|
People say the strangest things...
|
|
"Nobody in our government at least and I dont think the prior government could envision flying airplanes into buildings." - Bush
|
|
"Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles."
Washington Post on March 23 2002
Rice filibuster 911 commision
|
|
|
|
"Nobody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane
and slam it into the World Trade Center
that they would try to use an airplane as a missile." - Condoleeza Rice
|
"The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at
war with them. For more than 20 years, the terrorist threat
gathered, and America's response across several administrations
of both parties was insufficient.
Historically, democratic societies have been slow to react to gathering threats, tending
instead to wait to confront threats until they are too dangerous
to ignore or until it is too late.
Despite the sinking of the
Lusitania in 1915 and continued German harassment of American
shipping, the United States did not enter the First World War
until two years later.
Despite Nazi Germany's repeated
violations of the Versailles Treaty and its string of
provocations throughout the mid-1930s, the Western democracies
did not take action until 1939. The U.S. Government did not act
against the growing threat from Imperial Japan until the threat
became all too evident at Pearl Harbor.
And, tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11th, this
country simply was not on a war footing."
opening remarks
|
"I know of no intelligence during the roughly six-plus months leading up to September 11 that indicated terrorists intended to hijack commercial airlines and fly them into the Pentagon or the World Trade Center."
Donald Rumsfeld
|
|
The 9/11 You Were Never Told About
|
Are these not warning signs?
SEPTEMBER 12, 1994
On Sunday, September 11, 1994, after spending an evening with his brother consuming alcohol and smoking crack cocaine, Frank Eugene Corder asked his brother to drop him off in the vicinity of Aldino Airport in Churchville, Maryland. Corder walked to the airport and found the keys to a Cessna P150 airplane that had been returned to the airport earlier that day after having been rented by another individual. Although Corder was not a licensed pilot, he had taken several lessons in the aircraft and had flown it several times during the summer of 1993.
According to the airplane's hobbsmeter, which records the engine's total running time, Corder started the plane's engine at 1:55 p.m. FAA radar at the Baltimore/Washington International Airport first detected the airplane in the vicinity of York, Pennsylvania, at 1:06 a.m. Precisely what transpired in the interim is unknown."
SUMMARY STATEMENT OF FACTS THE SEPTEMBER 12, 1994 PLANE CRASH
|
|
Using Planes as Bombs
The Pentagon commissioned an expert panel in 1993 to investigate the possibility of an airplane being used to bomb national landmarks. Retired Air Force Col. Doug Menarchik, who organised the $150,000 study for the Defense Departments Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, recalled: It was considered radical thinking, a little too scary for the times. After I left, it met a quiet death. Other participants have noted that the decision not to publish detailed scenarios issued to some extent from fear that this may give terrorists ideas. Nevertheless, a draft document detailing the results of the investigation was circulated through the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Senior agency officials decided against a public release.
The veracity of the Pentagons radical thinking was confirmed in 1994 when there occurred three attempted attacks on buildings using airplanes. The first, in April of that year, involved a Federal Express flight engineer facing dismissal.
Having boarded a DC-10 as a passenger, he invaded the cockpit, planning to crash the plane into a company building in Memphis. Fortunately, he was overpowered by the crew.
The second attempt occurred in September. A lone pilot crashed a small plane into a tree on the White House grounds, just short of the Presidents bedroom.
The third incident occurred in December. An Air France flight in Algiers was hijacked by members of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) who are linked to Al-Qaeda aiming to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. French Special Forces stormed the plane on the ground. - Did Bush Know? Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
|
| Officials: Militants Targeted Eiffel Tower,"
PARIS - Islamic militants under investigation for allegedly planning an attack on the Russian Embassy in Paris had other targets on their list, including the Eiffel Tower, police and judicial officials said Wednesday.
Three men, all Algerians, were detained Jan. 11 in connection with an investigation into a network of Islamic radicals supporting Chechen rebels, the officials said on condition of anonymity.
More than 20 people have been jailed in a series of arrests since December 2002 as part of an investigation into the network. The investigation revealed an alleged plot against the Russian Embassy and a planned chemical attack.
On Wednesday, judicial officials confirmed the three arrests, which were first reported by the daily Le Parisien. The newspaper said attacks in Britain were also allegedly planned and that those arrested in France had links to a group of Islamic radicals in Spain.
According to judicial officials, the three men said among the targets was the veritable symbol of France, the Eiffel Tower. Also targeted were a clothing store in the central Paris district of Les Halles, which is a commuter link packed with people, Israeli interests and police stations, officials said. - AFP via Jihad watch
|
|
Origins of the 9/11 Attacks
The idea for the September 11 attacks appears to have originated with a veteran jihadist
named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). A Kuwaiti from the Baluchistan region of
Pakistan, KSM grew up in a religious family and claims to have joined the Muslim
Brotherhood at the age of 16. After attending college in the United States, he went to
Afghanistan to participate in the anti-Soviet jihad.
my note: [This was a CIA sponsored guerilla combat mission]
Following the war, he helped run a non-governmental organization in Pakistan assisting the Afghan mujahidin.
KSM first came to the attention of U.S. authorities as a result of the terrorist activity of
his nephew Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
KSM provided a small amount of funding for that attack. The following year, he joined
Yousef in the Philippines to plan what would become known as the "Bojinka" operation,
the intended bombing of 12 U.S. commercial jets over the Pacific in a two-day period.
That plot unraveled, however, when the Philippine authorities discovered Yousef's
bomb-making equipment in Manila in January 1995. During the course of 1995, Yousef
and two of his co-conspirators in the Bojinka plot were arrested overseas and were
brought to the United States for trial, but KSM managed to elude capture following his
January 1996 indictment for his role in the plot.
my note: see: [the Michael Meiring mystery: an agent provocateur in the philippines?
