http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0612/S00301.htm
|
UQ Wire: Peter Dale Scott - JFK and 9/11
Thursday, 21 December 2006, 12:57 pm
Speech: www.UnansweredQuestions.org
|
Distribution via the Unanswered Questions
Wire http://www.unansweredquestions.org/
. Global Research Feature
Article
JFK and 9/11 Insights
Gained from Studying Both by Dr. Peter
Dale Scott The assassination of John
F. Kennedy took place 43 years ago on Friday, November 22,
1963 in Dallas, Texas. The following text is the transcript
of a lecture delivered by Peter Dale Scott in Dallas on
November 18, 2006. When I first imagined doing
this talk I thought well I probably knew more at this stage
about 9/11 than most people here, who are professionally
concerned with JFK.1 But in preparing this talk, which I
only began last Monday, has been a real learning experience
for me. Taking a lot of things which I had already knew
about each, but which I had never really put together before
-- when I did they gave me a clearer view of what was
happening behind the scenes in both operations. Because
certain things repeat themselves. These things that
repeat themselves include what we might call external
features – which you are very familiar within the JFK case
- the ability of the government to establish a guilty party
or parties immediately, and the press and media consumption
of that product to the exclusion of all other
possibilities. Eventually, in both cases a commission is
set up – the Warren Commission in 1963 and the 9/11
Commission this time in 2003. And the starting point for
both commissions is to validate what was already decided by
the FBI on the day in question. That is the first of the
common features that I would like to look at a bit more
closely because it sort of hit me between the eyes when I
thought about the two together. Now if you remember the
case of Oswald, and I have to do this from memory here, so
correct me if I am wrong about the details, but within
minutes of the assassination and long before Oswald is
picked up in the Texas Theater, they put out on the police
network and possibly other networks, a description of the
killer – five foot ten – 165 pounds (WR 5), which
exactly matches what is in his FBI file, exactly matches
what’s in CIA documents about him. 2 One of the
problems is it doesn’t match the actual height and weight
of the man picked up and charged, which is more like five
foot nine and 140 pounds.3 And it’s also very suspect
because as far as we can trace the origins of this exact fit
with the FBI file, it’s attributed to Howard Brennan 4–
who saw someone two blocks from here in the sixth floor
window, from the waist up. So you’ll have to figure out
how they were able to get that exact. It appears they
already knew who was going to be charged before they found
him in the Texas Theater. Now the parallel to that for
9/11 is, I have to say, even more astounding, because of
Richard Clarke, who was director for counter-terrorism
activities in the White House, and a very important
eyewitness. His book Against All Enemies is almost totally
ignored by the 9/11 Commission, and it had to be ignored by
the Commission because it is at odds, in many important
respects, with what the 9/11 Report says (which I will get
back to). But he tells us that at 9:59 am on September 11,
which is the time when the second tower collapses, the North
Tower, the FBI already had a list of the alleged hijackers.
5 This is extraordinary in the first place because the FBI
always says about itself that it doesn’t do much
intelligence in the field of terrorism; its specialty is
criminal investigation afterwards. They had the names of
hijackers at 9:59; at 9:59 am Flight 93 had not yet crashed.
And even more astonishingly, if we believe the 9/11 Report
(which of course on this point I do not believe), NORAD,
which was searching for the hijacked planes, wasn’t aware
that Flight 93 had been hijacked until 10:08, which is nine
minutes later. ("I don't buy the idea that we didn't know
what was coming," a former FBI official with extensive
counter-terrorism experience has since said. "Within 24
hours [of the attack] the Bureau had about 20 people
identified, and photos were sent out to the news media.
Obviously this information was available in the files and
somebody was sitting on it.")6 So it’s worth thinking
about that for a moment, the two events together. And then
in the other cases that we know about, how the identity of
the person who is ultimately going to be identified as the
culprit is established at the very beginning - Sirhan
Sirhan, the bag with the gun that identifies James Earl Ray
– it isn’t investigative work AFTER the assassination,
that finds these people, it is just following up what is
already there, from the very beginning. As I say that is
the first thing that strikes my mind about the similarities
between the two events. And then we come to what I call the
internal continuity of content. Historically I was first
drawn to this because when the news of the Watergate
break-in was in the New York Times, on June 17, 1972, which
I remember quite vividly, there was Frank Sturgis, alias
Frank Fiorini, that I had already written about in The
Dallas Conspiracy a year before, because of his role in
perpetuating false Oswald stories, what I now call Phase One
Oswald stories, linking him falsely to Cuba. I could go
on and on about that, but I just wanted to say, in the new
paperback edition of Lamar Waldon’s book Ultimate
Sacrifice, we find validation of a very old story that Hunt
and McCord, who we may loosely call two of the Watergate
burglars, certainly the two who were controlling the fate of
the rest, worked together in 1963.7 This is an old charge,
which was largely forgotten, but is revived in this book,
and in my mind credibly. I just put myself on record that I
was not impressed with the hardbound edition of Ultimate
Sacrifice, and only this week just began reading my copy of
the paperback edition. And I have issues with a lot of the
things in there, but I am convinced it has to be taken
seriously, and that whether or not he is right about his
central thesis, he is more right about the supporting
details that he has gathered for it and it has the advantage
of being thoroughly documented book. The quality of the
documentation goes up and down, but there is a great deal of
it. THE WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS AGENCY Now I
want to come to a common denominator between what happened
in 1963 and what happened in 2001. It is not often
discussed, but by coincidence, I think it is being discussed
right now in the other place, as we call it [i.e. the Lancer
Conference], the role of the White House Communications
Agency. You are all JFK researchers. How many of you have
ever asked yourself about the role of the White House
Communications Agency – WHCA on 11/22/63–? Anybody?
Rex!8 (laugh) Well I am indebted to Rex [Bradford], who
of course is administering the web site of the Mary Ferrell
Foundation. There are quite a few documents there, and I am
going to draw on those documents. That is what’s so
wonderful about the Mary Ferrell Foundation, you never have
to go to the National Archives again, you just give a few
touches of the fingers on the keyboard and you get these
things. It’s going to help us with what I consider a
very crucial and unresolved question of 9/11, and I’m
sorry I have to telescope here. My big question and the
focus of my forthcoming book - The Road to 9/11 - out of
that huge book with 14 chapters, there are only two on 9/11
itself, and both of them are looking exclusively really,
almost exclusively, at what Dick Cheney did between 9 am and
10:39 on that morning -- because there are different
accounts of it, and interestingly there are different
accounts from Dick Cheney himself, incompatible accounts.
