'Fight Smart' Update - 13 June 2004

Don't Take the Bait - Fight Smart
ANIMATED 911 SUMMARY - CLICK HERE
Who is the enemy?

More Allegations
From Former FBI Translator
Justice And State Departments
Hiding Identity Of Key 911 Players
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WATEdmondsinterview.htm
Gagged Whistleblower Claims Evidence
That 911 Money Flow Touches People In 'High Places' In America

"Sibel Edmonds is a former FBI translator. She blew the whistle on the cover-up of intelligence that names some of the culprits who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. These culprits are protected by the Justice Department, the State Department, the FBI, the White House and the Senate Judiciary Committee. They are foreign nationals and Americans.  Ms. Edmonds is under two gag orders that forbid her to testify in court or mention the names of the people or the countries involved."
Sibel Edmonds Interview
Baltimore Chronicle, 7 May 2004

"Sibel Deniz Edmonds is waiting for a June 14 court case which
will determine if she can tell us all the full story about intelligence failures over
the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. government wants her knowledge to remain a state secret."
Sibel Edmonds: The 9/11 Missing Link
BreakForNews.com, 1 June, 2004

"Judge Reggie Walton has now called off the hearing -- no reason cited, and no future date scheduled. The fourth time he's done this in past two years. Sibel Edmonds will hold a press conference with Daniel Ellsberg at 3rd & Const. Ave. [Washington] on Monday, June 14, at 9:30 AM in front of the Court."
State Dept. Quashed 9/11 Links To Global Drug Trade - FBI Whistleblower
BreakForNews.com, 7 June 2004

"If they were to do real investigations we would see several significant high level
criminal prosecutions in this country. And that is something that they are not going to let out.
And, believe me; they will do everything to cover this up."
Sibel Edmonds Interview
Baltimore Chronicle, 7 May 2004

"So to just narrow it down and say al-Qaeda and the Saudis, or to say it's what they had at the camp in Afghanistan,
is extremely misleading..... And then you involve a significant amount of money into this equation.
Then things start getting a lot of overlap -- money laundering, and drugs and terrorist activities and their support
networks converging in several points. That's what I'm trying to convey without being too specific.
And this money travels. And you start trying to go to the root of it and it's getting into somebody's political campaign,
and somebody's lobbying. And people don't want to be traced back to this money."
Sibel Edmonds Interview
Baltimore Chronicle, 7 May 2004

"Even as a judge prepares to permanently silence her, a former FBI translator of intelligence has implicated the US State Department in quashing investigations which had linked the 9/11 terrorist network to a global drug trafficking ring.... Because of a provisional gag order issued by Judge Reggie B. Walton which prohibits revealing specific details, Edmonds can only paint a picture in the broadest of brush strokes. But her measured words hint at politically explosive connections between criminal drug/intelligence networks, and the 9/11 attacks."
State Dept. Quashed 9/11 Links To Global Drug Trade - FBI Whistleblower
BreakForNews.com, 7 June 2004

"Americans who think the 9/11 commission is going to answer all the crucial questions about the terrorist attacks are likely to be sorely disappointed"
The Great Escape
New York Times, 1 June 2004

"Edmonds claimed to have translated testimony in criminal and counter-intelligence cases involving different FBI field offices, going back into the late 1990s. Much of this involved tracking money, she said. Among the Farsi [spoken mainly in Afghanistan and Iran] translators working for the FBI, she said, it was common knowledge that a longtime, highly regarded FBI 'asset' placed in Afghanistan told the agency in April 2001 that he had information from his contacts there that bin Laden was planning a major attack, involving the use of planes, in one or another of big American cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York among them. The agents who took down the information from the spy wrote up reports and sent them to their superiors. That was the last the agents heard of the matter. Edmonds said she had heard the details of the Afghan asset story in an unclassified meeting at the Capitol, but she cannot talk about the specifics because of a Justice Department gag order that classifies as secret what she has to say.  She said, however, that 'there are a lot of activities in the U.S. A lot of money . . . and these activities involve money laundering, drugs, a support network for terrorism . . . people in high places . . . [people] in the political arena.'   Edmonds can't tell what she may know because Attorney General John Ashcroft recently invoked an arcane law to make her statements 'classified'—including previously public statements and journalism quoting her on the case. "
This Made Ashcroft Gag
Village Voice, 25 May 2004

"I have been given a warning that my turn [for smearing by the Bush Administration] is coming. I have been waiting for this for two years and two months... And they have not done it to this day, and they have not even denied anything. But I have been told to expect something to occur soon."
Sibel Edmonds Interview - Former FBI Translator
Baltimore Chronicle, 7 May 2004

"Despite the disinterest of the FBI or its oversight mechanisms, and the retrospective classification of her testimony to Congressional inquiries as state secrets, Edmonds is resolute --and well past the point of no return in her battle for the truth. 'Over two years have passed,' she says. 'I'm hoping there will be at least one.. just one Congressman, one Senator, who will be willing to take a stand, and come forward, and put out this information.... And I'm still looking for that one courageous person.' Such a representative will be the exception to the current rule. By way of illustration, Edmonds quotes a recent communication from an unnamed representative: 'Sibel Edmonds will not make any friends in the Congress, if she continues pressuring us and if she continues demanding action. That's not how she will make friends here -she will make only enemies.' With friends like that - who needs enemies. 'If they don't want to be pressured, then they should not run for office,' says Edmonds. Unsurprisingly, Edmonds' evidence has languished in Congress."
State Dept. Quashed 9/11 Links To Global Drug Trade - FBI Whistleblower
BreakForNews.com, 7 June 2004

Background To The Case Of Sibel Edmonds

"The Justice Department has taken the unusual step of retroactively classifying information it gave to Congress nearly two years ago regarding a former F.B.I. translator who charged that the bureau had missed critical terrorist warnings, officials said Wednesday.... some members of Congress and Congressional aides said they were troubled by the move, which comes as critics have accused the Bush administration of excessive secrecy. 'What the F.B.I. is up to here is ludicrous,' Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said in an interview. 'To classify something that's already been out in the public domain, what do you accomplish? It does harm to transparency in government, and it looks like an attempt to cover up the F.B.I.'s problems in translating intelligence.'....the F.B.I. now maintains that some of the information discussed was so potentially damaging if released publicly that it is now considered classified, according to a memorandum distributed last week within the Senate Judiciary Committee. The material could also play a part in pending lawsuits, including Ms. Edmonds's wrongful termination suit and a lawsuit brought by hundreds of families of Sept. 11 victims who have sought to take testimony from her. 'Any staffer who attended those briefings, or who learns about those briefings, should be aware that the F.B.I. now considers the information classified and should therefore avoid further dissemination,' the Judiciary Committee memorandum said. An F.B.I. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the decision to classify the material was made by the Justice Department, which oversees the bureau. The Justice Department declined to comment on Wednesday. The F.B.I. told Congressional officials that it was classifying topics including what languages Ms. Edmonds translated, what types of cases she handled, and what employees she worked with, officials said. Even routine and widely disseminated information - like where she worked - is now classified.... Ms. Edmonds testified in a closed session this year before the Sept. 11 commission, and she has made increasingly vehement charges about the F.B.I.'s intelligence failures, saying the United States had advance warnings about the attacks. Families of the Sept. 11 victims - who are suing numerous corporate and Saudi interests whom they accuse of having links to the attacks - have sought to depose her as a witness, but the Justice Department has blocked the move by saying her testimony would violate 'the state secret privilege.' Her lawyer could not be reached for comment on Wednesday. While some Congressional officials said they were confident the Justice Department had followed proper procedure in classifying the information, others said they could not remember any recent precedents and were bothered by the move. 'I have never heard of a retroactive classification two years back,' said an aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because the subject is classified. 'It would be silly if it didn't have such serious implications,' the aide said. 'People are puzzled and, frankly, worried, because the effect here is to quash Congressional oversight. We don't even know what we can't talk about.' Senator Grassley said, 'This is about as close to a gag order as you can get.'..."
Material Given to Congress in 2002 Is Now Classified
New York Times, 20 May 2004

"... [due to the gagging order] I cannot name any country. And I would emphasize that it's plural. I understand the Saudis have been named because fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. However, the names of people from other countries, and semi-legit organizations from other countries, to this day, have not been made public.... And specifically with that and their ties to people here in this country today [I have been gagged against]... [but] I can tell you that the issue, on one side, boils down to money -- a lot of money. And it boils down to people and their connections with this money, and that's the portion [of the story] that... has not been mentioned to this day. Because then it starts touching some people in high places.... this money travels. And you start trying to go to the root of it and it's getting into somebody's political campaign, and somebody's lobbying. And people don't want to be traced back to this money."
Sibel Edmonds Interview
Baltimore Chronicle, 7 May 2004

"The translator alluded to additional but more volatile allegations in a phone call on Friday night to Kyle Hence, cofounder of 9-11 Citizens Watch, who said in a widely distributed email that Edmonds told him 'if what she knows is revealed, it could lead to charges of treason being leveled against officials at top levels of the U.S. government.' Hence added, 'If that is the case, then all those who have been involved in keeping this information from getting to the public are complicit in this treason.... In a Washington, DC courtroom this morning, FBI attorneys will appear before Judge Reginald Walton in an attempt to block attorney Ronald Motley’s subpoena request to depose Edmonds as a witness for his $1 trillion lawsuit on behalf of 9-11 families to tell what she knows about prior warnings of the attacks.'"
Translator alleges FBI / State Dept espionage, possible treason
TomFlocco.com, 27 April 2004

"Mrs Edmonds, 33, a Turkish-American who had top secret security clearance, claimed this month that while working in the FBI's Washington headquarters, she saw information proving senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes. She has provided sworn testimony to the independent panel appointed by President George Bush to investigate the circumstances surrounding 11 September."
Lawyers Try to Gag FBI Worker over 9/11
Independent, 26 April 2004

"When he watched the planes hit the Twin Towers on 9-11, former FBI translator Behrooz Sarshar says he 'immediately' remembered a tip about an al-Qaida plot the bureau got from an informant more than four months before the terror group attacked America. Though he won't divulge details of the tip or discuss the sources and methods behind it, arguing they are still highly classified, Sarshar confirmed in an exclusive interview that he recently briefed three 9-11 Commission investigators about it, as WorldNetDaily first reported March 28. He says he met Feb. 12 with Lance Cole, Chris Healey and one other commission investigator in a secure room here on K Street. During the more than two-hour classified meeting, he says he told them the name of the informant. Part of the independent panel's mandate is to investigate leads U.S. law enforcement may have missed before the terrorist attacks, which killed 2,745 Americans. The 66-year-old Sarshar, who had Top Secret clearance when he left the bureau in November 2002, also briefed congressional investigators in the Senate Hart Building on Feb. 13. That meeting was not classified. Sources familiar with the briefing say the FBI informant told two FBI agents from the Washington field office in April 2001 that his sources in Afghanistan had heard of an al-Qaida plot to attack America in a suicide mission involving planes. Sarshar, fluent in Farsi, acted as an interpreter at the meeting, held at a Washington-area residence. The asset, an Iranian immigrant who worked in the shah's intelligence services, had been on the FBI's payroll for at least a decade, and was considered reliable. He travels abroad and is said to maintain good Afghan contacts. Iran shares its eastern border with Afghanistan. Both FBI agents took notes, and the case agent who worked with Sarshar filed a report with his squad supervisor, Thomas Frields. It's not clear if the information was teletyped to headquarters, however. Frields, now retired from the bureau, says the case is too 'sensitive' to discuss. 'It involves very sensitive matters that took place while I was an on-duty agent, and I have absolutely nothing to say,' said Frields, reached at his Washington-area consulting office. Two former colleagues described Frields as 'solid' and 'meticulous,' and said they have no doubt he would have notified headquarters if he thought the information was credible. The headquarters official in charge of counterterrorism at the time was FBI assistant director Dale Watson, also retired and now working for the same consulting firm as Frields. He did not return phone calls. Sarshar, who worked more than seven years for the FBI, says he asked the Senate Judiciary Committee for immunity to testify about the informant's tip and other FBI matters. He says the FBI warned him: 'If you talk about these things, you'll be locked up.'.... It was [Sibel] Edmonds who coaxed Sarshar to brief the 9-11 Commission. He met with investigators the day after she did. Her Feb. 11 classified briefing took place in a SCIF, or sensitive compartmented-information facility, set up in commission offices on D Street. Commission Chairman Thomas Kean confirmed the panel's meeting with Edmonds. 'We've had all her testimony and it's under investigation,' he said Sunday on NBC's 'Meet the Press.' Also, Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton appeared to confirm the panel's meeting with Sarshar the following day. 'We've talked to people she's identified,' he said on the same show.... Sarshar says the commission has not contacted him since his briefing. He says investigators indicated they'd call him back to testify with the informant.... Sarshar, a political refugee from Iran who joined the FBI in 1995, says he has testified seven times in federal court against FBI suspects, more than any other translator on the Farsi board. He says his life was threatened once after testimony he gave sealed a drug conviction. He also has worked on terrorism cases related to Mujahedin el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian dissident group that has killed Americans. In Iran, he was a colonel in the national police force under the shah, as well as president of Iran's judo federation, until the 1979 revolution, when he was forced to flee the country."
9-11 panel to probe FBI informant's tip
WorldNetDaily, 6 April 2004

"A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened. She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was 'an outrageous lie'. Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used 'state secrets privilege'. She told The Independent yesterday: 'I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily.'".
'I Saw Papers That Show US Knew al-Qa'ida Would Attack Cities With Airplanes'
Independent (UK), 2 April 2004

"FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, was offered a substantial raise and a full time job in order to not go public that she had been asked by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to retranslate and adjust the translations of [terrorist] subject intercepts that had been received before September 11, 2001 by the FBI and CIA.  Edmonds, a ten year U.S. citizen who has passed a polygraph examination, speaks fluent Farsi and Turkish and had been working part time with the FBI for six months -- commencing in December, 2001.... Edmonds said 'Attorney General John Ashcroft told me 'he was invoking State Secret Privilage and National Security' when I told the FBI  I wanted to go public with what I had translated from the pre 9-11 intercepts. I appeared once on CBS 60 Minutes but I have been silenced by Mr. Ashcroft, the FBI follows me, and I was threatened with jail in 2002 if I went public.' .... Edmonds said 'My translations of the pre 9-11 intercepts included [terrorist] money laundering, detailed and date specific information enough to alert the American people, and other issues dating back to 1999 which I won't go into right now.' Incredibly, Edmonds said 'The senate Judiciary Committee, and the 911 Commission have heard me testify for  lengthy periods of time time (3 hours) about very specific plots, dates, airplanes used as weapons, and specific individuals and activities.'..... 'This whole situation is outrageous and I am going public,' said Edmonds, adding 'I am currently being advised by counsel. Thank you.'"
DOJ Asked FBI Translator To Change Pre 9-11 Intercepts
TomFlocco.com, 24 March 2004

"The top of the FBI continues to illegally refuse the release of Wright's 500 page manuscript, 'Fatal Betrayals of the Intelligence Mission', that he submitted for prepublication review in October 2001. In fact, the FBI has even refused to turn the manuscript over to Senator Shelby, Vice Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, charged with investigating America's 911 intelligence failures. Wright has now launched a lawsuit against the FBI."
Iraqgate 2003 - Dr Kelly and 'Operation Rockingham'
'Fight Smart', 19 Oct 2003

"A 12-year veteran FBI agent is under investigation for alleged insubordination following his appearances on ABCNEWS programs and a recent press conference in Washington, D.C., in which he criticized the bureau's efforts to combat terrorism, according to the agent's attorney. Special Agent Robert Wright first went public last year on PrimeTime Thursday and told ABCNEWS Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross that he believes the FBI has failed to safeguard the United States from terrorist attacks.... Wright began tracking terrorists in the Chicago area in the mid-1990s for the Terrorism Task Force. He says he soon became frustrated when he was ordered by his superiors at the FBI Intelligence Division not to make any arrests of suspected terrorists. According to Wright, he was ordered to drop his investigation into a suspected terror financier whose name had arisen during the investigation into the bombings of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998, in which at least 224 people were killed. Wright is represented by Chicago attorney Dave Schippers and attorneys for Judicial Watch in Washington, D.C. Judicial Watch issued a statement Wednesday saying that 'Wright exposed FBI corruption and terrorist fund raising in America, which the FBI ignored to this day. Rather than going after terrorists, the FBI is seeking to destroy one of its loyal agents.'"
FBI Agent Probed After Criticizing Bureau
ABCNews, 12 June 2003

"Two veteran FBI investigators say they were ordered to stop investigations into a suspected
terror cell linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and the Sept. 11 attacks.... even after the [1998 African embassy] bombings, Wright said FBI headquarters wanted no arrests."
Called Off the Trail?
ABCNews, 19 Dec 2002

"There's so much more. God, there's so much more. A lot more."
FBI agent, Robert Wright, who is also being officially prevented from telling the public about how his efforts to investigate al-Qaeda pre-911 were blocked by his supervisors
'Called off the trail?' - ABC News, 19 Dec 2002

"I wonder why many questions are not asked [about 911]?... Even investigative journalists are fed propaganda and disinformation.... What has gone on, and goes on, in the name of intelligence services, are true crimes... Whoever wants to understand the CIA's methods, has to deal with its main tasks 'covert operations': below the level of war, and outside international law, foreign states are to be influenced, by organizing insurrections, terrorist attacks, usually combined with drugs and weapons trade, and money laundering."
Andreas von Bulow, former Cabinet Minister to Helmut Schmidt of Germany, and state secretary Ministry of Defence
Der Tagesspiegel, 13 January 2002

More Web Resources On The Sibel Edmonds Case - Click Here

911 Investigations - The Real Heroes

"It is.... rumoured that Pearl was in fact especially interested in any role played by the U.S. in training the ISI or backing it in any way.... Details of any U.S.-ISI cooperation would of course not be appreciated even in Washington, especially regarding U.S. cooperation in promoting any kind of Islamic militancy."
Pearl was probing spy agencies' role
Gulf News, 25 March 2002

Clinton, Bush and Bin Laden In Former Yugoslavia - US Backed Islamic Terrorism In The Balkans - Click Here

Where Is Sibel Edmonds Trying To Lead The World's Press
Without Being Prosecuted By The Bush Administration? - Key Interview Excerpts

"....the Bureau [FBI] is being asked by the State Department not to pursue certain investigations or certain people or certain targets of an investigation--simply citing 'diplomatic relations.' And what happens is, instead of targeting those people who are directly related to these illegal terrorist activities, they just let them walk free.... I have seen several, several top targets for these investigations of these terrorist activities that were allowed to leave the country -- I'm not talking about weeks, I'm talking about months after 9/11... I can tell you that there is so much involvement, that if they did let this information out, and if they were to hold real investigations--I'm not talking about this semi-investigation they're holding under this 'Joint Inquiry'--the pure show of the 9/11 Commission that has been getting the mass media's attention. If they were to do real investigations we would see several significant high level criminal prosecutions in this country..."
Sibel Edmonds Interview
Baltimore Chronicle, 7 May 2004

"During my work there I came across some very significant issues that I started reporting in December of 2001 to the mid-level management within the FBI. They said to basically leave it alone, because if they were to get into those issues it would end up being a can of worms. And after I didn't see any response from this mid-level bureaucratic management I took it to higher levels all the way up to [assistant director] Dale Watson and Director Mueller. And, again, I was asked not to take this any further and just let it be. And if I didn't do that they would retaliate against me..... In March 2002 I took this issue to the Senate Judiciary Committee and also I filed it with the Department of Justice Inspector General's office. And as per the Senate Judiciary Committee's request the IG started an expedited investigation on these serious issues; and they promised the Senate Judiciary Committee that their report for these investigations would be out by fall 2002 latest. And here we are in April 2004 and this report is not being made public, and they are citing 'state privilege' and 'national security' for not making this report public....Senator Hatch is blocking this investigation from taking place and for this public hearing to be held by the Senate Judiciary Committee....this issue is being covered up, and relentlessly being covered up.... "
Sibel Edmonds Interview
Baltimore Chronicle, 7 May 2004

"... [We should be] putting the pressure on our representatives in the Senate and the Congress, and the court system. They should be counter-acting this corruption, but they are sitting there silent. And they are just an audience, just watching it happen. Senators Leahy and Grassley and Hatch have the obligation to do that. It's not that they can choose not to do it. They don't have that luxury. This needs to be demanded of them. People need to pick up their phones. They need to write to these people and say, 'You'd better fulfill your responsibilities.'.... I took Mr. Sarshar to the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting in Senator Grassley's office. Mr. Sarshar provided them with detailed information, however, to this day Senator Grassley has not acted upon that, and he passed the buck to the 9/11 Commission. Next we arranged for a briefing between the 9/11 Commission and Mr. Sarshar, and he went there on February 12th, 2004 and he provided the investigators for the 9/11 Commission, for almost three hours with all the details of the investigation that had to do with the 9/11 terrorist attack. He gave them the names of certain assets used by the Bureau for at least twelve years. He gave them contact information for certain agents who were aware of these issues. And they, themselves, wanted to come and talk about it, but they needed certain protection.   Mr. Sarshar provided them with all this information and where to look for these documents etc. and, to this day, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the 9/11 Commission have been passing this buck back and forth. So, all this information has been sitting in front of them. They have not called any of those witnesses introduced by Mr. Sarshar to them. And during the 9/11 Commission hearing with [FBI] Director Mueller, none of these questions were asked. In fact they did not have any questions for Director Mueller, and they left it at that [except for the remark by Mr. Ben-Veniste that they should be addressing the translation issues behind closed doors.] And 'behind closed doors' has become a black hole for me because I have been in these closed door sessions so many times within the Senate, within the Inspector General's office, within the 9/11 Commission. And whatever information you are providing them behind these closed doors, you know for sure that that information will stay there and will never get out. That is why we are demanding to have public hearings with the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Senate floor and open to the public."
Sibel Edmonds Interview
Baltimore Chronicle, 7 May 2004

"[The FBI] had those four pieces [from agent investigations in Phoenix, Chicago, New York and Minneapolis] you mentioned, and far more than that, believe me, far more than that. And that has not been made public. And for them to say that we did not have any specific information is just outrageous. Because what were they waiting for? An affidavit signed by bin Laden?"
Sibel Edmonds Interview
Baltimore Chronicle, 7 May 2004

"... [due to the gagging order] I cannot name any country. And I would emphasize that it's plural. I understand the Saudis have been named because fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. However, the names of people from other countries, and semi-legit organizations from other countries, to this day, have not been made public.... And specifically with that and their ties to people here in this country today [I have been gagged against]... [but] I can tell you that the issue, on one side, boils down to money--a lot of money. And it boils down to people and their connections with this money, and that's the portion [of the story] that... has not been mentioned to this day. Because then it starts touching some people in high places.... this money travels. And you start trying to go to the root of it and it's getting into somebody's political campaign, and somebody's lobbying. And people don't want to be traced back to this money."
Sibel Edmonds Interview
Baltimore Chronicle, 7 May 2004

"... I cannot comment on that [the allegation that the transfer of money to Atta in conjunction with the presence of Pakistan's ISI chief in Washington during the week of 911 is the missing link]. But I can tell that once, and if, and when this issue gets to be, under real terms, investigated, you will be seeing certain people that we know from this country standing trial; and they will be prosecuted criminally.... At the very least, as early as May/June 2001, we could have issued a red code alert to the public, and we would have issued this very urgent warning system, which would, in return, have increased our Airport and INS security.... they had those four pieces [of information about the terrorists before 911].... and far more than that, believe me, far more than that. And that has not been made public. And for them to say that we did not have any specific information is just outrageous."
Sibel Edmonds Interview
Baltimore Chronicle, 7 May 2004

Click here to read the questions Edmonds wanted the 911 Commission to ask FBI Director Robert Mueller

Does Sibel Edmonds Have More Information on 'Omar Sheikhgate'?

"Omar Sheikh is a British born and educated Islamic militant who has been sentenced to death in Pakistan for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in early 2002. He almost certainly didn't do it. This is confirmed by, amongst other reports, a United Press International newswire issued last September which quotes Bob Baer, a former CIA case officer. Baer claims to hold important details relating to the actual person believed to have carried out the crime [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed]..."
The 911 Omar Sheik Files
Fight Smart, 2 January 2003

"Pakistani police sources tell TIME that at least one witness says Pearl's throat was slit by a top al-Qaeda terrorist, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed..... Fazal Karim has identified Mohammed as the man who drew the knife across Pearl's throat, two men who participated in Karim's interrogation tell TIME. Karim's testimony may weaken the government's case that [Omar] Saeed [Sheikh] was both ringleader of the plot and Pearl's executioner... Despite this fresh evidence, Pakistani police working on the Pearl case noticed a distinct cooling in their superiors' interest..."
Who Killed Pearl?
TIME magazine, 3 Feb 2003

".... the corporate media are still largely sticking to the demonstrably false Official Story of 911... So research into the events tends to be by alternative sources. Dissidents believe that the blocking of FBI agents who could have stopped the 911 plot was deliberate act of complicity by the Bush Junta whose popularity and pre-existing invasion goals [of Afghanistan and Iraq] were given an enormous boost by success of the attacks. Now the Natural Law Party has produced a superb piece of research into the British connection [with] Al Qaida.... ex-MI5 employee David Shayler has demonstrated that MI6 was plotting with elements linked to Al Qaida to assassinate Ghadaffi as late as the mid nineties... These are not the only links between Al Qaida and Bush/Blair..... the NLP has investigated the murder of [American] journalist Daniel Pearl and highlights an astonishing fact: The [British] Pakistani sentenced to death for the murder of Pearl, Omar Sheikh, is the same Al Qaida contact who wired USD 100,000 to Mohammed Atta shortly before 911 on the instructions of the head of Pakistani Intelligence General Mahmoud who quietly resigned soon after. Astonishingly, Mahmoud on the days around the 911 attacks was in a series of secret top level meetings in the White House and with hawkish senators on Capitol Hill .... The NLP suspects that Pearl was murdered because he was investigating the smoking gun USD 100,000 transaction and that Sheikh was framed for the murder to stop him talking... [A British MP] has put down a question on the matter to the Foreign Office, which they have refused to answer... The NLP research is to be found at
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WATomarsheikhgate.htm ."
Ian Henshall, chair of INK the Alternative Publishers umbrella group in the UK
and publisher of 911dossier.co.uk
Crisis Newsletter, 27 January 2003

"...while Omar may have been our original target [in our search for Danny], in truth he's just one in a massively complicated chain... ultimately he is a tool. But whose? It's become clear that Omar doesn't know where Danny is. That's never been his role. He was the lure; others are the captors.... who is overseeing it all? Who pulls the strings?..."
'A Mighty Heart' by Mariane Pearl, widow of Daniel
Virago Press, 2003