]
By the middle of 1996, according to his account, KSM was back in Afghanistan. He had
met Usama Bin Ladin there in the 1980s. Now, in mid-1996, KSM sought to renew that
acquaintance, at a point when Bin Ladin had just moved to Afghanistan from the Sudan.
At a meeting with Bin Ladin and Mohamed Atef, al Qaeda's Chief of Operations, KSM
presented several ideas for attacks against the United States. One of the operations he
pitched, according to KSM, was a scaled-up version of what would become the attacks of
September 11. -
from official outline of the 911 plot Staff Statement No. 16
|
|
Project Bojinka 1 & 2
The term Bojinka, as used by both Yousef and his prosecutors, referred to his different plan to plant bombs simultaneously on a number of US airliners. For this crime, which in a test run had already killed a Japanese airline pasenger, Yousef and two associates, one of them Abdul Hakim Murad, were tried and convicted in 1996. But at the time of Yousef's arrest in 1995 "Bojinka Two," the plan to hijack airliners, was already being implemented; and a version of it, a plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters, may have been discovered in Yousef's laptop - Peter Dale Scott
"In 1995, a terrorist cell was uncovered in the Philippines. Its members were part of
the bin Ladin network.
An accidental fire in their bomb factory had aroused the curiosity of
local officials and, when they arrived to investigate, Abdul Hakim Murad was arrested as he
attempted to flee. Murad revealed that his group was planning to assassinate the Pope during
his upcoming visit to Manila.
But that isn't all. He said he had trained in New Bern, North
Carolina, to fly commercial jets. Why? Because that was part of a plan called Project
Bojinka, which is a Yugoslav term for big bang.
The Bojinka was to blow up eleven
airliners in the same day, fly others into landmark targets such as CIA headquarters, the
Pentagon, the TransAmerica Building in San Francisco, the Sears Tower in Chicago, and the
World Trade Center in New York. All of this information was passed on to U.S. intelligence
agencies and also to the security service for the Vatican.1 That was 6 yrs before 9-11."
The war on terrorism from 'The Future Is Calling by G Edward Griffin
Defense Intelligence Agency Refuses to Declassify Info on Project Bojinka
Bojinka details
|
|
|
|
FBI foreknowledge of the WTC 1993 bombing
In the course of the trial it was revealed that the FBI had an informant, an Egyptian man named Emad Salem, who was involved with the bombing conspiracy. Salem claims to have informed the FBI of the plot to bomb the towers as early as February 6, 1992, information he was privy to possibly because he himself initiated the plot. Salem's role as informant allowed the FBI to quickly pinpoint the conspirators out of the hundreds of possible suspects.
Salem asserts that the original plan was to have the plotters build the bomb using a harmless powder instead of actual explosive, but that an FBI supervisor decided that a real bomb should be constructed instead. He substantiates his claims with hundreds of hours of secretly-recorded conversations with his FBI handlers, made during discussions held after the bombings.
Salem says he wished to complain to FBI headquarters in Washington about the failure to prevent the bombing despite foreknowledge, but was dissuaded from doing so by the New York FBI office.
The FBI has not explicitly denied Salem's account. - 1993 bombing attack of the WTC
|
Delmart Vreeland - Black-ops whistle-blower?
|
|
In December 2000 Delmart Vreeland was arrested in Toronto on charges which included fraud. Authorities in the US subsequently requested his extradition to face fraud charges in Michigan. Vreeland claims to be employed by ONI. He says that as the result of a trip to Moscow shortly before his arrest he discovered documents which contained information on the attacks that eventually took place on 9/11. Vreeland's story was very complex. He claimed to have composed a note which detailed a warning of the 9/11 attacks while he was in jail. He claimed to have designed the Star Wars system. He claimed to be the victim of a relentless drug dealer. Vreeland claimed that the Michigan charges were false.
Spy or con?
March 15, 2002, 10:50 AM PST (FTW) -- Delmart "Mike" Vreeland is out of danger for the time being.
9-11 whistleblower Delmart "Mike" Vreeland, the US Navy officer who wrote a written warning of the 9-11 attacks, a month before they occurred, was released on bail yesterday after a hearing in Toronto Superior Court in which he was ordered to reside at a Toronto apartment leased by his mother. At the time the bail release order was issued, the address was made part of the public record and announced in open court, raising immediate fears that Vreeland, who has expressed fear for his safety, would become easy prey for would-be assassins. The same pattern was followed immediately before the public execution of drug smuggler and intelligence operative Barry Seal in 1986.
welfare state
|
Memo warned of attack inside U.S.
|
IS CBS NEWS CLASSIFIED MATERIAL?
"Consider one CBS news story from July 26, 2001 in which it was reported:
"In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.
There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines,"
LIES A SIXTH GRADER WOULD NOT ACCEPT
- Mike Ruppert - From The Wilderness
Memo Warned Of Attack Inside U.S. CBS NEWS
Is this The MEMO?
"The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."
released Aug 6 PDB memo?
or is this?
["Eleanor Hill, staff director for the joint House-Senate inquiry into alleged intelligence failures ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks, released a 30-page statement Wednesday that found information on possible terrorist strikes continued to filter through the nation's intelligence system in the months directly before the attacks... ]
[...Such intelligence information dated back as far as 1998, Hill's report said, citing intelligence information in the fall of 1998 saying bin Laden's "next operation could possibly involve flying an aircraft loaded with explosives into a U.S. airport and detonating it" and a separate dispatch warned of a bin Laden plot involving aircraft in the New York City and Washington, D.C. areas."]
U.S. HAD "STEADY STREAM" OF PRE-9/11 WARNINGS
The real memo?
|
A month before Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush received an intelligence memo describing Osama bin Laden's interest in attacking the United States homeland and in hijacking an airplane. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said under oath:
BEN-VENISTE. Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the Aug.
