to Washington in 1981: Olson and Starr, who served as counselor to the attorney general. Twenty years later, Olson was at the center of one of the great political dramas of American history, arguing twice before the Supreme Court late last year on behalf of the Bush campaign. His success before the court impressed legal colleagues -- "If you were giving out . . . prizes, Olson would win one," said Lloyd Cutler, the prominent Washington lawyer and former counsel to presidents Jimmy Carter and Clinton. His victory in Bush v. Gore made Olson a hero among Republicans, and a natural candidate to be President Bush's solicitor general................. ......................... Lincoln Caplan of Yale Law School, a liberal and author of a book on solicitors general, "The Tenth Justice," said he was surprised that senators have not questioned Olson about the conclusion of the independent counsel who investigated him in the 1980s that he had given "disingenuous and misleading" testimony to Congress in a contentious hearing involving the Environmental Protection Agency. The independent counsel, Alexia Morrison, decided not to prosecute Olson, saying his "less than forthcoming" testimony was "literally true," and not provably a violation of law. Caplan described this conclusion as "significant for a solicitor general candidate" because "integrity is essential to the office," and Morrison's conclusions were "not an exoneration [but] quite a damning conclusion." Olson was criticized by others in that same episode. Lawyers in the Justice Department's public integrity section who investigated his testimony used strong language to characterize their conclusions: "The available evidence strongly suggests that Olson's testimony is false"; "We think it is probable that Olson's testimony, literally and in context, was false"; "Olson tailored a narrow response calculated to be literally true yet still evade the committee's purpose"; "there is significant evidence that Olson's testimony in this area was knowingly false." .................... ................... Describing herself as a strong supporter of Bush, Burford said she nevertheless had strong negative feelings about Olson. "He out-and-out lied to me," she said. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee joined in the criticism of Olson in that episode, concluding that "regrettably, the president was ill-advised by Assistant Attorney General Olson" on the law of executive privilege. The core of the Democrats' claim that Olson was misleading in his confirmation testimony centers on his involvement with the Spectator, which hired him as a lawyer in 1994 and put him on the board two years later. When asked about his involvement in the Arkansas Project on April 5, Olson replied: "It has been alleged that I was somehow involved in that so-called project. I was not involved in the project in its origin or its management." Later, in what Democrats consider to be a more problematic assertion, Olson wrote to the committee that his legal work for the Spectator "was not for the purpose of conducting or assisting in the conduct of investigations of the Clintons." Olson's partner, Cox, has said that Olson's legal work included the assessment of the Clintons' potential legal exposure. An article that Olson acknowledged he has co-authored on that subject ran in the American Spectator's February 1994 issue. Olson has repeatedly denied that he knew anything about Scaife's funding of the project until 1997, when a controversy arose inside the Spectator over whether the project's money was being spent appropriately. Arkansas Project accounting records show payments to Olson's law firm totaling $14,341.45 during 1994 alone, but Olson and Tyrrell, the Spectator's editor-in-chief, have both said there was no way Olson's law firm could have known what account the Spectator was drawing on to pay the firm. David Brock, a former investigative reporter for the Spectator, has described Olson participating directly in discussions of Arkansas Project stories. Tyrrell countered that Brock was not a part of the project and "the record on that is indisputable." Yesterday, Brock produced Arkansas Project expense records showing at least 19 payments to him for travel costs, books and periodicals and phone calls. One potential source of information that might clarify Olson's relationship with the Arkansas Project is the report written by Michael Shaheen in 1999, based on his investigation into whether lawyers working for Starr gave improper assistance to anti-Clinton witness David Hale, perhaps using money from the Arkansas Project. Shaheen, a former Justice Department official, concluded that there was no wrongdoing by Starr's staff. In the course of his inquiry, he interviewed many Arkansas Project participants, mostly before a special grand jury. More than one of them refused to testify, invoking the constitutional right not to incriminate oneself. Because the Shaheen report is based on grand jury testimony, it is covered by federal rules requiring that it be kept secret. Democrats on the Senate committee have expressed interest in seeing it in hopes it contains information about Olson. A Democratic aide was shown a heavily redacted portion of the report, sources said. According to knowledgeable sources, Cox, on Olson's behalf, has asked Robert W. Ray, Starr's successor as independent counsel, whether he could certify that the Shaheen report contains no information linking Olson to the Arkansas Project beyond Olson's own testimony that he learned about the project -- but not who funded it