"A top FBI counter-terrorism official told the US Senate governmental affairs committee on Thursday that investigators have 'traced the origin of the funding of 9/11 back to financial accounts in Pakistan.' John S Pistole, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counter-terrorism division, however, did not specify how those accounts in Pakistan were funded, or the role of Pakistani elements. The Times of India first reported on October 10, 2001 that India told the US that some $100,000 had been wired to the leader of the hijackers, Mahmud Atta, by British-born terrorist Ahmad Saeed Umar Sheikh. Indian authorities also told the US that the trail led back from Sheikh to the then chief of ISI, Lt Gen Mahmud Ahmad who was subsequently forced to retire by Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf. The FBI had been provided with the details, including Sheikh’s mobile numbers. But Pistole’s testimony is silent on these issues.... The FBI has estimated the September 11 attacks cost between $175,000 and $250,000. That money — which paid for flight training, travel and other expenses — flowed to the hijackers through associates in Germany and the United Arab Emirates. Those associates reported to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who managed much of the planning for the attacks from Pakistan, US officials have said. The Bush Administration is being cagey about declassifying 28 secret pages in a recent report on the 9/11 incident which officials say outline connections between Saudi charities, royal family members and terrorism. US authorities are silent about the role some Pakistanis may have played in the conspiracy. The role of Sheikh and Lt Gen Ahmad has yet to see the light of the day. Sheikh, wanted for kidnapping and terrorist conspiracy in India, has since been sentenced to death in Pakistan for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl."
9/11 funds came from Pakistan, says FBI
Times of India, 1 August 2003

"It is.... rumoured that Pearl was in fact especially interested in any role played by the U.S. in training the ISI or backing it in any way.... Details of any U.S.-ISI cooperation would of course not be appreciated even in Washington, especially regarding U.S. cooperation in promoting any kind of Islamic militancy."
Pearl was probing spy agencies' role
Gulf News, 25 March 2002

Clinton, Bush and Bin Laden In Former Yugoslavia - US Backed Islamic Terrorism In The Balkans - Click Here

".... an official confirmation about the discovery of the Pearl's body will derail the ongoing trial against Sheikh Omar and 10 other persons, earlier identified by the police as [the] main accused in the kidnapping-cum-murder of Daniel Pearl... police have yet to officially acknowledge this major breakthrough in the Pearl case [which is managed from] the police's branch famously known as the CIA - -- the Karachi police wing officially assigned as the prosecutors in the Pearl case."
Pearl case cover-up leaves government clueless about new terrorist threat
The News (Pakistan), 23 May 2002

'Omar Sheikhgate'
Stop Press - May 2004
"....at least a dozen leading suspects in the kidnap and murder of the 38-year-old journalist [Daniel Pearl] have been arrested, but have not been charged or tried in connection with his death. Some have been accused of unrelated - and mostly lesser - offences. The three most recently captured suspects have not yet been charged, and their arrests have never been officially announced. The only cases brought so far in connection with Pearl's death have been those against Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the British-born al-Qaeda terrorist, who was convicted of kidnap and conspiracy to murder the American journalist, and three others who played relatively minor roles in the kidnapping. All were given life sentences for conspiracy to kidnap [except for Sheikh who was given death sentence, 'Fight Smart'], but are now appealing against their convictions in the country's high court. Pakistani authorities are said to be reluctant to put the new suspects on trial lest their evidence helps the first four win their appeals.... Investigators say that senior officials in the Sindh police - the force responsible for Karachi - are 'petrified' that if militants arrested in the past year were tried for their part in Pearl's murder, their earlier case against Omar Sheikh might unravel in the courts.' One official close to the investigation said: 'Even if these men have admitted their roles in the kidnapping and killing of Daniel Pearl, we simply cannot charge them because of its impact on that earlier case.'..."
Daniel Pearl 'refused to be sedated before his throat was cut'
Daily Telegraph, 9 May 2004

"Omar Sheikh... has... been named as one of the key financiers of Mohammed Atta,
the pilot of one of the jets that hit the World Trade Centre on September 11."
Daily Telegraph, 27 Jan 2002

Media References For Omar Sheikh - Click Here

"Originally thought to be pursuing an aspect of the Richard Reid shoe bomber story it now seems more likely that Pearl was delving deep into the workings of the ISI according to Pakistani journalists quoted by the Times of India 11 March..... But the story does not end with the death of Daniel Pearl. Intriguingly it is precisely the same man used by General Mahmoud to wire money to 911 hijacker Mohammed Atta who has now been detained and tried for the murder of Pearl. More importantly, however, this does not explain why this young man - Omar Sheikh - was not previously detained when it became clear last October that he had wired $100,000 to Atta. This is a truly extraordinary circumstance given America's direct control over Musharraf and the CIA's own links with the ISI. Why did the US government not insist on Pakistan's detention of Sheikh once it became known that he was involved in the funding of lead hijacker Atta? Why was he allowed to roam free in Pakistan when the country was America's principal Asian ally in the 'war against terrorism'? Indeed, why is Sheikh still not being charged for his alleged involvement in the 911 attacks now that he is finally detained?"
'The Special Relationship' - Armitage And The UK National Security Adviser
What Did Britain Know About 911?
'Fight Smart', 28 August 2002

"Sheikh himself appears to be one of two key figures who might be able to give first hand testimony of central relevance to these [911] matters. The other is the former head of the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, who was suddenly 'retired' in October 2001 once the Indian government and the FBI had reported their claimed discovery of Sheikh's involvement in the 911 attacks (they say that it was ISI chief General Mahmoud who instructed Sheikh to make a large money transfer to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta before the attacks. It is also now known that it was Mahmoud who was meeting with the Bush administration in Washington immediately before and during the attacks)."
The 911 Omar Sheikh Files
'Fight Smart', 2 January 2003

"If the 9-11 Commission is really looking for a smoking gun, it should look no further than at Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad, the director of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) at the time. In early October 2001, Indian intelligence learned that Mahmoud had ordered flamboyant [British Pakistani] Saeed Sheikh - the convicted mastermind of the kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl - to wire US$100,000 from Dubai to one of hijacker Mohamed Atta's two bank accounts in Florida.... Mahmoud's involvement in September 11 might be dismissed as only Indian propaganda. But Indian intelligence swears by it and, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has confirmed the whole story: Indian intelligence even supplied Saeed's cellular-phone numbers. Nobody has bothered to check what really happened. The 9-11 Commission should pose very specific questions about it to FBI director Robert Mueller when he testifies this month. In December 2002, [Senator Bob] Graham said he was 'surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the [September 11] terrorists in the United States ... It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now.' He could not but be referring to Pakistan and Mahmoud. If Mahmoud was really involved in September 11, this means the Pakistani ISI -'the state within the state' - knew all about it. And if the intelligence elite in Pakistan knew it, an intelligence elite in Saudi Arabia knew it, as well as an intelligence elite in the US.....  Million-dollar questions remain. Did Mahmoud know when and how the attacks of September 11 would happen? Did Musharraf know? Could the Bush administration have prevented September 11? It's hard to believe high echelons of the CIA and FBI were not aware of the direct link between the ISI and alleged chief hijacker Mohammed Atta. On October 7, Mahmoud was demoted from the ISI. By that time, Washington obviously knew of the connection between Mahmoud, Saeed Sheikh and Mohamed Atta: the FBI knew it.... as Asia Times Online has reported, Mahmoud did disappear. He lives in near seclusion in Rawalpindi....The families of September 11 victims, US public opinion, the demonized Islamic world, the whole world for that matter, all everybody wants to know is what really happened on September 11.... The genie - the crucial information - is still in the bottle. "
9-11 AND THE SMOKING GUN
Asia Times, 8 April 2004

".....why is Sheikh still not being charged for his alleged involvement in the 911 attacks now that he is finally detained?.... the execution of Sheikh would certainly be useful in dealing with the CIA's problem of how to limit further investigation into any wider role it may have played in the events surrounding 911 via its involvement with the ISI...... In this respect the clamour from the Bush administration to spare Sheikh's life so that he can give evidence as to General Mahmoud's and his own involvement in the transfer of 911 money to Mohammed Atta is deafening by virtue of its total absence... Sheikh is a British born and educated Pakistani. He is a British Citizen. But this has not resulted in the British government securing an open trial for him....The possibility that Sheikh has been framed (certainly he is an ideal candidate given his previous involvement with militant groups) in order to engineer his execution cannot be discounted.... Given the widespread culture of deception and lying uncovered within the British Foreign Office during the Scott inquiry into the UK's illegal supply of arms to Saddam Hussein, the omens do not look good."
What Did Britain Know About 911?
'Fight Smart', 28 Aug 2002

"Is there more to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed than meets the eye?" - By Paul Thompson - Click Here
Media References for Omar Sheikh - click here

The Armitage Effect
Are These The Kind Of Networks That Sibel Edmonds Claims Overlap With Each Other And 911?

Richard Armitage
Assistant  Secretary of Defence, Bush-Reagan (Iran-Contra) Administration
Deputy Secretary of State, Cheney-Bush (Iraqgate) Administration

"Even as a judge prepares to permanently silence her, a former FBI translator of intelligence has implicated the US State Department in quashing investigations which had linked the 9/11 terrorist network to a global drug trafficking ring.... Because of a provisional gag order issued by Judge Reggie B. Walton which prohibits revealing specific details, Edmonds can only paint a picture in the broadest of brush strokes. But her measured words hint at politically explosive connections between criminal drug/intelligence networks, and the 9/11 attacks."
State Dept. Quashed 9/11 Links To Global Drug Trade - FBI Whistleblower
BreakForNews.com, 7 June 2004

"Edmonds said she had heard the details of the Afghan asset story in an unclassified meeting at the Capitol, but she cannot talk about the specifics because of a Justice Department gag order that classifies as secret what she has to say.  She said, however, that 'there are a lot of activities in the U.S. A lot of money . . . and these activities involve money laundering, drugs, a support network for terrorism . . . people in high places . . . [people] in the political arena.'"
This Made Ashcroft Gag
Village Voice, 25 May 2004

"In Chambliss' view governments often engage in smuggling (arms and drugs), assassination conspiracies, terrorist acts, and other crimes in order to further their foreign policy objectives.... In this section [of this University Course] we will examine the issue of state-organized crime as it relates to the United States ... In recent years, intelligence agencies in the United States have sought and received assistance from drug traffickers. While it is, of course, outrageously hypocritical for a government waging a drug war against its own citizens to seek assistance from drug traffickers, it is not surprising.... In the early 1970s, the CIA and organized crime played a key role in establishing and operating the World Finance Corporation, a Florida-based company involved in laundering drug money and supporting terrorist activities (Lernoux, 1984).....There is precious little difference between those people who society designates as respectable and law abiding and those people society castigates as hoodlums and thugs. The world of corporate finance and corporate capital is as criminogenic and probably more criminogenic than any poverty-wracked slum neighborhood.... In the everyday language of the police, the press, and popular opinion, 'organized crime' refers to a tightly knit group of people, usually alien and often Italian, that run a crime business structured along the lines of feudal relationships. This conception bears little relationship to the reality of organized crime today... "
CRJ 875: Crime and Public Policy
Module 9: State-Organized Crime as a Case Study Of Criminal Policy
Gary W. Potter, Professor, Criminal Justice and Police Studies
The Department of Criminal Justice and Police Studies
Eastern Kentucky University

"Narco-corruption in North America is most significantly manifested in money laundering. Ninety-one percent of the $197 billion spent on cocaine in the U.S. stays there, and American banks launder $100 billion of drug money every year. Those identified as money laundering conduits include the Bank of Boston, Republic National Bank of New York, Landmark First National Bank, Great American Bank, People's Liberty Bank and Trust Co. of Kentucky, and Riggs National Bank of Washington.... Investment houses such as Merrill Lynch and EF Hutton have also handled millions of dollars in drug money (putting it in the New York bullion market)..... Narco-corruption in North America is widespread amongst public officials as well. Sixty policemen in Miami have been identified as corrupt and 80 lawmen and public officials in Georgia have been charged with serious offenses such as accepting bribes. A Georgia state senator promised to protect drug smugglers if they contributed to his campaign for the governorship. Thirty-two U.S. law enforcement officials including Customs agents have been indicted for 'border-related corruption' which is 'systemic and pervasive' according to the FBI. Two-thirds of the cocaine coming into the U.S. does so at official entry points along the Mexican frontier. In Miami, three FBI agents and one from Customs were charged with stealing $200,000 from drug dealers in 1994. A former senior Justice Department official and two former prosecutors were indicted in June 1995 on charges of helping Colombian drug barons in a criminal conspiracy.  Kendall Coffey, the U.S. attorney for Southern Florida, stated that the latter case showed 'the degree to which cocaine profits have corrupted the legal system.' When the FBI tried to prosecute World Finance Corporation (an international lending company) for laundering drug money, the Bureau was reportedly informed by an Internal Revenue Service agent that 'WFC was a legitimate company: if it dealt in drug money so much the better; narcotics money that stayed in the U.S. was good for the economy.'"
THE CANADIAN CONNECTION: Drugs, Money Laundering and Canadian Banks
Briarpatch, July/August 1997

