4. America can be scary.

The audience cheered when the moderator asked Rick Perry about his record in executing more death-row inmates than any other governor in modern history. They cheered again when he said he hadn't lost a wink of sleep over the prospect that some of them might have been innocent. It was perhaps the strongest moment of Rick Perry's night. Shudder.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-09-12/cowan-the-romney-and-perry-show/2881690?section=world

 

Remember that Perry is a fundamentalist christian who has no qualm in flounting the 10 commandments... "You shall not kill..." This shows that Perry does not believe in what he claims his faith is... All he believes in is "POWER by any means". He lies ... and the faithfuls love and applaud the lie, for him to grab the "power".

From Paul KrugmanThe Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

 

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/the-years-of-shame/?src=me&ref=general

 

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Gus: if you wish to comment on this site about this post please do...

This September 11 marks the 38th anniversary of the CIA backed coup in Chile.

US henchmen killed Salvador Allende, the democratically elected President, and imposed a reign of terror on the Chilean people under ruling class US puppet Augusto Pinochet. 

These butchers on the payroll of American imperialism rounded up over 3000 leftists and executed them in the capital's main sports arena. Something like 15,000 died at Pinochet's hands in the years after.

This makes the main American political players in the coup - Nixon and Kissinger - the moral equivalent of Osama bin Laden.

This is not because they are inherently evil (although that helps) but because of the positions they held as the political defenders of US imperialism.

Bush used the terrorist attacks of September 11 on New York as justification for US state terrorism against Afghanistan and then Iraq. Reliable estimates are that over 1.5 million innocent Iraqis have died as a result of the American invasion. This is the equivalent of 9/11 every few weeks in Iraq.

In Afghanistan the total is tens of thousands.

Apparently we relativists should accept that the 3000 killed by terrorists in the US are of much greater importance than the millions killed by US terrorists.

Ah but that's the point, isn't it? The ruling class remembrance of 9/11 is designed as cover for US terrorism and to reinforce and strengthen the rule and sway of the war mongers.

The lessons of September 11 from Chile, the US & Australia

9/11: A Conspiracy Theory

You don't need a PhD to understand how terrorism works. It's in its name. By creating terror. The central point of terrorism is not the bombs or the explosions or the killings.

Terrorism is a calculated, rational tactic to create an emotional response. The best answer to terrorism is calm rationality, to refuse to co-operate with the enemy.

A great power cannot be provoked unless it allows itself to be.

The central flaw in the US response to the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of 10 years ago was that it gave America's enemies exactly what they sought.

The US allowed emotion to overwhelm calm analysis.

''We should not take ourselves psychological hostage,'' said Adam Garfinkle, editor of the American Interest magazine and a former speechwriter for Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

''Alas, that's precisely what the administration did allow.''

George Bush's deputy secretary of state at the time of the attacks, Richard Armitage, said the US abandoned its traditional hope and optimism: ''After 9/11 we found ourselves exporting something foreign from America: fear and anger.''

The greatest harm to America came not from the direct strike by the terrorists; it was self-inflicted by ill-judged US policy.

The costs were moral, strategic and economic.

As president, Bush made a speech declaring that ''torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere''. He deplored ''rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit . . . The US is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example.''

A CIA interrogator who'd been questioning a suspected al-Qaeda member wrote of the Bush statement: ''I found this speech infuriating. I knew what we were doing; our actions soiled what it meant to be American, perverted our oath, and betrayed our flag.''

The interrogator, Glenn Carle, had been required by his CIA superiors to send his prisoner to a friendly country to be tortured. Carle, after 23 years with the agency, has recorded his experience in a memoir, The Interrogator: A CIA Agent's true story.

But what of the claim by the US vice-president of the time, Dick Cheney, that ''enhanced interrogation techniques'' had extracted valuable intelligence from terrorists and saved lives? He is ''flat wrong'', according to Carle.

''In almost every case, the 'intelligence' obtained was faulty and subsequently discredited or suspect, or of secondary importance. The after-action assessments have mostly, albeit very quietly, found that we obtained little of critical benefit.''

Winning At A High Moral Cost

 

 

Eleven years after the horrible spectacle of the World Trade Center towers being struck by one 767 airliner and then another, then collapsing into nothingness, continues to capture our imagination like a fragment from a recurring nightmare.

Almost 3,000 lives were lost in New York City, Washington DC and on a lonely field in Pennsylvania. Had it stopped there we would by now have begun to move on and have rejected as mere hubris the claim that 9/11 changed everything.

Sadly the lives lost that day were just the beginning. The consequences of the 9/11 attacks, and our reactions to them, continue to ripple through communities around the world. Diligent intelligence work has helped prevent further attacks in the US and has thwarted numerous attempted attacks across the UK Europe and even Australia. But Al Qaeda and the ideas associated with Al Qaeda have not gone away and lives continue to be lost at an alarming rate. The magnitude of this often escapes us – while the West has been scarred by the spectre of terrorism, the vast majority of its victims are Muslims.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/international/eleven-years-since-911-and-terror-lives-on/

 

see image at top...

 

 

A US judge has dismissed claims against Saudi Arabia by families of victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks, who accused the country of providing material support to al-Qaeda.

US District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan, New York, said Saudi Arabia had sovereign immunity from damage claims by families of nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks, and from insurers that covered losses suffered by building owners and businesses. 

"The allegations in the complaint alone do not provide this court with a basis to assert jurisdiction over defendants," Daniels wrote.

The victims had sought to supplement their case with new allegations to avoid that result, including based on testimony they secured from Zacarias Moussaoui, a former al-Qaeda operative imprisoned for his role in the attacks, Reuters reported.

Daniels said even if he allowed the plaintiffs to assert those new claims, doing so would be "futile, however, because the additional allegations do not strip defendants of sovereign immunity".

Classified evidence

Saudi Arabia was dropped as a defendant before as judges said it was protected by sovereign immunity, but a federal appeals court in December 2013 reinstated it, saying a legal exception existed and the circumstances were extraordinary.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they would appeal. Sean Carter, one the lawyers, said he believed the ruling was also the consequence of the US government's decision to keep classified evidence that could be favourable to their cause.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/09/saudi-arabia-september-11-150929233729163.html

The laws of physics fail, and the world watches in awe as asymmetrical damage and scattered low temperature fires cause steel-framed buildings to collapse symmetrically through their own mass at free-fall speed, for the first time in history.

by Paul Craig Roberts

( September 11, 2015, Washington DC, Sri Lanka Guardian) Millions of refugees from Washington’s wars are currently over-running Europe. Washington’s 14-year and ongoing slaughter of Muslims and destruction of their countries are war crimes for which the US government’s official 9/11 conspiracy theory was the catalyst. Factual evidence and science do not support Washington’s conspiracy theory. The 9/11 Commission did not conduct an investigation. It was not permitted to investigate. The Commission sat and listened to the government’s story and wrote it down. Afterwards, the chairman and cochairman of the Commission said that the Commission “was set up to fail.” For a factual explanation of 9/11, watch this film.

Here is a presentation by Pilots For 9/11 Truth.

Here is an extensive examination of many of the aspects of 9/11.

Phil Restino of the Central Florida chapter of Veterans For Peace wants to know why national antiwar organizations buy into the official 9/11 story when the official story is the basis for the wars that antiwar organizations oppose. Some are beginning to wonder if ineffectual peace groups are really Homeland Security or CIA fronts?

The account below of the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory reads like a parody, but in fact is an accurate summary of the official 9/11 conspiracy theory. It was posted as a comment in the online UK Telegraph on September 12, 2009, in response to Charlie Sheen’s request to President Obama to conduct a real investigation into what happened on September 11, 2001.

The Official Version of 9/11 goes something like this:

Directed by a beardy-guy from a cave in Afghanistan, nineteen hard-drinking, coke-snorting, devout Muslims enjoy lap dances before their mission to meet Allah. 

Using nothing more than craft knifes, they overpower cabin crew, passengers and pilots on four planes.

And hangover or not, they manage to give the world’s most sophisticated air defence system the slip.

Unfazed by leaving their “How to Fly a Passenger Jet” guide in the car at the airport, they master the controls in no-time and score direct hits on two towers, causing THREE to collapse completely.

The laws of physics fail, and the world watches in awe as asymmetrical damage and scattered low temperature fires cause steel-framed buildings to collapse symmetrically through their own mass at free-fall speed, for the first time in history.

Despite their dastardly cunning and superb planning, they give their identity away by using explosion-proof passports, which survive the destruction of steel and concrete and fall to the ground where they are quickly discovered lying on top of the mass of debris.

Meanwhile in Washington

Hani Hanjour, having previously flunked Cessna flying school, gets carried away with all the success of the day and suddenly finds incredible abilities behind the controls of a jet airliner. 

Instead of flying straight down into the large roof area of the Pentagon, he decides to show off a little. 

Executing an incredible 270 degree downward spiral, he levels off to hit the low facade of the Pentagon. 
Without ruining the nicely mowed lawn and at a speed just too fast to capture on video.

In the skies above Pennsylvania

Desperate to talk to loved ones before their death, some passengers use sheer willpower to connect mobile calls that would not be possible until several years later.

And following a heroic attempt by some to retake control of Flight 93, the airliner crashes into a Pennsylvania field leaving no trace of engines, fuselage or occupants except for the standard issue Muslim terrorist bandana.

During these events President Bush continues to read “My Pet Goat” to a class of primary school children.

 

In New York 

World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein blesses his own foresight in insuring the buildings against terrorist attack only six weeks previously.

In Washington

The Neoconservatives are overjoyed by the arrival of the “New Pearl Harbor,” the necessary catalyst for launching their pre-planned wars.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

http://www.slguardian.org/911-fourteen-years-later/

 

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Note: picture at top Gus Leonisky from a picture taken by Gus in 1988.