before 1997 -- from his service on the American Spectator foundation's board. Ray decided that it would not be proper to respond to Cox's request, the sources said..... http://www.americanpolitics.com/20010523TedOlson.html In 1988, when President Reagan left office, Theodore Olson became his personal attorney and represented him in matters relating to the Iran Contra scandal. Olson monitored Reagan's testimony throughout the investigations and hearings, a central and indispensable figure during the examination of the extra-Constitutional power grab effected by conservative Republicans. Shortly after President Clinton took office in 1993, a loose cabal of conservative Republicans plotted to drive him from office. The same Theodore Olson, and his wife Barbara, were at the core of the effort, which nearly succeeded in deposing a popular, duly elected president against the expressed will of the American people. In 2000, Theodore Olson represented George W. Bush as conservative Republicans seized the presidency by forcing Florida to cease the counting of lawful votes through the machinations of the conservative Republican majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. Olson, again, was central to the effort -- a successful coup d'état. http://slate.msn.com/id/1007659/ chatterbox Gossip, speculation, and scuttlebutt about politics. Whopper of the Week: Ted Olson Timothy Noah Posted Friday, May 11, 2001, at 12:15 PM PT "Only as a member of the board of directors of the American Spectator. It has been alleged that I was somehow involved in that so-called project; I was not involved in the project, in its origin or its management." --Solicitor-general nominee Theodore Olson, testifying before the Senate Judiciary committee, in response to the question, "Were you involved with the so-called Arkansas Project at any time?" The Arkansas Project was the American Spectator's $2 million scandal investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton funded by conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife. Olson's remarks were quoted on May 3 by Jake Tapper in Salon, and on May 10 by Thomas B. Edsall in the Washington Post. Tapper was following up on earlier Salon stories by Joe Conason and Alicia Montgomery. Continue Article "[David] Brock, who was one of the Spectator's leading investigative reporters in the Arkansas Project but who left the magazine after a series of disagreements, said Olson attended a number of dinner meetings at the home of R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., president and chairman of the Spectator, which were explicitly 'brainstorming' sessions about the Arkansas Project. "'There were several dinners at Bob Tyrrell's house, editorial planning sessions, on articles on the Clintons in Arkansas,' Brock said. 'Ted [Olson] was sometimes there, occasionally Barbara Olson [Ted Olson's wife] as well.' "Olson, according to Brock, was an active participant in discussions of possible stories, of methods to investigate scandal allegations and of ways to cultivate sources who would be familiar with the Clintons' political and financial dealings." Bill, Ted Olson is the successor to "fixer" John McCloy, and he works for the contemporay equivalents of Robert Lovett, F. Trubee Davison, and Averill Harriman. Just as in JFK's day, there are 20 or so principle people and their high net worth corporatist funders who poison the country, keep it on a perpetual war footing, and eat democratic administrations like, JFK's, LBJ's, Jimmy Carter's, and Bill Clinton's, for breakfast, and now they are sitting down to breakfast on Obama's presidency. All the democrats mentioned, dutifully enable their own failure, by hiring the right wing establishment'e men, or by listening to their "advice". John McCloy was advisor to nine presidents....he counseled Carter to admit McCloy's "good friend the Shah", into the US to receive "medical treatment." We all know how that good advice from McCloy worked out for Carter and for the country, don't we? What makes Ted Olson "stand out", is that he is, and does.....seem to be "everywhere"....from Iran Contra, to the founding of the Federalist Society, to architect of the Whitewater persecution of the executive branch, to the impeachment of Clinton, legal advisor to Paula Jones and to Monica Lewinsky, to Bush-Cheney counsel before the Supreme Court to stop the 2000 Florida recount, and even to....late in the day on 9/11....being the sole source....to CNN, of hijackers using "box cutters", and the recipient of "collect calls" to his DOJ office, from his rabid partisan and right wing media pundit wife, Barbara, reported as a passenger on Flight 77 that was reported flown into the Pentagon....recipient of a series of four calls that morning of which there is no evidence found to support that any of the calls happened.... ....and then, in fall 2006, this same "fixer"....a man who told the Supreme Court that "There are lots of different situations when the government has legitimate reasons to give out false information," pulls a sitting US Attorney iin the early stages of investigating a corrupt congressional kingpin in a case where Porter Goss is visibly vulnerable by official appointments he made, and by direct and long association with the target of the investigation.....Olson pulls this US Attorney out of her job and sits her right under him in the same law firm where his partner(s) are providing criminal defense legal services to the very same investigation subject.....you're a journalist, Bill....I'm only a researcher, but I am impressed by what