9/11 On Trial

NOTE: SO FAR THIS IS THE LARGEST ARTICLE EVER PRINTED BY THE UK MAINSTREAM MEDIA RAISING MANY OF THE SERIOUS QUESTIONS ABOUT THE 9/11 COVER UP


Towers that fell ‘like a controlled demolition’. Planes that vanished then mysteriously reappeared, And crucial evidence that has
been lost for ever. A new book raises bizarre yet deeply unsettling questions about the world’s worst terror atrocity…..

By Tony Rennell – Daily Mail, Saturday 6th August, 2005

The plot by America’s military bosses was devilish in both design and intent – to fabricate an outrage against innocent civilians, fool the world and provide a pretext for war. In the pentagon, a top secret team drew up a plan to simultaneously send up two airliners painted and numbered exactly the same, one from a civil airport in America, the other from a secret military airbase nearby.

The one from the airport would have military personnel on board who had checked in as ordinary passengers under false names. The one from the airbase would be an empty drone, a remote-controlled unmanned aircraft.

Somewhere along their joint flight paths, the passenger-carrying plane would drop below radar height, and disappear, landing back at the airbase and unloading its occupants in secret.

Meanwhile, the drone would have taken up the other plane’s designated course. High over the island of Cuba, it would be exploded in mid-air after broadcasting an international distress call that it was under attack from enemy fighters.

The world would be told that a plane load of blameless American holidaymakers had been deliberately shot down by Fidel Castro’s Communists – and that the US had no choice but to declare war and topple his regime.

This ‘agent provocateur’ plan – code named OPERATION NORTHWOODS and revealed in official archives – dates from 1962 when the Cold War was at its height.

Four decades later, there are a growing number of people who look back at this proto-conspiracy and then to the events of 9/11 and see uncanny and frightening modern parallels.

For Cuba, read Iraq, say these skeptics. For the dummy airliner, read the Twin Towers in New York.

The Northwoods plan is crucial to the argument presented in a hugely provocative – many would say fantastical – yet, at times, genuinely disturbing new analysis of 9/11 by two radical British based journalists, Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan.

Did the CIA actively help the hijackers?

In it, they examine various conspiracy theories that suggest the Bush administration connived in the devastating aerial attacks on New York and Washington four years ago.

The reason? To give Bush the excuse he wanted to push ahead with his secret, long-held plane to invade Iraq and capture its oilfields.

As we shall see. Many of the theories they raise are outlandish in the extreme. It would be easy to dismiss them as hokum, the invention of over-active imaginations among those whose instinct is always to find some way to blame America for the world’s ills.

Are we really supposed to believe that the CIA actively helped the hijackers succeed – or even that the US government staged the whole attack and itself murdered thousands of its own citizens?

Some would say that even in discussing suck notions, we are lending comfort to terrorists and doing a disservice to the dead.

However, much of evidence the authors present is undeniably compelling – and their arguments sound rather less preposterous in the light of OPERATION NORTHWOODS all those years ago. That plan was proposed in all seriousness by America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff in a memo to the Secretary of Defence. It got as far as the Attorney General – Robert Kennedy, brother of the president, John Kennedy, before being vetoed.

It is proof, says Henshall and Morgan, that forces at the top of the US Government are capable of conceiving a deadly, devious and fraudulent plan to further their own secret ends – even under such a supposedly ‘nice guy’ president as JFK.

In which case, can the idea of a 9/11 plot by those who serve the deeply mistrusted Bush really be ruled out with total certainty, without at least considering the arguments?

Of course, the official explanation for 9/11 is that Al Qaeda just got lucky that sunny morning in September 2001.

The terrorists conducted their attacks without outside help, by this account, and intelligence and other blunders by the US authorities that contributed to their terrible success – for example, ignored warnings that an attack involving aeroplanes was likely, or issuing US entry visas to 19 Islamic fanatics set on murder – were just that: blunders.

This is the White House’s version and it was endorsed by a Washington commission of inquiry under Thomas Kean published last year.

But, according to Henshall and Morgan, the story is full of gaping holes and unanswered questions. And the most startling question, which remains unresolved, they say, is why the hijackers’ principal target, the two 110-storey towers at the World Trade Centre in New York crumbled so easily.

No-one who watched each building suddenly cascade into dust and debris in just 20 seconds will ever forget the slow-motion horror. But now the question is asked: was it all too pat, too neat?

Though 30 years old, the towers had expressly been built to survive the impact of a Boeing 707, a plane the same size and carrying as much fuel as the ones that struck. That they collapsed after being hit and fell at such speed was unprecedented in the history of architecture. It astonished many engineers.

The official explanation is known as the Pancake Effect – steel supports melting in the intense fireball, causing the floors to tumble down on each other.

The problem here is that the heat from the explosions was probably not nearly as great as people tend to assume.

There was indeed a lot of kerosene from the aircraft fuel tanks when flight 11 from Boston hit the North Tower between the 94th and the 98th floors but pictures show that most of this fireballed outwards. Experts have questioned whether the fire ever got hot enough to melt the buildings’ steel frames.

Oddly, too, original estimates by firefighters after the second plane, Flight 175, hit the South Tower, were that the blaze was containable.

Two firefighters actually reached the crash zone on the 78th floor and a tape exists of them radioing down that just two hoses would be enough to get the fire under control – in which ca\se the situation should have been little different from a ‘normal’ office fire, and no steel tower ever collapsed as the result of such a blaze.

‘The fire wasn’t hot enough to cause a collapse’
Kevin R Ryan, laboratory director at a US underwriting firm specializing in product safety, was sacked from his job last year after questioning the official explanation.

“The buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by the burning jet fuel”, he said. “If steel did soften or melt, this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers. That fact should be of great concern to all Americans.”

Intriguingly, Ryan claimed that his firm had checked and approved the steel used in the towers when they were built. This was later vehemently denied by the bosses who sacked him.

To add to the mystery, the tape of the two firemen was kept secret and when relatives were finally allowed to listen to it, they had to sign strict confidentiality agreements.

If the Pancake Effect theory is wrong, there’s one obvious alternative: that the towers were brought down by the sheer impact of the planes hitting them. But this, according to the skeptics, ignores basic physics.

The initial hit on the North Tower, for example, destroyed 33 of the 59 columns in its north face. This meant the damage was asymmetrical, so any resulting collapse would surely have been lopsided.

In fact, the building fell evenly. The TV aerial on the summit sank vertically, in a straight line.

There were other strange anomalies. According to the Kean Commission, when the first plane struck: ‘A jet fuel fireball erupted and shot down a bank of elevators, bursting into numerous lower floors, including the lobby level, and the basement four storeys below ground.’

Unlikely, say Henshall and Morgan. A firm by a French documentary crew, who by chance were following a New York firefighting team that day, shows the first men arriving. The lobby was covered in fine debris and the windows were shattered but there was none of the soot or oily residue that burning jet fuel would have left behind.

Meanwhile down in the basement, a 50-ton hydraulic press was reduced to rubble and a steel and concrete fire door demolished. Witnesses there said the destruction was less like that from a fireball flash and more like that from a bomb.

Some firefighters told reporters that day that they thought there had been bombs in the building – before apparently being silenced by their chiefs. So had Al Qaeda cleverly placed explosives inside the rowers as well as attacking them from the air?

Or, as conspiracy theorists would have it, had some homegrown agency mined the towers to make sure they fell – but neatly without collapsing over the rest of Manhattan, America’s financial and business heartland?

The authors quote an expert demolition contractor from Pennsylvania, Michael Taylor, who said the fall of the buildings ‘looked like a controlled demolition’.

Another expert, Van Romero, vice-president for research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, reached the same opinion after studying videos of the disaster, and concluded that ‘explosive devices inside the buildings’ caused them to collapse.

Strangely and without explanation, he recanted that view just ten days after going public with it. Might he possibly have been leaned on?

Even stranger, say Henshall and Morgan, was the collapse of a third building on the World Trade Centre site, a smaller 47-storey block known as WTC7, which was largely ignored by the world’s media.

It had not been hit by a plane yet it, too, mysteriously fell many hours after the Towers had gone.

The official explanation for this was that fuel stores caught fire as a result of debris from the burning towers, the building began to bulge in one corner, and after that it was unsalvageable.

But remember that, according to Henshall and Morgan, a steel-framed building had never collapsed as a result of a fire before this day. And, again according to the authors, WTC7 appears almost untouched by fire in photographs taken at the time.

The landlord of the World Trade Centre site, Larry Silverstein, explicitly suggested at one point that WTC7 was deliberately demolished. He told a US TV documentary that a decision was taken to ‘pull’ the building rather than risk loss of life, though this was later denied.

Certainly, according to Henshall and Morgan, the building’s fall in seven seconds was just as textbook-tidy and suspicious as the collapse of the Twin Towers. Given that it also housed offices of the US Secret Service, the CIA and the Defence Department, this has led conspiracy theorists to give it a key role in the supposed 9/11 plot – as we will see shortly.

Part of the whole problem, according to Henshall and Morgan, is that vital evidence about what happened was destroyed or muddied in the wake of the atrocity.

One expert said there were bombs inside the towers
Ground Zero, the base of the towers, was fiercely protected by the authorities – understandably so because it not only contained human remains but a cache of seized drugs held in an FBI office and more than $1 billion of gold from bank vaults in the Buildings.

Yet what went on behind all the heavy security?

After most air disasters, the wreckage of the planes is meticulously gathered up and pieced together in search of clues.

Extraordinarily, in the course of removing the rubble from the Twin Towers to a nearby landfill site, the 9/11 salvage operation seems to have ‘lost’ four six-ton aircraft engines, besides failing to find the ‘black box’ flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders from either of the planes.

These data boxes – which could have revealed exactly what happened in the doomed jets – are deliberately designed to withstand heavy impacts and exceptionally high temperatures. It is, according to experts, very rare for them not to be recovered after an accident.

Unfortunately, according Henshall and Morgan, there was a singular lack of official zeal even to establish the very basic fact that the aircraft that hit the Twin Towers were the same as those that took off from Boston.

Perhaps, with almost the entire world watching the attacks on TV, it hardly seemed necessary to prove the glaringly obvious. But this failure to follow standard procedures for accident investigation once again gave encouragement to the conspiracy theorists.

And then there was the oddity of the single passport. The black boxes may have been destroyed and steel girders melted – yet somehow one of the hijackers’ passports avoided this inferno and was found intact in a nearby street by ‘a passer-by’.

To Henshall and Morgan, that seems absurd, as does the almost instant identification of this person as a hijacker rather than a passenger or a Twin Towers office worker. Conspiracy theorists suspect the passport was planted to help establish the official story in the first, critical hours after the disaster.

Why didn't fighter planes intercept the hijackers?

Still more unanswered questions surround what happened at the Pentagon in Washington, in the third successful terrorist attack that day.

After taking off from Dulles Airport, Washington, American Airlines Flight 77 dropped off the radar screens for 36 minutes when its transponders sending signals back to air traffic control were switched off.

When the blip reappeared, it was closing on the city but where precisely the aircraft had been for the past half an hour was a mystery. Nor could anyone in air traffic control figure out what it was.

Experienced officials apparently watched its speed and maneuverability and thought it must be a military plane. Conspiracy theorists maintain this is precisely what it was.

In a repeat of New York, no evidence has ever been produced from the wreckage to prove that it was Flight 77 that hurtled into the side of the Pentagon at 350mph.

Photographs show that the hole it made was large enough for the fuselage of a Boeing 757 but not for the wings and the tail, though these supposedly disappeared through the gap and then vapourised.

For the conspiracy theorists, this points to a conclusion that what hit was not Flight 77, and not even a jetliner.

Some witnesses claim the plane they say hit the Pentagon was a small one, an eight – or 12-seater, and that it did not have the roar of an airliner but the shrill whine of a fighter plane, One witness is convinced it was a missile.

The authors say the matter could be cleared up by CCTV footage of the crash from a nearby filling station, a hotel and traffic surveillance cameras. Unfortunately, the FBI seized all three videos within minutes of the crash and they have never been released.

The hole in the Pentagon was too small for a Boeing
If they were produced, they might lay to rest the theory that what hit the Pentagon was a military drone painted in airline livery and that just before impact it fired a missile to enable a clean entry which would explain the lack of debris. But until they are, the skeptics will continue to have a field day.

In essence, to the extreme conspiracy theorists, what took place on 9/11 was a repeat of the aborted OPERATION NORTHWOODS.

Far from being an attack by Islamic terrorists, they say, the events were a complete hoax, a conjuring trick by the US government in just the same way that Kennedy’s generals wanted to fool the world over Cuba.

Planes were swapped, ‘drones’ slammed into the World Trade Centre (which was mined with explosives as well) and the Pentagon, and the identities of alleged hijackers from the Middle East were stolen or invented to put the blame on Al Qaeda.

Along with the ‘passengers’ who apparently boarded the planes, the ‘suicide hijackers’ are now either dead or living under different identities, just as the pentagon planned fro the military personnel it was going to use back in 1962.

The theory seizes on the fact that, like the plane that apparently hit the Pentagon, both Flight 11 and Flight 175 switched off their transponders on their way to the Twin Towers and disappeared from Radar screens. According to the skeptics, this gave them time and opportunity to land at the handily located Griffiss Air Force Base, a Pentagon command center which also houses research laboratories into advanced computers and radar. There, they were supposedly replaced by remote-controlled substitutes.

In technical terms, this is not as far fetched as it sounds. The US military experimented with unmanned aircraft as far back as World War II and there have been successful jet models since. Well-connected conspirators, so the theory goes, would have little difficulty getting their hands on a system to fit in an airliner.

The switch would supposedly be foolproof because, as we have seen, the aircraft in the ruins would not be properly identified.

Then there was the smaller building known as WTC7. It was the obvious point from which to run the New York end of the scam, guiding the planes into their target. Afterwards, of course, the evidence had to be destroyed, hence its demolition.

Taken as a rush, and without looking at the detail this might seem vaguely plausible. But could we really have been so totally and utterly conned?

Common sense says no. An operation of such intricacy and complexity would require the co-operation – and the silence until death – of thousands of people. Everything we have read about the victims on the planes, and their heartbroken relatives, would be a carefully constructed sham.

It might just be possible in a totalitarian society but surely not in a flawed yet robust democracy like America. And with four missions (the hijackers of the fourth plane, Flight 93, were overthrown by its passengers), not just one as in OPERATION NORTHWOODS? No.

To be fair to Henshall and Morgan, they make it clear that they themselves are not advocating such an extreme theory of empty planes and hoax attacks.

They admit the Pentagon’s radar reconstructions suggest the planes were not switched, and that alleged Al Qaeda ringleaders are said by their interrogators to have confirmed the official account.

Instead of retreating into fantasy, they simply insist that something is being held back – that we have not been told the full story. And it’s hard to discount all their arguments.

Why, they ask, were air traffic controllers so slow to report suspected hijackings to the military that day in breach of standard procedures, with the result that fighter planes arrived too late to intercept?

Flight controllers in four separate incidents were unaccountably slow to realize that something was wrong and alert the military authorities. Even after one plane was definitely known to have been hijacked, they failed to respond promptly when others went missing.

The air force scrambled from the wrong base
For some reason, too, when fighter planes eventually were scrambled to New York, they were from an airbase 150 miles away, rather than the much closer one in New Jersey. The Twin Towers were ablaze before they got there.

All the while the local TV channels were smoothly getting eye-in-the-sky helicopters into the air over the World Trade Centre. In the words of the authors: “Their routine mobilizations stand in stark contrast to the apparent impotence and indecisiveness of the $350-billion-a-year US military.

Yet for all the shortcomings of the Federal Aviation Authority and the US Air Force that day, no-one was ever fired or reprimanded.

One explanation for this paralysis is that there was, as fate would have it, an air defence exercise going on in US airspace that same day, codenamed Vigilant Guardian. The air traffic controllers were confused by this, thinking the planes disappearing from their screens might be part of the exercise.

Coincidence? No say the 9/11 sceptics. This was exactly the sort of smokescreen operation that anyone wanting to make life easier for the hijackers would launch to paralyse any authorities that might get in the way.

When the first evidence came that hijackings were taking place, traffic control officials wasted valuable time wondering whether or not this was part of the Vigilant Guardian exercise.

Suck a smokescreen fits well with two types of government-inspired plot postulated by 9/11 sceptics – popularly known as ‘LIHOP’ and ‘MIHOP’.

‘LIHOP’ – ‘Let It Happen On Purpose’ – holds that since the turn of the new century, radical right-wingers in Washington (the so-called new-cons) had been keen to get a US military presence in the Middle East oilfields and were also desperate to do something about Al Qaeda, which had been targeting US interests overseas.

When evidence came in of an impending terrorist attack, they decided to ignore it. They intended that it should succeed. It would act at the very least as a ‘wake-up’ call to their apathetic fellow countrymen and at best as an excuse for war.

In the much the same way, some historians believe, President Roosevelt knew in advance from broken codes about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 – but let it happen, at the cost of 2,400 lives, because he wanted an excuse to join World War II.

‘MIHOP” takes a step on from this – ‘Make it Happen On Purpose’. This theory has the same motivation but the active involvement of US agents. Planted in Al Qaeda, they helped organize the plot, or at the very least cleared a path for the hijackers.

These agents may even have tried to keep down casualty figures, which some think were suspiciously small in the circumstances.

The plane that hit the Pentagon was seen to swerve at the last minute and hit an area of the building that was largely unoccupied – and which had just been fitted with reinforced external walls and blast-resistant windows. A crash into the other side would have killed and maimed many thousands instead of just 125.

In New York, too, more than 50,000 inhabitants of the Towers were targeted but just 2,600 killed – not least because of the orderly way in which the buildings collapsed, after most of the occupants had been evacuated. Was this an example of a ‘managed’ atrocity?

For most observers, the idea of US involvement in the attacks still strains credulity beyond breaking point. Yet that catalogue of unanswered questions remains troubling.

Some are very basic. How, for example, did the hijackers manage to slip past airport security with weapons?

The White House explanation is plastic knives, but there has never been any independent confirmation of how the men were armed. Some passengers who made phone calls from the doomed planes said they witnessed stabbings but others spoke of bombs and even guns being used.

To some, the official recourse to ‘plastic knives’ smacks of a cover-up to conceal security lapses – or worse, a deliberate turning of blind eyes.

So how did the passengers make those phone calls?

Another problem here is those very phone calls from the planes. Experts in Henshall and Morgan’s book say it is all but impossible to make a mobile phone call above 8,000 feet – let alone four times that altitude, as the jet passengers are alleged to have done.

So how were these calls on which so much of the 9/11 narrative has been built ever made? Could they possibly have been invented?

The authors write: ‘Few issues cause as much controversy amongst 9/11 sceptics as these, not least because they were cited – by Tony Blair among others – as eyewitness reports and proof positive the official narrative was true.’

Doubts are even raised over the gung-ho story of Flight 93, the fourth plane in the attacks, which passengers apparently seized back from the hijackers, causing it to crash into a field but miss Washington.

The legend of the heroic cockpit-storming, launched to cries of ‘Let’s Roll’, was a product of tapes that have never been authenticated or released to anyone other than the victims’ relatives, who were sworn to secrecy.

Henshall and Morgan say the matter could be cleared up if recordings or billing evidence from phone companies were produced but they never have been.

This call for transparency is the thrust of their whole argument. It is time, they say, for a full and truly independent inquiry into 9/11 that will reveal all the facts and silence the rumours.

One thing it could consider would be the anthrax attack on America three weeks after 9/11. Five recipients of contaminated letters died, postal facilities were closed, as were office buildings on Capitol Hill where hundreds of lawmakers and staff were tested and given an antibiotic.

At the time, this was seized on by the Washington power-brokers pressing for action against Iraq. ‘Who but Saddam Hussein could have supplied Arab terrorists with anthrax,’ they asked.

By contrast, skeptics about 9/11 see this as this finishing touch to the grand plot – an attempt to distract attention from any doubts about the atrocities and the lessons to be learned from them.

They may have a case. The letters mysteriously stopped and the anthrax spores were identified by scientists as a particular strain stemming only from the government’s own labs in Maryland.

But by then the scare had shut down congress at a crucial time, when questions about 9/11 were beginning to surface, and helped deepen the mood of fear and paranoia among ordinary Americans.

It was those fears, say the skeptics, that Bush exploited to get his way on Iraq. Had he plotted it that way all along? Henshall and Morgan raise enough awkward points to make it a thought that cannot simply be laughed out of court.

After all, Bush and Blair, took us to war assuring us that ‘the Iraq regime continues to possess some of the most lethal weapons ever devised’. Yet those weapons of mass destruction have not been found and many doubt they existed.

With public trust one of the major casualties of the war, can any of us be absolutely sure we have not been caught up in a lie and perhaps a bigger one even than we ever though possible?

In their inquiries Henshall and Morgan may have discovered no smoking guns – but they have certainly left a whiff of something sinister in the air.


9/11 Revealed: Challenging The Facts Behind The War On Terror, by Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan is published by Robinson on August 25 at £8.99.
To order a copy (P&P free), Telephone 0870 161 0870

Operation Gladio: Template for the War on Terror

by
Burden of Dreams
B05233 / Sat, 2 Apr 2005 22:51:24 / Miscellaneous

There’s a reason anarchists are sometimes associated with violence, and it has little or nothing to do with the black bloc.

Throwing a trash can through a Starbucks window may be illegal, but it is not violent. Property damage may be viewed by the public with more horror and outrage than acts of violence (at least those of the state) but we should not conflate the destruction of inanimate objects with the destruction of living flesh. Even if we disagree on tactics.

That’s what the press is for.

No, the “bomb-thrower” caricature has its roots elsewhere, specifically in the decades before WWI.

Following the death of Bakunin and sparked by the writings of Erico Malatesta, the anarchist movement took to a strategy called “propaganda of the deed”. The idea, as demonstrated by Malatesta, was direct action: “the Italian federation believes that the insurrectional act, destined to affirm socialist principles by deed, is the most efficacious means of propaganda”.


Malatesta

“The following year [1877] Malatesta and other anarchists put their theory into practice. As part of an armed militia they entered two villages in Campania, Italy. Declaring an end to the reign of King Emmanuel, they burned the parish records and distributed the funds in the tax collectors’ safe to the poor. Troops soon arrived and the insurgents were captured. Although the exercise failed, the example was not missed by other anarchist revolutionaries.”

Malatesta was an eloquent writer and hero to literally millions of people during his lifetime, but the sort of “direct action” he was advocating had nothing on common with what followed. Malatesta wrote:

“We do not believe in the right to punish; we reject the idea of revenge as a barbarous sentiment. We have no intention of being either executioners or avengers. It seems to us that the role of liberators and peacemakers is more noble and positive”.

But other anarchists were also taking up the pen, or more accurately—the sword.

Johann Most wrote in his brilliant but savage polemic “The Beast of Property” that the only road to salvation was an “unrelenting, pitiless, thorough, war of extermination” against the ruling class.

“The injustice-yea the idiocy-of this state of affairs is evident. The money-bags of course merely shrug their shoulders. This they will continue to do until a rope well tied over their shoulders will end all further shrugging.”


Most

He followed up with the subtly titled pamphlet: “The Science of Revolutionary Warfare: a manual of instruction in the use and preparation of Nitro-Glycerine, Dynamite, Gun Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc, etc.” in which he explains “In giving dynamite to the downtrodden millions of the globe, science has done its best workÉA pound of this stuff beats a bushel of ballots all hollow.”

If Most were alive today and posting on Flag.blackened.net, his IP would surely be handed over to the authorities;)

There’s a certain charming naivety in the writings of Most and other anarchists of the period: they literally believed that revolution was just around the corner – all that was needed was a spark – and indeed, they may well have been right (the labor movement was extremely well organized and militant at the time), had it not been for a little something called the “Great War”, also called “the war to end all wars”.

By that time, unfortunately, the damage had already been done.

“In 1884, August Reinsdorf attempted to blow up the Kaiser Wilhelm and his Princes as they opened the national monument at Rudesheim. In Paris, in 1892, August Vaillant threw a bomb into the chamber of deputies. Despite killing no one, he was himself executed. To avenge his death Santo Caserio killed the French president Carnot. 1897 and 1898 saw the deaths of the Spanish prime minister Del Castillo and Austrian empress Elizabeth at the hands of anarchists.”

In 1886, Charles Gallo tossed a bottle of hydrocyanic acid into the Paris Stock exchange.

In Japan, the cry of “Museifu Shugi Banzai!” (Long Live Anarchy!) was heard in a Japanese court as 26 anarchists were tried for “high treason” (“Taigyaku Jiken”) – in this case, for attempting to assassinate the God emperor.

So maybe we agree with Most: the bastards had it coming. It’s wrong to condemn violent anarchists for “doing in a small way, what the rich do daily with impunity on a grand scale…”; it’s hypocritical for us to “heap burning coals of “moral indignation” upon [their] heads, and, with an austere visage, hand [them] over relentlessly in charge of the state, that in its prisons [they] may be fleeced the more effectively, i.e., cheaper.”

And maybe we agree with George Bernard Shaw, who responded to the turning down of an appeal for the Haymarket anarchists ( later hanged) that: “If the world must lose eight of its people, it can better afford to lose the eight members of the Illinois Supreme Court.”

Or maybe we don’t.

Either way, terrorism doesn’t work. It achieves precisely the opposite of what (by anarchists) is intended: it strengthens the state. It does not inspire “revolutionary action”; it inspires revulsion.

The “Propaganda of the Deed” campaign culminated, at the turn of the century, in the assassination of U.S. President William McKinley by an anarchist named of Leon Czolgosz. He claimed to have been inspired by a speech by Emma Goldman.


Czolgosz

She responded “Am I accountable because some crack-brained person put a wrong construction on my words? …I think Czolgosz was one of those down trodden men who see all the misery which the rich inflict upon the poor, who think of it, who brood over it and then, in despair, resolve to strike a great blow for the good of their fellow man!”

“Goldman was labeled “the most dangerous woman in the world,” occupying the same place in the American consciousness as Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do today. People cursed her on the street. Parents invoked her name when disciplining their children-behave, or Emma Goldman will get you. Even after she was cleared, no one in New York City would rent her an apartment.”

Eventually came the sedition laws, the more honestly named forebears of today’s “Patriot Acts”. Many anarchists were deported, others imprisoned, others killed, and the movement basically fizzled out (in the US, anyway).

Until today.

So what’s the lesson of all this?

Well, obviously we already know quite well what the lesson is, as did the anarchists of the period, who “by the turn of the century…had turned their efforts towards building revolutionary unions. Mass workers unions were built in France, Germany, Italy, Argentina, Chile, and many other countries. A minority had gone down a cul-de-sac but were now out of it, and a lot wiser too.”

Thing is, anarchists weren’t the only ones discovering that terrorism, far from being a successful tactic condusive to popular upheaval, is actually a boon to the state. The state itself, and its minions, were also picking up a few tricks.

The following is an excerpt from a much longer post I made on GNN1, which Darios reproduced in full over at Upwingers, about the so-called “Strategy of Tension”.

It deals with Operation Gladio. Unlike the majority of suspected false flag operations, it is extremely well documented and can therefore serve as a crash-course in the study of state-sponsored terrorism.

As I will outline in the follow-up, there are extraordinary similarities between Gladio and the “War on Terra”, not the least of which is that many neocons – top policy makers who are now at the helm of battleship Amerika (Kissinger, for instance) – were actually involved in the conspiracy.

One more note on anarchists and terrorism: about a year ago I happened to catch a blurb on the evening news about an alleged letter bomb sent to the head of the EU. According to the report, “anarchists” were the suspected culprits. There was no information made available as to why people with anarchist beliefs were believed to be responsible.

Presumably, a note of some sort.

If we pretend, as the majority of prominent “leftist” intellectuals and journalists do, that false flag operations don’t exist, we are only setting ourselves up for another catastrophe. We cannot afford to go on burying our heads in the sand.

So when anarchist Bin Laden decides to blow something up and place the rest of us in the crosshairs, remember the word “Gladio”. First they came for the Muslims…

PART I: EUROPE



“Staying Behind”

NATO’s TERROR NETWORK

“As the 50th anniversary of the end of the war is celebrated,
some unpleasant truths will become further buried beneath the
myth of the “triumph of freedom and democracy” over fascism. For
if fascism itself was the great evil that had to be stopped at
any cost, how are we to explain the total failure of the British,
French and American governments to do anything about the war in
Spain from 1936 to 1939, when Franco’s fascist forces, openly
supported with arms and troops by Hitler and Mussolini, destroyed
the “democratically elected” republican government? The answer is
not hard to find. For Western capitalism the real enemy was not
fascism but the popular revolution inaugurated by the Spanish
working class.”

“…In fact the Greek based “Operation Sheepskin” mentioned in
relation to the 1967 coup was but one part of a European wide
“Stay Behind” network, established by the British and Americans.
Ostensibly this network existed to provide the nucleus of a
guerilla army to fight on after any Soviet invasion, using arms
and explosives which had already been planted. However, the
evidence leaves little doubt that this network also had the
intention of resisting “internal subversion”.

“The Stay Behind network was conceived by the US Joint Chiefs
of Staff and put into operation in 1948 by the National Security
Council which set up the Office of Policy Co-ordination to run
it, staffed and funded by the CIA. Ultimately, coordination of
the network took place under the auspices of NATO. It involved
personnel from the “official” security services in each country
and received covert funding from industry and the state. Indeed
funding and support of such groups was one of the main tasks of
the newly-formed CIA. However, members of the network were mainly
recruited from the civilian population, notably “ex-fascists” and
others whose “anti-communist” credentials were unimpeachable.”

“The existence of the Stay Behind network was not a matter
for public knowledge. However, the activities of the Italian
branch – codenamed Operation Gladio – was exposed in a series of
judicial investigations, particularly between 1990 and 1992.”


“Operation Gladio was set up in 1958 with help from British
Intelligence and the CIA, with funding from the latter. This
assistance continued, with Gladio units being trained in Britain
in the early 1970s and by US instructors at a military base in
the Canary Islands from 1966 to the mid-70s. Gladio was
controlled by the Italian secret services from “Office R”. It had
strong links with P2, a fascist Masonic Lodge composed of most of
the top military officers, political leaders, industrialists,
bankers and diplomats in Italy. P2 has been described as
effectively constituting a right wing parallel government in
Italy. In addition, Gladio became a focal point for fascist
members of “Marine Star” a veteran’s group set up after the
Second World War, and was to make use of other fascist groups in
the 70s and 80s.”



“In fact Gladio was deeply involved in the so-called
“strategy of tension” in the late 60s and 70s. The aim of the
strategy, of which the principle tactic was “terrorist outrages”
carried out by fascists, was to spread panic and unrest and to
directly attack the Left and provoke them into an armed response,
which would both justify increased state power under the pretext
of a “national emergency” and isolate the Left from popular
support. General Gerardo Serravalle, head of “Office R” from
1971-1974, revealed that at a Gladio meeting in 1972 at least
half of the upper echelons “had the idea of attacking the

communists before an invasion. They were preparing for civil
war”.

http://www.etext.org/Politics/Autonome.Forum/Antifa/gladio



A Strategy of Tension

“Gelli’s P2 and elements within the Vatican (such as Father Krujoslav Dragonovic, a Croatian Catholic priest — one of many who had helped the CIA export Nazi war criminals out of Germany through its Rat Lines), working in conjunction with the CIA, aligned itself with criminals, corrupt police, and high government officials to discredit the emerging Left and stage a fascist coup. “The Vatican’s fear was clear: Communism posed a threat to its religious, political, and economic strength.”



“God’s Bankers”

“On behalf of democracy, the Mafia enlisted as their agent Salvatore Giuliano. He and his cousin Gaspere Pisciotta led their men into Portella della Ginestra. Without prejudice, they shot and killed a dozen people and wounded more than fifty others. New elections were held, and the Christian Democratic party won a resounding victory. Later, at the orders of the Mafia, Pisciotta murdered Salvatore Giuliano. At his trial, Gaspere Pisciotta said of the massacre, “We were a single body: bandits, police, and Mafia, like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

“The covert objectives of Gladio were to spread panic and unrest through the implementation of “terrorist outrages,” and also to directly attack the Left in an attempt to provoke them into an armed response. The purpose of this strategy was to demonize the Left and isolate them from popular support, while providing an excuse to curtain civil liberties. As a 1969 memo from Aginter Press, a fascist front group, explained:

“Our belief is that the first phase of political activity ought to be to create the conditions favouring the installation of chaos in all of the regime’s structures. This should necessarily begin with the undermining of the state economy so as to arrive at confusion throughout the whole legal apparatus. This leads on to a situation of strong political tension, fear in the world of industry and hostility towards the government and the political parties.… In our view the first move we should make is to destroy the structure of the democratic state, under the cover of communist and pro-Chinese activities.”

