MEANS
excerpted from the book
Crossing the Rubicon
The Decline of the American Empire
at the End of the Age of Oil
by Michael C. Ruppert
New Society Publishers, 2004,
paper
MEANS
p203
... many FBI agents, employees, and even military personnel did
speak out, both before and after 9/11. What they said is damning.
And what has happened to them remains a continued warning (though
not an excuse) for those who still function within the system
and keep it going. The main reason why these whistleblowers have
been so thoroughly smashed is because they all threatened to expose
direct US connections to the attacks of 9/11 and those who carried
them out.
p204
Robert Wright
Twelve-year veteran FBI agent Robert Wright
Jr. should be proud. Of all of the FBI "brick" agents
who have come forward since 9/11 to describe the deliberate obstruction
of investigations that could have prevented the attacks, no others
have taken the risks or endured the punishment that Wright has.
For good reason.
Wright is the only agent in the FBI's
history to have conducted an investigation of terrorists that
resulted in the seizure of financial assets. In 1998 he began
an investigation - since terminated by the FBI - into terrorist
money laundering
in the United States. That investigation
resulted in the seizure of bank accounts and other assets of Yassin
Kadi, who has "since been identified as one of the 'chief
money launderers' for Osama bin Laden." Kadi is reported
to have provided as much as $3 billion to al Qaeda before Wright
shut him down. ' (Wright's investigations also put a major crimp
in the funding for Hamas, another Palestinian-related support
group that has been linked to terrorist activities in Israel).
Based in Chicago, home of the Chicago
Board Options Exchange (CBOE) where a great deal of 9/11-related
insider trading was to take place, Wright was in one of the three
most important financial centers of the United States. Nobody
moves $3 billion without using exchanges such as the NYSE or CBOE.
It's just too much money arid must move in financial streams where
it would not stand out.
In the only real coverage of Wright's
decision to come forward which was coupled with a formal complaint
against the FBI for its suppression of him - the Congressional
News Service told a chilling tale as it reported on a press conference
held by Wright and his legal team on May 30, 2002:
In a memorandum written 91 days before
the September 11 terrorist attacks, an FBI agent warned that Americans
would die as a result of the bureau's failure to adequately pursue
investigations of terrorists living in the country... Wright says
that FBI management 'intentionally and repeatedly thwarted and
obstructed' his attempts to expand the investigation to arrest
other terrorists and seize their assets ....' As a direct result
of the incompetence and, at times, intentional obstruction of
justice by FBI management to prevent me from bringing the terrorists
to justice, Americans have unknowingly been exposed to potential
terrorists attacks for years,' he charged.
FBI Director Robert Mueller held a May
29, 2002, press conference where he stated, "It is critically
important that I hear criticisms of the organization including
criticisms of me in order to improve the organization." Meanwhile
the FBI was landing on Wright's chest with both feet. It had issued
Wright written orders not to discuss what he knew and not to disclose,
either in speech or writing, the contents of an unpublished manuscript
entitled Vulgar Betrayal that he had written for Congress. Wright
was threatened in writing with disciplinary action, civil suits,
revocation of security clearances, and even criminal prosecution
if he talked. That letter was received by Wright's attorney, David
Schippers, at 5:00 pm on the same day Mueller lied to the American
people about his pure intentions.
The next day, Wright concluded his own
press conference in tears: "To the families and victims of
September 11th," he said, "on behalf of [FBI Special
Agents] John Vincent, Barry Carmody, and myself - we're sorry."
But the real truth of what was done to this ethical law enforcement
officer is contained in a May 22 letter written by Schippers to
the FBI and in the words spoken at the press conference itself.
In writing to Wright's superior, Chicago
Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Thomas Krieir, Schippers described
how Wright had voluntarily given a heads-up about a New York Times
investigation into what had happened with his investigations.
Wright was subsequently ordered not to talk to the press. He complied.
Schippers wrote,
The FBI has failed seriously to address
Robert Wright's work-related concerns regarding the FBI's terrorism
responsibilities. In fact, we believe there has been a concerted
effort by the FBI to discredit Agent Wright and minimize his concerns
regarding the FBI's failures in connection with international
terrorism matters prior to September 11th, 2001. In part, this
effort includes providing false and misleading information to
the New York Times regarding Agent Wright and his Vulgar Betrayal
investigation. Even more disturbing is the fact that the FBI has
prevented Agent Wright and Special Agent John Vincent from providing
written responses to the New York Times to counter that false
and misleading information .... Agent Wright has also filed two
complaints with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in an attempt
to have his concerns addressed .... To our astonishment, the DOJ
employee advised that, although the allegations were extremely
serious, the Inspector General's Office did not have the resources
to conduct an investigation of this anticipated size and scope.
The sheer vindictiveness of a system that
seeks to silence whistleblowers was most fully revealed in the
press conference itself, in which it was disclosed that Wright,
Schippers, and attorney Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch (a Washington,
DC-based legal watchdog group) had actually met months before
9/11. They also disclosed that Wright had written most of his
manuscript and decided to speak out about the repression well
before the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Repeating allegations
that Wright had been threatened and intimidated by the Bureau,
Klayman stated that Wright's manuscript hits both Bush and Cheney
"hard." That leaves little doubt about where the orders
to crush Wright were coming from. Shippers added that Wright had
even been ordered not to talk to Congress. John Ashcrofr was not
spared in the scathing statements. Klayman said that "Ashcroft
very likely had all of this information" and didn't use Wright's
investigative work to pull the financial plug on al Qaeda before
the attacks.
The lawyers also described how Wright
had, since voicing his concerns, been demoted to performing "innocuous
tasks"; his office had been moved, computer equipment had
been taken away from him, and he had been forced to purchase computers
with his own money (which he did, out of sheer devotion to his
work). Klayman stated that his office, aware of the direct connections
between Wright's work and Osama bin Laden, had called Attorney
General Ashcroft immediately after the attacks. The response was
terse: "We're tired of conspiracy theories."
p207
Kenneth Williams and the Phoenix memo: a CIA connection
On July 10, 2001, Kenneth Williams, the
senior special agent from a Phoenix FBI terrorism task force,
sent a memo to FBI headquarters. That memo, resulting from a seven-year
investigation, alerted FBI headquarters that a number of Muslims,
suspected of radical ties, were taking flight lessons in Arizona.
It was later confirmed that Hani Hanjour, who was to be listed
as the suspected pilot of the airliner the government says crashed
into the Pentagon, had received his flight training in Arizona.
The memo specifically mentioned Osama
bin Laden and warned that terrorists were possibly going to hijack
aircraft or penetrate airport security. Williams requested that
the FBI institute a nationwide survey of aviation schools to ascertain
if there were large numbers of Middle Eastern students enrolled
in them. The request was denied, reportedly for lack of resources.°
The excuse seems weak. A list of flight schools is readily available
through the Internet, and a telephone survey would have yielded
fast results.
p208
Williams's memo was sent to the desk of Supervisory Special Agent
Dave Frasca at FBI headquarters in Washington, where Frasca sat
on it with an anvil. We may never know what is in the rest of
that memo and what Richard Behar kept hidden for the interests
he apparently serves. What has been documented here, however,
is yet another case of senior FBI personnel deliberately suppressing
information that might have prevented the attacks of 9/11 in order
to protect CIA assets who were subsequently connected to those
same attacks.