"[In 2001] Pakistan and the United States have turned to a tried and trusted 'friend' in their efforts to exert control over events in Afghanistan - convicted Pakistani drug baron and former parliamentarian, Ayub Afridi.... Without fanfare, Afridi was freed from prison in Karachi last Thursday after serving just a few weeks of a seven-year sentence for the export of 6.5 tons of hashish, seized at Antwerp, Belgium, in the 1980s. No reasons were given for Afridi's release..... It is a matter of record that top US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials believed in the early 1980s that they would never be able to justify a multibillion-dollar budget from the government to provide support to the mujahideen in the fight against the Red Army. As a result, they decided to generate funds through the poppy-rich Afghan soil and heroin production and smuggling to finance the Afghan war. Afridi was the kingpin of this plan.... "
US turns to drug baron to rally support
Asia Times, 5 Dec 2001

"Those who served in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War swear that indeed the CIA actively participated in drug running as an 'off-the-books' way to finance the secret war in Laos. And, two decades later, similar charges flew that the CIA used the same playbook in Central America to finance our support for the Contras in Nicaragua during a time when Congress refused to fund that effort. Six weeks ago here I quoted various newspapers from the mid-1980s that carried the charge by Burmese Drug War Lord Kun Sa against longtime CIA employee Richard Armitage - by name - that Armitage was directly involved in the drug trade and in importing the drugs into the U.S. Armitage has always denied these reports. Still, he is the only U.S. government employee I have ever heard of who was specifically fingered by name in a drug charge. Despite these serious charges – and with no investigation whatsoever - the US Senate last month confirmed Armitage as deputy secretary of state. Makes you wonder how serious Washington really is about the War on Drugs, doesn’t it?"
Could the CIA Be Bringing Drugs Into the USA?
NewsMax, 26 April 2001

"There are direct historical links between Osama bin Laden's business interests and those of the Bush family. On September 15 (2001) I received the following message from FTW subscriber, Professor John Metzger of Michigan State University: 'We should revisit the history of BCCI, a bank used by the legendary Palestinian terrorist known as Abu Nidal. BCCI was closely tied to American and Pakistan intelligence. Its clients included the Afghan rebels, and the brother of Osama bin Laden, Salem. Salem bin Laden named Houston investment broker James R. Bath as his business representative in Texas, right after George W. Bush's father became CIA director in 1976. By 1977, Bath invested $50,000 into junior's first business, Arbusto Energy, while Osama bin Laden would soon become a CIA asset. George W. Bush's FBI director Robert Mueller was part of the Justice Department's questionable investigation of BCCI. (On BCCI, the bin Ladens, and the Bushes, see the books, The Outlaw Bank, A Full Service Bank, and Fortunate Son).' Further details of the business and financial relationships between the Bush and bin Laden family are found in Peter Brewton's 1992 book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush. BCCI, incidentally, was founded by a Pakistani. Economics Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa has just completed a detailed history of bin Laden's career detailing his secret funding and logistical support to terrorist organizations beginning from his early CIA-supported roots in the 1980s as a 'freedom fighter' through to the present day. Chossudovsky's compelling and well documented article, Who Is Osama Bin Laden? dated Sept 12, 2001 can be found on the Internet at: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html. Bin Laden's role has not just been as a practitioner of terrorist acts but as a trainer and supplier of terrorist organizations around the world. Included in bin Laden's coterie are terrorist groups linked to the Balkans, Albania, the KLA (a U.S. ally), and rebel groups leading the insurrection against Russia in Chechnya. As FTW described in 1998, and as confirmed by Chossudovsky, the key to understanding U.S. support of bin Laden is to grasp that he has always been controlled by a cutout, the Pakistani government and its intelligence service the ISI. In this manner there has been virtually no direct contact between bin Laden and the CIA. This has served the dual purpose of maintaining his apparent 'purity' with his followers and providing plausible deniability for the CIA."
Osama bin Laden's Bush family Business Connections
From The Wilderness Publications, 18 September 2001

"The frustration has spread to the ranks of federal law enforcement. In October a U.S. Customs officer wrote to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate subcommittee on terrorism, narcotics and international operations, and complained that 'tons of documents were not reviewed . . . and the CIA put a halt to certain investigative leads' in a 1988 Florida inquiry that eventually led to the indictment of five mid-level B.C.C.I. officers. 'We had drug traffickers, money launderers, foreign government involvement, Noriega and allegations of payoffs by B.C.C.I. to U.S. government political figures. I will not elaborate on who these U.S. government figures were alleged to be, but I can advise you that you don't have all of the documents.  Some were destroyed or misplaced.'.... Mazur, who led the undercover sting operation that produced the first indictments of B.C.C.I. in 1988, quit the agency to work for the Drug Enforcement Administration. He reportedly was disgusted over the government's failure to pursue leads concerning secret B.C.C.I. ownership of U.S. banks and alleged payoffs to U.S. politicians. Although Kerry has declined to release correspondence from Mazur, sources who have seen Mazur's allegations about a cover-up say they are political dynamite."
Too Many Questions
TIME, 11 Nov 1991

"Michael J. Hand, a Vietnam war hero and later a CIA agent in Asia, disappeared after his founding-partner of the Australian Nugan-Hand Bank was found dead. Four Australian government investigations produced voluminous reports that do little to clear up the mystery of a financial operation said to have become a 'giant theft machine.'  Some of the Iran-Contra hearing's characters came under scrutiny: Gen. Richard Secord, the CIA's Tom Clines and Ted Shackley --- though Shackley denies involvement. Ed Wilson and all these former CIA officials! That's why the Australian Royal Commission of Inquiry began its work after former U.S. government officials shredded Nugan-Hand records when the bank failed seven years ago. It owed unknown millions to investors who could not afford the publicity of pressing their claims. The bank laundered money from the Southeast Asian drug trade. Profits bought arms to be sold to the world's trouble spots. Admiral Earl Yates, U.S. President of this odd bank, had been Chief of Staff for Plans and Policy of U.S. Pacific command. He says the group of former military and intelligence officers he helped attract to the bank were 'true patriots.'  Gen. LeRoy J. Manor ran a major branch of the bank in a strategic center. He had been chief of staff for Pacific command. Gen. Erle Cocke Jr. ran the Washington office. An Australian investigator said, 'Here are all these patriots who have served their country faithfully, suddenly saying `let's all become criminals and commit crimes against the very country we've been working for.'   The biggest crime is the swamping of North America with dope on such a scale that today the problem, despite President Ronald Reagan's 'war on drugs,' is now the root of major crime and big-city street warfare. For what the Nugan-Hand patriots left behind, when their empire collapsed, was a well established method of operations... The men who perfected the guns-for-dope traffic moved to the Middle East as experts in the sale of sophisticated arms, protected by officials at the top in the Pentagon and CIA. Richard Armitage, now the key Pentagon official in counter-terror and covert operations is named consistently by investigators as the man who helped the drug warlords market their crops.... The most prominent name recurring in this [CIA drug tafficking] connection is Vice President George Bush. While he was CIA director, much of these activities blossomed, but more serious charges are being made by former intelligence officers..... who fear that their institutions have been corrupted by a few self-proclaimed patriots."
BANK OF INTRIGUE
Toronto Sun, 13 August 1987

"When the [Iran-Contra] scandal broke, in late 1986 and early 1987, George Bush maintained that he knew nothing about these illegal activities; that other government officials involved in them had kept him in the dark; that he had attended no important meetings where these subjects were under discussion. Since that time, many once- classified documents have come to light, which suggest that Bush organized and supervised many, or most, of the criminal aspects of the Iran-Contra adventures. The most significant events relevant to George Bush's role are presented here in the format of a chronology. At the end of the chronology, parts of the testimony of George Bush's loyal assistant Donald Gregg will be provided, to allow for a comparison of the documented events with the Bush camp's account of things. Over the time period covered, the reader will observe the emergence of new structures in the U.S. government..."
Chapter -XVIII- Iran- Contra
'George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography'
by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin

"In the U.S., B.C.C.I. used Miami as a staging ground for the largest single drug-money operation yet recorded, secretly bought and helped run the largest bank in Washington, and played a key role in duping regulators about the failure of Miami-based CenTrust Savings and Loan, one of America's costliest thrift bankruptcies.... Several federal attorneys and agents contend that they have been told by Justice Department officials that B.C.C.I. is a 'political' case and that prosecutorial and investigative decisions must be made in Washington. 'We are constantly flabbergasted that the Justice Department says we should go forward and yet we never get the permission from Washington,' says a senior investigator."
Too Many Questions
TIME, 11 Nov 1991

"Former  B.C.C.I. officers have told investigators that they believe the bank's extensive U.S. intelligence connections -- which figured importantly in such undertakings as the Pakistan-based supply operation to the Afghan rebels, the bank's role in the [Reagan-Bush administration's illegal] covert resupply of the Nicaraguan contras, and the sale of arms to Iran -- help explain why the Justice Department is treating the inquiry so gingerly. Some former B.C.C.I. employees also point to the allegations of political payoffs as the reason for the slow pace. Congress has remained uncharacteristically silent on the subject, with only a handful of legislators demanding action."
Too Many Questions
TIME, 11 Nov 1991

"President George [W.] Bush is rapidly putting his own stamp on the US presidency, but his recent lower-level appointments show that the substance of the new team in Washington is overwhelmingly from of the era of his father and Ronald Reagan. The return of the Reaganites is particularly evident in the areas of foreign and defence policy, where Mr Bush has just appointed Richard Armitage deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell. Mr Armitage is a Pentagon veteran of the Reagan and Bush Sr era, during which he played a key role as a Middle East policy expert. His role in the Iran-contra arms smuggling scandal was sufficiently important to force George Bush Sr to withdraw his the nomination as army secretary in 1989. Mr Armitage worked closely with Colonel Oliver North in the secret Reagan White House effort to trade arms to Iran and syphon some of the profits to Nicaraguan contra rebels in defiance of an arms ban."
Return of the Reaganites
Guardian, 14 February 2001

"On a summer day in 1986, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gathered behind closed doors off the chamber floor to hear the sales pitch of a brash freshman, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts..... He had spent the spring conducting an unauthorized investigation into reports that the Reagan administration was illegally providing aid to the rebel Nicaraguan Contra armies, which were attempting to overthrow the left-wing government of that Central American nation. At this closed session, he planned to urge the committee to launch an official probe. The Republican senators who controlled the committee owed their majority status to Reagan's popularity. Privately, they were feeling increasing pressure from a shadowy figure at the White House, a Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North, who was orchestrating support for the contras. But behind the scenes, Kerry had forged an unlikely alliance with Senator Jesse Helms, the hidebound conservative from North Carolina. As the senior Republican on the committee, Helms was the key to Kerry's hopes. And the key to Helms was the drug war. In the course of their investigation, Kerry and his staff had found evidence that some contras had ties to drug smuggling. If there was one class of villain that Helms deplored as much as the communists, it was drug traffickers. On matters of political philosophy, Kerry and Helms were polar opposites. Yet each was something of a maverick, contemptuous of the capital's courtiers and willing to rock the clubby Senate. 'I spent time with Jesse,' Kerry recalls. 'I talked to him. Talked his language. Jesse didn't believe the same things I did in many cases, but he was a gentleman. He was a man of his word.' As Kerry finished his presentation, the senior members turned to Helms, taking his temperature on the issue. 'Jesse? What do you think about this?' asked Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the panel, according to a transcript of the then-secret session. 'I know you are a contra supporter.' 'I will tell you what I do not support, and John Kerry and I have talked about this: anybody sending drugs into this country,' Helms told his colleagues. 'I do not care whose side they are on.' Helms was on board. The committee reached a consensus: It would investigate the contras and the contra-drug connection.'... Before long, Kerry encountered resistance. Congressional investigators would later detail how the government intimidated Kerry's witnesses, including a mysterious figure named Jack Terrell, who claimed to have been a contra adviser operating under the nom de guerre 'Colonel Flaco.' Terrell told Kerry and a handful of investigative reporters that North's supply network had been used to smuggle arms and drugs.  Kerry's staff interviewed Terrell in New Orleans, brought him to Washington, installed him in a safe house, and obtained funding from a liberal think tank, the International Center for Development Policy. In a memo to Reagan, later obtained by the Iran-contra committee, North warned that 'Terrell's accusations are at the center of Senator Kerry's investigation.' North labeled Terrell a possible Nicaraguan spy, potential presidential assassin, and a 'terrorist threat.' The Secret Service was alerted, and the FBI placed Terrell under surveillance. Agents tailed him, combed his telephone records, searched his garbage, and pressured him into taking a polygraph test. They ultimately determined he was no threat to the president, but his eagerness waned and he never testified. Elsewhere, Republican staffers on the Foreign Relations committee leaked details of Kerry's probe to the administration. An assistant US attorney in Florida, who was also investigating the allegations, was told by his superiors that 'politics' forbade him from taking the case to a grand jury.... Despite Kerry's work, and that of House investigators, North's covert enterprise thrived. But on Oct. 5, 1986, a C-123 aircraft was shot down in Nicaragua. Documents found in the wreckage connected the plane to a CIA proprietary airline, Southern Air Transport. A surviving crew member, Eugene Hasenfus, said he was involved in an effort to arm the contras.... Suddenly, Kerry's theories didn't seem so far-fetched. He hoped this would be his moment to help lead the investigation into this extraordinary episode. The Iran-contra scandal was the top story in town, and there was worried talk in the halls of Congress that the United States might suffer another failed presidency. But when congressional leaders chose the members of the elite Iran-contra committee, Kerry was left off. Those selected were consensus-politicians, not bomb-throwers. The feeling among a disappointed Kerry and his staff was that the committee members were chosen to put a lid on things. 'He was told early on they were not going to put him on it,' Winer recalls. 'He was too junior and too controversial . . .. They were concerned about the survival of the republic.' Even some Democrats 'thought John was a little hotter than they would like,' says Rosenblith. As a consolation prize, the Democratic leadership gave Kerry chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations and a charter to dig into the contra-drug connection. While disappointed, Kerry stuck with his investigation and the subcommittee published a report in 1989 that concluded the CIA and other US agencies had turned a blind eye to drug trafficking occurring on the fringes of the contra network. In many cases, traffickers were using the same airplanes, airfields, and other resources that the contras were using. To the disappointment of the conspiracy theorists, Kerry and his team found no evidence the United States ran or sanctioned a contra drug ring. During the investigation, an Oregon businessman claiming CIA ties, Richard Brenneke, whose testimony was taken by Kerry's committee, made the sensational and undocumented charge that Vice President George H. W. Bush's office had sanctioned a contra-drug smuggling operation. Bush challenged Kerry to 'show some evidence and stop leaking out information that is not true.' Kerry denied he was the source of the leak, and the committee dropped the Brenneke angle.... Ultimately, the subcommittee's findings on the scope of the contra-drug connection were validated by two subsequent federal investigations. Inspectors General at the CIA and the Justice Department found that these agencies had done little or nothing in response to hundreds of allegations that elements of the contras and their supply networks were involved with drugs. 'Kerry's proven conclusion was that the government, especially the CIA, looked the other way,' says Blanton. 'The Kerry committee findings hold up.'... In an off-shoot of the contra-drug investigation, Kerry examined reports that Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was involved in drug trafficking. The probe led to information that Noriega was shipping money out of Panama with the help of a bank called BCCI -- which prompted yet another Kerry investigation. BCCI was an international bank of Middle East origins whose employees asked few questions of their wealthy and powerful customers, making it a favorite of arms merchants, drug dealers, despots such as Noriega, and intelligence agencies. At the CIA, which sometimes used the bank to launder its own activities, it was known as the 'Bank of Crooks and Criminals.'.."
With probes, making his mark
Boston Globe, 6 June 2003