I see happening here..... They have ways to destroy a presidency after the disaster that was the planned destruction on November 22, 1963, of the JFK presidency. We saw the implementation of the alternative methods, in full swing, during the Carter and Clinton presidencies, and it was no accident that the black bag job boys caught on purpose in the office of the Democratic party in the Watergate Hotel were all CIA linked, was it? It was time for Nixon to get the old "heave ho", too! Edited April 29, 2009 by Tom Scully Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack White Posted April 29, 2009 Share Posted April 29, 2009 Ted Olson's Report of Phone Calls from Barbara Olson on 9/11: Three Official Denials by David Ray Griffin Global Research, April 1, 2008 Late in the day on 9/11, CNN put out a story that began: “Barbara Olson, a conservative commentator and attorney, alerted her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, that the plane she was on was being hijacked Tuesday morning, Ted Olson told CNN.” According to this story, Olson reported that his wife had “called him twice on a cell phone from American Airlines Flight 77,” saying that “all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers. The only weapons she mentioned were knives and cardboard cutters.”2 Ted Olson’s report was very important. It provided the only evidence that American 77, which was said to have struck the Pentagon, had still been aloft after it had disappeared from FAA radar around 9:00 AM (there had been reports, after this disappearance, that an airliner had crashed on the Ohio-Kentucky border). Also, Barbara Olson had been a very well-known commentator on CNN. The report that she died in a plane that had been hijacked by Arab Muslims was an important factor in getting the nation’s support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” Ted Olson’s report was important in still another way, being the sole source of the widely accepted idea that the hijackers had box cutters.3 However, although Ted Olson’s report of phone calls from his wife has been a central pillar of the official account of 9/11, this report has been completely undermined. Olson’s Self-Contradictions Olson began this process of undermining by means of self-contradictions. He first told CNN, as we have seen, that his wife had “called him twice on a cell phone.” But he contradicted this claim on September 14, telling Hannity and Colmes that she had reached him by calling the Department of Justice collect. Therefore, she must have been using the “airplane phone,” he surmised, because “she somehow didn’t have access to her credit cards.”4 However, this version of Olson’s story, besides contradicting his first version, was even self-contradictory, because a credit card is needed to activate a passenger-seat phone. Later that same day, moreover, Olson told Larry King Live that the second call from his wife suddenly went dead because “the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don’t work that well.”5 After that return to his first version, he finally settled on the second version, saying that his wife had called collect and hence must have used “the phone in the passengers’ seats” because she did not have her purse.6 By finally settling on this story, Olson avoided a technological pitfall. Given the cell phone system employed in 2001, high-altitude cell phone calls from airliners were impossible, or at least virtually so (Olson’s statement that “the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don’t work that well” was a considerable understatement). The technology to enable cell phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created until 2004.7 However, Olson’s second story, besides being self-contradictory, was contradicted by American Airlines. American Airlines Contradicts Olson’s Second Version A 9/11 researcher, knowing that AA Flight 77 was a Boeing 757, noticed that AA’s website indicated that its 757s do not have passenger-seat phones. After he wrote to ask if that had been the case on September 11, 2001, an AA customer service representative replied: “That is correct; we do not have phones on our Boeing 757. The passengers on flight 77 used their own personal cellular phones to make out calls during the terrorist attack.”8 In response to this revelation, defenders of the official story might reply that Ted Olson was evidently right the first time: she had used her cell phone. However, besides the fact that this scenario is rendered unlikely by the cell phone technology employed in 2001, it has also been contradicted by the FBI. Olson’s Story Contradicted by the FBI The most serious official contradiction of Ted Olson’s story came in 2006 at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. The evidence presented to this trial by the FBI included a report on phone calls from all four 9/11 flights. In its report on American Flight 77, the FBI report attributed only one call to Barbara Olson and it was an “unconnected call,” which (of course) lasted “0 seconds.”9 According to the FBI, therefore, Ted Olson did not receive a single call from his wife using either a cell phone or an onboard phone. Back on 9/11, the FBI itself had interviewed Olson. A report of that interview indicates that Olson told the FBI agents that his wife had called him twice from Flight 77.10 And yet the FBI’s report on calls from Flight 77, presented in 2006, indicated that no such calls occurred. This was an amazing development: The FBI is part of the Department of Justice, and yet its report undermined the well-publicized