6 P.D.B. warned against possible attacks in this
country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of
that P.D.B.
RICE. I believe the title was Bin Laden Determined To
Attack Inside the United States. Now, the P.D.B. -
BEN-VENISTE. Thank you.
RICE. No, Mr. Ben-Veniste -
BEN-VENISTE. I will get into the -
RICE. I would like to finish my point here.
BEN-VENISTE. I didn't know there was a point.
RICE. Given that - you asked me whether or not it
warned of attacks.
BEN-VENISTE. I asked you what the title was.
RICE. You said did it not warn of attacks. It did not
warn of attacks inside the United States. It was
historical information based on old reporting. There
was no new threat information. And it did not, in
fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United
States.
Newsday
|
What about this one?
"Whatever the definition, the document is the innocuously named President's Daily Brief, a 10- to 12-page report produced overnight by the CIA. In recent weeks, it has become the hottest property in Washington. Two powerful bodies are demanding to see it: the nonpartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is trying to determine how the Bush administration reached its conclusions about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Negotiations and threats of subpoenas continued last week, but so far the White House has claimed that the PDB, as it is called, is off limits under executive privilege. No one remembers any White House ever giving it up. .So what, exactly, is in the PDB? Who gets to read it? And why do investigators say it is essential to understanding why the Bush administration invaded Iraq, or to learning what went wrong on Sept. 11, 2001? .Here are some answers, gathered from national security officials in the current and past administrations. .On the outside, the briefing is a blue, three-ring, loose-leaf notebook with "President's Daily Brief" stamped across the top. Inside is what the CIA considers the most important information of the last 24 hours. ."If there's something new and exciting and important, it has a good chance of making the PDB," said R. James Woolsey, who was President Bill Clinton's first CIA director."
CIA brief: Seen by just a few, sought by many
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
[Thanks to Ewing 2001 for pointing me to this story]
Who are Al Queda? |
|
On September 27, 2001 the Washington Post
Reported the Following Story: ©Newsbytes
Officials at an instant-messaging firm Odigo confirmed today that two employees received text messages
warning of an attack on the World Trade Center two hours before terrorists crashed planes into the
New York landmarks.
Citing a pending investigation by law enforcement, the company declined to reveal the exact contents of the
message or to identify the sender.
But Alex Diamandis, vice president of sales and marketing, confirmed that workers in Odigo's research and
development and international sales office in Israel received a warning from another Odigo user
approximately two hours prior to the first attack.
Diamandis said the sender of the instant message was not personally known to the Odigo employees. Even
though the company usually protects the privacy of users, the employees recorded the Internet protocol
address of the message's sender to facilitate his or her identification.
Soon after the terrorist attacks on New York, the Odigo employees notified their management, who contacted
Israeli security services. In turn, the FBI was informed of the instant message warning. FBI officials were not
immediately available for comment today.
The Odigo service includes a feature called People Finder that allows users to seek out and contact others
based on certain interests or demographics. Diamandis said it was possible that the attack warning was
broadcast to other Odigo members, but the company has not received reports of other recipients of the
message.
|
|
On October 31, 2001 The Electronic Herald (UK)
Reported the Following Story:
©The Electronic Herald / Reported by Ian Bruce
ISRAEL'S military intelligence service, Aman, issued an urgent warning of an impending terrorist "spectacular"
against America, several days before the suicide bombers flew passenger airliners into New York's Trade
Towers and the Pentagon on September 11.
Aman had no details of the targets, but picked up enough indicators of major terrorist activity from a
combination of informants and electronic eavesdropping to send out an alert, which also covered US interests
in Britain, France and Germany.
Much of the Israeli intelligence centered on Imad Mughniyeh, head of the Iranian-backed Hizbollah movement's
foreign operations section, and on Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri, the Egyptian-born terrorist mastermind reputed to
be Osama bin Laden's chosen successor.
The Israelis say they have evidence linking both men to agents representing SSO, Iraq's foreign intelligence
service, and believe Baghdad has provided finance and logistical support to them.
Links between the terrorist network and Iraq have been established by Pakistan's shadowy ISI agency and by
the Czech Republic's counter-intelligence service.
Salah Suleiman, an Iraqi SSO agent, was detained on the Pakistan border last October after a series of trips
into Taliban-controlled territory to meet bin Laden. After interrogation, he was deported.
Iraqi agent, Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani, has been expelled by the Czechs for "conduct incompatible
with his diplomatic status". They had been monitoring his activities after a tip-off from Israel that he was
planning to bomb Radio Free Europe, a station financed by the CIA that broadcasts to Iraq and Iran.
Baghdad regards the broadcasts as "an act of aggression".
During the surveillance, they photographed Al-Ani with Mohammed Atta, the al Qaeda agent believed to have
flown the first plane into the World Trade Center.
|
|
How to start a war
Throughout history, war planners have used various forms of deception to trick their enemies. Because public support is so crucial to the process of initiating and waging war, the home population is also subject to deceitful stratagems. The creation of false excuses to justify going to war is a major first step in constructing public support for such deadly ventures. Perhaps the most common pretext for war is an apparently unprovoked enemy attack. Such attacks, however, are often fabricated, incited or deliberately allowed to occur. They are then exploited to arouse widespread public sympathy for the victims, demonize the attackers and build mass support for military 'retaliation.'... - source
|
...and now: A few blasts from the past...
|
The Problem Reaction Solution Paradigm (The Hegelian Dialectic)
1) The government creates or exploits a problem blaming it on others
2) The people react by asking the government for help willing to give up their rights
3) The government offers the solution that was planned long before the crisis - index of the web
|
NEWSFLASH: THE LUSITANIA WAS DELIBERATELY SUNK
World War I - This war was devised to get the United States involved in a world conflict, and thus to borrow huge amounts of money.
