Maybe it is just me, but this is just chock full of very important
info.
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/Baffles.htm
Clearing the Baffles for 911
By Wayne Madsen
Top officials of the George W. Bush and, to a lesser extent, the
Clinton administration, stymied a number of coordinated intelligence
and law enforcement activities that could have prevented both the
911 attacks and the attack, eleven months before, on the USS Cole.
These subscribers and ardent supporters of the Project for a New
American Century's (PNAC) blueprint for U.S. global domination
interfered with covert projects by the CIA, FBI, Defense
Intelligence Agency, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Treasury
Department, and National Security Agency (NSA) that could have
exposed an international organized criminal cartel that included the
911 hijackers, arms and drug traffickers, and Mafia financiers.
According to a number of former CIA, FBI, and DIA officers, the one
glaring missing link in the 911 attacks and the USS Cole bombing is
the lack of provable involvement by organized Islamist
fundamentalists, including the generic bogeyman consistently cited
by the PNAC supporters: "Al Qaeda."
The element that is common to both the Bush II and Clinton
administrations is a group of neo-conservatives who signed on to the
PNAC dream of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new
Pearl Harbor" to advance their agenda in the same way the German
Nazis torched the Reichstag building to advance their agenda. Then
the bogeyman of convenience was the Communist Party, today, it is Al
Qaeda.
However, much like a submarine "clearing the baffles" by turning 120
degrees to port and starboard to detect trailing enemy subs, the
instigators of 911 cleared their own baffles by firing, suspending,
and blocking U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agents who were
aggressively pursuing the many leads that could have prevented the
advancement of the PNAC and the overall neo-conservative agenda.
Without 911, there would have been no Patriot Act, no Iraq War, no
trashing of the United Nations, no upending of the U.S. intelligence
community, no Department of Homeland Security, and no second
administration for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Moreover, there
would be no current role in government or policy making for those
who benefited most from 911, those who were charter members of PNAC:
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Zalmay
Khalilzad, Richard Perle, newly-emergent racist leader William
Bennett, and Cheney himself.
***
The one individual who stands tall among those intelligence and law
enforcement officers who was aggressively pursuing the criminal
network that would carry out 911 was FBI counter-terrorism top man
John O'Neill. Ever since the first World Trade Center bombing in
1993, O'Neill's pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda had been
dogged. After further terrorist attacks at the Khobar Towers
barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia; the U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania; and the USS Cole in Aden harbor, O'Neill's biggest problem
was not Al Qaeda, it was resistance from top officials inside the
U.S. government.
According to classified documents from French intelligence, Al Qaeda
and Bin Laden had still been under the operational control of U.S.
and British "security services" until 1995, fully two years after
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. As of 1996, the U.S. State
Department continued to refuse to list Al Qaeda as a terrorist
organization. After the 1996 bombings of the Khobar Towers that
killed nineteen U.S. military personnel, the State Department under
Secretary of State Warren Christopher, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and
the Saudi government did everything they could to obstruct O'Neill's
investigation.
In his aggressive pursuit of Al Qaeda, O'Neill, according to people
who worked closely with him, began to have serious concerns over
complicity by those inside the Clinton and Bush administrations.
There was the mysterious theft in the summer of 2000 of his
briefcase at a Tampa hotel during a retirement seminar where the
only other participants were 150 other FBI agents. In the briefcase
were a few classified emails and a classified document called the
Annual Field Office Report, a summary of the New York FBI's office
counter-terrorist and counter-intelligence operations, including one
very sensitive investigation being conducted by another New York
counter-intelligence FBI special agent, Michael Dick. Although a
lighter, cigar cutter, and expensive pen were stolen, the papers
were all accounted for when the briefcase turned up 90 minutes later
at another nearby hotel. Ninety minutes, of course, was sufficient
time to photocopy the documents and discover what O'Neill knew about
both Al Qaeda and their Israeli shadows.
Special Agent Dick, who worked closely with O'Neill, had discovered
a troubling ring of Israeli movers operating in the New York and New
Jersey areas. Furthermore, some of these Israelis not only had
connections with Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies but
were also shadowing Arab and Muslims that had been under
investigation as potential terrorist cells. But the Israelis were
acting independently and there was no effort made to inform the FBI
or local police of any intelligence they were obtaining on their
targets.