 

A bill that would allow the families of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government has passed a key hurdle in the US Senate.

The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) now moves to the House of Representatives.

Saudi Arabia's foreign minister warned that the move could cause his government to withdraw US investments.

President Barack Obama said he will veto the bill, but a Democratic senator is "confident" he'd be overruled.

If it became law the legislation would allow victims' families to sue any member of the government of Saudi Arabia thought to have played a role in any element of the attack.

Saudi Arabia denies any involvement in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36316117

 

See also: http://ahtribune.com/in-depth/899-911-scam.html

It’s ten to one you read in my title the opener to a much cited quote about Nazi Germany. And two to one that even if you couldn’t identify the author, Pastor Martin Niemöller, you could give an approximation of how the rest of it goes: I did not speak out because I was not a socialist…a trade unionist…a Jew…

Though anchored in time and place, in history at its darkest, the pastor’s remorse – he was not speaking rhetorically but in penitence – points to a truth neither finite nor spatially bound but universal: what goes around comes around. To look the other way as others are cruelly treated is not only cowardly and immoral. It is dangerously myopic. No man, opined one of England’s finest poets, is an island. Ask not for whom the bell tolls.

Then they came for the intellectuals…

Mao targeted these. So, in more distilled and chilling form, did Pol Pot. And long before Hitler’s doctors injected the disabled – life unworthy of the name – with benzene prior to graduating to carbon monoxide in sealed vans, and longer still before his inner circle drew up its plans for a final solution to The Jewish Problem, thinkers were ridiculed, purged and if need be liquidated by the Third Reich. All regimes strive to channel, to set limits to acceptable thought within, their intelligentsia.

All regimes.

This, for reasons I’ll go into another time, is not hard. Independence of mind is rare, academia not excepted. Scholars have competence in forms of symbolic discourse learned by way of apprenticeships that confer useful reasoning tools and, at best, an obligation of truthfulness through evidence based argument. They do little, however, to nurture originality, far less a stance of fearless independence.

There are exceptions. Over decades half in/half out of academia I’ve known professors, and more junior academics, I deem astute and independent thinkers. They are a minority though. Academics are seldom stupid – though a few have left me wondering – but not always that bright either. Not in the terms I’ve set out, of truly independent mindedness and the capacity to set aside a-priori assumptions; to take risks, and think with startling originality.

(That capacity demands heart and soul as well as brain, and for the most mundane of reasons. Our institutionally fostered careerism, intensified by the marketisation of academia, begets cynicism. Which in turn begets, by way of strategies to ease cognitive dissonance, diminished rigour. First it comes for your promotional aspirations. Then for your critical faculties …)

All of which makes Professor Piers Robinson special in my book. Connected in more ways than one – he works at University of Sheffield, where I taught (without our paths crossing), and he too reviewed for OffGuardian the recently published 9/11 Unmasked – we met over coffee for the first and so far only time back in October.

It was a good meeting: cordial, focused and wide ranging within a coherent framework. We’d read one another’s work and, while his knowledge of our topics – Syria, 9/11 and corporate media – far exceeds mine, he was appreciative and supportive of those like me who seek to synthesise and popularise views and facts subversive of dominant messages too useful to vested interests, and with too many incongruities and roaring silences, for acceptance at face value by the critically minded.

In the hour and a half we spent together, before I had to dash for a train to London, his detailed grasp of those three topics at times left me struggling to keep up. We agreed on parting to make these meetings a monthly event, though my November move to Nottingham has put this on the back burner.

What I remembered most clearly was his severally repeated insistence that things are worse than we realise. He may have said this in respect of Syria. He certainly said it in respect of 9/11. Most of all though he said it in respect of corporate media, addressing a conclusion long held by me: that the false narratives on Russia and the middle east may be aggravated by the career cynicism (similar to that in academia) and lazy credulity of journalists, but has at root more to do with the limits of dissent set by market forces.

Though I don’t recall him disagreeing, he finds that view – of journalists as credulous rather than consciously propagandist – too charitable.[1] Nor is he the only one to say so. I’ve been taken to task on this by BTL comments on OffGuardian pieces I’ve written, and by a Media Lens editor who wondered if pulled punches on George Monbiot betray a mild form of Stockholm Syndrome. At any rate, this recurring claim by Piers Robinson – that things are worse than we realise – is what I most recollect from our espresso fuelled engagement in October.

(In referring, amongst other things, to media infiltration by intelligence services, he cited his own experience. That said, unswerving backing by BBC and Guardian – Independent to lesser extent – of the West’s wars on the global south, and relentless Russia baiting, should in any case caution the open minded against slamming the door on such a possibility.)

I took it personally, therefore, when I was alerted – through a FB post by Elizabeth Woodworth, co-author of two books reviewed by me on this site and in OffGuardian, to a Huffington Post assault on Piers Robinson three days ago, on December 7. Indeed, the vitriolic tone – coupled with too many appeals to authority, too few to evidence – would have had me penning a swifter response, on this site and on the day, had I not been taken up with concerns that have kept me from writing for too long. Fortunately, Elizabeth has published her own on-the-day response, in the form of this open letter to HuffPo editor Jess Brammar and feature writer Chris York.

I do not know what happened on September 11, 2001, Robinson’s position on which is the thrust of HuffPo’s attack. I do know I was way too quick to condemn, on logical rather than empirical grounds, all 9/11 Truthers. Most inexcusably, I confused a marxist view – that conspiracy is not needed to explain the demonic logic of capital in the age of imperialism – with the non sequitur that 9/11 could not have been a false flag operation.

I ain’t saying it was, mind. Just that I can no longer – due to Elizabeth Woodworth’s and David Ray Griffin’s book on the subject[2] – rule it out. Actually that’s too weak. I can say emphatically that whatever did happen on 9/11, the official account by the National Institute of Standards & Technology – a US government inquiry accorded impartial and unimpeachable status by the HuffPo hatchet piece – is so riddled with flaws, inconsistencies and refusals to address hard evidence (indeed, in places with active concealment of the stuff) as to invite accusations of “coincidence theorist” and “pathologically credulous” on those who see NIST as fair-minded investigation, Truthism as the preserve of a lunatic fringe.

But back to that HuffPo piece. Do read it. And Elizabeth Woodworth’s open letter. Then, if you’re in the mood for more, try the Media Lens book, reviewed here, Propaganda Blitz. Might I draw your particular attention to its definition of propaganda blitzes?

…fast moving attacks … communicated with high emotional intensity and moral outrage, apparently supported by an informed corporate media/academic/expert consensus [and] reinforced by damning condemnation of anyone daring even to question the apparent consensus.

Which is as much as I have to say on the matter. For now.

NOTES:-

1. I’m inclining to the view that media conditions – in the context of declining revenues, of permanent war on the global south, and of looming strife at home – beget a third and hybrid position; an uneasy blend of naive but self serving acceptance of authority, with cultivated distaste for any line of inquiry that might challenge its core premises.
2. A further nail in the coffin of my refusal to give Truthism time of day was encountered just days ago. I consider the chapter on put-option, call-option and short selling in the days prior to 9/11 the weakest link in the powerful case assembled by Griffin and Woodworth. That chapter is in my view too slim to make the case. More detailed consideration of this aspect, however, is given in two linked pieces written in 2011 for Foreign Policy Journal by Mark Gaffney. Highly recommended for its impeccable substantiation. As, indeed, is G & W’s book

Read more:https://off-guardian.org/2018/12/12/first-they-came-for-the-socialists/

Image from the Glorious Useless Gus' Picture Library (250,000 pictures)...

 

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Almost four years after Sandra Bland was stopped by a Texas state trooper and then found dead in a jail cell three days later, cellphone video of the encounter taken by Bland herself has been released for the very first time, leading her family to call for a new investigation.

On July 10, 2015, the 28-year-old Chicago native was driving from Illinois to Texas to start a new job at Prairie View A&M University, her alma mater, when she was pulled over 50 miles northwest of Houston in Waller County by state trooper Brian Encinia for improperly signaling a lane change.

​She was detained after being arrested for allegedly becoming confrontational and posing a threat to Encinia's safety. Three days later, she was found hanged in her Houston jail cell. Her death was deemed a suicide, although her family maintains that Bland wouldn't have killed herself.

Before Bland's cellphone footage was released by Dallas television station WFAA-TV and the Investigative Network Monday, the only video evidence of the encounter was dashboard camera video from Encinia's car.

In the 39-second video from Bland's vantage point, she can be heard asking Encinia, "Why am I being apprehended?" as she attempts to film him. Moments later, Encinia aggressively opens Bland's car door, draws his stun gun and repeatedly yells at her to "get out of the car" while threatening to "light [her] up" for not putting out a cigarette she was smoking.

​After Bland exits her car, she continues recording Encinia. Her recording captures no actions that could be construed as a threat to Encinia's safety, as he claimed at the time.

"My safety was in jeopardy at more than one time… I had a feeling that anything could've been either retrieved or hidden within her area of control. My primary concern was with that purse, with her console, as far as being any kinds of weapons or drugs," Encinia said at the time.

However, the footage Bland captured makes it glaringly clear that she didn't reach for anything in the car during their encounter, as she was using her hands to hold her phone to tape Encinia. In fact, it appears the opposite, with Bland's life the one in danger. 

After Bland exits the car, Encinia demands she get off her phone, while still pointing the stun gun at her.

"I'm not on the phone. I have a right to record. This is my property," Bland responds, which reveals that Encinia knew at the time that he was being recorded by Bland.

The end of the video from Bland's point of view shows her filming the ground and her feet, before she abruptly stops recording. Footage taken from Encinia's dashboard shows her putting her phone down on her car before the video ends.

Following the incident, Bland's family filed a wrongful death suit against Waller County and the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), reaching a $1.9 million settlement in 2016.

