-Caveat Lector- A Word About Promis Software In the Sept, 2000 issue of FTW (Vol III, No 7) we described recent developments in the decades-long saga of the legendary Promis software and this writer's interaction with members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's national security section over its current use by various intelligence agencies. Promis (Prosecutor's Management Information System) was specifically reengineered and mated with artificial intelligence during the 1980s for the purpose of tracking terrorists. One of its main strengths was its ability to integrate diverse pieces of data and predict the movement of terrorists based upon financial (e.g. credit card transactions), entries through various border checkpoints, car rentals and airline ticket purchases. This special software, refined and enhanced many times since then, is capable of integrating and coordinating precisely the kind of information described above and then setting off warning bells. We have confirmed many times over that Promis' unique abilities have also been specifically targeted at financial markets to track sudden shifts in currency and stock speculation as well as the laundering of money. That being said, we find it extremely disturbing that the UPI and the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet both published September 14 reports indicating that Osama Bin Laden had possibly engaged in large scale stock speculation in the U.S. and Europe just before the attacks. Both stories suggested that Bin Laden had bought large amounts of "shorts.' Taking a short position means that an investor, betting that a stock's price will go down, places a large number of shares up for sale at a given price usually just at or below the current market price. If a stock is in short supply, buyers will purchase the stock rapidly and the "short seller" then has a given period of time to produce the actual shares which he or she is not required to own at the time of the sale. The future sale of the stock at a given price is a fixed contract that cannot be altered. The seller pockets the money before he has to go out and buy the shares. Therefore, if the seller agrees to sell 10,000 shares of XYZ company at $100 each and enters into a contract at that price, and if the stock price falls to $60 the following day, he can make a quick profit of $400,000 when he buys the stock to complete the contract. It is inconceivable that such movements were not detected before the WTC attacks. Given all of the above, which is only the beginning of what will be revealed as time passes, only a cretin would believe that the United States government could not and did not know that these attacks were coming, and then chose to remain silent. Given these tiny bits of knowledge that are now public how much more was available to the intelligence community? How could they have apparently ignored it? Dissenters will say, "Yes but the CIA has been hamstrung and prevented from taking pre-emptive action by those liberal do-gooders in Congress." Not so. A September 14 Reuters story reported accurately, "The CIA has been authorized since 1998 to use covert means to disrupt and pre-empt terror operations allegedly planned abroad by Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden, The Washington Post reported Friday. "The newspaper said the directive, signed by President Clinton and reaffirmed by his successor, George W. Bush, adhered to a legal ban on the assassination of foreign leaders but sanctioned the use of lethal force in self-defense. "Quoting government sources, the paper said the CIA had used such force several times to stop armed groups before they initiated attacks." A final question: Why, in light of all the information we now know the government had about imminent attacks, did the Bush Administration gift the Taliban with $43 million in May of this year? The move by the White House, sorely criticized by columnist Robert Scheer in the May 22, 2001 Los Angeles Times, was an alleged reward by the U.S. for the Taliban's destruction of Afghan opium crops in February. Now, the U.S. government is rushing to mate with a Pakistani regime that sustains itself by, and derives liquid currency from, the drug trade. The result of that is that opium production will surely blossom again in Afghanistan - under U.S./CIA control. The obvious suggestion here is that the U.S., directly or indirectly, helped to fund the WTC attacks. It took 60 years for The History Channel, this year, to disclose to us through U.S. government documents and the statements of intelligence personnel who participated in it, that the highest levels of both government and finance knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. And they kept silent about it. Historically, the key fact that made the attack suspicious was that all five aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet were conveniently and safely out to sea when the attacks occurred. In 2001, it appears that the aircraft carriers of American finance enjoyed the same advantage, one that was not afforded to those who died in New York, or even to members of the U.S. Congress. That should tell us where the real power lies. ___ Osama bin Laden's Bush family Business Connections Alliance With Pakistan Will Stimulate Drug Trade, Bring Revenues Under U.S. Control - Colombian Opium Production Will Soar The Taliban's Biggest Economic Attack on the U.S. Came in February With The Destruction of Its Opium Crop FTW - Money connections between Bush Republicans and Osama bin Laden go way back and the political and economic connections have remained unbroken for 20 years. And what appears to be a "new" alliance with Pakistan is merely a new manifestation of a decades-long partnership in the heroin trade. Conveniently ignored in all of the press coverage since the tragic events of Sept. 11 is the fact that on May 17 Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a gift of $43 million to the Taliban as a purported reward for its eradication of Afghanistan's opium crop this February. That, in effect, made the U.S. the Taliban's largest financial benefactor according to syndicated columnist Robert Scheer writing in The Los Angeles times on May 22. But -- as we described in FTW's March 2001 issue -- the Taliban's destruction of that crop was apparently the single most important act of economic warfare against U.S. economic interests that the Taliban had ever committed. So why the gift? Critics of the Gulf War well recall how, just prior to Sadam's invasion of Kuwait, President Bush (Sr.) dispatched Ambassador April Glaspie to visit Sadam with a letter and a "wink and a nod" telling the Iraqi leader that it was OK to invade his smaller neighbor. The May gift from Uncle Sam could well have been sending the same kind of message, along with necessary funds to complete the attacks. Drugs and terrorism go hand in hand. Until February, Afghanistan had been the world's largest producer of opium/heroin, claiming close to 70% of the world's total production. That opium, consumed largely in Western Europe and smuggled through the Balkans, was a direct source of cash deposits in Western financial institutions and markets. I specifically commented on this at an economic crisis conference in Moscow, Russia on March 7. In my formal statement to the Russian conference I said, "Just before coming to this conference I read in the Associated Press, Agence France Press and other