Further frustrating Dick's counter-espionage activities against the
Israelis was the fact that they were using communications methods
that made it almost impossible to conduct communications
surveillance: they used Verizon pre-paid cell phones, two-way Nextel
walkie-talkies, and Internet cafes.
At the same time, the DEA had discovered a nationwide ring of
Israeli "art students," many of whom had past connections to Israeli
intelligence and military demolition units, were operating in and
around New York and New Jersey. What the DEA did not realize was
that the art students were also shadowing the very same Arab cells
that would later carry out the 911 attacks.
And the DEA had become aware of a drug connection between the
Russian-Israeli Mafia in Colombia and the globe trotting Saudi
Prince Nayif al Saud. The DEA's Operation Millennium was directed
against this network, which largely took down most of the network in
June 1999, when 808 kilograms of cocaine were seized in Paris. Later
the DEA, in June 2000, the DEA declassified a "SECRET DEA-6" report
from the DEA's BCO (Bogota Country Office) so that the PCO (Paris
Country Office) could share the intelligence on Saudi cocaine
smuggling operations with the Paris police. The DEA and French law
enforcement had compiled tons of evidence that Prince Nayif was
transporting cocaine to support some major event.
The DEA report stated that Nayif stated that Allah had authorized
him to sell drugs and that later his reason for selling the drugs
would become known. It is significant that Nayif did not use
alcohol, tobacco or drugs. Nayif claimed diplomatic immunity and the
Saudi government threatened France and the Clinton administration
with withholding lucrative contracts if they pursued their prince.
Because of O'Neill's close contacts with DEA, this intelligence
would have been made known to him as well. The Saudi cocaine
smuggling network involved organized crime elements tied to the
Russian-Israeli Mafia in Miami; Medellin, Colombia; Marbella and
Barcelona, Spain; Venezuela; Geneva; and the Netherlands. According
to the DEA report, Nayif fathered a child with a woman named Doris
Salazar, a Colombian national residing in Miami. The report also
states that an organized crime figure only identified as "Pepe," a
Cuban American who ran a "large section of the Miami Port" and who
came to Florida during the 1978 Mariel boat lift, was involved with
Nayif in "protecting narcotic shipments upon arrival in the Miami
port." The declassified SECRET DEA-6 report contains the names of a
number of cooperating witnesses in the investigation of Nayif and
the cocaine smuggling network and the author takes seriously the
statement in the document: "Protect identities of the cooperating
defendants."
The DEA originally became interested in the Israelis because they
suspected they were involved in an Israeli Mafia Ecstasy smuggling
ring. However, it soon became clear that the DEA had stumbled across
something much larger not only were DEA offices and homes of DEA
agents around the country being cased by the Israelis, but they were
also targeting Federal judges, U.S. Marshals, Environmental
Protection Agency law enforcement officers, and FBI agents for
surveillance.
It also became clear to the DEA that the Israeli art students were
also involved with certain Colombians. On March 22, 2002, at the Oak
Hills Apartment Complex in Irving, Texas, DEA agents arrested
Israeli art student Dahan Eldad, along with Elsa Beatriz Africano-
Leon, a Colombian national. On March 27, DEA agents arrested four
other Israelis in the same apartment complex, including Aran Ofek,
who said his father was a retired Israeli army two-star general. A
$10,000 bond for another arrested Israeli, Michal Gal, was placed by
Ophir Baer, an employee of Israeli telecommunications firm AMDOCS,
Inc., a firm with operational access to the telephones being used by
FBI agents John O'Neill, Michael Dick, and the DEA agents involved
in tracking the Saudi/Mafia cocaine shipments being used to support
various terrorist and intelligence cells in the United States and
abroad.
On April 11, 2001, a DEA agent and a Fredericksburg, Virginia
policeman questioned two female Israeli "art student" nationals at
the shopping center in Fredericksburg. The passport for Yael Gavish
contained some interesting entry/exit visas: 13 December 2000, entry
into Bogota, Colombia and 5 February 2001, exit visa from Bogota. In
addition, on 5 February there was a possible entry visa for Panama,
which was followed by a 9 March 2001 entry visa in New York City.