Another major inconsistency in FBI operations
is that, in 1995, after receiving warnings that al Qaeda operatives
might be planning to crash hijacked airliners into CIA headquarters,
the FBI "descended" immediately on flight schools all
over the country. Yet in 2001 it was too busy.
p208
Colleen Rowley
On May 22, 2002, Minneapolis FBI Special Agent Colleen Rowley
hand-delivered a 13-page memorandum to FBI Director Robert Mueller.
In keeping with his customary practices, Mueller immediately classified
the memorandum from the Minneapolis Field Office's top lawyer
"Secret." That didn't help much, because Rowley, claiming
protection under the federal whistleblower statute, had also delivered
copies to the Senate Intelligence Committee and two of the Committee's
members, Republican Richard Shelby and Democrat Diane Feinstein.
The efforts of Rowley and her fellow brick
agents in Minneapolis centered on the so-called twentieth hijacker,
Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been in FBI custody since August 15
on immigration charges. It seems that for months before 9/11,
FBI headquarters (FBIHOJ had systematically blocked every effort
to investigate yet another case that - had it been supported might
have prevented the 9/11 attacks.
Rowley was irritated. It wasn't long before
the memorandum - edited of course was published by the likes of
TIME, the Associated Press, and Newsweek. Rowley's move was supremely
well considered and executed in such a way that there was little
else for Congress to do but embrace it. And the best thing to
do with Colleen Rowley is to get out of the way and let her speak
for herself.
May 21, 2002
FBI Director Robert Mueller
FBI Headquarters
Washington, D.C.
Dear Director Mueller:
I feel at this point that I have to put
my concerns in writing concerning the important topic of the FBI's
response to evidence of terrorist activity in the United States
prior to September 11. The issues are fundamentally ones of INTEGRITY
and go to the heart of the FBI's law enforcement mission and mandate
To get to the point, I have deep concerns
that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and
others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and
is occurring. The term "cover up" would be too strong
a characterization which is why I am attempting to carefully (and
perhaps over laboriously) choose my words here. I base my concerns
on my relatively small, peripheral but unique role in the Moussaoui
investigation in the Minneapolis Division prior to,
during and after September 11th I feel
that certain facts, including the following, have, up to now,
been omitted, downplayed, glossed over, and/or mischaracterized
in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional
embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper
political reasons:...
2) (As)the Minneapolis agents' reasonable
suspicions quickly ripened into probable cause, which, at the
latest, occurred within days of Moussaoui's arrest when the French
Intelligence Service confirmed his affiliations with radical fundamentalist
Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama Bin Laden, they
became desperate to search the computer lap top that had been
taken from Moussaoui as well as conduct a more thorough search
of his personal effects. The agents in particular believed that
Moussaoui signaled he had something to hide in the way he refused
to allow them to search his computer ....
... NOTES
[v.] During the early aftermath of September
11th, when I hap- I
happened to be recounting the pre-September
11th events concerning the Moussaoui investigation to other FBI
personnel in other divisions or in FBIHQ, almost everyone's first
question was "Why? Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately
sabotage a case?" (I know I shouldn't be flippant about this,
but jokes were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had
to be spies or moles, like Robert Hansen, who were actually working
for Osama bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis' effort.)
Along these lines, let me ask the question, why has it suddenly
become necessary for the Director to "handpick" the
FBI management? It's quite conceivable that many of the HQ personnel
who so vigorously disputed Moussaoui's ability! predisposition
to fly a plane into a building were simply unaware of all the
various incidents and reports worldwide of al Qaeda terrorists
attempting or plotting to do so [vi.] for the SSA continued to
find new reasons to stall
[viii.] For starters, if prevention rather
than prosecution is to be our new main goal, (an objective I totally
agree with), we need more guidance on when we can apply the Quarles
"public safety" exception to Mirandas 5th Amendment
requirements. We were prevented from even attempting to question
Moussaoui on the day of the attacks when, in theory, he could
have possessed further information about other coconspirators.
(Apparently no government attorney believes there is a "public
safety" exception in a situation like this?!)18
Thus Moussaoui, who had paid the $7,000
for his flight lessons in cash; who was, according to press reports,
not interested in learning how to take off or land; who wanted
to know if the doors of an airliner could be opened in flight;
and who was particularly interested in air traffic patterns around
New York City remained totally protected until after the attacks
of 9/11 had taken place.
... During my time as an LAPD officer
and in the years since, I have met several FBI agents, including
one former assistant director, who bragged about the FBI's ability
to conduct "black bag" burglaries (surreptitious entries)
during the 1960s and 1970s. Search warrants were never even a
consideration. Keep this in mind as you reread the Rowley memo
on the amazing refusal of FBI leadership to grant the field agents
a FISA warrant. With Moussaoui's laptop in their possession for
weeks before the attacks, it is very probable that they had already
examined all of its contents. The reason why they needed the warrant
was to make the evidence they had found admissible. Numerous press
stories since 9/11 have indicated that the contents of that laptop
will be used to convict Moussaoui of complicity in the attacks
and most probably sentence him to death. I can only imagine the
"off-the-record" conversations that took place between
the brick agents in Minnesota and Washington as the brick agents
- knowing of a certainty what was coming, lied in vain to get
their search warrant.
And who was the supervisory special agent
in Washington who brutalized the Minneapolis agents; who rewrote
search warrants; who lied, obstructed, road-
p216
Dave Frasca
Before concluding that Supervisory Special
Agent Dave Frasca of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters
was the primary agent responsible for the deliberate, willful,
and arguably harmful suppression of evidence and of investigations
that could well have prevented 9/11, a couple of key questions
need to be addressed. Various press reports have described FBI
units with oversight in these cases as the UBL (Osama bin Laden)
Unit and as the Radical Fundamentalist Unit. Are they referring
to the same thing? Secondly, is there any indication that any
member of Congress or of any other oversight body has noticed
at least some of these connections?
Dave Frasca was, until early 2002, the
chief of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit within the FBI's Counterterrorism/Counterespionage
branch. In that capacity; according to press reports, he oversaw
the operations of several subunits, one of which apparently was
the bin Laden or UBL unit. One ABC report said, "The Bureau's
Radical Fundamentalist Unit, headed by Supervisory Special Agent
Dave Frasca, and its Osama bin Laden Unit first got a memo that
Phoenix FBI agent Ken Williams sent in early July. "24 The
UBL unit was created, according to a statement by an FBI official,
in 1999.25
A description of the duties of the RFU
and its chief was found on the website of the high-technology,
intelligence-connected SAIC Corporation, based in San Diego, which
recently hired Frasca's predecessor, retired Supervisory Special
Agent Robert Blitzer. SAIC's website gave a telling description
of Frasca's duties, as he followed in Blitzer's footsteps.
From 1993 to 1996, Blitzer served as chief
of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit, Counterterrorism and Middle
East Section at FBI Headquarters. As the leader of this unit,
he was responsible for overall national coordination, oversight,
and direction of all criminal and intelligence operations against
the international terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center
and who attempted to conduct a wave of bombings in and around
New York City in early 1993.26
According to FBI spokesman Neal Schiff,
Frasca's tenure in the RFU position lasted from 1999 until he
was promoted in 2002. Frasca is currently the Assistant Section
Chief of the International Terrorism Operations Section I. Schiff
was ambiguous, at best, in describing the relationship between
the RFU and the UBL units. While maintaining that the two were
completely separate units, Schiff refused to confirm or deny that
Frasca had supervisory responsibility for the UBL unit. At the
same time he would not deny numerous press reports indicating
that Frasca did work both units. The Phoenix memorandum was sent
to the UBL unit, and Frasca apparently had a role in the decision
not to follow up on it. As to the Wright case, and in contrast
to statements given by Department of justice officials on condition
of anonymity confirming the RFU's role in squashing the Wright
investigation, Schiff declined to confirm or deny any relationship.