claim of the DOJ’s former solicitor general that he had received two calls from his wife on 9/11. Olson’s Story Also Rejected by Pentagon Historians Ted Olson’s story has also been quietly rejected by the historians who wrote Pentagon 9/11, a treatment of the Pentagon attack put out by the Department of Defense.11 According to Olson, his wife had said that “all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers.”12 This is an inherently implausible scenario. We are supposed to believe that 60-some people, including the two pilots, were held at bay by three or four men (one or two of the hijackers would have been in the cockpit) with knives and boxcutters. This scenario becomes even more absurd when we realize that the alleged hijackers were all small, unathletic men (the 9/11 Commission pointed out that even “[t]he so-called muscle hijackers actually were not physically imposing, as the majority of them were between 5’5” and 5’7” in height and slender in build”13), and that the pilot, Charles “Chic” Burlingame, was a weightlifter and a boxer, who was described as “really tough” by one of his erstwhile opponents.14 Also, the idea that Burlingame would have turned over the plane to hijackers was rejected by his brother, who said: “I don't know what happened in that cockpit, but I'm sure that they would have had to incapacitate him or kill him because he would have done anything to prevent the kind of tragedy that befell that airplane.”15 The Pentagon historians, in any case, did not accept the Olson story, according to which Burlingame and his co-pilot did give up their plane and were in the back with the passengers and other crew members. They instead wrote that “the attackers either incapacitated or murdered the two pilots.”16 Conclusion This rejection of Ted Olson’s story by American Airlines, the Pentagon, and especially the FBI is a development of utmost importance. Without the alleged calls from Barbara Olson, there is no evidence that Flight 77 returned to Washington. Also, if Ted Olson’s claim was false, then there are only two possibilities: Either he lied or he was duped by someone using voice-morphing technology to pretend to be his wife.17 In either case, the official story about the calls from Barbara Olson was based on deception. And if that part of the official account of 9/11 was based on deception, should we not suspect that other parts were as well? The fact that Ted Olson’s report has been contradicted by other defenders of the official story about 9/11 provides grounds for demanding a new investigation of 9/11. This internal contradiction is, moreover, only one of 25 such contradictions discussed in my most recent book, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press. NOTES 1 This essay is based on Chapter 8 (“Did Ted Olson Receive Calls from Barbara Olson?”) of David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008). 2 Tim O’Brien, “Wife of Solicitor General Alerted Him of Hijacking from Plane,” CNN, September 11, 2001 (http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/pentagon.olson). 3 This was pointed out in The 9/11 Commission Report, 8. 4 Hannity & Colmes, Fox News, September 14, 2001 (http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001/foxnews091401.html). 5 “America’s New War: Recovering from Tragedy,” Larry King Live, CNN, September 14, 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/14/lkl.00.html). 6 In his “Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture,” delivered November 16, 2001 (http://www.fed-soc.org/resources/id.63/default.asp), Olson said that she “somehow managed . . . to use a telephone in the airplane to call.” He laid out this version of his story more fully in an interview reported in Toby Harnden, “She Asked Me How to Stop the Plane,” Daily Telegraph, March 5, 2002 (http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2002/telegraph030502.html). 7 I discussed the technical difficulties of making cell phone calls from airliners in 2001 in Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2007), 87-88, 292-97. 8 See the submission of 17 February 2006 by “the Paradroid” on the Politik Forum (http://forum.politik.de/forum/archive/index.php/t-133356-p-24.html). It is quoted in David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008), 75. 9 United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, Exhibit Number P200054 (http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/exhibits/prosecution/flights/P200054.html). These documents can be more easily viewed in “Detailed Account of Phone Calls from September 11th Flights” (http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/calldetail.html). 10 FBI, “Interview with Theodore Olsen [sic],” “9/11 Commission, FBI Source Documents, Chronological, September 11,” 2001Intelfiles.com, March 14, 2008, (http://intelfiles.egoplex.com:80/2008/03/911-commission-fbi-source-documents.html). 11 Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon 9/11 (Washington DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2007). 12 O’Brien, “Wife of Solicitor General Alerted Him of Hijacking from Plane.” 13 9/11 Commission Staff Statement 16 (http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/staff_statement_16.pdf). 14 Shoestring, “The Flight 77 Murder Mystery: Who Really Killed Charles Burlingame?” Shoestring911, February 2, 2008 (http://shoestring911.blogspot.com/2008/02/flight-77-murder-mystery-who-really.html). 15 “In Memoriam: Charles ‘Chic’ Burlingame, 1949-2001,” USS Saratoga Museum foundation (available at http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/planes/a...emembered.html). 