To do this, the Lusitania was deliberately allowed to be sunk by the Germans -128 Americans died in the process - Bank Index
The Germans protested against the arming of merchant ships, pointing out that this would force them in turn to abandon the chivalrous "stop-and search" procedures that had hitherto been a feature of the U-boat war. Up to that time, a submarine would invariably surface, order the vessel to stop, board her, seize papers and anything else of value, and allow the crew ample time to take to the boats, before launching a torpedo. From now on the Germans would have no option but to attack without warning. They also lodged protests about the use of neutral flags by the British, particularly the Stars and Stripes. The German Embassy in New York placed prominent advertisements next to the Lusitania's timetable in the shipping pages, reminding travellers that a state of war existed between England and Germany and that the waters around the British Isles were considered a war zone........-Lusitania
|
century 20
WORLD WAR 1
|
The Morgan interests, in concert with Winston Churchill, tried to bring the U.S. into World War I as early as 1915 and succeeded in doing so in 1917. Colin Thompson's Lusitania implicates President Woodrow Wilson in the sinking of the Lusitania a horror device to generate a public backlash to draw the United States into war with Germany. Thompson demonstrates that Woodrow Wilson knew four darts beforehand that the Lusitania was carrying six-million rounds of ammunition plus explosives, and therefore, "passengers who proposed to sail on that vessel were sailing in violation of statute of this country."
The British Board of Inquiry under Lord Mersey was instructed by the British Government "that it is considered politically expedient that Captain Turner, the master of the Lusitania, be most prominently blamed for the disaster."
In retrospect, given Colin Thompson's evidence, the blame is more fairly to be attributed to President Wilson, "Colonel" House, J.P. Morgan, and Winston Churchill; this conspiratorial elite should have been brought to trial for willful negligence, if not treason. It is to Lord Mersey's eternal credit that after performing his "duty" under instructions from His Majesty's government, and placing the blame on Captain Turner, he resigned, rejected his fee, and from that date on refused to handle British government commissions. To his friends Lord Mersey would only say about the Lusitania case that it was a "dirty business."
Antony C Sutton
"The sinking of the Lusitania was the event that, more than any other, motivated the American people to accept the necessity and the morality of getting into World War I. Prior to that time, there was great reluctance. However, when the Lusitania left New York Harbor on May 1, 1915, with 196 Americans on board and was sunk six days later off the coast of Ireland, it became the cause celeb that moved the American consciousness into a war mood against Germany. Americans were outraged at a nation that could viscously and cold-heartedly attack a peaceful passenger ship."
taken from part 2 of The grand deception by G. Edward Griffin
|
WORLD WAR II
|
Hitler used the 1933 burning of the Reichstag (Parliament) building by a deranged Dutchman to declare a "war on terrorism," establish his legitimacy as a leader (even though he hadn't won a majority in the previous election).
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion "a sign from God," he called it to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their "evil" deeds in their religion."
The Reichstag fire
|
|
|
Dec. 14, 1940:
Joseph Grew, U.S. Ambassador to Japan, sends a letter to FDR, announcing that, "It seems to me increasingly clear that we are bound to have a showdown [with Japan] some day."
Dec. 30, 1940:
Pearl Harbor is considered so likely a target of Japanese attack that Rear Admiral Claude C. Bloch, commander of the Fourteenth Naval District, authors a memorandum entitled, "Situation Concerning the Security of the Fleet and the Present Ability of the Local Defense Forces to Meet Surprise Attacks."
Jan. 27, 1941:
Grew (in Tokyo) sends a dispatch to the State Department: "My Peruvian Colleague told a member of my staff that the Japanese military forces planned, in the event of trouble with the United States, to attempt a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor using all of their military facilities."
Feb. 5, 1941:
Bloch's December 30, 1940 memorandum leads to much discussion and eventually a letter from Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner to Secretary of War Henry Stimson in which Turner warns, "The security of the U.S. Pacific Fleet while in Pearl Harbor, and of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base itself, has been under renewed study by the Navy Department and forces afloat for the past several weeks If war eventuates with Japan, it is believed easily possible that hostilities would be initiated by a surprise attack upon the Fleet or the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor In my opinion, the inherent possibilities of a major disaster to the fleet or naval base warrant taking every step, as rapidly as can be done, that will increase the joint readiness of the Army and Navy to withstand a raid of the character mentioned above."
Feb. 18, 1941:
Commander in Chief, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel says, "I feel that a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor is a possibility."
Nov. 25, 1941:
Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson writes in his diary that, "The President ... brought up entirely the relations with the Japanese. He brought up the event that we're likely to be attacked [as soon as] next Monday for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning."
Nov. 27, 1941:
U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall issues a memorandum cautioning that "Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot ... be avoided, the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt action."
Nov 29, 1941:
Secretary of State Cordell Hull, responding to a speech by Japanese General Hideki Tojo one week before the attack, phones FDR at Warm Springs, GA to warn of "the imminent danger of a Japanese attack," and urge him to return to Washington sooner than planned.
Mickey Z
|
|
|
On the evening of December 6, 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president of the United States,
received a message intercepted by the U.S. Navy. Sent from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington,
the message was encrypted in the top-level Japanese "purple code." But that was no problem.
The Americans had cracked the code long before that.
It was imperative that the president see the message right away because it revealed that the Japanese,
under the heavy pressure of Western economic sanctions, were terminating relations with the United States.
Roosevelt read the thirteen-part transmission, looked up and announced, "This means war."
He then did a very strange thing for a president in his situation.
Nothing. - AFPN
|
|
|
|
|
Bin Laden With Advisor Zbignew Brezjinski who conducted, through the CIA, a covert operation in Afghanistan in order to create a Vietnam War for the Soviets.