"That case is still pending and I can't comment," he
said.
But the link between Robert Wright's oppressors
and FBI headquarters was established only days after my office
received the official statements from Schiff. On December 19,
2002, ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross aired an interview
with Wright and his partner John Vincent in which Wright stated,
"The supervisor who was there from headquarters was right
across from me and started yelling at me: 'You will not open criminal
investigations. I forbid any of you. You will not open criminal
investigations against any of these intelligence subjects."
It was made clear in the story that the
Wright/Vincent investigations had stemmed from the 1998 African
embassy bombings and that the money trail led to Osama bin Laden.
This would have placed the investigation within the UBL, Radical
Fundamentalist Unit, and under the direct control of Dave Frasca.
Schiff's assertion that the two units are separate and distinct
entities is belied by Senate documents, press stories, and Frasca's
own conduct post-9/1 1. A May 24, 2002, letter from Senator Patrick
Leahy to FBI Director Mueller said:
A press account on May 22 states that
the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters had decided
not to pursue the recommendations in the Phoenix memorandum before
September 11, 2001, since according to "officials.., the
FBI counterterrorism division was swamped with urgent matters."
Another press account on May 23 contains a correction by "a
senior FBI official" and [stated] that the FBI's "Osama
bin Laden Unit was responsible" for the decision rejecting
the recommendations ,
Leahy's letter, in conformity with press
stories, shows the interconnectedness of the two units, and Frasca's
roles in cases involving both units is underscored by the fact
that he was the agent (and in some cases, the only agent) who
provided congressional testimony on all of these matters, whether
they involved the RFU or the UBL unit. Schiff was unable to resolve
these contradictions and went into "no comment" mode
about press stories or congressional correspondence.
Knowing all this, it is now possible to
state that Frasca almost certainly had direct oversight responsibility
for all five of the previously described incidents. FBI sources
I contacted confirmed, on condition of anonymity, that the RFU
was the control point for all of these cases and that Frasca issued
the orders thwarting investigations that could have prevented
the 9/11 attacks. Looking at Frasca's actions, both in terms of
their frequency and in terms of their consistency, it stretches
the imagination to accept press accounts attributing FBI "screw-ups"
relevant to 9/11 to incompetence, lack of resources, or overwork.
There is a pattern here, rationally explained in only one way.
Someone at the FBI, or elsewhere in government, needed to make
sure that al Qaeda members were left in place either to perpetrate
the attacks or to take the blame for them afterwards. And the
Frasca connections at least insofar as Minneapolis and Phoenix
are concerned were noticed. Frasca testified before both the Senate
Judiciary and Intelligence committees, and many problems followed.
First, Frasca told the judiciary committee that he didn't see
the Phoenix memo until after the 9/11 attacks. Later his statement
was corrected to indicate that had seen the Phoenix memo before
9/11, but that the UBL unit had rejected the request for a survey
of flight schools. His statement was different from press accounts
which indicated that because the memo was marked routine, the
deadline for response to it was 60 days, which would have been
after 9/11 - so Frasca had taken no action.
Senators Patrick Leahy, Charles Grassley,
and Arlen Specter were understandably miffed, especially when
Leahy disclosed that he had acquiesced to a special request from
Mueller to hold the secret hearing where Frasca testified without
a stenographer or a transcript. Mueller didn't seem to have minded,
however, when the Intelligence Committee was allowed to make a
transcript of Frasca's statements for its members.
On May 24, 2002, Leahy closed a terse
and eloquent letter to Mueller on the subject, signed also by
Grassley and Specter:
Finally, it has been noted that Supervisory
Special Agent Dave Frasca in the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU)
may have been involved in handling the Phoenix memorandum and
the Moussaoui investigation at FBI headquarters. [This had been
previously confirmed in a number of press stories. The FBI only
started changing their position after people started asking questions.
- MCR] Please explain his role and the role of the RFU in evaluating
the requests from the Minneapolis field office in the Moussaoui
case; what connection, if any, he or others drew between the two
ongoing investigations; and whether he or others brought such
a connection to the attention of higher level FBI officials.
If a briefing rather than a written answer
would facilitate your response to the questions regarding agent
Frasca, please let us know
Some senators were a bit less polite in
their remarks. Senator Richard Shelby, the Republican ranking
member of the intelligence committee, was quoted as saying, "The
information coming from Phoenix and the information coming from
Minneapolis was stifled here at FBI headquarters." Senator
Grassley of Iowa decried sabotage" by FBI officials.
A secret team
To understand how someone like Dave Frasca
functioned inside the FBI, one needs to understand how the CIA
and other intelligence agencies place their people throughout
the government. Frasca fits that pattern perfectly. For those
unfamiliar with the way covert operations function within the
United States government, I cannot emphasize enough the importance
of two books: The Secret Team by the late Air Force Colonel L.
Fletcher Prouty (the Pentagon's liaison with the CIA during the
1960s), and CIA Diary by former CIA Case Officer Philip Agee.
Other excellent case studies in this area are found in The (CIA
and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks.
Operational patterns described by all of these men are confirmed
by hundreds of declassified documents that have surfaced in investigations
like those conducted by the Senate's Church committee in the 1970s.
To sum up the lessons clearly explained
in both books, all one needs to understand is that the CIA routinely
places its deep cover agents in every branch of the US government,
especially within the FBI, the DEA, and federal law enforcement
agencies. They even do it with municipal police departments such
as LAPD, NYPD, or the Chicago PD. The CIA attempted to recruit
me in 1973 as a college senior, and the proposition was made that
I become a case officer with CIA and then return to LAPD, go through
their Academy, and use the LAPD position as a cover. Although
I declined that offer and have never taken a penny from the CIA,
I was able to find out years later that the CIA, because of my
family connections to the Agency and the NSA, had actually steered
several of my assignments as an LAPD intern while I was an undergraduate
at UCLA. When the CIA places its agents inside the US military,
the process is routinely called "sheep dipping."
Why would the CIA do this? Frasca's behavior
is right out of the textbook. At LAPD I saw CIA assets and contractors
with access to narcotics investigations making deliberate decisions
as to who got arrested and who got away. Gary Webb documented
one such instance in Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and
the Crack Cocaine Explosion when he looked at massive CIA-connected
cocaine shipments into Los Angeles. CIA assets doing CIA's bidding
are always protected. There is no way to conclusively state that
Dave Frasca either worked or works for the CIA, either as a case
officer or as an asset. But the role he played before 9/11 clearly
served interests other than those of the FBI or the innocent Americans
killed or bereaved by the attacks. The power of this secret team
is that they are always able to protect their assets, no matter
how badly they are exposed. And, as Colleen Rowley noted, Frasca
was actually promoted right after 9/11.
p223
... a multitude of press reports, including stories from the New
York Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek, all published between
September 15 and 17, 2001, disclosed that at least five of the
hijackers had received US military training at bases in the US,
including flight lessons. Among the latter was Mohammed Atta,
who apparently received his training while wanted for terrorist
activities. Atta's US military training was confirmed by a separate
story published by Knight Ridder at a time when many of the military
training connections were causing the military to engage in some
disingenuous doubletalk. Several subsequent stories indicated
that while the five names matched up with 9/11 hijackers, it was
apparently a case of more than one person having the same name.