"When a few prosecutors finally began targeting BCCI's operations in the late Eighties, President George Herbert Walker Bush boldly moved in with a federal probe directed by Justice Department investigator Robert Mueller. The U.S. Senate later found that the probe had been unaccountably 'botched'--witnesses went missing, CIA records got 'lost,' all sorts of bad luck. Lower-ranking prosecutors told of heavy pressure from on high to 'lay off.' Most of the big BCCI players went unpunished or, like Mahfouz, got off with wrist-slap fines and sanctions. Mueller, of course, wound up as head of the FBI, appointed to the post in July 2001--by George W. Bush. In the late 1990s, U.S. authorities identified Mahfouz as a major financier of his brother-in-law's extracurricular activities. He denied it, but the spooked Saudis put him on ice, charging him with, of all things, bank fraud. He's now under 'house arrest'--or rather, 'palatial mansion arrest'--but still wheeling and dealing with Kean and Delta and other worthies. Indeed, one of Mahfouz's hirelings--the director of a Pakistani bank he owns--sits on the advisory board of our old friend the Carlyle Group, cheek by jowl with the firm's most celebrated shill: George Herbert Walker Bush."
Kean Insight - Bush, bin Laden, BCCI and the 9/11 Commission
Counterpunch, 31 January 2003

"A decade ago, while still new to the public defender's office, Mattes found himself in the thick of the cloak-and-dagger escapades of the Contras and their allies in Miami. In early 1986, Mattes was assigned to defend self-described mercenary and freelance intelligence operative Jack Terrell from charges he had violated the U.S. Neutrality Act because of his Contra-supply work. Ultimately the case was dismissed by a federal judge in 1990 on grounds that Terrell was a victim of selective prosecution. In the course of legal discovery in the Terrell case, Mattes obtained stacks of previously classified documents about the secret Contra supply network. These he turned over to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and its Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Communications, headed in 1987 by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), which was then digging into Contra improprieties... The Kerry report remains the most extensive inquiry into the Contra-CIA-drug connection, but as the years go by, other damaging material continues to filter out."
The Smuggler's trail - Federal Evidence of the CIA/Contra Cocaine Trade
Los Angeles Weekly, 4 October 1996

"In 1986, Terrell turned against the contras and began talking to Senate investigators about North's secret activities and about contra drug trafficking. North was frantic to discredit Terrell and to discourage further congressional inquiries. North assigned an ex-CIA officer, Glenn Robinette, to investigate Terrell. Robinette was paid from the Swiss slush fund that North had created with profits from the arms sales to Iran. Initially, Robinette contacted Terrell and tried to lure him into a phony business deal. Then, in summer 1986, North seized on an ambiguous remark by Terrell that he could 'get the president' as evidence that Terrell was plotting to assassinate Ronald Reagan. North hooked up Robinette with the FBI to supply derogatory information about Terrell. The scheme seemed to work. In a July 17, 1986, memo, North wrote that the 'operations sub-group' of the inter-agency Terrorist Incident Working Group planned to review an FBI 'counter-intelligence, counter-terrorism operations plan' aimed at Terrell. But Revell, who represented the FBI on the operations sub-group, told me that he was always suspicious of North's anti-Terrell vendetta. Revell said he ordered two FBI agents to watch North and his associates to determine if they were engaged in some kind of 'plumbers' operation. 'I actually had some surveillance run against them to see if they were running an investigation' of Terrell, Revell said. 'I just wanted to see what the hell was going on.' Despite what Revell says now, the FBI and Secret Service did investigate Terrell. Agents hauled him in for two days of polygraph examinations before concluding that the assassination allegations were bogus. Terrell told me later that the investigation had chilled his readiness to testify about the contras. 'It burned me up,' he said. 'The pressure was always there.'"
Lost History: Ollie's 'Enemies' & the FBI
Consortium News, 3 February 1997

"When I found that we were bringing drugs into the United States, and that we were receiving money which was being put into accounts which I knew to belong to the United States Government, as I'd set them up specifically for that purpose, I called Mr. Don Gregg, who was a CIA officer with whom I was acquainted, and complained about the nature of what we were doing.... At that time, he was George Bush - Vice-President George Bush's National Security Advisor.... I was told that it was not my business, what I was flying in and out of the country. That I was hired to do specific things, and if I would do those things and not pay any attention to anything else, we would all be very happy. I didn't like that.... Subsequently I talked to Mr. Gregg on a number of occasions as well as to other people in the Vice-President's office to voice my concern over the use of drugs in -- importing drugs into the United States and using the cash generated from that to perform operations which I perceived to be not put before Congress in any form...."
The Oral Deposition of Richard J. Brenneke
Joint Investigation by the Arkansas State Attorney General's Office and the U.S. Congress, June 21, 1991

"Attorney General Winston Bryant and Rep. Bill Alexander will meet with Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh next week to present what Bryant called 'credible evidence' that the CIA ran drugs into and guns out of the Mena Airport. At the urging of a group of University of Arkansas students, Bryant and Alexander in the past 45 days have conducted sworn interviews with an ex-CIA pilot, a former IRS agent, a state policeman who investigated the Mena Airport and others involved, Bryant said Monday. They also compiled documents gathered by state police. Bryant said the package shows 'credible evidence' that government operatives secretly shipped guns from the Mena Airport to the Nicaraguan Contras and that the planes carried drugs on their return trip. Alexander and Bryant will ask Walsh in Washington, D.C., to include the Mena Airport in his Iran-Contra investigation, which last week generated an indictment of a top CIA official. 'He's going to have to analyze the evidence and see if it's credible or not,' Bryant said of Walsh. 'We're going to say to Mr.Walsh that there appears to have been illegal drug activity at Mena and as special prosecutor we think you should investigate.'... Bryant said he and Alexander interviewed: Former CIA pilot and arms dealer Richard Brenneke. He claims he was one of the CIA pilots who flew into Mena, that he saw both drugs and guns there and that he laundered drug money in the area. Former IRS agent William Duncan, a native Arkansan who nowworks on Bryant's staff in the fraud division. Duncan testified to Congress in 1989 that IRS attorneys pressured him to lie to Congress and a federal grand jury in Arkansas to cover up what he found when he investigated Barry Seal...."
'Evidence' on Mena-CIA tie to go to Walsh Airport's inclusion in Contra probe urged
The Arkansas Gazette, 10 September 1991

"The last time a Republican administration was put together, there were only two political appointees who didn't make it through the confirmation process. One was John Tower, the elder President Bush's ill-fated pick to head the Defense Department. The other was Richard L. Armitage.... There were people on the right, like Ross Perot, who were deeply suspicious of Armitage and his involvement in MIA [soldiers 'missing in action'] negotiations. Many conservatives believed that Vietnam still held U.S. prisoners in secret camps, and Armitage's failure to press the Vietnamese harder was seen as evidence of collusion. Ryan and I, who personally thought it likely that the MIAs were all dead, nonetheless cultivated these conservative sources because their distaste for Armitage was much more intense than any liberal politician's. Perhaps unwisely, we shared an advance copy of our article with them, which became exhibit A in the senator's case against Armitage. We were interested in Armitage because of his prominent role in the Christic Institute lawsuit. The lawsuit--which was eventually thrown out of court, with sanctions that crushed the nonprofit law firm--alleged that members of the secret Contra resupply effort like Richard Secord were part of a long-standing 'Secret Team' of military and intelligence operatives that had been involved in various illegal activities going back at least to 1959. According to the Christic Institute's affidavit, Armitage was a key player in this team, helping to funnel drug profits from Laos and Thailand into assassination programs in Vietnam and Iran. The Christic Institute's charges have never been proven, or fully investigated, for that matter. But Armitage's documented history and associations do tantalizingly track the Christic allegations (see 'Pentagon Aide Linked to Drug Ring,' July 8, 1987). Armitage did come under investigation for his role in the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra scandal. Though he testified that he didn't know about the administration's secret sale of arms to Iran until November 1986, when they became public knowledge, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's report laid out extensive evidence that he knew about them a year earlier. In fact, Armitage apparently opposed the arms sales as early as December 1985, on the grounds that Iranians were 'sleazebags.' Secord later testified that he met with Armitage then in an effort to change his mind. Armitage claimed not to remember meeting with Secord, though Armitage's own meeting logs show that he did. Armitage kept a December 6, 1985 document describing the legal ramifications of the Iran arms sales, entitled 'Possibility for Leaks,' locked in his Pentagon safe until June 1987, when it was belatedly turned over to Walsh and the congressional Iran-Contra committee. Armitage also attended a Pentagon meeting in August 1986 in which Oliver North outlined the covert activities in support of the Contras that he had been supervising through the National Security Council. Armitage denied remembering anything about this meeting as well. In his final report, Walsh said he declined to prosecute Armitage for his numerous dubious statements on these issues because he could not prove they were knowingly false.... Now Armitage's loyalty is being rewarded with a new post: He has been tapped as the new deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell, a longtime friend. It's unlikely that he'll run into trouble this time around. MIAs are no longer the issue they once were among the right, and, then as now, Democrats who are willing to ask the right questions are hard to find. "
Secret Agent Man - Iran-Contra operative Richard Armitage is now Colin Powell's No 2
In These Times, 5 March 2001

"The Christic Institute had this thing figured out. They filed suit in May of 1986, alleging that the Reagan administration, the CIA, this sort of parallel government was going on. Oliver North was involved in it, you had the Bay of Pigs Cubans that were involved in it down in Costa Rica, they had names, they had dates, and they got murdered. And the Reagan administration's line was, they're a bunch of left-wing liberal crazies, this was conspiracy theory. If you want to see what they really thought, go to Oliver North's diaries, which are public -- the National Security Archive has got them -- all he was writing about, after the Christic Institute's suit was filed, was how we've got to shut this thing down, how we have to discredit these witnesses, how we've got to get this guy set up, how we've got to get this guy out of the country... They knew that the Christic Institute was right, and they were deathly afraid that the American public was going to find out about it. I am convinced that the judge who was hearing the case was part and parcel to the problem. He threw the case out of court and fined the Christic Institute, I think it was $1.3 million, for even bringing the lawsuit. It was deemed 'frivolous litigation.' And it finally bankrupted them. And they went away. But that's the problem when you try to take on the government in its own arena, and the federal courts are definitely part of its own arena. They make the rules. And in cases like that, you don't stand a chance in hell, it won't happen."
Gary Webb Speaks
Parascope Report, 16 January 1999