And I believe it is a very important issue because either he
was in the bunker, what we call the PEOC under the White
House, or not, when two crucial orders were made, a Stand
Down order that got all the planes down on the ground, that
came out of the bunker, and a Shoot Down order, to shoot
down any remaining hijacked planes. (At this point there was
only one – Flight 93, which of course is the plane that
should not have been shot down, according to the official
version, because the passengers were taking care of the
problem themselves.) And there is no doubt, everybody
agrees, including the 9/11 Report, that both these orders
occurred. There is no doubt that the first was at 9:42; and
there is great confusion as to whether the second order was
around 9:45 (Richard Clarke says it was before Air Force One
took off at 9:54) or when the Report indicates: probably
about 10:15, which of course is after Flight 93 had already
crashed.9 Now when did Dick Cheney go into the PEOC? He
spoke to Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" five days
afterward, on September 16, and said he got there before the
plane, if that is what it was, flew into the Pentagon, which
was at 9:37. And I believe what he said on September 16.
Then he was interviewed by Newsweek, and that appeared in
Newsweek on December 31; and it is the basis for the story
in the 9/11 Report: that he "arrived", and that’s the
Report’s word, in the bunker "shortly before 10 [am],
perhaps at 9:58."10 You notice if that was the case, he
was not present for either order, though we have many
sources to say that he was there for the first, and the only
coherent reading of Richard Clarke’s book is that he
transmitted to Clarke the shoot down order sometime before
9:54. What I think happened -- and this is where we will
get back to JFK -- is that Cheney did indeed arrive quite
early in the bunker, as Norman Mineta, who was also there,
testified. (There’s a very interesting story there that I
can’t get into here.)11 And THEN Cheney left, and this is
the interesting thing, he left the bunker, went back into
the tunnel leading to the bunker – and from the tunnel he
made the crucial phone call to Bush and perhaps an even more
crucial phone call to Rumsfeld, which Rumsfeld has referred
to but which the Report ignores, which was about three
things: 1) protecting Air Force One, which was
irrelevant; 2) orders (disputed) about planes, which may
have involved the shoot-down order; 3) Continuity of
Government.12 I wish I could get into this -- it is the
heart of my book: instituting COG, Continuity of Government
(which I call Change in Government, because it is often
called a plan for the suspension of the U.S. Constitution
– and that is a pretty accurate summary of it).13 How
many of you did know that it was actually instituted on
9/11? That is perhaps one of the most important things that
happened on 9/11, and it happened because of this phone
call, and there is no record of the phone call.14 And I
think it’s pretty obvious that there is no record of the
phone call because he wasn’t in the bunker where people
were taking notes and logs were being kept. He went to a
back channel from a secure phone somewhere. There’s no
question, everyone agrees, even Cheney himself, that he used
a secure phone in the tunnel at this time.15 Now this
matter could be resolved by going to the records of the
White House Communications Agency. They kept logs. The
Secret Service kept logs. And we have logs from that day
that which record a trivial phone call at 9:15 am and
another trivial phone call at 10:15 am. But Thomas Kean,
the commission chairman, complained publicly that the logs
were not complete. 16 We have the equivalent of an 18 minute
gap, which some of you will remember from the Watergate
investigation.17 The 9/11 Commission does not present any
records from the logs for the time of the phone call, either
because they never saw them, possibly because the logs had
been massaged and cleansed and purged before they got to
them, possibly because the commission purged them themselves
or, and this is what I believe, and I think you should think
about very seriously, because the phone in the tunnel was a
back channel for which normal logs were not kept, possibly
because it was a higher classification because it involved
Continuity of Government. And one of the things I would
press for is for Congress, when we start suing for the
records that don’t get released in 2009, 18– to get
released all of the documents pertaining to COG, which I
believe will tell us all about warrant-less wiretapping,
about the building of detention camps for large numbers of
undesirable people like US, and so on and so on. I think
this is a very important topic.19 Let me see where I am
from my notes here. Anyway, so because I noticed this gap.
First of all by the way, I had a researcher contact the
press officer of the WHCA and they very helpfully said to
put in a FOIA request. Well, the poor old ARRB wasn’t able
to spin significant documents from the WHCA so I didn’t
bother to try on my own.20 I did go however, to their web
site, and what I read there was, and this is a direct quote
now: "The WHCA was a key player in documenting the
assassination of President Kennedy." Well this struck me
as extremely interesting! Because I don’t know who they
documented it for; but on the basis of my research, they
didn’t document it for the Warren Commission. Because the
Warren Commission never got their records. And neither did
the ARRB. And there is actually a section of the ARRB Report
where they say – and I think they were much too limited in
their curiosity, but it came to their attention that edited
phone calls out of Air Force One flying back to Washington
were, in of all places, the LBJ Library. Well then they
figured if the edited records are at the LBJ Library we
should get the unedited set released. Their report said,
though, "The WHCA could not produce any records." 21 What
they really should have asked for, and I believe this would
have documented the assassination, were WHCA records BEFORE
the shots were fired, leading up to the moment the shots
were fired, but as I said, they only requested records from
Air Force One, which is to say some time after. However a
few documents from 1963 were released. (And this is the
beauty of the Mary Ferrell Foundation: you can read them
there.) And what we read there is remarkably resonant to
what I found out in respect to 9/11. In the post-shooting
period, the regular switchboard in Washington was out of
touch with Dallas, and the only way they could communicate
was to patch though to Fort Worth, which in turn would then
patch through to Dallas. But at the same time there was a
back channel, just like I was talking about 9/11. The back
channel was set up at Parkland Hospital, through the Secret
Service, and the main WHCA switchboard was unaware of
it.22 And this is what really gets interesting, because in
9/11 I became fascinated with the WHCA channel – which in
effect was the Secret Service channel, so the Secret Service
knew everything of what was happening on 9/11 immediately,
including what was on the screens at FAA or NORAD. That
information was going directly and immediately to the Secret
Service and therefore of course to Cheney, who had a Secret
Service agent with him. That I think will turn out - I make
this prediction, that if we ever get to the next layer of
what happened on that day, you will become extremely
interested in that Secret Service network with the White
House Communications Agency. And I say it involves two
levels, you will find a regular channel set of
communications and the back channel, where the significant
action is happening. What was really interesting, to
judge from the reports they filed, the WHCA regulars were
completely unaware that a back channel was operating. I
read this from the Mary Ferrell Foundation site: "Direct
communication was set up immediately, outside of Emergency
Room at Parkland, with Mr. Behn" (the Special Agent in
Charge of the White House Secret Service detail.) So it
wasn’t even a back channel back to the WHCA but it went to
the head of the Secret Service detail in his office in
Washington, "which became the Washington Command Post and
Clearing House."23 Now what do we know of what’s
happening at that Command Post on that day? Almost nothing.