Gavish's colleague Meirav Balhams had a New York State identity card
listing her address as 354 Paterson Plank Rd., Jersey City, New
Jersey. An FBI 9-11 suspect list dated February 22, 2002 lists
Dominik Suter, along with an Ornit Levinson, a.k.a., Omit Suter,
with an address of 312 Pavonia Avenue, Jersey City. Dominik Suter
was the head of Urban Moving Systems of nearby Weehawken, the base
of operations for two white vans with the same rear license plate
that were seen parked at the Doric Apartments (near Patterson Plank
Road) and at Liberty State Park at the same time the first plane
struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The occupants of
both vans, all Israelis, were seen celebrating the attack while
dressed in Arab garb. Five Israelis in one of the vans were later
arrested by the local police and FBI near Giant Stadium in East
Rutherford, New Jersey in the late afternoon of September 11.
O'Neill's FBI colleague, Mike Dick, aggressively investigated this
Israeli ring before and after 911. But like O'Neill, he soon found
himself removed from his duties on the orders of the then-head of
the Justice Department's Criminal Division Michael Chertoff. Dick
was very suspicious when Israeli movers quickly moved Zim American
Israeli Shipping Company out of its 10,000 square feet of office
space on the 17th Floor of the North Tower of the World Trade
Center. The partially Israeli state-owned firm forfeited a $50,000
security deposit when it terminated its lease and vacated the
building one week prior to 911. According to a non official cover
(NOC) CIA source who worked with Dick, Israeli movers moved
explosives into the 17th Floor office space after Zim moved out.
After 911, Dick as well as the CIA NOC were harassed by their
superiors on orders "from above." Those orders came from Chertoff.
Dick was first relieved of his primary counter-espionage duties,
eventually sent to Pakistan to investigate the kidnapping of Wall
Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and eventually buried in a
desk job at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. According to the CIA
source, Pearl was murdered because he was getting too close to the
money trail that financed 911. The CIA source said, "the same group
that beheaded Pearl in Pakistan did the beheadings in Iraq." The
source added that the beheadings were "not Al Qaeda."
The CIA source, who emphasized his past Republican credentials,
emphasized that Al Qaeda was merely a "list" of arms dealers,
mercenaries, drug dealers, financiers, and terrorists used by the
CIA and Saudis during the Afghan Mujaheddin War against the Soviets.
The source also iterated that all the 911 hijackers had fake IDs.
During a joint CIA-FBI operation against lead hijacker Mohammed Atta
in Fort Lee, New Jersey in 2000, the CIA and FBI team leaders
complained to their superiors that their operation was being
photographed by Israeli agents, thus compromising the operation. The
CIA source affirmed that the Israelis in New Jersey were providing
cover for the future hijacker teams.
It was not the first run-in by the CIA operative with the Israelis.
He once caught a senior U.S. diplomat with close ties to Israel
taking bribes from Moroccan government officials to write favorable
reports on Morocco's continued control over disputed and oil and
mineral rich Western Sahara. Attempts to follow the diplomat's
laundered money were rebuffed by Madeleine Albright's State
Department.
The problems at the top of the CIA and FBI, said the source, existed
since the Russian/Soviet spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen were
able to penetrate the top levels of both agencies. "They got there
with help," said the source.
O'Neill decided that because his own agency was stymieing his own
investigative leads, he relied on DEA to handle his most sensitive
inquiries and communications. Although DEA memos later suggested
that Israeli telecommunications companies, under contract to the
Justice Department, may have penetrated sensitive DEA communications
as part of an intelligence operation, O'Neill was sure that his
communications at the FBI were totally compromised and forced to
rely on the DEA because of both internal political pressure from the
FBI and Justice Department leadership and his fear that his
communications were being wiretapped.
