Saving the Saudis
Transcription
Saving the Saudis
KC & Associates Investigations Research Associates Quinault Valley Guns & Blades / Urban Escape & Evasion Course For 1st Responders International Relations * Military * Terrorism * Business * Security www.kcandassociates.org orders101@kcandassociates.org Kathleen Louise dePass Press Agent/Publicist .360.288.2652 From the desk of Craig B Hulet? Saving the Saudis Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup Murdoch’s NY Post Today Backs Michael Moore Bush-Saudi Claims from “Fahrenheit 911″ 5 Places You May Not Know the U.S. Military Operates Bush / Obama Crimes Exposed: Warning: Pictures of Torture You Are About To See Are Illegal” The 6,000-Page Report on CIA Torture Has Now Been Suppressed for 1 Year The FBI Goes To Disturbing Lengths to Set Up Potential Terrorists Reagan administration, CIA complicit in DEA agent’s murder, say former insiders /27 years later, CIA pilot tells of using secret Costa Rican airstrip to traffic guns, cocaine White House to preserve controversial policy on NSA, Cyber Command leadership Obama administration has decided to preserve a controversial arrangement under which a single military official is permitted to direct both the National Security Agency and the military’s cyberwarfare command despite an external review panel’s recommendation against doing so, a panel Obama brought into being! According to U.S. officials. An Act of War: CIA Leak Gives “Incontrovertible Evidence” That 9/11 Was State Sponsored Mac Slavo December 16th, 2013 If you have ever questioned the official narrative for the September 11th attacks then you have, without a doubt, been dubbed a conspiracy nut by the establishment media and those who hang on their every word. Like the Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination, the 9/11 Report assembled by a Congressional investigation is unraveling and being revealed for what it really is – nothing more than a cover story. This is no longer a conspiracy theory… it’s conspiracy fact. After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors. But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals. It was kept secret and remains so today. President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks. … Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally. The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war. The New York Post investigation reveals that Saudi agents, officials and operatives in Virginia, Florida, California and D.C. provided direct support by way funding or intelligence to those involved in bringing down the towers. Karl Denninger at the Market Ticker succinctly argues that this was, in fact, an act of war: It’s obvious given what happened, the logistical and funding requirements and where the hijackers came from along with inexplicable actions immediately following the attacks – unless our government explicitly let certain people flee. Yet we went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan while helping the Saudis — the very people who attacked us. And Obama, to this day, kisses the Saudi King. Over three thousands Americans are dead – yet President Obama bows to Saudi King Abdullah, whose government had direct ties to 9/11 hijackers: It makes a very convincing case that the Saudi Government was involved in an act of war against the United States. Not simply terrorism — remember, the Pentagon, a military target, was one of the locations hit. The other intended target for the plane that went down in PA was the Capitol. You awake yet America? You damn well should be. It’s about damn time that the mainstream media started talking about this — you’re only a decade late, *******s. And no, people like myself who have been saying this all along are not nuts. We’re right. In addition to this startling, yet unsurprising, revelation is even more evidence that those within the Saudi government knew what was coming. Somebody made a ton of money shorting airline stocks by positioning themselves for stock prices to crash in the aftermath of 9/11 and according to Infowars, that may well have been the Chief of Saudi Intelligence and other government officials. Moreover, after all flights within the continental United States were grounded there was one – just one – airplane that was allowed to fly over U.S. soil to, you guessed it, Saudi Arabia. On board that plane were – and this has been confirmed by an official Freedom of Information request – the members of Osama Bin Laden’s extended family. And these are but a few of the hundreds of inconsistencies surrounding the September 11th, 2001 attacks. As it turns out, the “conspiracy theorists” are the ones who accurately detailed the series of events and those involved in the attacks. The “official story” itself, it seems, is the “conspiracy theory.” They’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars on securing the United States and preventing another act of terror on U.S. soil. They’ve turned their massive surveillance infrastructure inwards on the American people under the pretext of preserving our safety. They’ve identified hundreds of thousands of Americans and included them on watch lists that restrict their travel or flag them as potential threats to national security. Yet the real threat, the one that has been validated by scores of reports and investigations, is being redacted and ignored by our government. We know that there is more to 9/11 than the official story. It doesn’t just involve the Saudis. America’s air defense, for example, were seemingly disarmed minutes before the attack occurred. Moreover, intelligence agents from Israel were reportedly spotted in New York on the day of, arrested by NYPD, and then released under suspicious circumstances. All of this is highly suspect, especially that a mainstream news source like the New York Post would start releasing these details to the general public. As with 9/11, most people couldn’t make sense of it or why. A decade on we have a better perspective because we’ve seen the implementation of initiatives all across America as a result of what happened that day. Call it a conspiracy, call it whatever you like, but look around. If they lied – yes, lied – about the assassination of a President of the United States, or about Benghazi, or Fast and Furious, or the benefits of new health care laws, then what else are they hiding from us? How much do you trust your government? How much do you trust the official narrative peddled by the establishment? How much do you trust that the powers that be have our best interests at heart? The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war. "Democrat Bob Graham, the former Florida senator who chaired the Joint Inquiry, has asked the FBI for the Sarasota case files, but can’t get a single, even heavily redacted, page released. He says it’s a coverup. A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are absolutely shocked at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks. Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can’ reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law. So they’vee proposed Congress pass a resolution asking President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report, A Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. These are credible men who should be given the benefit of the doubt. Considering the circumstances I give their words even more weight. These men have seen the redacted pages. Saving the Saudis Just days after 9/11, wealthy Saudi Arabians, including members of the bin Laden family, were whisked out of the U.S. on private jets. No one will admit to clearing the flights, and the passengers weren’t questioned. Did the Bush family’s long relationship with the Saudis help make it happen? By Craig Unger On the morning of September 13, 2001, a 49-year-old private eye named Dan Grossi got an unexpected call from the Tampa Police Department. Grossi had worked with the Tampa force for 20 years before retiring, and it was not particularly unusual for the police to recommend former officers for special security jobs. But Grossi’s new assignment was very much out of the ordinary. Two days earlier, terrorists had hijacked four airliners and carried out the worst atrocity in American history. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers had been from Saudi Arabia. “The police had been giving Saudi students protection since September 11,” Grossi recalls. “They asked if I was interested in escorting these students from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky.” Grossi was told to go to the airport, where a small charter jet would be available to take him and the Saudis on their flight. He was dubious about the prospects of accomplishing his task. “Quite frankly, I knew that everything was grounded,” he says. “I never thought this was going to happen.” Even so, Grossi, who’d been asked to bring a colleague, phoned Mañuel Perez, a former F.B.I. agent, to put him on alert. Perez was equally unconvinced. “I said, ‘Forget about it,’” Perez recalls. “‘Nobody is flying today.’” The two men had good reason to be skeptical. Within minutes of the attacks on 9/11, the Federal Aviation Administration had sent out a special notification called a NOTAM—a notice to airmen—ordering every airborne plane in the United States to land at the nearest airport as soon as possible, and prohibiting planes on the ground from taking off. For the next two days, commercial and private aviation throughout the entire United States ceased. Former vice president Al Gore was stranded in Austria when his flight to the U.S. was canceled. Bill Clinton postponed travel as well. Major-league baseball games were called off. For the first time in a century, American skies were nearly as empty as they had been when the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk. Nevertheless, at 1:30 or 2 p.m. on the 13th, Dan Grossi received his phone call. He was told the Saudis would be delivered to Raytheon Airport Services, a private hangar at Tampa International Airport. When he and Perez met at the terminal, a woman laughed at Grossi for even thinking he would be flying that day. Commercial flights had slowly begun to resume, but at 10:57 A.M. the F.A.A. had issued another notice to airmen, a reminder that private aviation was still prohibited. Three private planes violated the ban that day, and in each case a pair of jet fighters quickly forced the aircraft down. As far as private planes were concerned, America was still grounded. “I was told it would take White House approval,” says Grossi. Then one of the pilots arrived. “Here’s your plane,” he told Grossi. “Whenever you’re ready to go.” Unbeknownst to Dan Grossi, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the 52-year-old Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, had been in Washington orchestrating the exodus of about 140 Saudis scattered throughout the country who were members of, or close to, two enormous families. One was the House of Saud, the family that rules the Royal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and that, owing to its vast oil reserves, is the richest family in the world. The other was the ruling family’s friends and allies the bin Ladens, who, in addition to owning a multi-billion-dollar construction conglomerate, had spawned the notorious terrorist Osama bin Laden. Thanks to the bin Ladens’ extremely close relationship with the House of Saud, the family’s huge construction company, the Saudi Binladin Group, had won contracts to restore the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina, two of the greatest icons in all of Islam. The repatriation of the Saudis is far more than just a case of wealthy Arabs being granted special status by the White House under extraordinary conditions. For one thing, in the two years since September 11, a number of highly placed Saudis, including both bin Ladens and members of the royal family, have come under fire for their alleged roles in financing terrorism. Four thousand relatives of the victims of 9/11 have filed a $1 trillion civil suit in Washington, D.C., charging the House of Saud, the bin Ladens, and hundreds of others with wrongful death, conspiracy, and racketeering for having contributed tens of millions of dollars to charities that were al-Qaeda fronts. Newsweek has reported that Prince Bandar’s wife, perhaps unwittingly, sent thousands of dollars to charities that ended up funding the hijackers. In addition, F.B.I. documents marked “Secret” indicate that two members of the bin Laden family, which has repeatedly distanced itself from Osama bin Laden, were under investigation by the bureau for suspected associations with an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist support group. Most recently, in July, the administration asked Congress to withhold 28 pages of its official report on 9/11. According to news reports, the classified section charges that there were ties between the hijackers and two Saudis, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, who had financial relationships with members of the Saudi government. Saudi officials deny that their government was in any way linked to the attacks. The Saudis have asked that the pages be declassified so they can refute them, but President Bush has refused. Terrorism experts say that the Saudis who were in the U.S. immediately after the attacks might have been able to shed light on the structure of al-Qaeda and to provide valuable leads for investigating 9/11. And yet, according to sources who participated in the repatriation, they left the U.S. without even being interviewed by the F.B.I. Officially, the White House declined to comment, and a source inside asserted that the flights never took place. However, former high-level Bush-administration officials have told Vanity Fair otherwise. How was it possible that, just as President Bush declared a no-holds-barred global war on terror that would send hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, and just as Osama bin Laden became Public Enemy No. 1 and the target of a worldwide manhunt, the White House would expedite the departure of so many potential witnesses, including two dozen relatives of the man behind the attack itself? The incident is particularly important in light of the special relationship the Saudis have long had with the United States—and the Bush family in particular. For decades, Saudi Arabia has been one of America’s two most powerful allies in the Middle East, not to mention an enormous source of oil. The Bush family and the House of Saud, the two most powerful dynasties in the world, have had close personal, business, and political ties for more than 20 years. In the 80s, when the elder Bush was vice president, he and Prince Bandar became personal friends. Together, they lobbied through massive U.S. arms sales to the Saudis and participated in critical foreign-policy ventures. In the 1991 Gulf War, the Saudis and the elder Bush were allies. In the private sector, the Saudis supported Harken Energy, a struggling oil company in which George W. Bush was an investor. Most recently, former president George H. W. Bush and former secretary of state James A. Baker III, his longtime ally, have appeared before Saudis at fund-raisers for the Carlyle Group, arguably the biggest private equity firm in the world. Today, former president Bush continues to serve as a senior adviser to the firm, whose investors allegedly include a Saudi accused of ties to terrorist support groups. “It’s always been very clear that there are deep ties between the Bush family and the Saudis,” says Charles Lewis, head of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C., foundation that examines issues of ethics in government. “It creates a credibility problem. When it comes to the war on terror, a lot of people have to be wondering why we are concerned about some countries and not others. Why does Saudi Arabia get a pass?” On a humid July day, Nail al-Jubeir, director of information for Saudi Arabia, sits in his office in the Saudi Embassy in Washington and recalls the morning of September 11, 2001. Like many people, al-Jubeir was on his way to work that morning, and as soon as he heard that a second plane had crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center, he realized that terrorists had attacked. Over the next few days, the Saudi Embassy was in turmoil. Innocent Saudi citizens in the United States were arrested. “That created an issue,” al-Jubeir says. “How do we protect the Saudis who are being rounded up? Our concern was the safety of Saudis here in the United States.” Initially, Prince Bandar had hoped that early reports of the Saudi role in the attacks had been exaggerated—after all, al-Qaeda terrorist operatives were known to use false passports. But at 10 p.m. on the evening of September 12, about 36 hours after the attacks, a highranking C.I.A. official—according to Newsweek, it was probably C.I.A. director George Tenet—phoned Bandar and gave him the bad news: 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. After two decades as ambassador, Bandar had long been the most recognizable figure from his country in America. Widely known as “the Arab Gatsby,” with his trimmed goatee and tailored double-breasted suits, Bandar embodied the contradictions of the modern, jetsetting, Western-leaning member of the royal House of Saud. He knew that public relations had never been more crucial for the Saudis. With the help of P.R. giant Burson-Marsteller, Bandar launched an international media blitz. He placed ads in newspapers across the country condemning the attacks and disassociating Saudi Arabia from them. On TV, he hammered home the same points: Saudi Arabia would support America in its fight against terrorism. The hijackers could not even be considered real Saudis, he asserted, because “we in the kingdom, the government and the people of Saudi Arabia, refuse to have any person affiliated with terrorism to be connected to our country.” That included Osama bin Laden, Bandar said, since the government had taken away his passport in response to his terrorist activities. Osama bin Laden, however, was a Saudi, and not just any Saudi. Bandar knew the members of his prominent family well. “They’re really lovely human beings,” he told CNN. “[Osama] is the only one.... I met him only once. The rest of them are well-educated, successful businessmen, involved in a lot of charities. It is—it is tragic.... He’s caused them a lot of pain.” The bin Laden family neatly exemplifies the dilemma the United States faces in its relations with Saudi Arabia. On the one hand, the bin Ladens are products of Wahhabi fundamentalism, a puritanical Islamic sect that has helped make Saudi Arabia a fertile breeding ground for terrorists. Contrary to popular belief, Osama was not the only member of the immense bin Laden family—there are more than 50 siblings—with ties to militant Islamic fundamentalists. As early as 1979, Mahrous bin Laden, an older half-brother of Osama’s, had befriended members of the militant Muslim Brotherhood and had played, perhaps unwittingly, a key role in the Mecca Affair, a violent uprising against the House of Saud in 1979 which resulted in more than 100 deaths. Later, the Saudi Binladin Group became part of what was known as “the Golden Chain,” a list of wealthy Saudis who nurtured al-Qaeda at its inception in the late 80s, some time before it was perceived as an international threat. On the other hand, the bin Ladens years ago had disassociated themselves from Osama and his horrific terrorist acts. These were the Saudi billionaires who banked with Citigroup, invested with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, and did business with such icons of Western culture as Disney, Snapple, and Porsche. The young bin Ladens and members of the House of Saud who were living in the United States in September 2001 were mostly students attending high school or college and young professionals. Several bin Ladens had attended Tufts University, near Boston. Sana bin Laden had graduated from Wheelock College, in Boston. Abdullah bin Laden, a younger brother of Osama’s, was a 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School and had offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two bin Ladens—Mohammed and Nawaf—owned units in the Flagship Wharf condominium complex on Boston Harbor. Wafah (sometimes spelled Waffa) Binladin, a 26-year-old graduate of Columbia Law School, lived in a $6,000-a-month loft in New York’s SoHo and was considering pursuing a singing career. Partial to hip Manhattan nightspots and restaurants such as Lotus, the Mercer Kitchen, and Pravda, she happened to be in London on September 11 and did not return to the United States. Kameron bin Laden, in his 30s and a cousin of Osama’s, also frequented Manhattan nightclubs and, less than two months after 9/11, reportedly spent nearly $30,000 in a single day at Prada’s Fifth Avenue boutique. He elected to stay in the United States. But half-brother Khalil Binladin decided to go back to Jidda. Khalil, who has a Brazilian wife, had been appointed Brazil’s honorary consul in Jidda, though he also owns a sprawling 20-acre estate in Winter Garden, Florida, near Orlando. As for the Saudi royal family, its members were scattered across the United States. Some had gone to Lexington, Kentucky, for the September horse auctions, which were suspended on September 11 but resumed the next day. Saudi prince Ahmed Salman, a regular in Lexington, stayed and bought two horses for $1.2 million on September 12. “I am a businessman,” Salman said. “I have nothing to do with the other stuff. I feel as badly as any American.” Others felt more personally threatened. Shortly after the attacks, one of Osama bin Laden’s brothers frantically called the Saudi Embassy in Washington seeking protection. He was given a room at the Watergate Hotel and told not to open the door. King Fahd, the aging and infirm Saudi monarch, sent a message to his emissaries in Washington: “Take measures to protect the innocent.” If any foreign diplomat had the clout to pull strings at the White House in the midst of a grave national-security crisis, it was Prince Bandar. The Saudis were famously adept at currying favor with U.S. administrations—they have contributed to every presidential library built in the past 30 years—but no one did it better than Bandar. He had played racquetball with Colin Powell years earlier. He had run covert operations for the late C.I.A. director Bill Casey that were kept secret even from President Ronald Reagan. He was the man who had stashed away dozens of locked attaché cases that held some of the deepest secrets in the intelligence world. But it was his intimate friendship with the Bushes that truly set him apart. When George H. W. Bush became vice president in 1981, Bandar saw him for what he was—a Texas oilman who had enormous respect for the Saudis’ vast oil reserves and was not a knee-jerk defender of Israel. The two began to have lunch regularly, and in the mid-80s, at a time when the press was assailing Bush as a “wimp,” Bandar staged an extravagant soirée in his honor. After Bush became president in 1989, Bandar acted as an envoy between him and Saddam Hussein, assuring Bush that the U.S. could count on Saddam to provide a bulwark against extremist Islamic fundamentalism. In August 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Bandar joined Bush at the president’s family retreat in Kennebunk-port, Maine, where the two men discussed going to war together against Saddam. A few months later, at Bush’s urging, Bandar persuaded King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to join Bush as an ally in the Gulf War. In 1992, Bandar took Bush’s defeat by Bill Clinton as a personal loss. And after the 2000 election, Bandar flew off on his Airbus jet to go hunting in Spain with former president Bush, General Norman Schwarzkopf, and former national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft. Now, in the wake of 9/11, the Saudi-U.S. relationship was being tested, and Bandar went into overdrive. For the 48 hours after the attacks, he stayed in constant contact with Secretary of State Colin Powell and National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Before 9/11, coincidentally, President Bush had invited Bandar to come to the White House on September 13, 2001, to discuss the Middle East peace process. The meeting went ahead as scheduled, but in the wake of the terrorist attacks the political landscape had changed dramatically. According to The New Yorker, Bush told Bandar at the meeting that the U.S. would hand over to the Saudis any captured al-Qaeda operative who could not be made to cooperate, implying that the Saudis could use any means necessary to get suspects to talk. Nail al-Jubeir says he does not know if Prince Bandar and the president discussed getting the bin Ladens and other Saudis back to Saudi Arabia. But the job began to get done all the same. In Tampa, on the same day that Bandar and Bush were meeting in the White House, private investigator Dan Grossi says, he and Mañuel Perez waited until three Saudi men, all apparently in their early 20s, arrived. Then the pilot took Grossi, Perez, and the Saudis to a well-appointed eight-passenger Learjet. They departed for Lexington, Kentucky, at about 4:30 p.m. Grossi did not get the names of the students he was escorting. “It happened so fast,” he says. “I just knew they were Saudis. They were well connected. One of them told me his father or his uncle was good friends with George Bush Sr.” Both the Tampa Tribune and sources familiar with the flight say that one of the young men was either the son or nephew of Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi minister of defense and Prince Bandar’s father. Another passenger was said to have been the son of a Saudi army commander. But the Saudi Embassy declined to confirm their identities. The Tribune reported that the request to repatriate the Saudis had been made by a different Saudi royal, Prince Sultan bin Fahad. According to Grossi, about an hour and 45 minutes after takeoff they landed at Blue Grass Airport in Lexington. There the Saudis were greeted by an American who took custody of them and helped them with their baggage. On the tarmac was a Boeing 747 with Arabic writing on it, apparently waiting to take them back to Saudi Arabia. “My understanding is that there were other Saudis in Kentucky buying racehorses at that time, and they were going to fly back together,” Grossi says. The Tampa-to-Lexington flight, which was reported in the Tampa Tribune in October 2001, is the only documented incident in which Saudis had been granted access to American airspace when U.S. citizens were still restricted from flying privately—access that required special government approval. How did the phantom flight from Tampa get permission to take off? At the time, the F.A.A. denied the flight had taken place at all. “It’s not in our logs,” Chris White, a spokesman for the F.A.A., told the Tampa Tribune. “It didn’t occur.” On the record, the White House declined to comment, but privately a source there said the administration was confident that no secret flights took place and that there was no evidence to suggest that the White House had authorized such flights. According to Nail al-Jubeir, however, the repatriation had been approved “at the highest level of the U.S. government.” The process began in the bowels of the White House. At the time, the Bush administration was holed up in the Situation Room, a small underground suite with a plush, 18-by-18-foot conference room in the West Wing. Live links connected the room’s occupants to the F.B.I., the State Department, and other relevant agencies. Vice President Dick Cheney, NationalSecurity Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and other officials hunkered down and devoured intelligence, hoping to ascertain if other terrorist attacks had been planned. The most powerful officials in the administration came and went, among them Colin Powell, C.I.A. director George Tenet, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Within the cramped confines of that room, the White House terrorism czar, Richard Clarke, the head of the Counterterrorism Security Group of the National Security Council, chaired an ongoing crisis group making hundreds of decisions related to the attacks. A true Washington rarity, Clarke was a civil servant who had ascended to the highest levels of policymaking. As characterized in The Age of Sacred Terror, by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, Clarke was a man who broke all the rules. Beholden to neither Republicans nor Democrats, he refused to attend regular National Security Council staff meetings, sent insulting e-mails to his colleagues, and regularly worked outside normal bureaucratic channels. One of only two senior directors from the administration of the elder George Bush who were kept by Bill Clinton, Clarke, abrasive as he was, had continued to rise because of his genius for knowing when and how to push the levers of power. In the days immediately after 9/11—he doesn’t remember exactly when—Clarke was approached in the Situation Room about quickly repatriating the Saudis. “Somebody brought to us for approval the decision to let an airplane filled with Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, leave the country,” Clarke says. “My role was to say that it can’t happen until the F.B.I. approves it. And so the F.B.I. was asked—we had a live connection to the F.B.I.—and we asked the F.B.I. to make sure that they were satisfied that everybody getting on that plane was someone that it was O.K. to leave. And they came back and said yes, it was fine with them. So we said, ‘Fine, let it happen.’” Clarke, who has since left the government and now runs a consulting firm in Virginia, adds that he does not recall who initiated the request, but that it was probably either the F.B.I. or the State Department. Both agencies deny playing any role whatsoever in the episode. “It did not come out of this place,” says one source at the State Department. “The likes of Prince Bandar does not need the State Department to get this done.” “I can say unequivocally that the F.B.I. had no role in facilitating these flights one way or another,” says Special Agent John Iannarelli, the F.B.I.’s spokesman on counterterrorism activities. With just three Saudis on it, the Tampa flight was hardly the only mysterious trip under way. All over the country, members of the extended bin Laden family, the House of Saud, and their associates were assembling in various locations. According to The New York Times, bin Laden family members were driven or flown under F.B.I. supervision first to a secret assembly point in Texas and later to Washington. From there, the Times reported, they left the country when airports reopened on September 14. The F.B.I. has said the Times report is “erroneous.” Meanwhile, the Saudis had at least two other planes on call. Starting in Los Angeles on an undetermined date, one of them flew first to Orlando, Florida, where Khalil bin Laden boarded. From Orlando, the plane continued to Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, D.C., before going on to Boston’s Logan International Airport on September 19, picking up members of the bin Laden family along the way. Other stops for the Saudis are said to have included Houston, Cleveland, and Newark. Altogether, about 140 Saudis were on the flights, according to an F.B.I. source. By this time, the lockdown on air travel had begun to lift. The F.A.A. was allowing airlines to operate as long as they followed certain security rules. Private aviation was subject to more constraints, but even there the F.A.A. had begun to allow flights by charter-service planes when the pilots filed flight plans. The F.A.A. has given all its records of air travel during the period in question to the Department of Homeland Security. A Freedom of Information Act request has been filed, but the documents have not yet been released. Richard Clarke’s approval for repatriating the Saudis had been conditional upon the F.B.I.’s vetting them. “I asked [the F.B.I.] to make sure that no one inappropriate was leaving,” he says. “I asked them if they had any objection to the entire event—to Saudis leaving the country at a time when aircraft were banned from flying.” Clarke adds that he assumed the F.B.I. had vetted the bin Ladens prior to September 11. “I have no idea if they did a good job,” he says. “I’m not in any position to second-guess the F.B.I.” In fact, the F.B.I. had been keeping an eye on some of the bin Ladens. A classified F.B.I. file examined by Vanity Fair and marked “Secret” shows that as early as 1996 the bureau had spent nearly nine months investigating Abdullah and Omar bin Laden, who were involved with the American branch of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a charity that has published writings by Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb, one of Osama bin Laden’s intellectual influences. But, according to Dale Watson, the F.B.I.’s former head of counterterrorism, such investigations into Saudis in the United States were the exception. “If allegations came up, they were looked into,” he says. “But a blanket investigation into Saudis here did not take place.” At times, the Saudis who had assembled for departure tried to get the planes to leave before the F.B.I. had even identified who was on them. “I recall getting into a big flap with Bandar’s office about whether they would leave without us knowing who was on the plane,” says one F.B.I. agent. “Bandar wanted the plane to take off, and we were stressing that that plane was not leaving until we knew exactly who was on it.” In the end, the F.B.I. decided it was simply not practical to conduct full-blown investigations. “They were identified,” says Dale Watson, “but they were not subject to serious interviews or interrogations.” The bureau has declined to release their identities. Some participants in the repatriation insist that the failure to interview the Saudis was insignificant, and, indeed, a persuasive case can be made that neither the bin Ladens nor the Saudi royals would have knowingly aided terrorists. “For groups like al-Qaeda, their objective is to overthrow the Saudi government,” says Nail al-Jubeir, the Saudi