But from what I learned from 9/11, that is where we should
look to learn more about JFK. And I think potentially, and
here I am only speculating, that if we ever get to the
pre-shot WHCA records, we will learn things like why Winston
Lawson for example, stopped right in front of the TSBD where
a man was having a so-called epileptic fit, which led to the
Dallas Police ordering a direct pathway for an ambulance be
open to Parkland Hospital.24 So when the shooting of the
president occurred, the President’s car was like a pea in
a pea shooter, there was only one way to go - the path to
Parkland was open while access was blocked so the epileptic
could arrive. For those of you who know the story, there was
a man who when he got there, got off the stretcher and said
he felt fine and didn’t have an epileptic fit at all. He
had changed history, he had affected history, but he
didn’t have an epileptic fit. 25 DRUGS I was
thinking of two or three more points. Here’s a broader
one, where now you say, "There he goes again…" on the
question of drugs. In Deep Politics, and especially in
Deep Politics II (which thanks to Rex, is about to be
reissued I believe, and will be available shortly from the
Mary Ferrell Foundation), I discuss the importance of the
Mexican drug traffic as a factor – which is 1)
connected to Jack Ruby, 26 2) connected to the Mexican
DFS, which taped Oswald in Mexico City, 3) connected to
Richard Cain, this multifaceted mob and law enforcement
figure, who was the chief link between Sam Giancana and the
Mexican establishment. And he may have very well, as I say
in Deep Politics II, - his specialty was wiretapping, and
it’s conceded publicly that he did wiretapping in Mexico
of foreign embassies in Mexico City for the Mexican
government, which certainly sounds pretty relevant to the
over hearing of the man identifying himself as Lee Oswald,
and also some of the Cubans, we’ll come back to them
again, the Cuban students particularly Cubans students who
were involved in drug trafficking.27 At that point, when I
first wrote this I had not yet looked at the new version of
Ultimate Sacrifice; and realized that the Mexican drug
connection is, if anything, even more important in
Waldron’s book than it is in mine, which may explain my
new partiality to want to take that book seriously. He
brings in people like, for example the French Connection,
and whoever he was (Jean) Souêtre or (Michael Victor)
Mertz, who was reportedly in Dallas November 22, 1963.28 He
ties those people to Marcello, and to Trafficante and to
Rosselli and there are more people, I could give the rest of
my talk on that theme, but I won’t. Now the current
position of the George W. Bush administration and how they
feel about drug traffickers. How many are following the case
of Luis Posada Carriles? Nobody denies he is a terrorist,
he boasts to being a terrorist. He blew up an airliner in
1976 and he once boasted of bombing a Cuban resort in 1998
which resulted in the death of a tourist. He actually had
interviews with an American journalist to try to draw
publicity to this fact and he complained no news covered it,
and said, in effect, "What’s the point of killing tourists
if the tourist traffic is going to continue?" 29 Later he
was ultimately picked up for trying to assassinate Castro in
Panama in the year 2000. Well we now know how tolerant
the Reagan/Bush I administration was towards him because
Bush Sr. arranged for Felix Rodriguez to be running the
Ilopango Base in El Salvador, who turned around and gave a
job to Luis Posada Carriles, who was still wanted for these
crimes, but was now on the run. When that closed down in the
1990s, and now I am quoting from a Mexican journalist for
Por Esto, "Posada Carriles was protected in Guatemala,
Belize and Mexico by narco-traffickers in the Central
American cartel headed by Otto Herrera García, an associate
of the major Mexican trafficker Ismael Zambada."30 The State
Dept website says of Otto Herrera García: "In 2001, alone,
his organization moved approximately 12 metric tons of
cocaine, and may have the ability to smuggle as much as 2
tons of cocaine into the United States each month."31 Well
you would think that Posada would be in the bad graces of
the American government, but No. He was smuggled into this
country and the man who smuggled him in, who clearly
committed a crime, has not been arrested for any crime. And
when Posada once again called attention to himself, and got
himself detained, he once again asked for asylum, and I
think he will get it. Because the U S government has either
to extradite him, which I guarantee they won’t do, or
prosecute him, or release him. At this point the clock is
ticking, and they have three months left on how long they
have to decide what to do with him.32 They know how long
they have to decide on what do with him. The reason they
cannot prosecute him is because when he came back, the FBI
in Miami decided not to prosecute him and destroyed all of
the Luis Posada Carriles files. The man who did this is a
Cuban-American whose father came out of that exile network
where they all knew each other and protect each other and
such protection exist. And I am in such a burn over this.33
Orlando Bosch, who was a co-conspirator in blowing up the
plane, and was able to pay for an acquittal in Latin
America, came back without a record, was sponsored for US
citizenship and obtained it, championed by Jeb Bush.34 And
then shortly before, - and this gives me even more of a
burn, shortly before 9/11 occurred, the two men who are
confessed killers of former Chile Ambassador to U.S. Orlando
Letelier and Ronnie Moffitt right in Washington, who it took
years to get them convicted because of the interference from
George Bush, Sr., they were finally convicted. And after
serving seven years for this spectacular terrorist
assassination, they were, I don’t know they were was
paroled or pardoned, but anyway they were let out of jail by
the George W. Bush administration, after serving only seven
years. So those Cuban exiles still have their claws into
the intelligence-security-justice network that is so
interwoven with them – and that is going to be the theme
of the second half of my talk. Well, so drugs are still a
factor with intelligence, and the question is, now that we
are facing al Qaeda, what is the relationship of al Qaeda to
Drugs? And is it similar to what I think was drugs in being
in the background of the John F. Kennedy assassination?
Well there are two takes on this. Let me give you first
of all, what the British Parliament was told on October 4,
2001 and that is that "al Qaeda’s activity includes
substantial exploitation of the drug trade from
Afghanistan."35 Now let’s look at what the 9/11
Commission said on the same subject. They didn’t have to
say anything about drugs by the way, but they went out of
their way to say this: "While the drug trade was a source of
income for the Taliban, it did not serve the same purpose
for al Qaeda, and there is no reliable evidence that Bin
Laden was involved in or made his money through drug
trafficking."36 And this was after the U.S. Central
Command reported that in December, 2003 a dhow was
intercepted near the straight of Hormuz carrying almost two
tons of hashish, valued at up to $10 million dollars. And
the Cent Com statement said that there were, and I quote,
"clear ties" between the shipment and al Qaeda.37 If that is
true, then why did the 9/11 Report go out of its way to say
that there is no evidence of a connection between Bin Laden
and drug trafficking? I want to close this part of my
talk on the allegations of Sibel Edmonds. Unfortunately we
don’t really know what they are because she is under a gag
order. That for reasons of state she is not able to tell the
public what she told the FBI. She was a whistleblower, who
naively did what a whistleblower should do in the name of
protecting the American public order, and got fired for it.