Yet the Department of Defense has not to this date disclosed the
identities of the five people whose names matched those of 9/11
hijackers. Even more compelling is the fact that Newsweek reported
three of the hijackers had received flight training at the Pensacola
Naval Air Station.
All told, 14 of the 19 9/11 hijackers
lived and studied for a considerable period in southern Florida.
No one has done a better job of investigating the connections
of these hijackers to military and intelligence operations than
investigative journalist Dan Hopsicker. His investigations have
also produced compelling evidence linking Rudi Dekkers, the operator
of the flight school attended by Atta and others, to US intelligence
operations and the destruction and/or immediate confiscation of
incriminating records immediately after the attacks with the hands-on
involvement of Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Hopsicker, a former
broadcast news producer for MS-NBC, has produced a compelling
video called Mohammed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus that details
many of these links. He maintains a detailed website at: <www.madcowprod.com>
[inexplicably, in the summer of 2004, Hopsicker performed a startling
flip-flop by choosing to agree
p227
... continuing assertions by law enforcement and intelligence
executives and managers that they lacked the intelligence capabilities
(both technical and legal) to have known of the attacks before
they occurred are demonstrably false... Notwithstanding that the
mainstream media have inexcusably tried to hammer this belief
into the consciousness of the public, available evidence - most
of it undisputed by the government also reveals that al Qaeda
and its operatives were under minute scrutiny years before the
attacks.
... an exceptionally powerful eavesdropping
program called Echelon. Echelon's existence has been acknowledged
by the Australian government since 1988, when it was exposed by
whistleblowers who charged that it had been misused for political
purposes. Building on an original post-World War II alliance between
the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, Echelon had
by the late 1980s been expanded to include joint operations with
Germany, Japan, and China. It was initiated on the legal premise
that while it is not permissible for the US government to monitor
the conversations of its citizens without a warrant, it is not
illegal for British intelligence to monitor American citizens,
etc. Once the "take" has been pooled, the respective
agencies can have safe access to their own domestic intelligence,
because the Britons, Australians, or Germans did it, and not the
home government.
Echelon's surveillance power resides
in its ability "to tap all international and some domestic
communications circuits, and sift out messages which sound interesting.
Computers automatically analyze every telex message or data signal,
and can also identify calls to, say, a target telephone number
in London, no matter from which country they originate. '
Echelon has also been mated with computing
programs and secret spy-satellite technology, including voice
and "keyword" recognition that is remarkably effective
in bringing critical messages to the attention of analysts on
short notice. None of this, of course, diminishes the unlimited
ability - which has existed since the first telephone number was
issued - to intercept all communications to or from a known point.
The primary operating agency for all Echelon activities worldwide
is the US National Security Agency.
Even as the US government has continued
to officially deny Echelon's existence, the BBC discussed it at
length in 1999, saying:
Every international telephone call, fax,
e-mail, or radio transmission can be listened to by power/Id computers
capable of voice recognition. They home in on a long list of key
words, or patterns of messages. They are looking for evidence
of international crime, like terrorism. 4
So pervasive has Echelon become that in
February 2000 the European Parliament was holding hearings on
allegations that Echelon had been used to give unfair advantage
to American and British companies. The French, the apparent targets,
were quite upset, and the hearings made headlines across Europe
for days.
Author James Bamford, a former NSA employee,
has been justly praised for unearthing declassified Top Secret
records - most significantly, Bamford publicized documents from
Operation Northwoods, a 1960 program which the US military had
approved but which President Kennedy prevented. Northwoods was
a detailed plan to shoot down American aircraft and attack American
military bases in the guise of Cuban forces, and then blame Fidel
Castro as a pretext for a full-scale invasion of Cuba. Bamford
observed, "The NSA's targets are on the front pages of the
newspaper every day: Osama bin Laden, North Korea, missile transfers
to Iran, nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India ...
p236
Somebody knew
Throughout the world the independent media
organizations have done an outstanding job of picking up and reporting
on independently published stories that the major media overlooked.
One of the most outstanding examples of this was a July 16, 2002,
piece posted at the website of Portland Indymedia (<www.portland.indymedia.org>)
that reproduced the following short article originally found at
The Memory Hole.
NPR interview on 9/11 confirmed attack
was 'not entirely unexpected.
It's certainly one of the most disturbing
and important indications that the government knew the attacks
of September 11, 2001, were coming. On that morning, National
Public Radio (NPR) was presenting live coverage of the attacks
on its show Morning Edition. Host Bob Edwards went to a reporter
in the field David Welna, NPR's congressional correspondent -
who was in the Capitol building as it was being evacuated. Here
is the crucial portion of Welna's report:
"I spoke with Congressman Ike Skelton
- a Democrat from Missouri and a member of the Armed Services
Committee who said that just recently the Director of the CIA
warned that there could be an attack - an imminent attack on the
United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected.'
(Audio links for this interview are located
at The Memory Hole and NPR websites) <www.thememoryhole.org/tenet-9
11 .htm>
This one story is in diametric opposition
to all officially stated US government positions about US government
foreknowledge of 9/11. In the fall of 2002 I placed several calls
to the office of Congressman Skelton asking for comment. I had
hoped to be able to interview him during a pending trip to the
Capital. None of my calls was returned.
The bottom line is that, based upon what
is known about successful intelligence penetrations for years
prior to the attacks of 9/11, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda could
not have sneezed without the CIA or the NSA knowing about it.
p238
Outrage and a clear mission
Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon
before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading
in the US stock options market - CBS News, September 19, 2001.
* A jump in UAL put options 90 times (not
90 percent) above normal between September 6 and September 10,
and 285 times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack.
CBS News, September 26
* A jump in American Airlines put options
60 times (not 60 percent) above normal on the day before the attacks.
CBS News, September 26
* No similar trading occurred on any other
airlines.
Bloomberg Business Report;2 the Institute
for Counterterrorism (ICT), Herzliyya, Israel3 [citing data from
the CBOE}
* Morgan Stanley saw, between September
7 and September 10, an increase of 27 times (not 27 percent) in
the purchase of put options on its shares.
* Merrill-Lynch saw a jump of more than
12 times the normal level of put options in the four trading days
before the attacks.
'It's not that farfetched,' said former
SEC enforcement director William McLucas, now with the Wilmer,
Cutler & Pickering law firm. 'This collection of terrorist
acts has created a serious problem for our markets and a number
of industry sectors. It is not as whacky or as Tom Clancy-ish
as one might like to wish.'
'This could very well be insider trading
at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in
your entire life .... It's absolutely unprecedented to see cases
of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan to the
United States to North America to Europe.'
Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg News, ABC World
News Tonight, September 20, 2001.
'I saw put-call numbers higher than I've
ever seen in 10 years of following the markets, particularly the
options markets,' said John Kinnucan, principal of Broadband Research,
as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Montreal Gazette, September 19 2001
'When Isaw the volume of trading going
up at other exchanges, I thought it was a little peculiar, 'said
[Bill] Kennedy, of ING Group NV's ING TT&S (US) Securities
Inc, explaining that most trading that day was on other markets.
'There had not been a lot of volume in American the previous week.
You hope there was a reasonable explanation, and there may very
well be, but it leaves a very had taste in your mouth.
'It's a matter of great interest to intelligence.
To the extent we find this evidence, we shouldn't just focus on
it as proof of insider trading but as evidence of a desire to
commit murder and terrorism, 'said Columbia University law professor
John Coffee.