In January 2016, a grand jury charged Encinia with making a false statement on Bland's arrest report, which could have earned him up to one year in jail. However, the charge was later dropped when he promised to surrender his law enforcement license and "not pursue or engage in employment, in any capacity, with law enforcement," Sputnik previously reported.

The Investigative Network also released a video showing Bland's family and their attorney, Cannon Lambert, watching the cellphone footage for the first time. 

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/society/201905071074794967-footage-taken-by-sand...

 

 

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Futurist Who ‘Predicted’ 9/11 Says Trump Would Win 2020 In Time for ‘Global Crash’© AP Photo / David Goldman

 

 

An Australian national who claims to have predicted many international political and financial events, also predicts the world will see an assassination of an undisclosed world leader using drone technology in the next three years.

The next US president will most likely face a “global crash,” says Dr. Richard Hames – an Australian man who describes himself as an “anticipatory futurist” and claims that in 1998 he predicted the 9/11 plane attacks on the World Trade Center. 

He also says that an unnamed prominent world leader will be assassinated using drone technology within three years, and it will spark a global outcry, according to a report by News.com.au.

Hames says he is “surprised [drone assassination] hasn’t happened already,” the report says, citing last year’s event, in which a drone rigged with explosives almost killed Venezuela’s President Nicholas Maduro.

“There is now the technology to really monitor almost anyone in the world at any time, especially if you’re carrying a mobile phone, and deliver a toxic poison to anyone at all,” he says, according to the report.

“I think we’re going to see that very soon, especially given the antagonism between some world leaders and the difficulties between Israel and Palestine and now Iran and the US. The Middle East is just ripe for such an event.”

According to the self-described futurist, US President Donald Trump is likely to win the next presidential election and continue to lead the US in his characteristic ways. Hames justifies his prediction by pointing out that the Dems are in disarray and that the US economy is “going better than anyone expected.”

“At this stage Donald Trump will probably win the 2020 election and continue in his current manner of tough talk in the form of bluff and counterbluff,” he says.

Speaking on Trump and the Middle East, he also says that a war with Iran is possible but “hinges on two factors,” those being “whether John Bolton is ruthless enough to organize a false flag attack on US assets, and whether pressure from Netanyahu persuades Trump to turn Iran into a failed state at war with itself along ethnic and sectarian lines so that it no longer poses a threat to Israel.”

Trump’s victory, however, is going to come right ahead of a “second financial crisis,” which Hames believes is the consequence of the same dynamics that led to the 2008 global financial crisis, the report says.

“Since the global financial crisis, none of the structural dynamics have changed, in fact I think they’re getting worse,” Hames said. “There is going to be a global crash by the end of next year.”

On his website, Hames is said to have predicted a possible plane attack on World Trade Center in New York, as well as such major global events as the Arab Spring and the Global Financial Crisis. The website says Hames provides consulting to “governments and business corporations.” His newest predictions are a promotion of his tour around Australia that will take place between July and August this year, the News.com.au says.

 

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/viral/201907181076279472-futurist-who-predicted-911-says-trump-would-win-2020-in-time-for-global-crash/

 

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Any fool can predict something bad will come out of what we do. Why? Because we are fools and we know our limits and the parameters of our lunacy. This is religious hubris exploited with an economic and political artistic buggery. But one thing for sure is (or is it?). With Donald trump at the helm of USS Titanica, we only can hope that Rand Paul will do a wedgie to Donald's undies. In terms of US presidents being assassinated or nearly assassinated, the figures are predictable for the next ones... Basically, secretly, all US presidents have been targeted and the proportion of success is around 9 percent. 

The timing of the next war is impossible to gauge because Trump is a loonatic working on gut instinct whether he had prunes for dessert or not, the night before. Yes, technology of drone and poisoned umbrellas, like the "Game of Drones" has changed the dynamics of how to assassinate someone, but the counter-actions have also improved. Donald delivered the 4th July address from behind bullet-proof glass (or was it polycarbonate?) for good reasons. He did not trust the secret service to eliminate all threat directed at his dorky person... Yes, we know, Democrat Presidents are easier to top off.

Putin warned Bush about impeding attack TWO DAYS before 9/11 – ex-CIA analyst

Russian President Vladimir Putin had called his US counterpart George W. Bush two days before the 9/11 attacks in 2001, warning about an imminent terrorist plot coming from Afghanistan, a former CIA analyst has revealed.

The urgent warning coming from the Russian leader is mentioned in the book ‘The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe,’ released earlier this week and written by by George Beebee, a senior Bush-era CIA analyst.

Putin had telephoned President Bush two days before the attacks to warn that Russian intelligence has detected signs of an incipient terrorist campaign, ‘something long in preparation,’ coming out of Afghanistan.

The revelation by the former CIA operative appears to be yet another proof that Washington has been repeatedly warned about the attacks that ultimately happened on September 11, 2001.

While the existence of a warning from Moscow has been public knowledge for years – senior Russian intelligence officials spoke about them shortly after the attacks – Beebee’s book suggests that it was not limited to exchange between the intelligence agencies, and that Bush was warned by Putin personally.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/468133-putin-warned-bush-911/

 

 

 

 

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...

In addition to the manipulation of the official 9/11 story by lawyers, earlier the U.S. mass-media had spun the array of in-flight 9/11 cellular telephone calls so comprehensively that even U.S. prosecutor Raskin believed that they had occurred. He expounded them to the jury, and the Associated Press passed on his words to the world. Yet his Moussaoui trial evidence proved that many of the cell- phone calls he brandished had not taken place. The U.S. prosecutor was deluded and the government’s conspiracy theory lay in shreds on the court-room floor.

This was in spite of the showmanship used at the trial. For example, prosecutors played to the jury the cockpit voice recording (CVR) alleged to have been retrieved from the mangled and buried wreckage of Flight 93 (that nobody outside the secret state had seen). Passenger voices were heard shouting outside the cockpit (although normally only the pilots’ voices were recorded). The drama of shouting pilots and their chillingly cool rogue replacements was played out on high-tech equipment: “As jurors heard the cockpit recording Wednesday, they watched a color video showing a transcript, synchronized with the voices and the plane's instrument readings of its speed, altitude, pitch and headings.” There was no mention of the culminating eight minutes of the recording transcript that were mostly marked “unintelligible”. No mention of the original view that the CVR recording solved nothing. No one explained to the jury how Flight 93’s rogue pilot could have obtained permission from Reagan International airport air-traffic controllers to change the flight plan and fly towards Washington D.C.

 

Read more:

http://www.consensus911.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Rowland_Morgan_20...

 

 

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From Kevin Ryan

 

In my book Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects, a case is made for the investigation of nineteen people who were in position to do everything that was needed to affect the crimes. These legitimate suspects can be compared to the nineteen young Arabs who were accused of the crimes yet who did not have the means or opportunity to accomplish most of what happened that day.

The following seven questions should be asked when considering suspects. For each question, my nominees are described.

1. Who could have prevented U.S. intelligence agencies from tracking down and stopping the alleged hijackers before 9/11?
   • Louis Freeh was Director of the FBI for the nine years leading up to 9/11. Under Freeh’s leadership, the FBI failed miserably at preventing terrorism when preventing terrorism was the FBI’s primary goal. During this time the actions of FBI management suggest that it was facilitating and covering-up acts of terrorism. After 9/11, Freeh went on to become the personal attorney for Saudi Arabian ambassador Prince Bandar and a director for a company linked to 9/11 insider trading.
   • As Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DCI) from 1997 to 2004, George Tenet led an agency that botched and bungled its duties related to counterterrorism. The evidence suggests that, as with Louis Freeh and the FBI, at least some of those failures were intentional. Tenet had developed secret paths of communication with Saudi authorities and he appears to have disrupted plans to capture or investigate al Qaeda suspects.
   • Richard Clarke was appointed U.S. “Counterterrorism Czar” by President George H.W. Bush in1992 and he held that position until after the 9/11 attacks. Clarke was also a member of the highly secret Continuity of Government planning group along with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and he implemented that secret plan for the first time on 9/11. He was a personal representative of the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a country that financed terrorism and had many ties to 9/11. Clarke predicted terrorist attacks on Washington and New York and, through tipping off his friends in the UAE, was behind the failure of two CIA attempts to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden. On 9/11, he led the secure White House videoconference that failed to respond to the attacks.
   • Richard Armitage was a special operations soldier, long-time covert operative, and a member of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). On 9/11, Armitage was Deputy Secretary of State and, in this role, he implemented an express approval program that provided visas to the alleged 9/11 hijackers. On 9/11, he was involved in the secure videoconference run by Richard Clarke that failed to respond to the hijacked airliners.

1. Who could have disabled the systems in place to prevent hijackings that should have been effective?
   • On 9/11, General Michael Canavan was in the role of hijack coordinator for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) but he was mysteriously missing that morning. Canavan’s role was most responsible for communications between the FAA and the military and his absence was critical to the failure of air defenses. Having only started as FAA’s hijack coordinator just months earlier, Canavan left the position in October 2001. According to an FAA intelligence employee, Canavan started his job by running training exercises that were “pretty damn close to the 9/11 plot.”
   • Duane Andrews, a long time protégé of Dick Cheney, was a leading expert on the defense systems that failed on 9/11. At the time, he led the company Science Applications International (SAIC) that created the national databases to track and identify terrorists, supplied U.S. airports with terrorism screening equipment, predicted and investigated terrorist attacks against U.S. infrastructure including national defense networks and the WTC, helped create the official account for what happened at the WTC both in 1993 and after 9/11, was a leader in research on thermitic materials like those found in the WTC dust, led the robotics team that scoured the pile at Ground Zero using equipment capable of eliminating explosives, and provided the information to capture the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
   • Benedict Sliney was the FAA’s Command Center national operations manager on 9/11. It was his first day in the job, having just left a lucrative law career defending Wall Street financiers. Despite his lack of experience, his FAA superiors deferred to him as the attacks proceeded and allowed him to take charge of the response to the hijacked airliners. Sliney’s failure to respond effectively on the day of the attacks, allegedly not even knowing how to respond, contributed significantly to the failure of the national air defenses.

