posted on May 24, 2002 12:06:38 AM new
No, Cheryl is not Mivona, but she has the benefit of some of the same energies. She is a professional investigative reporter who has weathered challenges for fact on several levels by far more knowledgeable detractors than are to be found in these our puny chatboards and has been found to be not wanting for accuracy. Even so, it's obvious that not all would agree with her, or even find the fact of her writing as she does agreeable. Nevertheless, I think that her articles represent the embodiment of the meaning of free speech, and the day she is silenced, if ever she is, would be a most regretable day indeed.
PART II
The "Vague Warning" that Mapped out a
Blueprint for Disaster:
This past week, after admitting that Bush had
been warned of an impending attack in the
summer of 2001, the White House has been
working furiously to justify its failure to issue a
serious domestic travel warning. The story Bush
wants the world to buy is that the warnings he
received were vague, routine — too general to
act upon. Condi Rice wants us to believe that no
one in the administration could have dreamed the
hijackers would fly into a landmark building. But,
as they say in show biz, this is "lies, lies, and
damn lies."
Since 1993, scores of people, collectively, in
the White House, Pentagon, State Department,
FBI, and CIA have know that an attack like 9/11
was not only a possibility — but an increasingly
likely probability. Because I am not writing a
book here, I will confine myself to summarizing
the most obvious pieces of evidence that Bush
and his team had to work with. But they are
enough to convict him in any court of opinion.
TERRORISM 2000 REPORT:
Don't confuse this 1993 study with the report
turned out by the Bush administration in April
2001 under the same title. The 2001 release, a
summary of terrorist activity in 2000, lifted the
title of the original document, not doubt as a
smokescreen to confuse anyone who might be
seeking the 1993 document through a search
engine or library archives.
The 1993, the Pentagon commissioned, via
the Dept. of Defense's office of Special
Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, a think
tank-style study of the ways terrorists could
execute large-scale acts of terrorism on the U.S.
Participants in the $150,000 study consisted of a
panel of 41 intelligence/security experts that
included former ranking CIA, FBI, State
Department and Rand Corp. officials, as well as
an ex-KGB general and Israeli intelligence agent.
One of the problems the team brainstormed
over was the various ways an airplane could be
used to destroy national landmarks — in fact, the
WTC was most certainly on the panel's list of
possible targets. One conclusion reached by the
team as a future trend in terrorist activity was
that extremists would seek to maximize their
impact by escalating their attacks from
one-at-a-time truck bomb/suicide bomber events
to multiple, simultaneous targeting, thereby
touting their power and stretching the victim
governments' ability to respond.
The possible terrorist scenarios the team
outlined scared the socks off folks in the
government. One high-level official described it
as "too outrageous." As a result, the team's
report, "Terrorism 2000" (a reference to
terrorism in the new millennia) was blocked from
public release. Even a toned down version that
had been proposed as a way to raise public
awareness and improve national preparedness
was killed! A draft of the report was nonetheless
passed on through the Pentagon, the Justice
Department and the Federal Emergency
Management Agency. There is absolutely no
doubt that this information was available to
everyone in the Bush Administration, including
Ms. Rice. It should have been required reading
— especially since many of the predictions made
by the report had already come true before 9/11.
FOUR INSTANCES OF PLANES USED
AS WEAPONS BEFORE 2001
1994: A Federal Express Flight engineer was
apprehended as he tried to storm the cockpit of a
DC-10. The engineer, despondent over his
impending firing, had planned to crash the plane
into a Fed Ex building in Memphis
1994: A pilot stole a Cessna and tried to
crash it into the White House. He instead hit a
tree on the White House grounds, not far from
Clinton's bedroom
1995: An Islamic fundamentalist group
hijacked an Air France flight and loaded the plane
with 27 tons of fuel in Marseilles as a way to turn
it into an incendiary bomb when they crashed it
into the Eiffel tower. This plan was thwarted
when special forces stormed the craft before it
could leave Marseilles.