And she is still fighting to appeal her case. She can’t
talk, but she has talked here and there. And my friend
Daniel Ellsberg is very interested in her case; and very
recently he summed up what she is saying for KPFA, my local
Pacifica radio station. This is Ellsberg’s summary of what
Sibel Edmonds is saying: Al Qaeda, she’s
been saying to Congress, is financed 95% by drug money, drug
traffic to which the U.S. government shows a blind eye, has
been ignoring because it very heavily involves allies and
assets of ours, such as Turkey, Kyrayzstan, Tajikistan,
Pakistan, Afghanistan - all of the Stans, in a drug traffic
where the opium originates in Afghanistan, is processed in
Turkey and delivered to Europe where it furnishes 96% of
Europe’s heroin by Albanians, either in Albania or Kosovo,
Albanian muslims in Kosovo, basically the KLA Kosovo
Liberation Army (which we backed heavily in that episode at
the end of the century, that’s last century)
---– [I will interrupt at this point. In my
book, I’m sure I think I quite adequately document that:
A) That the KLA was deeply involved or its leaders were
deeply involved in drug trafficking and have used the NATO
intervention as a way to consolidate a drug route through
Kosovo and B) that they were very heavily involved with al
Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri’s brother came to organize KLA things
and al-Zawahiri himself may have come to Kosovo. C) At the
same time key KLA leaders were allied with PMCs – Private
Military Corporations -- notably DynCorp. Those of you who
were here last night heard Cynthia McKinney ask about
DynCorp – and why the defense department worked with them.
There are war crimes attributed to KLA leaders who in
Croatia worked hand in glove with DynCorp. I’m cutting
out a lot here that is relevant. But Sibel Edmonds says]
"Suitcases of cash were delivered to the Speaker of the
House Dennis Hastert at his home near Chicago from Turkish
sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money."
38 These are very serious charges that were aired to some
extent in some in Vanity Fair.39 And they are so important
that the media, predictably, ignored them. And I’m drawing
attention to what she is saying not because what she is
saying can be proven, but these charges are very serious and
not just pertinent to 9/11 alone, but to the whole fabric of
how this country is run. I consider this a top priority
for testing the honesty and credibility of the new
Democratic leadership in Congress. Will they pursue these
matters? I hope that by hook or by crook you will try and
put pressure on the new Democratic Congress to deal with
these matters, so that we get a proper investigation of them
for the first time. And to close this section, whatever
is the extent of what she is describing, it’s not just
her. There was another witness, Indira Singh, who was
talking at a 9/11 conference up in Canada; and she said, "I
was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around
9/11 that would be the end of me." 40 This is a woman who
has nothing to do with Sibel Edmonds, but alluded to the
same thing in the background of 9/11.41 And we need to learn
more about that. And I suspect that whatever the situation
is, it’s something which goes back to at least as far as
1963, and would then explain the same background for the
Kennedy assassination. One thing we can say with
confidence: the flow of Afghan heroin west through Turkey is
a problem that can be traced back to the CIA’s involvement
with Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, with the
drug-linked Bank of Credit and Commerce International
(BCCI), and with Islamist Afghan mujahedeen like Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar in the 1980s.42 In fact the web of influence she
describes corresponds closely to BCCI’s influence in the
1980s, when the head of BCCI used to boast to the head of
Pakistan of BCCI’s role in getting aid for Pakistan
approved by the US Congress.43 DOUBLE-AGENTS:
OSWALD This is all preliminary stuff – now I get to
the real stuff - Double Agents. In Deep Politics I
explored at some length the possibility that Lee Harvey
Oswald was, as Silvia Odio had heard, a possible (and this
is a quote) "double agent…trying to infiltrate the Dallas
Cuban refugee group."44 I went back and looked to see
what I had to say about this in Deep Politics, and I must
say in the light of 9/11, it blew my mind. I’m going to
read from my own book, something that I had forgotten.
The preceding chapter considered the possibility that
Oswald was associated with anti-Kennedy Cubans in order to
investigate them on behalf of a federal agency. But we saw
it alleged that Oswald was a double agent collaborating with
some of these groups, either (as I suspect) because he or
his handlers shared their goals [that is, anti-Kennedy
goals], or possibly because he or his handlers had been
"turned" by those they were supposed to investigate. Such a
possibility was particularly likely with targets, like Alpha
66, about which the government itself was conflicted, of two
minds. 45 Remember that Alpha 66 in early 1963 conducted a
series of raids, not just against Cuba, but against Soviet
ships in Cuba. It was obviously trying to shipwreck the US
– Soviet understanding on Cuba, and really, in a sense was
trying to torpedo the whole Kennedy policy of détente with
the Soviet Union. And so there is no ambiguity about the
total disapproval of the Justice Department (which cracked
down on them and made a public announcement that they had to
cease), and also the continuing support for Alpha 66 from
the CIA.46 Now Waldron says David Atlee Phillips – and I
don’t know if there really is any evidence on David
Phillips in 1963 -- had an Alpha 66 connection at some
point.47 I don’t know it was Phillips, but it was
certainly a group that was close to Phillips, and may I add,
extremely important to this book, the paperback edition of
Ultimate Sacrifice. Let me read one more paragraph from
my book Deep Politics: Here it is relevant
that Alpha 66, although anti-Kennedy, was being used
operationally by military intelligence. There are signs,
though complex and inconclusive, that Oswald’s strange and
self-incriminating behavior in New Orleans and Dallas was
staged to be documented in the secret files of military
intelligence.48 And here I will summarize
this very briefly. I go into how when he is arrested he
volunteers – he asks for an FBI agent. (This is an
experiment we could all do – get ourselves arrested for a
misdemeanor, and then say we’d like the FBI to come and
interview us. This is what Oswald did. How many of us are
going to get the FBI to come down on Saturday morning to
talk to us?) Well anyway, Oswald had no trouble doing
this and he also talked to the police. In both cases he was
talking about A. J. Hidell, and in both cases that
information ended up somehow, via the FBI agent with Army
Intelligence, and via Police Captain Martello with Naval
intelligence. So Oswald was enriching the files on himself
in a way that would lead to his death in Dallas in November
1963.49 Well, what is so arresting about the connection
here to 9/11? DOUBLE-AGENTS: ALI
MOHAMED Because I want to talk about another
double-agent – an unmistakable and very important one: Ali
Mohammad. How many people have heard of the name Ali
Mohammad before today? Almost nobody. Well listen to this,
as it is important. There is a quite a lot about him on now
on my web site because I’ve been talking about him. It
is striking that he was undeniably working for US Army
Special Forces, working with the CIA, almost certainly
admitted to this country on a CIA visa, and in his last
years certainly working with the FBI. He was actually
detained in Canada by the RCMP, and he said, phone this
number and you will release me; and they phoned the San
Francisco office of the FBI, and sure enough they released
him immediately.50 And that meant he was able to go to
Kenya, photograph the Kenyan embassy, and deliver the
photographs personally to Bin Laden, who told Ali Mohammad
where to plant the bomb.51 And there is this new book: in
fact it arrived the day before I caught a plane to come to
Dallas, so I haven’t had a very good read of it, but
I’ve been following Peter Lance. It is Peter Lance’s
book, Triple Cross – How Bin Laden’s Master Spy
[that’s Ali Mohammad] Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets
and the FBI and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop
Him. This is a very interesting story and there’s quite
a lot more on my web site.52 What is particularly important
here is that Ali Mohamed was not only protected under the
George W. Bush administration - but from as early as 1990
when the FBI SOG Special Operations Group in New York
photographed him training terrorists in terrorist activities
– sharp shooting, etc. I’m going to name the names of
some of his disciples,53 and you can remember them for sixty
seconds and then you can forget them: El Sayyid Nosair,
who went on to murder Meir Kahane, the Jewish racist, almost
immediately, was trained in sharp shooting by Ali Mohammad;
Mohammed Salameh, who went on to participate in the first
WTC bombing in 1993; and finally there’s a man called
(Clement) Rodney Hampton-El, who is the one American-born
black Muslim in the group, who clearly had Army backing. He
was allowed to go to Fort Belvoir, and an Army major gave
him a list of Muslims in the US Army whom he could recruit
to go to Bosnia.54 Ali Mohamed trained these Islamists to
fight in Afghanistan. So you might say: Well of course we
were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, so it makes sense
that it was okay for them to approve this kind of activity.