“Moreover, we have people who have infiltrated these groups and obviously we will have to tailor our actions to the ethos of the milieu — propaganda and action of a sort which will seem to have emanated from our communist adversaries and pressure brought to bear on people in whom power is invested at every level. That will create a feeling of hostility towards those who threaten the people of each and every nation, and at the same time we must raise up a defender of the citizenry against the disintegration brought about by terrorism and subversion.…”

As the 1969 dispatch added:

“The introduction of provocateur elements into the circles of the revolutionary left is merely a reflection of the wish to push this unstable situation to breaking point and create a climate of chaos…”



from Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist

“One early Gladio-precipitated incident was the December, 12, 1969 bombing of the Banca Nazionale del’ Agricultura in Milan’s Piazza Fontana. The attack killed 16 people and wounded 88. Police immediatly arrested and blamed anarchists. One anarchist leader, Giuseppe Pinelli, took the fall for the bombing, literally, when police tossed him out the window of the local precinct headquarters.”



Giuseppe Pinelli

“In addition to this, the Procurator General of the Republic, De Peppo, ordered the one unexploded bomb found in the wreckage to be detonated immediately. As in Oklahoma, the destruction of this evidence destroyed the single best chance at uncovering the true perpetrators of the deadly attack.”

“Nevertheless, police eventually discovered the real perpetrators — two fascists: Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura. Ventura, it seems, was in close contact with Colonel Guido Giannettinni of the SID (part of the secret services), who was a fervent supporter of MSI. The trial of Ventura and Freda was delayed for 12 years, when they were finally given life sentences, only to be cleared on appeal.”



Franco Freda



Giovanni Ventura



Guido Giannettinni

“Former Gladio agents also attributed the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing and the 1974 [and subsequent 1980] Bologna bombings, which resulted in over 113 deaths and 185 injured, to P2. These attacks include the Mafia’s involvement in the Red Brigade’s kidnap and murder of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978. The P2 organization was also suspected of the 1976 assassination of Italian magistrate Vittoria Occorsio. Occorsio was investigating P2 links to neo-Nazi organizations at the time. His death conveniently terminated any further investigation.



Aldo Moro

“This “strategy of tension,” organized around a brutal campaign of terror and murder, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people during the decades of the 1970s and ‘80s. The wave of terror led to the severe restriction of civil rights, with the 1975 law restricting popular campaigning and radical political discussion. Many people were locked up under “anti-terrorist” legislation (sound familiar?) or expelled from the country.”

“As the Left (the Red Brigades) resorted to armed struggle to defend themselves, it only strengthened Gladio/P2’s position. The Red Brigades, which had been systematically infiltrated by the secret services, were repeatedly blamed for the attacks, all the while unknowingly serving the agenda of the fascist P2 establishment.”

“One unforgetable example of this wave of terror was the Bologna railway bombing in 1980, that killed 80 people and injured over 160. While reportedly masterminded by P2 members Stefano Delle Chiaie and Licio Gelli, the attack was blamed on the Red Brigades to discredit the Italian Communist party. According to author Steve Mizrach:



Delle Chiaie

“Some Italian political analysts believe that P2 and “Ordine Nuova” (New Order) may have cooperated with the CIA [to bomb the railway station].… There are clearly overlapping circles of membership between P2, the CIA, and the Knights of Malta, a “sovereign military order descended from the Knights of St. John-Hospitallers,” and whose membership in the U.S. has included Bill Casey, Alexander Haig, and Prescott Bush [and reportedly George Bush].”
http://www.constitution.org/ocbpt/ocbpt_14.htm



“As the fascists embarked on a wave of bombings and
shootings, civil rights in Italy began to be severely curtailed,
with a 1975 law restricting popular campaigning and radical
political discussion. Many people were locked up under “anti-
terrorist” legislation or expelled from the country. As expected,
the Left, in the shape of the Red Brigades, resorted to armed
struggle to defend themselves against this assault. This simply
strengthened Gladio / P2’s hand – the Red Brigades were blamed
for fascist outrages, systematically infiltrated by the secret
services and used to carry out actions which supported the hidden
agenda.”

“Gladio was “officially disbanded” by the Italian government
in December 1990 after the story broke. On January 29th, 1992 it
was officially declared to have been a clandestine and illegal
“armed band” involved in subversion, by an Italian parliamentary
commission on terrorism.”

“The 1990 revelations in Italy had a wider impact. After all,
Gladio was simply the Italian branch of a European wide network.
The Belgian, French, Dutch, Greek and German governments all
officially acknowledged that they took part in the covert NATO
network, with the Belgian prime minister revealing that a Europe
wide meeting of the network had been held as recently as October
1990. Of course the respective governments were at pains to deny
that the network had been intended for anything other than to
enable post-invasion guerilla warfare. Intervention in domestic
politics could only be the work of “uncontrollables” following
their own agenda.”

http://www.etext.org/Politics/Autonome.Forum/Antifa/gladio



“This covertly-orchestrated “strategy of tension” would repeat itself in Belgium in the mid-80s, in a bizarre series of killings called the “Supermarket Massacres,” in which hooded gunmen walked into crowded supermarkets and began firing away. The massacres, orchestrated by a group calling itself the “Killers of Brabant,” were later discovered to be linked to Belgium’s Gladio unit.”

“The Supermarket massacres occurred during the period when the U.S. was pushing a plan to base the Euro-Missiles (nuclear-tipped Cruise missiles) in different European countries. The plan led to huge demonstrations in Europe, with certain countries threatening to break ranks with NATO. Belgium was one of those countries. The Belgian Parliament, which investigated the incidents, felt that they were another attempt to sow confusion and fear among the populace, thereby generating public outcries for a law-and-order government which would be amenable to the Euro-Missles.”

“Proof surfaced when a former gendarme, Madani Bouhouche, who worked for state security and was a member of a neo-Nazi paramilitary group Westland New Post (WNP), was arrested with one of the murder weapons. The next day, Bouhouche’s friend and fellow Right-wing militant Jean Bultot fled to Paraguay (a popular respite for Nazis). While in Paraguay, Bultot admitted to Belgian journalist René Haquin that the killings were a state security destabilization operation with government participation “at every level.”

http://www.constitution.org/ocbpt/ocbpt_14.htm

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Cut-outs, moles, patsies and provocateurs

B07306 / Fri, 8 Jul 2005 20:25:17 / Intelligence


In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far
less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened
in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she
startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was
not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London
were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, “just
to keep the people frightened.” Orwell, 1984, 127.

Commonly referred to as “blowback”, the bombings in London may be a case of “authentic” terrorism sparked by Anglo-American aggression in the Middle East.

They may also be case of “government sponsored terrorism”, a false flag operation designed to shore up support for the war on terror abroad and the war on civil liberties at home.

In lieu of reports that a group calling itself “Secret al-Qaeda Jihad Organization in Europe” has apparently taken responsibility for the attacks, a refresher course on cut-outs, moles, patsies and provocateurs is in order.

I have tried, without success, to find a single bombing attributed to “Al-Qaeda” that hasn’t been “masterminded” (according to terrorism “experts” and their mouthpieces in the press) by an informant connected to some or other intelligence agency.

This may suggest a modus operandi on the part of either Al-Qaeda, the intelligence agencies with which her members so frequently interface, or both. In the case of the CIA and Al-Qaeda, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the goals, strategies and even membership of these two groups, despite their alleged, bitter and mutual enmity. The convergence of personnel and the remarkable proclivity of Al-Qaeda to promote Anglo-American/Israeli business interests by blowing things up or issuing communiqués just at the right time and just at the right place has led to the now popular term “Al-CIA-Duh”.



According the TEMPO Interactive, Jakarta in an article of19 Sep 2002, the mastermind of the Bali bomings, Omar Al-Faruq, was a CIA informant:

“Former State Intelligence Coordinating Board (BAKIN) chief A.C. Manulang has said that Kuwaitd citizen Omar Al-Faruq, a terrorist suspect who was arrested in Bogor, West Java, on June 5, 2002 and handed over to the US three days later, is a CIA-recruited agent.

Al Faruq was assigned to infiltrate Islamic radical groups and recruit local agents within these groups.

Manulang claimed that “to achieve this, the CIA used one of its operatives, Omar Al-Faruq, an Arab living in the U.S. who speaks Arabic and knows a little about Islam and who was sent to Indonesia to infiltrate the so called terrorist groups.”

http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2004-04/21/article06.shtml

A reporter living in Indonesia at the time concurred:

“Al-Faruq was an enigma for us, being picked up in Bogor (where my wife and I live) and spirited away, openly by the CIA. This technically was a violation of Indonesian law (at the time). We attempted to track his movements during 2001, and came up zip – unusual for the indiviuals working on it. In addition, the team noticed heightened sensitivity to our inquiries. This carries a lot of weight for journalists in Indonesia. After interviewing family members, who were terrified and refused to talk initially, and reviewing the general lack of information about this individual, we came to the conclusion he was “brought in” by his CIA handlers in preperation for the escalation of “the war on terror” sponsored by the United States. His known travels were through Afghanistan and Malaysia. His “capture” was obviously staged, and in broad daylight in front of witnesses.”

“I believe that the information supposedly divulged during his subsequent “interrogation” was used to provide smoke/excuses for a variety of covert ops. They drained this guy for all he was worth. We were never able to establish his real identity. His wife has disappeared. He undoubtedly possessed information that was too critical to compromise. His whereabouts are unknown. The CIA rejected a FOIA request for information on his location. The Jakarta Post is in possession of all FOIA’s that I generated from Indonesia.”

http://www.libertyforum.org/show…&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=21©=6

According to Michel Chussudovsky in his article of 20 June 2004, the bombings in Madrid were also connected to state intelligence agencies:

“The Spanish investigation has revealed that two individuals involved in allegedly supplying explosives to the alleged 3/11 Madrid terrorists were police informers. More specifically Rafa Zouhier, was a police informer to an elite unit of the Guardia Civil known as Unidad Central de Operaciones, UCO). The second individual, Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras, was an inforrmer to the National Police Corps, more specifically the narcotics brigade of Aviles (Cuerpo Nacional de Policia del jefe de la Brigada de Estupefacientes de Aviles).”


Ali Mohammed

Kenya? An article in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, November 4, 2001, entitled “AL QAEDA TERRORIST WORKED WITH FBI”, claims that the mastermind of the U.S. embassy attacks in Kenya, Ali Mohammed, was a U.S. government informant:

“A former U.S. Army sergeant who trained Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards and helped plan the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya was a U.S. government informant during much of his terrorist career, according to sources familiar with his case.

Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen and longtime Silicon Valley resident who pleaded guilty last year to terrorism charges, approached the Central Intelligence Agency more than 15 years ago and offered to inform on Middle Eastern terrorist groups, a U.S. government official said.”

The article goes on to claim that Mohammed was a sort of super-duper double agent working both sides of the fence on behalf of Bin Laden, and that “The affair was ‘a study in incompetence, in how not to run an agent’. Yet despite having his name put on a terrorist watch list, and despite Mohammed’s alleged links to Bin Laden, this super-duper double agent was given a visa one year later, ultimately joining the U.S. army and making a home for himself in Silicon Valley.

The ease with which he procured his Visa gels nicely with Mike Springman’s reports from the US embassy in Jedah, where he claimed the CIA tried to browbeat him into granting visas to a long line of dubious characters with links to organized crime and terrorism.

“There he [Mohammed] worked as a supply sergeant for a Green Beret unit, then as an instructor on Middle Eastern affairs in the John F. Kennedy special warfare school. Mohamed’s behavior and his background were so unusual that his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson

“I think you or I would have a better chance of winning Powerball (a lottery), than an Egyptian major in the unit that assassinated Sadat would have getting a visa, getting to California . . . getting into the Army and getting assigned to a Special Forces unit,” he said. “That just doesn’t happen. ”

It was equally unthinkable that an ordinary American GI would go unpunished after fighting in a foreign war, he said. Anderson said all this convinced him that Mohamed was “sponsored” by a U.S. intelligence service. “I assumed the CIA,” he said.”



The 1993 World Trade Center bombing is an especially instructive case:

Time Magazine reported: “If Salameh is guilty, it still must be determined how to account for what looked like his extraordinary stupidity in renting a van under his own name, presenting a valid New York driver’s license with a real and traceable phone number and, instead of disappearing after the bombing, calling attention to himself by repeatedly trying to recover the deposit.”

The events are described succinctly by Andreas von Bulow, former State Secretary of the Ministry of Defense in Germany from 1976-1980:

“In the middle was the bombmaker, a former Egyptian officer. He had pulled together some Muslims for the attack. They were snuck into the country by the CIA, despite a State Department ban on their entry. At the same time, the leader of the band was an FBI informant. And he made a deal with the authorities: At the last minute, the dangerous explosive material would be replaced by a harmless powder. The FBI did not stick to the deal. The bomb exploded, so to speak, with the knowledge of the FBI. The Official story of the crime was quickly found: The criminals were evil Muslims.”

The New York Times later acknowledged that “such enigmas caused local investigators to “dismiss Mr. Salameh as perhaps a patsy for others, someone who may have been duped into carrying out the attack and taking the blame.”

One possible explanation for this weirdness is that the bombings attributed to “Al-Qaeda” have occurred in much the same manner as the original, WTC ’93: the informant recruits the willing dupes for the ostensible purpose of striking a blow against the great Satan (or from the informant’s angle, for the purpose of a sting operation), the spooks supply the technical know-how, raw materials (ie the bombs) and if necessary, the ruthless operatives willing to carry out the terrorist act itself, and after the action is complete the informant is either whisked away to safety or hung out to dry.

This would correspond with Rumsfeld’s P2OG network, described in this article by Chris Floyd in Counterpunch:

According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organization-<>the “Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)”-will carry out secret missions designed to “stimulate reactions” among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to “counterattack” by U.S. forces.

“Rumsfeld’s plan to create “a super-Intelligence Support Activity” that will “bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception.”

“In other words-<>and let’s say this plainly, clearly and soberly, so that no one can mistake the intention of Rumsfeld’s plan<>the United States government is planning to use “cover and deception” and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people. Let’s say it again: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the other members of the unelected regime in Washington plan to deliberately foment the murder of innocent people<>your family, your friends, your lovers, you-in order to further their geopolitical ambitions.

“For P2OG is not designed solely to flush out terrorists and bring them to justice-<>a laudable goal in itself, although the Rumsfeld way of combating terrorism by causing it is pure moral lunacy. (Or should we use the Regime’s own preferred terminology and just call it “evil”?) No, it seems the Pee-Twos have bigger fish to fry. Once they have sparked terrorists into action-by killing their family members? luring them with loot? fueling them with drugs? plying them with jihad propaganda? messing with their mamas? or with agents provocateurs, perhaps, who infiltrate groups then plan and direct the attacks themselves?

http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd1101.html

If so, it wouldn’t be the first time:



As Chomsky explains in his essay “Domestic Terrorism: Notes on the State System of Oppression”, the 60’s and 70’s were replete with violent provocateur actions masterminded by the FBI.

“During these years, FBI provocateurs repeatedly urged and initiated violent acts, including forceful disruption of meetings and demonstrations on and off university campuses, attacks on police, bombings, and so on. Meanwhile, government agencies financed, helped organize, and supplied arms to right-wing terrorist groups that carried out fire-bombings, burglaries, and shootings, all with the knowledge of the government agencies responsible 12—in most cases the FBI, although one right-wing terrorist in Chicago claims that his group was financed and directed in part by the CIA. 13

One FBI provocateur resigned when he was asked to arrange the bombing of a bridge in such a way that the person who placed the booby-trapped bomb would be killed. This was in Seattle, where it was revealed that FBI infiltrators had been engaged in a campaign of arson, terrorism, and bombings of university and civic buildings, and where the FBI arranged a robbery, entrapping a young black man who was paid $75 for the job and killed in a police ambush. 14 In another case, an undercover operative who had formed and headed a pro-Communist Chinese organization “at the direction of the bureau” reports that at the Miami Republican convention he incited “people to turn over one of the buses and then told them that if they really wanted to blow the bus up, to stick a rag in the gas tank and light it” (they were unable to overturn the vehicle).

The same ex-operative contends that Cointelpro-type operations, allegedly suspended in April 1971, were in fact continuing as late as mid-1974, when he left the Bureau’s employ. 15 Many details are now available concerning the extensive campaign of terror and disruption waged by the government during these years, in part through right-wing paramilitary groups organized and financed by the national government but primarily through the much more effective means of infiltration and provocation. In particular, much of the violence on campus can be attributed to government provocateurs.

To cite a few examples, the Alabama branch of the ACLU argued in court that in May 1970 an FBI agent “committed arson and other violence that police used as a reason for declaring that university students were unlawfully assembled” 16—150 students were arrested. The court ruled that the agent’s role was irrelevant unless the defense could establish that he was instructed to commit the violent acts, but this was impossible, according to defense counsel, since the FBI and police thwarted his efforts to locate the agent who had admitted the acts to him.”

With events of a more spectacular nature, the agents are given an elaborate history complete with doubles, handlers, means of support and false identities.

The most elaborate set-up for any patsy ever was of course Lee Harvey Oswald, who though he hung out with fascists, spooks and gangsters liked to give out Communist literature is his spare time, even appearing on a public radio show to promote “Marxist-Leninism” and defecting to the Soviet Union.



Similarly, the “good soldier” and patriot Timothy McVeigh, who often expressed so-called “liberal” views on matters such as national health care, suddenly began running around handing out copies of the Turner Diaries and associating himself with right-wing fanatics.

Was VcVeigh, like Oswald, a sheep-dipped soldier “infiltrating” the enemy’s camp?

“Timothy McVeigh’s sister said that he thought he was going into a Special Forces covert tactical unit to fight against evil-doers. Author David Hoffman confirms this sentiment in his book The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror:

“McVeigh wrote his sister Jennifer while he was still in the Army telling her that he had been picked for a highly specialized Special Forces Covert Tactical Unit (CTU) that was involved in illegal activities. The letter was introduced to the Federal Grand Jury.

http://69.28.73.17/elohim.html

The fantasies of a lone nut?

McVeigh isn’t the only lone nut accused of a major terrorist act to have bragged about working for “elite” units and/or the CIA. Another was Washington D.C. sniper John Allen Muhammed, who changed his name shortly before he began his rampage:

“The WSWS reported that “various sources indicate that Muhammad liked to boast about his service in the army and claimed to be working for the CIA and FBI.”



While applying at a government office on Antigua, he “claimed to have attended ‘Special Forces/ Sniper School’ in the US military and to have ‘taught urban warfare.’” In the summer of 2002, Muhammad told a nephew in Baton Rouge “a dubious story about working for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/oct2002/snip-o28.shtml

Michael Miering, who blew off his legs in a bomb (making) mishap in a Philippine hotel room on May 16, 2001, and was thence whisked away by members of the FBI in defiance in Filipino law, “referred to himself as CIA although he would qualify that to mean “Christ In Action.”

Others close to him doubted his claims to religiosity, but agreed that “Meiring may have been an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2003/08/51985.php

Meiring appears to have been caught in flagrante delicto. Two cases of a similar nature are the Lavon affair (Israel, blamed on the Moslem Brotherhood, Israeli agent caught in the act) and the recent apartment block bombings in Russia, blamed on Chechnya but carried out the FSB (former KGB):

“The panel brought attention to already known facts about a foiled explosion in Ryazan on 22 September 1999. The FSB was forced to admit that it had planted the device, when phonecalls amongst its agents were intercepted. Yet, simultaneously, head of the FSB Patrushev claimed that the explosives were actually sugar and that this was part of a so-called security exercise.

This sharply contradicts the version of the local police force which had determined that the substance was hexogen and that the detonator equipment was real and set for 5.30am – “the clock was ticking”. Four explosives experts from Britain and France recently examined the available evidence from the Ryazan incident and concluded that the bomb was authentic.”

The Reverend Jim Jones of Jonestown fame bragged about working for the Office of Naval Intelligence. As we will see, there is indeed some evidence to support the good preacher’s claim.

Back to McVeigh. What made him tick?

“The report concluded with the observation that Timothy McVeigh “is a military man… his heart and soul belongs to the military of the U.S. Government. In a non-military environment, McVeigh will not undertake any form of overt hostility that will be harmful to others or dangerous to himself…. It is not logical that he would undertake any action against our government in which others would be hurt or killed. To do so would violate everything he stands for.”[171]

“According to former CIA agent Victor Marchetti, the CIA currently does its most “fruitful” recruiting in the armed forces.[231] Intelligence agencies regularly recruit from the military, and military files are routinely reviewed for potential candidates — those who have proven their willingness and ability to kill on command and without hesitation — those whose combat training and proficiency with weapons make them excellent candidates for field operations. McVeigh had already taken the Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Course while he was at Fort Riley. Whether he knew it or not, McVeigh was well on his was way to a career in covert intelligence. An intelligence agency wouldn’t have to search hard for a man like McVeigh. His above-average military record, and the fact that he was a candidate for the Special Forces, would have made him a natural choice. Especially his try-out for Special Forces. The Special Forces were created as the covert military arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. According to Lt. Colonel Daniel Marvin (Ret.), “almost all of the independent operations within the Green Berets were run by the CIA”[232]

“following testimony given by Colonel Daniel Marvin, a highly decorated Special Forces Vietnam veteran. While going through Special Forces training at Fort Bragg in 1964,”The stronger a patriot you are, the more important it is to you that you do whatever is necessary for your flag, for your country,” he adds. “It makes you the most susceptible type of person for this kind of training. You are the ultimate warrior. You’re out there to do for your country what nobody else is willing to do. I had no qualms about it at all.”

“If McVeigh was recruited, his “opting out” of the military was most likely a cover story for that recruitment. Former Pentagon counter-intelligence officer Robert Gambert told Kennedy assassination researcher Dick Russell of the mysterious activities of his cousin Richard Case Nagell, “Dick played the role of a disgruntled ex-Army officer…. he was really still operational, in an undercover capacity, for the Army Intelligence…. They’re not gonna’ trust anybody who’s active military or a friendly retiree. They’re gonna trust somebody who’s going around griping against the military, against the intelligence operations, against the government….”[241]
Like Lee Harvey Oswald, who appeared to be an avid Communist, distributing leaflets on behalf of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, McVeigh would play the part of an avowed Right-winger, distributing literature about taxes, the Second Amendment, Waco and Ruby Ridge. Like Oswald, who left behind a diary widely believed to be a CIA forgery, McVeigh was purported to have similarly documented his own extremist position.

“Like Oswald, McVeigh’s departure from the military was under somewhat mysterious circumstances. And like Oswald, an ex-Marine with a top-secret security clearance who appeared to “defect” to the Soviet Union, McVeigh would appear to be a “disgruntled” ex-Army sergeant who happened to “drift” into the fringes of the far-Right.[275]

“Yet, like Oswald, who lived and worked amongst the bastions of the far-Right in Dallas while purporting to be a Marxist, McVeigh would not seem to be the extreme Right-wing fanatic he’s been made out to be. In a letter to his hometown newspaper in February, 1992, he wrote:

“At a point when the world has seen Communism falter as an imperfect system to manage people; democracy seems to be headed down the same road…. Maybe we have to combine ideologies to achieve the perfect utopian government. Remember, government-sponsored health care was a Communist idea….

“Obviously, such views are anathema to the far-Right, who see any attempt to socialize society as a major step towards the great one-world Communist conspiracy. It is possible that McVeigh was more progressive than his Right-wing associates. It is also possible that McVeigh was being sheep-dipped as a militant Right-winger.”



The aforementioned Jim Jones appears to have had a similar case of “split-personality” or “Jeckyll and Hyde” syndrome, though his function was obviously much different than the mere stool pigeons outlined so far.

At the same time Jones was proclaiming himself a socialist and the reincarnation of Jesus and Vladimir Lenin, he was raising money for Richard Nixon.

John Judge:

“Dan Mitrione, Jones’ friend, moved on to the CIA-financed International Police Academy, where police were trained in counter-insurgency and torture techniques from around the world.[88] Jones, a poor, itinerant preacher, suddenly had money in 1961 for a trip to “minister” in Brazil, and he took his family with him.[89] By this time, he had “adopted” Beikman, and eight children, both Black and white.[90] His neighbors in Brazil distrusted him. He told them he worked with U.S. Navy Intelligence. His transportation and groceries were being provided by the U.S. Embassy as was the large house he lived in.[91] His son, Stephan, commented that he made regular trips to Belo Horizonte, site of the CIA headquarters in Brazil.[92]

An American police advisor, working closely with the CIA at that point, Dan Mitrione was there as well.[93] Mitrione had risen in the ranks quickly, and was busy training foreign police in torture and assassination methods. He was later kidnapped by Tupermaro guerillas in Uruguay, interrogated and murdered.[94] Costa Gravas made a film about his death titled State of Siege.[95] Jones returned to the United States in 1963, with $10,000 in his pocket.[96] Recent articles indicate that Catholic clergy are complaining about CIA funding of other denominations for “ministry” in Brazil; perhaps Jones was an early example.[97]

“With his new wealth, Jones was able to travel to California and establish the first People’s Temple in Ukiah, California, in 1965. Guarded by dogs, electric fences and guard towers, he set up Happy Havens Rest Home.[98] Despite a lack of trained personnel, or proper licensing, Jones drew in many people at the camp. He had elderly, prisoners, people from psychiatric institutions, and 150 foster children, often transferred to care at Happy Havens by court orders.[99] He was contacted there by Christian missionaries from World Vision, an international evangelical order that had done espionage work for the CIA in Southeast Asia.[100] He met “influential” members of the community and was befriended by Walter Heady, the head of the local chapter of the John Birch Society.[101] He used the members of his “church” to organize local voting drives for Richard Nixon’s election, and worked closely with the republican party.[102] He was even appointed chairman of the county grand jury.[103]

Constant clash flow despite no visible means of support comes up often in the literature. For instance, the Washington Sniper:

“A number of witnesses have commented on the incongruity of an allegedly homeless man who always had money to spend. The L.A. Times reported that a former girlfriend told her family that Muhammad’s “story didn’t make any sense … He was a hard-luck drifter with money, a man who could pick up and fly to the Caribbean whenever he got the inclination.” The same Times report added that “She wasn’t the only one asking questions … The director of the shelter has said [of Muhammad] ... ‘He was rather secretive about his past and present … He was closed-mouthed. He didn’t have a visible source of income, but he was able to travel at a moment’s notice.’”

http://www.latimes.com/news/nati…world/la-na-killers27oct27.story



And Donald Defreeze, leader of the SLA and kidnapper of Patty Hearst, who was a known LAPD informant and who was supplied with a constant stream of cash after his “escape” from MKULTRA hotbed and later Manson residence, Vacaville prison.

Jones is also alleged to have had doubles, another common theme. In Jim Hougan’s excellent article “The Secret Life of Jim Jones: A Parapolitical Fugue” he writes:

“The only disturbance in the empty field of Jones’s whereabouts from 10/61 until 4/62 is the information that Passport #0111788 was issued in his name at Indianapolis on January 30, 1962.

“This is a considerable anomaly. As we have seen, Jones already had a passport—-#22898751, issued to him in Chicago on June 28, 1960. This earlier passport, which he had planned to use on a trip to the Soviet Union, was still valid.

Why, then, did someone make an application for a new passport, and who picked it up? Moreover, how is it possible that Jones’s second passport had a lower number than the one that he’d received more than a year before?

“An American family, making “a Cuban stopover,” seven to eleven months after the Bay of Pigs? Physically, transportation would not have been difficult to arrange; both Mexico City and Georgetown were transit-points for Havana. But Cuban visas were by no means issued automatically—-especially to Americans making well-publicized, anti-communist speeches in Guyana. How much harder it must have been for Jones to arrange to have a photo taken of himself with Castro (who was at that time the target of CIA assassination attempts planned by yet another Indianapolis native, William Harvey).

“It’s a peculiar, even eerie, business. I’m reminded of the man who impersonated Lee Harvey Oswald while applying for a visa at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City during 1963.

“Whatever his reason for visiting Cuba during the Winter of 1961-62, and whatever the reasons he was permitted to enter the country, Jones had no trouble entering Brazil that April. Given a visa that was valid for eleven months, he and his family traveled to Belo Horizonte where, as we have seen, Dan Mitrione had settled in as an OPS adviser at the U.S. Consulate.

“Nevertheless, while there is every reason to be skeptical of Jones’s memoir, it is interesting that he characterizes his relationship to the Mitriones as that of an informant, or spy. Given Jones’s sociopathic personality (not to mention his rightwing sermons in Guyana and the implications of his CIA file), it is very likely that Jones was working for Mitrione rather than against him.

“While Jones is said to have gone to the U.S. Consulate often, the only person whom he is known to have seen there was Jon Lodeesen.

“On October 18, 1962, Vice Consul Lodeesen wrote a peculiar letter to Jones on Foreign Service stationary. The letter reads:

“Dear Mr. Jones:
“We received a communication and we believe
its your interest to come at the Consulate
at your earliest convenience.” (Sic.)

“Signed by Lodeesen, there is a redundant post-script to the letter, requesting that Jones “Please see me.”

“While the letter itself is entirely opaque, an attachment to it is not. This a passport-type photograph of a man who, despite his mustache and receding hairline, looks remarkably like Jim Jones—<>or, more accurately perhaps, like Jim Jones in disguise. While one cannot be certain, it may well be that the photo is related to the peculiar circumstances under which a second passport was issued to Jones—while the first passport was still valid.

“That it was Jon Lodeesen who contacted Jones is significant in its own right. This is so because Lodeesen has been a spy for much of his life. According to Soviet intelligence officers, he is a CIA agent who taught at the US intelligence school in Garmisch Partenkirchen, West Germany—-a sort of West Point for spooks.

“Subsequently, he worked at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow—-until he was declared persona non grata for suspected espionage activities. Kicked out of the Soviet Union, he went to work for Radio Liberty, a CIA-created and -financed propaganda network based in Munich. There, he was Deputy Director of the Soviet Analysis and Broadcasting Section. More recently, Lodeesen was recommended for work with a CIA cover in Hawaii. In a letter to the proprietor of the cover, Lodeesen was described as “fluent in the principal Russian tongues” and an expert on “Soviet double agents, dissidents and escapees.”

Did McVeigh have doubles?

“The most damming evidence linking McVeigh to the crime would be the witness sightings placing him at the Murrah Building just before the bombing, following the Ryder truck, then speeding away in his yellow Mercury several minutes before the blast.

“Yet the most curious evidence implicating McVeigh in the bombing came from witnesses who say he cased the building on December 16, when he and Michael Fortier drove through Oklahoma City en route to Kansas, then again approximately one and a half weeks before the bombing.

“Danielle Wise Hunt, who operated the Stars and Stripes Child Development Center in the Murrah Building, told the FBI that on December 16, a clean-cut man wearing camouflage fatigues approached her, seeking to place his two children in the day care center. Hunt told agents that the man didn’t ask typical parent-type questions, but instead wanted to know about the day-care center’s security. Hunt thought he might be a potential kidnapper. Later, after seeing his face on TV, she recognized the man as Timothy McVeigh.[301]

“If the man was indeed Timothy McVeigh, it is curious why he would later claim he was unaware of the day-care center in the building.
Dr. Heath, “You remember this… My name is McVeigh.”

“Former Federal Grand Juror Hoppy Heidelberg concurs. “Why would McVeigh walk around the building before the blast telling people his name?”[304]

“Like the “Lee Harvey Oswald” who was seen filing out numerous job applications in New Orleans, “McVeigh” was seen going floor-to-floor in the Federal Building in Oklahoma. Except that the “Oswald” who filled out job applications listed his height as 5’ 9”, while the real Oswald’s height was 5’ 11.”

“According to employees at Elliott’s Body Shop in Junction City, the “McVeigh” (alias “Kling”) who rented the truck on April 17 was of medium build, 5’ 10” to 5’ 11” and weighed 180-185 pounds. Elliott’s employee Tom Kessinger stated on his FBI FD-383 report that the man had a “rough” complexion with “acne.”[320] (See Appendix)

“The only problem is, Timothy McVeigh is 6’ 2,” weighs 160 pounds, and has a totally clear complexion. Another shop employee, Vicki Beemer, said the man had a deformed chin, unlike the real McVeigh.[321]

“A “Lee Harvey Oswald” subsequently phoned, then showed up at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, speaking with a trade consultant who was allegedly a member of the KGB’s “liquid affairs” bureau (hit squad). The CIA later turned over to the Warren Commission a surveillance snapshot of a man they claimed was Oswald at the Soviet embassy. The man looked nothing like Oswald.

“On April 17, 1995, a “Bob Kling” showed up at Elliott’s Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas and rented a Ryder truck. Yet according to surveillance footage taken from a nearby McDonalds, McVeigh was sitting in the restaurant eating a hamburger at the time. He was wearing completely different clothes than those ascribed to “Kling.”

Yet the FBI contends that McVeigh left the restaurant 20 minutes before the truck was rented, walked the 1.3 miles to Elliott’s — a fifteen-minute walk — in a light rain, then showed up at Elliott’s nice and dry, wearing completely different clothes.