1995: Abdul Hakim Murad confessed to
planting timed explosive devices on eleven U.S.
airline flights in an attempt to create a "multiple
attack" event (as outlined in the "too outrageous"
Terrorism 2000" report). The same terrorist
group also planned to crash on airplane into CIA
headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and another
into the Pentagon (But Condi didn't dream
anyone would ever try such a think in 2001?).
This scheme was not a wild and fevered plot. It
was in the advanced planning stages — to the
point where specific flights had already been
selected. Murad himself was going to be the
suicide pilot who hit the CIA HQ. Where did he
get his pilot training? In a U.S. flight school.
CLINTON ADMINISTRATION TOOK
"VAGUE THREATS" MORE SERIOUSLY
THAN BUSH: Why Only 3 People Died during
the Summer Olympics of 1996.
One of Bush's favorite lines is that his
government is much tougher than Clinton's was
at keeping Americans safe. But the only group
Bush has seemed seriously interested in cracking
down on is innocent American citizens. In 1996,
terrorist activity warnings that were considerably
less specific than those Bush received in 2001,
were coming into the Clinton administration and
suggested that the summer Olympics in Atlanta
would be the most likely focus of such activity.
In response, Clinton (whose administration
commissioned the original "Terrorism 2000"
report) deployed Black Hawk helicopters and
special jets to intercept any suspicious aircraft.
That same summer, federal agents monitored
crop duster flights within hundreds of miles of
Atlanta, while agents combed through airports
throughout northern Georgia on the lookout for
potential hijackers.
From 1996 until Bush took office, FBI
agents actively investigated activities of Muslim
students at flight schools. It was well-known by
that time to the FBI that terrorists used U.S.
Flight schools for their training. Yet under Bush,
even urgent requests by FBI agents to a
ct on tips
about suspicious students (like the tip from the
Phoenix flight school) were ignored.
THE SPECIFICS OF THE "VAGUE
WARNING"
The most glaring lie Bush is using in his
current spin is his claim that the warnings he
received were too vague to act upon. But the
facts all by themselves scream "Liar!"
From April, 2001 right up to the day the
WTC and Pentagon were slammed, urgent
warnings of impending large-scale attacks by
terrorists had been issued to the Bush
administration from multiple sources. Germany,
Egypt, Russia and Israel all delivered alerts that
accurately foretold the scale of the attack and
that it would involve a prominent landmark of
some time. This would automatically put the
WTC and Pentagon on the short list, especially
as both landmarks had been targeted before (as
mentioned above, the Pentagon attack was
averted).
Through Echelon, the German intelligence
agency BND warned the U.S. and Israel both in
June that Middle Eastern terrorists were
"planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as
weapons to attack important symbols of
American and Israeli culture." This is hardly
vague, and hardly refers to an "overseas danger"
to Americans (which of our prominent landmarks
is in Europe or Asia, pray tell?).
On June 13, Egypt sent an urgent warning
that a plane stuffed with explosives could be used
as a weapon against George Bush. It was
assumed, incorrectly at that time that the target
could be the G-8 summit in Genoa, held in June
2001.
Vladimir Putin was so certain of the
information he received in the summer of 2001
of an impending attack that he personally
instructed Russian intelligence to tell Bush "in the
strongest possible terms" (his own words on
Sept. 15, 2001) of an impending attack involving
airports and government. The Russians told the
CIA that 25 terrorist pilots had been specially
trained to execute suicide missions. It was around
the same time that the FBI was receiving tips
about suspicious Arabic men in U.S. flight
schools.
In August, 2001, the Israeli intelligence
agency Mossad warned the CIA and FBI that as
many as 200 Al Qada members were infiltrating
the U.S. and planning "a major assault on the
U.S. " against "a large-scale target" in a setting
where Americans would be "very vulnerable."
Even before April, the Bush administration
HAD TO KNOW something was up and
probably had info that was even more specific
than the warnings given above. According to UPI
correspondent Richard Sale, by February 2001,
the National Security Agency had broken Osama
bin Laden's communications encryption system.