Germany's Bundesbank chief, Ernst Weltke,
said on the sidelines of the meeting that a report of the investigation
showed 'bizarre' fiscal transactions prior to the attacks that
could not have been chalked up to coincidence .... Weltke said
the transactions 'could not have been planned and carried out
without a certain knowledge, 'particularly citing heavy trading
in gold and oil futures.
'It's absolutely unprecedented to see
cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan
to the US to North America to Europe.'
ABC News Consultant Jonathan Winer, World
News Tonight, September 20, 2001
AMR [the parent company of American Airlines]
now represents just a tiny piece of what has become a giant international
paper chase.'
National Post, September 22, 2001
From my perspective, it is very clear
that there was highly unusual and suspicious activity in airline
and hotel stocks in the days and weeks leading up to this attack.'
Phil Erlanger, former senior technical analyst, Fidelity investments,
writing in his newsletter Erlanger Squeeze Play, November 13,
2001. Erlanger added that the inside traders might well have made
off with billions of dollars from 9/11.
The Chicago Board Options Exchange, the
biggest US options market, said yesterday that it is investigating
trading that happened before the terrorist attacks that flattened
New York's World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon.
Montreal Gazette, September 19, 2001
'[Investigators will] certainly be able
to track down every trade, where the trade cleared, where the
trade was directed from.'
Former SEC enforcement chief William McLucas
in an interview with Bloomberg News.'°
'If these clowns really bought puts on
airline stocks and financial companies the day before the attacks,
then they left another incriminating paper trail that may help
provide proof of who masterminded the evil.'
Bloomberg
p241
A great many people knew that the attacks of September 11th were
coming. Some of those people made a great deal of money from them.
They knew exactly which stocks were going to plummet as a result
of the attacks, and they knew that the attacks were going to succeed.
Otherwise they would not have risked the sums of money that they
did. That knowledge alone demonstrates - as we shall soon see
- a degree of specific knowledge about the attacks that has not
yet been revealed. And if the world views the attacks themselves
as evil, then the insider trading connected to them - financial
transactions made before the attacks happened and which could
only be successful with the death of thousands of people - require
a new word to describe them. I can't find it.
No rational mind, free of medication,
can fail to see that the levels of insider trading that occurred
before 9/11 were beyond aberrant behavior.
And the fact that a single $2.5 million
put option trade on United Airlines went unclaimed after the attacks
is appallingly clear evidence of criminal insider knowledge. News
accounts speculated that those responsible for that particular
trade did not act quickly enough to claim their profits and did
not anticipate that the financial markets would be closed for
four days after the attacks. Perhaps a group of people with access
to the knowledge got the idea to make trades at the same time
and didn't realize it was going to be a stampede that would leave
a huge dust cloud behind it. In spite of FBI statements calling
such trades rumors, and New York Times assertions that there were
benign explanations for the bizarre trading before the attacks,
I can think of no reasonable explanation for someone leaving $2.5
million in profits unclaimed, except one: They would be arrested
if they showed up and asked for it. That, as I learned when I
was with LAPD, is another clue.
The massive insider trading that occurred
proximal to the events of September 11 was not localized. It was,
in fact, a worldwide event, and there is no chance that all or
even most of the trades were made by Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda.
With a high-caliber networking software program derived from PROMIS,
anyone with basic knowledge of the transactions (the volume of
shares, the prices paid, the times of the trades, and the financial
firms that handled them) could go on to identify the traders as
well as their degrees of connection.
Insider trading, or suspicious trades
indicating possible 9/11 foreknowledge, were reported in the USA,
Germany, Britain, Canada, Japan (8 times above normal levels on
the Osaka Exchange), Switzerland, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Spain,
Belgium, Luxembourg, and Singapore. Official investigations were
announced in eight of those countries. Details of these international
trades have not been disclosed, but shares of American companies
are routinely purchased through foreign exchanges.
Nor was the trading limited to American
and United Airlines. Shortly after 9/11 the SEC issued a sensitive
list of some 38 companies whose shares had been traded suspiciously.
SEC announced that it had quietly established relationships with
brokerage firms to conduct its investigation. In publishing the
list - which was quickly withdrawn from public circulation - the
Cleveland Plain Dealer noted that all of these firms had seen
unusual levels of put option purchases right before 9/11 and almost
every company's shares had fallen sharply right after the attacks.
The story quoted Morningstar's airline analyst Jonathan Schrader:
While trading fluctuations happen all
of the time for no apparent reason, it seems there's certainly
something here. It's interesting that they thought they could
get away with it.
Indeed, no one could hope to get away
with it unless they controlled all the enforcement mechanisms
that would be called in afterward.
p253
The trades could only have been made by people high enough in
the US, Israeli, and European intelligence communities (including
Russia) to know about the attacks and - more importantly - which
of many planned attacks were going to be successful. This circle
could, of course, have included key world financial and political
figures who were implementing a global agenda. As we have already
seen, these two camps are one and the same. There is no other
explanation that encompasses all the known data, and takes notice
of the incredible veil of secrecy that has fallen over the issue.
Evidently, almost all the foreign intelligence
services that had penetrated al Qaeda ultimately realized that
the US government was going to facilitate the attacks. That knowledge
migrated to certain investors who promptly capitalized on it.
To have brought these figures to justice would have revealed how
much was known about the attacks in so many places before they
happened.
Nine agencies - SEC, NYSE, CBOE, Department
of Justice, FBI, Secret Service, CIA, Treasury, and the National
Security Agency - opened investigations into insider trading immediately
after 9/11 based upon initially admitted and obvious evidence
that it had, in fact, taken place. Much of the major press immediately
recognized the importance of the story and then shirked its obligation
to follow up. Not one of the agencies involved has to this day
divulged any information to the public.
All the insanity and depravity suggested
by 9/11 insider trading was made clear when the Pentagon announced,
and then immediately scrapped, plans for a futures market on terrorist
attacks called the Policy Analysis Market. This official program
constituted a frank admission that people with advance knowledge
of terror attacks would always seek to capitalize on that knowledge.
Although the outrage over the program forced the resignation of
convicted Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter, not a single press
story made any connection between the Pentagon's plans and the
trades of September 11th. The CIA is Wall Street. Wall Street
is the CIA.
p254
ISRAEL
No discussion of the events before, during,
and after 9/11 is either complete or intellectually honest without
looking at Israel. Since 9/11, three nations - the United States,
the United Kingdom, and Israel - have stood virtually alone as
a tripartite alliance in complete support of the Empire's actions.
One of the best questions to ask after any major event is Cui
bono? "Who benefits?" And here, Israel, the largest
recipient of US military and economic aid, has ranked at, or near,
the top of the list in almost every world development. There is
some good, and much that is bad, to be said about Israel and its
actions. But almost every attempt at rational discourse on the
question of the use of Israeli power has been hobbled by emotional,
almost hysterical preconceptions either pro or con - that miss
some very important pieces of the new, accurate map I have been
trying to draw for you.