O'Neill also relied on French intelligence to obtain wiretap
information on Al Qaeda cells. O'Neill was certain that the Saudi
government and oil industry-centric members of the Bush
administration were behind the Al Qaeda network. He was also aware
of repeated negotiations between U.S. oil companies like UNOCAL and
Halliburton and Taliban representatives dating back to 1996, the
same year the Khobar Towers were bombed by the Taliban's Al Qaeda
wards. Although those negotiations ceased after the 1998 embassy
bombings in Africa, they began again in earnest after George W. Bush
became president.
O'Neill had discovered that some of his Al Qaeda targets were
involved in some very un-Islamic fundamentalist activities,
including drug smuggling, teenage prostitution, and blood diamond
dealing. The financial trail led O'Neill to a network of bank
accounts in London, Dubai, the Isle of Man, Guernsey, and Jersey.
The network investigated coincided exactly with the activities being
carried out by the Russian-Israeli Mafia and its links to diamond,
drug, and weapons dealers that was especially active in New York and
Florida. The future 911 hijackers and their Israeli "shadows" had
more than living in the same neighborhoods and frequenting the same
bars, video rental stores, and rental mailbox stores in common.
***
On October 12, 2000, the USS Cole, docked in Aden harbor after the
U.S. Navy deemed the port safe and certified it as a Defense Fuel
Support Point, was reportedly blown up by two men who approached the
warship in a small boat. The men were said to be Al Qaeda members
from the bin Laden family homeland in Hadhramaut, a remote region in
the east of Yemen straddling the Yemeni-Saudi border. Later, groups
called the Army of Mohammed and the Army of Aden-Abyan claimed
responsibility for the attack but these claims were reported through
obscure sources in London.
O'Neill and his FBI soon arrived in Yemen to investigate the crime.
>From the outset, O'Neill received a cold shoulder from the U.S.
ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine (the Deputy Chief of Mission in
Kuwait before Desert Storm and the U.S. viceroy for central Iraq
after the U.S. occupation). Bodine's orders to limit the scope of
O'Neill's investigation came from Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, whose father Dr. Joseph Korbel, a neo-con anti-Soviet
professor, was the mentor for one of his students at the University
of Denver Condoleeezza Rice. O'Neill was not permitted to
interview Yemenis who witnessed the Cole explosion. O'Neill was not
permitted to examine the hat worn by one of the bombers in the boat
nor was he allowed to examine the harbor sludge for evidence.
O'Neill was soon pulled out of Yemen and Bodine refused him and his
team permission to re-enter the country. O'Neill was getting too
close to something. In February, 2001, after Yemen's Interior
Minister Hussein Mohammed Arab made a statement that there was no
evidence linking the Cole bombing to Al Qaeda ("Investigations have
not so far proved, either to us or to the Americans, any link
between Osama bin Laden and the Cole bombing."), the Bush
administration showed no desire to find out who actually bombed the
ship. They were too busy clearing the baffles for the Iraq invasion
and their other agendas.
In early 2001, rumors began circulating that O'Neill would take over
White House Counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke's job at
the National Security Council. Clarke had been one of the few
holdovers from the Clinton to Bush administrations. Suddenly, the
story about the 90 minute theft of O'Neill's brief case was leaked
to the New York Times, even though the Justice Department had long
before dropped its own investigation of the incident. Although the
FBI continued its own investigation of the brief case incident, it
prevented an investigation of the leak of the O'Neill incident to
the media.
On August 22, O'Neill retired from 30 years' service with the FBI.
The next day, he began his job as Security Director for the World
Trade Center. His office was on the 34th Floor of the North Tower of
the Trade Center. O'Neill's building was the first one hit on
September 11. He died while trying to save people in the South
Tower, the second building hit by the hijackers.
***
A joint CIA-FBI computer system, code named "Alex," was entirely
focused on Bin Laden's network. A unit at Langley, called "Station
Alex," was established in 1995. It began to detect that "Al Qaeda"
was actually a diversified financial, drug smuggling, arms
smuggling, and diamond smuggling network with tentacles in over 60
countries around the world. And, as with any large criminal
syndicate, it had ties with legitimate companies such as banks,
hawalahs, and religious charities, but also with criminal
enterprises, including the Russian-Israeli, Latin American, and
Balkans Mafias. This first step at coordinating the efforts of the
CIA and FBI in combating Al Qaeda was successful. The FBI lead Alex
agent was John O'Neill. His CIA counterpart was Michael Scheuer, who
would later abruptly leave Langley upset that the threat posed by Al
Qaeda was not being taken more seriously by the Bush administration.