We know that the encryption was broken
because the Bush administration reported
AFTER 9/11 that it had intercepted encrypted
calls OBL made to his mother two days before
the attack, saying "In two days, you're going to
hear big news, and you're not going to hear from
me for a while." If this message was intercepted
before the attack, what others were as well that
the Bush administration did NOT reveal? Mostly
likely six months worth of terrorist planning.
And last but not least, the CIA knew a week
before the attack WHICH airlines were most
likely to be hijacked. The Agency maintains an
advanced program called Promis which monitors
unusual stock market activity, SPECIFICALLY
as a way to anticipate potential terrorist attacks.
Promis provides 24-hour continuous real-time
data on stock market activity and the FBI and
Justice Department have both admitted that
Promis was up and running all through the
summer and fall of 2001. So there is no doubt
whatsoever that as early as Sept. 7, the CIA
knew that something was going down and knew
which airlines were being targeted. Even a
third-grader could have put this information
together with the long litany of warnings above
from foreign sources and come up with the
conclusion that an American or United Airlines
craft was going to be hijacked in the near future
and most likely used to crash into a landmark,
quite possibly the World Trade Center.
posted on May 24, 2002 07:20:50 AM new
Now we are in the cover up phase but it won't work because the evidence that Cheryl outlined is OVERWHELMING!
Cheney continues to question the patriotism of Democrats who imply that Bush knew anything and follows that by a spooky 4 day terror warning to divert even more attention from the fact of Bush involvement. Then Bush leaves the country! Florida is not a good enough cover now.. While he is being laughed and booed out of Europe the beat goes on. A high profine investigation will happen!!!
Today, a report surfaced that an attempted investigation by an FBI agent of Zacarias Moussaoui was prevented before the 9/ll event.
WASHINGTON, May 23 — The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, said today that he was ordering an internal inquiry into complaints by a senior agent in Minneapolis that officials at headquarters repeatedly held back agents in Minneapolis who sought to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui aggressively in the days before the Sept. 11 hijackings.
The agent, Coleen Rowley, general counsel in the Minneapolis office, also said in a detailed 13-page letter to the Congressional committee that is investigating the government's preparedness for the Sept. 11 attacks that Mr. Mueller had misrepresented the bureau's handling of Mr. Moussaoui's case after his arrest on immigration charges three weeks before the hijackings, according to officials who have reviewed her letter.
Ms. Rowley attacked Mr. Mueller's assertions that no information was available that would have helped the bureau to predict or thwart the hijackings, officials said.
Mr. Mueller responded this evening with a statement saying that he had referred the issue to the inspector general of the Justice Department for investigation.
"While I cannot comment on the specifics of the letter," he said, "I am convinced that a different approach is required. New strategies, new technologies, new analytical capacities and a different culture make us an agency that is changing post-Sept. 11. There is no room after the attacks for the types of problems and attitudes that could inhibit our efforts."
Ms. Rowley wrote that Mr. Mueller's statements to Congress and the public about the attacks were incomplete, officials who have seen the letter said. She also asserted that Mr. Mueller had played down important warning signs of a developing pattern that the F.B.I. had failed to spot, including a memo on July 10 from an agent in Phoenix about Al Qaeda flight training.
Taken together, the evidence should have alerted headquarters here that Osama bin Laden's followers were planning a strike in the United States, Ms. Rowley contended. Ms. Rowley said Minneapolis agents became so frustrated by inaction at F.B.I. headquarters at one point that they went directly to the Central Intelligence Agency for help in building their case against Mr. Moussaoui. Going behind the backs of their superiors was a breach of bureau protocol, and officials at headquarters reprimanded the Minneapolis agents, the officials said.
Ms. Rowley has sought whistle-blower status at the bureau to protect her from possible reprisals. The agency is exempt from the federal whistle-blower protection law, which shields government employees who disclose misdeeds in their agencies from retaliation by superiors.
In November, Mr. Mueller advised agents that they would be offered similar protection, provided that they made their complaints internally.
Several lawmakers and other officials who have read the letter said it was a broad indictment of the lack of action and attention in the months before the hijackings. They said the letter was being taken as a serious matter by the joint House-Senate intelligence panel that is examining whether the government may have missed warning signs of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Her letter really points to management failures at the F.B.I.," said Senator Richard J. Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois who is on the intelligence committee. The panel questioned Mr. Mueller about the letter on Wednesday in a closed meeting.