In November of 1963, a “Lee Oswald” walked into the downtown Lincoln Mercury dealership in Dallas announcing his intention to buy a Mercury Comet. According to the salesman, Albert Bogard, “Mr. Oswald” took him on a wild test drive, speeding along at 60 to 70 miles an hour. After he was told the amount of the down payment, another salesman, Eugene Wilson, heard “Oswald” say, “Maybe I’m going to have to go back to Russia to buy a car.”

“During the Warren Commission hearings, salesman Frank Pizzo described the customer as 5’ 8” tall. When the Warren Commission showed Pizzo a photo of Oswald taken after his arrest, he said, “I have to say that he is not the one…”[325]

After the bombing in Oklahoma City, ATF informant Carol Howe told the FBI that she recognized the two men on the FBI’s original wanted posters as Peter Ward and Michael Brescia — two Elohim City residents. She said that neither man was Tim McVeigh.[326]

“In early November of 1963, Mrs. Lovell Penn of Dallas found three men firing a rifle on her property. After they left, she found a spent cartridge bearing the name “Mannlicher-Carcanno,” the rifle that the Warren Commission claimed Oswald used to perform his historic feat of marksmanship in Dealy Plaza.

“As District Attorney Jim Garrison later noted, “These scenes were about as subtle as roaches trying to sneak across a white rug.”

Now would perhaps be a good time to bring up strip clubs. We’re all familiar with Mohammad Atta’s penchant for booze, coke, babes and gambling. If we’re not, here’s a reminder:

“Atta didn’t care. Atta was flush. Atta flashed a Big Roll. Ask the girls who dance at the Cheetah club in Sarasota. Cash was no problemo.

Atta liked very Un-Islamic lap dances at the Pink Pony Strip Club. Atta liked stuffing $20 bills into the panties of topless dancers in nightclubs at the seedy end of Las Vegas’ Strip.

Atta liked ogling infidel flesh. And he had a taste for the finer things in life too. Atta liked hanging out at Harry’s Bar in New York, where he preferred a table near the piano.”

To which I may add:



Atta liked the Beastie Boys. Atta wore a crucifix. Atta went gambling on a Republican lobbyists yacht one week before 9/11. Atta was a drug smuggler.

Is that why Atta was learning to fly? To be a bag-man for CIA drug-running out of Florida?

Atta left a Koran at the Pink Pony.

This business of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs is often so obvious and so hammy and so farcical one can only wonder how anyone, anywhere can accept the official stories. The apocrypha helps, I suppose; “official” reports of Atta meeting with Saddam or Khalid Sheik Muhammed (like the Man called Intrepid once said: “Nothing deceives like a document”); celebrity and stature help: Richard Clarke on Jon Stewart or Nightline warning of impending attacks and the necessity for martial law; still, it’s pretty goofy stuff. But back to strip clubs:

McVeigh, or someone who looked a lot like him, also attended a strip club before his rendezvous with infamy. He told a stripper: ‘Yes, and you’re going to remember me on April 19, 1995. You’re going to remember me for the rest of your life.’

James Earl Ray? Apparently he had identical cars:

“James Early Ray, MLK’s alleged assassin had owned a white Ford Mustang, which was seen speeding away after the assassination. Yet another white Mustang was seen parked in front of Jim’s Grill in Memphis, near where Ray had his car parked.

The two cars were almost identical, except for two things: While Ray was wearing a suit on April 4, 1968, the driver of the other Mustang was wearing a dark blue windbreaker; while Ray’s car had Alabama plates, the other car had Arkansas plates.”

Immediately after the killing, the gentleman who bore no resemblance to the alleged assassin was seen tearing from the boarding house where Ray resided, dropping a rifle on the sidewalk as he fled the scene.

And one of the Mossad’s many false flags:

“On April 6, 1979, the same Mossad terror unit now suspected of the Copernicus carnage blew up the heavily guarded plant of CNIM industries at La Seyne-sur-Mer, near Toulon, in southeast France, where a consortium of French firms was building a nuclear reactor for Iraq.… The Mossad salted the site of the CNIM bomb blast with ‘clues’ followed up with anonymous phone calls to police — suggesting that the sabotage was the work of a conservative environmentalist group….”

http://www.constitution.org/ocbpt/ocbpt_02.htm

“Was McVeigh an informant? Was he working for two different agencies? Numerous Kennedy researchers have uncovered evidence that Oswald was an FBI informant at the same time he was being sheep-dipped by the CIA for his role in the JFK assassination. According to former District Attorney (later federal judge) Jim Garrison:

“Oswald appears to have been extensively manipulated by the CIA for a long time prior to the assassination and may well have believed he was working for the government. Oswald was also a confidential informant, a job that provided additional control over him and may have given him a reason to believe he was actually penetrating a plot to assassinate the president.[288]

“Like Mohammed Salemeh, a World Trade Center bombing suspect arrested when he attempted to retrieve his truck rental deposit, McVeigh would be linked to the bombing by the first in a chain of damning evidence — his thumbprint on a fertilizer receipt found in Terry Nichols’ home; inquires about bomb-making materials made on his calling-card; and the paperwork used to rent the Ryder truck itself.

“Like Salemeh’s rental receipt which had traces of ANFO on it, McVeigh’s clothes would allegedly contain traces of a detonator cord known as PDTN.[300] Like the World Trade Center bombers who stockpiled bomb-making equipment in rented storage lockers in New Jersey, McVeigh and Nichols would store their ammonium nitrate in rented lockers in Kansas and Arizona. And like the World Trade Center bombers who called commercial chemical companies requesting bomb-making materials, McVeigh would implicate himself by using a traceable phone card to make his purchases.

The most wild example of “doubles” and aliases comes from James Earl Ray:

From Philip Melanson’s book The Murkin Conspiracy:

“But the best and spookiest evidence of a conspiracy consists of Ray’s use of sophisticated aliases during the months leading up to the assassination and directly thereafter.

“Melanson tracked down the Canadians, and the scenario he details in his 1989 book, The Murkin Conspiracy, is downright chilling. Months before the assassination, Ray was using the alias, ‘Eric Starvo Galt.’ Melanson discovered that, during the same period, the Toronto man named Eric Galt was signing his middle name, St. Vincent, as ‘St. V.,’ scribbling lopsided circles for the periods, so that the full name looked to the uninitiated like ‘Eric Starvo Galt.’ In an impressive bit of detection, Melanson found that at some point, the real Eric St. Vincent Galt changed his signature, and began signing documents and personal checks as Eric S. Galt. At about the same time, the recidivist American crook James Earl Ray changed his alias to ‘Eric S. Galt.’ And this was months before Ray’s first and only visit to Toronto!

To sum up:

Tarpley:

“The patsies ultimately have three vital functions. The first is that they have to be noticed. They must attract lots and lots of attention. They may issue raving statements on videotape, or doubles can be used to issue these statements for them if they are not up to it. They need to get in to fights with passersby, as Mohammed Atta is said to have done concerning a parking space at the airport in Maine early in the morning on September 11.

Even if they are presumed dead they must remain prominent, as in the case of Atta’s passport, which is alleged by the FBI to have survived the fiery collapse of the World Trade Center towers to be found undamaged and unsinged on a nearby street. Even when presumed dead they must be eloquent about themselves and their activities, as they accused 9/11 hijackers when they left behind a copy of the Koran, airline schedules, terrorist literature and videotapes, and Atta’s crudely forged last will and testament in a car and in luggage.

Finally, if all else goes well, it is the destiny of the patsies to take the blame for the terror action once it has happened. At this point the moles in the government apparatus, who had earlier been the patsies’ greatest friends and protectors, become their most implacable enemies. The patsies must be hunted down and, preferably, liquidated on the spot, as the British Special Air Services anti-terrorist force always prefers to do, with a maximum of firepower. Their faces and stories will be demonized as the latest manifestation of absolute evil. The nationality, philosophy, or religion which the media portray them as representing will become the target of raving vilification, arrest, economic sanctions, cruise missile retaliation, and armed invasion, as the case may be.”

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

Gladio: The Sequel

B07389 / Tue, 12 Jul 2005 19:25:23 / Intelligence


Speaking of provocateurs, another CIA-informant caught up in a radical Islamic proxy has emerged. This time, he has not orchestrated a bombing in the name of “Al-Qaeda” – he’s been kidnapped.

“Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, who was reportedly abducted in Milan on February 17, 2003, was a CIA informant, according to Albanian intelligence officials.”

According to Wayne Madsen, Nasr was abducted by “a covert team of U.S. Defense Department Special Forces, mercenaries, and intelligence agents who are now the subject of international arrest warrants.”

Chicago Tribune:

“Why would the U.S. government go to elaborate lengths to seize a 39-year-old Egyptian who, according to former Albanian intelligence officials, was once the CIA’s most productive source of information within the tightly knit group of Islamic fundamentalists living in exile in Albania?”

For the indefatigable blowback hacks who may not be aware of the answer, see my aforementioned posts.

What’s interesting about this case, more so than those of Al-Faruq, Ali Mohammed, Rafa Zouhier and Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras, is that specific names have emerged threatening to expose rather high-ranking members of the cryptocracy, including top Neocons and other fascists directly involved in the “war on terror”.

The usual figures are implicated:

“Negroponte. Ledeen. Boykin. North. Kerek. If these figures make you uneasy, they should. An Italian investigation has uncovered an underground, parallel police network with possible links to the CIA which may be involved in the slaying of Niccola Calipari and Il Diario reporter Enzo Baldoni, the extraordiary rendition of Abu Omar and Nigergate.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/1/134912/3377



More interesting still, there is a Gladio connection.

“It now appears members of this Pentagon-based (not the CIA) covert team were in cahoots with Gaetano Saya and Riccardo Sindoca, two neofascists “who reportedly have close ties to both the P-2 (Propaganda Due) Masonic lodge and a secret Cold War network known as Gladio,” according to Madsen. Saya and Sindoca set up something dubbed “the Department of Strategic Anti-Terrorism Studies, which reportedly had links to both the Bush administration and Ariel Sharon’s Likud government in Israel.”

The Italian government has tried to distance itself from the scandal, yet:

“Former CIA Osama Bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer told Italy’s La Repubblica that the kidnaping of Abu Omar was authorized by SISMI chief Nicolo Pollari. A number of SISMI agents and assets have been tied to the group, including Francesco Pazienza, a SISMI agent, and Rocco Martino, who said he was the source of the faked Niger yellowcake uranium documents that were laundered through Rome and used as proof by the Bush White House that Saddam Hussein was shopping for uranium in Niger. That charge prompted the CIA to send Ambasssador Joseph Wilson to Niger resulting in a retaliatory exposure by the White House of the CIA’s covert weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation network.” (Madsen)



“Checking out the easily researched background of SISMI we learn the spook organization “has long been notorious for far right, even neo-fascist, leanings. According to Italian judicial investigators, SISMI was deeply involved in numerous plots against Italy’s democratic government, including the 1980 Bologna train station terrorist bombing that left 85 dead and 200 injured,” Canadian journalist Eric S. Margolis reported last summer. “Senior SISMI officers were in cahoots with celebrated swindler Roberto Calvi, the neo-fascist P2 Masonic Lodge, other extreme rightist groups trying to destabilize Italy, the Washington neocon operative, Michael Ledeen, and the Iran-Contra conspirators.” In short, SISMI is neck-deep in Gladio operations. As Margolis reports, the American liaison is none other than Michael Ledeen, an “influential” neocon with direct input into the Bush administration. “

http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/?p=798

More on Ledeen in a moment.

“In an unexpected and possibly related move, the U.S. Defense Department announced that it was withdrawing a specal forces unit, mostly comprising Navy SEAL personnel, from the Rota Naval Station near Cadiz in southern Spain. The move came after the Pentagon announced it would move much of its Special Operations to southern Europe, particularly Spain, Italy, and Portugal and establish a new Special Operations command at Rota. Some experts on Gladio and the “stay behind networks” have cited the similarity of the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings and a Gladio/P-2-connected train bombing in Bologna in August 1974 and the 1978 assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro (after he announced he would bring Communists into the government) and the recent assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri after his negotiations with the pro-Syria and pro-Iran Hezbollah. Hariri was reportedly threatened beforehand by White House National Security Council officials in the same way Henry Kissinger threatened Moro in 1974 while the Christian Democratic leader was Foreign Minister.”

“It is interesting the Italians are in the process of linking two fascist Gladio warriors to the Pentagon abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim apparently working under cover for the CIA, according to sources quoted by the Chicago Tribune. Of course, all of this will blow over in a few days as the news cycle revolves around more important stories—for instance, women desperate for Jessica Simpson’s hair, or singer and reality show attendee Pink’s marriage to motocross racer Carey Hart.” (Madsen)

Or perhaps Karl Rove.

Never fear liberal press, there’s even a Karl Rove connection in this sordid affair to wet the appetites of the parapolitically disinclined, or should I say chicken-shit.

“When The Washington Post published a list of the people whom Karl Rove, President George W Bush’s closest advisor, regularly consults for advice outside the administration, foreign policy veterans were shocked when Michael Ledeen popped up as the only full-time international affairs analyst.” Asia Times -Veteran neo-con adviser moves on Iran

http://www.sw-asia.com/People/Bio916.htm



AlterNet on Michael Ledeen, dated May, 2003:

Most Americans have never heard of Michael Ledeen, but if the United States ends up in an extended shooting war throughout the Middle East, it will be largely due to his inspiration.

He basically believes that violence in the service of the spread of democracy is America’s manifest destiny.

Now Michael Ledeen is calling for regime change beyond Iraq. In an address entitled “Time to Focus on Iran—The Mother of Modern Terrorism,” for the policy forum of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) on April 30, he declared, “the time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon.”

With a group of other conservatives, Ledeen recently set up the Center for Democracy in Iran (CDI), an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran.”

DEVELOPING STORY July 4, 2005 —More on Rovegate. According to Washington insiders, Karl Rove is not the only “person of interest” being investigated by a Federal special prosecutor and the FBI for leaking the name of covert CIA agent to the media. In addition to the leak, itself a crime, prosecutors are looking at criminal conspiracy involving a non-White House “pass through” that leaked the classified information on Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings Associates to Robert Novak. Although Novak’s now infamous column appeared on July 14, 2003, the focus is on a phone call or calls made by Rove and a non-White House player on July 6, 2003, the same day Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s OP-ED on the bogus Niger intelligence appeared in The New York Times. The Rove investigation is also dovetailing with two other investigations—AIPAC espionage on behalf of Israel and the forgery of Niger government documents used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

Who is Michael Ledeen?

Excerpt, taken from Edward Herman / Gerry O’Sullivan, The “Terrorism”
Industry (Pantheon, 1989), p. 161 ff.

Michael Ledeen has long been associated with CSIS [Center for
Strategic and International Studies] and was one of the founding
organizers of JINSA [The Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs]. During the Reagan years, Ledeen moved into the higher
circles of power, serving as Secretary of State Haig’s advisor and
agent in Italy, as a consultant on terrorism, and playing a role in
both the Bulgarian connection case and the Iran-contra affair. With
these connections, Ledeen had exceptional media exposure, appearing on
ABC’s “Nightline” and “This Week with David Brinkley,” PBS’s
“MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour,” and CNN’s “Crossfire.” He has also written
op-ed columns and articles for numerous magazines and newspapers, and
edited the Washington Quarterly (published by CSIS) prior to going to
work for Haig.

Ledeen’s academic career came to an end when he was denied tenure at
Washington University in St. Louis in 1972 for, among other reasons,
plagiarism [1]. During the 1970s, he worked as a journalist in Italy
with Il Giornale Nuovo, a right-wing newspaper reputedly controlled by
the CIA [2]. During this Italian stint he collaborated regularly with
Claire Sterling in anticommunist propaganda closely tied to ongoing
U.S. interventionist strategies [3]. In 1980 he entered into a
collaboration with Francesco Pazienza, an agent of the Italian secret
service (SISMI) and a member of Rome’s extreme right-wing Masonic
Lodge, P2 (Propaganda Due), headed by the fascist Licio Gelli. In an
Italian criminal court in 1985, Pazienza was judged guilty of
political manipulation, forgery, and the protection of criminals and
terrorists, among other offenses. Indeed, according to the findings of
the court, Pazienza falsified information about the Bologna bombing in
order to divert attention away from the real (right-wing) terrorists
who had staged the attack. Ledeen is identified in the court documents
as an agent of SISMI, possibly placed on their payroll by Pazienza
himself. Ledeen collected money for his services to SISMI, which
included “risk assessment,” the training of Italian intelligence
agents, and providing reports on terrorism to the Italian government
[4].

Pazienza and Ledeen worked together in the so-called Billygate affair
during the 1980 presidential campaign, luring Jimmy Carter’s brother
into a compromising relationship with Qaddafi (this according to
prosecuting Judge Domenico Sica). During the Reagan transition, to
quote Italian police official Umberto d’Amato, “there was an
interregnum during which relations between Italy and the United States
were carried on in the persons of the duo Pazienza-Ledeen” [5].

Later, the pair were important participants in the creation of the
Bulgarian plot to kill the pope, a story that succeeded in gulling
most of the major media in the West.

Ledeen has moved within the power structure and between Western
governments according to opportunity, for personal advantage and
perhaps also in pursuit of political ends that are not entirely clear.

Although serving as a loyal agent of the U.S. state in Italy in the
1970s, his service in the Billygate affair was to the Republican
Party. He was on the payroll of the Italian secret service agency
SISMI in the early 1980s, but his manipulations in Italy caused the
new head of SISMI to declare before Parliament in 1984 that Ledeen was
an “intriguer” and unwelcome in Italy [6]. His attachment to Israel,
reflected in his JINSA connection, may have influenced his pursuit of
the hostage deal with Iran (Israel favored such a transaction), and
his former boss in the Pentagon, Noel Koch, asserts that while Ledeen
was in Italy the CIA station chief there took him to be “an agent of
influence of a foreign government” [7].

In articles written for Commentary and the New Republic, Ledeen argued
in favor of U.S. support for right-wing terrorists (“resistance
forces”) such as UNITA and the Nicaraguan contras, and claimed that
the Soviets had aligned themselves with the Mafia in order to use drug
money to support international terrorism. In the first piece, entitled
“Fighting Back,” Ledeen urged the U.S. government to assassinate
selected leaders of the Sandinista, Cuban, East German, Libyan, and
Palestinian armed forces as a “counter-terrorism” measure [8]. In
“K.G.B. Connection,” after repeating the oft-told tale of the
Bulgarian plot to kill the pope, Ledeen asserted that the Soviets were
working with drug smugglers because they are “alarmingly short of hard
cash these days.” “Yuri Andropov’s old organization, the K.G.B., has
apparently become a major backer of drug smugglers, arms runners, and
terrorists…” [9]. And all of this without a shred of evidence to
support his charges.


Orwell rolls in his grave

Ledeen’s writings on terrorism, as exemplified by the examples above,
are intellectually negligible and entirely opportunistic [10]. His
superior in the government, Noel Koch, who hired him as an expert
consultant on terrorism at the urging of Reagan officials, described
his work on the subject as “transparent crap.” Not only did the head
of SISMI denounce him as an intriguer, but the authors of the Tower
Commission Report concluded that the CIA should permanently terminate
its relationship with Ledeen and his associate, Ghorbanifar. All of
this, however, has not interfered with his status as a terrorism
expert for the U.S. mass media. His connections are still potent, the
right-wing and Israeli lobby are fond of him, he is glib and his
“transparent crap” is therefore acceptable

http://www.eyeranian.net/2003/05/07,54.shtml

And from Yellow Cake and Black Shirts

Michael Ledeen

Yellow Cake and Black Shirts

“We should have been paying attention all along, but particularly since the sadly unsurprising revelation that Italian military intelligence looks to have served as a linchpin in the Niger “Yellow Cake” caper, we would do well to brush up on the strange case of Michael Ledeen

You know Ledeen: arguably Washington’s most influential neoconservative. He’s resident scholar of the senior neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, and regarded widely as one of the world’s leading authorities on intelligence, counter-intelligence and international affairs. From the beginning, and before the beginning, Ledeen has been one of the loudest cheerleaders for the “War on Terror.”

Now, do you know of Italy’s “Strategy of Tension”? It was a campaign of false-flag terror in the late 1970s, waged by outright fascists who enjoyed the patronage of the CIA, the Mafia and far right elements of the Italian State. These were the Gladio Brigades and Licio Gelli’s P2 Lodge, and they intended to discredit the increasingly popular Communist Party, and to ensure it would not take power, by staging terrorist acts in the name of the Left. Their campaign culminated in the Bologna train station bombing of 1980.

Now, do you know where Michael Ledeen was during these years, what he was doing, and with whom he was doing it?

From tompaine.com:

...terrorism has been Ledeen’s bread and butter since at least the late 1970s, when he consulted for Italian military intelligence.

From Asia Times:

Ledeen’s right-wing Italian connections – including alleged ties to the P2 Masonic Lodge that rocked Italy in the early 1980s – have long been a source of speculation and intrigue, but he returned to Washington in 1981 as “anti-terrorism” advisor to the new secretary of state, Al Haig.

Over the next several years, Ledeen used his position as consultant to Haig, the Pentagon and the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan to boost the notion of a global terrorist conspiracy based in the Kremlin, whose KGB pulled the strings of all of the world’s key terrorist groups, especially in the Middle East.

An excerpt from Herman and O’Sullivan’s The “Terrorism” Industry:

In 1980 [Ledeen] entered into a collaboration with Francesco Pazienza, an agent of the Italian secret service (SISMI) and a member of Rome’s extreme right-wing Masonic Lodge, P2 (Propaganda Due), headed by the fascist Licio Gelli. In an Italian criminal court in 1985, Pazienza was judged guilty of political manipulation, forgery, and the protection of criminals and terrorists, among other offenses. Indeed, according to the findings of the court, Pazienza falsified information about the Bologna bombing in order to divert attention away from the real (right-wing) terrorists who had staged the attack.

From Barbara Honegger’s October Surprise:

When the Italian police raided (P2 Lodge founder) Gelli’s home in March 1981, it was Michael Ledeen who, at the instigation of Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger, offered to buy the list of 953 P2 members in an apparent attempt to keep it from becoming public. Henry Kissinger had also reportedly sent Ledeen to Italy to try to squash an investigation into his and Haig’s involvement in the founding of P2.



On the morning of August 2, 1980, a massive bomb since linked to Gelli…exploded in the waiting room of the central train station in Bologna, killing 81 people and injuring 200 others. General Santorito, the chief of Italy’s military intelligence agency, SISMI, who was also reportedly a member of P2, testified in the wake of the bombing that it had been planned by the British-Swiss-American Montecarlo Comite, P2’s “sister” organization based in Monaco. When P2 had come under increasing scrutiny in 1979, grandmaster Licio Gelli had reportedly made his base of operations the Montecarlo Comite…. Not surprisingly, reported members of the Montecarlo Comite are Gelli, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig and Michael Ledeen.

And this assessment, translated from the Italian:

One of the most dangerous of these “bad teachers” is Michael Ledeen, promoter of the the idea of “universal fascism”. These days he does not stop threatening war against Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, and has evidently been chosen once more by the establishment to manipulate institutions and threaten those who oppose his dangerous and wicked madness. On the other hand, Ledeen has a long history of interference in Italy’s strategic choices. During the Moro case he was among those “most suspected” of having misled the enquiries, with the collaboration of the “bretheren” of the P2. It was wondered and it is still wondered why the Italian magistrates do not carry out adequate enquiries about him and his work

And now, from the man himself. Some of Ledeen’s own words, on a leadership trait he admires, from his book Universal Fascism:

In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments, the leader may have to ‘enter into evil.’ This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired and challenging… we are rotten…. It’s true that we can achieve greatness if, and only if, we are properly led.

Back to Italy, for some of his thoughts on the fascist era:

...fascism nevertheless constituted a political revolution in Italy. For the first time, there was an attempt to mobilize the masses and to involve them in the political life of the country.

And on Mussolini himself:

He never had enough confidence in the Italian people to permit them a genuine participation in fascism.

The resemblance between the recent mass murder in Madrid and the Bologna bombing extends, I suspect, well beyond the scale of carnage.

Why do some insist on calling these people neo-fascists? I see nothing new here.
posted by Jeff at 1:02 PM

And on a final, sinister note: Madsen:

“In addition, DSSA shopped around a video of the Jihadist slaying of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, an Italian private security officer, in Iraq. Italian investigators are trying to determine how DSSA got the video of the slaying and whether official levels in the Italian government were involved in the procurement of the video. Carlo Taormina, an MP with the ruling Forza Italia Party, said DSSA was known to top levels of the Italian police and intelligence services.

Bali Bombed Again

Intel Op Jemaah Islamiah Suspected

By Kurt Nimmo
October 1st, 2005


Once again, an explosion has ripped through the Indonesian resort island of Bali, killing at least 23 people. “We think it’s almost certainly a terrorist attack, I doubt that there’s any other explanation for it, you could assume it’s an attack by an organization like Jemiaah Islamiah speaking from experience, but of course at this stage no one’s claimed responsibility for the attack and we have no evidence,” Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer told ABC News. It was almost exactly three years ago (October 14, 2002) “terrorists, allegedly linked to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, blew up a nightclub in the resort town of Kuta Beach in Bali killing 202 people and wounding another 100,” as the Crime Library summarizes. As CNN reported on November 8, 2002, an al-Qaeda message posted on the al-Neda website claimed responsibility for targeting “nightclubs and whorehouses in Indonesia.” It was claimed a local “terrorist” organization, Jemaah Islamiyah, supposedly linked to al-Qaeda, planted the bombs.
“On 30 April 2003, the first charges related to the Bali bombings were made against Amrozi bin Haji Nurhasyim, known as Amrozi, for allegedly buying the explosives and the van used in the bombings,” notes Wikipedia.
On 8 August he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Another participant in the bombing, Imam Samudra, was sentenced to death on 10 September. Amrozi’s brother, Ali Imron, who had expressed remorse for his part in the bombing, was sentenced to life imprisonment on 18 September. A fourth accused, Mukhlas, was sentenced to death on 1 October. All those convicted have said they will appeal, and none of the death sentences have yet been carried out…. On 15 August Riduan Isamuddin, generally known as Hambali, described as the operational chief of Jemaah Islamiyah and as al-Qaeda’s “point man” in Southeast Asia, was arrested in Bangkok. He is in American custody in an undisclosed location, and has not been charged in relation to the Bali bombing or any other crime. It was reported that the United States is reluctant to hand Hambali over to Indonesian authorities in light of the lenient sentence given to Abu Bakar Bashir [an Islamic cleric who is the alleged spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiyah].
It is interesting to note another “al-Qaeda” functionary, Omar al-Faruq, who fingered Bashir and Jemaah Islamiah for a bombing outside the largest mosque in Jakarta in 1999, also disappeared. “Former State Intelligence Coordinating Board (BAKIN) chief A.C. Manulang has said that Kuwaiti citizen Omar Al-Faruq, a terrorist suspect who was arrested in Bogor, West Java, on June 5, 2002 and handed over to the US three days later, is a CIA-recruited agent,” Tempo Interactive reported on September 19, 2002. ‘When Al Faruq finished his assignments, the CIA created a scenario that he had been arrested,’ Manulang told Tempo News Room…. ‘Anti-Islam intelligence agencies committed the bombings in Indonesia. They have been trained for this and they are very organized,” said Manulang.”
It is no secret the Indonesia military has documented links to Islamic terrorist groups, although this is often explained away as simply a few bad apples or the unfortunate connections of “corrupt elements within the military,” as the Sydney Morning Herald put it. Indonesia’s ruthless Army Special Forces, Kopassus, was trained by the CIA (and U.S. Special Operations Forces in psychological operations) and is known for its covert ops (for instance, “Ninja” assassinations; see Peter Dale Scott, Murder in Java: Psychological warfare and the New York Times). Kopassus was also responsible for the murder of over 200,000 people on the island of East Timor.
Moreover, Indonesian intelligence has links to Jemaah Islamiah and other terrorist groups. “The links between JI [Jemaah Islamiah] and Indonesia’s Intelligence Agency (BIN) are acknowledged by the International Crisis Group (ICG),” writes Michel Chossudovsky, who quotes the ICG as follows: “This link [of JI to the BIN] needs to be explored more fully: it does not necessarily mean that military intelligence was working with JI, but it does raise a question about the extent to which it knew or could have found out more about JI than it has acknowledged,” an assertion to which Chossudovsky responds: “The ICG, however, fails to mention that Indonesia’s intelligence apparatus has for more than 30 years been controlled by the CIA.” Suspicion is also cast on General A. M. Hendropriyono, the head of Indonesian intelligence. “The agency and its director, Gen. A. M. Hendropriyono, are well regarded by the United States and other governments,” Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez write for the New York Times (25 November 2002). “But there are still senior intelligence officers here who believe that the C.I.A. was behind the [first Bali] bombing.”
Of course, none of these suspicious connections will be investigated by the corporate media now that a second Bali bombing has occurred. Instead, attention will turn in a predictable and well-scripted direction toward a cast of usual suspects—”al-Qaeda in Indonesia,” Jemaah Islamiah, or a new terrorist formation—as the point here is to keep up the strategy of tension and barrage the public with one nightmarish terrorist incident after another, usually aimed at innocents, non-combatants, tourists, and women and children in Iraq, etc., thus sending a message repeatedly and incessantly: Islam has declared an immoral and psychotic war against the people of America and much of the western world. Our response should be, as Ann Coulter so famously (and disgustingly) explained, to “bomb them and convert them to Christianity,” or at least wreck their societies and culture.
It is too early to speculate on the motivations of the latest Bali bombing. But we can rest assured it will be the same story—crazed Muslims declaring war on infidels wherever they find them and for the usual murderous religious reasons—and al-Qaeda will once again post a video or audio message on the internet. No doubt this claim for responsibility will come over the next few days and the latest outrage and carnage will be laid at the feet of “al-Qaeda,” the database of Mujahedeen organized by the CIA and used in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, and elsewhere. For the neocons, “al-Qaeda” is the best thing since the invention of sliced bread.