1. Who could have disabled the U.S. chain of command that should have immediately responded to the attacks but did not?
   • Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was in charge of U.S. defenses on 9/11. After the Pentagon was hit, Rumsfeld wandered out to the parking lot for approximately 30 minutes. His presence there showed that he was not concerned about other planes that were reported as hijacked, as if he knew what to expect. Rumsfeld did not concern himself with the work of his direct subordinate, NORAD Commander Ralph Eberhart, and he did not do his job to ensure the nation’s air defenses. Rumsfeld and his Defense department later failed to cooperate with 9/11 investigations.
   • Vice President Dick Cheney was in charge at the White House on 9/11 and is known to have been the primary decision maker that day. In the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, Cheney gave instructions that appear to have directed a stand down of air defenses as well as an order to shoot down United Flight 93. Cheney later worked to prevent any investigation into 9/11 and led a campaign of lies to start the Iraq War.

1. Who could have disabled the U.S. national air defenses that should have responded effectively and intercepted some, if not all, of the hijacked aircraft?
   • Ralph Eberhart, the commander of NORAD on 9/11, sponsored the highly coincidental military exercises (i.e. war games) that obstructed the military response. Twelve hours before the attacks, Eberhart apparently ordered the defense readiness alert system Infocon to its least protective level, making it easier to hack or compromise the defense computer networks. Failing in his duties to protect the nation while giving orders that further prevented response, Eberhart later lied to Congress about the military’s knowledge of the hijackings.
   • As a special agent in charge for the Secret Service, Carl Truscott supervised all protective matters relating to the president, the first family, and the White House. The response of the Secret Service to the 9/11 attacks suggests foreknowledge of the events because the agency failed to protect the president from the obvious danger posed by terrorists. Combined with the failure of the Secret Service to follow-up on offers of air support from Andrews Air Force Base, this led to the suspicion that the agency was complicit in the attacks.

1. Who could have caused three WTC skyscrapers to fall through the path of what should have been the most resistance?
   • Brian Michael Jenkins, as deputy chairman of Crisis Management for Kroll Associates, played a leading role in planning for terrorist events at the WTC, including having reviewed the possibility of airliner crashes into the towers. A special operations soldier and long-time right-wing political advisor, Jenkins had been accused of implementing a “terror war” in Central America during the 1980s.
   • Wirt Walker was named a 9/11 insider trading suspect in previously classified 9/11 Commission documents. Walker’s company Stratesec provided security services for the WTC, United Airlines (which owned two of the planes hijacked on 9/11), and Dulles Airport (where American Airlines Flight 77 took off that day). Stratesec held its annual meetings in offices leased by Saudi Arabia and Walker also ran an aviation company in Oklahoma at an airport that was associated with the alleged hijackers.
   • Barry McDaniel was the chief operating officer of Stratesec. McDaniel was in charge of WTC security in terms of what he called a completion contract, to provide services up to the day the buildings fell down. He is also an Iran-Contra suspect and previously worked for companies that conducted covert operations, like Sears World Trade and The Vinnell Corporation. After 9/11, McDaniel went on to start a business with Dick Cheney’s former business partner, Bruce Bradley.
   • Rudy Giuliani was Mayor of New York City on 9/11. He and his staff had foreknowledge that the WTC Towers would fall when no one could have predicted such a thing. Giuliani was also responsible for the destruction of critical WTC evidence at Ground Zero. In a crime that continues to take lives, he told people in the area that the air was safe to breathe, when it was not, in order to speed the removal of evidence.
   • L. Paul Bremer’s career with the State Department and as managing director of Kissinger Associates led to him becoming, like Jenkins, one of few leading experts on terrorism before 9/11. On the day of 9/11, Bremer had an office in the South Tower of the WTC and was working for Marsh & McLennan, a company that occupied all the impact floors in the North Tower. Also associated with a company that had patented a thermite demolition device, Bremer was one of the first people to provide the official account for what happened on television that morning.

1. Who could have coordinated an attack against the Pentagon that struck the exact spot that had just been renovated while allowing all Pentagon leadership to escape unharmed?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdGJQgEMnxI

 

“But someone would have talked,” say the self-styled skeptics who believe the government’s official conspiracy theory of 9/11. But there’s a problem with this logically fallacious non-argument. “Someone” did talk. In fact, numerous people have come out to blow the whistle on the events of September 11, 2001, and the cover-up that surrounds those events. These are the stories of the 9/11 Whistleblowers.

 

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After making a mistake in declassifying a document on the role of the Saudis in the 2001 attacks, the FBI released the name of a kingdom diplomat: Mussaed al-Jarrah. He is believed to have helped several hijackers.

 

Almost twenty years after the tragedy, the news could completely revive the various investigations into the attacks carried out on American soil on September 11, 2001. Indeed, our colleagues from Yahoo News across the Atlantic revealed on May 13 the name of a Saudi diplomat suspected of having supported two of the hijackers of this disastrous Tuesday: Mussaed Ahmad al-Jarrah.

 

Official of the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, assigned to the Embassy of the Kingdom in the United States between 1999 and 2000, the man is implicated in a testimony before the Federal Court, under oath, and dated April 13, from Jill Sanborn, deputy director of the FBI counterterrorism division.

 

This revelation comes as families of victims wage a fierce fight against the American administration in order to declassify documents proving, according to them, the role of support of the Wahhabi Kingdom to the hijackers, members of the terrorist organization al- Qaeda, 15 of 19 of whom were Saudi.

 

An FBI blunder Spotted by a Yahoo News reporter, al-Jarrah's name should never have appeared in the declassified version of the statement. Systematically redacted, the identity of the Saudi is only revealed in one place, on page 7, presumably an oversight by Jill Sanborn’s lawyers.

 

 

Find out more about RT France: https://francais.rt.com/international/75107-diplomate-saoudien-mis-cause...

 

 

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Former FBI agent Mark Rossini talks about the Sept. 11 hijackers' movements in the U.S., including in New Jersey, and says that 9/11 could have been prevented.

 

Exclusive: New FBI documents link Saudi spy in California to 9/11 attacks - Mike Kelly

MIKE KELLY | NorthJersey.com

 

Soon after the 9/11 attacks two decades ago, the FBI quietly launched an investigation into a seemingly obscure Saudi Arabian government bureaucrat in Southern California.

The man claimed to be nothing more than a Saudi aviation official who innocently happened to befriend two Islamic jihadists in the months before they carried out the 9/11 attacks. 

That story now appears to be false. The alleged aviation official was really a Saudi spy who reported directly to a Saudi prince who happened to be the kingdom’s influential ambassador in Washington and a close friend of President George W. Bush and other top U.S. government officials.  

The FBI concluded five years ago that there was a "50/50 chance" that this Saudi spy knew ahead of time that the two Islamists he befriended were about to join the plot to hijack commercial jetliners and crash them into buildings in what turned out to be America's deadliest terrorist attack. But the FBI refused to go public with its findings — until now. 

The story of the spy and the ambassador-prince emerged in recent days as the centerpiece of a startling series of revelations in a newly declassified FBI report that could shed light on a perplexing mystery that has long shadowed the 9/11 investigation:

• Did Saudi government officials play a role in America’s deadliest terror attack?
• If so, what sort of role?
• And who else was involved?

While heavily redacted, the report offers the most direct link yet between the Saudi government, its secretive royal family and the team of 19 operatives of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terror network who hijacked four jetliners on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorists crashed two jetliners into New York’s World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon in Northern Virginia and a fourth, which was reportedly headed to the U.S. Capitol, into a farm field in Pennsylvania. 

Nearly 3,000 people died in that mass murder-suicide scheme. But for two decades, a major question has shadowed the inquiry into how a band of 19 Islamic extremists pulled it off: Did the Saudi government offer assistance to the terrorists?

Mike Kelly: The FBI begins to open its files on Saudi links to 9/11. What do they show?

Saudi spy connections detailed

 

A 510-page secret FBI report, written in 2017 and declassified last week without any fanfare by the FBI or Justice Department, concludes that the California-based Saudi spy, Omar al Bayoumi, not only helped several 9/11 hijackers to find housing in San Diego, but that there was a “50/50 chance” he “had advanced knowledge” of their deadly plans.

For years, top FBI leaders and Justice Department officials kept this potentially explosive information secret, refusing to tell Congressional investigators, the 9/11 Commission and the more than 10,000 American citizens who had signed on to a massive federal lawsuit that seeks to link Saudi officials to 9/11.

The findings in the FBI report are coming to light just as the Biden administration is reportedly reaching out to several oil producing nations — including Saudi Arabia — to increase production and help curtail rising gas prices across the United States. Whether the FBI’s report will impact negotiations with Saudi oil officials remains to be seen. But for decades, critics have pointed to Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves and their importance to the economies of many western nations as a reason the U.S. has not pushed harder for more information on alleged Saudi links to 9/11 and other Islamist-based terrorist attacks.  

 

Before the 9/11 attacks, the FBI report says, Bayoumi was on the payroll of Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, the kingdom’s influential U.S. ambassador who was so close to the Bush administration and visited the White House so often that he was nicknamed “Bandar Bush.” 

The FBI concluded that Bayoumi regularly passed intelligence findings to Bandar. But the report does not say whether Bayoumi told Bandar that he had met with two members of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terror network who had flown to California in early 2000 to begin preparations for attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Related: 9/11 hijackers were 'hiding in plain sight' before the 2001 attacks. How did they do it?