The problem is the Soviets had totally withdrawn from
Afghanistan by early 1989, and all of this training was
going on in late 1989-90, at a time when the U.S.
government, to paraphrase what I just said about 1963, was
of two minds about what to do in Afghanistan. Remember
that Gorbachev was now the President of Russia, and that the
State Department, and I believe the White House, attached a
lot of importance from Reagan’s last years on to working
with the Soviet Union. The man the Soviets left in charge
of Kabul, I think his name is Najibullah,55 said in effect,
"You may not like me in the West, but I’m the best you are
going to get, and if you get rid of me you will have a
nation of drug traffickers," which is essentially what we
now have de facto in Afghanistan. His prediction was
entirely correct. The CIA was way off base here. The CIA
were backing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whom some people call the
leading heroin trafficker in the world, to get rid of this
secular, anti-Islamist government in Kabul, which we would I
think, we would pay an awful lot of money to get back at
this stage as preferable to what we have. Meanwhile a
State Department official, Edmund McWilliams, objected that
"Pakistani intelligence and Hekmatyar were dangerous
allies," and that the United States was making an important
mistake by endorsing ISI’s puppet Afghan interim
government.56. But Ali Mohamed’s training, both in
Afghanistan and later around New York, was precisely
designed to strengthen the Arab Afghans in Brooklyn who
intended to go support Hekmatyar.57 So this is a
conflicted program and the fact that Ali Mohammad was doing
it, earned him high-level protection. And there is so much
I’m not telling you about how he was actually flying to
Afghanistan and fighting while he was on the US Army
payroll, which is a definite no-no. And his commanding
officer didn’t like it, but there was nothing he could do
about it because Ali Mohammad was apparently being directed
by another agency.58 And you can only guess what that other
agency would have been. Well anyway, the new book by Peter
Lance confirms that Ali Mohammed was one of al Qaeda’s top
trainers in terrorism –yes, top trainers in terrorism,
including top training in hijacking: how to bring on box
cutters, where to sit in the plane.59 (And that’s not
against the Soviets, because you couldn’t hijack a Soviet
plane, because no civilians ever got on a Soviet plane in
Afghanistan.) Mohamed has also been called one of the
primary sources for the infamous Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential
Daily Brief (PDB) entitled `Bin Laden Determined To Strike
In U.S.’"60 At the heart of that August 6 PDB was
unmistakably a disguised double reference to Mohamed
himself.61 To sum up: Mohamed was a top trainer. He was an
operative for the CIA and the Army, and in my book I write
that in 1990 his trainees intended to help the CIA support
the drug trafficker Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, even after the
Soviets withdrew. Back in 1990 the FBI knew these people
were involved in conspiratorial activity. As I said, they
photographed, they videotaped Ali Mohamed training these
people. Then very shortly afterwards, Nosair went out and
shot Meir Kahane, and because of his own lack of cool, ended
up being shot himself and arrested.62 The police and the
FBI told the public that he was, and we’ve heard this kind
of language before, a "lone, deranged gunman." who, and this
is the FBI speaking, "acted alone." Here you have a guy
who was part of a tolerated conspiracy, and when it went
public, - I don’t think they anticipated the killing of
Kahane, that is their response. First of all they knew he
wasn’t alone because they had film of him training these
other people. All of his trainees were members of the
al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which served as the main
American recruitment center for the network, which after the
Afghanistan war, became known as al Qaeda. And it has been
said that the murder of Kahane was the first al Qaeda attack
in America. The al-Kifah Center was headed at the time,
by the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who like Ali Mohamed,
had been admitted to the US on a CIA visa, despite being on
a State Department watch list. And as he had done earlier in
Egypt, he issued a fatwa that permitted his followers to rob
banks and kill Jews.66 Now in November 1990, three of
Mohamed’s trainees conspired together to kill Meir Kahane,
the racist founder of the Jewish Defense League. The actual
killer, El Sayyid Nosair, was caught by accident almost
immediately; and by luck the police soon found his two
co-conspirators, Mahamud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh,
waiting at Nosair’s apartment. So they had the other
two conspirators, and this is also what they found at
Nosair’s house, and I am quoting, There
were formulas for bomb making, 1,440 rounds of ammunition,
and manuals from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center
at Fort Bragg marked ‘Top Secret for Training’ [May I
say those manuals were supplied by Ali Mohamed – the
double-agent, and became the basis for the al Qaeda’s own
manual, which was mostly written by double-agent Mohamed]
along with classified documents belonging to the U.S. Joint
Chiefs of Staff. The police found maps and drawings of New
York City landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square
– and the World Trade Center. The forty-seven boxes of
evidence they collected also included the collected sermons
of blind Sheikh Omar, in which he exhorted his followers to
"destroy the edifices of capitalism."67 So
all three – Nosair, Abouhalima and Salameh -- had been
trained by Mohamed. The FBI had photographed them, and if
they had moved on and seized all three of them we probably
would not have had the first World Trade Center bombing. And
we almost certainly would not have had the so called
Landmarks Conspiracy, where there was a plot to blow up
other landmarks you just heard mentioned, like the Statue of
Liberty. The police on the case thought at the beginning
that they were facing a conspiracy.68 And yet only hours
after the killing, Joseph Borelli, Chief of NYPD detectives,
struck a familiar American note and pronounced Nosair a
"lone deranged gunman." And some time later, he actually
told the press - and this is the real giveaway, that "There
was nothing at Nosair’s house, nothing that would stir
your imagination. Nothing has transpired that changes our
opinion that he acted alone."69 So if 47 boxes of
incriminating evidence is remembered by this man as
"nothing," then he either has an astonishingly bad memory,
or that this is how the US law enforcement system treats
people who are marginally attached to intelligence
operations, covert operations, even controversial operations
which are opposed by other elements of the US government.