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Bali II: Another Elusive Terror Mastermind on the Loose

By Kurt Nimmo
October 2nd, 2005


Azahari bin Husin, said to be the explosives “mastermind” behind the Bali bombings this past weekend, has a very interesting background. He is not your average rural madrassa religious fanatic or “al-Qaeda” goat herder of the sort captured in Afghanistan. Husin is a “former university lecturer and gifted mathematician,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald. “He returned home to obtain his degree, and at the end of the 1980s went to Reading University in England, where he impressed his tutors so much they persuaded him to stay on to complete a doctorate.” Husin’s future was promising as a lecturer at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia at Skudai in the southern state of Johor—and then he suddenly experienced a fanatical religious “epiphany” under the sway of the late Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir, followers of the Darul Islam ideology and co-founders of Pondok Ngruki and eventually Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamic separatist movement supposedly dedicated to the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic state in Southeast Asia.
I say “supposedly” because there are doubts (never mentioned in the western corporate media) about the legitimacy of Jemaah Islamiyah, as I noted in an earlier blog entry (subsequently posted on the Muslim Public Affairs Committee website).
According to Sayed Abdullah, who operates an intelligence services firm in Indonesia, “It is clear that the CIA and the Mossad have infiltrated such organizations [Jemaah Islamiyah, Hamas, and Hezbollah].” Abdullah told Kazi Mahmood of IslamOnline the he believe it “is obvious the CIA and the Mossad, assisted by the Australian Special Action Police (SAP) and the M15 of England, are all working towards undermining Muslim organizations in an attempt to weaken the Muslims globally.”
Abdullah believes the Bali bombing of 2002 was “an operation clearly financed and assisted by the CIA and Mossad, made use of Muslims to carry out the final act…. Those Muslims were not innocent since they took the bait handed over by the CIA and the Mossad to bomb Bali and to avenge against the U.S. war on the Muslims in Afghanistan.”
The Indonesian expert argued said that “to achieve this, the CIA used one of its operatives, Omar Al-Faruq, an Arab living in the U.S. who speaks Arabic and knows a little about Islam and who was sent to Indonesia to infiltrate the so called terrorist groups.
He said that Al-Faruq initially infiltrated the Laskar Jihad, a group of Muslim volunteers fighting for the safeguard of the Maluku’s during the conflict of the Island.
When the Laskar was winded down by its leader, Al-Faruq was sent to join the Mujahideen Council of Indonesia (MMI), created and headed by jailed Indonesian Islamic leader Abu Bakar Basyir, added Sayed Abdullah.
“After he failed to be a member of the MMI and failed to get to Basyir, he decided to work on the followers of Basyir. It is then that he came into contact with some of the Bali bombers and this is how the whole Bali operation was conducted,” according to the Indonesian intelligence expert.
He claimed that Australia, the U.S. and even Taiwan knew that Bali was to be bombed but they did nothing about it.
As noted in yesterday’s entry here, Omar Al-Faruq “was assigned to infiltrate Islamic radical groups and recruit local agents within these groups” for the CIA. “After the CIA obtained complete data on this matter, they then made Al-Faruq disappear. It’s common in intelligence world,” former Indonesian State Intelligence Coordinating Board chief A.C. Manulang told Tempo Interactive in September, 2002.
Azahari bin Husin’s British connection should be examined, especially in light of the revelations that Haroon Rashid Aswat, the so-called mastermind of the 7/7 London Bombings, worked for British Intelligence, as noted by former Justice Department prosecutor and terror expert John Loftus on, of all places, Fox News. Steve Watson wrote for Infowars on August 2:
John Loftus went on to spell out that British Intelligence and the US dept of Justice had protected Haroon Rashid Aswat: “Back in 1999 he came to America. The Justice Department wanted to indict him in Seattle because him and his buddy were trying to set up a terrorist training school in Oregon… we’ve just learned that the headquarters of the US Justice Department ordered the Seattle prosecutors not to touch Aswat… apparently Aswat was working for British intelligence…”
This information is startling and again highlights how Al Qaeda exists as an organized body only where the intelligence services have created, funded and employed it. Loftus points out that several weeks before the London Bombings, Aswat was again located by the South African Intel agency but again allowed to slip away, this time to London:
“He was a British intelligence plant. So all of a sudden he disappears. He’s in South Africa. We think he’s dead; we don’t know he’s down there. Last month the South African Secret Service come across the guy. He’s alive… the Brits know that the CIA wants to get a hold of Haroon. So what happens? He takes off again, goes right to London. He isn’t arrested when he lands, he isn’t arrested when he leaves… He’s on the watch list. The only reason he could get away with that was if he was working for British intelligence. He was a wanted man.”
In similar fashion, Azahari bin Husin managed to elude capture in late 2003. Indonesian security officials “say Indonesian police were close to catching him in late 2003 in a swoop on Pekanbaru, capital of Sumatra’s Riau province, and opposite Singapore,” explains the Sydney Morning Herald. “Azahari was there, but slipped through the dragnet unrecognized.” He was able to do this because he is “[l]ong-haired and lean-faced” and bears “little resemblance to the one photograph police have of him.” Obviously, Husin shares the same mercurial nature as Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
It would seem the Brits and the United States have greasy fingers when it comes to capturing potentially dangerous Islamic fanatics and al-Qaeda operatives. In fact, they are simply recycling trusted intel operatives (or their painstakingly engineered reputations).
Of course, considering “al-Qaeda” (appropriately earning the moniker “al-CIA-duh”) is a documented CIA-ISI-MI6 asset, the “escape” of key “terrorists” such as Azahari bin Husin is not only logical, it is mandatory if state-sponsored terrorism is to be used as a form of psychological warfare against unwitting populations in need of manipulation (since most normal people recoil from the prospect of forever war and need to be reminded of the specter of terrorism). Since we have no evidence Bin Husin actually exists—he was last seen prior to the first Bali bombing—the corporate media, regurgitating spook generated mythologies, is now free to turn the former mathematician and university lecturer into a world-class terrorist on par with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Like Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein, Azahari bin Husin lives on as an effective bogeyman, an effective (if illusive) villain in a constellation of Islamic villains, an evasive apparition one step ahead of the law and thus forever a possible threat—or at least a threat until our rulers decide they no longer have use for him (as they apparently no longer have use for Osama bin Laden now that nine eleven is established folklore and the irrefutable foundation of the supposed war on terrorism).

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Foreknowledge of the Bali Terror Bombings?
According to Indonesian & Australian reports


by Michel Chossudovsky

October 2, 2005
GlobalResearch.ca


Queensland's Premier Peter Beattie couldn't resist a joke. He leaned towards the microphone and said:

"We might announce a coup. Men and women of Australia...". (Canberra Summit Press Conference, 27 September 2005).


The October 1st Bali bombing occurred a few days after a special meeting of The Council of Australian Governments in Canberra, during which the State premiers agreed to the adoption of far-reaching antiterrorist measures. The day following the Canberra Summit, the Australian media warned, based on reliable sources, that a terrorist attack was looming.

Two distinct sources, Indonesia late August and Australia, late September, point to an "imminent" terror attack.

1. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono warns that terrorist attacks "may happen in September or October"

In late August, the President of Indonesia warned in no uncertain terms that JI was preparing an attack:

"According to an AP report of 29 August; President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono "had ordered increased surveillance. 'We know the terrorists cells are still active, they are still hiding, recruiting, networking, trying to find new funding and even planning ... for another strike,' he said. 'Last night, I instructed the security minister, the head of the intelligence agency and the police chief to conduct more active operations into the detection and prevention (of the) act of terrorism that may happen this year ... in the months of September and October.'" (ABC Australia 29 August 2005, italics added)

A related report published by the Indonesian newspaper Banjarmasin Post's website on 2 September refers explicitly to Jemaah Islamiyah's "Moneyman" Noordin Mohamed Top, prime suspect in the October 1 Bali bomb attack:

"Noordin M. Top, the fugitive for several bombings in Indonesia has apparently been staying at the home of one of his associates in Yogyakarta. Moh Ridwan, the Head of Wonogiri village, Jatirejo, Yogyakarta, told the press this on Thursday (1 September).

According to him, around the end of July 2005, Noordin arrived at the home of his friend, Joko Tri Hermanto, to take part in Shalat Isya [evening prayers]. Recently Joko was arrested by members of the Police Headquarters Detachment 88 Anti-Terrorist Unit. During the arrest officials found ten kilograms of TNT 500 rounds of 38 calibre ammunition. During questioning Joko Tri admitted that Noordin had stayed at his home....

Ridwan said that Noordin and Dr Azahari were the Police Headquarters' number one fugitives, but they were not in the house when it was raided. [passage omitted]

Separately, intelligence expert Dynno Chressbon, viewed that there were indications that there would be another bigger terrorist act. Besides finding something looking like a bomb [in a hotel in Kuta, Bali, on 31 August], around ten days ago, one of the Al-Qa'idah spokesmen, who made the statement on the Al-Jazeera TV station warning of the attack on the WTC [World Trade Centre], said that Al-Qa'idah would carry out an attack on one of the tourist cities in the Asia region.

"I predict that this will possibly be in Thailand and in Indonesia, namely Bali. Therefore, if 10 kg of TNT were found in Yogyakarta, it could be to supply something in Bali, Ambon and other areas."(Banjarmasin Post website, in Indonesian, 2 September 2005, translation BBC Monitoring, italics added))

2. Australian Media: "Terror Attack Looming"

Three days before the Bali bombings of October 1st, the Australian press published several reports pointing to an imminent terrorist. These reports were based on statements of the Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Mr. Aldo Borgu:

"the Indonesia-based terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah could try to carry out another major attack soon and Australians could again be its target, an advisory group has warned."

Australian Strategic Policy Institute terrorism specialist Aldo Borgu said JI had tried to carry out a major attack every 12 months and another could be due soon.

The organization was behind the Bali nightclub bombings in 2002, the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003 and the 2004 Australian embassy bombing.

Mr. Borgu said that despite the damage JI had suffered it was still capable of carrying out annual attacks.

"There is still a possibility that one might be in the offing some time soon," he said.

The institute's view contradicts that of former foreign minister Gareth Evans, who now heads the International Crisis Group. Mr. Evans said this week that JI had been smashed and no longer posed a serious threat. (Terror attack looming: alert, The Age (Australia), 29 September 2005 italics added))

Mr. Aldo Borgu has close links to Australia's intelligence and Homeland Security community. He was previously senior adviser in the Australian Ministry of Defense and strategic analyst for Australia's Defense Intelligence Organisation (DIO) Reproduced at the foot of this article is the transcript of the Australian ABC TV interview with Mr. Aldo Borgu

The Canberra Counter-Terrorism Summit

The October 1st Bali bombing occurred barely a few days after the holding of a special meeting of The Council of Australian Governments in Canberra, during which the State premiers agreed to the adoption of far-reaching antiterrorist measures.

Leader of the federal opposition Labor Party, Kim Beazley, made his pitch on Sunday, suggesting that state police should be given the power to lock down entire suburbs if they suspect or fear a terrorist act.

The federal attorney-general, Philip Ruddock, has been dismissive of the plan. The president of the Australian Council of Civil Liberties, Terry O'Gorman, is alarmed, saying federal, state and territory leaders appear to be attempting to outbid each other. He says he is worried basic human rights will be abandoned. "In essence they're getting out there thumping their chests and say look at us, look what we're proposing," he said.

But premier of the state of New South Wales, Morris Iemma, says the alarm is misplaced. "I believe it is possible for us to be tough on terror and at the same time protect people's rights." he said. All five premiers say they are confident of a good outcome at Sunday's meeting. (ABC Radio Report, 26 September 2005)

On the 27th of September, at the conclusion of the Summit, Howard secured the unanimous agreement of all six premiers and two chief ministers "to the biggest changes to Australia's counter-terrorism regime since 2001":

Although state and territory leaders at the Council of Australian Government meeting won several concessions from the Prime Minister -- notably the 10-year sunset clause on new legislation including police powers authorizing preventative detention for up to 14 days -- in the end Howard achieved everything of substance he wanted.

"The laws that we have agreed to today are in fact draconian laws but they are necessary laws to protect Australians," admitted Queensland Premier Peter Beattie after the states signed up. "If it wasn't for the threat of terrorism, we would never agree to such laws as we have here." (The Weekend Australia, 1 Oct 2005)

"The deal was reached after Prime Minister John Howard agreed to a 10-year sunset clause and a review of the legislation after five years. The laws includes allowing police to hold terrorism suspects for up to 14 days and broad stop, search and question powers. There will also be greater use of security cameras and Australians could be fined if they leave their baggage unattended at airports. After the meeting, Mr. Howard said they are unusual laws for unusual times.

"If we weren't living in a terrorist environment none of us would be here," he said.

"They're not the sort of things any of us, whether we are liberal or labor, would want to be proposing in an environment where we didn't face this shadowy elusive and lethal enemy." (ABC Asia Pacific Report, 28 Sept 2005)

The significance of the Canberra summit was reviewed in an incisive article by Michael Head, published in late August by the World Socialist Web Site, shortly after the announcement by Prime Minister Howard of the holding of the Canberra Summit:

Over the past five years, the Howard government has, with Labor’s parliamentary and political support, already used the “war on terror” as a pretext to introduce a barrage of laws, each granting unprecedented powers to the federal government and its security agencies.

“Terrorism” has been made punishable by life imprisonment and defined so widely that it covers many traditional forms of political dissent. Cabinet has been given the power to outlaw organisations that it labels terrorist. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has been authorised to secretly detain and interrogate people without trial, even if they are not suspected of links to terrorism. Terrorist trials can be held behind closed doors. The military can be called-out to combat “domestic violence,” that is, civil unrest.

Now further inroads into democratic rights are being prepared. Howard has nominated new items for the summit agenda: counter-terrorism legal frameworks, preventing advocacy of terrorism, surface transport security, identity security and “enhancing community understanding of and engagement in the national counter-terrorism arrangements”.

Under the heading of “legal frameworks,” Howard and his Attorney-General Philip Ruddock have foreshadowed an array of moves. These include extending to possibly three months the time that anyone can be detained for interrogation by ASIO. Such detentions are currently limited to one week, with ASIO able to apply for extensions. Those detained are prohibited from notifying anyone, except for a lawyer. If the detention period were extended, it would mean that people could disappear into ASIO’s custody for up to three months without trace.

Ruddock has also ordered a review of his powers to ban organisations as “terrorist.” This follows an ASIO recommendation that he did not have grounds to outlaw Hizb ut-Tahrir, a fundamentalist group that advocates the non-violent establishment of an Islamic state, or caliphate, throughout the Middle East. The proscription power is currently limited to organisations that the attorney-general is “satisfied on reasonable grounds” are “directly or indirectly engaged in, preparing, planning, assisting in or fostering the doing of a terrorist act (whether or not the terrorist act has occurred or will occur)”. (Michael Head, wsws.org, 27 August 2005).

In an interview on Oct 2nd, Prime Minister Howard suggested that:

"there is still the risk of a domestic attack in this country and we have to prepare for it and we have to understand, based on the London experience that you can have an attack from within in the most unsuspecting of circumstances"

The October 1st Bali bombings have served to dispel the concerns by human rights organizations regarding the ongoing repeal of the Rule of Law in Australia. While the new counter-terrorism legislation is yet to be formally enacted, it is supported by both the government and the opposition Labor party.




Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), He is the author of a America's "War on Terrorism", Global Research, September 2005.


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ANNEX: News Reports



Report says JI continues to be a significant threat

ABC Net. Australian TV,

The World Today - Wednesday, 28 September , 2005 12:14:00 Reporter: Tanya Nolan

Transcript

TANYA NOLAN: It was only last year that the Federal Government, in its White Paper on Terrorism, identified Jemaah Islamiyah as the principal terrorist threat to Australia.Former foreign minister Gareth Evans was yesterday declaring that JI was all but dead. But a new report out today says that as the largest and most coordinated terrorist group in South East Asia, JI continues to be a significant threat, and regards Australians as legitimate targets.

And the report released by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, "Local Jihad: Radical Islam and Terrorism in Indonesia", concludes that Australia lacks a coherent long-term strategy to combat the threat posed by Jihadist terrorism.

Aldo Borgu is co-author of the report and Program Director of Operations and Capability at the Institute, and he's been a senior adviser to the Minister for Defence, and a strategic analyst in the Defence Intelligence Organisation.

Aldo Borgu joins me from our Canberra studios.

Aldo Borgu, thank you for your time.

Firstly, your report is very timely for a number of reasons, namely in the context of the new raft of terrorism laws that was agreed to yesterday.

Now, the Prime Minister himself acknowledges these laws are unusual. Peter Beattie calls them draconian even, but given that JI has been identified as the principal terrorist threat to both Australia and the region, will they be effective?

ALDO BORGU: Well they may well be effective. Certainly you can't look at those sorts of laws having an effect on JI, because the primary terrorist threat that JI poses to Australia isn't actually within Australia, it's actually within the region.

They've certainly undertaken a number of attacks against Australia within Indonesia. They've still got aspects of their groups operating within the Philippines. So I probably wouldn't see the domestic laws applicable to them, but obviously we've got to look at a much wider threat as well.

TANYA NOLAN: Should we be alarmed about impinging further on civil liberties, or more concerned about the terrorist threat?

ALDO BORGU: Well it obviously depends on your perception of the threat. You know, we've obviously got to be at the point where we don't allow terrorism to define our daily lives and the way that we conduct our lives.

The bottom line is that with these new laws, I mean, they're certainly not as draconian as say the British or the United States laws through the Patriot Act that they've put together, but we've got to bear in mind that the laws themselves will only affect a very small proportion of the Australian population.

Most Australians will live their lives without even knowing that the laws exist.

The problems that you do come up against, however, is how the security agencies actually apply those laws to the other one per cent or so of the people. And how those laws are implemented, because we could actually find that we end up feeding the threat as much as we are combating it.

TANYA NOLAN: Now there are reports today that ASIO has identified up to 800 Muslim extremists living in Australia, that would appear to sharply raise the spectre of a home grown terrorist attack, though, wouldn't it?

ALDO BORGU: Based on that information, yes. Obviously the Government's saying that you know, the number's highly speculative.

It depends as well though on what your definition of an extremist is. An extremist can be a person that just basically has, you know, an extreme ideology, without necessarily wanting to conduct acts of violence.

I think one of the things that you're probably having at the moment is that the definition of an extremist has been widened after the July 7 bombings in London.

You know, we had numbers then of 50 to 60 to 70 people that we were keeping an eye on. Obviously we've actually defined a wider definition of what an extremist and what a potential terrorist might be.

TANYA NOLAN: Well in your report today, you urged governments to go back one step and redefine the starting point for a counter-terrorism strategy by providing exactly that, a clear definition of what exactly we're fighting – the tactic of terrorism or the ideology of radical Islam.

What's the danger in not doing that?

ALDO BORGU: Well, certainly the major danger is that unless you clearly define or understand what you're fighting you might develop the wrong strategies.

A case in point is that as part of waging an ideological conflict, a battle of ideas to stop future generations of terrorists from arising entails liaison involvement with the Muslim community.

Now, one of the ways that you can actually combat terrorists is actually through engaging with the fundamentalist aspects of the Islamic community, sort of the more extreme, but who don't necessarily believe in violence.

However, the problem is, is if you view radical Islam as the enemy, then you're far less likely to actually engage with those more radical elements to try to combat the actual threat of physical violence and terrorism.

TANYA NOLAN: So what do you see as the principal threat to Australia? Is it the ideology of radical Islam, or is it terrorism?

ALDO BORGU: I think we're more concerned with the actual tactic of terrorism. If you look at a lot of the Government's statements to date, or certainly in the past, they've been more concerned with the actual use of terrorism against Australia and Australian interests.

But lately you've been getting a few more elements in ministerial speeches and some documents that point to that we're concerned about "extremism", whatever that might actually be defined as, and that we're actually following a lot of the concerns that the United States has, which is far more concerned with the ideology than with the tactic.

So that's one of the reasons why we think the Government just needs to be clear in its own mind, let alone in terms of how it actually explains these policies to the Australian public.

TANYA NOLAN: And you argue that Australia's involvement in the global war on terror can actually distort that clarification of what it is we're fighting – that the war on terror might not be applicable to the primary terrorist threat, which is JI.

ALDO BORGU: Well certainly I don't see the campaign against terrorism, against JI in Indonesia as being part of the US global war on terror, and I think that's one of the reasons why we've been more successful in combating JI than say we have against combating al Qaeda more globally, precisely because the US isn't involved.

It's not directly involved in Indonesia, from both a perception or a reality point of view, because in some cases, as we've seen in Iraq, that actually ends up feeding the threat more than anything else and I think we have to give the Indonesian Government a lot more credit and patience in terms of how it's actually been dealing with the threat, because it's been more successful than a lot of other countries have.

TANYA NOLAN: And you say that this terrorism threat can't be separated from the future stability of the region, and that even the fight in combating JI can't actually be fought from Australia or by Australia.

ALDO BORGU: Certainly Australia can't defeat JI as a group. The only country that can do that is Indonesia, and the only government that can do that is the Indonesian Government.

One of the concerns I think we have is that with a rising factionalism with JI, we may well see the group focussing more on internal instability and communal conflict within Indonesia, and in many respects that's a greater threat to Australia's national interests than directly attack…targeting Australian citizens and individuals?

TANYA NOLAN: Haven't we been doing a lot though, to help Indonesia develop its intelligence and police capabilities?

ALDO BORGU: We have. Government's sort of done a number of measures – setting up a law enforcement centre in Jakarta, a sort of jointly funded by us. We've done a lot of work, obviously, in the aftermath of the Bali bombings with forensics, helping them to track down, jail and convict a number of the bombers, but there's always more that can be done.

And certainly one of the challenges is to look into the future in terms of the future types of terrorist threats, particularly given the fact that Indonesia's likely to face a more diverse range of threats and new groups that arise over the years, particularly as JI decreases its capabilities and they're the sorts of things that we need to do, have an evolving strategy in order to deal with an evolving threat.

TANYA NOLAN: Well one of the more controversial recommendations that you make is this idea of red teaming to be introduced into terrorism analysis, that we need analysts who start to think like terrorists so that they can challenge the assumption of the policy makers.

That would take a great deal of political courage, one would imagine?

ALDO BORGU: It would, because obviously part of the problem with dealing with terrorism is a lot of it is couched in politics and emotion. And I mean we need to deal with the threat and the issue in a hard, analytical manner.

Red teaming's been used, certainly was used in the Cold War by the United States and other countries, where you'd get groups of analysts who were trained to think like Russians, like Soviets in terms of that they'd actually provide an enemy you could war game an exercise against, and they'd also provide input into the development of policy.

Part of the big problem that we're facing at the moment, and you hear it time and time again from analysts, commentators and policy makers is, they can't understand why people would blow themselves up, why they would take innocent lives like this. Well, part of the problem is we've got to understand them, we've got to make the effort.

Understanding them doesn't mean that you sympathise with them, but if you really want to combat the threat, then understanding them is actually the first pre-condition to doing so.

TANYA NOLAN: Aldo Borgu, we could talk forever, but we'll have to leave it there. Thank you very much for your time today.

Aldo Borgu is from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and co-author of the report Local Jihad: Radical Islam and Terrorism in Indonesia.

Copyright ABC Australia 2005


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Terror expert warns of JI attack
By Max Blenkin


The Courier Mail, Australia

28 Sept. 20005

THE Indonesian terror group behind the Bali bombing could be planning another attack soon, an Australian terror expert said today.

Jemaah Islamiah (JI) appeared to be undergoing a split but its hardline elements remained dangerous, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) program director Aldo Borgu said.

JI had been hard hit in the post-Bali bombing crackdown but it could still carry out terror attacks, he said.

"But, importantly, it's still got the capability ... to undertake annual attacks," he said.

"There is still a possibility that one might be in the offing some time soon."




The al-Qaeda-linked JI bombed two Kuta nightclubs in October 2002 killing 202 people, including 88 Australians.

It was also behind the Jakarta Marriott Hotel attack in August 2003 which killed 11 people, and the Australian embassy attack in September last year which also killed 11 people.

The dates indicate an operational cycle of about 12 months.

In an ASPI report on terrorism in Indonesia, Mr Borgu and Australian National University Indonesia expert Greg Fealy noted that JI, founded in 1993, was South-East Asia's largest and most sophisticated terror network.

But evidence was emerging of a internal split between hardline elements who favoured mass casualty attacks and the central leadership who favoured a return to the original vision of achieving an Islamic state by more gradual means.

Should JI's non-bombers emerge on top, they would probably return to their 25- to 30-year plan for an Islamic state using preaching, education and military training to defend against attacks from infidel forces, Dr Fealy said.

"However, there is a risk here. Once you give people military training in how to make bombs and do assassinations, they may not be patient enough to wait for the realisation of your 30-year plan," he said.

"They may want to go out and do something next month. They may well be very angry and alienated people.

"JI is becoming less of a lethal threat. The threat is now in other kinds of networks that the bombers have moved to. They are recruiting from groups who have been closely involved in the Muslim-Christian conflicts in places like Maluku and Central Sulawesi."

Dr Fealy said this would mean more scattered terror networks.

"They (security organisations) have to be open to the possibility that people they've never heard of before can in a very short space of time be recruited to an operation and become the foot soldiers in a major terrorism attack," he said.

Mr Borgu said future JI operations could have more to do with sectarian and communal conflict and that could more directly threaten Indonesian national stability.

"One of the things that has characterised JI over the last five years is that it hasn't directly attacked the Indonesian state," he said.

"If that does change, in some respects it could actually be a greater challenge to Australia's interests that directly targeting individual Australian citizens."


Copyright The Courier Mail, Australia, 2005


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Australian Associated Press

September 27, 2005, Tuesday

PM Howard scores a coup

By Paul Osborne

While the premiers waited for the prime minister to arrive for a press conference after their counter- terrorism summit in Canberra, Queensland's Peter Beattie couldn't resist a joke.

He leaned towards the microphone and said: "We might announce a coup. Men and women of Australia...".

But it is Prime Minister John Howard who has scored a political coup after convincing the states and territories to back his tough new anti-terrorism measures.

The only concessions Mr Howard made was allowing a review of the laws within five years and putting a 10-year use-by date on them.

After just two and a half hours, which included a security briefing by the nation's spy chiefs, the premiers and Mr Howard emerged from the terror summit amid much back-slapping and congratulations.

There was no sign of the traditional slugfest or walkouts which often mark these gatherings.

It must have been hard to resist putting Australia's toughest anti-terrorism powers in place after a briefing from ASIO chief Paul O'Sullivan and Office of National Assessments head Peter Varghese.

ACT chief minister Jon Stanhope who, before the summit, spoke out the strongest of any of the leaders about civil liberties concerns, was obviously convinced by details of the potential threats in Australia.

Asked how decisive the words of the two spy chiefs were, Mr Stanhope said: "They were significant ... there are people of enormous concern (in Australia)."

Mr Howard has successfully marginalised federal Labor by harnessing the goodwill and support of the state ALP leaders.

Opposition Leader Kim Beazley, whose personal approval and party support fell sharply in polling released today, has been painted into a corner.

To oppose such reforms in an atmosphere charged with fear over secretive cells plotting suicide bombings would be politically naive.

Mr Beazley's options are to back the changes or outbid them, which runs its own risk, with some in the party concerned about the impact tougher laws have on civil liberties.

But even the government is not immune to a backlash.

The sight of more blue uniforms in airports, security cameras in train stations, fines for leaving bags unattended and being stopped and questioned at anti-war rallies could lead to concerns about the country turning into a police state.

But a terror attack on Australian soil could change all that.

Copyright AAP, 2005


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Other relevant articles, courtesy Freedomfiles

October 1, 2005

Bombs Explode on Bali, President Calls Urgent Security Meeting
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aeY7AtLg9jeU&refer=top_world_news

September 30, 2005

President Urges People to Maintain Law and Order
http://www.antara.co.id/en/seenws/?id=6619

September 29, 2005

Terror Attack Looming: Alert (Jemaah Islamiah)
http://www.theage.com.au/news/war-on-terror/terror-attack-looming-alert/2005/09/28/1127804547891.html

September 28, 2005

Terror Expert Warns of Jemaah Islamiah attack
http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,16749920%255E1702,00.html

Jemaah Islamiah: Principal terrorist threat to Australia
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2005/s1470265.htm

No evidence that a weakened JI reduces terror threat
http://au.news.yahoo.com/050928/19/w4pq.html

Australia to impose Draconian Anti-Terror Laws
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3425364a12,00.html

Indonesia Braces for Fuel Price Protests
http://www.voanews.com/english/2005-09-28-voa15.cfm

Extensive Police Deployment In Indonesia For Protests
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7000306009

September 27, 2005

Indonesian Minister of Defense: Bali Doesn’t Need Special Autonomy
http://www.tempointeractive.com/hg/nasional/2005/09/27/brk,20050927-67171,uk.html

Indonesia says Asian Al Qaeda arm Weakened
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theworld/2005/September/theworld_September732.xml §ion=theworld

Appalling Anti-Terrorism Laws Draw Criticism (Australia)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200509/s1469669.htm

September 26, 2005

Concerns about human rights ahead of terrorism summit in Australia
http://www.abc.net.au/ra/news/stories/s1468318.htm

September 21, 2005

Taking aim at Indonesian Terrorists
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/GI21Ae01.html

September 16, 2005

Indonesia: Implications for U.S. Interests
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0509/S00296.htm

September 10, 2005

Indonesia plans to rise defense budget next year
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-09/10/content_3471129.htm

September 09, 2005

US-Indonesian Military Relations almost back in step
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/GI09Ae03.html

September 07, 2005

Decentralization remains a delicate issue in Bali
http://www.thejakartapost.com/yesterdaydetail.asp?fileid=20050907.D10

August 30, 2005

Indonesia Warns of Terror Attack
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=700&id=1862132005

August 29, 2005

Philippine, Indonesia Govts Warn of Possible Terrorist Attacks
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aBCXEIMNfB8A&refer=top_world_news

Indonesia on alert for new attacks
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,16421235-38196,00.html
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-08/29/content_3417983.htm

SAARC Summit in Kathmandu, Discuss Terror Threats
http://www.outlookindia.com/pti_news.asp?id=319676

US Training Southeast Asian Security Forces to Combat Terrorism
http://www.sierratimes.com/05/08/29/205_188_116_14_95158.htm

August 26, 2005

Al Qaeda targeting Australia's region: judge
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2005/s1447325.htm

Beware Asia, Al Qaeda is out there
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1211661.cms

Asian cities in al-Qaeda sights
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/08/26/1124563029376.html?from=top5

The London Bombings of 7/7 and the Aftermath

"I was in tube bomb carriage - and survived"

CAMBRIDGE dancer Bruce Lait has spoken of his miraculous escape when a bomb exploded just yards away from him in a Tube train carriage.

The 32-year-old was knocked out by the blast and awoke to a terrible scene of devastation in the underground tunnel near London's Aldgate East station.
So lucky: Bruce recovers in hospital
Mr Lait, who teaches dance in Cambridge, believes he and his dance partner Crystal Main were the only passengers in the carriage who survived the blast without serious injury - even though they were sitting nearest to where the bomb detonated.

When he came to, there was a body lying on top of him and he was surrounded by the dead and injured. But incredibly, the only wounds the dance coach sustained were facial lacerations and a perforated eardrum.

"I feel extremely, extremely lucky," he said.

The explosion happened just after Mr Lait and Ms Main, 23, got on the train at Liverpool Street on their way to the South Bank for a rehearsal.

He recalled that the carriage had about 20-25 people in it, from all walks of life, and aged from their teens to over 60.

"I remember an Asian guy, there was a white guy with tracksuit trousers and a baseball cap, and there were two old ladies sitting opposite me," he said.

"We'd been on there for a minute at most and then something happened. It was like a huge electricity surge which knocked us out and burst our eardrums. I can still hear that sound now," he said.

The impact of the blast made him pass out. As he came to, he wondered whether he was alive or dead.

"We were right in the carriage where the bomb was. I was knocked out. I did not know what was going on.

"I wondered if I was dead or not. I said to myself, you can't be dead because your brain is having conscious thoughts, so concentrate hard. I was telling myself 'wake up Bruce, wake up'."
Royal visit: At Royal London Hospital
Disorientated, he only gradually realised where he was and what had happened.

"When I woke up and looked around I saw darkness, smoke and wreckage. It took a while to realise where I was and what was going on, then my first concern was for Crystal.

"She was okay but she was in shock because she was trying to deal with the person on top of her who had massive head injuries. We have just found out that this person died," said Mr Lait, who lives in Suffolk.

He too was afraid to move because there was a seriously injured woman lying on top of him.

"I realised someone was lying on top of me. I tried not to move her because I didn't know if she was still alive, or I could have made it worse. This person also died, while on top of me."

At the same time, he slowly tried to work out whether he or Crystal had been injured.

"I thought if I can wiggle my toes I'm okay, and I could, and I asked Crystal to do the same."

Describing the scene as they waited for help, he said: "It was just the most awful scene of death and there were body parts everywhere. There was something next to me. I was trying not to look. I couldn't figure out what it was."

When paramedics arrived, they confirmed that the woman on top of him was dead and carefully moved her body. Mr Lait said the middle-aged woman had blonde curly hair, was dressed in black, and could have been a businesswoman.

He and Crystal were helped out of the carriage. As they made their way out, a policeman pointed out where the bomb had been. It was like a huge electricity surge which knocked us out and burst our eardrums.

Tube survivor Bruce Lait

"The policeman said 'mind that hole, that's where the bomb was'. The metal was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train. They seem to think the bomb was left in a bag, but I don't remember anybody being where the bomb was, or any bag," he said.
They were led through the tunnel to the platform at Aldgate, which was just a few hundred yards away, and taken out of the station to wait for an ambulance.

Mr Lait was taken to the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, where he was visited by the Queen on Friday.

He said: "They asked would I mind if my name were put forward and I said I'd love to meet the Queen, even if the circumstances weren't ideal."

Sitting with his parents, Pat and Tom, Mr Lait told the Queen as she stood at his bedside: "I'm very thankful to still be here."

He said of Her Majesty: "She just seemed very nice and concerned, she seemed very genuine."

Now back at home, he has been trying to recover from the ordeal, with the help of friends and family.

Mr Lait, who teaches the Latin formation team XS, based in Cambridge, and the Cambridge Dancers' Club, said he has been moved by people's care and consideration.
On the floor: Bruce & dance partner Crystal, who was also on the train
"I've had people who know me phone me from all over the world and ask if I am alright. Those pictures of me and the Queen have gone all over the world."

And he said the terrible experience has given him a new outlook on life.

"It has made me realise how important life is, and that we only get one life, and we've got to be happy with what we've got in our lives."

Reflecting on the ordeal, he said: "Out of that whole carriage, I think Crystal and I were the only ones who were not seriously injured, and I think we were nearest the bomb.

"It makes me thank Him up there. I'm not overly religious but I'm not a disbeliever. I pray now and again. Something like this has just made me think, 'thank you Lord'."