"[BUSH] got out of his hotel suite this morning, [on his way to a school] was about to leave, reporters saw the White House chief of staff, Andy Card, whisper into his ear. The reporter said to the president, 'Do you know what's going on in New York?' He said he did, and he said he will have something about it later." (ABC's John Cochran, Peter Jennings)
source
|
|
|
The attacks, which some have compared in intensity to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7,
1941, forced the evacuation of key buildings and the closure of financial markets and schools. -
report made 12th Sept 2001
|
Pearl Harbor - the mother of all conspiracies
|
"A prodigious Congressional Inquiry published its findings in 1946 in which every detail was exposed ofthe events leading up to the war between the United States and Japan and of the failure to send positive "Alert" orders through the military departments to their fleets and garrisons in exposed situations. Every detail, including the decoding of secret Japanese telegrams and their actual texts, has been exposed to the world in forty volumes. The strength of the United States was sufficient to enable them to sustain this hard ordeal required by the spirit of the American Constitution.
I do not intend in these pages to attempt to pronounce judgment upon this tremendous episode in American history.
We know that all the great Americans round the President and in his confidence felt, as acutely as I did, the awful danger that Japan would attack British or Dutch possessions in the Far East, and it would carefully avoid the United States, and that in consequence Congress would not sanction an American declaration of war...The President and his trusted friends had long realized the grave risks of United States neutrality in the war against Hitler and what he stood for, and had writhed under the restraints of a Congress whose House of Representatives had a few months before passed by only a single vote the necessary renewal of compulsory military service, without which their Army would have been almost disbanded in the midst of the world convulsion. Roosevelt, Hull, Stimson, Knox, General Marshall, Admiral Stark, and, as a link between them all, Harry Hopkins, had but one mind...
A Japanese attack upon the United States was a vast simplicfication of their problems and their duty. How can we wonder that they regarded the actual form of the attack, or even its scale, as incomparably less important than the fact that the whole American nation would be united for its own safety in a rightous cause as never before? To them, as to me, it seemed that for Japan to attack and make war upon the United States would be an act of suicide. Moreover, they knew, earlier than we in Britain could know, the full and immediate purpose of their enemy. We remember how Cromwell exclaimed when he watched the Scottish army descending from the heights over Dunbar, "The Lord hath delivered them into our hands."
Winston Churchill
|
|
|
The 'Nutso's' plan for Cuba? : Operation Northwoods
William H Craig - Carribean survey group
"Operation Northwoods was a plan by the highest US military authorities to create a series of incidents involving loss of American and Cuban exile lives through the actions of phony Cubans in order to persuade the US public to go to war against Cuba. The document detailing this plan were obtained from Defense Seceretary McNamara's file after his death and were first published in Australia by Jon Elliston (Psy War on Cuba: The Declassified History of US Anti-Castro Propaganda, Ocean Press, 1999) with no reaction at all from the US. They were used again by ABC News journalist James Bamford in his history of the NSA (Body of Secrets, Doubleday, 2001), causing some minor notice among historians."
from the afrocuba website
|
"maybe the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government."-James Banford
PRETEXTS TO JUSTIFY US MILITARY INTERVENTION IN CUBA
(Note: The courses of action which follow are a preliminary submission suitable only for planning purposes: They are arranged neither chronologically nor in ascending order. Together with similar inputs from other agencies, they are intended to provide a point of departure for the development of a single, integrated, time-phased plan. Such a plan would permit the evaluation of individual projects within the context of cumulative, correlated actions designed to lead inexorably to the objective of adequate justification for US military intervention in Cuba).
1. Since it would seem desirable to use legitimate provocation as the basis for US military intervention in Cuba a cover and deception plan, to include requisite preliminary actions such as has been developed in response to Task 33 c, could be executed as an initial effort to provoke Cuban reactions. Harassment plus deceptive actions to convince the Cubans of imminent invasion would be emphasized. Our military posture throughout execution of the plan will allow a rapid change from exercise to intervention if Cuban response justifies.
2. A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.
[snip]
8. It is possible 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.
a. An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA 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.
b. 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 Eglin 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 being 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 radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to " sell" the incident.
The Northwoods document
|
|
The Clincher?
Codename Grillfire
During the Study I made the statement that if the corrective actions were not taken and we were attacked because of it I would do what I could to get this information to the American People; immediately upon saying this Lt. Teague and Sgt Middleton both took one arm and physically carried me down the hall and told me that I was in the Military and you don't say, that if it fails that you are going to tell the American People; I responded that it wasn't the people from the Study I was talking about because we were trying to prevent it but those in the Government who would do nothing.
A week or so later I was given the Direct Order that if the World Trade Center Twin Towers was ever attacked the way that we discussed in the Study that I was to do everything I could to bring this information to the American People and that this Order was never to be rescinded because those who would rescind it would be the people who turned against the American People. So what I am doing is following a Lawful Order.
Lt. Michael Teague was from Long Island, NY and when those who were conducting the Study changed the scenario from any 100 story building to the WTC Twin Towers, he said he could do this because it was his duty but it was weird to be asked to plan to blow up your own hometown. This is the one person that I would like most to hear what his opinion is now, that the attacks happened the way we planned them to in 1976.
Cutting the throat of the stewardess was a contribution to the Study that I made; one day Lt. Teague asked the question what could be done to take control of passengers on a hijacked airplane? I said; take one of the stewardess' and cut her throat, toss her to the floor and then grab another one and hold the knife on her. I was asked why this would work and I explained that to just hold a knife to the throat of a stewardess wouldn't get the passengers attention because everyday on TV we see people taken hostage with knifes of guns and we have become immune to this; where if you were to cut the jugular vein and spray 2 to 3, maybe 4 rows of passengers with her blood this would get their attention; then I was asked why this would get their attention? I answered that when I worked at a machine shop in California one employee injured his hand while using the punch press and severed an artery; turning around to see why he yelled I saw a stream of blood shooting out of his hand, I had been told that blood could do this but I had never seen it happen; so instead of helping him I just stood there in amazement of how far his blood was squirting and to spray the first few rows of passengers would have a similar effect of getting their attention that you where dead serious about what you were doing. - source
|
|
Century 21
 The New American Century?