Ms. Rowley sent the letter to Mr. Mueller and copies to Congress as a personal communication. Today, the bureau ordered it classified.
Reached by telephone at the Minneapolis office, Ms. Rowley declined to comment on her letter. Congressional officials said the staff of the Congressional investigating committee interviewed Ms. Rowley this week.
She said agents at headquarters had interfered with the Minneapolis agents in Mr. Moussaoui's case and had bungled the warning from the agent in Phoenix who had written that Mr. bin Laden's followers could be using American aviation schools to train for terror operations.
The complaint from Ms. Rowley is the first instance that a senior F.B.I. official has publicly challenged the version of events presented by senior bureau officials about their performance in the weeks leading to Sept. 11.
Kenneth Williams, the agent in Phoenix who wrote the memorandum in July about Mr. bin Laden's followers, gave testimony to Congress this week that supports the bureau position that his memorandum did not envision attacks like those on Sept. 11. Mr. Williams has also said the bureau could not have stopped the attacks, even if his recommendations to scrutinize Arabs at flight schools had led to action.
Agents in Minneapolis arrested Mr. Moussaoui on Aug. 16, after employees at a flight school had told the bureau that he was acting suspiciously and had paid at least $6,800 in cash for training on a flight simulator.
Mr. Mueller became director of the bureau in September, arriving just before the hijackings. He was not at the bureau when Mr. Moussaoui was arrested. Ms. Rowley's complaints focus on his statements after the attacks.
Mr. Moussaoui was indicted in Virginia on charges connected with the attacks. Federal prosecutors accuse him of being the so-called 20th hijacker.
Before Sept. 11, a request from the Minneapolis office to obtain a search warrant that would let investigators look at his computer and search his belongings was rejected by headquarters, law enforcement officials said. Agents in Minneapolis sought the warrant under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that lets the government carry out searches and surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases.
In the months before Sept. 11, the F.B.I. had encountered problems in obtaining approvals from its lawyer to seek court approval for search warrants under the law, and the Minneapolis request was denied.
A subsequent request for a criminal search warrant was also rejected, the law enforcement officials said. The agents in Minneapolis repeatedly questioned Mr. Moussaoui while he was held in an immigration detention center. One agent accused him of being a terrorist.
Yet only after Sept. 11 did the F.B.I. obtain a search warrant and found in his computer information about crop dusting, the officials added.
The United States attorney for Minnesota, Thomas R. Heffelfinger, said in a brief interview today that the field office in Minneapolis was "proud of the work they did on Moussaoui, and they have every reason to be proud of it."
He declined to comment on Ms. Rowley's criticisms of headquarters.
The special agent in charge of the Minneapolis office, Ray Morrow, did not return a telephone call seeking comment.
posted on May 24, 2002 07:26:28 AM new
Of course, the biggest lie was that the warnings were too vague to act on. While Germany, Egypt, Russia and Israel all issued warnings before 9/11, Bush did NOTHING.
What Bush could have done.
Exerpt
by Melissa Barlow
1. Ordered that armed air marshals be placed on every plane in U.S. airspace. Even if there weren't enough air marshals for this, he could have ordered that as many planes as possible have them.
2. In August, authorities discovered that known al-Qaeda operatives Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq al-Hamzi had slipped into the U.S. Bush could have ordered their names and pictures be sent to all ticket counters, airports and travel agencies throughout the U.S. When the two men purchased their tickets days before September 11, they would have been captured and the plot disrupted.
3. Bush could have ordered a general alert to go out to the country to watch for and report anything suspicious that related to hijackings. Numerous citizens across the U.S., some of whom had already contacted authorities, would have responded.
4. With the arrest of Zaccarias Moussaoui, Bush could have ordered the FBI and other agencies to investigate other flight schools throughout the country.
5. Bush could have ordered increased airport security and screening of passengers.
posted on May 24, 2002 08:56:42 AM new
As usual, Cheryl's thoughts are short on facts, and long on suppositions. Lies, and "he must have known? " C'mon.