16 Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon 9/11 (Washington DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2007), 12. 17 Of these two possibilities, the idea that Ted Olson was duped should be seriously entertained only if there are records proving that the Department of Justice received two collect calls, ostensibly from Barbara Olson, that morning. Evidently no such records have been produced. This article is based on Chapter 8 of Dr. Griffin's new book, "9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press," (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008). This book reframes the central events of 9/11 as a series of 25 internal contradictions. The only way that its readers will be able to continue to accept the official story is to accept mutually contradictory accounts. "9/11 Contradictions" may have the best chance of any of DRG's books (or indeed any book) of opening up a new investigation into 9/11. David Ray Griffin is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by David Ray Griffin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Howard Posted April 29, 2009 Share Posted April 29, 2009 Ted Olson's Report of Phone Calls from Barbara Olson on 9/11: Three Official Denialsby David Ray Griffin Global Research, April 1, 2008 Late in the day on 9/11, CNN put out a story that began: “Barbara Olson, a conservative commentator and attorney, alerted her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, that the plane she was on was being hijacked Tuesday morning, Ted Olson told CNN.” According to this story, Olson reported that his wife had “called him twice on a cell phone from American Airlines Flight 77,” saying that “all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers. The only weapons she mentioned were knives and cardboard cutters.”2 Ted Olson’s report was very important. It provided the only evidence that American 77, which was said to have struck the Pentagon, had still been aloft after it had disappeared from FAA radar around 9:00 AM (there had been reports, after this disappearance, that an airliner had crashed on the Ohio-Kentucky border). Also, Barbara Olson had been a very well-known commentator on CNN. The report that she died in a plane that had been hijacked by Arab Muslims was an important factor in getting the nation’s support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” Ted Olson’s report was important in still another way, being the sole source of the widely accepted idea that the hijackers had box cutters.3 However, although Ted Olson’s report of phone calls from his wife has been a central pillar of the official account of 9/11, this report has been completely undermined. Olson’s Self-Contradictions Olson began this process of undermining by means of self-contradictions. He first told CNN, as we have seen, that his wife had “called him twice on a cell phone.” But he contradicted this claim on September 14, telling Hannity and Colmes that she had reached him by calling the Department of Justice collect. Therefore, she must have been using the “airplane phone,” he surmised, because “she somehow didn’t have access to her credit cards.”4 However, this version of Olson’s story, besides contradicting his first version, was even self-contradictory, because a credit card is needed to activate a passenger-seat phone. Later that same day, moreover, Olson told Larry King Live that the second call from his wife suddenly went dead because “the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don’t work that well.”5 After that return to his first version, he finally settled on the second version, saying that his wife had called collect and hence must have used “the phone in the passengers’ seats” because she did not have her purse.6 By finally settling on this story, Olson avoided a technological pitfall. Given the cell phone system employed in 2001, high-altitude cell phone calls from airliners were impossible, or at least virtually so (Olson’s statement that “the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don’t work that well” was a considerable understatement). The technology to enable cell phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created until 2004.7 However, Olson’s second story, besides being self-contradictory, was contradicted by American Airlines. American Airlines Contradicts Olson’s Second Version A 9/11 researcher, knowing that AA Flight 77 was a Boeing 757, noticed that AA’s website indicated that its 757s do not have passenger-seat phones. After he wrote to ask if that had been the case on September 11, 2001, an AA customer service representative replied: “That is correct; we do not have phones on our Boeing 757. The passengers on flight 77 used their own personal cellular phones to make out calls during the terrorist attack.”8 In response to this revelation, defenders of the official story might reply that Ted Olson was evidently right the first time: she had used her cell phone. However, besides the fact that this scenario is rendered unlikely by the cell phone technology employed in 2001, it has also been contradicted by the FBI. Olson’s Story Contradicted by the FBI The most serious official contradiction of Ted Olson’s story came in 2006 at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. The evidence presented to this trial by the FBI included a report on phone calls from all four 9/11 flights. In its report on American Flight 77, the FBI report attributed only one call to Barbara Olson and it was an “unconnected call,” which (of