Many of the top members of the Bush administration
have exceptionally close ties with the Israeli government. These
include the former Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board,
Richard Perle; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary
of Defense Douglas Feith; Edward Luttwak of the National Security
Study Group; Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's Chief Financial Officer
on 9/11; Elliot Abrams at the National Security Council, and Press
Secretary An Fleischer. Some have even worked on joint planning
projects with Israeli ministries. These relationships alone make
Israel a subject worthy of discussion. These and many other Israeli-connected
experts formed the core group at the Project for a New American
Century that had drafted plans for the invasion of Iraq long before
9/11. (This chapter is a brief effort to put some very important
pieces into place. And I should say at the outset that none of
my research has found any compelling data to suggest that Israel
was the architect or mastermind of the attacks of September 11
(as is obvious from the preceding chapters) It would have been
impossible for the Israeli government to have so compromised US
intelligence, military, economic, and political systems as to
have had control of the operation, not to mention the full and
unquestioning cooperation of the American mid-level functionaries
needed to execute it.
p255
The term "anti-Semitism" refers to a European social
and political phenomenon (which, like much of European pre-World
War II ideology, still lingers in some places, e.g., Japan). Anti-Jewish
feeling, thought, and behavior are as old as monotheism itself
and have undergone almost as many transformations. There's the
anti-Judaism of late antiquity; the massacres against Jews in
the Crusades and the Inquisition, the murderous pogroms by rural
European peasants in the 18th and 19th centuries, the middle-class
resentment, mythologizing, and persecution that led to the Dreyfuss
Affair in 1890s France, and a massive wave of hatred toward Jews
that came upward from European folk ideology and downward from
fascist and rightist parties and governments in the first half
of the 20t century. Like all forms of bigotry, "Anti-Semitism"
remains a serious problem all over the world. But the phrase itself
has no real anthropological basis; it dates from the 1870s, when
most European writers still divided up the world's peoples according
to Biblical categories - "Semites" were thought to be
descended from Noah's son Shem, while everybody else came from
either Ham or Japhet. In fact, Antisemitismus was invented as
part of an effort by German racist authors to replace the religion-based
Jew-hatred (Judenhass) of the past with a more modern, ethnicity-driven
contempt. Of course, this apparently intellectual construct barely
masked a deep reservoir of anti-rational, virulent hatred. It
formed the basis for the pseudo-scientific racism of the Nazi
movement.
p256
To say that Israel did not perpetrate the attacks of 9/11 is not
to deny that the Israeli government was very close to those attacks
and may have played a role in them. There is evidence that points
both ways. On the one hand it is clear that Mossad made several
attempts to warn the US government that the attacks were coming
- in one case even providing the US government with a list that
included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, including Mohammed
Atta and that charmed pair, NawafAlhazmi and Khalid Almidhar.'
Everybody knew the attacks were coming. Yet even after this information
was in American hands, various agencies of the US government allowed
Alhazmi and Almidhar to roam free and unmolested.
The analysis of insider trading by the
Herzliya Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT) is another example
of Israeli action pointing toward, rather than away from, evidence
that the CIA knew what was going on and allowed the attacks to
happen.
p260
In 2000, after a protracted court battle, the Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai Brith (ADL) lost a civil suit in California federal
court after it was found that the ADL had engaged, in cooperation
with Israeli and South African intelligence agencies, in a massive
domestic spying operation against American citizens and organizations
such as Green Peace and groups opposed to US involvement in the
Contra war. American officials who cooperated with the ADL were
sometimes given all-expenses-paid trips to Israel, where they
were introduced to representatives from the Mossad and Shin Bet
intelligence services. It was found that the ADL had broken many
laws by storing illegal intelligence records from local, state,
and federal law enforcement agencies. In ruling in favor of the
plaintiffs a US District Court judge permanently enjoined the
ADL from engaging in any further illegal spying against 'Arab-American
and other civil rights groups." Several members of the House
of Representatives were plaintiffs in the suit.
On April 25, 2002, former Congressman
Pete McCloskey of California was awarded a $150,000 judgment against
the ADL in a related case. McCloskey's suit was prompted by FBI
and San Francisco police raids on ADL offices which discovered
that the ADL had files on almost 10,000 people across the US,
and that about 75 percent of the material had been illegally obtained.
Two of the three victims in the case who won awards were Jewish.
This ruling followed a March 31, 2001, ruling in a Denver court
upholding a $10.5 million defamation judgment against the Anti-Defamation
League for falsely labeling two Colorado residents as anti-Semitic.
To think of the ADL affair as something
that originated solely with Israeli impetus is to overlook some
key historical data. In the wake of myriad violations of US law
committed by the FBI, the military, the CIA, and other government
agencies in the 1960s and 1970s, and especially after the damning
revelations of the Frank Church (D-ID) and Otis Pike (D-NY) congressional
investigations in the mid 1970s, American agencies were forced
to divest themselves of illegal records and to cease domestic
spying operations. The problem, from their point of view, was
how to hold on to data they deemed irreplaceable. The ADL, a nongovernmental
organization connected with a foreign government, seemed an ideal
solution. The solution was not without its costs.
In the 1980s the Los Angeles Police Department's
Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID) was found to have
been doing what was accomplished by other agencies directly through
the ADL. Ultimately some ADL connections surfaced in the PDID
case. Tens of thousands of illegal intelligence records were disclosed
as having been stored in the private residence and storage facilities
rented and maintained by LAPD Detective Jay Paul. Paul, who was
later revealed to have ties to Israeli interests, maintained many
of the records on computers provided by an ultra-right-wing group,
Western Goals. Sitting at the time on the board of directors of
Western Goals was Iran-Contra figure and retired Army General
John Singlaub, a virulent anti-Communist and CIA-connected covert
operative.
As the LAPD scandal was unfolding I served
as one of the unnamed sources for the Los Angeles Times' reporting
of the scandal. Although the Times stopped well short of stating
that US intelligence agencies had supported this intelligence
gathering, two decades later the pattern is very clear. The ADL
was there when it was needed. Yet in using the ADL as a plausibly
deniable cutout, American intelligence agencies at the state and
federal level paid a price. They gave the ADL license to use the
data for its own purposes and created a monster that ultimately
became a liability in its own right.
p264
Those with experience in intelligence operations will recognize
some patterns to this widespread operation. First of all, when
mounting an operation of wide scope, governments usually allow
the operation to be used for multiple purposes. Within the Israeli
government there might be three or four different intelligence
units that could benefit from a large-scale deployment of covert
operatives. We have already seen how closely intertwined narcotics
and intelligence operations are worldwide. Not only does drug
dealing provide, in some cases, the necessary covert funding for
the operations themselves, it is also a means of generating income
for national economies. With the United States and the CIA as
the "Alpha dog" in the worldwide drug trade, there are
few areas of competition left to generate large cash flows. One
area in which Israeli organized crime has excelled, however, is
in controlling the largest market share of trafficking in the
drug MDMA (Ecstasy). And the interfaces between intelligence agencies
and organized crime are well documented.
p269
SILENCING CONGRESS
impressive the post-9/11 world of its
own making, imperial America demonstrated an impressive new level
of ruthlessness. Congress was the first and most important arena
for a spectacular melodrama of political brutality. Starting within
a week of September 11th the imperial power moved quickly and
aggressively to silence those who threatened its interests. While
some efforts were -successful, others were not.
Believing that Congress will save the
day is a trap. After more than 20 years of study and interaction
with it, I reached the familiar conclusion that Congress is ineffective
because its power is concentrated among a very few profoundly
compromised legislators. Only the committee chairpersons and the
party leadership can either promote or prevent serious change.
On 9/11, the major senators in this category were former Senate
Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, Pat Leahy.
Because of their charismatic appeal and
outspokenness, some members of the House of Representatives are
threats to the Empire. These members take serious risks when they
speak out. They pose greater dangers because they can spark popular
sentiment and break (or redirect) the mass media's hypnotic hold
on the public. In this category one finds Representatives Ron
Paul of Texas, John Conyers of Michigan and Henry Waxman of California;
former Representatives Cynthia McKinney and Bob Barr; and, in
the Senate, Russ Feingold and the late Paul Wellstone.
p269
Tom Daschle and Pat Leahy
Tom Daschle was in a position of enough
power to derail all of the Empire's new legislative imperatives.