In a document written a year before 9/11 - which was titled :
'Rebuilding America's Defenses - Strategy, Forces and Resources for a new century'
by the PNAC
Thomas Donnelly, argued that
|
|
"The United States cannot simply declare "strategic pause" while experimenting with new technologies and operational concepts. Nor can it choose to pursue a transformation strategy that would decouple American and allied interests. A transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for projecting force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed forward basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy goals and would trouble American allies. Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions."
|
|
Just a few questions :
Why did a right wing think tank,
think America needed to rebuild its defenses in 1997...
Rebuild it from WHAT???
Transform into WHAT?
| also: see
|
J. Michael Waller, who wrote the Insight piece with Paul M. Rodriguez, is a member of the right wing, pro-Israel Center For Security Policy, which, according to the Center's own site, includes an "extraordinary number of members of the Center's National Security Advisory Council" in the top echelons of the Bush Administration. Waller, incidentally, also wrote an Insight piece entitled "Preparing For The Next Pearl Harbor Attack" - just a few months before 9/11 [ Issue: 6/18/01 ]- in which he described the plan for a Homeland Security Agency, as recommended by the Hart-Rudman Commission report (yes, they had the "homeland security" blueprint in place several months before 9/11).
Stacking the Patsies of 9/11-
Global research
|
|
Is it just a co-incidence that many of the members
of this group became members of the Bush Government?
|
examine the The PNAC statement of intent:
The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.
Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:
we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global
responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.
[recognize any of these names?]
Elliott Abrams - Gary Bauer- William J. Bennett - Jeb Bush
Dick Cheney - Eliot A. Cohen - Midge Decter - Paula Dobriansky - Steve Forbes
Aaron Friedberg - Francis Fukuyama - Frank Gaffney - Fred C. Ikle
Donald Kagan - Zalmay Khalilzad - I. Lewis Libby - Norman Podhoretz
Dan Quayle - Peter W. Rodman - Stephen P. Rosen - Henry S. Rowen
Donald Rumsfeld - Vin Weber - George Weigel - Paul Wolfowitz
[Statement]
|
PNAC are funded by:
|
the list of Bradley grant recipients reads like a Who's Who of the U.S. Right ... Heritage Foundation ... Madison Center for Educational Affairs ... American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, literary home for such racist authors as Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) and Dinesh D'Souza (The End of Racism), former conservative officeholders Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Jack Kemp and William J. Bennett, and arch-conservative jurists Robert H. Bork and Antonin Scalia....
"Accordingly, the general purpose of the John M. Olin Foundation is to provide support for projects that reflect or are intended to strengthen the economic, political and cultural institutions upon which the American heritage of constitutional government and private enterprise is based. The Foundation also seeks to promote a general understanding of these institutions by encouraging the thoughtful study of the connections between economic and political freedoms, and the cultural heritage that sustains them."
The Foundation commenced funding conservative "causes" in 1973 when Richard Mellon Scaife became the foundation's chairman. During the 1960s, Richard inherited an estimated $200 million from his mother, Sarah. His net personal worth was estimated at $800 million by Forbes magazine, which would make Richard the 38th richest person in the United States. Richard controls the Scaife, Carthage, and Alleghany foundations. In 1993 alone, the Scaife and Carthage foundations donated more than $17.6 million to conservative think tanks.
|
|
|
|
America still continues to plan
the transformation of the Air force into a space military
which could use 'pre-emptive' aggression globally
...as written in it's AIR FORCE SPACE COMMAND PLAN 2004 written 5 Nov 02
|
page 7
"Effective use of space-based resources provides a continual and global presence over key areas of the world satellites permanently "forward deployed" add another dimension to the capability of our force's ability to quickly position themselves for employment. "
page 28
"No matter how it is structured, the end result is a fiscally reasonable and technologically achievable plan--one that produces a fully integrated Air and Space Force that is persuasive in peace, decisive in war and pre-eminent in any form of conflict."
|
|
High Strangeness!
|
|
2 Pepsi's - to go!
Spies like us [1985] Plot: Two totally incompetent applicants, Emmett Fitzhume and Austin Millbarge, are chosen from a CIA recruitment program.
They are parachuted into Pakistan and eventually end up in Afghanistan, chased by the Russians, where they learn they are being used as decoys to draw out the Sovet defenses.
Two real spies are sent in. Their mission is to Hijack a soviet Missile launcher, launch the Soviet missile and test the new US orbital defence laser.
The missile is fired and while heading for an American City, the laser system misses it's target. The contingency plan for this scenario, as set out by the Pentagon Nuts who planned it from deep within a secret underground bunker, is to let the 3rd World War happen anyway...
|
Hey Relax! It's only a film!
|
"...the [9-11] commission is marred by conflicts of interest. It operates in a cozy bi-partisan inter-agency environment, where the various crony factions within the administration, the US Congress, etc. are present."
|
|
|
U.S. Military Turns to Video of 9/11/01
to Win Hearts and Minds of Afghans
By MIKE ECKEL, Associated Press Writer - TADOKHIEL, Afghanistan - To some, the images on the screen were vaguely familiar: airplanes exploding into tall, glittering buildings; well-dressed people running from billowing clouds; firefighters, rubble, dust, destruction.
To most in the village of Tadokhiel, however, the images of the destruction of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were incomprehensible.
For the past several months, U.S. Army Psychological Operations units have traveled around Afghanistan) talking to officials, promoting the fledgling government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and trying to convince Afghans of the United States' good intentions.
|
|
The unit's "information operations" publish Dari- and Pashtun-language newspapers and leaflets and produce radio broadcasts. In the past month, PsyOps has turned to a military-produced video complete with Dari- and Pashtun-language voiceovers, graphics and Afghan music to get the military's message out: "Why the United States is in Afghanistan."