"When the Nicaraguan contras began to covertly fund their war against the Sandanistas by selling drugs and guns to California street gangs, the Central Intelligence Agency turned a blind eye. While black neighborhoods were being ravaged by the crack cocaine plague, CIA operatives actively participated in this devastating drug explosion, protected from prosecution by a secret agreement between the Department of Justice and the CIA. Nevertheless, thanks to investigative journalists like Bob Parry and Gary Webb, the story got out. When Webb's 'Dark Alliance' series was released on the Internet by the San Jose Mercury News, the scandal ripped across USENET and the Web like a wildfire. Yet three years later, we're still fighting to get all the answers from a government that would prefer to flush the whole matter as quickly as possible. On January 16, 1999, Webb spoke to a packed house at the First United Methodist Church in Eugene, Oregon. Approximately 300 people listened with rapt attention as Webb recounted his investigation of the CIA's connections to contra drug trafficking. Webb's presentation was followed by an intense question-and-answer session, during which he candidly answered questions about the 'Dark Alliance' controversy, his departure from the San Jose Mercury News, and CIA/contra/crack secrets that still await revelation. It was a fascinating exchange packed with detailed information on this developing case. Webb spoke eloquently, with the ease and confidence of an investigator who has spent many long hours researching his subject, and many more hours working to share this information with the public. [At that meeting Webb said] "What I've attempted to demonstrate in my book was how the collapse of a brutal, pro-American dictatorship in Latin America, combined with a decision by corrupt CIA agents to raise money for a resistance movement by any means necessary, led to he formation of the nation's first major crack market in South Central Los Angeles, which led to the arming and the empowerment of LA's street gangs, which led to the spread of crack to black neighborhoods across the country, and to the passage of racially discriminatory sentencing laws that are locking up thousands of young black men today behind bars for most of their lives. But it's not so much a conspiracy as a chain reaction. And that's what my whole book is about, this chain reaction. So let me explain the links in this chain a little better..... In 1979 and 1980, the CIA secretly began visiting these [Nicraguan exile] groups that were setting up here in the United States, supplying them with a little bit of money, and telling them to hold on, wait for a little while, don't give up. And Ronald Reagan came to town. And Reagan had a very different outlook on Central America than Carter did. Reagan saw what happened in Nicaragua not as a populist uprising, as most of the rest of the world did. He saw it as this band of communists down there, there was going to be another Fidel Castro, and he was going to have another Cuba in his backyard. Which fit in very well with the CIA's thinking. So, the CIA under Reagan got it together, and they said, "We're going to help these guys out." They authorized $19 million to fund a covert war to destabilize the government in Nicaragua and help get their old buddies back in power. Soon after the CIA took over this operation, these two drug traffickers, who had come from Nicaragua and settled in California, were called down to Honduras. And they met with a CIA agent named Enrique Bermúdez, who was one of Somoza's military officials, and the man the CIA picked to run this new organization they were forming. And both traffickers had said -- one of them said, the other one wrote, and it's never been contradicted -- that when they met with the CIA agent, he told them, 'We need money for this operation. Your guy's job is to go to California and raise money, and not to worry about how you did it. And what he said was -- and I think this had been used to justify just about every crime against humanity that we've known -- 'the ends justify the means.'  Now, this is a very important link in this chain reaction, because the means they selected was cocaine trafficking, which is sort of what you'd expect when you ask cocaine traffickers to go out and raise money for you. You shouldn't at all be surprised when they go out and sell drugs. Especially when you pick people who are like pioneers of the cocaine trafficking business, which Norwin Meneses certainly was.... By 1985, the LA crack market had become saturated. There was so much dope going into South Central, dope that the CIA, we now know, knew of, and they knew the origins of -- the FBI knew the origins of it; the DEA knew the origins of it; and nobody did anything about it....  In 1987, the DEA sent undercover informants inside this drug operation, and they interviewed one of the principals of this organization, namely Ivan Torres. And this is what he said. He told the informant: 'The CIA wants to know about drug trafficking, but only for their own purposes, and not necessarily for the use of law enforcement agencies. Torres told DEA Confidential Informant 1 that CIA representatives are aware of his drug-related activities, and that they don't mind. He said they had gone so far as to encourage cocaine trafficking by members of the contras, because they know it's a good source of income. Some of this money has gone into numbered accounts in Europe and Panama, as does the money that goes to Managua from cocaine trafficking. Torres told the informant about receiving counterintelligence training from the CIA, and had avowed that the CIA looks the other way and in essence allows them to engage in narcotics trafficking.'...So, the one thing that I've learned from this whole experience is, first of all, you can't believe the government -- on anything. And you especially can't believe them when they're talking about important stuff, like this stuff. The other thing is that the media will believe the government before they believe anything. This has been the most amazing thing to me. You had a situation where you had another newspaper who reported this information. The major news organizations in this country went to the CIA, they went to the Justice Department, and they said, what about it? And they said, oh, no, it's not true. Take our word for it. And they went back and put it in the newspaper! .... And the other thing that came out just recently, which nobody seems to know about, because it hasn't been reported -- the CIA Inspector General went before Congress in March and testified that yes, they knew about it. They found some documents that indicated that they knew about it, yeah..... there was an agreement made in 1982 between Bill Casey [Dirctor of the CIA] -- a fine American, as we all know [laughter from the audience] -- and William French Smith, who was then the Attorney General of the United States. And they reached an agreement that said if there is drug trafficking involved by CIA agents, we don't have to tell the Justice Department. Honest to God. Honest to God. Actually, this is now a public record, this document. Maxine Waters just got copies of it, she's putting it on the Congressional Record.... The other thing about this agreement was, this wasn't just like a thirty-day agreement -- this thing stayed in effect from 1982 until 1995. So all these years, these agencies had a gentleman's agreement that if CIA assets or CIA agents were involved in drug trafficking, it did not need to be reported to the Justice Department. So I think that eliminates any questions that drug trafficking by the contras was an accident, or was a matter of just a few rotten apples. I think what this said was that it was anticipated by the Justice Department, it was anticipated by the CIA, and steps were taken to ensure that there was a loophole in the law, so that if it ever became public knowledge, nobody would be prosecuted for it. The other thing is, when George Bush pardoned -- remember those Christmas pardons that he handed out when he was on his way out the door a few years ago? The media focused on old Caspar Weinberger, got pardoned, it was terrible. Well, if you looked down the list of names at the other pardons he handed out, there was a guy named Clair George, there was a guy named Al Fiers, there was another guy named Joe Fernández. And these stories sort of brushed them off and said, well, they were CIA officials, we're not going to say much more about it. These were the CIA officials who were responsible for the contra war. These were the men who were running the contra operation. And the text of Bush's pardon not only pardons them for the crimes of Iran-contra, it pardons them for everything. So, now that we know about it, we can't even do anything about it. They all received presidential pardons... And we've got approximately a thousand pages of evidence of CIA drug trafficking on the public record finally.  That said, let me tell you, there are thousands of pages more that we still don't know about. The CIA report that came out in October was originally 600 pages; by the time we got ahold of it, it was only 300 pages... The question was, when did George Bush first know about this? The CIA, in its latest report, said that they had prepared a detailed briefing for the vice president -- I think it was 1985? -- on all these allegations of contra drug trafficking and delivered it to him personally. So, it's hard for George to say he was out of the loop on this one.... "
Gary Webb Speaks
Parascope Report, 16 January 1999

"The first question was about whether I ever touched on what was going on in the Golden Triangle. Fortunately, I didn't have to -- there's a great book called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, by Alfred McCoy, which is sort of a classic in CIA drug trafficking lore. I don't think you can get any better than that. That's a great reference in the library, you can go check it out. McCoy was a professor at the University of Wisconsin who went to Laos during the time that the secret war in Laos was going on, and he wrote about how the CIA was flying heroin out on Air America. That's the thing that really surprised me about the reaction to my story was, it's not like I invented this stuff. There's a long, long history of CIA involvement in drug traffic which Cockburn gets into in Whiteout.... Brewton wrote a book called The Mafia, CIA and George Bush. It's hard to find, but it's worth looking up if you can find it. It's all there, it's all documented. See, the difference between his story and my story was, we put ours out on the web, and it got out. Brewton's story is sort of confined to the printed page, and I think the Washington Journalism Review actually wrote a story about, how come nobody's writing about this, nobody's picking up this story. Nobody touched this story, it just sort of died. And the same thing would have happened with my series, had we not had this amazing web page. Thank God we did, or this thing would have just slipped underneath the waves, and nobody would have ever heard about it.... Bob Parry tells a story of being at a dinner party with Bobby Inman from the CIA, the editor of Newsweek, and all the muckity-mucks -- this was his big introduction into Washington society. And they were sitting at the dinner table in the midst of the Iran-contra thing, talking about everything but Iran-contra. And Bob said he had the bad taste of bringing up the Iran-contra hearing and mentioning one particularly bad aspect of it. And he said, the editor of Newsweek looked at him and said, "You know, Bob, there are just some things that it's better the country just doesn't know about." And all these admirals and generals sitting around the table all nodded their heads in agreement, and they wanted to talk about something else.  That's the attitude. That's the attitude in Washington. And that's the attitude of the Washington press corps, and nowadays it's even worse than that, because now, if you play the game right, you get a TV show. Now you've got the McLaughlin Group. Now you get your mug on CNN. You know. And that's how they keep them in line. If you're a rabble rouser, and a shit-stirrer, they don't want your type on television. They want the pundits."
Gary Webb Speaks
Parascope Report, 16 January 1999

"Yesterday I detailed one of a series of news reports about Richard Armitage, the nominee to be deputy secretary of state. Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson extensively reported in 1986 about Armitage's alleged connection with a Vietnamese woman. Armitage had written a letter on behalf of the woman during the time she was being investigated for participating in an organized crime gambling ring. That report contributed to Armitage twice having to withdraw from consideration for high-ranking positions in the first Bush administration. He simply could not get past Senate confirmation. But that was not all that helped derail Armitage back then. As the Associated Press reported on June 4, 1987, 'A drug warlord in Burma accuses Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard L. Armitage and others of drug trafficking to fund anti-communist operations, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported Thursday.' The AP story then stated, 'In a three-hour videotape interview smuggled out of Southeast Asia within the past week, Khun Sa said high-ranking American officials were involved in drug trafficking between 1965 and at least 1979.' This three-hour videotape was made by retired Army Green Beret Lt. Colonel James 'Bo' Gritz and then smuggled out of Burma. I have seen part of this tape – and it is chilling. It is now being sent to the FBI and to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be used during Armitage's confirmation process. Mr. Armitage denied any involvement in the drug trade. He called the allegations, according to AP, 'ludicrous and baseless.' He also was never charged with any crime based on these or other allegations. But Khun Sa, according to the AP story, 'said Armitage controlled the finances of the alleged American drug operation.' On the tape, one of Khun Sa's aides says, 'After the Vietnam War, Richard Armitage was a prominent trafficker in Bangkok. Between 1975 and 1979 he was a very popular trafficker. He was one of the embassy employees.' Armitage, in his denial, also denied being an 'embassy employee.' However, he does claim to have worked as a 'consultant' to the Defense Department working on Iran naval programs. An allegation of participation in 'drug trafficking', reported by AP, and another allegation of using his Pentagon office to help an alleged gambler, reported by Jack Anderson. No wonder he could not be confirmed by the U.S. Senate! Now, however, Colin Powell wants his 'best friend in the world' in the super-powerful position of deputy secretary of state. Why, if Armitage was not able to pass muster 12 years ago, should he make the grade this time?"
Why Taint the New Bush Administration?
NewsMax, 1 March 2001

"The men who perfected the guns-for-dope traffic moved to the Middle East as experts in the sale of sophisticated arms, protected by officials at the top in the Pentagon and CIA. Richard Armitage, now the key Pentagon official in counter-terror and covert operations is named consistently by investigators as the man who helped the drug warlords market their crops.... The most prominent name recurring in this [CIA drug tafficking] connection is Vice President George Bush. While he was CIA director, much of these activities blossomed, but more serious charges are being made by former intelligence officers ..... who fear that their institutions have been corrupted by a few self-proclaimed patriots."
BANK OF INTRIGUE
Toronto Sun, 13 August 1987

"After his appointment in 1981, Armitage began working in Southeast Asia to track down reports of MIAs [soldiers 'missing in action'] in Viet-Nam; [Ross] Perot suspected him of not doing enough. Last October, Perot met with Armitage at the Pentagon and bluntly demanded that he resign....... At the meeting, Armitage vigorously denied any implication that he had anything to do with an illicit arms or drug network, Perot then took his case to George Bush. The Vice President's office has confirmed that Perot raised 'what he considered to be evidence of wrongdoing ' by Armitage. Bush told Perot to go to the 'proper authorities.' So the billionaire called on FBI Director William Webster. Perot has also made at least one visit to the White House carrying a pile of documents. Yet he has received no support from the Reagan Administration. In fact, National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci in January called him in to ask him to stop pursuing Armitage....."
PEROT'S PRIVATE PROBES
Time Magazine, 4 May 1987

"Nothing - not even Ashcroft - raises so many warning flags about the intentions of the Bush administration than does the resurrection of this veteran of some of the sleaziest and most corrupt periods of American foreign policy, including the CIA-drug trade love fest in SE Asia and the Iran-Contra scandal. If we had a press and a Democratic Party worthy of their names, the Armitage appointment would be major news..."
'Behind the Bushes'
PROGRESSIVE REVIEW