Bayoumi helped the two find an apartment in San Diego. He also introduced them to several members of a Saudi-financed mosque in Los Angeles.

The two al-Qaeda operatives later made their way to northern New Jersey, where they met with other 9/11 conspirators, rented cars, opened bank accounts and postal boxes, exercised at a local gym and hung out at Macy's and other stores at the Willowbrook Mall in Wayne. 

The FBI report does not say whether Bayoumi knew they left California — or, if he did, whether he offered them advice on how to travel to New Jersey. Nor does the report say whether Bayoumi ever told Prince Bandar whether he knew about the 9/11 attacks before they took place.

Compiled after years of outspoken concerns and criticism from 9/11 victims about a possible Saudi connection to the plot, the report and its findings were kept secret by FBI and Justice Department officials until late last week. The report was released as part of an ongoing executive order by President Joe Biden last September to declassify the FBI’s trove of 9/11 investigative files.

 

In the days leading up to the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks last September, Biden had been under intense pressure by 9/11 victims and their relatives, along with several key members of Congress, to release the FBI’s secret investigative files. Some victims and relatives even threatened to stage protests or boycotts at 9/11 anniversary ceremonies if Biden showed up without ordering the FBI to open its files.

Since Biden’s executive order, the FBI has declassified a steady trickle of files. But few of the documents offered much insight into the long-rumored Saudi link to the 9/11 plot — until last week.

Clear evidence of a conspiracy between bin Laden’s jihadists and Saudi officials has long been scarce. These latest revelations could change that, advocates say. And, if nothing else, this latest report offers one of the most startling glimpses yet into the shadow world of spies and terrorists -- and Saudi royalty. 

“It’s exactly what we’ve been saying,” said James Kreindler, one of the lead attorneys in a lawsuit by more than 10,000 9/11 victims and relatives against the Saudi government. “Saudi government officials at a high level were integral to the 9/11 attacks.”

The Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington — and their American attorneys in the lawsuit — did not respond to requests for comment. The White House did not respond either. The FBI’s media office in Washington said in an email: “We have no comment on the documents.” 

Prince Bander, 73 who is now retired after moving from his U.S. ambassadorship to the head of the Saudi intelligence service and the Saudi National Security Council, and Bayoumi, 63, both live in Saudi Arabia. They could not be reached for comment. 

 

Victims' families, former agent angered

The revelations about Bandar and Bayoumi drew an angry response, not just from 9/11 victims and their relatives, but from a former FBI agent who tried to sound an alarm during the summer of 2001 after he found evidence that al-Qaeda operatives had secretly entered the United States.

 

“This latest report just shows what we have known all along, but disgustingly has taken 20 years to finally be disclosed,” said Mark Rossini, an FBI counter-terror expert assigned in 2001 to the CIA’s Alec Station team, which was tracking several al-Qaeda operatives but deliberately did not alert the FBI when a terrorist team entered the U.S. 

Rossini, who was reached at his home in Spain where he has lived since leaving the FBI in 2008 after pleading guilty to illegally accessing files on a case unrelated to 9/11, claims he was ordered by CIA officials and threatened with federal charges if he bucked orders and told the FBI about the presence of al-Qaeda terrorists on U.S. soil.

Neither the CIA nor the FBI has ever explained why they did not cooperate on what now seems to be such a basic piece of an important counter-terror investigation — and, therefore, may have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

Brett Eagleson of Middletown, Connecticut, who lost his father in the collapse of the Trade Center's twin towers in lower Manhattan, said the new evidence is a major step forward in the long legal and public relations battle to not only draw attention to Saudi Arabia’s possible links to 9/11 but hold the kingdom’s royal family and other officials accountable.

“For 20 years we’ve seen a helluva lot of smoke,” said Eagleson, who has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of Saudi Arabia among the 9/11 victims and relatives in their lawsuit against the kingdom. “I think we’ve just found the fire.”

 

Names of sources and other identifying details in the FBI report are blacked out. Many of the 510 pages consist mostly of lines drawn through entire sentences and even paragraphs. But enough information remains to outline the seemingly strange connection between the spy (Bayoumi), the prince (Bandar) and two rag-tag Saudi-born members of al-Qaeda’s terrorist network, Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi.

Mihdhar and Hazmi were well known al-Qaeda operatives long before they joined the team of 19 hijackers who carried out the 9/11 plot. In 2000, the CIA tracked Mihdhar and Hazmi from the Middle East to an apartment in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where they met with other members of bin Laden’s network.

What the CIA did not know at the time was that the initial plans were hatched in that meeting to hijack commercial jetliners in America and crash them into buildings — the essential ingredients of the massive attack on Sept. 11, 2001 that caught America by surprise and transformed U.S. foreign policy.

After leaving the Kuala Lumpur apartment gathering, Mihdhar and Hazmi flew to Bangkok, Thailand. With U.S. travel visas in hand, both caught a flight to Los Angeles — not knowing that CIA agents were tailing them.

After Mihdhar and Hazmi landed in Los Angeles, they were soon met by Bayoumi, who helped them find an apartment and introduced them to a handful of Saudis also living in Southern California.

The CIA had no legal authority to continue tracking the two terrorists inside the United States. By law, the CIA is strictly confined to overseas spy operations. Critics have long claimed the CIA should have called in the FBI and its domestic counter-terror squads. But the CIA remained silent and has never explained why it did not immediately summon the FBI.

During the summer of 2001, Mihdhar and Hazmi moved to northern New Jersey, settling into the Congress Inn motel on Route 46 in South Hackensack and other area motels and apartments. From there, they met with other 9/11 hijackers, including the ringleader, Mohamed Atta, who lived for various periods at motels in Wayne, New Jersey.

A few weeks before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA finally told the FBI that al-Qaeda operatives were on the loose inside America. By then, it was too late to stop them, however. Mihdhar and Hazmi had disappeared with other members of the 9/11 plot.

After the 9/11 attacks, FBI investigators focused attention on Bayoumi and other Saudis in Southern California. But none was ever arrested.

Bayoumi left the United States and returned to Saudi Arabia not long after the 9/11 attacks. While in America, he was described in the FBI report as a “co-optee of the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency” who was paid an undisclosed “monthly stipend” by Prince Bandar. The FBI report, however, does not say whether Bayoumi ever spoke directly with Prince Bandar or communicated by email.

But the report also offers this glimpse on Bayoumi’s role as a spy and his connection to Prince Bandar: “The information AlBayoumi (sic) obtained on persons of interest in the Saudi community in Los Angeles and San Diego and other issues, which met certain GIP intelligence requirements, would be forwarded to Bandar. Bander would then inform GIP of items of interest to the GIP for further investigation/vetting or follow up.”

The 9/11 Commission investigated Bayoumi’s links to Mihdhar and Hazmi before releasing its best-selling report 2004. But neither Saudi officials nor the FBI and the CIA ever spelled out to Commission investigators the extent of Bayoumi’s work as a spy or his connection to Prince Bandar.

Reached this week, the Commission’s chairman, Tom Kean, the former New Jersey governor, said his investigators never learned that Bayoumi was a spy.

“If that’s true I’d be upset by it,” Kean said in a telephone interview, adding, “The FBI said it wasn’t withholding anything and we believed them.”

But Kean also cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the extent of Saudi involvement in the 9/11 plot.

“I think you have to take a look at the evidence,” he said.

The FBI report also does not explain when it formally concluded that Bayoumi was, in fact, a spy. In the years after the 9/11 attacks, a number of media reports speculated that Bayoumi might have worked for the Saudi intelligence service. But there was no formal declaration of Bayoumi’s role until now.

“This is scary,” said Jerry S. Goldman, a New York-based attorney who represents 500 victims in the federal lawsuit against Saudi Arabia. “According to the allegation in the FBI report, the Saudi ambassador is dealing with a guy who dealt with terrorists?”

Tim Frolich, who grew up in Little Falls, New Jersey, and escaped from the 80th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center after it was struck by a hijacked jetliner, said the latest revelations confirmed long suspicions about Saudi links to terrorism. But Frolich, who worked as an accountant for Fuji Bank in the South Tower, also harshly criticized the FBI for withholding the details about Bayoumi for so many years.

“This information obviously should have been out to the family members and to the American public long before now,” said Frolich who lives in Brooklyn. “Certainly the FBI knew a whole lot more than what they said. 

Sharon Premoli, who moved to Vermont from her home in Jersey City after escaping from the 80th floor of the North Tower where she worked as a vice president for a financial marketing firm, said she has long suspected that the FBI knew much more than it was telling about the Saudi links to the 9/11 attacks.

“Knowing what we already know,” she said, “how is it possible that we continue to nurture this relationship with Saudi Arabia?”

As for the FBI and its decision to hold back for years what it knew about the spy and the prince and the terrorists, Premoli said: “We feel abandoned.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 We Have New Evidence of Saudi Involvement in 9/11, and Barely Anyone Cares

BY

BRANKO MARCETIC

 

The FBI has quietly revealed further evidence of Saudi government complicity in the September 11 attacks — and nothing’s happened.

 

There’s a lot going on in the world right now, so it’s not surprising some news slips through the cracks. Still, it’s amazing that explosive new information about an allied government’s complicity in one of the worst attacks on US soil in history has simply come and gone with barely any notice.

Last week, the FBI quietly declassified a 510-page report it produced in 2017 about the 9/11 terrorist attack twenty years ago. The disclosure is in accordance with President Joe Biden’s September 2021 executive order declassifying long-hidden government files about the attack, which many hoped would reveal what exactly US investigators knew about the Saudi Arabian government’s possible involvement.