Scheuer's worries mirrored those of O'Neill in the months before he
was killed at the World Trade Center. As O'Neill got closer to
those who would be behind 911, he found himself locked out of the
Alex computer system. His access authorization had been pulled by
higher authority. Eventually, Alex, like its counterpart, Able
Danger, would be shut down by the Bush administration.
Foreign intelligence agencies would prove more useful than either
the CIA or FBI in tracking leads on Al Qaeda and other terrorist
threats against the West. The French, who had a long history of
problems with Islamist terrorists dating from its Algerian War, had
tremendous assets who had penetrated both the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
A Confidential "French Eyes Only" DGSE intelligence document dated
January 9, 2001, which was written about terrorist activities at the
Al Qaeda training camp at Darounta, Afghanistan, bolsters what a CIA
source reported about the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole.
O'Neill was particularly interested in doing a DNA analysis of the
hat worn by one of the so-called suicide bombers in the small boat
that pulled alongside the Cole. He also wanted to conduct an
explosives analysis of the mud beneath the ship.
The Cole was at THREATCON (threat condition) BRAVO, which means that
its crew was on alert for suspicious approaching craft. One of the
security detail aboard the Cole said he was under the impression
that the small boat was a harbor services craft used to assist in
garbage disposal and other routine operations.
The classified French intelligence report concludes that there was
never a link between Al Qaeda units trained in Afghanistan for
amphibious operations against ships and the attack on the Cole. This
begs the question: if Al Qaeda did not bomb the Cole (as affirmed by
the Yemeni prime minister), who did?
The following is from the French intelligence report:
"A group of Arab nationals, whose nationality is undetermined, were
trained in amphibious operations at Darounta at the end of 1999
under the command of a Yemeni. In addition, in January 2000, a
project to attack an American destroyer in Aden failed due to a lack
of preparation. Finally, in February 2000, a group comprising 10
Yemenis had arrived in Darounta. Until May 2000, they were trained
in using explosives supplied by Abou Khabab before they were sent to
Jordan and Yemen.
No proof exists to connect these elements to the attack on the
destroyer USS Cole perpetrated on October 12, 2000, but the American
intelligence service has rapidly attempted information on Abou
Khebab after the attack.
Finally, for what concerns France, it has been established that
several French Islamists implicated in the attacks of 1995 and 1996
traveled to Afghan camps. Among them appear former Bosnian
combatants like Joseph Jaime and David Vallat, and especially Farid
Mellouk, who, in 1995, attended a training course in explosives at
Darounta. Investigated by French police, he was arrested on 5 March
1998 in Belgium. A search resulted in the seizure of explosives,
various types of detonators, potassium cyanide, and different
written notes similar to the information in the course run at
Darounta.
Excepting the Maghrebian enclave, the training given at Darounta,
for a duration of about 2 months, principally concerned the making
of explosives for the use by terrorists. This instruction,
originally provided at Khalden camp in Paktia, was transferred
during 1995, on the order of Ibu Cheikh, to Darounta after their
break from the control of the special services of certain countries,
notably the United States and United Kingdom."
The classified report also gives some background on Abou
Khebab: "Abou Khebab Egyptian. He is identified in March 1999 by
the CIA as the person in charge of training the Islamists associated
with Osama bin Laden in the manufacture and use of chemicals and
biological weapons. According to Egyptian intelligence, he was in
Yemen in June 1999 and makes frequent trips to Pakistan."
Given O'Neill's close ties to French intelligence, he would have
been aware of the cold trail the French had linking Al Qaeda to the
Cole bombing. He would have also been aware of the CIA's bird
dogging of Abou Khebab between Yemen and Pakistan. So, if the Yemeni
prime minister and the French are correct, who bombed the Cole?