"If the 9-11 Commission is really looking for a smoking gun, it should look no further than at Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad, the director of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) at the time. In early October 2001, Indian intelligence learned that Mahmoud had ordered flamboyant Saeed Sheikh - the convicted mastermind of the kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl - to wire US$100,000 from Dubai to one of hijacker Mohamed Atta's two bank accounts in Florida.... Mahmoud's involvement in September 11 might be dismissed as only Indian propaganda. But Indian intelligence swears by it, and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has confirmed the whole story: Indian intelligence even supplied Saeed's cellular-phone numbers. Nobody has bothered to check what really happened. The 9-11 Commission should pose very specific questions about it to FBI director Robert Mueller when he testifies this month. In December 2002, Graham said he was 'surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the [September 11] terrorists in the United States ... It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now.' He could not but be referring to Pakistan and Mahmoud. If Mahmoud was really involved in September 11, this means the Pakistani ISI -'the state within the state' - knew all about it. And if the intelligence elite in Pakistan knew it, an intelligence elite in Saudi Arabia knew it, as well as an intelligence elite in the US..... On September 10, the Pakistani daily The News reported that the Mahmoud visit to the United States 'triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council'. If he'd been to the National Security Council, he had certainly met Rice. Mahmoud did meet with his counterpart, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet. Tenet and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had been in Islamabad in May, when Tenet had 'unusually long' meetings with Musharraf. Armitage for his part has countless friends in the Pakistani military and the ISI. Mahmoud also met a number of high officials at the White House and the Pentagon and had a crucial meeting with Marc Grossman, the under secretary of state for political affairs. Rice maintains she did not meet Mahmoud then.... Million-dollar questions remain. Did Mahmoud know when and how the attacks of September 11 would happen? Did Musharraf know? Could the Bush administration have prevented September 11? It's hard to believe high echelons of the CIA and FBI were not aware of the direct link between the ISI and alleged chief hijacker Mohammed Atta. On October 7, Mahmoud was demoted from the ISI. By that time, Washington obviously knew of the connection between Mahmoud, Saeed Sheikh and Mohamed Atta: the FBI knew it.... as Asia Times Online has reported, Mahmoud did disappear. He lives in near seclusion in Rawalpindi....The families of September 11 victims, US public opinion, the demonized Islamic world, the whole world for that matter, all everybody wants to know is what really happened on September 11.... The genie - the crucial information - is still in the bottle. "
9-11 AND THE SMOKING GUN
Asia Times, 8 April 2004

"Tenet and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had been in Islamabad in May, when Tenet had 'unusually long' meetings with Musharraf. Armitage for his part has countless friends in the Pakistani military and the ISI."
9-11 AND THE SMOKING GUN
Asia Times, 8 April 2004

"Originally thought to be pursuing an aspect of the Richard Reid shoe bomber story it now seems more likely that Pearl was delving deep into the workings of the ISI according to Pakistani journalists quoted by the Times of India 11 March..... But the story does not end with the death of Daniel Pearl. Intriguingly it is precisely the same man used by General Mahmoud to wire money to 911 hijacker Mohammed Atta who has now been detained and tried for the murder of Pearl. More importantly, however, this does not explain why this young man - Omar Sheikh - was not previously detained when it became clear last October that he had wired $100,000 to Atta. This is a truly extraordinary circumstance given America's direct control over Musharraf and the CIA's own links with the ISI. Why did the US government not insist on Pakistan's detention of Sheikh once it became known that he was involved in the funding of lead hijacker Atta? Why was he allowed to roam free in Pakistan when the country was America's principal Asian ally in the 'war against terrorism'? Indeed, why is Sheikh still not being charged for his alleged involvement in the 911 attacks now that he is finally detained? Why isn't Armitage pursuing this? There is no outsider better placed than Armitage to command the system within Pakistan. According to a discussion paper produced by the India based South Asia Analysis Group (SAAG): 'Mr. Armitage, who had spent some years of his career in the CIA/DIA and holds the highest Pakistani civil decoration that could be awarded to a foreigner for his role during the Afghan war of the 1980s, has a large circle of friends in the Pakistani military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate.'"
'The Special Relationship' - Armitage And The UK National Security Adviser
What Did Britain Know About 911?
'Fight Smart', 28 August 2002

"So what was the UK's 'national security adviser' doing in America on Sept 11? Was his visit prompted by the terrorist threat that Tony Blair now confirms 'everybody knew' was being planned? Despite his de facto status as Blair's special envoy on foreign affairs and security matters the US State Department appointment records show no scheduled meetings for Manning with Secretary Powell himself during the days immediately prior to the attacks. Those records do, however, show that he was meeting with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage on September 10th. Armitage is second in command to Colin Powell who left for a trip to Peru later that day, meaning that the Bush administration's principal 'dove' was out of the country when the attacks happened. In Powell's absence 'when the storm breaks [on 911] Richard Armitage... is at its heart' according to the BBC's Edward Stourton (Radio 4, 27 August: 'With Us or Against Us'). So who is Richard Armitage? Described by Stourton as a 'bulldog diplomat', Armitage has had a 'colourful' previous history. This embraces alleged covert operations with the CIA, including illegal arms and drug running on behalf of the US government ...... However, Armitage's wider interests are especially pertinent to the situation that had developed in Afghanistan by the summer of 2001. As Armitage himself has publicly acknowledged the energy reserves of the Caspian Sea region are of great strategic importance to America and its allies in the industrialised world. But they also appear to be of some personal importance to Armitage himself. A report by the US National Bureau of Asian Research cites an article in the Washington Times 28 July 1997 which lists Armitage, along with Dick Cheney, as having business or consulting interests in the Caspian zone. It is also claimed that Armitage was contracted by US oil and gas corporation Unocal to work on Central Asia pipeline interests in 1997 when he was head of Armitage Associates (also at Armitage Associates was Peter Watson, previously Director of Asian Affairs at the National Security Council in the first Bush administration. Watson was appointed President of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) by George W. Bush in 2001. OPIC provides political risk insurance and loans to US companies operating overseas 'because it is in America's economic and strategic interest'. Since Watson's appointment, in a deal worth $350 million, Unocal has absorbed nearly the whole of the allocation of an OPIC joint initiative with the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency for US business investment in Indonesia . The allocation had been announced September 2001. The deal is despite Unocal's human rights record and allegations that State Department documents indicate the company's involvement in 'corruption, collusion and nepotism' in several billion-dollar power plant deals with the Suharto government. Similar allegations have also been made against Enron). The importance of Afghanistan in this context was spelt out in evidence given to a congressional hearing in 1998 by Unocal's Vice President for International Relations, John Maresca: 'Mr. Chairman, the Caspian region contains tremendous untapped hydrocarbon reserves......[one] option is to build a pipeline south from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. One obvious route south would cross Iran, but this is foreclosed for American companies because of U.S. sanctions legislation. The only other possible route is across Afghanistan, which has of course its own unique challenges..... From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders, and our company.....' Unfortunately efforts by the Bush administration to reach a deal with the Taliban over the proposed pipeline collapsed in the summer of 2001. No longer willing to tolerate an impasse the US government threatened Afghanistan with military action during at a meeting which the BBC reports took place in Berlin in July. According to one representative of Pakistan who attended the meeting a US attack on Afghanistan was already planned for October. Thanks to the special 'skills' of US diplomacy, therefore, it seems that the first overt provocation in the west's new war with the Taliban was made by the US in Berlin in July 2001, and not by al-Qaeda in New York on Sept 11. It is something of an understatement to say that in the history of international affairs it is not unknown for provocation to produce response. Given the threat made by the US in July, it would be reasonable to have expected trouble there onwards. The intelligence picked up by the British and other governments last summer would seem to confirm this. This brings us back to Sir David Manning's meeting in Washington with Armitage on September 10. Presumably Manning also had other meetings in Washington that day, although with whom it is not clear. Neither is the purpose of his visit. Was he in fact passing on specific intelligence information about the impending terrorist attacks? It is certainly possible. By coincidence or otherwise Newsweek magazine reported 24 September that on that same day 'a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.' It would be interesting to know what, if any, security issues relating to America where discussed by Manning during his pre-Sept 11 meetings in Washington and whether they involved any specific intelligence."
'The Special Relationship' - Armitage And The UK National Security Adviser
What Did Britain Know About 911?
'Fight Smart', 28 August 2002

STOP PRESS JUNE 2004 - NOW ARMITAGE WANTS VACANT CIA POST

"Washington on Friday was abuzz with speculation over who might succeed George Tenet as Director of Central Intelligence. The top candidate to take over the CIA is Porter Goss. He's a Republican congressman and chairman of the House Intelligence committee. Mr Goss used to be an intelligence officer himself and is well acquainted with the byways of legislation and politics. But another contender may be Richard Armitage.... Sources close to the intelligence community say Mr Armitage is known to want the CIA job."
Where now for the CIA?
BBC, 5 June 2004

"Tenet and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had been in Islamabad in May, when Tenet had 'unusually long' meetings with Musharraf. Armitage for his part has countless friends in the Pakistani military and the ISI."
9-11 AND THE SMOKING GUN
Asia Times, 8 April 2004

"Armitage has long and deep Pakistani intelligence connections. It would be reasonable to assume that while in Islamabad, Tenet, in what was described as 'an unusually long meeting,' also met with his Pakistani counterpart, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmad, head of the ISI. [Source: The Indian SAPRA news agency, May 22, 2001]"
A TIMELINE SURROUNDING SEPTEMBER 11TH
IF CIA AND THE GOVERNMENT WEREN'T INVOLVED IN THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS WHAT WERE THEY DOING?
From the Wilderness Publications, 911 Timeline

"ISI Chief Lt-Gen. [Ahmad] Mahmoud's week-long presence [immediately before 911] in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council. Officially, he is on a routine visit in return to CIA Director George Tenet's earlier visit to Islamabad. Official sources confirm that he met Tenet this week. He also held long parleys with unspecified officials at the White House and the Pentagon....... What added interest to his visit is the history of such visits. Last time Ziauddin Butt, Mahmoud's predecessor, was here, during Nawaz Sharif's government, the domestic politics turned topsy-turvy within days."
ISI chief's parleys continue in US
Karachi News, 10 September 2001

"....for the foreseeable future oil will remain an essential commodity. Greater attention must therefore be given to increasing supplies of oil in ways that diversify supplies from areas other than the Persian Gulf. The most promising new source of world supplies is the Caspian region, which appears to contain the largest petroleum reserves discovered since the North Sea. This geopolitical crossroad, which includes Iran, Russia, and a number of newly-independent states struggling with post-Soviet modernization and dangers of Islamic extremism, demands more attention by American policymakers."
AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTERESTS
A Report from The Commission on America’s National Interests, July 2000
Co-authored by Richard Armitage et al [pdf]

"....Enron secretly employed CIA agents to carry out its dealings overseas.... an FBI source told The Enquirer: 'Enron and Unocal dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Afghanistan and the Taliban. The pipeline would relieve our dependence on Saudi Arabia -- and Enron would make billions.'... The visit [to Texas in 1997 at the invitation of Enron and Unocal] was aimed at getting Taliban cooperation to build the pipeline, which would carry vast gas and oil deposits from [Caspian Sea States] Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Enron had exclusive contracts with the former Russian republics, according to another former Enron employee. The pipeline was to travel through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean."
Enron gave Taliban $millions
National Enquirer, Monday March 4, 2002

"Khalilzad is not the only person from the Unocal payroll to figure prominently in the new U.S. policy towards Afghanistan, both pre- and post- September 11. Richard Armitage, the current Deputy Secretary of State was also contracted by Unocal to work on Central Asia pipeline interests in 1997 when he was head of Armitage Associates."
Drillbits and Tailings
Volume 7, Number 1, January 31, 2002

"The U.S. military's use of private contractors for the sensitive task of wartime interrogation marks a sharp shift from traditional practices and is raising difficult issues of accountability as authorities investigate the alleged role civilian workers played in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.... J.P. 'Jack' London, the chairman and chief executive officer of CACI International Inc. - an Arlington, Va., company implicated in an internal Army investigation of abuses in Iraq - acknowledged in a phone interview yesterday that his company has done interrogation work for the U.S. government since the mid- to late 1990s.... More than 90 percent of CACI's business comes from its main customer - the Pentagon - and other federal agencies, according to reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Among the company's former directors is Richard L. Armitage, who resigned in 2001 to accept an appointment from President Bush as deputy secretary of state."
Contractors act as interrogators
Baltimore Sun, 4 May 2004

"Armitage is always one of those characters who just happen to be standing around when something BAD happens to America. Never anything good. ALWAYS something BAD. If he was a sailor, his shipmates would call him a Jonah."
(Internet forum response to above Baltimore Sun article)
Libertypost.org, 8 May 2004

"When the [911] storm breaks, Richard Armitage, Vietnam veteran and bulldog diplomat, is at its heart. The number two at the State department, he is minding the shop for Colin Powell, who is away on official business in Peru. [According to Armitage] 'I was seated in this very room, and my executive assistant came in and said one of the towers in New York had been hit by an aircraft. I ran in there, immediately picked up the phone and called to the assistant secretary for counter-terrorism. Even before the second airplane went in, I thought it was impossible to have this happen actually on a clear day and said, 'We've got a problem.' About that moment, the second aircraft went into the tower, which I watched on television. Immediately after that, I was told to go to the operations center here to get on call to the vice-president, and I spent the rest of the day in the ops center with the vice-president.'"
Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State
'With Us or Against US', Programme 1, BBC Radio 4, 20 August 2002
(note: the wording   'and I spent the rest of the day in the ops center with the vice-president' was not included in the broadcast radio transmission or in the transcript of the full programme, but is included in the BBC's unedited transcript of the solo Armitage interview)

"The Bush Administration faced deep embarrassment yesterday after having to admit that its claims for the 'success' of the war on terrorism were wrong.... The State Department’s annual terrorism report, Patterns of Global Terrorism, said that the number of attacks last year fell to a 34-year low, down by 45 per cent since 2001. Fewer people were being killed, injured and kidnapped, it said, and 'mild' terrorism events with no fatalities had dwindled from 231 in 2001 to 21 last year. Richard Armitage, General Powell’s deputy, said that the report provided 'clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight against global terrorism'. In fact, the number of terror attacks rose sharply during that period to a 20-year high. The report also failed to show that the worst kind of terrorist attacks had spread to at least ten countries. The errors were uncovered after Henry Waxman, a Democratic congressman from California, asked the Congressional Research Service to check the facts. Mr Waxman complained that the State Department had refused to address his concerns three weeks ago. He had told General Powell at the time: 'This manipulation may serve the Administration’s political interests, but it calls into serious doubt the integrity of the report.'”
US admits false terror statistics
London Times, 12 June 2004