They weren’t let down. These most recent revelations revolve around Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national working in San Diego for a Saudi government–owned aviation company he never actually turned up to. Al-Bayoumi had long been the subject of suspicion, both because of his ties to extremist clerics and due to the strange coincidences that surrounded him, from the job he never worked to the fact that he just happened to meet two of the future hijackers in a restaurant by chance — before finding them an apartment in San Diego, cosigning their lease, acting as their guarantor, paying their first month’s rent, and plugging them into the local Saudi community.

Despite all this, and even though FBI agents had reason to believe he was a Saudi spy — something only revealed in 2016 upon declassification of twenty-eight pages of the 9/11 Commission Report that former president George W. Bush had ordered be kept secret — US authorities exonerated him. The report ultimately concluded there was “no credible evidence” that al-Bayoumi “knowingly aided extremist groups,” while the bureau decided in 2004 that he had no “advance knowledge of the terrorist attack” nor that the two hijackers-to-be were members of al-Qaeda.

 

This latest release makes those claims a lot less tenable. According to an FBI communiqué dated to June 2017, from the late 1990s to September 11, 2001, al-Bayoumi “was paid a monthly stipend as a cooptee of the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency (GIP),” the country’s principal spy agency. The document notes that while his involvement with Saudi intelligence wasn’t confirmed at the time of the 9/11 Commission Report, the bureau has now confirmed it. In a separate 2017 document, bureau officials judge that “there is a 50/50 chance [al-Bayoumi] had advanced knowledge the 9/11 attacks were to occur.”

Upon being told about the revelation, the 9/11 Commission chair, former New Jersey governor Tom Kean, said that “if that’s true, I’d be upset by it” and that “the FBI said it wasn’t withholding anything and we believed them.”

More than that, the report directly implicates a member of the Saudi royal family and government. Al-Bayoumi’s monthly stipend was paid “via then ambassador [to the United States] Prince Bandar bin Sultan Alsaud,” it states, and any information al-Bayoumi collected on “persons of interest in the Saudi community in Los Angeles and San Diego and other issues, which met certain GIP intelligence requirements, would be forwarded to Bandar,” who would “then inform the GIP of items of interest to the GIP for further investigation/vetting or follow up.”

This disclosure is particularly explosive, because Bin Sultan was not just a member of the House of Saud but was close family friends with President Bush and generally cozy with the US political establishment — to the point that he was nicknamed “Bandar Bush.” Close friends with Bush’s father for more than two decades (“I feel like one of your family,” he wrote him in 1992), he later donated $1 million to the elder Bush’s presidential library.

This friendship extended to the younger Bush, whose father advised him to consult Bin Sultan as he prepared to launch his presidential campaign. So close was their relationship that Bin Sultan was one of the first people Bush told when he decided to invade Iraq. In a markedly weird episode, the two met at the White House two days after the September 11 attack and smoked cigars on the Truman Balcony, mere hours before chartered planes, in violation of the nationwide grounding of aircraft, picked up 160 royals, Bin Laden family members, and other prominent Saudis and flew them out of the country.

So let’s recap what these new documents tell us. They tell us that one of the men who helped two of the September 11 hijackers settle in the United States as they prepared to carry out their attack was in fact a spy for the Saudi government — a government long accused of supporting and financing fundamentalist extremists and the country where the vast majority of the hijackers came from. That spy was paid by and reported directly to the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States, a close and long-standing family friend of the US president.

This should, realistically, prompt many questions, like: If al-Bayoumi had advance knowledge of the attack, did Bandar bin Sultan know, too? Did the latter raise the alarm with anyone in the United States, like his close friend the president? Was Bin Sultan aware of al-Bayoumi’s assistance to the hijackers? Did Bush’s relationship with Bin Sultan cloud his judgement and explain his indifferent response to the intelligence warnings that came to his desk? What did the two talk about on September 13, and why has the Saudi government faced absolutely no accountability over the years?

That might happen in a media ecosystem that doesn’t have the attention span of a fruit fly. In the world we live in, the story has been covered by NorthJersey.com, by Democracy Now!, and . . . that’s it. The September 11 attack was a profoundly traumatic event that has irrevocably shaped US foreign policy and domestic politics for the entirety of this century, often in ways disastrous for both the world and average Americans. Yet when new information implicating an allied government in its execution comes to light, hardly anyone seems to care.

House of Humiliation

This is all particularly relevant now, given not just the decades of US policy that has lavished favors on the Saudi government but Washington’s continued support for the kingdom’s unspeakably brutal war against Yemen.

For seven years now, the Saudi-led coalition has waged an indiscriminate bombing campaign on the country, attacking military targets at roughly the same rate it bombs civilian infrastructure and residential areas, while depriving Yemenis of food and fuel through a tightening blockade. The result has been more than 377,000 dead Yemeni civilians, 70 percent of them kids under five, with two-thirds of them estimated to have died from starvation and preventable diseases, diseases that have exploded in the country thanks to the war. Millions are suffering extreme poverty and malnutrition, and the country is close to wholesale famine.

The United States and other Western governments have directly supported this war throughout, selling the Saudi-led coalition tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons. Washington and the UK , for their part, also provide the coalition with key logistical support, without which a former CIA and Pentagon official has said the war could not go on. Imagine if instead of assisting Ukraine in Russia’s current invasion, the US government instead sold Russia weapons, refueled its planes, shared intelligence with it, and helped its air force with targeting as it turned Ukrainian cities to rubble, and you have some idea of the nature of the US role in this.

Why is the US government doing this? After all, it was just three years ago that a bipartisan coalition in a GOP-controlled Senate voted to end the war, and Joe Biden ran and won the presidency on ending US support for it, before — in trademark Biden style — he kept on supporting the war anyway. Since then, with Biden’s support, the Saudi-led coalition has intensified its bombing to the worst its been since 2018, and the country’s humanitarian crisis is worse than it was under Biden’s predecessor.

The simple reason is that Washington sees the Saudi government as too important to alienate. This was, after all, the same government that led the 1973 oil embargo that caused worldwide economic mayhem and, conversely, stepped up oil production when Saddam Hussein’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait threatened to do the same. With the Saudi kingdom’s vast reserves of oil, the fundamental ingredient of modern civilization, US officials would rather keep it on their side by backing this horrendous war than alienate it and push it closer to hostile powers like Russia or China. This, we can presume, is also largely the reason why the Saudi government has only ever been rewarded by Washington despite mounting evidence of its complicity in an attack on US soil twenty years ago.

The tragic irony is that, in spite of Biden’s steadfast backing of its war, the Saudi government has lately been thumbing its nose at him. As oil-driven inflation threatens to derail Biden’s presidency, the Saudi crown prince has consistentlyrejected US pleas to alleviate it by boosting oil production. Both Saudi Arabia and its bellicose partner, the United Arab Emirates, dragged their feet on joining a UN resolution condemning Russia’s war. Just recently, the Saudi crown prince spoke with Russian president Vladimir Putin as the latter continued carrying out atrocities in Ukraine, then declined to even take Biden’s phone call as the president desperately looked for alternative oil supply to fill the vacuum created by sanctions against Russia. Biden sent him more weaponsanyway.

It’s hard to imagine any country ritually humiliating the United States like this, let alone being rewarded for it. Then again, it’s also hard to imagine any foreign government being as complicit as the House of Saud was in an atrocity like September 11 and getting away entirely scot-free, but here we are.

The reason it can do this is the same reason why Putin believed he had the leverage to launch his war last month: the modern world’s continuing refusal to transition away from fossil fuels, ensuring that every despot who has enough oil and gas can violate international law, mock its allies, and even carry out atrocities with minimal cost. Who knows what else we’ll learn as more of the September 11 documents are declassified? But one thing’s for sure: little will come of it if the status quo stays in place.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/03/911-revelations-saudi-arabia-al-bayoumi-bandar-bush

 

 

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Gus' Conspiracy theory: This is most likely why bin Laden got assassinated by the Americans as he was writing his "memoirs", spilling the beans about the Saudis involvement... All his manuscript got destroyed — except the duplicates that would have been secretly stored away.... Is this why Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi got killed by the Saudis in Turkey (because he did not want to tell where the bin Laden papers were) and why the US did not pursue this matter with vigour???.... Was Khashoggi about to release the real information about 9/11? He would have been very careful handling such material (if it exists).... 

 

See also: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/35479

 

 

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'Special' service: Declassified Guantanamo court filing suggests some 9/11 hijackers were CIA agents

What does the intelligence agency have to do with the suicide terrorist attack?

 

An explosive court filing from the Guantanamo Military Commission – a court considering the cases of defendants accused of carrying out the "9/11" terrorist attacks on New York – has seemingly confirmed the unthinkable.

The document was originally published via a Guantanamo Bay court docket, but while public, it was completely redacted. Independent researchers obtained an unexpurgated copy. It is an account by the Commission’s lead investigator, DEA veteran Don Canestraro, of his personal probe of potential Saudi government involvement in the 9/11 attacks, conducted at the request of the defendants’ lawyers.

Two of the hijackers were being closely monitored by the CIA and may, wittingly or not, have been recruited by Langley long before they flew planes into the World Trade Center buildings. 

 

The story of two men

Of the great many enduring mysteries of the 9/11 attacks still unresolved over two decades later, perhaps the biggest and gravest relate to the activities of Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar in the 18 months leading up to that fateful day. The pair traveled to the US on multi-entry visas in January 2000, despite having repeatedly been flagged by the CIA and NSA previously as likely Al Qaeda terrorists. 

Mere days before their arrival, they attended an Al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, during which key details of the 9/11 attacks are likely to have been discussed and agreed. The meeting was secretly photographed and videotaped by Malaysian authorities at the direct request of the CIA’s Alec Station, a special unit set up to track Osama bin Laden, although oddly, no audio was captured. 

Still, this background should’ve been sufficient to prevent Hazmi and Midhar from entering the US – or at least enough for the FBI to be informed of their presence in the country. As it was, they were admitted for a six-month period at Los Angeles International airport without incident, and Bureau representatives within Alec Station were blocked from sharing this information with their superiors by the CIA.