Embassy spokesperson. “People say we pay [al-Qaeda] off, but that’s simply not the case. Why would we support people who want to overthrow our own government?” Most of those who were leaving were either students or young businessmen. The bin Ladens, moreover, had forcefully broken with Osama by issuing a statement expressing “condemnation of this sad event, which resulted in the loss of many innocent men, women, and children, and which contradicts our Islamic faith.” An F.B.I. agent says that they had a right to leave and that being related to Osama did not constitute grounds for investigation. But 9/11 was arguably the biggest crime in American history. Nearly 3,000 people had been killed. A global manhunt of unprecedented proportions was under way. Attorney General John Ashcroft had asserted that the government had “a responsibility to use every legal means at our disposal to prevent further terrorist activity by taking people into custody who have violated the law and who may pose a threat to America.” All over the country Arabs were being rounded up and interrogated. By the weekend after the attacks, Ashcroft had already proposed broadening the F.B.I.’s power to arrest foreigners, wiretap them, and trace money-laundering to terrorists. Hundreds of people were detained by the government while U.S. agents performed extensive background checks. Some were held for as long as 10 months at the American naval base in Guantánamo, Cuba. “It’s a natural part of any investigation to seek out people who know the alleged suspect in the murder,” says John L. Martin, who, as chief of internal security in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, supervised the investigation and prosecution of national-security offenses for 18 years. “In the case of the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald’s family, including his wife and mother, while not culpable, were looked upon for information about his background. In the case of Timothy McVeigh, McVeigh’s family became a center of attention.” How could officials bypass such an elemental and routine part of an investigation during an unprecedented national-security catastrophe? At the very least, wouldn’t relatives have been able to provide some information about Osama’s finances, associates, or supporters? A number of experienced investigators expressed surprise that the Saudis had not been interviewed. “Certainly it would be my expectation that they would do that,” says Oliver “Buck” Revell, former associate deputy director of the F.B.I. “Here you have an attack with substantial links to Saudi Arabia,” John Martin says. “You would want to talk to people in the Saudi royal family and the Saudi government, particularly since they have pledged cooperation.” Did a simple disclaimer from the bin Laden family mean that no one in the entire family had any contacts or useful information whatsoever? Not long after 9/11, Carmen bin Laden, an estranged sister-in-law of Osama’s, told ABC News that she thought members of the family might have given money to Osama. Osama’s brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa was widely reported to be an important figure in al-Qaeda and was accused of having ties to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and to the funding of a Philippine terrorist group. (Khalifa was rumored to be in the Philippines in September 2001.) Khalil bin Laden, who boarded a plane in Orlando that eventually took him back to Saudi Arabia, won the attention of Brazilian investigators for possible terrorist connections. According to a Brazilian paper, he had business connections in the Brazilian province of Minas Gerais, not far from the tri-border region, an alleged center for training terrorists. Then there were the secret F.B.I. documents detailing Abdullah and Omar bin Laden’s involvement with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. Indian officials and the Philippine military have both cited WAMY for funding terrorism in Kashmir and the Philippines. “WAMY was involved in terrorist-support activity,” says a security official who served under George W. Bush. “There’s no doubt about it.” F.B.I. officials declined to comment on the investigation, which was reported in Britain’s The Guardian, but the documents show that the file on Abdullah and Omar was reopened on September 19, 2001, while the Saudi repatriation was still under way. “These documents show there was an open F.B.I. investigation into these guys at the time of their departure,” says David Armstrong, an investigator for the Public Education Center, the Washington, D.C., foundation that obtained the documents. In the 1980s, with the support of the American government, the House of Saud and prominent Saudi businessmen had eagerly contributed to the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan by sending money and weapons to Islamic-fundamentalist rebels who were battling alongside local mujahideen forces. Both the Saudis and the Americans supported these militants. But after helping to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan, these guerrillas, led by Osama bin Laden, morphed into the terrorist network known as al-Qaeda. Vexing questions remain about the extent to which the Saudis continued to support militant Islamic fundamentalism after bin Laden and al-Qaeda began attacking U.S. targets in the 1990s. During the Clinton administration, the Saudis repeatedly resisted attempts by the United States to track the funding of terrorism within the kingdom. According to Richard Clarke, who led that initiative, there were several reasons for resistance from the Saudis. “Some of them were clearly sympathetic to al-Qaeda,” he says. “Some of them thought that if they allowed a certain degree of cooperation with al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda would leave them alone. And some of them were merely reacting in a knee-jerk, instinctive way to what they believed was interference in their internal affairs.” Again and again, the U.S. Treasury Department has gone after the directors of various Islamic charities for providing support to terrorists. In October 2002 the Council on Foreign Relations asserted that, more than a year after 9/11, al-Qaeda continued to raise funds from wealthy Saudi supporters. Last November, Newsweek reported that thousands of dollars in charitable gifts from Princess Haifa, the wife of Prince Bandar, had indirectly ended up in the hands of two of the September 11 hijackers. And many members of the royal family, along with several members of the bin Laden family, are now defendants in the $1 trillion class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of 4,000 relatives of 9/11 victims. Documents filed in the suit allege that Prince Bandar’s father, Defense Minister Prince Sultan, has contributed at least $6 million since 1994 to four charities that finance Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Sultan’s own attorneys acknowledge that for 16 consecutive years he approved annual payments of about $266,000 to the International Islamic Relief Organization—a Saudi charity whose U.S. offices were raided by federal agents. Casey Cooper, an attorney for Prince Sultan, says, “The allegations have no merit.” He adds that Prince Sultan authorized the grants as part of his official governmental duties and did not knowingly fund terrorism. The allegation against Prince Sultan is just one of hundreds included in the lawsuit. In addition to Osama bin Laden, the family company, the Saudi Binladin Group, has been named as a defendant in the suit. At the heart of the allegations is the charge that the defendants knew some of their money was going to al-Qaeda and therefore had some responsibility for the September 11 attacks. Many of the Saudis acknowledge that they contributed to the charities in question but say they had no knowledge that the money would end up in the hands of al-Qaeda. “The biggest problem we have with Saudi charities is poor and sloppy management,” says Nail al-Jubeir. The plaintiffs’ attorneys do not consider that a satisfactory answer. In addition, they believe that, by interviewing the bin Ladens and members of the royal family before they left the country, the government could have answered some key questions. “They should have been asked whether they had contacts or knew of any other Saudi contacts with Osama bin Laden,” says Allan Gerson, co—lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the case. “What did they know about the financing of al-Qaeda? What did they know about the use of charitable institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere as conduits for terrorism financing? Why was the Saudi government not responsive to U.S. pleas in 1999 and 2000 that they stop turning a blind eye to terrorist financing through Saudi banks and charities?” All of which leads to the question of who made the decision to let the Saudis go. And why? Could the long-standing relationship between the Saudis and the Bush family have influenced the administration? National-security experts such as Richard Clarke find that suggestion dubious. “Prince Bandar played a very key role during the first Gulf War,” Clarke says. “He was very close to the Bush family. But I don’t think it’s accurate to say that he plays that role now. There’s a realization that we have to work with the government we’ve got in Saudi Arabia. The alternatives could be far worse. The most likely replacement to the House of Saud is likely to be more hostile—in fact, extremely hostile—to the U.S. That’s probably the reason the administration treats it the way it does—not any personal relationship.” With the war on terror getting under way, the U.S. wanted Saudi cooperation, and repatriation was clearly a high priority at the highest levels of the kingdom. Still, the Bush-Saudi relationship raises serious questions, if only because it is so extraordinary for two presidents to share such a long and rich personal history with any foreign power, much less one that is both as vital to U.S. economic interests and as troublesome as Saudi Arabia. It began in the mid-70s, when two young Saudi billionaires—Salem bin Laden, Osama’s older brother and the head of the Saudi Binladin Group, and Khalid bin Mahfouz, a billionaire Saudi banker—first came to Texas hoping to forge political relationships. To represent their American interests, they chose a Houston businessman named James R. Bath, who knew George W. Bush from the Texas Air National Guard. Bath invested $50,000 in Bush’s new oil company, Arbusto. He denies, however, that his investment represented the Saudis’ interests. In 1986, George W. Bush sold the latest incarnation of his failing oil company to Harken Energy, an independent Texas oil company that was struggling itself, and took a seat on its board of directors. By then, Khalid bin Mahfouz had become the largest stockholder in the Bank of Commerce & Credit International, or B.C.C.I., an international bank which financed drug dealers, terrorists, and covert operations and which became known as the most corrupt financial institution in history. Once Bush was with Harken, a phantom courtship by Khalid bin Mahfouz and B.C.C.I. began. Neither George W. Bush nor Harken ever had any direct contact with bin Mahfouz or B.C.C.I. Yet once Bush took his seat on the board, wonderful things started to happen to Harken—new investments, unexpected sources of financing, serendipitous drilling rights. Among those with links to B.C.C.I. who came to Harken’s aid were the Arkansas investment bank Stephens Inc., Saudi investor Sheik Abdullah Bakhsh, and the Emir of Bahrain, who unexpectedly awarded Harken exclusive offshore drilling rights. In 1991, a Wall Street Journal investigation into Harken’s B.C.C.I. ties concluded, “The number of B.C.C.I.connected people who had dealings with Harken—all since George W. Bush came on board—likewise raises the question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son.” After George H. W. Bush and James Baker returned to the private sector in 1993, they finally began to reap the benefits of their friendship with the Saudis. That year, Baker took a position as senior counselor with the Carlyle Group, the $16 billion private-equity firm. Two years later, Bush signed on as senior adviser. In 1998, former British prime minister John Major joined the firm as well. On several occasions, Bush, Baker, and Major flew to Saudi Arabia with Carlyle executives to meet with and speak before members of the royal family and wealthy businessmen such as the bin Ladens and the bin Mahfouzes, Saudi Arabia’s richest banking family. As world leaders who had defended the Saudis during the Gulf War, Bush, Baker, and Major had the potential to be star rainmakers for Carlyle, and the firm’s practices allowed them to do so without sullying their hands by asking for money directly. “Bush’s speeches are about what it’s like to be a former president, and what it’s like to be the father of a president,” says Carlyle C.E.O. David Rubenstein. “He doesn’t talk about Carlyle or solicit investors.” After Bush’s speeches, Rubenstein and his fund-raising team would come in for the money. “Carlyle wanted to open up doors,” one observer told The Independent, “and they bring in Bush and Major, who saved the Saudis’ ass in the Gulf War. If you got these guys coming in ... those companies are going to have it pretty good.” Rubenstein says Bush and Baker were not given special treatment in Saudi Arabia. “They were well received there, as they are throughout the world.” A source close to the Saudi government says that the royal family viewed investing in the Carlyle Group as a way to show gratitude to President Bush for defending the Saudis in the Gulf War. “George Bush or James Baker would meet with all the big guys in the royal family,” the source says. “Indirectly, the message was ‘I’d appreciate it if you put some money in the Carlyle Group.’” According to The Washington Post, Prince Bandar was among those who invested. In 1995 the bin Ladens joined in. Khalid bin Mahfouz’s sons Abdulrahman and Sultan became investors as well, according to family attorney Cherif Sedky. Abdulrahman bin Mahfouz was a director of the Muwafaq Foundation, which has been designated by the U.S. Treasury Department as “an al-Qaeda front.” “Abdulrahman and Sultan made an investment in one of the Carlyle funds in 1995 which is in the neighborhood of $30 million,” Sedky wrote in an e-mail. “The investment is held for their benefit by Sami Ba’arma,” an investment manager who has often worked with the bin Mahfouz family. Sedky added that the bin Mahfouz family condemns terrorism and denies that funds it has given to charities have been used to finance terror. Carlyle categorically denies that the bin Mahfouzes are now or have ever been investors. Reached on vacation in Michigan, Cherif Sedky stood by his original statement. “I assume that Carlyle has records of investments from somebody on the bin Mahfouz side, whether it is with Sami Ba’arma as a nominee or someone else,” he said. He added that Ba’arma was a first cousin of the bin Mahfouz brothers. In all, Carlyle officials say that the Saudis have invested $80 million in the firm. It is unclear how much of that was raised following meetings attended by former president George Bush or James Baker. The bin Ladens put $2 million in the Carlyle Partners II Fund, a relatively small sum that was said to be part of a larger package. One family member, Shafig bin Laden, was attending an investor conference held by the Carlyle Group in Washington on September 11, 2001. But after the attacks of that day, Carlyle bought out the bin Ladens’ interest. “At first I felt it was unfair to blame the other 53 half-siblings because of this guy they haven’t seen in 10 years,” Rubenstein says. “But then I realized, life isn’t fair at times.” There is no evidence to suggest that Carlyle played any role in the repatriation of the Saudis, but public advocates argue that the Bush-Saudi ties create at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. “You would be less inclined to do anything forceful or dynamic if you are tied in with them financially,” says the Center for Public Integrity’s Charles Lewis. “That’s common sense.” On September 18, 2001, a specially re-configured Boeing 727 flew at least five members of the bin Laden family back to Saudi Arabia from Logan airport. On September 19, President Bush’s speechwriting team was working on a stirring address to be delivered the next day, officially declaring a global war on terror. “Our war on terror … will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated,” he would vow. At the Pentagon, planning was already under way to take this new war on terror all the way to Iraq. That same day, the plane that had originated in Los Angeles and made stops at Orlando and Dulles airports arrived at Logan. It is unclear how many members of the bin Laden family or other Saudis had boarded prior to its arrival in Boston, but once it landed, at least 11 additional bin Laden relatives boarded the aircraft. At the time, Logan was in chaos. The airport was reeling from criticism that its security failures had allowed the hijackings to take place. After all, the two hijacked planes that had crashed into the World Trade Center had departed from Logan. As a result, exceptional measures were now being taken. Several thousand cars were towed from the airport’s parking garages. “We didn’t know if they were booby-trapped or what,” says Tom Kinton, director of aviation at Logan. The F.A.A. had allowed commercial flights to resume on September 13, as long as they complied with new security measures. Logan, however, because of various security issues, did not reopen until September 15, two days later. Even then, air traffic resumed slowly. So when a call came into Logan’s Emergency Operations Center in the early afternoon of September 19 saying that the charter aircraft was going to pick up members of the bin Laden family, Kinton was incredulous. “We were in the midst of the worst terrorist act in history,” he says, “and here we were seeing an evacuation of the bin Ladens!” Bush, Baker, and Major flew to Saudi Arabia with Carlyle executives to meet with members of the royal family. Like Kinton, Virginia Buckingham, then the head of the Massachusetts Port Authority, which oversees Logan, was stunned. “My staff was told that a private jet was arriving at Logan from Saudi Arabia to pick up 14 members of Osama bin Laden’s family living in the Boston area,” she later wrote in The Boston Globe. “‘Does the F.B.I. know?’ staffers wondered. ‘Does the State Department know? Why are they letting these people go? Have they questioned them?’ This was ridiculous.” Only a few days earlier, some planes, such as the one carrying a heart to be transplanted to a deathly ill cardiac patient in Olympia, Washington, had been forced down in midflight. According to F.B.I. spokesman John Iannarelli, F.B.I. counterterrorism agents pursuing the investigation were stranded all over the country, unable to fly for several days. Yet now the same counterterrorism unit was effectively acting as a chaperone for the Saudis. Astonishingly, the repatriation was routed through Logan and Newark, two of the airports where, just a few days earlier, the hijackings had originated. As the bin Ladens began to approach Boston, the top brass at Logan airport were agog at what was taking place. But federal law did not allow them much leeway to restrict individual flights. “I wanted to go to the highest authorities in Washington,” says Tom Kinton. “This was a call for them. But this was not just some mystery flight dropping into Logan. It had been to three major airports already, and we were the last stop. It was known. The federal authorities knew what it was doing. And we were told to let it come.” Kinton and his co-workers were also told to let the other bin Ladens board and to allow the plane to leave and return to Saudi Arabia. As Virginia Buckingham put it, “Under the cover of darkness, they did.” It was an inauspicious start to the just-declared war on terror. “What happened on September 11 was a horrific crime,” says John Martin, the former Justice Department official. “It was an act of war. And the answer is no, this is not any way to go about investigating it.” Craig Unger is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. Murdoch’s NY Post Today Backs Michael Moore Bush-Saudi Claims from “Fahrenheit 911″ by Roger Friedman - December 15, 2013 UPDATE- Paul Sperry responds: “Unger and Moore have their own agendas. mine aligns with the FBI WFO case agents and FCPD* detectives who say they’ll never forgive the Bush admin for throttling their investigation of leads back to Saudi Embassy and Bandar himself in McLean. they view the former POTUS as a traitor.” Earlier this afternoon: Shock: today’s Murdoch owned highly conservative New York Post features an opinion piece backing Michael Moore‘s Bush-Saudi claims from “Fahrenheit 911.” It’s the main story on the Post’s website with a huge photo and prominent placement. The story is also featured in a color block headline on the front page of today’s paper. Moore must get a lot of satisfaction out of this. It’s only taken a decade for a conservative pundit writing in a conservative newspaper to endorse his movie. Indeed, Paul Sperry’s editorial is a direct echo of a 2003 Vanity Fair story by Craig Unger, author of the book that was the underlying information for the Oscar winning movie. That book was called “House of Bush, House of Saud” and it still available for Kindle. The Vanity Fair article was called Saving the Saudis, publishing ten years ago. Here’s the link: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2003/10/saving-the-saudis-200310 Today’s piece by Sperry is shocking first because he is a conservative. But second, Sperry’s piece questions why huge portions of a Congressional report about 9/11 remain redacted– blacked out–in his piece called “Inside the Saudi Cover Up.” http://nypost.com/2013/12/15/inside-the-saudi-911coverup/ The story could just as easily have been called “Inside the Bush Cover Up.” It’s amazing that NY Post editor Col Allan ran it, and that Rupert Murdoch would have approved it. The Post has always mocked Michael Moore, and certainly backed George W. Bush endlessly. For conservatives, Sperry suddenly endorsing Moore and Unger and “Fahrenheit 911″ has to be a slap in the face. Sperry writes: “President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blackedout here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words). A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks.” He adds: “Just days after Bush met with the Saudi ambassador in the White House, the FBI evacuated from the United States dozens of Saudi officials, as well as Osama bin Laden family members. Bandar made the request for escorts directly to FBI headquarters on Sept. 13, 2001 — just hours after he met with the president. The two old family friends shared cigars on the Truman Balcony while discussing the attacks.” Even stranger, the NY Post via Sperry is now featuring Sen. Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida. Sperry writes: “Democrat Bob Graham, the former Florida senator who chaired the Joint Inquiry, has asked the FBI for the Sarasota case files, but can’t get a single, even heavily redacted, page released. He says it’s a “coverup.” Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup By Paul Sperry December 15, 2013 | 5:13am September 11 Negligence not cause of 3rd WTC collapse: court 9/11 cop's kidney plea Former CIA Deputy Director gets book deal Warren Buffett's 9/11 payday After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors. But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals. It was kept secret and remains so today. President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words). A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks. Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can’t reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law. So they’ve proposed Congress pass a resolution asking President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report, “Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.” Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally. The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war. The findings, if confirmed, would back up open-source reporting showing the hijackers had, at a minimum, ties to several Saudi officials and agents while they were preparing for their attacks inside the United States. In fact, they got help from Saudi VIPs from coast to coast: LOS ANGELES: Saudi consulate official Fahad al-Thumairy allegedly arranged for an advance team to receive two of the Saudi hijackers — Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — as they arrived at LAX in 2000. One of the advance men, Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi intelligence agent, left the LA consulate and met the hijackers at a local restaurant. (Bayoumi left the United States two months before the attacks, while Thumairy was deported back to Saudi Arabia after 9/11.) SAN DIEGO: Bayoumi and another suspected Saudi agent, Osama Bassnan, set up essentially a forward operating base in San Diego for the hijackers after leaving LA. They were provided rooms, rent and phones, as well as private meetings with an American al Qaeda cleric who would later become notorious, Anwar al-Awlaki, at a Saudi-funded mosque he ran in a nearby suburb. They were also feted at a welcoming party. (Bassnan also fled the United States just before the attacks.) WASHINGTON: Then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar and his wife sent checks totaling some $130,000 to Bassnan while he was handling the hijackers. Though the Bandars claim the checks were “welfare” for Bassnan’s supposedly ill wife, the money nonetheless made its way into the hijackers’ hands. Other al Qaeda funding was traced back to Bandar and his embassy — so much so that by 2004 Riggs Bank of Washington had dropped the Saudis as a client. The next year, as a number of embassy employees popped up in terror probes, Riyadh recalled Bandar. “Our investigations contributed to the ambassador’s departure,” an investigator who worked with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington told me, though Bandar says he left for “personal reasons.” FALLS CHURCH, VA.: In 2001, Awlaki and the San Diego hijackers turned up together again — this time at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, a Pentagon-area mosque built with funds from the Saudi Embassy. Awlaki was recruited 3,000 miles away to head the mosque. As its imam, Awlaki helped the hijackers, who showed up at his doorstep as if on cue. He tasked a handler to help them acquire apartments and IDs before they attacked the Pentagon. Awlaki worked closely with the Saudi Embassy. He lectured at a Saudi Islamic think tank in Merrifield, Va., chaired by Bandar. Saudi travel itinerary documents I’ve obtained show he also served as the official imam on Saudi Embassy-sponsored trips to Mecca and tours of Saudi holy sites. Most suspiciously, though, Awlaki fled the United States on a Saudi jet about a year after 9/11. As I first reported in my book, “Infiltration,” quoting from classified US documents, the Saudisponsored cleric was briefly detained at JFK before being released into the custody of a “Saudi representative.” A federal warrant for Awlaki’s arrest had mysteriously been withdrawn the previous day. A US drone killed Awlaki in Yemen in 2011. HERNDON, VA.: On the eve of the attacks, top Saudi government official Saleh Hussayen checked into the same Marriott Residence Inn near Dulles Airport as three of the Saudi hijackers who targeted the Pentagon. Hussayen had left a nearby hotel to move into the hijackers’ hotel. Did he meet with them? The FBI never found out. They let him go after he “feigned a seizure,” one agent recalled. (Hussayen’s name doesn’t appear in the separate 9/11 Commission Report, which clears the Saudis.) SARASOTA, FLA.: 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers visited a home owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd. FBI agents investigating the connection in 2002 found that visitor logs for the gated community and photos of license tags matched vehicles driven by the hijackers. Just two weeks before the 9/11 attacks, the Saudi luxury home was abandoned. Three cars, including a new Chrysler PT Cruiser, were left in the driveway. Inside, opulent furniture was untouched. Democrat Bob Graham, the former Florida senator who chaired the Joint Inquiry, has asked the FBI for the Sarasota case files, but can’t get a single, even heavily redacted, page released. He says it’s a “coverup.” Is the federal government protecting the Saudis? Case agents tell me they were repeatedly called off pursuing 9/11 leads back to the Saudi Embassy, which had curious sway over White House and FBI responses to the attacks. Just days after Bush met with the Saudi ambassador in the White House, the FBI evacuated from the United States dozens of Saudi officials, as well as Osama bin Laden family members. Bandar made the request for escorts directly to FBI headquarters on Sept. 13, 2001 — just hours after he met with the president. The two old family friends shared cigars on the Truman Balcony while discussing the attacks. Bill Doyle, who lost his son in the World Trade Center attacks and heads the Coalition of 9/11 Families, calls the suppression of Saudi evidence a “coverup beyond belief.” Last week, he sent out an e-mail to relatives urging them to phone their representatives in Congress to support the resolution and read for themselves the censored 28 pages. Astonishing as that sounds, few lawmakers in fact have bothered to read the classified section of arguably the most important investigation in US history. Granted, it’s not easy to do. It took a monthlong letter-writing campaign by Jones and Lynch to convince the House intelligence panel to give them access to the material. But it’s critical they take the time to read it and pressure the White House to let all Americans read it. This isn’t water under the bridge. The information is still relevant today. Pursuing leads further, getting to the bottom of the foreign support, could help head off another 9/11. As the frustrated Joint Inquiry authors warned, in an overlooked addendum to their heavily redacted 2002 report, “State-sponsored terrorism substantially increases the likelihood of successful and more lethal attacks within the United States.” Their findings must be released, even if they forever change US-Saudi relations. If an oil-rich foreign power was capable of orchestrating simultaneous bulls-eye hits on our centers of commerce and defense a dozen years ago, it may be able to pull off similarly devastating attacks today. Members of Congress reluctant to read the full report ought to remember that the 9/11 assault missed its fourth target: them. Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration” and “Muslim Mafia.” 5 Places You May Not Know the U.S. Military Operates BY HAYES BROWN ON DECEMBER 14, 2013 AT 9:00 AMShare this: President Barack Obama on Friday sent to Congress his biannual report on just where he’s deployed U.S. military personnel without their direct approval, including several locations that might surprise most casual observers. The president is required under the War Powers Act of 1973 to detail to Congress any ongoing activities occurring without a declaration of war from the legislature. In the five page letter, Obama described several highly reported military operations taken over the last few months, including a daring raid into Somalia and the capture of a suspected terrorist in Libya. Alongside these feats and descriptions of the progress in Afghanistan, several lesser-known engagements are detailed, where hundreds of U.S. forces are currently stationed. Here’s five of them: Jordan The United States’ desire to see the Assad regime removed in Syria is no secret, nor is their support for several of the rebel groups working to oust the Syrian president. Friday’s letter to Congress served as a remind of just how much the U.S. is doing to bring this about, having left behind at the request of Jordan “a combat-equipped detachment of approximately 700 U.S. personnel remain in Jordan following participation in a training exercise that ended on June 20, 2013.” Among the equipment they are stationed along the Syrian border with includes “Patriot missile systems, fighter aircraft, and related support, command, control, and communications personnel and systems.” Their presence brings the total number of U.S. troops in Jordan to 1,500, among which are U.S. Special Forces of them are engaged in training Syrian rebels in tactics and providing military advice as needed. Niger “As indicated in my report of June 14, 2013, U.S. military personnel in Niger continue to provide support for intelligence collection and to facilitate intelligence sharing with French forces conducting operations in Mali and with other partners in the region,” Obama wrote to Congressional leaders. According to the White House, there are currently approximately 200 personnel deployed there at the time. The Sahel became noted as a prime area for counter-terrorism operations following al-Qaeda affiliate group Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) managed to takeover of most of northern Mali last year. In the aftermath of France’s intervention, the region has faded off the radar again, but the Washington Post in March of this year reported that the U.S. was establishing a drone base to conduct surveillance operations in West Africa. Kosovo Even though the intervention in Kosovo was more than a decade ago, the United States still has a sizable number of forces still in the former Serbian enclave. Once former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic capitulated, ending the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in the region, NATO opted following combat operations to leave behind a force known as KFOR to help keep the peace. “The U.S. contribution to KFOR is approximately 670 U.S. military personnel out of the total strength of approximately 4,900 personnel,” Obama informed Congress. Central Africa Made infamous through the social media campaign #Kony2012, the Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony has been dubbed a primary target of the United States, leading to the deployment of military personnel to aid African nations in the hunt for him. First deployed in 2011, the U.S. contingency of approximately 120 personnel is spread across the Republic of South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic in the hunt for Kony and other senior LRA leaders. “These forces, however, will not engage LRA forces except in self-defense,” Obama made clear in his letter. Egypt As part of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, a multinational force has been deployed between the two along the Sinai peninsula for decades. Originally meant to be a United Nations peacekeeping force, the U.N. was unable to comply due to the threat of a veto from the Soviet Union. In response, the U.S. worked with Egypt and Israel in setting up the Multinational Force and Observers. The U.S. joins Australia, Canada, Norway, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Fiji, Hungary, New Zealand, Columbia, Uruguay, and France in patrolling the region. 