The former CIA agent who worked with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task
Force in New York and New Jersey stated that the USS Cole was hit by
a specially-configured Popeye cruise missile launched from an
Israeli Dolphin-class submarine. Israeli tests of the missile in May
2000 in the waters off Sri Lanka demonstrated it could hit a target
930 miles away. The ex-CIA agent also stated that Ambassador Bodine
threw John O'Neill and his team out of Yemen lest their
investigation began uncovering evidence that the Cole was not blown
up by an explosive-laden boat but by an Israeli cruise missile.
The former CIA agent said the reason for the Israeli attack was to
further galvanize U.S. public opinion against both Al Qaeda and the
Democrats in the weeks prior to the 2000 presidential elections. The
Bush-Cheney team could blame the Democrats for not taking the Al
Qaeda threat seriously. However, this is exactly the tact the Bush
administration took after taking office: failure to support the CIA-
FBI's Alex Station, pressuring John O'Neill and other agents like
Minneapolis agent Coleen Rowley and others across the nation who
detected activity involving Arab flight students, and pulling the
plug on a major data mining operation directed against Al Qaeda code
named Able Danger, which was being jointly run by the DIA and the
Special Operations Command.
***
The French discovery of a Bosnian connection to two of its nationals
at Darounta is noteworthy. The Muslim operation in the Balkans was
largely supported by official (CIA, DIA, and Special Operations)
U.S. assistance but also by unofficial help. This was mainly carried
out by private military contractors like MPRI and financial support
networks like the Bosnia Defense Fund, established in the mid-1990s
at a Riggs Bank account in Washington, DC. The principal movers
behind the Bosnian Defense Fund were Richard Perle and Douglas
Feith. In fact, Feith's law firm, Feith and Zell (FANZ) set up the
Bosnia Defense Fund. According to a former Riggs legal adviser, when
objections were raised about the hundreds of millions of dollars
collected from such countries as Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Malaysia, the
UAE, Iran, Jordan, and Egypt that were being detected by the
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) being sent from
Washington to Sarajevo, Bosnia, and reports that there
was "spillage" of these funds into the hands of Al Qaeda units in
the country, Perle's response at one contentious meeting was, "just
make it fucking happen."
After 911, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill attempted to pressure
banks and other financial institutions in Dubai and Saudi Arabia to
provide records of past and ongoing Al Qaeda financial transactions.
According to a former auditor with the Central Bank of the United
Arab Emirates, during a trip by O'Neill in March 2002, the UAE and
Saudi officials shook O'Neill's hand, smiled at him, and offered to
assist. However, they soon put pressure on the Bush administration,
including several leading neo-cons who knew the stakes of such
disclosures, to force Paul O'Neill out. Later that year, in
December, Bush forced O'Neill to resign. A November 29, 2001 letter
from Treasury Department General Counsel David D. Aufhauser to Swiss
Procurator General Claude Nicati described the measures the Treasury
Department was taking against a major Al Qaeda financier named
Yassin A. Kadi. However, that particular thread intersected with
activities by Islamist guerrillas in Bosnia, and that was a threat
to certain neocon elements who had established a Bosnian support
fund in the 1990s that involved the same financial support networks
that supported Al Qaeda. In fact, Al Qaeda units were active in
Bosnia during the civil war. And those units were partly supported
by the Bosnia Defense Fund established by Perle and Feith.
According to the Aufhauser letter to his Swiss counterpart, "Mr.
Kadi has acknowledged in a number of press accounts that he is the
founder of the Muwafaq, or "Blessed Relief" Foundation. He is
identified in legal records as `Chairman' of the foundation. The
leader of the terrorist organization Al-Gama'at Al-Islamiya, Tala
Fuad Kassem, has said that the Muwafaq Foundation provided
logistical and financial support for a mujahadin battalion in
Bosnia. The foundation also operated in Sudan, Somalia, and
Pakistan, among other places." The letter continued, "Muhammad Ali
Harrath, main activist of the Tunisian Islamic Front (TIF) in the
United Kingdom, was associated with Muwafaq personnel in Bosnia and
other TIF members worked at the Muwafaq Foundation."
Paul O'Neill was too aggressive against the Saudi and global
organized crime terrorist money movers. It got him fired.