70 Now Borelli himself was not acting alone in this
matter. His position was also that of the FBI, who said they
too believed "that Mr. Nosair had acted alone in shooting
Rabbi Kahane." "The bottom line is that we can't connect
anyone else to the Kahane shooting," an FBI agent said.71
So there is an MO here. And I want to go back to what I
was saying at the very beginning. To end up having a
unsolvable crime, somebody has pre-selected a candidate or
candidates. And the ideal pre-selected candidate will be one
about whom the truth will never emerge, because of the
candidate’s controversial involvement in previous
covered-up operations. This will guarantee that an
institutional cover-up, already in place, will be extended
to cover the new crime, even if it is a major one. Oswald
was one such pre-selected candidate. Those conspiratorially
involved with Ali Mohamed and with 9/11 would also seem to
fit the same description. That is what struck me most when I
went back to compare the two events, or meta-events. I
should make clear that with respect to 9/11, I have certain
knowledge of only one fact: that there has been and
continues to be a massive cover-up. I have not yet
assimilated the earlier cover-up of Ali Mohamed in 1990 into
my theory of what happened in 2001. But I commend this to
you as something which merits further investigation. In
this talk I’m not getting into the question of conspiracy.
But of course there has to be a conspiracy theory about
9/11.You cannot say 9/11 was someone acting alone. To avoid
a serious "conspiracy theory," the best you can come up with
is something like "19 lone nuts acting together." Just in
case you don’t remember it, the FBI identified these names
before 10 o’clock on that morning. And within two weeks
there were five, six or seven people, in various places
(nearly all turned out to be pilots, by the way) who said,
"That’s my name; yes, I went to that flight school;" two
or three even said "that’s my photograph that was
published." But they also said "it’s not me," and you had
to sympathize with their logic: "it’s not me because I’m
still here and I’m still alive." And it was bad enough
that the Saudi government officially protested to the United
States government. In response to these problems, FBI
Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on September 20, 2001,
that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers was in
doubt.72 How many of you have looked at the 9/11 Report?
You’re a virgin audience here. The 9/11 Report has a great
deal to say about the 19 hijackers, but it’s never hinted
that there had ever been a shadow of suspicion as to who
they really are. Which is just one of the many indications
this was not a very profound investigation. And like the
Warren Commission Report, they already knew were they had to
end up because it had been pre-defined for them. They
already knew. But it is the combination I want you to think
about. The truth about the predesignated culprit or culprits
is unpursuable because he/they were part of an operation too
embarrassing to disclose. Which in the case of 9/11 is a
scandal. I mean these people could have been stopped back in
1990 and weren’t. And I haven’t gone into the Patrick
Fitzgerald part of it. This is a very important book by the
way, Triple Cross. And he has another book, A Thousand Years
for Revenge, which is almost as important. My final words
are words that I have said I think on many occasions, and
are a propos on many subjects: That when we look at
something like the JFK Assassination or 9/11, throw in
Iran-Contra – or the bombing of Letelier, we are looking
at meta-events. Meta-events, unlike most events, are not
treated normally in the US press; but are what John [Judge]
called this morning a hidden history. And they are reserved
for a special kind of treatment, and that requires, among
other things, a special kind of audience, people like you.
Because we stumble upon it somewhere, in this case with
JFK, we are open to the fact that it happens elsewhere. And
like I said before and will say so again, and my final words
to you is to understand any of these events in real depth,
you have to go beyond bullet angles at Dealey Plaza, and
films from the same place, and look at what is on-going in
this country. And I’ll remind you again of the possible
involvement of the drug traffic. And to get to any kind of
level where we can cope and deal with these kinds of
problems in our country, we have to see the continuity and
deal with it every time it surfaces. Because if we
don’t deal with it this time, and we probably won’t, it
will surface again. Thank you very much.
NOTES 1 My thanks to Bill Kelly for transcribing this
talk and making the text available online. 2 E.g. CIA
Cable 74830 of 10 Oct 63 to Mexico City,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=30335&relPageId=2;
reproduced in John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York:
Carroll & Graf, 1995), 512. 3 Manning Clements FBI FD-302
of 11/23/63; in Warren Report, 614. 4 WR 5. Brennan
subsequently failed to pick out Oswald in a police line-up
(Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact [Mary Ferrell
Foundation Press, 2006], 10-13, 78n). 5 Richard A.
Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on
Terrorism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 13-14. 6
William Norman Grigg, "Did We Know What Was Coming?" New
American, 3/11/02,
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2002/03-11-2002/vo18no05_didweknow.htm.