715 military personnel are assigned to the MFO currently, according to Obama. Obama Crimes Exposed: “Warning: The Pictures That You Are About To See Are Illegal” Breaking News | December 14, 2013 | 27 Comments (ASheepNoMore) These are the Pictures Your Government does not want you to see. Remember when the progressives/Liberals where all over George Bush for torture pictures that were released from GITMO? Well you haven’t seen anything yet. Anything George Bush can do, Barack Obama can do better and here are the pictures to prove it. And do you know why Obama can torture just like Bush if not better? Because there is no left vs right or right vs left …only tyranny vs freedom. And, people need to WAKE UP and stop defending some party purposely perpetrated on them and then they become unconsciously indoctrinated into this divide and conquer agenda which is the how a small amount of elitists continue their reign over their larger slave population. Understand that voting just ensures the continuation of one corrupt party or the other. The puppets in charge (So Called Politicians) are just that-puppets. The Republican party and the Democratic party are to heads of the same beast. They continue with the same actions, the same agendas, only the names are changed. And if people can’t grasp this divide and conquer agenda and continue to defend the one party oligarchy which always results in more infighting, please know that one of the individuals in these photos could be you or one of your loved ones some day in the near future. For those who are not awake and aware of the NDAA or DHS purchases or police state that is slowly creeping upon the US, this won’t make sense …but we are hoping they get the message to unite and stop the division. The pictures of torture under the Obama adminstration are below. Warning: You maybe offended by some of these pictures, they are very graphic in nature. One recent example is from The Guardian June 22, 2013: Increasingly brutal tactics are being used in an attempt to break the hunger strike by detainees at Guantánamo Bay, according to fresh testimony from the last British resident still held in the camp. The following torture photos are from General Strike USA. You can clearly see that the tactics G.W. Bush used are still being used today and then some. Would you rather be water boarded or beat Black n Blue? After pledging to run the most transparent administration in history, President Obama is blocking the release of RECENT detainee abuse photos. The Pentagon admits to 34 deaths caused by torture, we have counted over 100. Pentagon admits to holding 8 children ages 12-17 at Gitmo, we count 21. Q. What’s worse than a TERRORIST? A. a TYRANT. Tyranny of the people does not happen violently or suddenly. Tyranny is gradual and silent. President Obama says America does not torture. This is a lie. We were told that Enhanced Interrogation Techniques were only used on 3 high level terrorists. We were told that the worst was WATERBOARDING. These are all lies designed to protect the guilty. We were told that the prisoner abuse in Iraq was an aberration, not systematic. This is a lie. Tyranny is the complete absence of limits of government. As things stand now, President Obama and every President thereafter has the authority to deem anyone, whether they are a U.S. citizen or not, a terrorist. And to kidnap, detain without charges, deny bail, trial, legal reps and torture anyone. The government claims sweeping authority under the Patriot Act to collect a record of every single phone call made by every single American “on an ongoing daily basis.” This program not only exceeds the authority given to the government by Congress, but it violates the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment, and the rights of free speech and association protected by the First Amendment. The Justice Department filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking it to overturn an appeals court decision requiring the Pentagon to disclose the photos, which depict abuse of prisoners in U.S. military custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo and elsewhere. In September, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld a district court decision requiring the photos to be released. “The appeals court soundly rejected all of the government’s arguments for withholding the photos, and it’s unfortunate that the government has chosen to contest that decision,” Amrit Singh, an ACLU attorney, said in a statement e-mailed to reporters. “These photos would provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib. As disturbing as the photos may be, it is critical that the American people know the full truth about the abuse that occurs in their name. “WARNING: The pictures that you are about to see are ILLEGAL Would any member of the U.S. Senate confront President Obama about his actions to conceal photographs of torture by the U.S. military? The Senate passed S. Amdt. 1157 to H.R. 2346, a bill that provides supplementary military spending for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Amendment 1157, entitled the Censorship of Photographs of Future Torture Amendment and creates a loophole in the Freedom of Information Act. With this loophole, the Secretary of Defense is granted the power to conceal photographs of any torture of prisoners whether those photographs were taken in the past, or will be taken in the future. Fact: this amendment was approved unanimously This legislation marks the end of the Democrats’ claim of opposition to torture. What I’m about to show you is illegal. It does us no good to write to our Representatives in Washington. Voting only ensures the continuation of one corrupt party or the other. We’ve thrown out the whole top tier of government, but the crooks & thugs are still there. Still in power, as brutal as ever. WARNING: These are actual pictures of torture The CIA admits it misled the White House, the Department of Justice, and Congress about the “effectiveness” of waterboarding, wall-slamming, shackling in painful positions, and other methods of torture and abuse. Prisoners are held in isolation and secrecy locked into a system of punishment before any evidence of guilt is established. These techniques, born in the gulag, only elicit false confessions, not actionable intelligence. The Uniform Code of Military justice prohibits U.S. Armed Forces from engaging in cruelty, oppression or maltreatment of prisoners, assaulting prisoners and communicating a threat to wrongfully injure a detainee. We must not allow them to brazenly trample on everything that this great country stands for, everything that our fathers fought and DIED for. Only a politician would have the gall to brag about his crimes and still get away with it. President Barack Obama says he will: keep in place the secret rendition program Bush used to torture detainees; keep the government spying on citizens; deploy nuclear carriers with enough firepower to annihilate any country, refuse to investigate & prosecute the war and torture crimes of the Bush regime. WARNING: What I’m about to show you is GRAPHIC 2,500 juveniles detained in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay since 2001 http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/u-s-military-treatment-of-juveniledetainees-undergoes-international-scrutiny/ CIA Promotes Person Who Destroyed Torture Tapes http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/cia-promotes-person-who-destroyedtorture-tapes/ CIA/Torture Whistleblower sent to prison http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/ciatorture-whistleblower-sent-to-prison/ C.I.A. TORTURES CHILDREN http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/c-i-a-tortures-children/ (What is) Torture http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/what-is-torture/ The U.S. is holding 27,000 kidnapped people in secret prisons http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/the-u-s-is-holding-27000-kidnappedpeople-in-secret-prisons/ CIA Promotes Person Who Destroyed Torture Tapes http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/cia-promotes-person-who-destroyedtorture-tapes/ General Petraeus guilty of “acts of torture” in Iraq http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/general-petraeus-guilty-of-acts-oftorture-in-iraq/ Army Now Says G.I. Was Beaten in Role http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/army-now-says-g-i-was-beaten-in-role/ Former Interrogator Rebukes Cheney for Torture Speech http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/former-interrogator-rebukes-cheneyfor-torture-speech-2/ C.I.A. in contempt http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/cia-in-contempt/ (A Congressional report reveals) The C.I.A is a criminal Enterprise http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/a-congressional-report-reveals-the-c-i-ais-a-criminal-enterprise/ C.I.A.s Real Role in the Afghan Heroin Trade http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/c-i-a-s-real-role-in-the-afghan-herointrade/ C.I.A & the MAFIA & the Global Drug Trade (Then & Now) http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/c-i-a-the-mafia-then-now/ Hinchey Report SUBJECT: CIA Activities in Chile FOIA U.S. Dept. of State http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/hinchey-report-subject-cia-activities-inchile-foia-u-s-dept-of-state/ Syrian Revolution or CIA coup? http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/syrian-revolution-or-cia-coup/ Must see video- http://www.onetruemedia.com/shared?p=118440be48c880abab0bc7d&skin_id=1602 &utm_source=otm&utm_medium=text_url Pres. Barack Obama has condoned TORTURE http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/pres-barack-obama-has-condonedtorture/ Torture Pics BANNED by Obama-Obama has effectively decriminalized torture http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/512/ Guantanamo HUNGER STRIKE and genital searches to continue http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/guantanamo-hunger-strike-and-genitalsearches-to-continue/ New report: Gitmo costs U.S. $2.7 million per prisoner http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/new-report-gitmo-costs-u-s-2-7-millionper-prisoner/ Soldier admits Afghan massacre http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/soldier-admits-afghan-massacre/ Leaked CLASSIFIED Report: U.S. Drone Strikes not against al-Qaeda http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/leaked-classified-report-u-s-dronestrikes-not-against-al-qaeda/ Strike Updates: Hunger Strike: Guantanamo force-feedings http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/strike-updates-hunger-strikeguantanamo-force-feedings/ US Marine demoted for urinating on corpses http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/us-marine-demoted-for-urinating-oncorpses/ Traitors (How Congress Profits from Never ending War) http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/traitors-how-congress-profits-fromnever-ending-war/ 237 Millionaires in Congress http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/237-millionaires-in-congress/ 6 Brave Govt. Whistleblowers Charged Under the Espionage Act by Obama’s Administration http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/6-brave-govt-whistleblowers-chargedunder-the-espionage-act-by-obamas-administration/ CIA finally admits it was behind 1953 Iran coup http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/cia-finally-admits-it-was-behind-1953iran-coup/ Obama Defends Right to Take All Your Phone Records http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/obama-defends-right-to-take-all-yourphone-records/ NSA Spies on Merkel, the Pope, the U.N., and the Rest of Us http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/nsa-spies-on-merkel-the-pope-the-u-nand-the-rest-of-us/ Verizon is turning your phone records over to the government http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/verizon-is-turning-your-phone-recordsover-to-the-government/ U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/u-s-intelligence-mining-data-from-nineu-s-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/ How Google and Facebook Cooperated with the NSA and PRISM http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/06/08/how-google-and-facebook-cooperatedwith-the-nsa-and-prism/ Google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks, Get a Visit from the Feds http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/google-pressure-cookers-and-backpacksget-a-visit-from-the-feds/ Secretive DEA Unit Illegally Spies On Americans, Covers Up Actions http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/secretive-dea-unit-illegally-spies-onamericans-covers-up-actions/ DEA Agents Urged to Cover Up Use of NSA Intel in Drug Probes http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/dea-agents-urged-to-cover-up-use-ofnsa-intel-in-drug-probes/ The Supreme Court Decided Your Silence Can Be Used Against You http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/the-supreme-court-decided-your-silencecan-be-used-against-you/ Warrantless Surveillance: Project SHAMROCK http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/warrantless-surveillance-projectshamrock/ U.S. government to fight for warrantless GPS tracking http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/u-s-government-to-fight-forwarrantless-gps-tracking/ Know Your Rights: CISPA Passes http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/05/11/cispa/ Who’s a TERRORIST? Pentagon Says: You Are http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/whos-a-terrorist-pentagon-says-you-are/ Know Your Rights: FISA passes http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/know-your-rights-fisa-passes/ CISPA and the NSA’s Ability to Read Your Emails http://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/cispa-national-security-and-the-nsasability-to-read-your-emails/ What should be done about this? I would love to hear from you below. In case you haven’t seen enough pictures, there are more here Obama War Crime Torture Pics. Critical Reads: More News Mainstream Media Chooses To Ignore By Josey Wales, Click Here! - See more at: http://govtslaves.info/obama-crimes-exposed-warning-pictures-seeillegal/#sthash.Yj8iP4w5.D8Ry0v5O.dpuf Reagan administration, CIA complicit in DEA agent’s murder, say former insiders Posted: Friday, December 06, 2013 - By John McPhaul Former DEA El Paso boss: Agent Camarena had discovered the arms-for-drugs operation run on behalf of the Contras, aided by U.S. officials in the National Security Council and the CIA, and threatened to blow the whistle on the covert operation. Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan meets with Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Ed Meese and Don Regan to discuss the president's remarks on the Iran-Contra affair, in the Oval Office on Nov. 25, 1986. Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library, official government record/Wikimedia Commons First in an exclusive Tico Times series in two parts Two former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and a former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency contract pilot are claiming that the Reagan Administration was complicit in the 1985 murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena at the hands of Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero. The administration’s alleged effort to cover up a U.S. government relationship with the Mexican drug lord to provide for the arming and the training of Nicaraguan Contra rebels, at a time when official assistance to the Contras was banned by the congressional Boland Amendment, led to Camarena’s kidnap, torture and murder, according to Phil Jordon, former head of the DEA’s El Paso office, Hector Berrellez, the DEA’s lead investigator into Camarena’s kidnapping, torture and murder, and CIA contract pilot Robert “Tosh” Plumlee. “We’re not saying the CIA murdered Kiki Camarena,” Jordan said. But the “consensual relationship between the Godfathers of Mexico and the CIA that included drug trafficking” contributed to Camarena’s death, he added. “I don’t have a problem with the CIA conducting covert operations to protect the national security of our country or our allies, but not to engage in criminal activity that leads to the murder of one our agents,” Jordan said. Camarena had discovered the arms-for-drugs operation run on behalf of the Contras, aided by U.S. officials in the National Security Council and the CIA, and threatened to blow the whistle on the covert operation, Jordan alleged. Berrellez said two witnesses identified, from a photo lineup, two or three Cuban CIA operatives who participated in Camarena’s interrogation. Plumlee said he and three other pilots ran tons of cocaine into U.S. military bases on return trips from delivering weapons to Contra rebels in Central America, and was warned by Camarena that he would be busted. Plumlee has a long and colorful history of working for the CIA, beginning with flying arms to Cuba before Fidel Castro’s takeover in the 1950s. Jordan said the cover story Plumlee had been told by his CIA “handler” William Bennetee – that his cocaine flights into U.S. military bases were part of a drug interdiction program to penetrate and dismantle the cocaine routes of Colombian drug lords Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa – was unimaginable, since the DEA, which would have had to approve the program, had no knowledge of it. “I don’t know of any DEA administrator that I worked for who would have sanctioned cocaine smuggling into the United States in the name of national security, when we are out there risking our lives,” Jordan told The Tico Times. The CIA reacted indignantly to the allegation of complicity in Camarena’s murder. “It’s ridiculous to suggest that the CIA had anything to do with the murder of a U.S. federal agent or the escape of his killer,” an agency spokesman told Fox News. The DEA said only that U.S. justice has gotten to the bottom of the Camarena case. “DEA believes that the individuals responsible for the torture and murder of Special Agent Kiki Camarena have been identified and indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. They include Rafael Caro-Quintero and 15 others,” said the agency in a statement. An agency spokeswoman declined to elaborate. Mexican former drug cartel boss, Rafael Caro Quintero, was serving his conviction at Puente Grande prison in Guadalajara when he was released last July. The U.S. government is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture and prosecution in the United States. AFP Plumlee said he worked undercover as a CIA contractor for the civilian aviation company SETCO, flying between points in Mexico, South and Central America and the United States, delivering arms for the Contras. Various investigations, including one by the CIA’s Inspector General, established that SETCO was an airline controlled by Honduran drug trafficker Juan Matta Ballesteros, and also was the principal company used to traffic arms to the Contra rebels. Matta Ballesteros is currently serving time in a U.S. federal prison. Plumlee said he flew a C-130 transport plane in and out of Caro Quintero’s ranch in Veracruz, Mexico, to Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia, to Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador, and to a secret airstrip on the Santa Elena Peninsula in Costa Rica, among other locations, carrying arms south from the U.S. to the Contras and cocaine north to U.S. military installations, including El Toro Marine Air Base in southern California and Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. Plumlee estimated that among them, the four pilots smuggled about 40 tons of cocaine in the operation. The pilot said he had no worry about being caught by civilian aviation or military authorities because he carried “coded transponders” that identified his plane as a “spooky” flight warning off any official scrutiny. The transponders permitting such flights could only have come from the White House, Plumlee said. The programs were code-named “Grasshopper,” for the El Toro route and “Roosterhop,” for the Homestead route, Plumlee added. Berrellez said he’s convinced the drugs were taken from the airbases by traffickers with connections to the Contras and sold on the streets. In fall 1984, Plumlee met at the Oaxaca Café in Phoenix, Arizona, with agents from the Phoenix Organized Crime Detail and the Arizona Tri-State Task Force, including Camarena, to discuss his SETCO flights. When Plumlee told the agents the flights were sanctioned by the U.S. government, “Kiki said, ‘That’s horseshit. You’re lining your pockets,’” Jordan recalled. “He could not believe that the U.S. government could be running drugs into the United States.” Alarmed by Camarena’s threats to bust the operation, Plumlee went to Bennettee and told him about Camarena’s warning, saying that he had no intention of going to jail and would blow the whistle if indicted. Bennettee told Plumlee not to worry. “Camarena isn’t going to do anything,” he reassured the pilot. DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena, who was tortured and murdered in 1985. Courtesy of U.S. Justice Department. About five months later, on Feb. 7, 1985, Camarena was kidnapped in Mexico by agents of the Federal Security Directorate (DFS by its Spanish acronym), which the former DEA agents say were both the eyes and ears of the CIA in Mexico and at the same time at the beck and call of Mexico’s powerful drug cartels. According to Plumlee, the DEA agent had written a series of memos complaining about official lethargy in bringing the gunrunning operation under control. “Kiki said, ‘What do we have to do, does someone have to get killed to do something about this?’” Plumlee said. Jordan added that the use of a drug dealer’s property by the CIA for the purpose of helping the Contras didn’t sit well with the DEA agents. “That’s the way we’re brought up, so to speak,” he said. “When we see someone running drugs, we want to bust them, not work with them.” Three weeks after he disappeared, Camarena’s decomposing body was found on a ranch. He had been tortured, it was later learned, in a brutal three-day ordeal that ended in his death. Officials blamed Caro Quintero, who, they said, had exacted revenge on Camarena for busting Caro Quintero’s multimillion-dollar marijuana plantation in Chihuahua, Mexico. But Berrellez charges the CIA with complicity in the murder, based on the cozy relationship between the CIA and DFS, and between the DFS and the Guadalajara drug cartel, the timing of Camarena’s threat to Plumlee, and the fact that the CIA was able to produce two or three of the tapes of Camarena’s interrogation, but failed to provide three or four other similar tapes. “Kiki was sacrificed because it was thought that he was on to them,” Berrellez said. Plumlee said the White House was concerned about a leak that might have incriminated officials in the illegal arming of the Contras. He said he knows this because he was given access to intelligence reports and briefing materials during his testimony in 1990 to the Senate committee chaired by then-Senator and now-Secretary of State John Kerry. Much of Plumlee’s testimony was given in closed session and remains sealed as a national security secret, the pilot said. “They wanted to talk to Kiki about the arms, not drugs,” Plumlee said. The alleged support for the Contras by Mexican drug kingpins, including Caro Quintero and Miguel Félix Gallardo, is not new. The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post reported on the relationship between the Reagan government and the drug lords in 1990, according to the book “Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America,” by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall. But the alleged connection between the Reagan Administration’s Contra policies and Camarena’s murder has only surfaced after the release in July of Caro Quintero from prison – where he served 28 years of a 40-year jail term – and has been widely reported in the Mexican and Central American press. Some in the Mexican press went so far as to say that the CIA, not Caro Quintero, killed Camarena. The Contra's Southern Front, April 22, 1983. Mario Castillo/La República/Tico Times The fact that witnesses have placed CIA operatives at the scene of Camarena’s kidnapping and interrogation tells Jordan that the CIA operatives should have told their handlers ahead of time and stopped it. “If it were the other way around and it were DEA operatives with knowledge of a possible kidnapping of a CIA agent, the DEA would never allow it to happen,” Jordan said. Plumlee said he is talking now because he wants to cover himself now that the issue has come into public view, and also to set the record straight, as some news sources, especially in Mexico, have blamed the CIA directly for murdering Camarena. Plumlee produced a letter dated Feb. 11, 1991, written by former Sen. Gary Hart to then-Sen. Kerry saying that Plumlee had been in contact with his office about the arms and drug trafficking between 1983 and 1985, and that Hart’s staff had informed the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees but “no action was initiated by either committee.” Bill Holden, Hart’s national security adviser and now a county commissioner in Arapaho County, Colorado, said he met with Plumlee several times. “I have no reason not to believe Plumlee,” Holden said. National Security Council adviser Lt. Col. Oliver North “was involved in a lot of nefarious activities that led the Reagan Administration into Iran-Contra.” Iran-Contra was the scandal that rocked the Reagan Administration when it was revealed that the government had sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to finance the Contras. Berrellez said the 76-year-old pilot is risking a lot to speak out, as he could still be prosecuted for the drug trafficking and even as an accessory to murder for flying Caro Quintero from Veracruz across the border to Guatemala when the drug lord made his escape from Mexico en route to a short-lived stay in Costa Rica in March 1985. Even before the Iran-Contra scandal broke, two reporters from the Associated Press, Brian Barger and Robert Parry, had published a series of articles reporting on alleged drug trafficking by Contra rebels. The articles focused on companies that served as fronts for both aiding the Contras and running drugs, but did not hint at drug running on the scale alleged by Plumlee. In 1996, Gary Webb, reporting for the San Jose, California-based Mercury News, broke a story linking Contra drug running to the proliferation of crack cocaine in Los Angeles that had bred addiction and gang-related violence. Though the “Dark Alliance” series was based on a case that had already been aired, the series hit a nerve by implying that the a U.S. government-backed rebel group (the “CIA’s army” as the series repeatedly stated) was responsible for a crack epidemic that began in L.A. and spread to other communities, especially black communities, across the country. Soon thereafter, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all published articles shooting down Webb’s reporting, saying that the amount of drugs run by the ring in Webb’s article could not by itself have sparked an epidemic on a scale experienced by U.S. cities. Reporter Gary Webb wrote the "Dark Alliance" series linking Contra drug running to the proliferation of crack cocaine in Los Angeles. He committed suicide in 2004, although the cause of death has been highly disputed. Screenshot from interview by School of Authentic Journalism 2002 seminar in Merida, Mexico The particular ring written about by Webb, headed by Nicaraguan drug traffickers Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandon, was not big enough to have fueled the crack epidemic and provided relatively little money to the Contra cause, the news reports said. Berrellez admitted that he can’t make a firm connection between the Contra drug flights into southern California, but said he is convinced the Meneses-Blandon drug ring had access to cocaine flown into El Toro Marine Air Base, adding that the ultimate buyer of the drug for street sales in Los Angeles, “Freeway” Ricky Ross, dealt in tons of cocaine and had Meneses and Blandon as his suppliers. “I was working in Los Angeles at the time, and I can tell you we knew of no interdiction program at El Toro,” Berrellez said. “The Contras were running drugs from Central America and the Contras were providing drugs to street gangs in Los Angeles. That’s your connection.” Initially supportive, Webb’s editors, in the face of the criticism, backed off the story, saying the articles had overreached. Webb was demoted to a backwater suburban beat and eventually quit the newspaper. Unable to find work at another major daily, he committed suicide in December 2004. But outrage over Webb’s allegations prompted the CIA to assign the agency’s inspector general, Fredrick Hitz, to investigate the extent of the CIA’s knowledge of cocaine trafficking by the Contras. The Hitz report found no evidence the CIA was involved in the trafficking, but did ascertain that individuals and companies related to Contra operations were involved in the trafficking, and that the CIA did not act in an expeditious manner to stop it. As for Caro Quintero, since his release, the U.S. government has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture and prosecution in the United States. Said Jordan: “From my own opinion, he has to worry more about CIA operatives than he does the Mexican government or the CIA.” 27 years later, CIA pilot tells of using secret Costa Rican airstrip to traffic guns, cocaine Posted: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 - By John McPhaul They seemed like isolated events unfolding in the chaos of Central America in the 1980s. But now, the pieces of the puzzle are fitting together. The Tico Times Former CIA contract pilot Robert “Tosh” Plumlee says he trafficked cocaine and weapons in and out of a secret airstrip in northern Costa Rica in the 1980s to arm the Nicaraguan Contras. The cocaine came from Colombia and was shipped to consumers in the U.S. Second in a series. Read the first part here. Costa Rica’s Santa Elena Peninsula in the northwestern province of Guanacaste was the site of a smoking gun in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, the scandal that rocked the administration of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Santa Elena also was the site of extensive drug trafficking back then, according to pilot who now says he trafficked cocaine and guns to a secret airstrip on the peninsula. The airstrip was located in Potrero Grande, a 1.6-kilometer valley on the coast some 15 km south of the Nicaraguan border. According to former CIA contract pilot Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, drug smugglers used the airstrip for years, even before U.S. Lt. Col. Oliver North came looking for a staging area for arms flights into Nicaragua’s “Southern Front.” A team of journalists, including Tico Times reporters, discovered the airstrip in September 1986. “Santa Elena had been on a drug-running route long before we started using it to help arm the Southern Front,” Plumlee told The Tico Times. Somehow, North fell in with the owner of the property, the Santa Elena Development Corporation, represented by North Carolina native Joe Hamilton. North took out a $5 million mortgage on the property for an unknown purpose. “Men with maps” approached former Costa Rican President Luis Alberto Monge to obtain his blessing to create a full-scale air base at Potrero Grande, arguing that it would be needed if Sandinistas attacked Costa Rica. After he left office, Monge told The Tico Times he assumed the men were U.S. officials. He readily agreed. A phantom Panamanian company, Udall Resources, set up by retired U.S. Gen. Richard Secord and “owned” by a “Robert Olmstead” – the pseudonym of William Haskell, a Maryland accountant and North’s Vietnam buddy – was contracted to extend the airstrip in 1984 to enable it to accommodate large C-130 transport aircraft. Iran-Contra investigators discovered that a “cabal” had elaborated a plan to conceal the backing of Nicaraguan Contras by the U.S. government at a time when the U.S. Congress had prohibited the Reagan Administration from aiding the Contras. Plumlee said he flew to the Potrero Grande airstrip before North dubbed it “Point West,” beginning in 1983, in a smaller C-123 transport plane. Plumlee estimated that he trafficked up to 30,000 kilograms of cocaine from Medellín and Bogotá, Colombia, out of Potrero Grande. When Óscar Arias became president of Costa Rica in May 1986, he ordered U.S. Ambassador Lewis Tambs to shut down the site. But the refurbished airstrip had become operational the same month Arias took office, and remained open for business, Plumlee said. Residents in the neighboring communities of Liberia and La Cruz spotted airplanes flying low over the hills of Santa Rosa National Park, which bordered the airstrip. A team of journalists set out to find the airstrip in September 1986. When they traveled to Santa Rosa National Park to ask about the