“We’ve got to tell the Bureau about this. These guys clearly are bad. One of them, at least, has a multiple-entry visa to the US. We've got to tell the FBI,” Mark Rossini, a member of Alec Station, has recalled discussing with his colleagues. “[But the CIA] said to me, ‘No, it’s not the FBI’s case, not the FBI’s jurisdiction.’”

Immediately upon arrival, Hazmi and Midhar encountered a Saudi national residing in California named Omar al-Bayoumi in an airport restaurant. Over the next two weeks, he helped them find an apartment in San Diego, co-signed their lease, gave them $1,500 towards their rent, and introduced them to Anwar al-Awlaki, an imam at a local mosque. Al-Awlaki was killed in a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

In the wake of 9/11, Bayoumi unsurprisingly became a subject of interest in an FBI probe of potential Saudi involvement in the attacks, known as Operation Encore. In a 2003 interview with investigators in Riyadh, he claimed his meeting with Hazmi and Midhar was a coincidence – he heard them speaking Arabic, realized they couldn’t speak English, and decided to assist them out of charity. 

 

The Bureau reached a very different conclusion – Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence operative and part of a wider militant Wahhabist network in the US, which handled a myriad of potential and actual terrorists, and monitored the activities of anti-Riyadh dissidents abroad. What’s more, Encore judged there to be a 50/50 chance he had advanced knowledge of the 9/11 attacks before they happened, and so did the Saudi government. 

 

Why was it hidden?

Those bombshell facts remained hidden from public view until March 2022, when a trove of FBI documents was declassified at the request of the White House. The newly released Guantanamo Military Commission filing sheds even further light on Bayoumi’s contact with Hazmi and Midhar – and in turn, the CIA’s keen interest in them, their activities throughout their stay in the US, and refusal to disclose their presence to the FBI until late August 2001.

The filing is an account by the Commission’s lead investigator, DEA veteran Don Canestraro, of his personal probe of potential Saudi government involvement in the 9/11 attacks, conducted at the request of the defendants’ lawyers. Based on a review of classified information held by, and interviews with representatives of, the FBI and Pentagon, the content strongly suggests that the CIA obstructed official investigations to conceal its penetration of Al Qaeda.

That’s the judgment of four separate, unnamed FBI agents interviewed by Canestraro who worked on investigations into the 9/11 attacks. The most incendiary charges were leveled by a Bureau agent referred to in his report as ‘CS-23’, who had “extensive knowledge of counterterrorism and counterintelligence matters.”

CS-23 recounted how the CIA repeatedly lied and stonewalled the FBI in its investigations into Bayoumi. For example, while Agency officials claimed to possess no files on him when asked by Operation Encore representatives, CS-23 knew for a fact this was a “falsehood,” and the CIA maintained several operational files on Bayoumi, amounting to an extensive paper trail.

Furthermore, CS-23 was certain that the CIA used its liaison relationship with the Saudi intelligence services to attempt to recruit Hazmi and Midhar, and circumvent laws prohibiting the Agency from conducting spying operations on US soil, by using Riyadh as a go between.

 

 

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https://www.rt.com/news/574490-cia-dirty-deeds-nine-eleven/

 

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9/11 revelations – is Washington now throwing Riyadh under the bus?

 

written by gavin o'reilly

 

Recently released court filings outlining how two of the 9/11 hijackers had knowingly or unknowingly been recruited into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation, confirmed what was already open knowledge.

In July 2016, the infamous ‘28 Pages’ section of the official inquiry into the intelligence services activities before and after 9/11 was declassified, outlining the role that high-ranking Saudi officials and intelligence officers had played in the attacks by providing financial and logistical support to the hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.

Indeed the Al-Qaeda organisation itself has its roots in Operation Cyclone, a Cold War-era CIA programme involving the arming, funding and training of Wahhabi militants known as the Mujahedeen, who were then sent on to wage war on the Socialist government of previously-Western friendly Afghanistan in 1979. One of the most well-known of the Mujahedeen was none other than Osama Bin Laden.

The 9/11 attacks also served as the pretext for the US to pursue an aggressive foreign policy in line with the aims of Project for the New American Century, a highly-influential Neoconservative think tank which envisaged the United States maintaining global hegemony through radical changes in its military and defence policy, including the removal by force of then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. In ominous fashion, a September 2000 report by the PNAC predicted that the implementation of such policy changes would be slow and incremental, and that only an event on the scale of Pearl Harbour would allow for rapid upheaval, with such a catalyst conveniently occurring a year later in New York and Virginia.

In further ominous foreshadowing, retired four-star General Wesley Clark would later recount how on a visit to the Pentagon in the days following 9/11, an unnamed military official had informed him that the decision had been made for the US to go to war with Iraq, despite there being no evidence to link Baghdad to the attacks. In a subsequent follow up meeting a few weeks later when the US had begun bombing Afghanistan, the same official informed Clark that a further six countries - Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran - would be targeted in response to 9/11, despite each one, like Iraq, having no established connection to the attacks.

The timing of the latest release of court documents highlighting Saudi involvement in 9/11 is also highly suspect.

Last month, in a seismic geopolitical shift, it was announced that the Gulf Kingdom and its long-time regional rival Iran, had resumed diplomatic ties in a deal brokered by China. Less than two weeks later, it was announced that Saudi Arabia would also seek to restore diplomatic ties with Syria in talks mediated by Russia, effectively signalling the end of US hegemony in the region.

The release of documents relating to Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11 in the same timeframe suggests that ties between Washington and what was perhaps its most strategic ally in west Asia after Israel – also with known connections to the 9/11 attacks - have now began to go cold following Riyadh’s pivot towards Beijing and Moscow; and in response, Washington has now began to publicise Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11, possibly in a bid to isolate Riyadh on the world stage.

Indeed, the US throwing former allies under the bus in light of new geopolitical developments has a historical record.

Iran, once a key US-ally in the region, has been the subject of Western sanctions and threats of war since the 1979 Islamic Revolution saw the US and UK-backed Shah Pahlavi overthrown and replaced with Ayatollah Khomeini, with a Syria-style coup attempt currently ongoing in the country.

Neighbouring Iraq would effectively be used as a US-proxy during the Iran-Iraq war that began a year later, with then-Middle East envoy to the Reagan administration and future PNAC member, Donald Rumsfeld, infamously meeting Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 1983 in order to reiterate US support. Two decades, Rumsfeld would serve as Secretary of Defense in the administration of George W. Bush that would go on to invade Iraq, with Hussein subsequently being executed in the aftermath.

Now, with Riyadh’s pivot eastwards and the publication of documents relating to its role in 9/11 in the same period, it would appear that this historical trend is now beginning to take place in Saudi Arabia.

 

READ MORE:

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2023/april/23/911-revelations-is-washington-now-throwing-riyadh-under-the-bus/

 

 

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Destroying History to Preserve an Illusion

 

By Joe Lauria

Special to Consortium News

On April 9, 2016 Consortium News published an article, republished last September 12, “Why Americans Are Never Told Why,” that sought to explain why the historical context surrounding terrorist attacks on the West is suppressed to whitewash any responsibility Western governments have for putting their populations in danger.

Instead Western leaders prefer their people believe the illusion that totally irrational actors attack them because “they hate their freedoms” and not because of an aggressive foreign policy towards the Middle East. 

Making clear that these attacks against civilians were never justified, the article contained links to statements from perpetrators spelling out why they attacked the West, including a “Letter to the American People” from Osama bin Laden, which explained in detail why al Qaeda struck the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. 

The link in the article pointed to the letter’s publication by The Guardian on Nov. 24, 2002. That document has now been removed by The Guardian. It did so last Wednesday, Nov. 15,  after 21 years. The newspaper gave this explanation: 

“The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it.

The clips crossed over to X, formerly Twitter, in a supercut tweeted by the writer Yashar Ali, who wrote that “thousands” of the videos had proliferated across TikTok. Ali’s tweet itself racked up more than 11,000 retweets and 23.8m views.

‘The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds. Many of them say that reading the letter has opened their eyes, and they’ll never see geopolitical matters the same way again,’ wrote Ali. 

In a statement on Thursday, the White House said: ‘There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil, and antisemitic lies that the leader of al Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history.'”

Even after linking to The Guardian article that supposedly gave the letter the “context” The Guardiansays was missing, it still did not publish bin Laden’s historical document.  With the stated aim of providing “context,” The Guardian instead has destroyed the context that puts Western foreign policy towards the Middle East in a very grim light. 

It is difficult not to conclude that that was The Guardian‘s and TikTok’s motives: to succumb to Western government’s pressure to run interference for the West and Israel to keep Westerners ignorant about what their governments have been up to in the Middle East that has caused so much havoc. It also spotlights the disastrous consequences of Israel’s decades-long occupation of the Palestinians.  

This episode is yet another example of suppressing the historical context of a current event that undermines the West’s interpretation. We saw it in Ukraine, when previously published news by mainstream media of the 2014 U.S.-backed coup and the influence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine was airbrushed from the story in 2022 and made taboo to mention. 

It is like banning historians from mentioning the Versailles Treaty as one cause of World War II in the grossly misleading contention that it somehow justifies Nazi atrocities. Explaining the historical contextof Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine is what journalists are supposed to do, and what Consortium News has done, to explain what happened, not to justify it. 

Likewise, Consortium News has striven in numerous articles to provide the historical context for Israel’s attack on Gaza, as well as Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.  For saying that Oct. 7 did not “happen in a vacuum,” Israel hysterically called for U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s resignation, as if he justified the attack, a call that he angrily rejected. 