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


London Bombings: Cover Story Mutation Continues

London bombing story riddled with holes


by Kurt Nimmo

July 18, 2005
Another Day in the Empire


It should not come as a surprise Osama Nazir ratted out Shahzad Tanweer. Nazir, described as a “key al-Qaeda operative,” is locked up in Lahore, Pakistan, accused of killing Christians and participating in a failed attempt to assassinate Pervez Musharraf. Now we are told Shahzad Tanweer, supposedly one of the London “suicide bombers,” traveled to Pakistan to meet with Nazir. “Tanweer is believed to have visited a radical religious school, run by a banned Sunni Muslims militant group, while on a trip to Pakistan,” reports CTV (let’s not forget these “radical religious schools,” or madrassas, were funded by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI). It makes perfect sense because Tanweer engaged in “relentless reading of the Quran and daily prayers became almost an obsession,” according to the Associated Press, and more important he was “withdrawn and increasingly angry over the war in Iraq.” Bingo! Here we have the perfect suicide bomber—a Muslim fanatic with an anger management problem. As for Osama Nazir, he will say whatever British intelligence want him to say—his Pakistani jailers are probably not feeding him Chicken Makhani, sipping tea, and playing Double Trumps with him. It’s no secret Pakistan has one of the worst human rights records in the world and political prisoners are routinely tortured.
Now we have Magdy el-Nashar, arrested in Egypt, who we are told is an al-Qaeda chemist. “El-Nashar, who studied at North Carolina State and Leeds University, was being interrogated by Egyptian authorities,” reports the Guardian, in other words they are torturing a confession out of him. “What we expect to find at some stage is that there is a clear al-Qaida link, a clear al-Qaida approach, because the four men who are dead, who we believe are the bombers, are in the category of foot soldiers,” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair explained. No doubt, after el-Nashar’s testicles are shocked with a field telephone battery, he will provide the necessary background information on this “clear al-Qaida link.” Since forensic evidence is required to pedal the story el-Nashar served as an al-Qaeda chemist in Leeds, a “highly volatile explosive—acetone peroxide—has been discovered in a house in Leeds thought to have been used as a bomb-making factory,” according to the Scotsman. “The home-made explosives found in Leeds are similar to those used in other al-Qaida-linked attacks. They were also used by shoe-bomber Richard Reid.” I was under the impression Reid used a “very, very sophisticated” plastic explosive (PETN-based material), but now we are told acetone peroxide (or triacetone triperoxide) was used. “This is a shocking development in the sense that earlier ideas about commercial or military grade explosive being used in the bombs themselves would therefore seem to be wrong,” notes a “security source” quoted by the Scotsman. In other words, since it is dangerous for the cover story to have any link to military technology (and thus a link possibly leading back to military intelligence), a new story has emerged: an “al-Qaeda chemist” mixed up the explosives in a kitchen sink in the Burley area of Leeds (the explosive mix, as the Times Online tells us, is nicknamed Mother of Satan).

It is amazing how quickly details about the suspects (patsies) have emerged and how quickly the police have stacked up “evidence” against the conveniently dead and blasted to smithereens suspects, leading us to the conclusion al-Qaeda consists or rank amateurs. Magdy el-Nashar was on a security watch and yet “he was not put under surveillance, as he was not regarded as being of sufficiently high risk,” according to the Times Online. Meanwhile, in the United States, members of the innocuous Green Party are put on security risk lists at airports. Most of the London bombing cover story is riddled with holes you could drive a Mack truck through and yet our acquiescent corporate media never bothers to mention these problems or the highly suspicious tweaking of the story.

But never mind. Booga-booga. Rest assured the governments of Britian and the United States are dogged in their attempts to protect us from al-Qaeda terr’ists, never mind those terrorists were assembled, trained, and funded by the CIA, MI5 and MI6, and Pakistan’s ISI.

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


London Underground Bombing 'Exercises' Took Place at Same Time as Real Attack
Culpability cover scenario echoes 9/11 wargames

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet | Updated July 13 2005

UPDATE: London Underground Exercises and the Magically Exploding Terrorists: Important Questions

A consultancy agency with government and police connections was running an exercise for an unnamed company that revolved around the London Underground being bombed at the exact same times and locations as happened in real life on the morning of July 7th.

On a BBC Radio 5 interview that aired on the evening of the 7th, the host interviewed Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, which bills itself as a 'crisis management' advice company, better known to you and I as a PR firm.

Peter Power was a former Scotland Yard official, working at one time with the Anti Terrorist Branch.

Power told the host that at the exact same time that the London bombings were taking place, his company was running a 1,000 person strong exercise which drilled the London Underground being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life.

The transcript is as follows.

POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.

Click here for a clip of this dialogue. Click here for a longer clip where the comments can be heard in their full context.

The fact that the exercise mirrored the exact locations and times of the bombings is light years beyond a coincidence. Power said the drill focused around 'simultaneous bombings'. At first the bombings were thought to have been spread over an hour, but the BBC reports just today that the bombings were in fact simultaneous.



Mr. Power (pictured above) and Visor Consultants need not have been 'in on the bombing' or anything of that nature for this to be of importance. The British government or one of their private company offshoots could have hired Visor to run the exercise for a number of purposes.

We are not suggesting that Mr. Power had any knowledge of the real purpose of the exercise, and the open shock he exclaims in relating the story underlines this.

The exercise fulfils several different goals. It acts as a cover for the small compartamentalized government terrorists to carry out their operation without the larger security services becoming aware of what they're doing, and, more importantly, if they get caught during the attack or after with any incriminating evidence they can just claim that they were just taking part in the exercise.

This is precisely what happened on the morning of 9/11/2001. The CIA was conducting drills of flying hijacked planes into the WTC and Pentagon at 8:30 in the morning.

It is clear that at least five if not six training exercises were in operation in the days leading up to and on the morning of 9/11. This meant that NORAD radar screens showed as many as 22 hijacked airliners at the same time. NORAD had been briefed that this was part of the exercise drill and therefore normal reactive procedure was forestalled and delayed.

The large numbers of 'blips' on NORAD screens that displayed both real and 'drill' hijacked planes explain why confused press reports emerged hours after the attack stating that up to eight planes had been hijacked.

The Anglo-American establishment that controls the military-industrial complex of the West has been caught over a hundred times carrying out bombings and other terrorist attacks around the world to further their corporate aims and to blame their enemies.

The US government has been caught planning to carry out attacks and carrying out attacks. The British government has been caught red-handed as well. Members of Vladimir Putin's FSB were caught planting bombs in a Russian apartment building in 1999 by the Moscow police.

This is not speculation. Kermit Roosevelt admited on NPR radio that in 1953 the CIA and British intelligence carried out a wave of bombings and shootings in Iran. He then went on to brag about how they subsequently blamed the bombings on Iran's President, Mossadegh. Do you understand, these people brag about what they do 40 years later?

The London bombings have the same signature as the Madrild bombings of 3/11. Both of these bombings are almost indistinguishable from the Bolognia bombing in 1980 that killed over 80 people.



The bombing in Bolognia was part of a CIA operation code named Gladio, where the US government would pay right-wing terrorists to carry out bombings to be blamed on leftists in Europe. All of this was blown wide open when two of the Bolognia bombers were convited in an Italian court, forcing them to spill their guts admitting that they were neo-fascists contracted by the CIA. Operation Gladio documents have since been declassified.

The London terror alert level was lowered before the bombings took place. This gave the purpotrators extra cover to plan and execute the attack without having to evade the most stringent security.

In any crime you look at history and motive, The British government has been caught in multiple examples of carrying out bombings in London which were then blamed on the IRA. They even had one of their own MI5 agents wihin the Omagh bomb squad. Click here for an archive of this evidence.

The wider agenda will become clearer when Blair firmly points the finger at the selected patsies designated to take the fall. But for the moment he's happy to grandstand as the courageous leader who immedately returned to London to take control of the chaos.

BBC polls that were showing 80 per cent plus opposed the ID card will now likely flip back in the opposite direction. Support for the European Union and increased globalization through the G8 will rise. Who stands to gain from all this? Who has the motive?

From Putin blowing up his own apartment buildings to Israel being behind Hamas, the evidence is consistently clear that large scale terrorism is always state sponsored.

The Madrid train bombing is another example. The bombers were found to be police informants with close links to the Spanish security services. They had access to the most secure areas of the Madrid train system. The Spanish government initially tried to blaim the Basque group ETA for the blast in the hope that the people would rally behind the government and get them re-elected. After ETA denied involvement and the people started saying the government was involved, the Spanish government had to blame Al-Qaeda and kill some patsies by claiming they blew themselves up during a raid.

The London Underground exercises were used as the fallback cover to carry out the attack. This is the biggest smoking gun yet pointing directly to the most secretive levels of the British establishment itself being behind the attack.

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Yet more on the London bombs

by Xymphora
Friday, July 15, 2005


This summary from Prison Planet is about as good a reconstruction as possible on how the deception was pulled (but note my comments on Peter Power below).

The main problem remains that it is completely ludicrous for the alleged terrorists to have behaved the way they did. London is the most notoriously videotaped city in the world, truly like something out of an Orwellian nightmare (and to add insult to injury, British authorities get to gloat over how helpful the cameras were in solving the crime). We are to believe that this was part of a larger operation that intended to make more terrorist attacks. And yet the four alleged terrorists took not the slightest steps to avoid leading police right back to their terrorist base. They allowed themselves, together with the mysterious fifth man (who now no longer exists, begging the question of who was on the video), to be seen in the same car, took the same commuter train into London (the car could easily have dropped disguised men at separate stations), allowed themselves to be videoed together at King's Cross station, and carried identification with them that made the work of the authorities remarkably easy. With just the slightest effort, they could have made it practically impossible to track their traces back to their base. The authorities want us to believe they were part of an operation that intended more attacks, and that they were so proud of themselves that they wanted to be identified by their ID's (as Kurt Nimmo points out, carrying an ID when you sit beside a bomb is a dumb way to ensure that your identity will become known to the authorities). These goals are completely inconsistent.

The ID's themselves are also problematic. The identity documents of at least one terrorist was apparently found at two attack sites, blocks away from each other. Of the three sites that the authorities were able to investigate, they found identities at each one, from terrorists supposedly sitting beside the bombs. No way!

The second problem involves the use of suicide bombers in cases where suicide bombers are unnecessary. The only reason suicide bombers are used as that it is otherwise impossible to get near the target. Suicide bombers are hard to come by, and terrorist organizations won't waste them unless they are completely necessary. They weren't necessary here, so why were they wasted? I note also that the supplied biographies of at least some of the alleged terrorists don't (or here) ring true as the biographies of suicide bombers.

The third problem concerns the change in the Official Story, which I've already been over. It is amusing to hear people talk of 'conspiracy theories', when we can clearly see that all theories are conspiracy theories. Jack Straw was musing about an al Qaeda attack before he could possibly have known enough to make a reasonable guess. The police kept coming up with reports expressed as certainties which they now claim are all wrong. If every theory is a conspiracy theory, including the Official Story, you owe it to yourself to make a reasonable judgment of your own, based on common sense, as to what really happened.

The French reported that the terrorists had all been arrested as part of a scheme to turn them and infiltrate the cell. This was immediately denied by the British (the two Reuters stories are nine minutes apart). Of course, this is the most terrifying claim that can be made against an intelligence or police service, that its own double agents were actually triple agents and fooled the foolers. Timothy McVeigh is probably an example of this. We have also seen hints of it in the investigation of September 11. MI5 has even used the technique with al Qaeda.

I still think Peter Power is just hyping his product, which is just the usual management bullshit where a bunch of middle managers sit around a boardroom table and brainstorm a case study involving bombs placed in London and what effect it would have on business. I see nothing in what he has said to indicate there was any tactical or operational aspect to what he does. What is interesting is that he seems to have business connections to Giuliani, who was in London at the time of the bombings (the connection was through the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness which, by happy coincidence, held its World Conference on Disaster Management in Toronto from June 10 to 13). You have to wonder whether the point of his interview was to plant the seed of the idea that suicide bombers were involved, an idea that was still being rejected by the authorities at the time. The thesis that suicide bombers were involved fits nicely into the 'war on terror' that Giuliani now makes a good living talking about (he also hopes to parlay it into a bid to become President).

The British police have a history of framing people for bombing. At least it resulted in one of the best songs by The Pogues:
"There were six men in Birmingham

In Guildford there's four

That were picked up and tortured

And framed by the law

And the filth got promotion

But they're still doing time

For being Irish in the wrong place

And at the wrong time"


If you read Cryptome regularly, you'll see that British spies are still up to their old tricks.

Pakistan had a double agent in al Qaeda, whose cover was blown by Tom Ridge when he gave out too much information about the guy (as part of the ongoing Republican plan to use terror alerts for partisan political purposes). At the time, Pakistan was reported to be angry about the matter. The supposed 'mastermind' of the London bombs was connected to an al Qaeda official who attended an al Qaeda summit at which the bombing was supposedly planned. Had Ridge not opened his big mouth it is possible that the double agent might have helped lead to the arrest of the bombers. If you buy all this al Qaeda background - and it may just be part of the mythology - Tom Ridge and the Republicans may be responsible for the London bombings.


What is the motive for this attack? Cui bono? Anyone who wishes to support the Zionist lies that all Muslims are terrorists and the only way to fight terrorism is for more state terrorism and war against Muslims (a 'world war' 'until the enemy is eliminated'), anyone who wishes to further curtail civil liberties in the guise of protecting people from terrorism, anyone who wants to sell arms, anyone who wants to justify the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians and the Anglo-American treatment of the people of Iraq, and anyone who wants to use the 'war on terror' as a disguise for neocolonial geopolitics in the Middle East and around the world.

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London ritual murder

by Xymphora
Tuesday, August 30, 2005

There are so many crazy new stories about the London shooting, but I've been trying to understand this one in The Guardian:

"Armed police officers fired at Jean Charles de Menezes for over 30 seconds when they killed him at Stockwell tube station, according to a witness statement made to independent investigators and obtained by the Guardian.

The witness says the shots were fired at intervals of three seconds and that she ran for her life fearing terrorists had opened fire on commuters."


The witness was Sue Thomason, a freelance journalist from south London, who apparently correctly said that eleven shots were fired at a time when the actual number of shots was not made public. Some excerpts from her testimony:
"The shots were evenly spaced with about three seconds between the shots, for the first few shots, then a gap of a little longer, then the shots were evenly spaced again."


and:
"I recall hearing gunshots . . . The shooting was coming from the carriage to the left of me. When I heard the gunshots I thought it was terrorists firing into the crowd. I thought about getting behind a seat . . . After the initial first shots . . . I left the carriage."


and:
"While I was making my way to the escalator I remember hearing more shots coming from behind me. I thought that I would be shot in the back... Half way up the escalator I remember looking behind me and hearing two more shots... "Once I got outside the station my legs went.

I would say there was 10 or 11 shots fired. The shots were . . . evenly spaced out (timewise)."


What the hell?! Remember these were extremely close-range shots to the head. I can understand a panic response when a flurry of shots is fired almost simultaneously, but this timing is just plain weird. It would sound something like this (for those who count seconds by counting Mississippi's!):


BANG

[time space . . . one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi]

BANG

[time space . . . one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi]

BANG

[longer time space . . . one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . . four Mississippi . . . five Mississippi]

BANG

[time space . . . one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi]

BANG

[time space . . . one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi]


and so on, up to eleven shots, spaced out over a period of thirty seconds.




She says that the two investigators from the Independent Police Complaints Commission who interviewed her used a map of Stockwell tube which had key features in the wrong place, and omitted the number of shots and the intervals between them from her statement until she insisted that this information be included! Her story rings true, as she could confirm the interval based on the time it took for her physical escape from the scene of the crime.



Was this some kind of ritual killing? Did the number of shots and their timing have a meaning to the SAS? Is it like a twenty-one gun salute? Can anyone confirm if similar SAS executions in Ireland had similar characteristics?

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MI6 Terror: London Bombing Mastermind Is MI6 Asset
by CHRISTOPHER BERRY-DEE


In a lengthy statement that will send shockwaves around the world, John Loftus, a terrorism expert and a former prosecutor for the US Justice Department, has publically revealed that the so called mastermind of the 7/7 London Bombings, Haroon Rashid Aswat, is a British ‘Intelligence Asset’.

A TNC US-based source has sent us extraordinary fully verifiable information, along with a filmed interview during which Loftus makes his accusations.

We are double-checking with our contact – a former long-time colleague of former FBI Counter Terrorism Special Agent and Al-Qaeda hunter, John O’Neill, who died in the 9/11 Twin Towers disaster.

Former Justice Dept. prosecutor and terror expert, John Loftus, revealed that the so-called Al-Muhajiroun group, based in London had formed during the Kosovo crisis, during which Fundamentalist Muslim Leaders (Or what is now referred to as Al Qaeda) were recruited by MI6 to fight in Kosovo.


Loftus stated that "...back in the late 1990s, the leaders all worked for British intelligence in Kosovo. Believe it or not, British intelligence actually hired some Al-Qaeda guys to help efend the dMuslim rights in Albania and in Kosovo. That's when Al-Muhajiroun got started."

In a blistering attack on MI6, John Loftus went on to spell out that British Intelligence and the US Dept of Justice had protected Haroon Rashid Aswat:

"Back in 1999 he came to America. The Justice Department wanted to indict him in Seattle because him and his buddy were trying to set up a terrorist training school in Oregon... we've just learned that the headquarters of the US Justice Department ordered the Seattle prosecutors not to touch Aswat... apparently Aswat was working for British intelligence."

This story has been around for some weeks, the TNC reports, but it has always been ‘dressed up’ as a slight ‘difference of opinion’ between the FBI and MI6, with the Home Office claiming that they have been reluctant to hand Aswat over to the US authorities because he is a British national.

But, senior US intelligence officials are said to be fuming, claiming that everytime they got close to detaining Aswat, wherever he is in the world, he slips through the net.

Loftus claims in an unprecedented attack on MI6 that this is startling and again highlights how Al Qaeda exists as an organized body only where the intelligence services have created, funded and employed it. Loftus points out that several weeks before the London Bombings, Aswat was again located by the South African Intel agency but was again allowed to slip away, this time to London:

"He was a British intelligence plant. So all of a sudden he disappears. He's in South Africa. We think he's dead; we don't know he's down there. Last month the South African Secret Service come across the guy. He's alive...the Brits know that the CIA wants to get a hold of Haroon. So what happens? He takes off again, goes right to London. He isn't arrested when he lands, he isn't arrested when he leaves... He's on the watch list. The only reason he could get away with that was if he was working for British intelligence. He was a wanted man."

Loftus' information is also backed up by the New York Times and CNN who reported on this incident, however, the internet link to the London Independent’s article has mysteriously disappeared.

If proven, the ramifications of John Loftus’s claims – and he is supported by many FBI agents – could be that the London bombings could have been prevented if Haroon Aswat had been taken into custody long ago.

TNC’s US source writes:

“It is now believed that British born Haroon Rashid Aswat was the brains behind the London attacks on July 7th in which 56 died and 700 were wounded. During the investigation of the London attacks the British police and American intelligence sources were able to determine that Aswat had received on his portable telephone a score of calls from the four suspects in the July 7th London attacks. The Times asserts that Aswat stated that he had been a bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden. This would have made him the 2nd highest- ranking Al Qaeda member in Britain. Haroon Rashid Aswat was an aide to the cleric, Abu Hamza Al-Masri. Abu Hamza was listed by USA intelligence sources as a suspected terrorist financier because of links to the Islamic Army of Aden, an Al Qaeda-associated group and the 2000 attack on the U.S. warship the USS Cole in Yemen. For 10 years Aswat had associated with militant Muslim groups and had been to Khalden, the Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Haroon Rashid Aswat is also known to have ties to South Africa and Johannesburg and suspected of involvement in planning the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.

“Aswat had long been the object of US and British intelligence surveillance. Haroon Aswat had entered to Zambia on July 6, 2005. He was arrested on July 20, 2005 in Lusaka for "terrorist activities" and "infringements with the rules of immigration".

Loftus added:

“This is the guy [Aswat], and what's really embarrassing is that the entire British police are out chasing him, and one wing of the British government, MI6 or the British Secret Service, has been hiding him. And this has been a real source of contention between the CIA, the Justice Department, and Britain…he is a double agent.

The CIA and the Israelis all accused MI6 of letting all these terrorists live in London not because they're getting Al-Qaeda information, but for appeasement. It was one of those you leave us alone, we leave you alone kind of things.”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
at
New Criminologist

London Bombing ringleader, Haroon Rashid Aswat – double agent for MI6?
Published on 23 August 2005 | Author BERRY-DEE, Christopher.

The Israeli Art Students And "Urban Moving Systems" and 9/11

Excerpts from an article
by Wayne Madsen

The presence in the United States of a number of young Israelis, most of whom had specialized military and intelligence backgrounds, in the months prior to 911 is a subject that has received inadequate attention from the major U.S. media and government investigators. The activities of the Israelis fell into two main areas: the casing of the offices and homes of Federal law enforcement officials, U.S. military bases, and other sensitive sites by Israeli “art students” during 2000 and 2001 and the unusual activities of Israeli “movers” around sensitive areas during and after 911. These incidents occurred in tandem with the suspiscious activities of other former Israeli military and intelligence officials in neighboring countries, including Canada and Mexico, after 911. In addition, a number of Israeli intelligence agents were apprehended abroad for passport violations and other illegal activities.

The possibility that the suspicious Israeli activity was linked to the movements of Al Qaeda cells cannot be brushed aside as merely coincidental. For example, a number of the Israelis arrested for suspicious activities involving selling bogus Israeli art and driving moving vans were concentrated in some of the same neighborhoods where a number of the 911 Saudi and other Arab hijackers lived and trained at flight schools.

Two internal U.S. government documents revealed that among the 120 Israeli “art students” who attempted to penetrate the security of dozens of Federal office buildings and who visited the homes of scores of U.S. law enforcement personnel during 2000 and 2001 were some who used addresses and mail drops in southern Florida and Texas near those used by a number of the 911 hijackers. The information came from a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Report drafted in June 2001 on the activities of the art students and a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) list of the hijackers and other terrorist suspects, accidentally released in early October 2001 on a Finnish government web site. The DEA memo specifically stated that the Israelis may have had ties to an “Islamic fundamentalist group.”

As a journalist, it has become increasingly difficult since the 911 terrorist attacks to cover the more secretive aspects of the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities. Many government officials have readopted the famous World War II missive of “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” in refusing comment on anything deemed sensitive. Journalists who rely on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain copies of documents also face unprecedented challenges. After 911, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a memorandum that states his Justice Department will use its enormous legal might to defend any refusal by any government agencies to withhold information requested under the FOIA.

Coming into possession of a sensitive Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report on the activities of Israeli “art students” was, therefore, a welcome surprise. DEA, the chief agency that investigates drug cartels, dangerous work under any circumstance, is traditionally very secretive about its investigations. However, some members of the agency, frustrated that their concerns were not being taken seriously by senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Justice Department, apparently decided to leak the report. Their decision was supported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), another agency involved with the DEA in the joint task force set up to investigate the Israeli “students.”

Being presented with a document such as the DEA report, titled “Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities,” posed unique problems in itself. For example, the document had to be verified as authentic and not a hoax. Many times, government agencies will merely state they “can neither confirm nor deny” the genuineness of leaked documents. However, in the case of the DEA report, confirmation of its genuineness came from the DEA in relatively quick fashion.

One amazing element of the story was the fact that a number of DEA, INS, and FBI agents had discovered, as had I, that several of the known addresses of the Israeli students were very close to those of the Al Qaeda terrorists and their supporters. These included addresses in Hollywood, Florida; Miami, Florida; and Irving, Texas. Speaking off-the-record, some of the agents told me that the fact that the Israelis and Al Qaeda were living in the same neighborhoods at the same time--January through May 2001--led the agents to believe the real mission of the Israelis was not to sell art at federal facilities but to spy on the Al Qaeda members.

As rock solid as the story about the true nature of the art students remains--it has had to face another, even more insurmountable problem than getting federal agents to talk. Immediately after the story appeared in Intelligence Online, Le Monde, and the Associated Press, the sizeable pro-Israeli lobby in the United States began to gear up for a counter punch. They had been through this in December 2001 when the Fox News Network, in a four part series by Carl Cameron, referred to Israelis being arrested and detained in the United States for espionage. Cameron also stated, “Evidence linking these Israelis to 911 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.” No sooner had Fox put the story on its web site it was pulled down without explanation. A similar story on Houston’s CBS affiliate, KHOU-TV, provided the following introduction:

“10/02/2001 - Fifteen People Arrested in March in Dallas, Suspected of Casing Federal Buildings. 11News reported how people claiming to be “Israeli art students” might be trying to sneak into federal buildings and defense sites, and even doing surveillance. In Dallas, the so-called students hit early this year at the city’s FBI building, the Drug Enforcement Administration and at the Earle Cabell Federal building, where guards found one student wandering the halls with a floor plan of the building.”[1]

When trying to access the full story on the TV station’s web site, one receives the following message: “The page you requested could not be found.” However, Channel 11 News’ terrorism expert and former Defense Department analyst Ron Hatchett said the Israeli activity was “obvious surveillance” and “not a bunch of kids selling artwork.” A Federal Protective Service memo, obtained by KHOU after Israelis were seen casing the Leland Federal office building in Houston, stated, “Federal sites have experienced an inundation of art solicitations at office buildings by students claiming to be selling Israeli art.”[2]

Federal agents in Dallas were also concerned that the Israeli art students had other intentions. The office manager for a Plano physician reported that after being told to leave, the Israelis kept returning to her building, which had a no soliciting policy. Channel 8 in Dallas reported that a number of Israelis were caught casing Federal buildings in Dallas and being involved in suspicious behavior in north Texas.[3]

The author’s own colleagues reported that aggressive Israeli art students paid visits during late 2000 and early 2001 to the offices of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC and the headquarters of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) in Arlington, Virginia.

Other suspected Israeli intelligence activity surrounding 911, including the arrest by New Jersey police near Giants Stadium of five Israelis who were seen celebrating, high-fiving, jumping up and down, and videotaping the collapse of the World Trade Center, was reported by the media. A New Jersey apartment resident named Maria, who declined to give her last name, told ABC News about several Israelis she saw celebrating the attack on the Twin Towers in her parking lot. The Israelis were later linked to an Israeli-owned office moving company called Urban Moving Systems headquartered in Weehawken, New Jersey at 3 West 18th Street. Another Urban Moving office was located on West 50th Street in Manhattan. Urban Moving’s owner, Dominik Otto Suter, fled to Israel shortly before he was to be re-questioned by the FBI. [4] One of the five Israelis had a ticket for Bangkok and was due to fly out on September 13.[5] The New York Department of Transportation revoked Urban Moving Systems’ license after it was discovered that its Manhattan business address was merely a post office box.

At 3:31 P.M. the FBI issued a nationwide alert called “Be On Lookout” or “BOLO” for the Israelis. Drafted by Special Agent Dave O’Brien, it read:

“Vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack. White, 2000 Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration (JYJ 13Y) with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park. Jersey City, NJ, at the time of the first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center.”[6]

According to FBI sources, Urban Moving Systems and the activities of its employees on 911 did not sit too well with one member of the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, Special Agent Michael Dicks. He pursued the Israeli angle but soon found himself transferred to Karachi, Pakistan to help rescue Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl who had been kidnapped by Al Qaeda functionaries. There was one hitch. The FBI was already aware that Pearl had been brutally murdered by his captors.



Urban Moving Systems Weehawken, NJ bomb making and anthrax storage warehouse.

Moments after Maria felt the ground shake from the impact of the first plane into the World Trade Center and she received a phone call from a neighbor to look out her window at the southern Manhattan skyline, she noticed a white Chevy van parked in the lower parking lot with three of the five men in the van jumping on the roof of the vehicle and videotaping each other with the carnage in the background. Maria was also shocked that the men were celebrating the horrific scenes across the Hudson River. After writing down the license plate number of the van, Maria and her husband Pat phoned the police.[7]

Subsequently, Information Spectrum, Inc. (ISI) of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a subsidiary of the Fairfax, Virginia-based defense contractor, Anteon, took over the operation of the Jersey City police computer system that handled all incoming emergency phone calls on September 11. The system had been maintained by Larimore Associates, a company that specializes in archiving police emergency calls. However, Larimore’s contract was abruptly canceled by Jersey City authorities and awarded to Information Spectrum after the sudden death from a heart attack of Jersey City’s first African-American mayor, Democrat, Glenn D. Cunningham, himself a former Jersey City police officer. According to Jersey City Police officials, after the emergency call system was changed from a Wang to a Windows environment, 8000 emergency 911 system calls registered on September 11 were scrubbed from the archives. In fact, archives dating back to 1989, including those dealing with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, were similarly affected. Information Spectrum’s running of the computer system resulted in a number of server crashes. When Larimore volunteered to help recover the lost data, there was no response from the police department.[8] Some Jersey City police sources speculated the change from Larimore to ISI/Anteon was prompted by orders from Trenton and the administration of Governor James McGreevey. They termed the changeover as “political.” Governor McGreevey resigned in 2004 after it was discovered he had an alleged gay relationship with his chief of Homeland Security, Golan Cipel. An Israeli citizen, Cipel, a former diplomat assigned to Israel’s Consulate General in New York City, was thought by many intelligence experts to be a junior Mossad case officer who lured McGreevey into a “honey trap.”

Jersey City was a major base of operations for the 1993 World Trade Center attack. The Ryder van used in that attack was rented from a Jersey City rental agency. As for the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center, there were no records of a call by Maria or any other witness to the Israeli activity in Maria’s building parking lot or at Liberty State Park. The only call remaining in the system was a late night call on September 11 about a suspicious vagrant in a south Jersey City neighborhood.[9]

However, there was a call placed to the Jersey City Police Department that claimed “Palestinians” in Arab clothes were seen celebrating the attacks. Although the Jersey City Police discovered their 911 system tapes on September 11, 2001 disappeared from their servers and achives after ISI took over the contract, some tapes implicating “Arabs” found their way into the hands of WNBC-TV in New York in June 2002. WNBC played transcripts of 911 calls from the Jersey City Police:

Dispatcher: Jersey City police.
Caller: Yes, we have a white van, 2 or 3 guys in there, they look like Palestinians and going around a building.
Caller: There’s a minivan heading toward the Holland tunnel, I see the guy by Newark Airport mixing some junk and he has those sheikh uniform.
Dispatcher: He has what?
Caller: He’s dressed like an Arab.[10]

It is clear that the Jersey City Police Department’s 911 call tapes were manipulated to delete any calls that might implicate the Israelis. The one call provided to WNBC was clearly an attempt at a “false flag” operation implicating “Palestinians” wearing “sheik uniforms” as the culprits in at least one of the white vans driven by Israeli “movers” on the morning of September 11.

After the van was traced to the Israeli moving company, the BOLO went out for the arrest of the vehicle’s driver and passengers. An East Rutherford policeman directing traffic away from the closed Lincoln Tunnel on Route 3 East noticed the van was driving slowly on the service road towards the tunnel. The tag of the vehicle was only off by one letter from what was contained in the BOLO (JRJ 13Y) and the front New Jersey plate had been removed. It is very possible that to confuse the police, the Israelis were using NJ plate JRJ 13Y as the rear tag on two white vans – the one sighted in Liberty State Park and the other in Maria’s apartment building parking lot. In fact, local police reported a number of white van sightings during September 11, with a number of them phoned into the police. Maria told ABC News she phoned tag number JRJ 13Y to the Jersey City Police after seeing the Israelis driving in a white van celebrating the first plane’s impact, while Liberty State Park witnesses said the same tag number -- JRJ 13Y -- had been passed to the police and FBI after a white van with “celebrating Arabs” had been chased from the park by the park’s chief ranger after the first plane impact.[11] It was clear that officials of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection in Trenton, which has authority over the state’s parks, ordered Liberty State Park officials not to talk to the media about September 11 and the Israeli van.[12]

The East Rutherford Police report on the Israeli van states:

“Officer assigned to Special Detail on Route 3 was rerouting traffic on Highway 3 East to Hwy 120 and 3 West. Lincoln Tunnel was shut down and officer was diverting traffic. Officer notified by dispatch of a National Broadcast to be on lookout for 2000 Chevy Van White, NJ tag JYJ 13Y. 3 to 4 occupants. Officer noticed van traveling at slow speed east towards Lincoln Tunnel on the Service Road with 2 occupants visible. Officer informed sergeant of possible match. No front license plate but JRJ 13Y tag may have one letter off from National Broadcast. Sergeant told officer to stop vehicle because van seen in Liberty State Park at time of first impact. Driver did not exit vehicle. He fumbled with a black “fanny pack.” Officer removed driver and van was searched. County bomb squad and FBI notified. FBI Newark ordered occupants to be held for prints because occupants were seen in Liberty State Park at time of first impact. 5 individuals were detained. Vehicle registration and insurance card were obtained. Officer spoke to FBI Special Agents Robert F. Taylor, Jr., Bill Lloyd, and Dave O’Brien. Prior to transportation to NJ State Police Barracks at Giants Stadium, driver said, “We are Israelis, we are not your problem. Your problems are our problem. Palestinians are the problem.” [13]

After the Israelis were arrested they misrepresented their location to one of the arresting police officers, Scott DeCarlo, claiming they were driving on West Side Highway in Manhattan when the planes struck the Trade Center. Dogs provided by the Bergen County Police K-9 unit alerted to the presence of explosives in the van. The nearby Homestead Studio Suites Hotel was evacuated for several hours. Asked about the Israelis in the van being present at Liberty State Park at the time of the first World Trade Center impact, one East Rutherford officer responded, “sure they were there.”[14] Another confidential source told the Bergen County Record, “There are maps of the city in the car with certain places highlighted . . . It looked like they’re hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park.”[15] According to several Weehawken neighbors of the Urban Moving Systems warehouse, the FBI, upon searching the the warehouse, discovered fertilizer, other chemicals for making explosives, pipes, caps, and traces of anthrax. After anthrax was discovered, investigators wearing hazardous material suits went through the warehouse. Residents around Urban Moving Systems who had connections to the local police also reported that helicopters with infrared radar swooped in over the warehouse on several occasions.[16]

According to the ABC 20/20 report and echoing the East Rutherford police report, the van’s driver, Sivan Kurzburg, told DeCarlo, “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”[17] The Israelis also reportedly told police they were tourists.[18] When the FBI developed the photos taken by the Israelis of the World Trade Center carnage, one photo depicted Kurzburg flicking a cigarette lighter in a celebratory manner with the burning buildings in the background.[19]



The Liberty State Park vantage point the five Urban Moving Systems celebrants had of lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11.