mysterious flights, a U.S. scientist working in the park said, “It’s about time.” If the U.S. government was running a drug interdiction operation through Potrero Grande, it was a secret to the Costa Rican government. After journalists discovered the airstrip, then-Public Security Minister Hernán Garrón said Costa Rican police had seized the airstrip the previous month. “We didn’t know if we’d find Contras or armed drug traffickers,” Garrón told The Tico Times at the time. Nicaraguan guerrilla fighters led by Edén Pastora, known as "Comandante Cero," pictured here in 1983. The Tico Times In October 1986, the Sandinista army shot down a C-130 carrying arms to the Contras and captured a cargo kicker named Eugene Hasenfus, the only crew member with a parachute. Journalists given access to documents found aboard Hasenfus’ airplane linked the flight to the CIA. A Tico Times reporter determined that two phone numbers found in logs in the wreckage belonged to the home and the embassy office of CIA San José station chief Joe Fernández (codenamed Tomás Castillo), a foreshadowing of the Iran-Contra scandal that erupted the following November, when U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese revealed that the U.S. government had sold weapons to Iran and used the proceeds to help arm the Contra rebels. The chain of events raised questions over how much the U.S. government, in general, and the CIA, in particular, had aided the Contra cause when a congressional prohibition was in place. In Costa Rica, a Legislative Assembly commission, acting on findings richly informed by the U.S. Senate Committee investigating Contra involvement in drugs and chaired by then-Senator – now-Secretary of State – John Kerry, prohibited a number of former U.S. officials – including North and Ambassador Tambs – from entering Costa Rica. Eventually, the Arias administration expropriated the Potrero Grande land and it became a part of Santa Rosa National Park – but not before a protracted court battle with the airstrip owners and the direct intervention of then-U.S. President George H.W. Bush, who held up an InterAmerican Development Bank loan to Costa Rica to prod the Arias administration over the “investment issue.” The Costa Rican government ended up paying about $13 million for the property, after negotiations arbitrated by the World Bank. The fact that Mexican drug cartel kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero was a supporter of the U.S.backed Nicaraguan rebels, providing a training and staging area for arms flights to the Contras at his Veracruz, Mexico, ranch, also casts a different light on the drug lord’s escape to Costa Rica and the circumstances surrounding his short stay in the country. In early March 1985, tipped off that Caro Quintero was about to fly out of Guadalajara to escape the manhunt that had prompted U.S. President Ronald Reagan to close the U.S. border with Mexico, DEA agents raced to the city’s airport to find agents from Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate (DFS) protecting Caro Quintero’s Gulf Stream jet. According toHéctor Berrellez, the DEA’s lead investigator into agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena’s 1985 kidnapping, torture and murder, Caro Quintero appeared in the doorway of the airplane holding a bottle of champagne and shouting to the outgunned DEA agents: “My children, next time bring more guns.” Caro Quintero was flown north to Sonora by Costa Rican pilot Warner Lotz – another CIA contract employee, according to Plumlee – to see his brother Miguel before Lotz flew the cartel boss to his ranch in Veracruz. Plumlee said he was waiting there to take Caro Quintero across the border to Guatemala, where yet another pilot, Luis Carranza, flew him to Costa Rica. Caro Quintero and his entourage, which included several cronies and his girlfriend Sara Cosio, passed through Customs unchecked upon arriving in San José. According to some reports, they may have first landed at an unsupervised provincial airstrip, making their arrival in San José a domestic flight exempt from passing through Customs. The participation of so many CIA contractors in Caro Quintero’s escape raises questions about whether the CIA might not have arranged for Caro Quintero to come to Costa Rica, where he could be more readily nabbed. “Absolutely not,” Berrellez said. “The only reason the Costa Rican government moved to arrest him was because we [the DEA] told them exactly where he was.” The DEA had pinpointed the drug lord’s location by tapping a telephone at the Mexican home of Cosio’s parents. Cosio had called home and tipped off the DEA, Berrellez said. A clandestine airstrip in Potrero Grande, in Costa Rica's northwestern province of Guanacaste. The airstrip was used to traffic guns and drugs, according to a former CIA pilot. Julio Laínez/Tico Times In the early morning hours of April 4, 1985, Costa Rican cops, accompanied by DEA agents, stormed Finca California, a mansion in the Ojo de Agua area of Alajuela near Juan Santamaría International Airport, and arrested Caro Quintero and his cohorts. According to press reports, Caro Quintero complained to the arresting officers that he had paid handsomely for refuge in Costa Rica. Later that morning at the DEA’s office in the U.S. Embassy, DEA-agent-in-charge Don Clemens was on the telephone to Costa Rican officials trying to convince them to hold Caro Quintero for extradition to the United States, to no avail. Instead, the Monge administration loaded Caro Quintero and his entourage onto an airplane and deported them to Mexico the same day the drug lord was captured. Another Costa Rican Legislative Assembly commission, which investigated the circumstances surrounding Caro Quintero’s stay in Costa Rica, concluded that a “superior political authority” was responsible. As for Caro Quintero, the drug kingpin vanished after his release last Julyfrom a Mexican prison. Mexican authorities ignored a U.S. extradition request. In the ’80s, no one imagined the link between Caro Quintero’s ranch in Veracruz, Mexico, and the Santa Elena airstrip in Costa Rica – two pieces of a puzzle that on the surface had little do with each other. While reporters have focused on isolated incidents, the entire picture of the Contra drug saga has yet to come into focus, according to Celerino Castillo, a former DEA agent and author of “Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War.” “All this is very well documented, but no one has put the pieces together,” Castillo said. “But the pieces do fit together.” An aerial view of the U.S. government's secret airstrip in Santa Elena Peninsula, northern Costa Rica. The Tico Times The FBI Goes To Disturbing Lengths To Set Up Potential Terrorists Paul Szoldra Mar. 11, 2013, 5:31 PM 32,453 11 James Cromitie, center, is led by police officers from a federal building in New York after being arrested for plotting to bomb New York synagogues and shoot down military aircraft. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has busted an impressive number of homegrown terror plots over the past decade, but many people don't realize how these plots materialize. In some cases, they are hatched not from a cave-dwelling fanatic, but actually from the Bureau itself. Ever since 9/11, the task of thwarting terrorist plots has consumed the majority of the FBI's budget — $3.3 billion compared to $2.6 billion for organized crime, according to a report written for Mother Jones by Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory. The once exclusively investigative bureau has morphed into a counterterrorism agency, with field agents tapping into a nationwide network of informants that infiltrate mainly-Muslim communities. The FBI targets the "disgruntled few" who would participate in a terrorist plot if given the opportunity, according to Aaronson. In many cases, the FBI recruits potential terrorists and provides them with plans, equipment, and weapons — before finally shutting them down and getting credit for thwarting another attack. One example surfaced in December 2005, when the FBI arrested Michael Curtis Reynolds after he tried to meet an FBI informant whom he believed to be an al Qaeda contact. Authorities said he expected to receive $40,000 to finance an alleged plot to blow up pipelines and refineries, according to Fox News. The charges and his later conviction stemmed mostly from online conversations he was having with a Montana judge (and FBI informant) he believed was a terrorist leader. But would Reynolds have gone that far on his own? An FBI official speaking to Fox News on condition of anonymity said "that the agency has since concluded that Reynolds might be mentally ill and not as serious a threat as originally believed." Another case in May 2007 involved men who certainly weren't fans of the United States, but had scarce means of carrying out an attack. Five foreign-born men, described by federal authorities as "radical Islamists," along with a sixth man who helped get them weapons, were charged in May 2007 in a plot to attack a U.S. Army base in Fort Dix, N.J. Officials later admitted the men had no apparent connection to any terrorist organization. The Washington Post writes: At the same time, a 26-page indictment unsealed Tuesday indicates that the group had no rigorous military training and did not appear close to being able to pull off an attack. The arrests in the case began Monday night after two defendants arrived at a local home to buy assault weapons, which had been supplied and disabled by the FBI, officials said. "Obviously, these guys had some radical beliefs and the stuff they downloaded from the Web was very serious," said a law enforcement source close to the case, speaking to The Washington Post. "But it's not like they were going to be able to get rocket-propelled grenades and blow things up." What's more, the case relied on the controversial use of paid informants, one of whom had a notable criminal past, and the other who undermined the case (to no avail) by admitting in court that at least two of the suspects later jailed for life had no knowledge of the supposed plot. A federal jury found five of the six alleged plotters guilty of conspiracy to commit murder but cleared them of attempted murder. Perhaps the most extreme case of the FBI setting up potential terrorists involved the "Newburgh Four." On May 20, 2009, law enforcement arrested four black Muslim men in connection with a bombing plot in the Bronx, and an attack on military aircraft in Newburgh, N.Y. The men had set explosives in cars outside of local synagogues, and obtained a missile launcher to take down planes, but their plan was disrupted before it happened. Although all the weapons the men used were fakes obtained from FBI agents, it certainly seemed like a slam-dunk case. But The Guardian reports a stark difference between this group and other terrorists: ... far from being active militants, the four men [the FBI informant] attracted were impoverished individuals struggling with Newburgh's grim epidemic of crack, drug crime and poverty. One had mental issues so severe his apartment contained bottles of his own urine. He also believed Florida was a foreign country. At one point during the sting, James Cromitie, the leader of the four-man group, reportedly tried to thwart the plan himself. For weeks, he pretended to leave Newburgh to avoid his terrorist contact Hussain (a paid FBI informant). He stopped going to the mosque, and ignored Hussain's phone calls and voice mails. He even went so far as to pretend not to be in when he showed up at his house. The Guardian reports: Only when Cromitie lost his job, and became desperate for money, did he contact Hussain again. "I told you, I can make you $250,000, but you don't want it, brother," Hussain told him. Now Cromitie agreed and set about finding lookouts. "Ok, f--- it. I don't care. Ah, man. Maqsood, you got me," he said, using Hussain's fake name. A quick $250,000 seemed rather enticing to the four men living in poverty. After their arrest and trial, they were given a minimum 25-year sentence, but even the judge lambasted the government's handling of the case, according to the New York Daily News: "The essence of what occurred here is that a government understandably zealous to protect its citizens from terrorism came upon a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own," McMahon said, referring to Cromitie. And although Judge Colleen McMahan would reject Cromitie's claims of entrapment, she still called the FBI's handling of the case a "fantasy terror operation," as The New York Times reported: “Only the government could have made a ‘terrorist’ out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in its scope." The arrests and convictions of men who didn't have the means to conduct an attack without FBI help certainly raises ethical questions. While they have been able to stop actual threats — it seems that in some other cases, the line between real and contrived has often blurred. Some defense attorneys agree, as CBS News later reported: "When the government supplies a fake bomb and then thwarts the plot, this is insanity. This is grandstanding," said Susanne Brody, one of the defense attorneys for another terror case in Portland, Ore. "The people they repeatedly come up with continue to be people who have no ability to do something on their own," said Samuel Braverman, a defense attorney in the Newburgh case. In spending all of this time concocting terrorist plots, the FBI may be wasting resources and ignoring the real threats. As one terrorism analyst at Stanford University writes, the priority for Islamic fighters now is actually to expel Westerners from their lands, not attack them in their own: Many assume that jihadists all want to attack the West, and that those who leave do so for training. I argue the opposite, namely, that most Western jihadists prefer foreign fighting, but a minority attacks at home after being radicalized, most often through foreign fighting or contact with a veteran. US aviation worker arrested in FBI sting operation trying to set off car bomb in Kansas airport Heather Saul Saturday 14 December 2013 Authorities said the planned assault by Terry Lee Loewen at Wichita's Mid-Continent Regional airport was to demonstrate his support for al-Qa'ida. Loewen, 58, who worked at the airport for Hawker Beechcraft, was arrested before dawn as he tried to drive into the tarmac. The materials in the car were inert, and no one at the airport was in any immediate danger, authorities said. Loewen planned to die in the explosion in his quest to become a martyr in a jihad against America, according to court documents. Police said they had been investigating Loewen, of Wichita, for approximately six months after he made statements online about wanting to commit "violent jihad" against the United States, US Attorney Barry Grissom said. Eventually, an undercover FBI agent befriended Loewen, striking up conversations about terrorism and Loewen's admiration for those who plotted violence against American interests. Authorities said Loewen spent months studying the layout of the airport, its flight patterns and other details to maximize fatalities and damage in an attack. During that time, he developed a plan with other 'conspirators' to use his employee access card to pull off the attack, who were actually undercover FBI agents. Loewen made an initial court appearance on Friday afternoon, answering "yes" to various procedural questions. A US magistrate ordered that Loewen is detained until a hearing next Friday after prosecutors said he was a flight risk and a danger to the community. Authorities said they believe Loewen acted alone. No other arrests are expected. His wife and attorney declined comment after the hearing. Wide use of FBI sting operations has prompted frequent controversy over balancing the needs of law enforcement and civil liberties. One involved an undercover agent pretending to be a terrorist who provided a teenager with a phony car bomb, watched him plant the bomb in downtown Chicago and press a trigger. Civil rights groups have criticised such tactics and argued the FBI is systematically violating peoples' constitutional rights by luring targets into committing crimes. The FBI however argues such operations are a vital law enforcement tool that has averted potentially deadly terrorist attacks. Investigators said Loewen also frequently expressed admiration for Anwar Al-Awlaki, the American-born al-Qa'ida leader who was killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen. Al-Awlaki emerged as an influential preacher among militants living in the West and called for jihad, or holy war, against the US during his English language Internet sermons. In August, an undercover agent offered to introduce Loewen to someone who could help him engage in jihad. A few days later, he mentioned providing a "tour" of the airport for one of the undercover agents. In September, the undercover agent told Loewen he had returned from overseas after meeting with individuals connected with al-Qa'ida. The agent told him the "brothers" were excited to hear about his access to the airport and asked Loewen if he would be willing