course) lasted “0 seconds.”9 According to the FBI, therefore, Ted Olson did not receive a single call from his wife using either a cell phone or an onboard phone. Back on 9/11, the FBI itself had interviewed Olson. A report of that interview indicates that Olson told the FBI agents that his wife had called him twice from Flight 77.10 And yet the FBI’s report on calls from Flight 77, presented in 2006, indicated that no such calls occurred. This was an amazing development: The FBI is part of the Department of Justice, and yet its report undermined the well-publicized claim of the DOJ’s former solicitor general that he had received two calls from his wife on 9/11. Olson’s Story Also Rejected by Pentagon Historians Ted Olson’s story has also been quietly rejected by the historians who wrote Pentagon 9/11, a treatment of the Pentagon attack put out by the Department of Defense.11 According to Olson, his wife had said that “all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers.”12 This is an inherently implausible scenario. We are supposed to believe that 60-some people, including the two pilots, were held at bay by three or four men (one or two of the hijackers would have been in the cockpit) with knives and boxcutters. This scenario becomes even more absurd when we realize that the alleged hijackers were all small, unathletic men (the 9/11 Commission pointed out that even “[t]he so-called muscle hijackers actually were not physically imposing, as the majority of them were between 5’5” and 5’7” in height and slender in build”13), and that the pilot, Charles “Chic” Burlingame, was a weightlifter and a boxer, who was described as “really tough” by one of his erstwhile opponents.14 Also, the idea that Burlingame would have turned over the plane to hijackers was rejected by his brother, who said: “I don't know what happened in that cockpit, but I'm sure that they would have had to incapacitate him or kill him because he would have done anything to prevent the kind of tragedy that befell that airplane.”15 The Pentagon historians, in any case, did not accept the Olson story, according to which Burlingame and his co-pilot did give up their plane and were in the back with the passengers and other crew members. They instead wrote that “the attackers either incapacitated or murdered the two pilots.”16 Conclusion This rejection of Ted Olson’s story by American Airlines, the Pentagon, and especially the FBI is a development of utmost importance. Without the alleged calls from Barbara Olson, there is no evidence that Flight 77 returned to Washington. Also, if Ted Olson’s claim was false, then there are only two possibilities: Either he lied or he was duped by someone using voice-morphing technology to pretend to be his wife.17 In either case, the official story about the calls from Barbara Olson was based on deception. And if that part of the official account of 9/11 was based on deception, should we not suspect that other parts were as well? The fact that Ted Olson’s report has been contradicted by other defenders of the official story about 9/11 provides grounds for demanding a new investigation of 9/11. This internal contradiction is, moreover, only one of 25 such contradictions discussed in my most recent book, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press. NOTES 1 This essay is based on Chapter 8 (“Did Ted Olson Receive Calls from Barbara Olson?”) of David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008). 2 Tim O’Brien, “Wife of Solicitor General Alerted Him of Hijacking from Plane,” CNN, September 11, 2001 (http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/pentagon.olson). 3 This was pointed out in The 9/11 Commission Report, 8. 4 Hannity & Colmes, Fox News, September 14, 2001 (http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001/foxnews091401.html). 5 “America’s New War: Recovering from Tragedy,” Larry King Live, CNN, September 14, 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/14/lkl.00.html). 6 In his “Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture,” delivered November 16, 2001 (http://www.fed-soc.org/resources/id.63/default.asp), Olson said that she “somehow managed . . . to use a telephone in the airplane to call.” He laid out this version of his story more fully in an interview reported in Toby Harnden, “She Asked Me How to Stop the Plane,” Daily Telegraph, March 5, 2002 (http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2002/telegraph030502.html). 7 I discussed the technical difficulties of making cell phone calls from airliners in 2001 in Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2007), 87-88, 292-97. 8 See the submission of 17 February 2006 by “the Paradroid” on the Politik Forum (http://forum.politik.de/forum/archive/index.php/t-133356-p-24.html). It is quoted in David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008), 75. 9 United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, Exhibit Number P200054 (http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/exhibits/prosecution/flights/P200054.html). These documents can be more easily viewed in “Detailed Account of Phone Calls from September 11th Flights” (http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/calldetail.html). 10 FBI, “Interview with Theodore Olsen [sic],” “9/11 Commission, FBI Source Documents, Chronological, September 11,” 2001Intelfiles.com, March 14, 2008, (http://intelfiles.egoplex.com:80/2008/03/911-commission-fbi-source-documents.html). 11 Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon 9/11 (Washington DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2007). 