President George W. Bush meets with Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (left) at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2003. White House photo by Susan Sterner - click here

"[In 2001] Pakistan and the United States have turned to a tried and trusted 'friend' in their efforts to exert control over events in Afghanistan - convicted Pakistani drug baron and former parliamentarian, Ayub Afridi.... Without fanfare, Afridi was freed from prison in Karachi last Thursday after serving just a few weeks of a seven-year sentence for the export of 6.5 tons of hashish, seized at Antwerp, Belgium, in the 1980s. No reasons were given for Afridi's release..... It is a matter of record that top US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials believed in the early 1980s that they would never be able to justify a multibillion-dollar budget from the government to provide support to the mujahideen in the fight against the Red Army. As a result, they decided to generate funds through the poppy-rich Afghan soil and heroin production and smuggling to finance the Afghan war. Afridi was the kingpin of this plan.... "
US turns to drug baron to rally support
Asia Times, 5 Dec 2001

"Neither does the last State Department report explain why Haji Ayub, a major Pakistani drug baron, who had voluntarily surrendered to U.S authorities, returned to Pakistan in 1999 after spending a mere three and a half years in a U.S prison ....The saga of Haji Ayub Afridi is a good illustration of the troubling links between traffickers and politicians in Pakistan, as well as the shady deals made by the United States with both sides..."
The World Geopolitics of Drugs - Annual Report 1998/9

"While we usually think of corruption in relation to police officers on the street and local prosecutors, the drug war has managed to offer incentives for corruption that reach to the very highest levels of the United States government. It is indeed ironic that the very agencies of government who are beating the drums loudest in the war on drugs have also established an infamous record of accepting assistance from and providing logistical support to some of the largest drug trafficking syndicates in the world."
CRJ 875: Crime and Public Policy
Module 5: The Failure of Drug Control Policies
Gary W. Potter, Professor, Criminal Justice and Police Studies
The Department of Criminal Justice and Police Studies
Eastern Kentucky University

More 911 Smoking Guns In The Direction Of Pakistan And The Bush Administration

"One of the most startling developments during the investigation occurred on July 22, 1999, at the TriBeca Grill in New York where Glass, wearing a [recording] wire, met with a man referred to in court documents as Abbas, believed to be a Pakistani government agent brought in by Malik. Glass was informed that they wanted to buy a whole shipload of weapons and they said it was for bin Laden. 'At the meeting Abbas said Americans are the enemy and they will have no problem blowing up this entire restaurant because its full of Americans,' Glass said. 'As we leave the restaurant, Abbas turns and says, 'those towers (the World Trade Center) are coming down.' Despite that information, available to the government two years before the World Trade Center attack, the FBI's terrorism task force didn't appear to take the threat seriously, Glass said."
Con Man Turned Patriot Tells All
Cox News Service, 2 August 2002

"Three months before September 11th, he [Glass] reached out to Florida State Senator Ron Klein and told him about threats against national security....  Klein contacted the office of Florida Senator Bob Graham, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. According to Graham spokesperson Jill Greenberg, case worker Charlie Yonts spoke with Glass last summer, prior to September 11th, Glass claiming he had at least six conversations with the case worker. And while we've been unable to corroborate the nature of those conversations, Greenberg confirms some of that information was passed along to the Senate Intelligence Committee.... Glass says that until recently no one from any intelligence agency had contacted him."
Tip Questions
Newschannel 5, NBC TV, Florida, 7 October 2002

"... we in turn gave that information [from Mr Glass] to the appropriate intelligence agency..... The acutal operations of collection of information, interviewing possible sources, is the responsibility of the F.B.I. if it's a domestic matter or the C.I.A. if it's foreign..... I had a concern about that and a dozen other pieces of information, uh, which were emminating in the summer of 2001.... I cannot say what agency but the agency that we felt was the most appropriate for the nature of the information that he was providing."
Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee
Tip Questions
Newschannel 5, NBC TV, Florida, 7 October 2002

".... I was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States. I am stunned that we have not done a better job of pursuing that to determine if other terrorists received similar support and, even more important, if the infrastructure of a foreign government assisting terrorists still exists for the current generation of terrorists who are here planning the next plots. To me that is an extremely significant issue and most of that information is classified, I think overly-classified. I believe the American people should know the extent of the challenge that we face in terms of foreign government involvement. That would motivate the government to take action.... I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing - although that was part of it - by a sovereign foreign government .... It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now. And, we need to have this information now because it's relevant to the threat that the people of the United States are facing today...."
Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee
Public Broadcasting Service, 11 Dec 2002

"Federal investigators are reexamining a recent arms smuggling case in Florida to determine whether agents of the Pakistani government tried to buy missiles and nuclear weapons components in the United States last year for use by terrorists or Pakistan's military. The original criminal case - a sting operation in which intermediaries allegedly tried to buy the weapons from [Randy Glass] a diamond thief-turned-informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms - attracted little public notice when arrests were made in June 2001. It resulted in a single guilty plea and the sealing of court files for another defendant..... One reason, informed sources said, was that prosecutors, in an unusual step, removed references to Pakistan from public filings because of diplomatic concerns.... "
U.S. Reopens Arms Case In Probe for Taliban Role
Washington Post, 2 August 2002

"....the Bureau [FBI] is being asked by the State Department not to pursue certain investigations or certain people or certain targets of an investigation--simply citing 'diplomatic relations.' And what happens is, instead of targeting those people who are directly related to these illegal terrorist activities, they just let them walk free.... I can tell you that there is so much involvement, that if they did let this information out, and if they were to hold real investigations--I'm not talking about this semi-investigation they're holding under this 'Joint Inquiry'--the pure show of the 9/11 Commission that has been getting the mass media's attention. If they were to do real investigations we would see several significant high level criminal prosecutions in this country..."
Sibel Edmonds Interview
Baltimore Chronicle, 7 May 2004

"Sheikh himself appears to be one of two key figures who might be able to give first hand testimony of central relevance to these matters. The other is the former head of the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, who was suddenly 'retired' in October 2001 once the Indian government and the FBI had reported their claimed discovery of Sheikh's involvement in the 911 attacks (they say that it was ISI chief General Mahmoud who instructed Sheikh to make a large money transfer to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta before the attacks. It is also now known that it was Mahmoud who was meeting with the Bush administration in Washington immediately before and during the attacks)."
The 911 Omar Sheikh Files
'Fight Smart', 2 January 2003

"'The complaints were ordered sanitized by the highest levels of government,' Glass said. The complaints were sealed, but Glass pointed out that his sentencing document June 15 [2001] listed threats against the World Trade Center and Americans. The [WTC] towers came down three months later."
Informant: Terrorists Warned Of WTC Collapse
WPBF Channel 25, 5 August 2002

"Randy Glass, the former Boca Raton con man who rubbed elbows with terrorists as a federal informant, testified Wednesday before congressional investigators looking into the terrorist attacks last year. What Glass has to say centers on his role in the probe that resulted in the West Palm Beach arrests of two men as arms brokers trying to finalize a deal to sell stinger antiaircraft missiles, nuclear components and other high-tech weaponry to terrorists linked in court documents to Osama Bin Laden. The special joint inquiry committee created by the House and Senate intelligence committees to review the events of Sept. 11 also is looking into intelligence communication breakdowns. In August 2001, just before Glass started to serve a seven-month sentence for a $6 million jewelry scam, he said he reached out to Sen. Bob Graham and U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler. He said he told staffers for both lawmakers that a Pakistani operative working for the Taliban known as R.G. Abbas made three references to imminent plans to attack the World Trade Center during the probe, which ended in June 2001. At one meeting at New York's Tribeca Grill caught on tape, Abbas pointed to the World Trade Center and said, 'Those towers are coming down,' Glass said. Glass also now says the State Department, in an effort to maintain good diplomatic relations with Pakistan, pulled the plug on the South Florida terrorist probe... Glass spent 3 1/2 hours under oath Wednesday. ....  'I told them I have specific evidence, and I can document it,' Glass said. ..... A federal prosecutor told a judge that Glass had been in contact with agents of the Taliban, the Afghan regime that protected bin Laden. "
Intelligence Panel Hears from Glass
The Palm Beach Post, 17 October 17, 2002

"I felt incredibly uncomfortable. Because I knew that something was going to happen.... I did know there was a plan of attack against the United States and that the World Trade Centre was mentioned."
Undercover FBI informant, Randy Glass,
whose warnings he says were passed onto the intelligence community three months before 911 via State and Federal  Senators
Newschannel 5, NBC TV, Florida, 7 October 2002

"[Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee] Graham acknowledged at news conference in Boca Raton last month that Glass had contact with his office before Sept. 11, 2001, about an attack on the World Trade Center."
Intelligence Panel Hears from Glass
The Palm Beach Post, 17 October 2002

"U.S. Rep. Ben Gilman has called for an investigation. 'The government knows about those involved in my case who were never charged, never deported, who actively took part in bringing terrorists into our country to meet with me and undercover agents,' Glass said."
Con Man Turned Patriot Tells All
Cox News Service, 2 August 2002

"Three professional staff members of the United State's Independent National Commission investigating the Sept 11 terrorist attacks to draw possible linkages are currently in Pakistan but their visit has been kept under wraps, Dawn has learnt.... The three professional staff members of the 10-member commission arrived here last week to meet officials in key government institutions and to interview individuals that they deem relevant to their inquiry....This is the first visit by staff members of the high-profile commission to Pakistan since it was formed in late 2002. The members of the commission have already received some official briefings in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, and have been travelling all over Pakistan. There has been no official word about their arrival from either a government office or the US embassy in Islamabad. None of the officials Dawn contacted were willing to even talk about the visit."
9/11 probe body's visit kept under wraps
Dawn (Pakistan), 28 October 2003

Bogus 'War On Terror' - Why They Are Really Doing It

".... it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation. The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested... Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).... Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).... The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests.... The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11.... Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance.... the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into 'tomorrow's dominant force' is likely to be a long one in the absence of 'some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor'. The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the 'go' button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement. The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies."
Michael Meacher, former Blair government Minister - 'This war on terrorism is bogus'
Guardian, 6 September 2003

GLOBAL ENERGY CRISIS LOOMING
Click Here

Ex-CIA Chief Predicted 'Peak' Oil Crisis In 1999 CFR Paper - Click Here

"But the age of cheap oil is over. If you doubt this, take a look at the BBC's online report yesterday of a conference run by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. The reporter spoke to the chief economist of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol. 'In public, Mr Birol denied that supply would not be able to meet rising demand ... But after his speech he seemed to change his tune: 'For the time being there is no spare capacity. But we expect demand to increase by the fourth quarter by 3m barrels a day. If Saudi does not increase supply by 3m barrels a day by the end of the year we will face, how can I say this, it will be very difficult. We will have difficult times.' The reporter asked him whether such a growth in supply was possible, or simply wishful thinking. 'You are from the press?' Birol replied. 'This is not for the press.' So the BBC asked the other delegates what they thought of the prospects of a 30% increase in Saudi production. 'The answers were unambiguous: 'absolutely out of the question'; 'completely impossible'; and '3m barrels - never, not even 300,000'. One delegate laughed so hard he had to support himself on a table.' And this was before they heard that two BBC journalists had been gunned down in Riyadh. The world's problem is as follows. We now consume six barrels of oil for every new barrel we discover. Major oil finds (of over 500m barrels) peaked in 1964. In 2000, there were 13 such discoveries, in 2001 six, in 2002 two and in 2003 none. Three major new projects will come onstream in 2007 and three in 2008. For the following years, none have yet been scheduled."
Break out the bicycles
Guardian, 8 June 2004

Including

The 'Arrest' Of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), Alleged 911 'Mastermind' - 9 June 2004
D-Day Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower Warned America - Saw Bush Era Coming - 5 June 2004
Ex-CIA Chief Predicted 'Peak' Oil Crisis In 1999 CFR Paper - 23 May 2004
Where Was The US Airforce On 911? - 25 April 2004
The Silence Of George Tenet - 911 And The Israeli-Russian Connection - 18 April 2004
From Macedonia To Enron - Rice Must Explain Pre-911 National Security Priorities - 5 April 2004
American Sponsored Islamic Jihad In Yugoslavia - 27 March 2004
Is Bush Camp Preparing Another 'October Surprise' For The 2004 US election? - 21 March 2004
911 Inquiry Must Investigate US Military Command, Intelligence Services, and Cheney - 24 Feb 2004
Hutton And The Libyan Black Gold Rush - 8 Feb 2004
Hussein Kamel And The Big Anglo-American Deception - 4 Jan 2004
Iraq: British Government admits to 'Operation Mass Appeal' - 28 Dec 2003
Iraqgate 2003 - Dr Kelly and 'Operation Rockingham' - 19 Oct 2003
A Vision For Transforming America - 24 March 2003
This Is Our Prime Minister - 23 Feb 2003
What Is Happening To Britain And America? - 9 Feb 2003
The 911 Omar Sheikh Files - 2 Jan 2003
'October Surprise 2002' - Life After The US Constitutional Coup - 31 Oct 2002
What Did Britain Know About 911? - 28 Aug 2002
Why Did Bush Not Act On Sept 11? - 9 May 2002
World Peace Offered From Hiroshima - 22 April 2002
Did Sept 11 victims die for Enron? - 8 March 2002
CIA provided funds to financiers of Sept 11 bomber - 18 Nov 2001

NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@btinternet.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex

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