On the morning of September 12, the FBI canvassed the residents of the Israelis’ apartment building, The Doric, in Union City. They asked the residents if they could identify photographs of the five Israelis.[20] The three Newark-based FBI agents on the case were Robert F. Taylor, Jr., Bill Lloyd and Dave O’Brien, the same agents who questioned the van drivers arrested in East Rutherford. All have subsequently been transferred from the Newark Field Office. A Union City off-duty policemen, saw three suspicious people at Union Park next to the Doric Temple at the corner of 9th Street and Palisades Avenue in Union City. The three, who matched the description of other Israeli “false flag” teams, were filming New York City’s skyline before the first plane hit the World Trade Center. The officer also witnessed the three high-fiving each other. The officer chased the celebrants on foot but was unable to apprehend them. The officer later reported the three headed into Jersey City by car.[21]

Another van carrying explosives was stopped by police on an approach ramp to the George Washington Bridge from the New Jersey side. Police suspected the perpetrators were trying to blow up the bridge.[22]

According to Jersey City police sources, another FBI agent, Monica Patton, investigated the activities of Israeli “movers” and four of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, and two Saudi brothers – Waleed M. and Wail Al-Shehri -- at the same video rental store in Jersey City. One of the videos the Saudi brothers rented was an HBO documentary on the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Another video they rented was “The Towering Inferno.” The video storeowner said his video rental records were later stolen after the FBI interviewed him and he told them about the Saudis’ rental history. The Al Shehri brothers also purchased phone cards from the video store for special use in calling Dubai. The Jersey City intrigue does not stop with the Saudis and Israelis. Jersey City Police also reported that the business card of a Jersey City municipal government social worker had been found on Timothy McVeigh after his arrest for the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.[23]

After serving two and a half months in prison and after a barrage of official complaints from the Israeli government, the five Israeli “movers” (Kurzberg, his brother Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Elner, and Omer Marmari) were released over the objections of the CIA and permitted to return home. However, when Jersey City police checked the Israelis’ van they found $4,700 hidden in a sock, two foreign passports and a Stanley-knife box cutter (the same brand used by the 911 hijackers). Paul Kurzberg, refused for ten weeks to take a polygraph and then flunked it when he did. His lawyer said his client once worked for Israeli intelligence in “another country.”[24] Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert interceded twice with his good friend New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to have the Israelis released. On September 14, 2004, the five “dancing Israelis” filed suit against the United States in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn for wrongful arrest and imprisonment.
(....)

A number of interesting facts are stated in the Israelis’ complaint. It states that some of the Israelis were classified as being “of high interest” to the government’s terrorism investigation, “Witness Security” and/or “Management Interest Group 155.” They were “housed in one of the most highly restrictive prison settings possible, the Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit (“ADMAX SHU”) of the Metropolitan Detention Center (“MDC”).” The government was also interested in the Israelis’ possessions. The complaint states the government “confiscated personal identification, money, and valuable personal items” from the Israelis. In addition, the government searched the homes of the Israelis and confiscated additional personal items.

One intriguing complaint was that the U.S. government detained the Israelis precisely because they were Jewish Israelis. The court filing states: “Defendants and others have also engaged in racial, religious, ethnic, and/or national origin profiling. Plaintiffs’ race, religion, ethnicity, and/or national origin played a determinative role in Defendants’ decision to detain them initially, to subject them to a blanket non-bond policy, to subject them to punishing and dangerous conditions of confinement, and then to keep them detained beyond the point at which removal or voluntary departure could have been effectuated . . .”

Silvan Kurzberg was required to provide a blood sample while in prison, an indication that federal authorities may have had some DNA evidence they wanted to match. At the time of their arrest, all the Israelis had plane tickets back to Israel. When they were first detained, the Israelis were not permitted to meet with a Rabbi. Later access to a Rabbi was granted under “severely limited” circumstances. Prayer books and a bible given to the Israelis by the Rabbi were inspected by prison guards. During their first two weeks of detention, the FBI prohibited the Israeli Consul in New York from meeting with the Israelis.

One of the most astounding claims of the Israelis was that the FBI, Bureau of Prisons, and Immigration and Naturalization Service did not umderstand the difference between Arab Muslims and Jewish Israelis. The complaint states: “The plaintiffs are Jewish Israelis, not Moslems, but due to the similarity of language and the geographical location of Israel in the Middle East, and the ignorance or lack of understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the fact that Israel is an ally of the United States, the defendants mentally placed the plaintiffs in the same category as Moslems, and discriminated against them the same way.”[25]

***

At around noon on September 12, 2001, Roy Barak, a former Israeli paratrooper, and Motti Butbul, both employed by Urban Moving Systems as drivers, were stopped by police near York, Pennsylvania. They were en route from Chicago to New York City. Police discovered Barak had an expired visa and Butbul had no work permit. FBI agents were soon on the scene and grew suspicious when a box cutter was found inside the truck. The FBI polygraphed Barak and showed him a picture of his five colleagues arrested in New Jersey and asked him why they were smiling. Barak responded that they were not smiling. The FBI thought Barak was a possible terrorist and a Mossad spy. The FBI was particularly interested if someone sent Barak to the United States and if, at the time, he held a security clearance in the Israeli army. Barak spent his second week in solitary confinement without a television, radio, or any books.[26]

Vince Cannistraro, the former operations chief for counter-terrorism for the CIA, said that a search of the CIA’s national intelligence database turned up some of the names of Israelis arrested in New Jersey. He said a number of people in the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Urban Moving was a Mossad operation and the Israelis were pursuing Islamist radicals in the New Jersey-New York area and particularly in Patterson, New Jersey. Pauline Stepkovich, who lived across the street from Urban Moving, told ABC News that FBI agents removed about a dozen boxes and computers, enough to fill up two SUVs. Cannistraro told ABC News that the FBI was concerned that the Israeli movers had some advanced knowledge of the 911 attacks but failed to warn the United States. “The fear of some of the FBI investigators in this particular case was that this group had some advanced knowledge of what was going to happen on 911. And once they understood there was an Israeli connection--an Israeli intelligence connection--they became very disturbed, because the implication was that the Israelis may have had some advanced knowledge of the events of 911 and hadn’t told us,” Cannistraro said.[27] Israeli intelligence foreknowledge about the 911 attacks was confirmed by two senior-level intelligence officials at the CIA and FBI.[28]

In Washington, Israeli embassy spokesman, Mark Regev, dismissed the espionage charges, claiming the excitement of the Israelis seeing the World Trade Center collapse was due to “youthful foolishness.”[29] A lawyer for one of the Israelis said his client denied celebrating the terrorist attack on the Trade Center, however, after the FBI developed their film it clearly showed three of the Israelis on top of the van “smiling and clowning around” with the buildings burning in the background.[30] The evidence bolstered what Maria and Pat told the police and proved that the Israelis lied to the police when they claimed they were in Manhattan during the attack.

The Jewish weekly newspaper, The Forward, reported that a top U.S. government official told it, “The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it… the conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs.”[31] ABC 20/20 host Barbara Walters commented on how the story of the Israeli movers was received in the Arab world, “The story is that Israel knew more than it would like to admit about the terrorist attack in this country. It's a rumor, but in some Arab countries--including Saudi Arabia, which I visited earlier this year--even educated people told me that they believe it is absolutely true.”[32]

Perhaps the young Israelis were only mirroring the feelings of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who when asked how the 911 attacks would affect U.S.-Israeli relations, said, “It’s very good… Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy for Israel from Americans.” Bergen County Police Chief John Schmidig was not as serene. He said, “We got an alert to be on the lookout for a white Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration and writing on the side. Three individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State Park after the impact. They said three people were jumping up and down.”[33]

It is no coincidence that both Fox News and KHOU-TV had to pull down their web stories on the Israeli art students (based on the exposés in Intelligence Online and Le Monde, Fox began referring to its original December 2001 story on its web site). According to a number of Washington journalists, any time an article critical of Israel appears in the U.S. press, reporters and editors can expect to hear from a Boston-based group called the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America or “CAMERA.” The Kafkaesque group makes no secret of its aggressive intimidation methods. Its web site states: “CAMERA systematically monitors, documents, reviews and archives Middle East coverage. Staffers directly contact journalists and publishers concerning distorted or inaccurate coverage… CAMERA members are encouraged to write letters both to the publication or network, and to the sponsors or advertisers… If corrections and improved coverage are not forthcoming, we publicize the faulty reporting and the journalist’s refusal to admit error.”

As an example, CAMERA cited a Washington Post story that refuted the legitimacy of the DEA’s investigation and report on the Israeli art students. The story by reporters John Mintz and Dan Eggen questioned the motive behind the DEA’s report by claiming, without offering any proof, that the agent who wrote it was disgruntled. Moreover, there was more than one author of the report. Apparently, CAMERA’s “fact checkers” were only interested in checking out stories with which they disagreed or found embarrassing.

Neither the Washington Post or CAMERA seemed all that much interested in a warning about the Israeli “art students” and their “aggressive” visits to the offices and homes of U.S. federal agents that was circulated in March, 2001 by the White House Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive. The warning stated:

“In the past six weeks, employees in federal office buildings located throughout the United States have reported suspicious activities connected with individuals representing themselves as foreign students selling or delivering artwork. Employees have observed both males and females attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings.

If challenged, the individuals state that they are delivering artwork from a studio in Miami, Florida, called Universal Art, Inc., or that they are art students and are looking for opinions regarding their work. These individuals have been described as aggressive. They attempt to engage employees in conversation rather than giving a sales pitch.

Federal police officers have arrested two of these individuals for trespassing and discovered that the suspects possessed counterfeit work visasand green cards. These individuals have also gone to the private residences of senior federal officials under the guise of selling art.”[34]

The nature of reporting on Israeli espionage in the United States can result in sources drying up rapidly. In the case of the DEA, the spokesman who originally confirmed the veracity and validity of the DEA Report was suddenly sent away on “vacation.” Other DEA agents and employees of other Justice Department agencies began to seal their lips. Attorney General John Ashcroft refused on two occasions to comment on the DEA investigation. Congress was also unwilling to look into the matter. Asked why, a senior congressional staffer replied, “You’ve got to be kidding… This is an election year!” He was referring to the 2002 congressional elections.

Ashcroft was portrayed as “disinterested” in counterterrorism during the summer of 2001, according to internal FBI memos written by Acting Director of the FBI Thomas Pickard.[35] Ashcroft’s “disinterest” in terrorism did not affect his looking out for his own safety. At the end of July 2001, Ashcroft broke with precedence and flew in a private G-3 Gulfstream to go on a fishing trip to Missouri. Ashcroft had previously flown on commercial planes. When asked why Ashcroft did not fly commercial, the Justice Department said that because of a “threat assessment” by the FBI, Ashcroft would “travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.” Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it. However, the FBI security detail for Ashcroft determined that the threat was critical enough for Ashcroft not to fly on commercial aircraft.[36]



The FBI ignored both the warnings about Israeli art students and Arab hijackers. The two groups’ paths crossed in a number of U.S. cities in 2000.

After the DEA Report was leaked, I met with a journalist colleague who was also covering the art student story and had high level contacts within the Justice Department and FBI. During our meeting at the Navy Memorial just across the street from the National Archives, he summed up the problem: the cover-up went right to the top and the primary culprits were John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

The Israelis were described in the DEA Report and other security advisories as being part of an “organized intelligence gathering activity.” According to the FBI list, the Arab terrorist and suspect cells lived in the same neighborhoods as the Israeli cells in Irving, Texas and Hollywood and Miami, Florida from Dec. 2000 to April 2001. In the case of Irving, the Israeli cell used a rental mailbox in a shopping center just one block away from an Arab suspect’s apartment. In Hollywood, the terrorists, including lead hijacker Mohammad Atta, the Egyptian who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, used a rental mailbox drop two blocks from an apartment rented by an Israeli “art student” team leader.

If the Israelis were stalking the hijackers, they would have also likely known about their interest in the World Trade Center. Speaking at a press conference in Washington, DC on March 22, 2004, William Rodriguez, the President of the Hispanic Victims Group and a 20-year veteran employee of the World Trade Center, revealed that he spotted Mohand Al-Shehri (alias Mohammed al Shehhi), one of the terrorist hijackers of United Flight 175 that crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, two and a half months before September 11. Rodriguez said he saw Al-Shehri, a Saudi citizen, casing the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Rodriguez’s comments were part of the press conference partly organized by family members of 911 victims. The family members were calling for a full accounting by members of both the Clinton and Bush administrations about what they knew about the Al Qaeda threat to hijack planes prior to 911.
Rodriguez was a building manager for the World Trade Center and he held the master key for the North Tower. He was the last survivor pulled by rescue workers from the rubble of the building after it collapsed.
Rodriguez said Al-Shehri asked him how many public bathrooms were in the building and, in retrospect, Rodriguez believed the terrorist was looking for ways to place additional explosives in the building prior to the airplane attack. Rodriguez also said as he was climbing the stairs to help rescue people after American Airlines Flight 11 struck his building he heard heavy equipment being moved around on the 34th floor, which was closed and locked for renovation. In the chaos, Rodriguez did not have time to open the doors to the 34th floor to find out who was there but he believed there might have been additional explosives placed inside the building. Rodriguez also claimed that while assisting evacuees he heard non-aircraft-related explosions coming from floors below his location on the 33rd floor. The former chief economist for the Bush Labor Department, Morgan Reynolds, believed the Bush administration’s story about the World Trade Center collapse was “bogus.” Reynolds, who was the director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and later professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, opined that “if demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers [the Twin Towers and Building 7] at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an ‘inside job’ and a government attack on America would be compelling.” Reynolds added, “The government’s collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings.”[37]

Moreover, Rodriguez passed along several of his tips about pre-911 surveillance of the World Trade Center to the FBI but he said the agency never bothered to talk to him. However, according to the August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Brief, the FBI was aware that suspected terrorists were conducting surveillance of buildings in New York. The White House revealed that prior to 911, the FBI interviewed two Yemenis it detained for taking photographs of buildings in Federal Plaza in New York City. The FBI released them after determining the Yemenis were “tourists.”[38] Yemen is the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and a number of Al Qaeda operatives hail from Yemen.

Of course, not everyone within the FBI was asleep at the wheel. Minneapolis Special Agent Coleen Rowley tried in vain to get a wiretap on Zacarias Moussaoui. Phoenix Special Agent Kenneth J. Williams reported flight training by Arab students connected to Bin Laden. John P. O’Neill, the FBI’s top counterterrorism agent, constantly raised the problem of Saudi support for Al Qaeda, only to be rebuffed, and eventually, hounded out of the bureau by his superiors.

The internal DEA report from June 2001 dealt with attempts by teams of Israeli “art students” to penetrate the security of various Federal buildings and offices throughout the United States. The DEA refused to officially comment on the report but a high-level source within the agency reports that it was the product of a larger investigation conducted jointly by a DEA and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Operational Task Force set up in 2000 specifically to investigate the Israelis.

A number of the art students, who claimed they were from either Bezalel University in Jerusalem or the University of Jerusalem, said they answered ads in Israeli newspapers but could not give details of the identities of their bosses when interviewed by Federal agents. A number of the male and female art students, who were mainly in their early to mid 20s, had recently served in Israeli military and intelligence service, according to the report. Their activities were concentrated during the February-March 2001 time frame. More important, there was no University of Jerusalem and Bezalel said it had no record of any of the students having ever been enrolled there.

The DEA compiled an extensive list of the Isreali art students as an appendix (Indexing Section) to its report (.......)
On April 30, 2001, the Air Force issued a security alert from Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City concerning a “possible intelligence collection effort being conducted by Israeli art students.” DEA, INS, FBI, and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) offices received similar alerts. The FBI office in New Orleans reportedly received a “Counter terrorism Advisory Report regarding suspicious activities around Federal buildings that related to Israeli students” in February 2000. The FBI also reported that an Israeli art student attempted to sell art at the residences of a U.S. District Judge and U.S. Magistrate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. However, according to knowledgeable U.S. government sources, the FBI stayed away from the ongoing DEA-INS investigation for “political reasons.”

The Israeli students operated in groups of between 4 to 8 individuals led by “Team Leaders.” The team leaders controlled the teams’ visits, drove the vehicles, and often had in their vehicles cameras and recording equipment. A number of the students had significant Israeli military experience in demolitions, explosives, and signals intelligence.

The team active in the Irving, Texas area (near Dallas-Fort Worth Airport) had links to the Chesterfield, Missouri-based Israeli communications software firm AMDOCS, which has an outsourcing agreement with Nextel; RETALIX, an Israeli company involved in software for the retail food industry; and NICE, an Israeli software engineering firm. The report cites Michael Calmanovic as the leader of the Irving group and states he “was a recently discharged electronic intercept operator for Israeli military.” Calmanovic and his Israeli supervisor from California were arrested on April 4, 2001 in Irving, Texas, while vacating their apartment. The DEA report states Calmanovic used a mailbox drop at Mailboxes, Etc. located at 3575 N. Beltline Rd. Apt. 316, Irving,Texas. The FBI list dated 3 Oct. 2001, which was sent to national financial control authorities to freeze the accounts of the Saudi hijackers and their associates, states the address for suspect Ahmed Khalifa, also known as Almad Khafefa, as 4045 N. Beltline Rd. Apt. 314, Irving, Texas (Marbletree Apartments), just a few blocks from the Israeli mail drop.

There are a number of possible explanations about why the Israeli art students were living so close to the hijackers, especially in Florida where much of the terrorists’ flight training occured. One is that the Israelis had penetrated Al Qaeda with two cells comprising six Egyptian- and Yemeni-born Jews and that some of these agents posed as Israeli art students and were shadowing the Al Qaeda cells inside the United States and reporting their movements back to Mossad or a “cut out” intelligence unit in Ariel Sharon’s office. Another explanation is that, like the Israeli “movers” in the New York-New Jersey area, the art students were providing an operational decoy and even material support to the hijackers. This theory arose when several Israeli art students in Canada were arrested for selling bogus Chinese art that they were passing off as Israeli. Two Canadian newspapers reported that U.S. counter-intelligence officials had warned Canadian authorities that the Israeli art students were funneling proceeds from the art sales to Islamist radical groups.[40] If the Florida and Texas Israeli art rings discovered prior to 911 were providing such financial support to the hijackers, it would explain why they closely located their mail drops so close to one another.

The involvement of the Israeli cells with communications companies raised serious concerns at the DEA and Justice Department, which were both using Israeli communications intercept software in their field operations. The DEA used a T2S2 intercept system provided by Comverse and JSI, two Israeli companies. Comverse was very close to the Israeli government, which reimbursed it up to 50 percent for its research and development costs. The FBI’s Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) Implementation Office in Chantilly, Virginia was extremely concerned about the threat posed by Comverse’s intercept system. But the worries of the Chantilly office and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) were overridden by the FBI’s engineering office in Quantico, Virginia, which was supported by such contractors as Booz Allen Hamilton.[41] The nexus of art students, intelligence surveillance, and possible involvement in Ecstasy trafficking set off alarm bells at the highest levels of the DEA about the “art students.” The reason was simple. T2S2 systems were used in what the DEA, Coast Guard, Customs, and other counter narcotics agencies called High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTAs) and associated wiretap centers and surveillance teams (STs).

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On March 4, 2002, Robert F. Diegelman, the acting Assistant Attorney General for Administration, issued a Justice Department memo reiterating that standing Justice Department Order 2640.2D, dated July 12, 2001, prohibited non-U.S. citizens from access to Department of Justice information technology. The order and memo reiterated the policy, “Foreign Nationals shall not be authorized to access or assist in the development, operation, management or maintenance of Department IT systems, unless a waiver has been granted by the Department CIO.”

Small teams of Mossad agents found with eavesdropping equipment are nothing new to European or American law enforcement. In February 1998, five Israelis, three men and two women, were arrested in an apartment in the suburbs of Berne, Switzerland. The Israeli team managed to convince the police that they did not break and enter into the apartment but were there legally. The apartment was the residence of an Islamic activist. Four of the Israelis, two men and two women, were released. However, the fifth Israeli was later discovered with sophisticated surveillance equipment and a number of false passports. He was arrested, detained, and held for 65 days until Israel paid 3 million Swiss francs for his release with a promise he would return from Israel to stand trial. In July 2000, Isaac Bental, the cover name under which the Mossad allowed the Swiss to prosecute their agent, stood trial for espionage before the Swiss Federal Court. It was the first time a Mossad agent had gone on trial outside Israel.[43]

In December 1998, Cypriot police arrested two Israeli agents, Uri Argov and Yisrael Damari, for the illegal possession of communications intercept equipment and espionage. In March 1998, three Mossad agents aborted a wiretapping operation in London after they were tipped off to the police. The Mossad had operated illegally in London since 1987. That year, a furious Margaret Thatcher ordered Israel to close its Palace Green, Kensington Mossad station after its role in the assassination of a Palestinian cartoonist on a South Kensington street was revealed.[44]

In 1999, Shalom Shaphyr, an Israeli national having residences in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon was arrested by the FBI in Alexandria, Virginia for trying to buy computer intercept equipment from undercover FBI and Customs Service agents. Shaphyr was accused of trying to illegally export the equipment to Vietnam. Shaphyr possessed a business visa that permitted him to enter and leave the United States at will.[45]

On May 31, 2005, it was announced in Israel that Israeli police and Interpol discovered a huge computer espionage ring involving a number of former Israeli intelligence officers and Israeli companies, including AMDOCS. Israeli police questioned AMDOCS computer security manager Eitan Shiron in the investigation that surrounded the use by over a dozen Israeli companies of a sophisticated hacking software program, called a Trojan horse, which bypassed the security controls on targeted computer systems.[46] The Israeli investigation also focused on four major Israeli telecommunications companies – Cellcom, Israel’s largest mobile phone company; two subsidiaries of the largest telecommunications company Bezeq Israel Telecom; mobile phone company Pelephone; and satellite television company Yes.[47] Scotland Yard also participated in the take down of the Israeli espionage ring, arresting dual Israeli-German citizen Michael Haephrati and his wife Ruth Brier-Haephrati in London on an Israeli extradition warrant. The Israeli couple was charged with”unauthorized modification of the contents of a computer” between December 12, 2004 and February 28, 2005.” Police said they wrote the Trojan horse computer program and provided it to a middleman. The Trojan horse in question was believed to be a derivative of the PROMIS software program illegally procured from Inslaw, Inc. in Washington, DC in the early 1980s and re-engineered by a number of intelligence agencies, including Israel’s, to perform computer espionage. Oddly, The Scotsman newspaper reported that Haephrati was questioned about a “separate matter” by detectives with Britain’s National Hi-Tech Crime unit on May 25, before his arrest on the Israeli warrant. The Haphraetis were remanded in the Bow Street Magistrates Court in London.[48]

Yet another possible Israeli intelligence link to electronic eavesdropping on the U.S. government was unearthed in the questionable awarding by the U.S. Congress of a wireless contract to a company owned by Israel. In 2000, LGC Wireless, a San Jose, California-based firm was considered in the lead to provide wireless connectivity for the U.S. House of Representatives. A year earlier, the House Administration Committee, then headed by Republican Representative Bill Thomas of California, granted LGC authority to conduct a design and securityn survey of the Capitol. In addition, the FBI and NSA reviewed LGC’s system design to ensure that foreign intelligence agencies could not penetrate the House’s wireless network. By December 2000, LGC had cleared its plans with the Capitol Architect, the House Information Resource Office, and the House Administration Committee. However, soon a new Israeli co,pany named Foxcom Wireless, which changed its name to MobileAccess, began making an end run to secure the Capitol wireless contract. The new chairman of the House Administration Committee, Republican Representative Bob Ney of Ohio, clearly favored MobileAccess over LGC and in 2002, the Israeli company received the House wireless contract. Ney had a close poltical and financial relationship with GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, an extreme pro-Israeli political insider, who came under Justice Department investigation for questionable ties to Ney and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. It was later revealed by The Washington Post that in 2001 MobileAccess donated $50,000 to the Capital Athletic Foundation, which was run by Abramoff. In 2004, MobileAccess paid $240,000 in lobbying fess to Greenberg Traurig, Abramoff’s former firm. The ranking member on the House Administration Committee, Democratic Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, said he was not kept fully informed of the wireless contract by either Thomas or Ney. LGC also cried foul when, in 2004, the U.S. Senate awarded MobileAccess a $3.9 million contract to install a wireless network for the Senate.[49] As with the questions surrounding Information Spectrum Inc. abruptly replacing Larimore Associates as the Jersey City Police Department computer system contractor, similar complaints were aired by LGC. Ian Sugarboard, LGC’s CEO told The Hill newspaper, “. . . it appeared that lobbyists had exerted undue influence on the deal.” In addition, the House Administration Committee did not specify what security criteria MobileAccess had to meet. The FBI and NSA had previously approved LGC’s security countermeasures.[50]

Abramoff’s strong connection to Israel and his influence in the Bush administration serve as yet another nexus between Israel, the Bush administration, and officials closely connected with Saudi Arabia. Top GOP adviser and Abramoff friend Grover Norquist, who was Abramoff’s campaign manager when he ran for President of the College Republicans (a post also once held by Karl Rove), also maintained close links to a number of Saudis, some of whom were implicated in funding terrorism. Norquist was a cofounder of the Islamic Institute, co-located in Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform offices in Washington, DC. Norquist was a key player in the Bush 2000 outreach for Muslim and Arab voters. Sami al Arian, a University of South Florida professor, was an ardent supporter of Bush’s Florida campaign to woo Muslim and Arab voters and his support likely helped tip the close election to Bush. The Islamic Institute was founded in 1999 with start up money from Kuwait; Qatar; other Arab countries; the founder of the American Muslim Council, Abdurahman Muhammad Al Amoudi; and two Islamic non-profits, the Safa Trust and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). In 2002, as part of Operation Greenquest, the FBI raided Safa and IIIT for their role in financing international terrorism. Another one of Al Amoudi’s groups, the International Relief Organization, was suspected of laundering Saudi money to terrorist groups. Although Arian and Al Amoudi were later charged by the federal government with supporting terrorist groups, they maintained close ties to the Bush campaign. Just a few months before the 911 attacks, Arian attended a June 2001 White house briefing with Karl Rove. Suhail Khan, the White House point man for arranging access to Bush by prominent Muslim-Americans and a former director of the Islamic Institute, was the son of the late imam of the Santa Clara, California mosque. The mosque had once hosted Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri, the second in command of Al Qaeda. Norquist and his friends were clearly part of a Saudi- and Wahhabi-funded political machine that sought to marginalize moderate Muslims in the United States. Agha Jafri, a Sh’ia leader in New York, said there was in the United States a Saudi “mafia” that was “intent on crushing moderate Sufi and Shiite Muslims in the United States.”[51] In addition, Norquist’s friend Al Amoudi was also discovered to have links to the 911 hijackers. German police files indicated that Al Amoudi met in the fall of 2000 Mohammed Belfas, an Islamic leader in Hamburg who once shared an apartment with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a kingpin behind the 911 attacks. One of Belfas’s colleagues, Agus Budiman, had accompanied Belfas on a scouting mission to Washington, DC in late 2000. Budiman pleaded guilty to helping Belfas obtain a phony identification card using a non-existent address in Arlington, Virginia. German police obtained a photograph from Belfas’s Hamburg apartment showing a meeting between him, Budiman, and Al Amoudi in Al Amoudi’s Arlington, Virginia office. [52]

***

Texas was not the only case where the Israelis were found to be in the same location as the Saudi hijacker cells. According to the DEA Report, another Israeli team operating out of Hollywood, Florida, led by team leader Hanan Serfaty lived at 4220 Sheridan St., #303, Hollywood, Florida 33021 (Emerald Greens Apartments) while the Saudi hijackers Khalid Al Midhar, Abdulaziz al Omari, Walid Al Shehri, and UAE national Marwan al Shehhi, operated from a mail drop at Mailbox Rentals, 3389 Sheridan St. #256, Hollywood, Florida 33021-3608. Another Serfaty residence at 701 S. 21st Ave., Hollywood was located near the homes of Atta and Al Shehhi, including a residence on Jackson Street, just a few blocks away, and the Bimini Motel Apartments, Apartment 8, at 1600 North Ocean Drive. On September 7, just days before their terrorist attack, Atta and Al Shehhi spent several hours at Shuckums Oyster Bar and Grill at 1814 Harrison St., just a few blocks away from Serfaty’s 21st Ave. residence. A Miami-based Israeli unit, led by Legum Yochai, operated from 13753 SW 90th Ave., Miami while hijacker Al Shehri lived nearby at Horizons Apartments, 8025 SW 107th Ave.

During the time the Israelis and Arabs were living in Hollywood, Atta and his team were attending flight training and inquiring about crop dusting planes in southern Florida. According to a source with high-level contacts within the Mossad, Israeli agents based in southern Florida were able to successfully penetrate the Arab cells in southern Florida and informed their Tel Aviv headquarters that an attack on the east coast of the United States was being planned and that it involved commercial aircraft. Although it is not known if these agents were art students, they were Yemeni and Egyptian-born Jews who spoke fluent Arabic and were trained at a secret base in Israel’s Negev Desert. Although Mossad chief Efraim Halevy warned CIA Director George Tenet of an “imminent attack,” the warning contained no details about the terrorists training on commercial aircraft. Tenet was said to have dismissed the warning because it was not specific. The Mossad units reportedly left the United States after the September 11 attack on El Al flights and were listed on sky marshal manifests as El Al employees.

It is likely that some of the Mossad warnings about hijackings in the United States did reach some people. Officials at Odigo, an instant-messaging company with offices in New York and Herzliya (where the headquarters of Mossad is located) admitted that two of its employees said they received e-mail warning of the attack two hours before the planes careened into the twin towers. Alex Diamandis, Odigo’s vice president for sales and marketing, confirmed that Odigo employees in New York and Israel received a warning two hours before the attack. The warning appeared to be anonymous but Odigo programmers recorded the Internet protocol address of the message’s sender. Odigo also notified Mossad and the FBI but the FBI failed to take action and notify occupants of the World Trade Center.[53]

By September 3, 2001, Zim-American Israeli Shipping Company, completed its move from the World Trade Center to Norfolk, Virginia after suddenly canceling its lease in April 2001 and forfeiting a $50,000 lease cancellation penalty. World Trade Center and New York-New Jersey Port Authority Police had previously determined that Zim’s World Trade Center office was an intelligence operation that involved Mossad and CIA agents. Unlike other tenants in the World Trade Center, Zim’s stairwell access door were covered by security cameras.[54]

The major media largely failed to report the story of Israeli intelligence teams masquerading as art students. Only Fox News referred to it in a four-part investigative series in December 2001 but soon removed it from its web site. At the time, reporter Carl Cameron stated, “There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the September 11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it.”[55]

However, Cameron’s report was somewhat bolstered by news reports in early 2002 that Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, in early September 2001, sent the CIA a warning of an impending Arab terrorist attack on the East Coast of the United States. Two three- man Mossad units consisting of Yemeni- and Egyptian-born Jews had apparently tracked some of the September 11 hijackers in Hamburg and south Florida. CIA chief George Tenet referred to the Mossad report as “too non-specific” and decided not to order any higher alert level throughout the CIA’s network of stations. Follow-up reports from the Mossad units referred to their quarry attending flight training. After the attacks, the Mossad teams left the United States on board El Al flights.[56]

Newspapers across the United States also reported Israelis being arrested around U.S. military installations. In May 2001, two Israelis, Gal Kantor and Tsvi Watermann, were arrested at the Volk Field Air National Guard base at Camp Douglas in Juneau County, Wisconsin. They said they were going to visit a museum on the base but instead began taking photographs on the runway. When an Air Force security guard asked the young men if they were selling art, Kantor became upset and demanded to know why the question was being asked. Obviously, the Volk Field security personnel had been warned about the suspicious activities of Israeli art students. Three days before the two Israelis were arrested at Volk Field, four Israelis were arrested and deported after they were discovered selling art door-to-door in a neighborhood close to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. Reflecting some sort of official sensitivity about the Volk Field incident, the base sent a news release to the Capital Times of Madison marked “for release on request only.”[57]

The Tinker Air Force Base incident was confirmed by Midwest City Police Chief Brandon Clabes who said his police officers “were on alert” because they received a national security advisory warning that “Israeli nationals were posing as students selling artwork… to gain information about the U.S. military and security.” Clabes said his officers encountered the Israelis on May 17, 2002, shortly after 7:15 PM. Two of the Israelis were on foot conducting “unusual door-to-door solicitations” in the Oakwood East housing area. A third Israeli was acting as a driver. In addition to several other photo identification cards, all three had Israeli Air Force identification. Clabes identified the three Israelis as Naor Topaz, Zeev Cahen, and Yaron Ohana. The three Israelis and a fourth member of their team were later arrested by the police on visa violations. The Israelis denied they were selling their artwork. Although the Air Force Office of Special Investigations later denied the Israelis were involved in espionage, Clabes said higher authorities in U.S. law enforcement believed the Israelis were using the selling of art to get people to divulge additional information by first engaging in “casual conversation about art, and then start slipping in questions about who lived there, is their family in the military--those types of things.”[58]

Around 8:10 AM on September 11, 2001, American Airlines flight attendant Madeline Amy Sweeney, a 13-year veteran of the airline, used her cell phone to report to her supervisor at Logan Airport in Boston about the hijacking and murders occurring on her aircraft. A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Memorandum written the same day stated that one of the hijackers assigned to seat 10B (reportedly Satam Al Suqami) shot and killed the passenger assigned to seat 9B. The passenger shot was reported to have been Daniel C. Lewin, an Israeli-American agent with the top secret Israeli anti-terrorist Unit 269 of the counter-terrorism Sayeret Matkal branch of the Israeli Defense Force. Lewin also served as the chief technology officer of Akamai Technologies, Inc., a software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[59] The 911 Commission Report stated that Lewin was stabbed and not shot by Suqami. While Lewin and Israel were praised in the report no mention was made of Sweeney’s last words to her superiors.