The Treasury Department, in its efforts to track down past money
flows to Al Qaeda, had undoubtedly come across those Riggs Bank
transfers to Sarajevo and hence to Al Qaeda in the 1990s. And the
2.5 terabytes of data collected by the Able Danger team on Al Qaeda
also undoubtedly included FINCEN, SWIFT, and other banking and wire
transfer data. And that pointed not only to people like Yassin Kadi
but also to the Bosnia Defense Fund of Perle and Feith. More the
reason to obstruct Paul O'Neill's earnest money tracking efforts.
Soon, O'Neill and Aufhauser would be bounced out of Treasury and
replaced with more "agreeable" people to fight the "global war on
terrorism."
Aufhauser's letter ends with a troubling conclusion about Albania
and Bosnia, the two countries that received support from the neo-
cons in the Clinton and Bush administrations and which have surfaced
in recent disclosures in Italy about ties between the Pentagon's own
intelligence unit and Al Qaeda-affiliated operatives in Italy who
had been liaisons between the Americans and Islamist fighters in the
Balkans: "When a region becomes more settled, such as Bosnia or
Albania today, seemingly legitimate businesses replace charitable
foundations as cover for continuing terrorist organizational
activity. Mr. Kadi's actions and those of his Muwafiq Foundation and
businesses fit this pattern and give rise to a reasonable basis to
believe that they have facilitated terrorist activities."
***
By the end of 2000, DIA, CIA, and NSA had compiled quite a dossier
on Al Qaeda and its activities. Yet, the political leadership of the
outgoing Clinton administration was more interested in not rocking
the boat before leaving for the private sector and the incoming Bush
administration officials were already making it known that they
wanted to see intelligence that conformed with its political dogma.
After the neo-cons nested in the Pentagon, the use of DIA and NSA to
produce cooked intelligence became policy. Similar pressure would
soon be brought to bear on the CIA, State Department, FBI, and
National Security Council.
Post-911, the FBI insisted that Mohammed Atta did not arrive in the
United States for the first time until 2000. However, Able Danger
placed him in the United States as early as 1999. In addition, FBI
Farsi, Azeri, and Turkish translator Sibel Edmonds discovered
further evidence that "Al Qaeda" was tied up with drug dealers
operating from Afghanistan to Turkey and into the Balkans, including
Albania and Kosovo, the nexus for Al Qaeda activity. The drug
connection to Al Qaeda was never investigated by the 911 Commission.
Past U.S. official and unofficial support for the Albanian and
Bosnian Al Qaeda and other terror cells would become highlighted.
The neo-con connection to those elements was also problematic.
Edmonds was fired by the FBI and faced the same recriminations as
John O'Neill, Coleen Rowley, and dozens of other intelligence and
law enforcement agents who did detect that something on the scale of
911 was about to occur. Allegations by the CIA director Porter Goss,
his successor as House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Chairman Peter Hoekstra, the 911 Commission, and others that the
U.S. Intelligence Community failed the nation on 911 are convenient
charges designed to draw attention away from the involvement of
senior Bush and Clinton administration officials in laying the
groundwork for the attack: the closing down of various intelligence
operations, the firing of key officials, and allowing classified
information to leak to countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,
Israel, and Turkey.
In the course of its data trawling, which commenced in 1999, Able
Danger grabbed some astounding data. According to DIA source,
evidence was uncovered of secret deals between then-Stanford
University Provost and Chevron director Condoleezza Rice and the
government of China. After former DIA analyst Russ Tice reported the
possible presence of a Chinese agent inside DIA, he was abruptly
fired from his highly classified position at his next agency, the
NSA. At the same time, a top Chinese analyst at DIA, who was
responsible for taking care of his elderly parents, strangely
committed suicide. Almost simultaneously, a highly-cleared Chinese-
American Air Force officer stationed at Offutt Air Force Base
outside of Omaha, Nebraska, also committed suicide, however, no
suicide note or body were ever recovered. In November 2003, similar
strange suicides plagued the State Department, NSA, and CIA
communities as intelligence was being cooked to support the war
against Iraq. Tice, a veteran like John O'Neill of operations in
Yemen following the USS Cole bombing, was reassigned to the NSA
motor pool and later run through a series of humiliating and
demoralizing Kafkaesque hearings and panels run by a combination of
NSA's draconian Security Directorate and NSA's subservient
psychological assessment unit.