Cf. the remarks of Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer of the Pentagon
Able Danger project: "We were amazed at how quickly the FBI
produced the name and pictures of all 19 hijackers. But then
again, we were surprised at how quickly they’d made the
arrests after the first World Trade Center bombing. Only
later did we find out that the FBI had been watching some of
these people for months prior to both incidents" (Peter
Lance, Triple Cross [New York: Regan/HarperCollins, 2006],
383). 7 Lamar Waldron, with Thom Hartmann, Ultimate
Sacrifice (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006), 74, 170. 8
Before giving the talk I had already discussed WHCA
documents with Rex Bradford, the only person to raise his
hand at the conference in response to my question. 9 9/11
Report, 41. 10 9/11 Report, 40. 11 Discussion in David
Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and
Distortions (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press/Interlink,
2004), 220-23.. 12 Clarke, Against All Enemies, 8; 9/11
Report, 38. The two accounts agree about Air Force One and
COG, but not about the planes (Clarke: "tell the Pentagon
they have authority from the President to shoot down hostile
aircraft;" 9/11 Report: "The White House requested…a
fighter combat air patrol over Washington, D.C.") 13 See
James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Viking, 2004),
138-45, 295-96. 14 9/11 Report, 41. 15 9/11 Report,
40. 16 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean later complained
that "The phone logs don’t exist, because they evidently
got so fouled up in communications that the phone logs have
nothing. So that’s the evidence we have." "There's no
documentary evidence here," added Vice-Chairman Lee
Hamilton. "The only evidence you have is the statements of
the president and vice president" (9/11 Commission, Hearing
of 6/17/04,
http://www.9-11commission.gov/archive/hearing12/9-11Commission_Hearing_2004-06-17.pdf
). 17 "Most Americans have heard of the ‘18 minute
gap’ in a Nixon Presidential tape--the erasure was part of
a cover-up for which Nixon was driven from office. But few
know of the erasure of a 1963 conversation between President
Lyndon Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a call
recorded less than 24 hours after the murder of President
Kennedy. This new documentary short, The Fourteen Minute
Gap, relates Rex Bradford's discovery of the erasure,
initial denials by the LBJ Library, and his failed attempt
to get the story into the national media" (Rex Bradford,
"The Fourteen Minute Gap,"
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/The_Fourteen_Minute_Gap
). 18 Supporting evidence for the 9/11 Report is
scheduled for release on January 2, 2009. See 9/11
Commission, Media Advisory, 8/20/04,
http://www.9-11commission.gov/press/pr_2004-08-20a.pdf ;
Thomas H., Kean, and Lee H. Hamilton, with Benjamin Rhodes,
Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission
(New York: Knopf, 2006), 312: "All of our records were
transferred to the National Archives, with an agreement that
they would be made public at the beginning of 2009." 19
Peter Dale Scott, "Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New
Detention Camps," Pacific News Service, 2/8/06,
http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=eed74d9d44c30493706fe03f4c9b3a77: Censored
2007: The Top 25 Censored Stories (New York: Seven Stories
Press, 2006) 20 In the 1990s the Assassination Records
Review Board attempted to obtain from the WHCA the unedited
original tapes of conversations from Air Force One on the
return trip from Dallas, November 22, 1963. (Edited and
condensed versions of these tapes had been available since
the 1970s from the LBJ Library in Austin.) The attempt was
unsuccessful: "The Review Board’s repeated written and
oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did
not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that
illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes." See
Assassinations Records Review Board, Final Report, Chapter
6, Part 1, 116,
http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/review-board/report/chapter-06-part1.pdf.
21 "The Review Board’s repeated written and oral
inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not
bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that
illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes." See
Assassinations Records Review Board, Final Report, Chapter
6, Part 1, 116,
http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/review-board/report/chapter-06-part1.pdf.
Cf. p. 155. 22 NARA Record 172-10001-10003 (11/22/63),
WHCA statement, "Dallas.": "Direct communication set up
immediately between Agent directly outside of emergency room
[in Highland Hospital] and Mr. Behn [Special Agent in
Charge, White House Secret Service detail] in his office in
Washington which became the Washington Command Post and
clearing house." 23 NARA Record 172-10001-10003
(11/22/63), WHCA statement, "Dallas." 24 Peter Dale
Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 273-74, 277-78;
quoting 23 WH 841, "cut all traffic for the ambulance going
to Parkland." 25 Scott, Deep Politics, 273-74,
277-78. 26 Scott, Deep Politics, 127-46. 27 Peter Dale
Scott, Deep Politics Two, 135-36. 28 Waldron, Ultimate
Sacrifice, 513-15, 525-26, 647-48, 785-86, etc. 29 Ann
Louise Bardach, Washington Post, 11/12/06,
http://www.bardachreports.com/articles/wp_20061112new.html:
Posada had complained "of the U.S. media's reluctance to
believe reports about a series of bombings in Cuba, which he
hoped would scare tourists and investors away from Castro's
island." Cf. New York Times, 7/12-13/98. 30 Quoted by Al
Giordano, Narco News Bulletin, 6/21/05,
http://www.narconews.com/Issue38/article1354.html. 31
http://www.state.gov/p/inl/narc/rewards/47900.htm 32 In
August 2003, the Miami bureau of the FBI made the startling
decision to close its case on Posada. Subsequently,
according to the FBI, several boxes of evidence were removed
from the bureau's evidence room. Since then, in a change of
heart, Justice Department has reopened the case, by
pursuing, not Posada, but the files of the NYT reporter (Ann
Louise Bardach) who interviewed him. She fought back with a
report on her problems in the Washington Post (11/12/06):
"Justice Department …struck a plea deal for about two
years in prison for Posada's comrades Santiago Alvarez and
Osvaldo Mitat, who had been facing up to 50 years in prison
for the illegal possession of hundreds of firearms."
Santiago Alvarez, formerly of Comandos L, is one of the
Cuban terrorists who pledged participation in the
Revolutionary Junta of Paulino Sierra Martinez, whose
connection to the JFK assassination is discussed by Robert
Blakey and myself (Deep Politics, 89-90, 329-30). 33
Bardach, Washington Post, 11/12/06. 34 Bardach,
Washington Post, 11/12/06. 35 "Evidence Presented to the
British Parliament, 4th October 2001," Los Angeles Times,
10/4/01. Cf. e.g. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 9/30/01; Asia
Times, 12/8/01; New York Times, 10/4/01, 10/11/01; San
Francisco Chronicle, 10/4/01. For further documentation, see
Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War [Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2003], 32, 36. 36 9/11 Report, 171, 37
"US `seizes al-Qaeda drugs ship'," BBC News, 12/19/03. 38
Daniel Ellsberg with Kris Welch, KPFA, 8/26/06,
http://wotisitgood4.blogspot.com/2006/10/ellsberg-hastert-got-suitcases-of-al.html.
39 Vanity Fair, September 2005. 40 Indira Singh
testimony, 9/11 Citizen’s Commission, 128,
http://www.justicefor911.org/September-Hearings.doc. Indira
Singh was a one-time senior employee of J.P. Morgan, who was
fired after she shared her concerns about an Arab-financed
contracting firm with her bank and the FBI. 41 The most
sensational charge of a direct 9/11-drug connection is made
by Daniel Hopsicker in his self-published book Welcome to
Terrorland. "Hopsicker is still researching the three
Huffman-trained 9/11 pilots, who he says had financial,
drug-trafficking and military intelligence ties to the U.S.
government. He is developing suspicions that Atta and the
entire school were involved with Osama bin Laden in heroin
trafficking. Hopsicker reports that on July 25, 2000, the
DEA in Orlando discovered more than 30 pounds of heroin
inside a Learjet owned by Wally Hilliard, owner of Huffman
Aviation. Earlier that month, on July 3, Atta and Marwan
Al-Shehri had started flight lessons at Huffman. Hopsicker
claims it's not a coincidence that Atta was allegedly
importing heroin with Hilliard's help, selling Afghanistan's
notorious opium and heroin to finance the Taliban. Hilliard
would not be interviewed for this story. `The apparatus that
Osama bin Laden set into place along with the CIA back in
the '80s, still exists,’ Hopsicker says. `The FBI is
protecting an operation set in place back in the '80s...a
money-laundering device to funnel money to the Afghan
Mujahedeen and to flood this country with heroin’" (Sander
Hicks, Long Island Press, 2/26/04,
http://www.911citizenswatch.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=82).