For the record, I don't put anything past the Bush government, including having a hand in 9/11. However, so far there has been no real proof of that.
A breakdown of intelligence operations is a far cry from conspiracy. Also, since none of the ultra-liberals has pointed it out, if some of these "suspects" had been seized and their computers searched, perhaps 9/11 could have been prevented. But then there's that thorny issue of civil rights you folks love so much.
posted on May 24, 2002 10:45:30 AM new
No need for such, they had the information on their plate to begin the path to discovery. This agent Williams brought it home, apparently, and even the limited statements of the senators who are hearing it now pretty clearly indicate that the FBI dropped the ball at least. With what his reports sound to have contained his higher ups could have acted to prevent the thing, and the action they would take would be to pass the information upward.
For my entire career the criteria for responsibility was not who knew, it was that the highest level which SHOULD HAVE KNOWN bore the responsibility for any failures.
We don't know how high William's reports got and we may never know for sure as denial is the name of the game today. But with information of the import that his reports seem to have carried I would think that it should have been made known to the next higher level by each level that received it. There's no one here who can tell me much about the internal politics of a governmental agency and I KNOW that in order to cover his butt William's boss would send the reports on rather than risk a discovery that they were squished at his level. If William's well formulated information has the import that it seems to have had prior to the attacks, and assuming that by the fact of having attained his or her level in that agency the receiving level was more adept at CYA than his underlings, it is nearly impossible to imagine that the reports were not passed upward to the top. Did Harry Truman take his sign with him when he left office? The one which read "The Buck Stops Here"?
posted on May 24, 2002 12:25:56 PM new
May as well put the next portion here. Much of the information about John O'Neill has been up before now, but the questions brought by the suppression of his work remain in force. Doesn't the widely accepted knowledge of the U.S. protection of Saudi Arabian interests lend force to the argument offered here by Cheryl? This guy O'Neill was the foremost anti-terrorism and Qsama expert available to us; he as much as predicted the attack; yet he was ignored , even interfered with, to the point that he felt he had no choice but to resign.
SMOKING GUN: The Evidence that May Hang G.W. Bush
Part I Part II Part III
Osama Bin Laden Hunter O'Neill Was Killed at WTC:
Was He Also a Casualty of the Bush Administration?
Until he resigned in August of 2001, John O'Neill was the director of antiterrorism for the FBI's New York
office. O'Neill had worked on the investigations of the first WTC bombing in 1993 and the attacks on the
American embassies in Africa in 1998. He became one of the world's top experts on Osama Bin Laden and Al
Quada. O'Neill believed that "All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization
can be found in Saudi Arabia." Yet the Bush administration blocked O'Neill's efforts to investigate the Saudi
ties to Bin Laden. The main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism, asserted O'Neill, were U.S. oil
corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it.
For example, Bush blocked an FBI investigation of the bin Laden family and kept his family's business ties
to the Bin Ladens as secret as possible. Among these business dealings were bin Laden investments in the
Carlyle Group and connections between Bin Laden and George W. Bush's first oil companies. It must have
truly enraged O'Neill if he knew that Osama bin Laden had flown to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the
American hospital, where he was visited by local CIA agent Larry Mitchell on July 12.
O'Neill was very well aware of the warnings that came out in the summer of 2001. But it was obvious that
he was considered more of a liability than an asset to the oil-obsessed Bush administration. Back in 2000,
O'Neill had been investigating the bombing of the SS Cole, for which he was sure Bin Laden was responsible.