Life in today's U.S. Intelligence Community: Suicide is commonplace
After the U.S. Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) and
its contractor Orion Scientific pulled out of Able Danger, most of
the work was conducted between DIA's TWI-2 (Trans World Information
Warfare) support (Computer Technologies) division, code named
Stratus Ivy, and Raytheon, a company with close links to the U.S.
intelligence community. TWI-1 is DIA's Special Activities Trans
World Information Warfare support group, which liaised with the Able
Danger group. It was during Phase II of Able Danger, the phase that
primarily relied on Raytheon support, that the Chinese connection to
Rice was uncovered. It is uncertain what Able Danger and another DIA
program code named Doorhawk Galley may have uncovered on the
Mohammed Atta cells around the country, their affiliation with
Israeli movers and art students, and other terrorist plans, but the
revelations of Able Danger have resulted in the revocation of the
security clearance, based on trumped up charges, of Lt. Col. Anthony
Shaffer, the key person involved in the programs to track Al Qaeda
prior to 911. The revelations have also likely spelled the end of
any further DIA data mining programs that could embarrass the Bush
administration and its Israeli and Saudi allies. These include Able
Danger's proposed successor Able Provenance and its data base
Kimberlite Magic.
Those who knew too much: John O'Neill, Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer,
Sibel Edmonds, and Paul O'Neill. All were victims of baffle clearing
by the neo-cons.
***
Another group that was getting close to Russian-Israeli Mafia
involvement with the so-called Al Qaeda network was the CIA's
Counter Proliferation Division. Working through Operations
Directorate and clandestine case officers and non-official cover
personnel, the CIA began to discover links between Al Qaeda,
Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence (ISI), Pakistani nuclear
weapons smuggler and top nuclear physicist A. Q. Khan, and a Russian-
Israeli-Turkish nuclear component smuggling ring that involved
illegal exports from the former Soviet states, the United States,
South Africa, and Malaysia to Pakistan, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia,
and North Korea.
The secret deals to traffic in weapons of mass destruction, if
revealed, would expose certain key figures in the Bush
administration. Therefore, it had to be cut off at the knees. The
White House revelations about a CIA NOC front company, Brewster
Jennings and Associates and one of its under cover agents, not only
served to attack anti-Iraq war opponents but also effectively rolled
up the covert operation and took the heat off of certain political
and financial middlemen who worked for or were close to the
administration, especially within Dick Cheney's office and Donald
Rumsfeld's Pentagon. Chief among these were I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, and Douglas Feith.
It was not the first time that a CIA NOC company had been exposed as
a result of the penetration of the U.S. intelligence by a foreign
government. According to a former CIA officer, Synergistics
Technologies, Inc., described as a CIA front, had been exposed after
Israeli intelligence had broken U.S. and NATO encryption codes
during Desert Storm. The firm's covert activities with post-Soviet
Russian television networks, the European Broadcasting Union, and
the Regional Security Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow were
laid wide open. That compromise of U.S. intelligence with the
Israelis would not be the first. Air Force Colonel Larry Franklin
was indicted for passing classified information to the pro-Israeli
organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Since Franklin agreed to a plea bargain with the government, it is
expected that the case may target additional officials and
consultants of the Bush administration.
***
The clearing of the baffles by senior officials of the Bush and
Clinton administrations in preparation for their defining moment of
a "new Pearl Harbor" has resulted in the virtual destruction of
America's ability to adequately collect intelligence and honestly
analyze its importance. The corridors of the FBI, NSA, DIA, CIA,
State Department, Treasury, and other agencies are littered with the
broken careers and dead bodies of dedicated intelligence and law
enforcement officers. There are a number of cases in which career
and conscientious intelligence and law enforcement officials have
abruptly lost their jobs -- some for showing undesirable
independence and free thinking, others for merely knowing too much
about who knew what and when about 911.
The neo-cons have done to the U.S. Intelligence Community what
Hurricane Katrina did to the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. America has
never been weaker. Rather than creating a "New American Century,"
the neo-cons have created a new global "Dark Age" of fear and
constant war.
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