On a recent trip to this dusty, crumbling hamlet two hours' drive northeast of Kabul, army medics and dentists set up a health clinic in the village school to offer medicine, check on decayed teeth and warn about the dangers of land mines.
Hundreds of men, women and children crowded the cordoned-off square, sitting or squatting, watching the Americans. Soldiers allowed groups of a dozen to walk forward, then stopped them in front of a television set to watch the three-minute video.
The villagers watched the jets flying into the Twin Towers. They watched firefighters hauling debris from the pile that the towers became. They watched U.S. fighter jets firing missiles into what appeared to be Afghan villages. They watched American soldiers carrying boxes of humanitarian aid and saw images of Afghan girls attending school.
They looked up now and again to watch the American soldiers, who had driven up in a swirl of trucks and Humvees, handing out brightly colored vitamin pills and ball point pens. Then they went back to watching the video.
Most of the villagers had never seen a television. Few had ever seen pictures of New York City. Most knew only vaguely that something had happened on Sept. 11. None in Tadokhiel have electricity or running water.
"I watched the (the video) because they made us," said Shamsuddin, 41, an unemployed former mujahadeen fighter who uses only one name. "It was a bad thing that those terrorists flew. It was not Muslim."
"I didn't know why we had to watch the video. It was strange but I didn't mind," said Mirzagul, a 65-year-old watchman at the village school who also uses only one name.
Mirzagul said when the American bombing campaign started last November, he was sad, confused and angry. He's glad the Americans have brought a semblance of stability to the country. When the country is fully secure, he'll be glad for the Americans to leave.
"We don't like foreigners to stay here forever," he said.
No one is required to watch the video to receive medical treatment, said Staff Sgt. Samuel Escobar, of the Fort Bragg, North Carolina-based 9th PSYOP Battalion. Most Afghans watch it out of curiosity. In Tadokhiel, however, villagers must walk directly past the television and the PsyOps soldiers to reach the entrance to the medical clinic. No villagers refused to watch, though some only partly paid attention.
The videos, which were produced by the 8th Psychological Operations Battalion also of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, are a high priority for U.S. operations around Afghanistan, said Maj. Gen. John R. Vines, who oversees the bulk of the conventional forces operating in Afghanistan.
"It makes clear to the Afghan people why we are here," Vines said. "They understand that we, like they, have a responsibility to defend our homes against attack."
A teenage girl whose face is shrouded by a burqa said she had heard people in the village talking about the Sept. 11 attacks last year, and she knew many people had died. She wished the Americans would do more to bring food to her family and the village.
"The buildings were pretty (in the video). It's terrible that those al-Qaida people crashed those planes," the girl said, declining to give her name for fear she would be ostracized for talking to a man.
Said Agha, a 50-year-old bean and wheat farmer, said he hated the harsh Taliban regime and was happy that the Americans had forced it out. He said he was sad to hear how many had died on Sept. 11 and bore no ill will toward the Americans over the Afghan civilians killed since the U.S. military operations began last year.
"We want peace in our country. We don't want any more fighting," Agha said.
PsyOps plans a children's version of the video, Escobar said, and the team intends to show the videos as much as possible in coming months. He bristles at the idea that the video was propaganda.
"The stuff we do, the public should be as receptive to it as the Afghans are," he said. "The more we tell them, the better off they are." -
psywarrior.com
|
|
|
|
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting
immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam
Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around
the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on
CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is
connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to
Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But,I'm willing to say it, but what's your
evidence?' And I never got any evidence. And these were people who
had-Middle East think tanks and people like this and it was a lot of
pressure to connect this and there were a lot of assumptions made. But I
never personally saw the evidence and didn't talk to anybody who had the
evidence to make that connection."
Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert on June 15 edition
of NBC's Meet the Press
from FAIR [also read William Rivers Pitt- Slaughtergate]
|
|
|
Report: Iraq Did Not Help with Sept. 11 Attacks
The Sept. 11 commission finds "no credible evidence" that Iraq was involved in the 2001 terrorist attacks, although al Qaeda did approach Saddam Hussein about a collaboration. The panel is holding its final two days of hearings in Washington.
NPR
|
|
"Not for the first time the American public might be being mislead, by those with ulterior motives, into lending its support to a war, this time against Iraq, that has no bearing whatsoever on the interests of the people of the USA."
Colonel Donn de Grand - source
"Mr. Cheney said yesterday that the "evidence is overwhelming" of an Iraq-Qaeda axis and that there had been a "whole series of high-level contacts" between them. The 9/11 panel said a senior Iraqi intelligence officer made three visits to Sudan in the early 1990's, meeting with Osama bin Laden once in 1994. It said Osama bin Laden had asked for "space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded." The panel cited reports of further contacts after Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996, but said there was no working relationship. As far as the public record is concerned, then, Mr. Cheney's "longstanding ties" amount to one confirmed meeting, after which the Iraq government did not help Al Qaeda. By those standards, the United States has longstanding ties to North Korea.
Mr. Bush has also used a terrorist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Mr. Bush used to refer to Mr. Zarqawi as a "senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner" who was in Baghdad working with the Iraqi government. But the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, told the Senate earlier this year that Mr. Zarqawi did not work with the Hussein regime, nor under the direction of Al Qaeda.
When it comes to 9/11, someone in the Bush administration has indeed drawn the connection to Iraq: the vice president. Mr. Cheney has repeatedly referred to reports that Mohamed Atta met in Prague in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent. He told Tim Russert of NBC on Dec. 9, 2001, that this report has "been pretty well confirmed." If so, no one seems to have informed the C.I.A., the Czech government or the 9/11 commission, which said it did not appear to be true. Yet Mr. Cheney cited it, again, on Thursday night on CNBC."