Though his public stance vocally supported the administration's
agenda, there were indications that, in the ultra-nationalistic
fervor that followed the attacks, he was having quiet reservations
about the new authoritarian onslaught. Daschle is by no means
a crusader. Yet by October 10th his leadership had allowed Russ
Feingold of Wisconsin to block passage of the undebated (and largely
unread!) US Patriot Act - a monstrosity whose immediate passage
the White House demanded.
Getting Daschle (and his presidential
ambitions) into line was a critical task for the Empire, because
major pieces of legislation like Homeland Security, various bioterrorism
measures, and a multitude of investigations were soon going to
fall within his grasp. Prior to 9/11 he had not been a vocal critic
of Washington's ways, but as events would show, it was imperative
to make sure that he would not find his voice.
On October 15 it was disclosed that Daschle's
office had received an anthrax letter, and that several members
of his staff had been exposed. By the 18th of October it was disclosed
that as many as 31 senate staff members had tested positive for
anthrax.
The Patriot Act that eviscerated the Constitution
was passed without debate on October 24th, 2001. Politically and
physically frightened, a chamber full of pragmatists adapted to
the new world by trading the Bill of Rights for their own political
and physical security. In other words, Congress had gotten the
message. The few opposition voices that remained, having been
rendered ineffective, could be left in place as symbols to show
that debate still existed. On January 29, 2002, CNN announced
that both the president and vice president had asked Daschle to
limit any congressional investigations into the attacks, arguing
that they might take resources away from the war against terror.
Not only did Daschle comply, he delayed public investigations
until revelations from other sources, particularly rank-and-file
FBI agents, dictated that they had to be held in order to maintain
the credibility of American government.
p270
Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont was also in a position to derail
many of the unconstitutional actions and the legislation coming
out of the White House. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee
he apparently had the power, the obligation, and the willingness
to do so. He did it eloquently and with great fire until it was
his turn to suffer. Throughout September, October, and November,
Leahy was an open critic of the Bush administration and particularly
of Attorney General John Ashcroft's moves to wiretap attorney-client
conversations, to detain foreign nationals in secret and without
trial, and to conduct secret military tribunals with the power
of life and death where constitutional concerns had been tossed
out the window.
Leahy was especially irritated at Ashcroft's
imperial refusals to come and answer questions before his committee.
He sent several terse letters to Ashcroft and ultimately demanded
that Ashcroft appear. When that failed, Leahy demanded a written
response to important questions from the committee. Ashcroft ignored
Leahy, but only up to a point.
On November 16 Senator Leahy received
his own anthrax letter. And the anthrax sent to Leahy's office
was incredibly powerful, concentrated at a trillion spores per
gram. When, on December 6, Ashcroft finally made an appearance
before the Judiciary Committee he was treated with kid gloves
in an utterly appalling display of total surrender. I found it
hard to keep from screaming as I watched Ashcrofr enjoy his dog-and-pony
show on C-SPAN.
It was not for some months that the American
public and the world were to learn that the Ames strain of anthrax,
which was identified as the strain sent to Congress, was solely
and exclusively the product of a CIA weapons research program
(involving the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious
Diseases (USAMRHD), the Dugway Proving Ground, and the Batelle
Memorial Institute All of the anthrax sent post-9/11 had come
from within the United States and had originated in CIA-run covert
research programs.
p271
Cynthia McKinney and Bob Barr
There is no question that of these two
brave former members of Congress, who are as ideologically different
as night and day, Cynthia McKinney stirred the most domestic and
international reaction by asking questions that needed to be asked
and by directly challenging the administration on its obvious
deceptions. Bob Barr had also been extremely vocal in his criticism
of the administration's assault on the Bill of Rights. McKinney
and Barr represented neighboring districts in Georgia until January
of 2003. Both were defeated in their primary election campaigns
in August of 2002.
... The demise of McKinney and Barr was,
at least in part, a bipartisan operation. There is a message in
this. And because McKinney had asked tougher questions, she received
a special kind of treatment reserved for no other. With the exception
of Paul Wellstone, she was the ultimate congressional object lesson
presented by the Empire after 9/11.
p272
McKinney's crime
On March 25, 2002, McKinney appeared on
a Berkeley; California, radio program on the Pacifica network,
hosted by Dennis Bernstein. There she made the following statements:
... persons close to this administration
are poised to make huge profits off America's new war. Former
President Bush sits on the board of the Carlyle Group. The Los
Angeles Times reports that on a single day last month, Carlyle
earned $237 million selling shares in United Defense Industries,
the Army's fifth-largest contractor. The stock offering was well
timed: Carlyle officials say they decided to take the company
public only after the September 11 attacks. The stock sale cashed
in on increased congressional support for hefty defense spending,
including one of United Defense's cornerstone weapons programs.
Now is the time for our elected officials
to be held accountable. Now is the time for the media to be held
accountable. Why aren't the hard questions being asked? We know
there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September
11. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, delivered one such warning.
Those engaged in unusual stock trades immediately before September
11 knew enough to make millions of dollars from United and American
airlines, certain insurance and brokerage firms' stocks. What
did this administration know, and when did it know it about the
events of September 11? Who else knew and why did they not warn
the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered?
We know that there were several warnings
that were given prior to the events of September 11th From people
in Germany to people in the Cayman Islands to people who ... even,
now we learn about the owners of the pilot schools. People were
calling in to the CIA and the FBI, and they were giving information
that was critical. Even prior to these warnings, we had the trial
itself from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And we had the
trial from the American Embassy bombings. So we know that the
World Trade Center bombing trial gave us a lead on the fact that
U.S. embassies were being targeted. And now the United States
government is being sued by survivors of the embassy bombings
because it is clear that America had warning and did nothing,
did nothing, to protect the lives of the people who served in
our foreign service, and who serve us in other ways in our embassies
around the world. Now the United States government is being sued
and we're going to have to pay for that, as those families are
now paying every day with the loss of their loved ones ...
There was adequate warning. There were
people who failed to act on the warnings. And THAT'S what ought
to be investigated. But instead of requesting that Congress investigate
what went wrong and why, we had President Bush, painful for me
to say that, but, we had President Bush place a phone call to
Majority leader Senator Tom Daschle, asking him NOT to investigate
the events of September 11th. And then, hot on the heels of the
president's phone call was another phone call from the vice president
asking that Tom, that Tom Daschle also NOT investigate the events
that led to September 11th.
My question is: What do they have to
hide? And why is it that the American people are being asked to
make tremendous sacrifices now in our civil liberties, in the
fact that we got this request for an unprecedented hike in ...
in ... the hike alone, of $48.1 billion, is more than any one
of our allies spend TOTAL in their defense.
Then, the other issue that saddens me
is the fact that the former president, President Bush's daddy,
sits on the board of the Carlyle Group. And so we get this presidency
of questionable legitimacy requesting a nearly unprecedented amount
of money to go into a defense budget for defense spending that
would directly benefit his father! Where is the ... where are
the brakes on transparency [sic] and corruption that I see happening
as a result of the fact that the president's father stands to
make money off of the very request that the president has made
on what I would call a specious argument, saying that we needed
to increase defense spending because of September 11th, when we
now know that there were enough warnings to September 11 that
we didn't even have to experience September 11th at all, at least
that's the way it is now beginning to appear.