There is still an active link here to the full text of bin Laden’s letter.  And it can be found archived on The Guardian via The Wayback Machine.  Besides explaining that al Qaeda was at least in part motivated to act on 9/11 because of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with U.S. backing, the letter egregiously tries to justify the criminal intent of collective punishment against citizens of the West — a point Israel shares with bin Laden in regard to the Palestinian people. No straight-thinking person would agree with some of what bin Laden says, but it is crucial that the public knows what he is saying. 

The problem for Western governments is that he said a lot of accurate things about their ugly behavior in the Middle East and for that bin Laden must now be silenced, not because he is a terrorist, but because he names Western crimes.  

TikTok took down the letter and banned it as it went viral on its platform. The Guardian reported: 

“Videos dissecting and responding to Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ had gained traction on TikTok in past days amid the Israel-Hamas conflict. The hashtag #lettertoamerica had accrued more than 10m views by Thursday before the company blocked searches for it.

The clips crossed over to X, formerly Twitter, in a supercut tweeted by the writer Yashar Ali, who wrote that ‘thousands’ of the videos had proliferated across TikTok. Ali’s tweet itself racked up more than 11,000 retweets and 23.8m views.

‘The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds. Many of them say that reading the letter has opened their eyes, and they’ll never see geopolitical matters the same way again,’ wrote Ali.”

 

It might be worth recalling that protagonist Winston Smith’s job in the George Orwell dystopian novel 1984 was to go into the archives of The Times and change history. 

Americans are finally finding out why. We are republishing here the 2016 piece that originally contained The Guardian link to bin Laden’s letter, which is now gone.

Why Americans Are Never Told Why

When Western media discusses terrorism against the West, such as 9/11, the motive is almost always left out, even when the terrorists state they are avenging longstanding Western violence in the Muslim world, reports Joe Lauria.

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/11/21/destroying-history-to-preserve-an-illusion/

 

 

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SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4As5pIOYIIo

 

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPmhqxnRU5w

 

Vivek Ramaswamy Tells Tucker Carlson FBI, CIA LIED About 9/11: Rising Reacts

 

 

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By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News

 

The U.S. Defense Department announced Wednesday that Khalid Shaikh Muhammad (KSM), the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as two co-defendants, had agreed to plead guilty to multiple charges of terrorism and would escape execution, serving consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole instead.

The agreement brings to an end, at least for KSM, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, an odyssey through uncharted and unprecedented Defense Department legal territory. The announcement led to mixed feelings from many of the 9/11 victim families, human rights activists and the legal community, and there are certainly lessons to be learned. 

The deal, according to the Associated Press and attorneys for the defendants, is actually quite straightforward. The three will serve sentences of life without parole. In exchange, the Pentagon has promised to not impose capital punishment and will allow them to remain at Guantanamo for rest of their lives. (They reportedly don’t want to experience the harsh winters at the Supermax penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.)

Much of the commentary around the deal is negative, unsurprisingly. The New York Post, for example, wrote that the deal “dishonors the victims of terror.” And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell released a statement saying disingenuously that:

“The Biden-Harris Administration’s weakness in the face of sworn enemies of the American people apparently knows no bounds. The plea deal with terrorists…is a revolting abdication of the government’s responsibility to defend American and provide justice…The Administration’s decision to spare these mass murderers from the death penalty is an especially bitter pill.”

Oh, how quickly they forget. If you want somebody to blame, blame the C.I.A. And Mitch McConnell and almost every other member of Congress who served in 2009 and 2015.

Let me begin by saying that I can tell you from first-hand experience that KSM and his codefendants were absolutely guilty of planning and carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks. These are very, very bad people. They have the blood of nearly 3,000 Americans on their hands. They deserve to be punished severely. Many Americans, perhaps even most Americans, probably believe they deserve the death penalty for what they did. But that’s not going to happen for some very specific reasons.

As an aside, I was the C.I.A.’s chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan from January to May 2002. At one point in March of 2002, after my team had captured so many Al-Qaeda fighters that we had literally filled the Rawalpindi Jail, I sent a cable to C.I.A. headquarters asking what to do with the prisoners.

The response was quick: Put them on a C-12 cargo plane and send them to Guantanamo. The idea was that they would remain at Guantanamo for three or four weeks until the Justice Department could determine in which federal district court — the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, or the District of Massachusetts — they would be tried.
They would then be transferred to the United States, where they would appear before a jury of their peers and, presumably convicted, sentenced, and many hoped, executed. But that never happened.

A Big Fish for the Agency

Enter the C.I.A. KSM was a very big fish for the Agency. And rather than turn him over to the Justice Department once he was captured, the C.I.A. elected to send him instead to a series of a half-dozen or so secret prisons around the world, where C.I.A. officers and contractors subjected him to merciless torture.

Sure, KSM and the others eventually confessed to planning and carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks. But they probably would have confessed to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, if they had been asked. And in the end, nothing that they had told the C.I.A. could be used against them in the Guantanamo military tribunal because it had been extracted through torture.

As a result, there was a real chance that even the stacked deck of a Pentagon military tribunal would have had to find them not guilty.

At the same time, our elected representatives on Capitol Hill, in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion, passed a measure in 2009 to forbid any Guantanamo prisoner from being transferred to the United States to face trial.

That vote was 68-29 in the Senate and 281-146 in the House. And in 2015, Congress passed a bill forbidding the president from closing the facility. That vote was 91-3 in the Senate and 370-58 in the House. As a result, these heroes of the rule of law made Guantanamo permanent.

So, what is a terrorism defendant who has been tortured by the C.I.A. to do? He accepts the fact that he will never, ever be free and he takes the best deal his attorneys can negotiate, figuring the government would have continued to argue “national security” to delay the military tribunal indefinitely. At the end of the day, they just simply didn’t want to risk the death penalty.

And what is a Guantanamo military prosecutor to do? He goes public that the C.I.A. blew it, that the likes of KSM and his friends could have been convicted two decades ago and probably would have been executed by now if the C.I.A. had simply followed the law.

But here we are, nearly 23 years after the attacks, and many of the 9/11 families feel robbed. They feel that their family members died violently and unnecessarily and their killers get to live. That’s the sad truth. But don’t blame Joe Biden. It’s not his fault. Blame the outlaws at the C.I.A. We should never forget (or forgive) that they subverted the Constitution just because they could.

And what of the issue of plea bargains? Again, from first-hand experience, I can tell you that they’re used as cudgels. In my own case, after my arrest for blowing the whistle on the C.I.A.’s torture program, I was offered a plea deal that I eventually accepted.

I believed in my heart that I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I knew that if there had been such a thing as an “affirmative defense,” where I could have said that I did what I did in the public interest, I would have been acquitted at trial.

But in the end, I was offered a sentence of 30 months in prison. I asked my attorneys what my likely sentence would be if I were to turn down the government’s offer, go to trial, and lose. The answer was 12-18 years. And indeed, at my sentencing, Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia said on the record,

“I see you have a plea deal, Mr. Kiriakou. I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit. But I’m compelled to accept it. If it were up to me, I would give you 10 years.”

Well, imagine the alternative if your name is Khalid Shaikh Muhammad or Walid bin Attash or Mustafa al-Hawsawi. The alternative is the death penalty. Nobody wants to roll those dice.

John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

 

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/02/john-kiriakou-the-cia-the-9-11-plea-deals/

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

 

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has withdrawn a plea deal with three 9/11 suspects, including the alleged mastermind behind the attack, the Pentagon said on Saturday. The agreement involved the three men pleading guilty to avoid the death penalty.

The deal was initially announced by the prosecutors on Wednesday and involved Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi.

Mohammed is widely regarded as the mastermind of the 2001 attacks. Bin Attash is believed to have selected and trained most of the 19 hijackers who flew commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Al-Hawsawi is accused of financing the hijackers’ stays in the US before the attack.

The agreement was negotiated by retired Brigadier General Susan K. Escallier, who was designated by Austin as the convening authority for military commissions in 2023. The defense secretary has now removed her from the case, a memo published by the Pentagon says.

According to the document, Austin reserves the exclusive right to enter into pre-trial agreements with the suspects for himself.

“I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the above-referenced case, responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority under the Military Commissions Act,” Austin said in the memo, informing Escallier that he is withdrawing her authority in this particular case. He also said he “withdraws from the three pre-trial agreements” signed on July 31, 2024. He did not provide any reasons for the withdrawal.

The deal envisaged the three suspects receiving life sentences and avoiding a major trial and potential death penalties in exchange for pleas. All of them are currently being held at the US Navy’s detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The suspects were captured in 2003 and spent time in other secret CIA prisons previously.

The suspects were initially set to stand trial in January 2021, but it was repeatedly postponed as defense lawyers argued that the use of torture against the accused rendered much of the evidence against them inadmissible in a court of law.

News of the plea deals sparked outrage from groups representing the families of 9/11 victims. The organizations insisted that the agreements should “not close the door on obtaining critical information that can shed light on Saudi Arabia’s role” in the attacks.

Most of the hijackers, as well as former Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, Bin Attash, and al-Hawsawi hail from prominent Saudi families. Saudi Arabia was sued by members of the group ‘9/11 Justice’ over its alleged complicity in the attacks. Riyadh has denied any responsibility.

https://www.rt.com/news/602096-pentagon-revoke-plea-9-11/

 

9/11 WAS 23 YEARS AGO! AND THE YANKS STILL DON'T KNOW ANYTHING? OR CAN'T CHARGE THE PRISONERS AFTER YEARS OF TORTURE?....EXCEPT THEY KNOW THAT THE SAUDIS WERE INVOVED UPTO THEIR ARSE IN THE THINGSTER (POSSIBLY A "FALSE FLAG" TO GIVE THE US A REASON TO INVADE AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ) AND THAT THE TOWERS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO COLLAPSE AND KILL NEARLY 3000 PEOPLE....

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.