Hopsicker’s charges are reported, but only minimally
corroborated, in Sander Hicks, The Big Wedding (Vox Pop #2,
2005), 31-39. Most other researchers, myself included, are
looking for more independent corroboration. 42 Scott,
Drugs, Oil, and War, 27-58. 43 Peter Truell, and Larry
Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the
World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1992), 132. 44 Scott, Deep Politics and the
Death of JFK, 252; quoting Lucille Connell, 26 WH 738. 45
Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 257. 46
Hinckle and Turner, Deadly Deceits, 173-76. 47 Waldron,
Ultimate Sacrifice, 187-88. 48 Scott, Deep Politics,
257. 49 Scott, Deep Politics, 257-58. 50 Lance, Triple
Cross, 123-25. 51 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower:
Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006),
198. 52 http://www.peterdalescott.net/q.html. 53
Lance, Triple Cross, 47-51. 54 United States v. Omar
Ahmad Ali Abdel Rahman et al., Federal Court, SDNY,
15629-30, 15634-35, 15654, 15667-68, 15671, 15673; Kohlmann,
Al-Qaida’s Jihad, 72-74; J.M. Berger, "Al Qaeda Recruited
U.S. Servicemen: Testimony Links Plot To Saudi Gov't,"
Intelwire.com,
http://intelwire.egoplex.com/hamptonel010604.html. In my
talk, I said erroneously that Hampton-El was recruiting for
Afghanistan. 55 I mistakenly said "Rabbani." I have
corrected my spoken text in this section to present my
argument more accurately. 56 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New
York: Penguin Press, 2004), 196; cf. 197-202. 57 Cf.
Lance, Triple Cross, 20, 66. 58 Cf. Lance, Triple Cross,
43: "Ali Mohamed defied his commanding officer and prepared
to go [to Afghanistan] anyway. At that point, it seems clear
that he was serving two sets of masters at Bragg." 59
Lance, Triple Cross, 365, 382; J.M. Berger [ed.], Ali
Mohamed: An Intelwire Sourcebook (Intelwire Press, 2006),
14; cf. Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the
Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 181. 60 J.M.
Berger, "Unlocking 9/11: Paving the Road to 9/11,"
IntelWire,
http://intelwire.egoplex.com/unlocking911-1-ali-mohamed-911.html.
FBI Agent Cloonan said on the National Geographic Show that
"If you look at the six- or seventeen sentences that are in
there, from what I’ve seen, all that information came from
Ali. "National Geographic Presents Triplecross;" Berger, Ali
Mohamed, 20. But Cloonan’s statement exaggerates; one
section of the PDB is clearly from Millennium plotter Ahmed
Ressam. 61 9/11 Report, 261-62: "Al-Qa’ida members --
including some who are U.S. citizens -- have resided in or
traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently
maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two
al-Qa’ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb
our embassies in East Africa were U.S. citizens, and a
senior EIJ [Egyptian Islamic Jihad] member lived in
California in the mid-1990s." Ali Mohamed is simultaneously
one of the two found guilty in the embassies plot (the other
was his friend Wadih el Hage), and also the EIJ member who
lived in California. 62 Lance, Triple Cross, 56-58. 63
Newsday, 11/8/90; quoted in Peter Lance, 1000 Years for
Revenge (New York: Regan Books, 2003), 35. 64 New York
Times, 12/16/90. 65 Rahman was issued two visas, one of
them "by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular
section of the American embassy in Sudan" (Peter L. Bergen,
Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden
[New York: Free Press, 2001], 67). FBI consultant Paul
Williams writes that Ali Mohamed "settled in America on a
visa program controlled by the CIA" (Paul L. Williams, Al
Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror [Upper Saddle River, NJ]:
Alpha/ Pearson Education, 2002], 117). 66 Wright, The
Looming Tower, 177. 67 Lance, 1000 Years, 34. Cf. John
Miller and Michael Stone, with Chris Mitchell, The Cell (New
York: Hyperion, 2003), 45. 68 Miller and Stone, The Cell,
43: "Nosair, the NYPD had already learned, had apparently
not acted alone…Lieutenant Eddie Norris…seemed to be
looking at a conspiracy involving three and possibly more
assassins." 69 New York Times, 11/8/90; Robert I.
Friedman, Village Voice, 3/30/93. 70 John Miller, who
went on to be the assistant director of public affairs for
the FBI (Lance, Triple Cross, 115), blames the culture of
the NYPD: "The previling theory in the NYPD was, `Don’t
make waves.’…So in the Nosair case, when Chief Borelli
turned a blind eye to the obvious, he was merely remaining
true to the culture of the NYPD" (The Cell, 44-45.)
Miller’s unlikely explanation suppresses the relevant fact
that the FBI turned a blind eye to the obvious as well.
71 New York Times, 12/16/90. 72 BBC, 9/23/01;
Newsday, 9/21/01; Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline: Year
by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute (NewYork:
HarperCollins/Regan Books, 2004),
498. ************* Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat
and English Professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His chief
poetry books are the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum:
Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989), Listening to
the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the
Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000. In addition he has
published Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994).
In November 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award.
An anti-war speaker during the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, he
was a co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program
at UC Berkeley, and of the Coalition on Political
Assassinations (COPA). His poetry has dealt with both his
experience and his research, the latter of which has
centered on U.S. covert operations, their impact on
democracy at home and abroad, and their relations to the
John F. Kennedy assassination and the global drug traffic.
The poet-critic Robert Hass has written (Agni, 31/32, p.
335) that "Coming to Jakarta is the most important political
poem to appear in the English language in a very long
time." ********************
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole
responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect
those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. To become a Member of Global
Research The Centre for Research on Globalization
(CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca grants permission to
cross-post original Global Research articles in their
entirety, or any portions thereof, on community internet
sites, as long as the text & title are not modified. The
source must be acknowledged and an active URL hyperlink
address to the original CRG article must be indicated. The
author's copyright note must be displayed. For publication
of Global Research articles in print or other forms
including commercial internet sites, contact:
crgeditor@yahoo.com For media inquiries:
crgeditor@yahoo.com
© Copyright Peter Dale Scott, Global
Research,
2006 ********************
STANDARD DISCLAIMER FROM UQ.ORG: UnansweredQuestions.org
does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in the
above article. We present this in the interests of research
-for the relevant information we believe it contains. We
hope that the reader finds in it inspiration to work with us
further, in helping to build bridges between our various
investigative communities, towards a greater, common
understanding of the unanswered questions which now lie
before us.
|