However, the US ambassador to Yemen, one Barbara Bodine, hamstrung FBI efforts at every turn, publicly
calling O'Neill a liar, refusing to allow his men to be armed with more than small handguns, and, in general,
crippling the investigation. Although Bodine claims she was trying to keep diplomatic relations running
smoothly, take a look at Bodine's history:
Barbara Bodine has served primarily under rightwing old boys and in areas where their oil interests are
being served. Under Reagan, she served as Deputy Principle Officer in Baghdad, Iraq. Under Bush, Sr., she
served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Kuwait and was there during the Gulf War. She has also worked for Bob
Dole, and far more ominously, for Henry Kissinger. Then, under Bush, Jr., she is in Yemen impeding an FBI
investigation that focused on the son of a Bush family business associate (see
http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/biography/bodine.html. What makes Bodine's actions toward O'Neill
particularly despicable is that she was in part to blame for the Cole disaster. Even though she had been warned
that the risk of attacks on Americans in the Yemen area were extremely high at that time, the Cole entered port
under the lowest grade of security permitted in the Middle East with no warning to the destroyer. A top military
analyst for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency quit in protest the day after the bombing because of
Bodine and Gen. Anthony Zinn's decision to allow the Cole to come into the port.
In July, Bodine had O'Neill and the FBI barred from Yemen.
About that time, O'Neill's name had been proposed by Richard Clarke as Clarke's successor as terrorism
czar at the National Security Council. But a very mysterious incident that had happened nearly a year before
was dredged up and used to blow that possibility out of the water. In Nov of 2000, at a retirement seminar in
Tampa, O'Neill left his briefcase for a few moments in the convention room to go around the corner to use the
phone. When he returned in a few minutes, the brief case, containing some papers considered classified, was
gone. It soon turned up, but the incident was seized upon as an excuse to guarantee O'Neill would not get
promoted. Was it a real theft? Or a set up to squeeze out the man who asked too many questions about Saudis
and oil? O'Neill had finally had enough and quit.
Meanwhile, from February through August, the entire time that the danger from Bin Laden was the
greatest, Bush was focusing most of his efforts on persuading the Taliban to allow him and his oil pals put a
pipeline through Afghanistan. Bush wanted to swipe the oil-rich Caspian region from Russian control. Back
when Bush thought he could cut a deal with the Taliban, he did not consider them "evil." In fact, back when he
smelled an easy deal in the wind, Bush described the Taliban's repressive regime "as a source of stability in
Central Asia" that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline. So, in Spring of 2001, in Texas oil
wheeling-dealing style, Bush handed $43 million in taxpayer dollars over to the Taliban to sweeten the pot. Still,
no deal.
Laila Helms, the niece of former CIA director Richard Helms, worked as a public relations coordinator for
the Taliban at this time. According to Helms, the Taliban offered to turn over Bin laden or provide the
coordinates of his whereabouts. However, apparently under Bush's orders, the State Department refused this
deal — a deal that would have removed Bush's best trump terrorist card from his stacked deck. Instead, on
August 2, State Department officials met with Taliban reps in Islamabad and there delivered this ultimatum:
give us what we want for the oil companies and we will "carpet your with gold." If you don't, "we will bury
you beneath a carpet of bombs." The Taliban still held out.
Four days later, Bush was given the warning that could have, if acted upon, saved 3,000 America lives and
the thousands of civilian lives lost in Afghanistan since October. Instead, he chose to ignore it.
In early September, O'Neill took a job at the WTC as head of security there. Right before the disaster, he
told friends he felt sure an attack was imminent and that he feared that terrorists would try to finish the job
they had begun in 1993 to destroy the WTC. John O'Neill was in the first tower when it was hit. He was on his
way into the second tower to help evacuate people when he was killed.
O'Neill must have sensed — the best detectives have that uncanny "sixth sense" — that something very
big, very horrendous might go down and that he might not survive. In June and July, 2001 he met with French
intelligence analyst Jean-Charles Brisard (in June in Paris and in July in New York City). O'Neill confided
much of what he knew about the Bin Laden situation and Bush to Brisard — a fellow intelligence officer, but
one who was not under the Bush administration's thumb. Brisard and his associate Guillaume Dasquié, an
intelligence analyst and the editor of Intelligence Online, dedicated their book "Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth"
(released in France in November 2001) to O'Neill. The book has been vigorously avoided by U.S. publishers
and everyone in the mainstream U.S. press except Paula Zahn, who has presented excerpts of it.
History will be kind to John O'Neill. It will not be kind to George W. Bush.