12 O’Brien, “Wife of Solicitor General Alerted Him of Hijacking from Plane.” 13 9/11 Commission Staff Statement 16 (http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/staff_statement_16.pdf). 14 Shoestring, “The Flight 77 Murder Mystery: Who Really Killed Charles Burlingame?” Shoestring911, February 2, 2008 (http://shoestring911.blogspot.com/2008/02/flight-77-murder-mystery-who-really.html). 15 “In Memoriam: Charles ‘Chic’ Burlingame, 1949-2001,” USS Saratoga Museum foundation (available at http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/planes/a...emembered.html). 16 Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon 9/11 (Washington DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2007), 12. 17 Of these two possibilities, the idea that Ted Olson was duped should be seriously entertained only if there are records proving that the Department of Justice received two collect calls, ostensibly from Barbara Olson, that morning. Evidently no such records have been produced. This article is based on Chapter 8 of Dr. Griffin's new book, "9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press," (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008). This book reframes the central events of 9/11 as a series of 25 internal contradictions. The only way that its readers will be able to continue to accept the official story is to accept mutually contradictory accounts. "9/11 Contradictions" may have the best chance of any of DRG's books (or indeed any book) of opening up a new investigation into 9/11. David Ray Griffin is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by David Ray Griffin Jack, that is some post, well done..... I think the bottom line regarding all of the momentous events going back even 100 years before 9-11, such as the Spanish American War 1895, is inherently explained in the very phrase, "pablum for the masses." It is all a question of mathematics, and a press that acts as a reflection of governmental policy. Which perhaps more than any other reason outside of corruption, is why the US has declined as a world power over the last fifty years. Why do I mention mathematics? Because, people want to believe in the goodness of their respective nations, in 1963 everyone wanted to believe that a lone nut Communist with a desire to kill somebody great would make all the ugliness go away, it didn't. Another way of expressing it in opposite terms is why did the various fiends of history, "round up the intellectuals?" My personal belief is that in many cases the intellectuals usually knew more about the reality of their times than the resident genuises, that many John and Jane Q. Citizen's think they are. As long as you can have the various King's roundtable's of history scoff at "allegations" then what need have we of witnesses. But that was a long time ago too. Which is another concept of JFK that still resonates, he was, in my estimation a visionary, in the sense that he sought to defeat the totalitarianism of Communism inherent in the sentence, "we seek a free flow of information," knowing that the power of freedom resided in the concept of authentic democracy, forty odd years later, I realize that both he and Bobby tremendously underestimated the power on the right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nathaniel Heidenheimer Posted April 29, 2009 Share Posted April 29, 2009 , forty odd years later, I realize that both he and Bobby tremendously underestimated the power on the right. Yep. "We Kennedy's eat Rockefeller's for breakfast" -- RFK to Peruvian University students on a trip to Peru in 1965. Nelson was no liberal, as we are always told he was everytime his name is mentioned on TV. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Tom Scully Posted April 30, 2009 Share Posted April 30, 2009 (edited) Jack and Robert, Since the principle tie in this thread to Ted Olson is his part in quickly retarding the progress of the investigation of Rep. Jerry Lewis that was first announced in May, 2006, and is still ongoing, by Olson, a partner in the lawfirm Jerry Lewis retained to defend him in that investigation, hiring away the LA US Attorney in charge of that investigation, It is probably best to keep the "Olson 9/11 telephone calls...reality or a part of a "Northwoods" style Op", tangential element of the core discussion here, of Porter Goss and the "back story" behind his appointment of now convicted Kyle "Dusty" Foggp, and Foggo's association with his best friend, Brent Wilkes, convicted briber of convicted Rep. Randy Cunningham, and the ongoing investigation of Cunningham and Goss close associate in congress, Rep. Jerry Lewis, over here: Olsen 9-11 call officially debunked (merged) http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=14288 ....and... on your way "over" to that thread, I am pleased to suggest that you peruse the only recently made available, "purported" "airfone records" of Olson's Flight 77 on 9/11, beginning on .pdf page 13, here: http://www.911myths.com/images/c/c3/Team7_AirfoneRecords.pdf Please post answers to this question on the other thread....why would calls originating on different flights, all show the originating tel# as 904-555-0004 ? Rowland Morgan has studied the government's representations of these alleged calls, as thoroughly as anyone, his reaction: http://hcgroups.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/s...ed/#comment-387 Edited April 30, 2009 by Tom Scully Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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