reliable sources that the Taliban has recently eradicated most of its 3000 ton opium crop in Afghanistan. If true, I view this as a form of economic warfare against Russia [and the U.S.] because it would drive opium production more into Southeast Asia and Colombia. However, I now suspect that this will result in a shift of opium production to the Caucasus under the Kurds which will see an increase in smuggling through Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. I should note that both Vice President Richard Cheney and the designated Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage are members of the US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce. Such a move would have the effect of drastically shortening smuggling routes and costs into Western Europe and of bypassing unstable areas of the Balkans. I have received additional reports that Uzbekistan is now awash in the opium poppy and, as in the US with the CIA, that Russian military and intelligence agencies facilitate the trade as a means of protecting access to hard currency. The point here is not that the US it totally evil or the only country doing these things. But the US is far and away the most advanced nation when it comes to the use of such methods to achieve superiority. As [Russian economist Michael] Khazin has noted, the US and Britain and Germany started the conflict in Kosovo in 1999 to stave off a collapse of western markets following the Asian collapse of 1997-8. Now Colombia is a last-ditch effort to protect the US markets and European opposition is jeopardizing that plan." The Taliban's actions this year severed the ruling military junta in Pakistan from its primary source of foreign revenues and made bin Laden and the Taliban completely expendable in the eyes of the Pakistani government. It also cut off billions of dollars in revenues that had been previously laundered through western banks and Russian financial institutions connected to them. Now as US military action will replace the Taliban government and fresh crops will be planted in Afghanistan, the slack in cash flow will assuredly be replaced by dramatically increased opium production in Colombia; the revenues from that effort being needed to maintain the revenue streams into Wall Street. Prior to the WTC attacks, credible sources, including the U.S. government, the IMF, Le Monde and the U.S. Senate placed the amount of drug cash flowing into Wall Street and U.S. banks at around $250-$300 billion a year. In that context, the real history of Osama bin Laden, as America's useful terrorist-du-jour reveals a long and continuous history, interwoven with the drug trade and the Bush family, of supporting conflicts that have benefited U.S. military and economic interests. bin Laden There are direct historical links between Osama bin Laden's business interests and those of the Bush family. On September 15 I received the following message from FTW subscriber, Professor John Metzger of Michigan State University: "We should revisit the history of BCCI, a bank used by the legendary Palestinian terrorist known as Abu Nidal. BCCI was closely tied to American and Pakistan intelligence. Its clients included the Afghan rebels, and the father of Osama bin Laden. The father of bin Laden named Houston investment broker James R. Bath as his business representative in Texas, right after George W. Bush's father became CIA director in 1976. By 1977, Bath invested $50,000 into junior's first business, Arbusto Energy, while Osama bin Laden would soon become a CIA asset. George W. Bush's FBI director Robert Mueller was part of the Justice Department's questionable investigation of BCCI. (On BCCI, the bin Ladens, and the Bushes, see the books, The Outlaw Bank, A Full Service Bank, and Fortunate Son)." Further details of the business and financial relationships between the Bush and bin Laden family are found in Peter Brewton's 1992 book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush. BCCI, incidentally, was founded by a Pakistani. Economics Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa has just completed a detailed history of bin Laden's career detailing his secret funding and logistical support to terrorist organizations beginning from his early CIA-supported roots in the 1980s as a "freedom fighter" through to the present day. Chossudovsky's compelling and well documented article, Who Is Osama Bin Laden? dated Sept 12, 2001 can be found on the Internet at: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html. Bin Laden's role has not just been as a practitioner of terrorist acts but as a trainer and supplier of terrorist organizations around the world. Included in bin Laden's coterie are terrorist groups linked to the Balkans, Albania, the KLA (a U.S. ally), and rebel groups leading the insurrection against Russia in Chechnya. As FTW described in 1998, and as confirmed by Chossudovsky, the key to understanding U.S. support of bin Laden is to grasp that he has always been controlled by a cutout, the Pakistani government and its intelligence service the ISI. In this manner there has been virtually no direct contact between bin Laden and the CIA. This has served the dual purpose of maintaining his apparent "purity" with his followers and providing plausible deniability for the CIA. The whole underlying pretext for this relationship evaporated with the Taliban's destruction of the opium crop in February. Chossudovsky writes: "The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the CIA's covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. In this regard [Professor] Alfred McCoy's study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, 'the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 per sent of the U.S. demand "With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production has unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 -- coinciding with the build up of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics -- reached a record high of 4600 metric tons. Powerful business syndicates in the former Soviet Union allied with organized crime are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes. "The ISI's extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic "jihad" out of Pakistan" " The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In the last few months there is evidence that Mujhideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of the KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia " With regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan In this regard, the involvement of Pakistan's ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war. "Russia's main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington's perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin." The oil and drug connections were the subject of FTW's story, The Bush-Cheney drug Empire in October, 2000. That story is online at http://www.copvcia.com/stories/previous/bush-cheney-drugs.html. Both Bush and Cheney are oil men. George Bush, Sr. was Vice President and, by virtue of executive Order 12333, in charge of all U.S. intelligence and narcotics operations from 1981 through 1989. As President from 1989 through 1993, he continued and expanded his control in these areas. Thus, it was Bush (the elder) who directly nourished and nurtured bin Laden's evolution. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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