NY Times on Indymedia
|
|
When you connect the dots between lesser known facts in the 9-11 matrix, you begin to see the very strong probability that, not unlike Pearl Harbor, this was another burning of the Reichstag, a surgical excision of democracy and freedom, and the kick-off for the next wave of globalization. The ends serve only the mean men.
The unspeakable is the most plausible, and in the words of Jared Isreal, editor-in-chief of Emperor's Clothes, an online site that challenges mainstream media reports, "... if you want to build a movement to change unjust policies... you have to expose lies and hypocrisy in high places."
And here's the red flag: as reported by CNN and the Washington Post, during a private meeting on January 29, Emperor Dubbya personally asked congressional leaders to limit investigation into the events of September 11, on the grounds that they "not unduly burden the defense and intelligence communities as they are still charged with fighting a war." Conveniently, the evidence is barricaded in the war room the people stay in the dark.
The Son King Rises
|
| Rice: "...that fine September day..."
"I want you to keep focused on what you are doing here," Rice told U.S. troops gathered in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces. "This war came to us, not the other way around."
"The United States, along with the rest of the free world, believed somehow for a number of years that people in this region didn't care about freedom, and we cared about stability and what we got was neither. We got a malignancy that was growing that came to haunt us on that fine September day," - Condaleeza Rice May 2005
|
|
|
"While people may disagree on the decision to liberate Iraq, all should agree that the country is the central front in the war on terror,"
"We went to war because we were attacked," he said. "And we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens." - G.W.Bush 18th June 2005
|
Iraq - Al Queda links from evidence gained by Rendition [kidnapping & torture]
|
Al-Qaeda link to Iraq tied to coercion claim
By Douglas Jehl - Dec 8 2005
The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.
The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.
The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Mr. Libi's accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons.
The fact that Mr. Libi recanted after the American invasion of Iraq and that intelligence based on his remarks was withdrawn by the C.I.A. in March 2004 has been public for more than a year. But American officials had not previously acknowledged either that Mr. Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Mr. Libi contended that his statements had been coerced.
A government official said that some intelligence provided by Mr. Libi about Al Qaeda had been accurate, and that Mr. Libi's claims that he had been treated harshly in Egyptian custody had not been corroborated.
A classified Defense Intelligence Agency report issued in February 2002 that expressed skepticism about Mr. Libi's credibility on questions related to Iraq and Al Qaeda was based in part on the knowledge that he was no longer in American custody when he made the detailed statements, and that he might have been subjected to harsh treatment, the officials said. They said the C.I.A.'s decision to withdraw the intelligence based on Mr. Libi's claims had been made because of his later assertions, beginning in January 2004, that he had fabricated them to obtain better treatment from his captors.
At the time of his capture in Pakistan in late 2001, Mr. Libi, a Libyan, was the highest-ranking Qaeda leader in American custody. A Nov. 6 report in The New York Times, citing the Defense Intelligence Agency document, said he had made the assertions about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda involving illicit weapons while in American custody.
Mr. Libi was indeed initially held by the United States military in Afghanistan, and was debriefed there by C.I.A. officers, according to the new account provided by the current and former government officials. But despite his high rank, he was transferred to Egypt for further interrogation in January 2002 because the White House had not yet provided detailed authorization for the C.I.A. to hold him.
While he made some statements about Iraq and Al Qaeda when in American custody, the officials said, it was not until after he was handed over to Egypt that he made the most specific assertions, which were later used by the Bush administration as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons.
Beginning in March 2002, with the capture of a Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah, the C.I.A. adopted a practice of maintaining custody itself of the highest-ranking captives, a practice that became the main focus of recent controversy related to detention of suspected terrorists.
The agency currently holds between two and three dozen high-ranking terrorist suspects in secret prisons around the world. Reports that the prisons have included locations in Eastern Europe have stirred intense discomfort on the continent and have dogged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit there this week.
Mr. Libi was returned to American custody in February 2003, when he was transferred to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to the current and former government officials. He withdrew his claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda in January 2004, and his current location is not known. A C.I.A. spokesman refused Thursday to comment on Mr. Libi's case. The current and former government officials who agreed to discuss the case were granted anonymity because most details surrounding Mr. Libi's case remain classified.
During his time in Egyptian custody, Mr. Libi was among a group of what American officials have described as about 150 prisoners sent by the United States from one foreign country to another since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks for the purposes of interrogation. American officials including Ms. Rice have defended the practice, saying it draws on language and cultural expertise of American allies, particularly in the Middle East, and provides an important tool for interrogation. They have said that the United States carries out the renditions only after obtaining explicit assurances from the receiving countries that the prisoners will not be tortured.
Nabil Fahmy, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that he had no specific knowledge of Mr. Libi's case. Mr. Fahmy acknowledged that some prisoners had been sent to Egypt by mutual agreement between the United States and Egypt. "We do interrogations based on our understanding of the culture," Mr. Fahmy said. "We're not in the business of torturing anyone."
In statements before the war, and without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and other officials repeatedly cited the information provided by Mr. Libi as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons. Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases."
The question of why the administration relied so heavily on the statements by Mr. Libi has long been a subject of contention. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, made public last month unclassified passages from the February 2002 document, which said it was probable that Mr. Libi "was intentionally misleading the debriefers."
The document showed that the Defense Intelligence Agency had identified Mr. Libi as a probable fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda involving illicit weapons.
Mr. Levin has since asked the agency to declassify four other intelligence reports, three of them from February 2002, to see if they also expressed skepticism about Mr. Libi's credibility. On Thursday, a spokesman for Mr. Levin said he could not comment on the circumstances surrounding Mr. Libi's detention because the matter was classified. - FT.COM
|
|