The FAA Memo, which was later reported by the FAA to be alternately erroneous and a first draft, was eventually scrubbed from the FAA’s internal e-mail system. The original FAA memo stated:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

September 11, 2001

On September 11, 2001, several commercial air carrier incidents, believed to be terrorist-related, occurred in various locations in the United States. As numerous U.S. passenger air carriers were involved, this has impacted many passengers as well as numerous persons on the ground in these various crash sites. The following is a summary of the events, which have occurred:

American Airlines Flight 11, departed today from Boston Logan International Airport (BOS), bound for Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The aircraft type was a Boeing 767-200 with eighty-one passengers, nine flight attendants and two crew in the cockpit, which totaled 92 persons on this flight. At approximately 9:18 AM, it was reported that the two crew members in the cockpit were stabbed. The flight then descended with no communication from the flight crew members. The American Airlines FAA Principle Security Inspector (PSI) was notified by Suzanne Clark of American Airlines Corporate Headquarters, that an on board flight attendant contacted American Airlines Operations Center and informed that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in seat 9B at 9:20 AM.[60] The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin, shot by passenger Satam Al Suqami. One bullet was reported to have been fired. The flight headed in the direction of John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK). At 9:25 AM, this flight crashed directly into one of the towers at the World Trade Center. At 11:26 AM, a passenger manifest was obtained. The status of any selectees is as yet undetermined.

United Airlines Flight 93 departed this morning, from Newark International Airport (EWR) bound for San Francisco International Airport (SFO). The aircraft type is Boeing 757, confirmation pending. The flight consisted of thirty-eight passengers, two pilots and five crew members, which totaled 45 persons on this flight. Two selectee passengers (Christine Adams and Nicole Miller) were boarded on this flight with no unusual behavior noted per the air carrier personnel and screeners.[61] No cargo was on board this flight. One unit load device (ULD), was on board containing U.S. mail. At 9:42 AM, there was a report of a bomb threat on board this flight. Passengers’ screams were heard in the cabin. At 10:05 AM, the Illinois State Police received a 9-1-1 telephone call from a passenger on that flight, who reported that three hijackers were on board with knives and reportedly made a bomb threat. The three hijackers were reported to be rushing to the cockpit area. At 10:12 AM, the flight crashed near Sommerset, PA. This location is approximately 70-90 miles from Pittsburgh near Route 30.

United Airlines Flight 175, departed from Boston-Logan International Airport (BOS), bound for Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). This aircraft type was a Boeing 767. There were no selectee passengers on this flight. The flight consisted of nine crew members and forty-seven passengers, which totaled fifty-six persons on this flight. At 9:30 AM, radar contact with FAA air traffic control was lost. At 9:45 AM, United Airlines reported that one flight attendant was stabbed and two crew members were killed. This flight crashed into the second World Trade Center Tower.

Page 2

American Airlines Flight 77, departed Washington-Dulles International Airport (IAD), destined for Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). This flight departed Gate D26 of the IAD mid-field terminal at 8:09 a.m., and was airborne at 8:21 AM. The aircraft type was a Boeing 757. Number of selectee passengers is unknown at this time; ramp personnel noticed two selectees checked bags on the ramp. One non-selectee passenger did not board due to confusion of gate location. This flight consisted of fifty-eight passengers and six flight crew members, which totaled sixty-four persons on this flight. There was no cargo being transported on this aircraft. There were a total of thirty-five checked bags. It is presumed that this flight crashed into the Pentagon located in Washington, DC at approximately 10:00 AM.

Additional information is continuously being gathered on each of the four incidents described above.

911/01 5:31 PM

In November 2001, the INS arrested several Israelis, including some with military backgrounds, selling Puzzle Car and Zoom Copter toys from shopping mall kiosks and veding carts. Many of the malls were located near U.S. government facilities, including the Pentagon and CIA. A majority of the Israelis, arrested for visa violations instead of espionage, worked for a Florida-based company called Quality Sales. A spokesman for the company admitted the company hired vacationing Israeli students but they had thr wrong visas. The spokesman also revealed the Israelis were deemed “special interest” cases by INS – a new government designation applied to terrorism suspects in the wake of 911.[62] Federal authorities suspect the Israelis were using the kiosks as intelligence fronts in the same manner that Israelis were using door-to-door art sales as covers. The National Counterintelligence Center (NCIX) stated in a report issued in March 2001 that, “In the past six weeks, employees in federal office buildings located throughout the United States have reported suspicious activities connected with individuals representing themselves as foreign students selling or delivering artwork. Employees have observed both males and females attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings.” The report was temporarily removed from the NCIX web site.

One of the malls where the Israeli “toy sellers” based their operations was the Pentagon City Mall, just across Intersate 395 from the Pentagon. In July 2004, the mall served as the rendezvous point for alleged Israeli Pentagon spy Larry Franklin and Keith Weissman, an AIPAC official. Franklin warned Weissman that Iranian agents were going to start attacking American soldiers and Israeli agents in Iraq. Weissman then went to brief the account of the meeting to Steve Rosen, another senior AIPAC official. They both informed the Israeli embassy in Washington and Glenn Kessler, a reporter for The Washington Post. Those phone calls were being wiretapped by the FBI as part of its investigation of a major Israeli spy ring in the United States, an investigation that had been going on since before the 911 attacks. The FBI was also monitoring meetings between Franklin, Weissman, and Rosen, including one held in February 2003 at the Arlington, Virginia Ritz-Carlton hotel, which adjoins the Pentagon City Mall. [63]

In February 2005, an Israeli man named Ohad Cohen was deported, along with four other Israelis, from Omaha, Nebraska. In what was becoming a common occurrence in the United States, a total of ten Israelis, who were working at shopping mall kiosks in the Omaha and Lincoln areas, were deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for illegally working in the United States on tourist visas. The Israelis operated out of Omaha’s Oak View Mall and Lincoln’s Gateway Westfield Mall. The Federal government probe was reported to be part of a wider probe of Israeli shopping mall kiosk activity throughout the Midwest. In December 2004, FBI and immigration officers arrested 15 Israelis in Minnesota and three operating from a mall kiosk in Grand Forks, North Dakota.[64] Omaha is also the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC).

The International Association of Counter-terrorism and Security Professionals wrote in a May 2000 report that “U.S. law enforcement reports ‘numerous encounters’ with Middle Eastern ‘art students’ with ‘fraudulent documents’ who attempted to ‘gain unauthorized access’ to federal buildings.”[65]

The unusual casing of sensitive locations continued after 911. According to informed sources in Corpus Christi, Texas, young Israelis were seen conducting surveillance of the Port of Corpus Christi in January 2002. The report was contained in the U.S. Coast Guard’s Corpus Christi Marine Safety Office Intelligence Bulletin. The bulletin stated:

…There were four significant events in the Port of Corpus Christi in the past four weeks. Each event is under current investigation by the FBI. They may or may not be cases of actual or potential surveillance.

Ø Three men of Middle Eastern descent on board a charter boat in Port Aransas were asking unusual and very nosy questions about the operation of the ship’s machinery and equipment.

Ø Five men of Middle Eastern descent taking photographs of the Clark Flagship charter boat at 11:30 at night.

Ø A man and a woman of Middle Eastern descent were taking pictures outside the fence of Citgo East. Upon questioning by security personnel, the female stated they were art students. She further added they were photographing a “pipe rack.” The term is one that would only be used by someone in the industry. Coupled along with several other suspicious indicators, the picture taking did not seem legitimate.

Ø Two men of Middle Eastern descent drove through a gate at Citgo West after it was opened to let a delivery truck out. The men drove straight down to the oil docks where a ship was moored. Before security personnel could arrive, the men boarded the ship for several minutes, and were en-route back out of the facility. The men claimed to be selling electronic equipment. In a search of their truck by the sheriff’s office, a loaded pistol was found in the cab. They had also been denied access at an adjacent facility shortly before this incident.[66]

The FBI investigated a case of a “Middle Eastern-looking” man photographing the Ultramar Diamond Shamrock refinery in Three Rivers, Texas, near Corpus Christi. On November 22, 2001, a refinery employee saw the man taking pictures from Highway 281. The man sped away when refinery employees approached his vehicle, a Dodge van rented from McAllen, Texas. The FBI was called in to investigate. Live Oak County Sheriff Larry Busby said the FBI never followed up with his office after the incident. Busby and Three Rivers police chief Ace Robbins had been on the alert ever since September 11 when a suspicious aircraft was seen circling the Ultramar refinery.[67]

In June 2004, groups of young and neatly dressed “Middle Eastern-looking” men were also spotted near the U.S.-Mexican border in Arizona’s Cochise County near Tombstone and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Huachuca. A spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol in Tucson said he was not at liberty to discuss the country of origin of the Middle Eastern-looking men.[68] According to FBI sources, “Middle Eastern-looking” or “Middle Eastern descent” are internal code words used to describe Israelis without having to face the inevitable political problems of identifying them as such.

Copies of Department of Homeland Security morning briefs, classified “For Official Use Only,” were mistakenly leaked to the public from an Energy Department web site. The briefs contain a number of references to suspicious “Middle East looking” persons seen around sensitive U.S. facilities. The descriptions match identically the behavior of Israeli “art students” cited in the DEA Report and various other law enforcement encounters with Israeli “movers.”

The September 27, 2004 brief stated:

FOUO) MAINE: Suspicious Persons in Southwest Harbor. According to 23 September USCG reporting, a concerned citizen reported suspicious behavior by three men of possible Middle Eastern descent at a convenience store located in Southwest Harbor. The men were asking if any local businesses rented power boats, kayaks, or bikes. The men were driving a maroon-colored van with Florida license plates. The reporting citizen stated that although he initially thought the men’s behavior was suspicious, he did not think to report it, until he learned that the Queen Mary II would be making a port visit to Bar Harbor on 27 September. An investigation is ongoing. (COGARD Southwest Harbor; 23 Sep 04; HSOC 3577-04)

MASSACHUSETTS: Possible Video Surveillance of Interstate Highway. According to military reporting, on 22 September, in Lexington, a military member reported observing four Middle Eastern individuals standing on an I-95 overpass videotaping the northbound traffic and recording information into a notebook. Reportedly, the same military member recalled observing two of the individuals on the same overpass in late February or early March 2004. (AFOSI Talon 102-23-09-04-2297; 23 Sep 04; HSOC 3579-04)[69]

From the September 29, 2004 briefing there were additional reports of suspicious “Middle Easterners,” in addition to a report from San Francisco about suspicious activity by two individuals whose van was traced to a jewelry store in Seattle:

FLORIDA: Suspicious Photographing and Videotaping of High-Rise Buildings Including the Main Street Bridge and the Skyway. According to 25 September Jacksonville Regional Domestic Security Task Force reporting, in downtown Jacksonville, an off-duty police officer reported seeing one of three people, whom he described as Middle Eastern in appearance, photographing and videotaping high-rise buildings, to include the Main Street Bridge and the Skyway. When the off-duty police officer pulled alongside the minivan, the individual with the camera immediately put it down, and the minivan departed the area. The off-duty police officer reported the minivan’s license plate and description. The registration showed the minivan was maroon, while the vehicle the officer saw appeared gray. An investigation is on-going. (FDLE Daily Brief, 28 Sep 04; HSOC 3629-04)

(FOUO) WASHINGTON / CALIFORNIA: Suspicious Activity at USCG Group San Francisco. According to USCG reporting, on 23 September, Coast Guard members observed two individuals in a blue van taking pictures of the Bay Bridge and surrounding area in front of USCG Group San Francisco’s main gate. The license plates were traced to a jewelry store address in Seattle, Washington. Additional checks revealed that the two individuals were not owners, employed or had any association with the store. An investigation is on-going. (COGARD San Francisco, 28 Sep 04; HSOC 3630-04)[70]

From the September 30, 2004, Homeland Security brief, there were further descriptions of “Middle Eastern” activity:

FOUO) WASHINGTON: Suspicious Activity of Two Middle Eastern Males on Ferry. According to USCG reporting, on 27 September, in Seattle, two Middle Eastern males were observed studying the schematic of the Wenatchee Ferry for an extended period of time. As soon as the two males noticed an employee approaching, they immediately walked away from the schematic and picked up a magazine to ward off attention. At the end of the voyage, the two males returned to their vehicle. A license plate check revealed the vehicle belonged to a rental company. Information from the rental company on the vehicle indicated that it was a rented to a business located in Tukwila. The business was unable to be located. An investigation is on-going. (COGARD FIST Seattle, 28 Sep 04; HSOC 3657-04)[71]

On October 14, 2004, a further report on “Middle Eastern” activity:

Suspicious Activity at Andrews AFB Main Gate. According to military reporting, on 12 October, Andrews AFB security officers observed a possible Middle Eastern male photographing the main gate area using what appeared to be a small, disposable camera. When a security officer approached the individual to question him, the unidentified male left the gate area, walked across the street, met up with another individual believed to also be of Middle Eastern origin, entered a white, late-model Pontiac Grand Am and quickly departed the area. Reportedly, a possible Middle Eastern female was sitting in the back of the vehicle. (AFOSI Talon 331-12-10-04-2484, 12 Oct 04; HSOC 3876-04)[72]

A particularly suspicious report was found in the October 19, 2004 brief. Several teams of Israeli art students had cased U.S. Air Force bases, including Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City:

MISSOURI: Suspicious Telephone Calls. According to military reporting, on 15 October, at Whiteman Air Force Base [home base for the B-2 bomber], an unknown male, described as having a heavy Middle Eastern accent, telephonically contacted the 509 th Munitions Squadron, claiming that he represented a not-for-profit organization and wanted to confirm the squadron’s address. Reportedly, when questioned about his organization, the unknown caller became belligerent and ended the phone call. On 16 October, another member of the 509 th Munitions Squadron received a call at his residence on his personal cellular telephone from an unknown individual—also described as having a Middle Eastern accent—who solicited information related to Whiteman AFB, where the military member worked, and other operationally related questions. The military member did not provide any information to the caller and hung up. An investigation is on-going. (USAF Talon Report, 207-18-10-04-2533, 18 Oct 04; HSOC 3953-04)[73]

From the October 26, 2004 brief:

(FOUO) ILLINOIS: Possible Surveillance Activity. According to the Illinois State Terrorism Intelligence Center (STIC), on 22 October, in Joliet, at a worksite at the McDonough Street Bridge, a construction foreman observed a male of possible Middle Eastern origin taking photographs of the bridge. When the foreman told the unidentified male to leave, the individual became upset and continued to photograph nearby buildings before departing the area. Reportedly, the individual left in a Chevrolet Cavalier with Minnesota plates which have been traced back to a finance company in Boca Raton, Florida. (Illinois State Police STIC, 25 Oct 04; HSOC 4065-04)[74]

From the December 9, 2004 brief yet another incident involving a U.S. Air Force Base:

TEXAS: DoD Lesson Plans Stolen from USAF Member Hotel Room / Possible Surveillance Activities. According to 7 December military reporting, in San Antonio at Lackland AFB, on 30 November, USAF personnel arrived at a local hotel and noticed four possible Middle Eastern males behaving suspiciously. Approximately three to four days later, the men were observed counting and photographing the doors to the rooms belonging to the USAF members. Reportedly, the men always traveled together, and appeared to be purposely present when the USAF members gathered for breakfast. The men were also noted to have the “No Service” door magnets posted on their doors throughout the day. On 6 December, one USAF member reported that his lesson plans were stolen from his room. The other USAF members reported that nothing was missing, but personal items were seemingly out of place in their rooms to include open drawers and closet doors. An investigation is on-going. (AFOSI Talon #409-07-12-04-2968, 7 Dec 04; HSOC 4701-04)[75]

Another suspicious case was reported in the December 28, 2004 briefing involving two “Middle Easterners” with Florida connections:

(FOUO) NEW JERSEY: Suspicious Activity at Critical Infrastructure. According to a Call-in report, on 20 December, at a Dam in Morris County, a Vehicle occupied by two males of possible Middle Eastern descent entered a restricted area. A Dam employee approached the vehicle and advised the subjects that they were on private property. The two subjects claimed that they wanted to take one last look at the reservoir and dam before they relocated to Florida. The Dam employee ordered the subjects to leave the premises, informing them that local law enforcement had been contacted. The vehicle took off at a high rate of speed leaving the premises. (Call in, 27 December 04: HSOC 4929-04)[76]

The December 30, 2004 brief actually contained a report concerning Israeli-Ukrainians detained in Buffalo for passport fraud:

(FOUO) NEW YORK: Ukrainian Nationals Attempt Entry with Photo-Substituted Passports and Visas. According to BTS reporting, on 29 December, Ukrainian nationals Ivan SERNOWSKIY (DOB: 10/25/1968, A97914917) and Maria FESTUK (DOB: 06/20/1975, A97914918) arrived by bus at the Buffalo, NY Port of Entry (POE) claiming to be an Israeli couple named Vyesheslav and Marya URMANOV. The couple applied for admission as visitors for pleasure. SERNOWSKIY presented Israeli passport 8400058 in the name of Vyesheslav URMANOV (DOB: 03/12/1965) with a visa issued in Tel Aviv on November 29, 2000 (foil 41200881). FESTUK presented Israeli passport 6830276 in the name of Marya URMANOV (DOB: 06/20/1975) with machine-readable visa (20011717790001). The Automated Biometrics Identification System (IDENT) checks resulted in a fingerprint mismatch on Mr. URMANOV. The couple was referred to secondary for further examination. NTC research revealed a recent photo of Vyesheslav URMANOV which was forwarded to CBP officers for comparison. SERNOWSKIY was confronted with the fingerprint and photograph discrepancies and admitted his true identity. The U.S. Attorney’s Office accepted this case for prosecution. CBP determined both aliens were inadmissible to the U.S. (willful misrepresentation of material fact), refused their admission, and detained them for prosecution. (BTS Daily Operations Report, 30 Dec 04; HSOC 4958-04)

The December 30 brief also included a report reminiscent of Israeli art student surveillance of Federal buildings and offices:

(FOUO) MARYLAND: Possible Surveillance of Federal Building in Baltimore. According ICE reporting 28 December, a Special Agent from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Inspector General (HUD-OIG) observed three individuals conducting possible surveillance of two federal facilities in Baltimore, MD. The two male and one female subjects, described as being of Middle Eastern descent, were seen videotaping the US Customs House and the Appraiser Building. Each of the subjects had their own camera. The agent notified contract guards inside the Appraiser Building. When the agent and guards went outside to contact the subjects, the three individuals hid their cameras and departed the area, with each subject traveling in a separate direction. The Baltimore City Police Department Intelligence Unit was notified, and the matter has been referred to an FPS Special Agent for further investigation. (ICE Daily Summary, 29 Dec 04; HSOC 4962-04)[77]

The January 5, 2005 brief also mentioned an incident involving a named Israeli citizen:

ISRAEL: Citizen of Israel Subject of TIPOFF and TSA No Fly has Visa Revoked on January 3. According to BTS reporting on 5 January, Samuel COHEN (DOB: 07/20/1969) arrived at LAX on COPA airlines from Lima, Peru, seeking admission as a visitor for pleasure. At LAX, the CT Watch determined that COHEN was a TIPOFF and NO FLY match. Close coordination resulted in the Department of State (DOS) revoking COHEN's visa on the spot. As a result of this revocation, COHEN was found to not be in possession of proper documents and was processed for an Expedited Removal. He is scheduled to depart 5 January, from the United States on COPA airlines flight CM303. (BTS Daily Operations Report, 5 Jan 05, HSOC 0033-05)[78]

On July 27, 2005, it was revealed that New York’s Metropolitan Transportation (MTA) Authority's Interagency Counter Terrorism Task Force was maintaining a database of individuals stopped and questioned for filming bridge and tunnel crossings around New York City. Some of the people in the database were stopped on more than one occasion for filming and photographing bridges and tunnels and in one case an individual who was stopped for filming a New York area bridge was discovered to be driving the same vehicle as another person who was stopped earlier for filming the Verazano Narrows Bridge. An MTA source revealed that much of the filming did not involve regular tourists, but much more. The source said the filming “appear[ed] to be more than just casual filming.” The filmers and photographers were concentrating on bridge beams (as in the case of the Memphis I-40 bridge) and security checkpoints. The MTA database includes individuals stopped for filming the bridges and tunnels under the control of the MTA: Verrazano, Triborough, Throgs Neck, Whitestone, Henry Hudson, Marine Parkway, Cross Bay Veterans Memorial, the Midtown Tunnel and the Battery Tunnel.[79] A number of Federal law enforcement authorities report that suspicious Israelis continue to be stopped around the nation photographing and filming sensitive facilities and infrastructures but are not charged and brought to trial.

In October 2004, a suspicious Israeli was detained by the Delaware County, Oklahoma Sheriff’s Department. Two miles of State Highway 20, east of Jay, were closed down while an Oklahoma State Police Bomb squad searched the Israeli’s car for “possible terrorist activities.” As has been the modus operandi in such cases, the FBI from Tulsa questioned the Israeli, who could not produce either a passport or a visa, and released him after seven hours. The Israeli had an Arizona driver’s license showing an address in Gentry, Arkansas. The FBI said they were familiar with the Israeli. Delaware County Undersheriff Dale Eberle did not disclose the Israeli’s identity since he was never arrested. The 40-year old Israeli, who was married to a U.S. citizen, had been traveling around the Tulsa area with a tubular camera on the roof of his car. Police were notified that the camera looked like a pipe bomb. Eberle said police were concerned that the Israeli may have been targeting the Pensacola Dam and two watersheds that feed Tulsa. The Israeli had recording devices and tools in his car, according to a police inventory. The Israeli had been asking questions about local industries in Jay and when he stopped at a local diner he refused to use a glass or silverware because he did not want to leave fingerprints.[80]

On May 15, 2003, Cloudcroft, New Mexico Police Chief Gene Green stopped a U-Haul van in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, near the White Sands Missile Test Range, for speeding. According to the Alamogordo Daily News, the two truck drivers had Israeli driver’s licenses and claimed they were hauling furniture from Austin to Chicago. Yet the rental agreement had expired two days earlier and New Mexico was way off track from the Austin to Chicago route. The Israelis then changed their story--they claimed they were dropping off furniture in Deming, New Mexico. But they could not provide a delivery address in the town. Also, their rental agreement was only for intrastate use in Illinois. Inside the truck, Chief Green found junk furniture not worth moving anywhere and 50 boxes that the Israelis claimed were a “private delivery.” The Israelis were turned over to INS and nothing more was heard about them or their “cargo.”[81] Consumers who have hired them have complained about suspicious behavior and illegal practices of Israeli-owned moving companies from Wisconsin to Florida to Pennsylvania. Advanced Moving Systems of Sunrise, Florida, an Israeli-owned moving company, complained that police in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and North Carolina stopped several of its crews. The firm’s owner, Zion Rokah, claimed the police were “xenophobic and racist.”[82]

Almost one year earlier, on May 7, 2002, two Israelis were arrested in Oak Harbor, Washington, near Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. Police and Naval law enforcement investigators found traces of TNT and plastic explosives in a rental truck driven by the Israelis after they were stopped for speeding. One of the Israelis had an expired visa, an international driver’s license, and no identification. They claimed they had delivered furniture in Oak Harbor and were on their way back to Canada. A bomb-sniffing dog reacted to traces of explosive material on the truck’s steering wheel and gear shift. The FBI later said the explosive tests were negative and the INS, in keeping with tradition, refused to comment on the case.[83] In the days following September 11, a number of residents of Island County called emergency centers to report sightings of “Middle Eastern” looking men driving Canadian trucks.[84]

In a similar incident on May 21, 2004, two Israeli men, Tamir D. Sason and Daniel Levy, both of Metar, Israel, and reported to have been working for an Atlanta moving company, attempted to enter the King’s Bay, Georgia U.S. Naval Submarine base. They were supposedly contracted to move someone from the base. As with the Whidbey Island incident, a bomb-sniffing dog alerted to a briefcase in the truck. Security guards became suspicious when one of the Israelis could not provide proper identification. The base went into a three-hour security lockdown and a bomb squad inspected the truck. As in the other cases involving Israelis trying to penetrate security perimeters, the Israelis were handed over to immigration authorities and the FBI refused comment. In addition to the FBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Navy Criminal Investigate Service were called in to investigate the Israeli incident.[85] King’s Bay is close to Sea Island, Georgia, the site of the June 2004 G-8 Summit, a fact that obviously piqued the interest of law enforcement officials in the area.

On May 10, 2004, two other Israeli “movers” were apprehended suspiciously close to the Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee and the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina where convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard was incarcerated. Driving a Ryder rental truck leased in Plantation, Florida, Shmuel Dahan and Almaliach Naor, led Unicoi County Sheriff Kent Harris on a high-speed chase. The Israelis claimed they were delivering furniture to West Virginia but Harris wondered why they would have been on the more remote two-lane U.S. Highway 23 rather than the faster Interstate 26. The Israelis also possessed false identification documents, Dahan a bogus Florida driver’s license issued in Plantation, Florida and Naor a fake identification card. Harris also searched a storage facility the Israelis rented in Mars Hill, North Carolina. The FBI was called in to investigate but in typical fashion they turned the matter over the U.S. immigration officers who scheduled a deportation hearing. An FBI spokesman said the Israelis were guilty of nothing more than littering. Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms also joined the investigation. While chasing the Israelis, Harris noticed they threw a vial out of the truck. The Israelis later denied they threw anything out of the truck. The ejected container was reported to have contained a suspicious “fuel source” that was sent to the Tennessee Emergency Management office in Sevierville, Tennessee. It was later discovered to have contained a mixture of a cleaning fluid called Astromid 18, Gluconic acid, and water. Harris said he was not sure why the substances were mixed together. The Israelis also had a “Learn to Fly” brochure in their truck. Harris said he “got a sick feeling” when he saw the brochure and the business card of a Fort Launderdale, Florida-based flight instructor named Nissan Giat, another Israeli citizen. Police feared the Israelis might have been targeting the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in nearby Erwin, Tennessee. A lawyer for the Israelis later claimed they meant no harm, that Naor possessed a fake identification card so he could get into a Miami nightclub. Naor’s age was never given.[86] Although the Federal government said the Israelis posed no danger, the state of Tennessee kept the case open. The DEA report on the activities of Israeli “art students” cited a case in which the Federal Protective Service arrested two Israeli art students in Plantation, Florida for possession of fake Social Security cards. Plantation was also the base of operations for Dahan.

On October 17, 2001, three Israelis driving a truck were discovered by Plymouth, Pennsylvania police with possession of a close-up videotape of the Sears Tower in Chicago. Plymouth Police Chief David McCann reviewed the tape and then found the Sony camera inside the truck. The police had responded to a call that the Israelis were illegally dumping furniture into a dumpster behind a Pizzeria Uno restaurant from a tractor-trailer truck registered in Florida. When the restaurant manager confronted the Israeli driver he drove off quickly from the scene. The leader of the team who drove the truck sporting the sign “Moving Systems Incorporated” was Moshe Elmakias. Two other Israelis, a woman named Ayelet Reisler, and a man named Ron Katar, were also questioned by Plymouth police after the truck was seen parked. Reisler had a German passport in one name and a prescription in another name. Whitpain, Pennsylvania Police later discovered that the truck’s operator log had been falsified. All the evidence of the Whitpain and Plymouth police was collected by the FBI, which then deep-sixed the investigation in typical FBI fashion when it came to Israeli surveillance and espionage activity in the United States. Elmakias and Katar were turned over to the INS but Reisler was released.[87]

The Interstate 40 Hernando De Soto Bridge in Memphis was also an apparent surveillance target for the Israelis. According to the Arkansas State Police, a few days after 911, the FBI and Memphis police were alerted to two Israelis (officially reported to be of “Middle Eastern” appearance) taking photographs of the De Soto span and the older Interstate 55 Bridge. The Israelis were particularly interested in the undersides of the bridges. They had seven cameras of different sizes and makes. Upon being detained by the FBI, the men claimed to have diplomatic immunity and one produced a diplomatic passport. After the Israelis were turned over to the INS, the FBI dropped any further investigation.[88]




The Hernando de Soto Bridge in Memphis. Surveilled by Israelis a few days after 911.

In early October 2001, the FBI was on a nationwide search for six Israelis stopped by the police in the Midwest and found to be in possession of box cutters and “other equipment.” The Israelis also had photos and descriptions of a Florida nuclear power plant and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The Israelis were traveling in groups of three in two white sedans. Although the INS ordered the men released, the FBI was reported to be furious that the Israelis were allowed to flee, possibly to Canada. The INS refused to reveal in what state the Israelis were stopped. Although their Israeli passports were reported valid, there was no way to know if their true identities matched those in the passports. The FBI refused to release the names and descriptions of the Israelis. FBI Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General John Ashcroft held a news conference on October 2, 2001 warning that a new wave of terrorist attacks could be expected in the United States. Their warning came after the Israelis were stopped in the Midwest.[89] In what may have been a related case, six Israelis were arrested in Cleveland in mid-October and were held incommunicado. A seventh Israeli woman was also reported to have been arrested.[90]

On October 10, 2001, two Israelis, one a former Israeli Army Colonel and the other a Mossad agent, were arrested in the Mexican Congress with 9mm pistols and dynamite. According to the Mexican Justice Department official web site “the head of Congressional Security Salvador Alarcón verified that the Israelis had in their possession nine hand grenades, sticks of dynamite, detonators, wiring and two 9mm ‘Glock’ automatics.” The Israelis were subsequently released after the intervention of the Israeli embassy in Mexico City.[91]

In 1990, the head of Colombia’s secret police, General Miguel Maza Marquez, blamed Israeli paramilitary training for a wave of terrorist attacks in Colombia during the entire year. These included the bombing of an Avianca passenger jet in November 1989 that killed 117 people, assassinations of local political leaders, and two attempts on his own life. A bombing of Maza’s police headquarters killed 63 people. Colombia responded to the Israeli involvement with terrorism by abrogating a 1962 no visa travel agreement with Israel.[92]

In April 2004, New Zealand’s Foreign Minister called in Israel’s ambassador to that nation to complain about two suspected Mossad agents arrested at Auckland airport after trying to obtain false New Zealand passports. The Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) had cooperated in the sting of the Israelis, identified as Elisha Cara and Uri Zoshe Kelman. New Zealand and Australian police and intelligence services tied the Israelis to the Russian-Israeli mafia. Police were looking for a third suspected Mossad spy, Zev William Barkan, who was believed to have fled New Zealand for Israel, and a fourth unidentified Israeli believed to have gone into hiding in New Zealand. Barkan was later discovered to have served at Israeli embassies in Austria and Belgium. Police later identified a New Zealander named Anthony David Resnick, a 13-year veteran of the Israeli Defense Force and a member of Auckland’s Jewish Council, as another conspirator in the Mossad operation. Resnick reportedly fled to Israel. Cara and Kelman were both released on bail with the provision that they remain at two separate Auckland hotels but both Israelis violated their bail and checked out of their hotels.[93] They were eventually sentenced to six months in jail and New Zealand protested the illegal Mossad operation in New Zealand by suspending relations with Israel.[94] There were reports that the Israeli operation extended to Australia and that the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) may have tipped off its New Zealand counterpart about the espionage ring. After tipping off New Zealand about Cara and his accomplices, Australian agents raided Cara’s rental home on Sydney’s north shore. Cara’s front was a Haifa-based travel agency called Eastward Bound.[95] After it was discovered that Kelman, an Israeli-Canadian, used a Canadian passport to enter New Zealand, Canada lodged a protest with Israel. In 1997, after two Mossad agents on an assassination mission were caught in Jordan using Canadian passports, Israel agreed to refrain from using Canadian passports in its intelligence operations.[96]

In February 2005, it was reported that Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade ordered a senior Israeli embassy officer in Canberra to leave the country for his intelligence ties to Cara and Kelman. Although the opposition Australian Labor and Green parties demanded details of the explusion of the suspected Mossad agent, the John Howard government remained tight lipped about the matter.[97] Israeli President Moshe Katsav cancelled a March 2005 trip to New Zealand over the affair but he visited Australia on schedule.