For just a moment the earth stood still.
People around the world held their breath waiting for a reaction
that was not long in coming. All over the major media the reaction
was brutal. McKinney had lost it. She was a pushy, arrogant bitch
who had lost her mind at a time of great crisis. How could anyone
suggest such things about America's great president?
She got the worst treatment from FOX News,
run by former GOP political strategist and Bush ally Roger Ailes.
FOX stooped to less-than-covert racial slurs; it seemed to me
as if they stopped just short of calling McKinney an "uppity
Negro" on the air.
Of course, as time revealed, she was absolutely
right. And had she made her comments just a few months later,
after the revelations had come from the Phoenix and Minneapolis
FBI offices, she might have held her seat. There are strong signs
that she will be back in office after 2004. Yet she had been a
thorn in the Empire's side for a long time, and her criticisms
had not begun with the Bush presidency. She had been a vocal and
daring critic of covert operations and human rights violations
in the name of profit all throughout the Clinton period. She was
fiercely critical of Israel's conduct. She had been a vocal supporter
of Palestinian rights. She was the biggest walking bull's-eye
in Washington.
p275
Wither Congress, Wither America? Crushing Congressional Dissent:
The Fall of Hilliard, Barr and McKinney
by Wayne Madsen, From The Wilderness
Historians will one day write that the
107th Congress was the last to stand up to the constitutional
encroachment by the military and monarchist policies of the Bush
II administration. Just like its ancient Roman predecessor, the
Congress of the United States is becoming an elite club of pathetic
assenters and global elitists. Once the domain of great orators
and dissenters like Cato and Cicero, the power of the Roman Senate
was eventually subsumed by the Roman Army when the Emperor took
on dictatorial powers. The Roman Senate could say nothing as the
military dictatorship annexed Macedonia, Spain, Greece, the Middle
East, and North Africa. By the time Emperors Tiberius and Septimius
Severus took power, the Senate, which had grown to an elite club
of 600, was a rubber stamp body that had no choice but to go along
with the military's continued usurpation of power.
The United States Congress stands on
the same precipice where its Roman ancestor once fell. If Bush
pulls another electoral coup in 2004 and we see the presidential
election thrown into the House of Representatives, the future
for the country appears very dim.
The August 20 defeat of two Georgia Representatives,
one a Democrat, the other a Republican, is a bellwether event
that bodes ill for this November's elections.
... McKinney and Barr were both defeated
handily, McKinney with the help of 25,000 crossover votes. Of
course, the fact that people not authorized to vote in the Fourth
District may have voted anyway would fall into the category of
election fraud. But after the Florida debacle, the Ashcrofr Justice
Department sees such electoral machinations as an acceptable way
to remain in power - like any totalitarian regime parading before
the world as an exemplary democracy.
... McKinney had incurred the wrath of
the White House by her question about what George W. Bush knew
in advance about the September 11 terrorist attacks. But that
was only the tip of the iceberg for the Republicans and their
major campaign contributors. While it is true that McKinney has
championed the cause of Palestinian statehood and self-determination,
thus inviting the enmity of major Zionist organizations in the
United States, it was her long-time opposition to the trade of
blood diamonds and other strategic minerals in Africa that earned
her a major challenge from multinational corporations, including
Barrick Gold, on whose board President Bush's father serves as
an international adviser. Among its other misdeeds, Barrick has
been accused of helping to cover up the 1996 burying alive by
one of its subsidiaries of over 50 Tanzanian gold miners in Bulyanhulu,
in the northwest part of the country. Of course, when it comes
to the lives and welfare of non-white people, the Bushes have
never really held any soft spot, whether they are blacks in Africa
or America's inner cities, Afghan or Iraqi children, or even a
troubled half-Hispanic daughter/niece/granddaughter in Florida.
McKinney long advocated a halt in the
pilferage of blood diamonds out of African war zones. She cited,
on numerous occasions,
p278
The next Congress will be full of complacent African-American
opportunists like Majette and Davis; dangerous extreme rightists
like former cockroach exterminator [Tom] DeLay and former sportscaster
J. D. Hayworth of Arizona; pitiful morons like Florida's former
Secretary of State and chief election rigger Katherine Harris;
Republican moles and sleepers like Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman;
and Democratic spineless amoebas like Richard Gephardt and Tom
Daschle. They will stand ready to back Bush's military campaigns
into Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Colombia, or wherever Bush's economic
interests are at stake. The country stands on the brink of disaster.
But we cannot count on the future Congress to save us. Lacking
a spine or any guts, it will surely help to bury us.
p279
Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?
by Michael C. Ruppert
Nov. 1, 2002, 15:00 PST (FTW) -The air
crash deaths of Sen. Paul Wellstone, wife, daughter, three staff
members, and two pilots at approximately 10:25 a.m. on October
25 in Eveleth, Minnesota have given rise to the widespread belief
- shared by at least two members of the House of Representatives
who spoke on condition of anonymity - that the crash was a murder.
Almost as important as the known details
of the crash, which often contradict mainstream press reports,
is the fact that the belief is so widely held. It says something
about America that cannot and should not be ignored.
A HISTORY TOO FULL OF COINCIDENCES
From a historical standpoint Democrats
are twice as likely to die in air crashes as Republicans. Frequently,
those who have died were known to have been either involved in
the investigation of covert operations or to have taken highly
controversial positions in opposition to vested government interests.
... THE WELLSTONE CRASH
Perhaps no member of the Senate ranked
higher on the Bush administration's enemies list than Minnesota
Democrat Paul Welistone. And the enmity goes back years to when
Bush's father was president. The November 4 issue of TIME recounts
an encounter between Wellstone and the elder Bush after which
he referred to Welistone as "this chickenshit." And
it is known that there has been at least one prior reported attempt
on Wellstone's life.
In the months before his death Wellstone
had voted against several key Bush agendas including Homeland
Security the Iraqi use of force resolution, and many of Bush's
judicial nominees. In a Senate controlled 50-49 by the Democrats,
Wellstone was perhaps the biggest one-man obstacle to Bush's fervent
and stated desire to secure passage of the Homeland Security measure
prior to a US invasion of Iraq...
So what happened to Paul Wellstone?
A check of more than 50 of the world's
leading news organizations three days after the Wellstone crash
left one clear impression: the crash had been caused by "freezing
rain and snow," limited visibility, and likely icing of the
wings. One CNN report on October 24 described the plane as flying
in "snowy, frozen rain."
None of these conditions, which did not
exist as just described, had anything to do with the crash.
... INSIDE SOURCES
FTW was able to receive comments on the
crash from two Democratic members of the House of Both, who spoke
on condition of anonymity, stated that they believed that Wellstone
had been murdered.
One said, "I don't think there's
anyone on the Hill who doesn't suspect it. It's too convenient,
too coincidental, too damned obvious. My guess is that some of
the less courageous members of the party are thinking about becoming
Republicans right now."
It is a rare occurrence when this writer
refers to a quotation from an unnamed CIA source. I have demonstrated
in at least four interviews with the staffs of both the Senate
and House Intelligence committees established that I know sources
who have worked for the CIA in some very nasty covert operations.
The day after the crash I received a
message from a former CIA operative who has proven extremely reliable
in the past and who is personally familiar with these kinds of
assassinations. The message read, 'As I said earlier, having played
ball (and still playing in some respects) with this current crop
of reinvigorated old white men, these clowns are nobody to screw
around with. There will be a few more strategic accidents. You
can be certain of that."
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