On January 12, 2000, Indian Central Bureau of Intelligence (CBI) agents arrested 11 Israelis disguised as Islamic preachers (“tabliqis”) before they boarded a Bangladesh Biman Airlines flight from Calcutta to Dhaka. The 11 Israelis, reported at first to be Afghans who spent some time in Iran, were to attend an Islamic conference in Dhaka but the government of Bangladesh denied them a visa. They all had one-way tickets to Dhaka, something that triggered alarms in Bangladesh. CBI officials were surprised when they discovered the arrested Islamic preachers were actually Israelis from the West Bank. After the Israelis were arrested, Israel exerted enormous pressure on the Indians to release them and permit them to return to Tel Aviv. A CBI official said, “It appeared that they could be working for a sensitive organization in Israel and were on a mission to Bangladesh.” It was suspected that the Israelis, who could have been Afghan Jews, may have been recruited by Mossad to penetrate Al Qaeda cells in Bangladesh.[98]

On January 11, 2000, India’s Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) issued a Top Secret circular (NO: ER/BCAS/PIC/CIRCULAR/99), regarding a possible hijacking attempt on a Bangladesh Biman aircraft in India. The circular was signed by India’s regional civil aviation security chief at Calcutta Airport and copies were sent to other Indian agencies as well as to the Bangladesh Biman office in Calcutta. It was this alert that helped India and Bangladesh nab the 11 Israelis the following day.[99]

***

The DEA-INS continued to have a “keen interest” in the activities of the Israeli art students. The DEA believed there may have been links between the Israeli espionage teams and trafficking in the drug Ecstasy. Although the Israelis denied any espionage activity in the United States, some of their supporters in the Bush administration have defended the art students claiming, “It is quite normal for young Israelites to travel around the world for one year after they complete their military service.”

A March 8, 2002, an editorial in the Albuquerque Journal summed up the general angst and suspicion over the activities of the Israeli art students:

When U.S. authorities suspect an organized team of spies is seeking to infiltrate sensitive federal office buildings and the homes of government employees, they should arrest and interrogate to get to the bottom of the plot. Instead, a draft report from the Drug Enforcement Administration reports that young Israelis posing as art students but suspected of espionage activities were merely deported.

DEA first said the youths’ actions “may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity.” But immigration officials deported the suspicious Israelis, said to number in the dozens, for visa violations.

Perhaps the officials had forgotten the case of Jonathan Pollard, a civilian Navy intelligence officer who gave classified information to the Israelis. It was an operation that Israel eventually acknowledged was known and approved of in the highest reaches of the Israeli government. Pollard has served some 13 years of a life sentence.

The recent arrests were made in a number of major U.S. cities from California to Florida, amid public warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies about suspicious behavior by people posing as Israeli art students and “attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings.”

The United States owes no duty to Israel to ignore spying. Israel, it could be argued, should at least be grateful enough to the United States that it should be reluctant to try to steal secrets.[100]

Perhaps the espionage incident would have faded entirely had it not been for the fact that similar art students, with unbelievable alibis, were caught in 2003 by Canadian security police around the Houses of Parliament in Ottawa.

On September 12, 2003, nine Israeli art students were arrested by Canadian Immigration officers and Ottawa police on Lisgar Street, just a few blocks from Parliament Hill, the day after the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The Canadian police were tipped off by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) that the Israelis, who were reported selling paintings in downtown Ottawa, were possible Mossad agents. The Israeli embassy spokesman in Ottawa used the same sort of language used by his Washington, DC counterpart to brush aside the arrests as routine, “We don't know full details about what the paintings were but it was a completely commercial matter,” said Ben Forer, the spokesman for the Israeli embassy.[101] The arrests followed similar arrests of Israeli art students in Calgary, Toronto, and Saskatoon, according to Canadian Immigration officials. Residents of the Ottawa suburban district of Centrepoint had complained about Israelis selling fake art in 2001. Canadian authorities issued exclusion orders for all nine Israelis arrested in Ottawa and ordered them deported. Residents of the Ottawa suburban district of Centrepoint had complained about Israelis selling fake art in 2001.

In August 2004, two ringleaders of an Israeli “art student” door-to-door sales scam, Guy Grinberg and Yukov Senior, were deported from Canada for operating an art sales ring in Alberta. The “art student” ring operated in Calgary, Edmonton, and Red Deer. Eight others were rounded up with the art sales ringleaders. Three apparently escaped Canadian law enforcement arrest.[102] In neighboring Manitoba, twelve Israelis – six men and six women – were arrested in Winnipeg for selling the junk art.[103]

It is interesting to note the answers that some of the Israelis gave when they were questioned by the immigration court. Thanks to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, transcripts of the hearings were made available and they permit the reader to have an inside view of how the Israeli art selling rings operated, both in Canada and the United States. Five transcripts were provided but two provide interesting details of the art selling rings. The Canadian immigration authorities did not believe most of the evasive explanations provided by the Israelis. The answers of the team leader, Roy Laniado, are extremely interesting, especially his discussion of his “boss,” an unnamed individual who traveled from the United States to Canada. As a result of the secrecy surrounding the INS roundup of some 120 Israeli “art students” in the United States, Americans never had the opportunity to know the inside story of how the operation worked:

The transcripts of the deportation hearings of the art students are revealing. Former and well-educated former members of the Israeli military acted as if they never knew it was against the law to work in another country without a permit. There were references to an unnamed “boss” who lived in the United States and owners of the art selling operation who wanted to avoid run-ins with law enforcement. Perhaps the art students in Canada were merely unaware but couple the Canadian art operation with the American operation carried out just two years prior and a pattern of deception emerges. The motto of the Mossad is noteworthy when pointing to its foreign operations: “By way of deception, thou shalt do war.”

There was an interesting postscript to the Israeli espionage activity in the United States before, during, and after 911. In December 2004, it was reported that a former senior U.S. government official, commenting on the FBI’s raid of AIPAC’s Washington offices, stated that in 2001 the FBI discovered a “massive” Israeli espionage operation on the East Coast, specifically including New York and New Jersey.[104] National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley were both briefed on the FBI investigation of Israeli espionage in the United States shortly after they took office in early 2001.[105] A Justice Department source confided that it was Attorney General John Ashcroft who personally ordered the investigation of the Israelis stopped in the months prior to 911 – a decision that proved fateful for the thousands of people who perished on September 11.
Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2004, pp. 26-27.

------------------------------------
Read the whole article including the transscripts and footnotes at this url:
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/Artstudents.htm

Operation Northwoods:

US PLANNED FAKE TERROR ATTACKS ON CITIZENS
TO CREATE SUPPORT FOR CUBAN WAR

From BODY OF SECRETS, James Bamford, Doubleday, 2001, p.82 and following.
Scanned and edited by NY Transfer News.


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



...In [Joint Chief's chair] Lemnitzer's view, the country would be far better off if the generals could take over. [JFK assassination legend has it some general presided over the fudgy JFK autopsy. --Mk]
For those military officers who were sitting on the fence, the Kennedy administration's botched Bay of Pigs invasion was the last straw. "The Bay of Pigs fiasco broke the dike," said one report at the time. "President Kennedy was pilloried by the super patriots as a 'no-win' chief . . . The Far Right became a fount of proposals born of frustration and put forward in the name of anti-Communism. . . Active-duty commanders played host to anti-Communist seminars on their bases and attended or addressed Right-wing meetings elsewhere."

Although no one in Congress could have known it at the time, Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge.

According to secret and long-hidden documents obtained for Body of Secrets, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of antiCommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

The idea may actually have originated with President Eisenhower in the last days of his administration. With the Cold War hotter than ever and the recent U-2 scandal fresh in the public's memory, the old general wanted to go out with a win. He wanted desperately to invade Cuba in the weeks leading up to Kennedy's inauguration; indeed, on January 3 he told Lemnitzer and other aides in his Cabinet Room that he would move against Castro before the inauguration if only the Cubans gave him a really good excuse. Then, with time growing short, Eisenhower floated an idea. If Castro failed to provide that excuse, perhaps, he said, the United States "could think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable." What he was suggesting was a pretext a bombing, an attack, an act of sabotage carried out secretly against the United States by the United States. Its purpose would be to justify the launching of a war. It was a dangerous suggestion by a desperate president.

Although no such war took place, the idea was not lost on General Lemnitzer But he and his colleagues were frustrated by Kennedy's failure to authorize their plan, and angry that Castro had not provided an excuse to invade.

The final straw may have come during a White House meeting on February 26, 1962. Concerned that General Lansdale's various covert action plans under Operation Mongoose were simply becoming more outrageous and going nowhere, Robert Kennedy told him to drop all anti-Castro efforts. Instead, Lansdale was ordered to concentrate for the next three months strictly on gathering intelligence about Cuba. It was a humiliating defeat for Lansdale, a man more accustomed to praise than to scorn.

As the Kennedy brothers appeared to suddenly "go soft" on Castro, Lemnitzer could see his opportunity to invade Cuba quickly slipping away. The attempts to provoke the Cuban public to revolt seemed dead and Castro, unfortunately, appeared to have no inclination to launch any attacks against Americans or their property Lemnitzer and the other Chiefs knew there was only one option left that would ensure their war. They would have to trick the American public and world opinion into hating Cuba so much that they would not only go along, but would insist that he and his generals launch their war against Castro. "World opinion, and the United Nations forum," said a secret JCS document, "should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere."

Operation Northwoods called for a war in which many patriotic Americans and innocent Cubans would die senseless deaths, all to satisfy the egos of twisted generals back in Washington, safe in their taxpayer financed homes and limousines.

One idea seriously considered involved the launch of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth. On February 20,1962, Glenn was to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on his historic journey. The flight was to carry the banner of America's virtues of truth, freedom, and democracy into orbit high over the planet. But Lemnitzer and his Chiefs had a different idea. They proposed to Lansdale that, should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that . . . the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba [sic.]"

This would be accomplished, Lemnitzer continued, "by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans." Thus, as NASA prepared to send the first American into space, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing to use John Glenn's possible death as a pretext to launch a war.

Glenn lifted into history without mishap, leaving Lemnitzer and the Chiefs to begin devising new plots which they suggested be carried out "within the time frame of the next few months."

Among the actions recommended was "a series of well coordinated incidents to take place in and around" the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This included dressing "friendly" Cubans in Cuban military uniforms and then have them "start riots near the main gate of the base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside the base. Ammunition would be blown up, fires started, aircraft sabotaged, mortars fired at the base with damage to installations."

The suggested operations grew progressively more outrageous. Another called for an action similar to the infamous incident in February 1898 when an explosion aboard the battleship Maine in Havana harbor killed 266 U.S. sailors. Although the exact cause of the explosion remained undetermined, it sparked the Spanish-American War with Cuba. Incited by the deadly blast, more than one million men volunteered for duty. Lemnitzer and his generals came up with a similar plan. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," they proposed; "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

There seemed no limit to their fanaticism: "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," they wrote. "The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States.

We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). . . . We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized."

Bombings were proposed, false arrests, hijackings:

*"Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government."

*"Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. 'Cuban' B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with 'Cuban' messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and 'Cuban' shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MiG type aircraft by U.S. pilots could provide additional provocation."

*"Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba."

Among the most elaborate schemes was to "create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight."

Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs worked out a complex deception:

An aircraft at Elgin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CJA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida.

From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a "May Day" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the U.S. what has happened to the aircraft instead of the U.S. trying to "sell" the incident.

Finally, there was a plan to "make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack." It was a particularly believable operation given the decade of shoot downs that had just taken place.

In the final sentence of his letter to Secretary McNamara recommending the operations, Lemnitzer made a grab for even more power asking that the Joint Chiefs be placed in charge of carrying out Operation Northwoods and the invasion. "It is recommended," he wrote, "that this responsibility for both oven and covert military operations be assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

At 2:30 on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 13, 1962, Lemnitzer went over last-minute details of Operation Northwoods with his covert action chief, Brigadier General William H. Craig, and signed the document. He then went to a "special meeting" in McNamara's office. An hour later he met with Kennedy's military representative, General Maxwell Taylor. What happened during those meetings is unknown. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer that there was virtually no possibility that the U.S. would ever use overt military force in Cuba.

Undeterred, Lemnitzer and the Chiefs persisted, virtually to the point of demanding that they be given authority to invade and take over Cuba. About a month after submitting Operation Northwoods, they met the "tank," as the JCS conference room was called, and agreed on the wording of a tough memorandum to McNamara. "The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the Cuban problem must be solved in the near future," they wrote. "Further, they see no prospect of early success in overthrowing the present communist regime either as a result of internal uprising or external political, economic or psychological pressures. Accordingly they believe that military intervention by the United States will be required to overthrow the present communist regime."

Lemnitzer was virtually rabid in his hatred of Communism in general and Castro in particular "The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the United States can undertake military intervention in Cuba without risk of general war" he continued. "They also believe that the intervention can be accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunities for solicitation of UN action." However; what Lemnitzer was suggesting was not freeing the Cuban people, who were largely in support of Castro, but imprisoning them in a U.S. military-controlled police state. "Forces would assure rapid essential military control of Cuba," he wrote. "Continued police action would be required."

Concluding, Lemnitzer did not mince words: "[T]he Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the United States. They also recommend that such intervention be undertaken as soon as possible and preferably before the release of National Guard and Reserve forces presently on active duty."

By then McNamara had virtually no confidence in his military chief and was rejecting nearly every proposal the general sent to him. The rejections became so routine, said one of Lemnitzer's former staff officers, that the staffer told the general that the situation was putting the military in an "embarrassing rut." But Lemnitzer replied, "I am the senior military office--it's my job to state what I believe and it's his [McNamara's] job to approve or disapprove." "McNamara's arrogance was astonishing," said Lemnitzer's aide, who knew nothing of Operation Northwoods. "He gave General Lemnitzer very short shrift and treated him like a schoolboy. The general almost stood at attention when he came into the room. Everything was 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir.'

Within months, Lemnitzer was denied a second term as JCS chairman and transferred to Europe as chief of NATO. Years later President Gerald Ford appointed Lemnitzer, a darling of the Republican right, to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Lemnitzer's Cuba chief, Brigadier General Craig, was also transferred. Promoted to major general, he spent three years as chief of the Army Security Agency, NSA's military arm.

Because of the secrecy and illegality of Operation Northwoods, all details remained hidden for forty years. Lemnitzer may have thought that all copies of the relevant documents had been destroyed; he was not one to leave compromising material lying around. Following the Bay of Pigs debacle, for example, he ordered Brigadier General David W Gray, Craig's predecessor as chief of the Cuba project within the JCS, to destroy all his notes concerning Joint Chiefs actions and discussions during that period. Gray's meticulous notes were the only detailed official records of what happened within the JCS during that time. According to Gray, Lemnitzer feared a congressional investigation and therefore wanted any incriminating evidence destroyed.

With the evidence destroyed, Lemnitzer felt free to lie to Congress. When asked, during secret hearings before a Senate committee, if he knew of any Pentagon plans for a direct invasion of Cuba he said he did not. Yet detailed JCS invasion plans had been drawn up even before Kennedy was inaugurated. And additional plans had been developed since. The consummate planner and man of details also became evasive, suddenly encountering great difficulty in recalling key aspects of the operation, as if he had been out of the country during the period. It was a sorry spectacle. Senator Gore called for Lemnitzer to be fired. "We need a shake up of the Joint Chiefs of Staff" he said. "We direly need a new chairman, as well as new members." No one had any idea of Operation Northwoods.

Because so many documents were destroyed, it is difficult to determine how many senior officials were aware of Operation Northwoods. As has been described, the document was signed and fully approved by Lemnitzer and the rest of the Joint Chiefs and addressed to the Secretary of Defense for his signature. Whether it went beyond McNamara to the president and the attorney general is not known.

Even after Lemnitzer lost his job, the Joint Chiefs kept planning "pretext" operations at least into 1963. Among their proposals was a deliberately create a war between Cuba and any of a number of .n American neighbors. This would give the United States military an excuse to come in on the side of Cuba's adversary and get rid of "A contrived 'Cuban' attack on an OAS [Organization of Americas] member could be set up," said one proposal, "and the attacked state could be urged to 'take measures of self-defense and request ice from the U.S. and OAS; the U.S. could almost certainly obtain necessary two-thirds support among OAS members for collective action against Cuba."

Among the nations they suggested that the United States secretly were Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago. Both were members of the Commonwealth; thus, by secretly attacking them and then blaming Cuba, the United States could lure England into the war Castro. The report noted, "Any of the contrived situations de above are inherently, extremely risky in our democratic system in which security can be maintained, after the fact, with very great difficulty. If the decision should be made to set up a contrived situation it be one in which participation by U.S. personnel is limited only to the most highly trusted covert personnel. This suggests the infeasibility of the use of military units for any aspect of the contrived situation."

The report even suggested secretly paying someone in the Castro government to attack the United States: "The only area remaining for ration then would be to bribe one of Castro's subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on [the U.S. naval base at] Guantanamo." The act suggested--bribing a foreign nation to launch a violent attack American military installation--was treason.

In May 1963, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze sent a the White House proposing "a possible scenario whereby an attack on a United States reconnaissance aircraft could be exploited toward the end of effecting the removal of the Castro regime." In the event Cuba attacked a U-2, the plan proposed sending in additional American pilots, this time on dangerous, unnecessary low-level reconnaissance missions with the expectation that they would also be shot down, thus provoking a war "[T]he U.S. could undertake various measures designed to stimulate the Cubans to provoke a new incident," said the plan. Nitze, however, did not volunteer to be one of the pilots.

One idea involved sending fighters across the island on "harassing reconnaissance" and "show-off" missions "flaunting our freedom of action, hoping to stir the Cuban military to action." "Thus," said the plan, "depending above all on whether the Cubans were or could be made to be trigger-happy, the development of the initial downing of a reconnaissance plane could lead at best to the elimination of Castro, perhaps to the removal of Soviet troops and the installation of ground inspection in Cuba, or at the least to our demonstration of firmness on reconnaissance." About a month later, a low-level flight was made across Cuba, but unfortunately for the Pentagon, instead of bullets it produced only a protest.

Lemnitzer was a dangerous-perhaps even unbalanced-right-wing extremist in an extraordinarily sensitive position during a critical period. But Operation Northwoods also had the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even senior Pentagon official Paul Nitze argued in favor of provoking a phony war with Cuba. The fact that the most senior members of all the services and the Pentagon could be so out of touch with reality and the meaning of democracy would be hidden for four decades.

In retrospect, the documents offer new insight into the thinking of the military's star-studded leadership. Although they never succeeded in launching America into a phony war with Cuba, they may have done so with Vietnam. More than 50,000 Americans and more than 2 million Vietnamese were eventually killed in that war.

It has long been suspected that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident-the spark that led to America's long war in Vietnam-was largely staged or provoked by U.S. officials in order to build up congressional and public support for American involvement. Over the years, serious questions have been raised about the alleged attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on two American destroyers in the Gulf But defenders of the Pentagon have always denied such charges, arguing that senior officials would never engage in such deceit.

Now, however, in light of the Operation Northwoods documents, it at deceiving the public and trumping up wars for Americans to fight and die in was standard, approved policy at the highest levels of the Pentagon. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin seems right out of the Operation Northwoods playbook: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba . . . casualty lists in U.S. newspapers cause a helpful wave of indignation." One need only replace "Guantanamo Bay" with "Tonkin Gulf," and "Cuba" with "North Vietnam" and the Gulf of Tonkin incident may or may not have been stage-managed, but the senior Pentagon leadership at the time was clearly capable of such deceit.

Book epigram:

"The public has a duty to watch its Government closely and keep it on the right track." --Lieutenant Gen. Kenneth A. Minihan, USAF, Director, NSA, _NSA Newsletter_, June 1997

The Left Gatekeepers

by
Burden of Dreams
B07459 / Fri, 15 Jul 2005 16:04:27 / "War on Terror"

“The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”
–Aldous Huxley (author of “Brave New World”)

“The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.” – George Orwell, on “Doublethink” from his book of faction, “1984”

Since my blog was mentioned in Stephen’s recent post on Jeff Berg’s article The Tube bombings: Cui Bono? , and since I’m too impatient to wait until said article appears in Site assets, I thought I”d say a few words and get it over with.

Berg’s piece is refreshing on a number of levels.

It doesn’t dismiss the possibility that London was a false flag simply ‘cause “the guv says so”; it acknowledges the existence of these operations (some of which are very well documented, such as The Lavon Affair and Gladio); it doesn’t use the term conspiracy theorist as an epithet, ridiculing the scores of people who give credence to these theories (and with good reason); it doesn’t resort to the kind of propaganda techniques witnessed in various other critiques by certain left and right gatekeepers (eg here ), which include:

Lies of Omission or “Blackouts”
The ignorance defense (“I haven’t actually looked at the evidence”)
Pseudo-intellectual posturing
Ridicule
Peddling disinformation
Confusing the Situation
Diverting Attention
Strawman arguments
“Bracketing” (hiding a plausible theory or fact within a string of absurdities)
Guilt by association
Sophistic appeals to “institutional analysis” and other ivory tower concepts

In other words, the very same techniques used by the Sean Hannity’s of the world when it comes to the war in Iraq.

Why “conspiracy theories” have become such a bugaboo on the left I’m not exactly sure. Some have suggested it has something to do with funding; Amy Goodman for instance receives cash from the Ford Foundation, at least that’s what I’m told. A few of the more hysterical types have gone so far as to say these people are “controlled” (Alex Jones has remarked that “Chomsky is a shill for the New World Order”).

Unfortunately, so long as progressives continue to ignore the elephant in the living room, or worse, attempt to convince people that the elephant simply isn’t there (even as it goes on shitting on their rug) they will continue to be subjected to these attacks—pun intended. They will be left behind.

As the gate-keepers continue to ignore, downplay and ridicule the crucial role of black ops in the intelligence world they will continue to be outmaneuvered, outfoxed and eventually outsourced by the regular men and women who have studied the evidence for themselves and who aren’t afraid of sullying their image in the eyes of “respectable” society.

That is after all the target audience of Chomsky and co. , is it not? The people, not their rulers?

In many ways the Chomskys and Goodmans deserve the slander: whatever their reasons – reputation, ego, strategic aims (conspiracies are a “distraction”), large quantities of ink devoted to “blowback” theories or even honest-to-goodness ignorance, there is no excuse for attempting to marginalize skeptics and bury the truth.

And make no mistake, left denial on “conspiracies” is not merely a question of agnosticism. As Jack Straw wrote in his article “Left denial on 9/11 turns irrational”:

“Ever since the events of 9/11, the American Left and even ultra-Left have been downright fanatical in combating notions that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks or at least had foreknowledge of the events.”

Cockburn has referred to “9/11 nuts”, Chomsky to “crazed theories about the CIA”, and Churchill, well, let’s take a look: “But, the problem with the idea that it was an inside job is that it suggests that brown people are not capable of such feats and gives all the credit to the white man, another master race fantasy”.

I won’t bother commenting on this, except to say that no man, whether Bin Laden or Larry Silverstein, could have brought down WTC7 without the use of (a) explosives or (b) an as-yet-unproven sixth sense, such as telekinesis.

Michael Albert of Znet quips “None of the above [9/11 theories] strike us as remotely interesting much less plausible.” As readers of Operation Northwoods are all too aware, Albert is only showcasing his own ignorance.

Berg’s article is a different matter entirely, and a welcome critique.

Unfortunately, since there isn’t yet enough evidence related to the London bombing to unabashedly support one theory or another (although such evidence is mounting), the author is forced to focus on ideology instead of evidence.

The theory, unless I’m mistaken, is that there is an organization known as “Al-Qaeda” which has, through a series of master-strokes, drawn the Anglo-American empire into a quagmire in the middle east, where it will eventually meet its demise. At the head of this organization is a Machiavellian super-villain named Bin Laden living in an extinct volcano stroking a cat, laughing maniacally.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

First things first: is there any such organization as “Al-Qaeda”?

Tony Blair doesn’t seem to think so.

Commenting on the possible role of Al Qaeda, Blair said, “Al Qaeda is not an organization. Al Qaeda is a way of working … but this has the hallmark of that approach.”

http://prisonplanet.com/articles/july2005/150705blairadmits.htm

Hell, even William Blum was careful to preface his recent comments about “Al-Qaeda” with (I’m paraphrasing): “assuming there is any such thing as Al-Qaeda”.

My hope is that progressive journalists may one day start putting Al-Qaeda in quotation marks along with the “war on terror”, but that may suggest a quantum leap in common sense, analytical ability and most important – courage – so far unseen amongst the Amy Goodmans et al.

Insofar as “Al-Qaeda” has any sort of tangible reality it appears to be a simple cut-out for deskmen working in Langley. This has been documented at length by Chussudovsky and others. Indeed, all the bombings attributed this group have been masterminded, according to mainstream newspaper reports, by informants working for western intelligence agencies.

This isn’t to say that aren’t plenty of enraged Muslisms out there who, if given the opportunity, would set off a bomb in New York or London, it’s just when analyzing these sorts of things we have to focus on evidence, not ideology, and all of the bombings attributed to “Al-Qaeda” have had the hands of intellligence all over them.

This is inescapable.

To ignore the role of intelligence is to miss a major piece of the puzzle. Without it, we are left in the dark, sitting ducks awaiting the next terra attack.

Parenti:

“As I pointed out in published exchanges with Cockburn and Chomsky (neither of whom responded to the argument), conspiracy and structure are not mutually exclusive dynamics. A structural analysis that a priori rules out conspiracy runs the risk of not looking at the whole picture. Conspiracies are a component of the national security political system, not deviations from it. Ruling elites use both conspiratorial covert actions and overtly legitimating procedures at home and abroad. They finance everything from electoral campaigns and publishing houses to mobsters and death squads. They utilize every conceivable stratagem, including killing one of their own if they perceive him to be a barrier to their larger agenda of making the world safe for those who own it.”

Peter Dale Scott:

“I believe that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to a few bad people but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed.” In sum, national security state conspiracies are components of our political structure, not deviations from it.”

If we’re gonna use the term “Al-Qaeda” to describe any bombing committed anywhere by any person with brown skin (or attributed to a person with brown skin), ok then, maybe the lads in London who were “proud to be British” and not particularly interested in politics whigged out for no particular reason, but let’s not pretend – based on not a shred of credible evidence – that there is some sort of highly organized network of al-Qaeda sleeper cells armed with suitcase nukes waiting to the do the bidding of some (probably long-dead) Saudi millionaire making video communiqués from beyond the grave in his cave in Afghanistan.

Talk about setting yourself up for disaster.

In light of the use of informants, a more plausible explanation as to what exactly Al-Qaeda is is offered by Webster Tarpley:

“But it should also be clear that state sponsored terrorism cannot call itself by its own real name. It must necessarily masquerade as an authentic voice of the oppressed – be they Arabs, Moslems, workers, national minorities, or whatever. The terror groups cannot be labeled CIA or KGB – they must call themselves Red Brigades, Red Army faction, ETA, or al Qaeda. The false flag and false ideology allows the terror group to pretend that it is something that it is not, and to convince billions of naïve viewers of CNN or al Jazeera that the false dumb-show is indeed reality.

...Something quite similar has been established in regard to the Italian Red Brigades. In 1982 an important official of the Italian Justice Ministry in Rome, Giovanni Senzani, was arrested on the charge of being the head of the Red Brigades in the Naples area. Senzani had been the object of a campaign in the Rome press about the need to discover the identity of “la talpa,” the mole in the state bureaucracy. Senzani was in close relations to SISMI, the Italian military intelligence service, an agency which had been implicated in the Milan bomb of 1969 and other terrorist atrocities. This would indicate that at least part of the Red Brigades structure was directed from inside the government.

The Red Brigades had been created in the late 1960s at the Sociology Department of the University of Trento in northern Italy. The original members had displayed sociopathic symptoms, and they had gradually been eliminated by arrests and shootouts with the police. The Italian investigating judge Ferdinando Imposimato asserted in 1982 that the Red Brigades had been infiltrated by the Israeli Mossad no later than 1978. Based on testimony from two jailed former members of the Red Brigades, Imposimato reported that the Mossad had provided the Italian terrorists with weapons, money, and information. As the original members suffered attrition, they were replaced by new recruits. One of these was Mario Moretti, reputedly the leader of the Red Brigades during
the Moro kidnapping. More senior members complained from their jail cells that Moretti failed to pass on warnings of coming police raids, and sabotaged attempted jail breaks.

Moretti advocated a policy of constantly escalating violence, and was widely considered an agent provocateur of the CIA.

In these cases, it is not the terrorist organization which has infiltrated the state apparatus, but the state apparatus which finds it convenient to practice a virtual interchangeability with top members of the state apparatus. Sanguinetti notes that, in certain safe houses or lairs of the Red Brigades, there was found “an abundance of ultra-confidential material issuing from police headquarters, central police stations and even from ministries. In view of such eloquent facts, spectacular information [i.e. new broadcasts] always claimed to explain them by emphasizing the ultra-efficient organization of the terrible Red Brigades, and by adding, in order to enhance this wonderful godsend for advertising, the fact that these clandestine militants, so hunted-down but so tentacular, have infiltrated
everywhere, even ministries and central police stations.” This, as we will see, is like some 9/11 researchers who conclude that, since the attacks took place on a day when so many special exercises were taking place, Al Qaeda must have infiltrated the Pentagon in order to know exactly when to strike. Naturally Sanguinetti cannot entertain such nonsense. His conclusion: Once more power speaks by way of counter-truth “it is not the Red Brigades who have infiltrated the central police stations and ministries, but agents of the State, issuing from the central police stations and ministries, who have infiltrated the Red Brigades by design, and not only their top leadership, to be sure.” (Sanguinetti 21)

As for speculating about the motivations of the super-genius in charge of this phantom organization, let’s take a closer look at Bin Laden:

“But Bin Laden is not the greatest political genius of today’s world, as the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris attempts to convince us. Bin Laden is a dilettante who could not survive very long without powerful protectors and a comprehensive support network, including kidney dialysis. Rather than a political genius, we see in Bin Laden a clueless dupe, a patsy who cannot comprehend the forces around him which make his day to day activity and above all his universal notoriety possible. According to one of Bin Laden’s handlers by the name of Beardman, during the Afghan years Bin Laden was not aware of
the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of Bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): “neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help.” (Meyssan 2002 7) In an interview with Frontline, Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, said that when he first met bin Laden, in the nineteen-eighties, “I thought he couldn’t lead eight ducks across the street.”

account given by Saudi Prince Mahmoud bin Abdel Aziz to the
US press. The Prince recalled that night a decade ago when Osama Bin Laden attended an evening salon to describe his exploits fighting in
Afghanistan….[The prince] remembers young Osama floundering
when guests questioned him about the interpretation of religious
texts. “Finally, I had to signal with my hands for them to stop it,”
said the prince. “He really is quite a simple man.” (Anonymous
108)

‘My knowledge of Bin Laden makes me unable to conceive what is happening now,’ said Dr. Abdullah al Muayyad, a former director general of the Saudi finance ministry who worked with Bin Laden during the Afghan jihad.’”

The claim by Berg that the goals of “Al-Qaeda” and the CIA converge is absolutely correct; the mistake he makes is in assuming that the former isn’t simply a proxy or surrogate of the latter, as all of the evidence suggests.

The 9/11 truth movement is anarchy in action, a grass-roots awakening that is challenging not only authorities in government and the corporate sector but also authorities in the progressive media. Except for a handful of deep politickers such as Webster Tarpley and Ralph Schoenman, and a handful of whistle-blowers, no one in the public eye has dared to question the official story.

No one except the people, and they are demanding their voices be heard.


For two other excellent pieces on this controversy see
9/11 Conspiracies and the Defactualisation of Analysis:
How Ideologues on the Left and Right Theorise Vacuously to Support Baseless Supposition
and
CONSPIRACY PHOBIA ON THE LEFT by Michael Parenti.