to plant some type of device, according to court documents. "Wow! That's some heavy stuff you just laid down. Am I interested? Yes. I still need time to think about it, but I can't imagine anything short of arrest stopping me," Loewen told the agent, adding that he needed to let Allah guide him. The documents allege that he also asked for reassurances that he wasn't being set up, saying his greatest fear was not completing the operation. The criminal complaint also details a meeting in November with other undercover agents in which they discussed executing the plan prior to Christmas in order to cause the greatest physical and economic damage. He also provided components from his employer that the agents requested to wire the fake explosive device, according to court documents. On Wednesday, Loewen met with another undercover agent and helped assemble the false bomb, court documents allege. Loewen was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, attempting to damage property and attempting to provide support to terrorist group al-Qa'ida. Hawker Beechcraft spokeswoman Nicole Alexander confirmed Friday that Loewen worked at the company's aircraft maintenance facility at the airport, but she said he has been suspended amid the investigation. The 6,000-Page Report on CIA Torture Has Now Been Suppressed for 1 Year It cost $40 million to produce, documents serious wrongdoing, and doesn't threaten national security. Team Obama won't release it. Conor Friedersdorf Dec 13 2013, 12:01 AM ET One year ago today, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to adopt a 6,000-page report on the CIA rendition, detention, and interrogation program that led to torture. Its contents include details on each prisoner in CIA custody, the conditions of their confinement, whether they were tortured, the intelligence they provided, and the degree to which the CIA lied about its behavior to overseers. Senator Dianne Feinstein declared it one of the most significant oversight efforts in American history, noting that it contains "startling details" and raises "critical questions." But all these months later, the report is still being suppressed. The Obama Administration has no valid reason to suppress the report. Its contents do not threaten national security, as evidenced by the fact that numerous figures who normally defer to the national-security state want it released with minor redactions. The most prominent of all is Vice President Joe Biden. Another is Senator John McCain. "What I have learned confirms for me what I have always believed and insisted to be true—that the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience, but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence," he said in a statement. "... It is therefore my hope that this Committee will take whatever steps necessary to finalize and declassify this report, so that all Americans can see the record for themselves, which I believe will finally close this painful chapter for our country." They are hardly alone. In order to mark the one-year anniversary of the report being adopted (only to be suppressed), the Center for Victims of Torture has assembled a list of 58 figures of note who insist that the public ought to be able to read the important document. It includes a total of eight U.S. senators and numerous former Obama Administration officials, including Harold Koh and Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering. Former CIA employees who want the report released include John Rizzo, former CIA general counsel; Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations and analysis at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center; and Glenn Carle, 23-year veteran of CIA (among others). If it's former military flag officers that will sway you, here are fewer than half of the ones who want the report on CIA imprisonment released: General Joseph P. Hoar, former Commander, U.S. Central Command; General Charles C. Krulak, former Commandant of the Marine Corps; General David M. Maddox, former Commander in Chief, U.S. Army, Europe; General Barry McCaffrey, former Assistant Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; General Merrill A. McPeak, former Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force; Lieutenant General Robert G. Gard Jr.; Vice Admiral Lee F. Gunn, former Inspector General, Department of the Navy; Lieutenant General Arlen D. Jameson, former Deputy Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Command; Lieutenant General Charles Otstott, former Deputy Chairman, NATO Military Committee; Lieutenant General Harry E. Soyster, former Director, Defense Intelligence Agency; Lieutenant General James M. Thompson, former Director for Estimates, Defense Intelligence Agency; Major General Paul D. Eaton, former Commanding General of the command charged with reestablishing Iraqi Security Forces. Despite all these figures calling for the report's release, the Obama Administration, which promised voters that it would be the most transparent in history, has bowed to pressure from a faction within the CIA to keep secret the most thorough accounting we have of the agency's lawless, immoral behavior during the Bush years. In doing so, Team Obama makes it less likely that we learn the lessons of CIA torture, and more likely that America tortures again one day. Latest from National Security U.S. to maintain unified NSA, Cyber Command leadership Ex-FBI agent who disappeared in Iran worked for CIA Adam Goldman Officials say disappearance of Bob Levinson in 2007 prompted major internal investigation at Langley White House to preserve controversial policy on NSA, Cyber Command leadership By Ellen Nakashima, The Obama administration has decided to preserve a controversial arrangement under which a single military official is permitted to direct both the National Security Agency and the military’s cyberwarfare command despite an external review panel’s recommendation against doing so, according to U.S. officials. The decision by President Obama comes amid signs that the White House is not inclined to place significant new restraints on the NSA’s activities and favors maintaining an agency program that collects data on virtually all phone calls of Americans, although it is likely to impose additional privacy-protection measures. NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander said Wednesday that his organization is implementing changes to prevent a leak comparable to that committed by Edward Snowden from happening again. Some officials, including top U.S. intelligence officials, had argued that the NSA and Cyber Command should be placed under separate leadership to ensure greater accountability and avoid an undue concentration of power. “Following a thorough interagency review, the administration has decided that keeping the positions of NSA Director and Cyber Command commander together as one, dual-hatted position is the most effective approach to accomplishing both agencies’ missions,” White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in an e-mail to The Washington Post. The announcement comes as an external panel appointed by Obama to review U.S. surveillance policies submitted its report on Friday. According to some U.S. officials, the panel was expected to recommend that the NSA-Cyber Command leadership be split and that the agency’s phone program be modified by having the phone companies or a third party hold the records, not the NSA. The five-member panel made more than 40 recommendations, which the White House is free to reject or modify as it conducts its own review of NSA surveillance. That review is expected to be completed in January. “The big picture is there’s not going to be that much [additional] constraint” by the White House, said a U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “They’re really not hurting [the NSA] that much.” NSA officials declined to comment. Hayden said the internal review focuses on the NSA’s activities around the world, with an emphasis on the collection of intelligence about heads of state, coordination with close U.S. allies and partners, and the issue of whether the process of setting national intelligence priorities should be modified. She declined to discuss details, saying the review was ongoing. Some officials familiar with the decision to keep one person in charge of both the NSA and Cyber Command expressed disappointment. They say the missions of the two organizations are fundamentally different: spying and conducting military attacks. “It’s a mistake,” said another U.S. official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “Cyber Command and NSA each needs its own full-time head, and [Obama] could have continued the coordination and close working relationship between the two organizations without them being led by the same individual.” But Mike McConnell, a former NSA director and director of national intelligence, said: “I think it’s the right decision. Combining the skills and capability of the NSA is essential for the successful operation of Cyber Command in its war-fighting mission.” Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who is due to retire as NSA director in March after more than eight years at the helm, has long advocated maintaining the “dual hat” arrangement for the NSA and Cyber Command. The NSA “plays a unique role in supporting Cyber Command’s mission, providing critical support for target access and development, including linguists, analysts, cryptanalytic capabilities and sophisticated technological infrastructure,” Hayden said. The NSA has been the focus of new public scrutiny since June, when The Washington Post and other news outlets began disclosing documents leaked by a former agency contractor, Edward Snowden. One document revealed the existence of an agency program to collect billions of phone- call records of Americans for counterterrorism purposes. Congress is debating whether to rein in that program or endorse it explicitly in legislation. Civil liberties groups have sued the government, alleging that the data collection violates privacy laws and the Constitution. The external panel, formally known as the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, was expected to recommend that phone companies or a third party retain the records and have the NSA transmit numbers suspected of terrorism links to be run against them. The Senate Intelligence Committee rejected that approach in drafting legislation to codify the data-collection program. Industry officials have said that they do not wish to be custodians of such large amounts of data, which they said would become the target of local law enforcement and lawyers seeking information in divorce and criminal cases. Significantly, sources said, the White House is not likely to terminate the program or to adopt the panel’s recommendation to have phone companies hold the data. Under the program, the NSA collects information such as when phone calls were made and how long they lasted, but not the content of the conversations. The review panel also weighed whether to recommend that the federal court overseeing surveillance programs release significant opinions to companies that receive court orders to furnish data to the FBI or the NSA for domestic surveillance programs. These opinions are generally classified and would still not be released to the public. Obama has said that he wants to improve public confidence in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s oversight of the NSA by “ensuring that the government’s position is challenged by an adversary.” The review panel was expected to make such a recommendation. The White House also has been under considerable fire from European allies over revelations based on Snowden disclosures that the NSA had monitored phone calls of foreign leaders over the past decade, including those of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Although collecting intelligence on “leadership intentions” is what Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. has called “a basic tenet” of espionage, the White House is expected to include a new level of review of such collection to assuage allies, sources said. A third and separate review of NSA surveillance is being conducted by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent executive branch agency. It hopes to have its report completed by the end of the month. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzmW8c66UaI Wesley Clark - This Country was Taken Over by a Group of People http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzP9YJpBubk Richard Clarke: 50 CIA personnel knew AQ entered the country before 9/11 and were helped by Saudi Arabian intelligence - [12:53] New World Order – The Endgame Has Begun By Richard K. Moore Global Research, December 16, 2013 News Beacon 13 December 2013 The nature of power in today’s world: The central bank system “Let me issue and control a nation‘s money and I care not who writes the laws.” – Amschel Rothschild Perhaps the single most important thing to know about power in the world today is that most nations do not have control over their own currencies. Instead privately owned, for-profit central banks – such as the Federal Reserve Bank in the US – create money out of nothing and then loan it at interest to their respective governments. This is an incredibly profitable scam, but that’s not the worst of it. Not only do the central banks have the power to create money for free, they also have the power to set interest rates, to decide how much credit is issued, and to decide how much money is put into circulation. With this power central banks can – and do – orchestrate boom and bust cycles, enabling the super-wealthy owners of the banks to profit from investments during the booms, and buy up assets at bargain prices during the busts. And that still isn’t the whole story. The most profitable of all central bank activities has been the financing of major wars, particularly the two World Wars. When nations are engaged in warfare, with their very survival at stake, the governments stretch their resources to the limit in the competition to prevail. The struggle to get more financing becomes as important as the competition on the battlefield. Moneylenders love a desperate borrower, and vast fortunes have been made by extending credit to both sides in conflicts: the longer a war continues, the more profit for the central bankers. A very good introduction to the history of central banking, and in particular the Rothschild dynasty: The Money Masters (1996) [FULL DOCUMENTARY] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDtBSiI13fE Centralized wealth leads to centralized power “Some of the biggest men in the United States are afraid of something. They know there is a power somewhere, so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” – Woodrow Wilson Our political systems, based on parties competing to get elected, are inherently prone to corruption. Just as the struggle for financing is important in military campaigns, so is it important in political campaigns. Wealthy donors are able to get special treatment, when it comes to legislation and regulation that affects their business interests. This kind of corruption, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. A more effective way that wealth translates into power is by the placing of agents – individuals loyal to wealthy backers – into positions of influence and power. For example, when the Rothschilds and Rockefellers joined forces to establish the Federal Reserve, they recruited an unknown professor, Woodrow Wilson, promised to make him President, and secured a return promise that he would sign the Federal Reserve bill when the time came. With their influence over party bosses, their control of newspapers, and unlimited funding, they were able to get Wilson elected. He may have later regretted his bargain with the devil, as suggested in the above quotation. A more modern example is Obama, long time protégé of Henry Kissinger, himself a key agent of the Rockefellers. Like Wilson, Obama appeared out of political nowhere, was rocketed into the Presidency, and proved his loyalty in office. In Obama’s case, this involved promptly turning the White House over to central-banker agents from Wall Street – Timothy Geithner and his buddies. They make the policy; Obama makes the speeches. This kind of thing has been going on for centuries, first in Europe and later in the US. What began as the placement of a few key agents has evolved over time. What we have now is an international web of control, with key agents placed in political parties, governments and their agencies, the media, corporate boards, intelligence services, and the military. At the center of the web are the central banking dynasties – the Gods of Money – who remain mostly behind the scenes, pulling the strands of real power. Read the complete article at http://news-beacon-ireland.info/?p=15435 Craig B Hulet was both speech writer and Special Assistant for Special Projects to Congressman Jack Metcalf (Retired); he has been a consultant to federal law enforcement DEA, ATF&E of Justice/Homeland Security for over 25 years; he has written four books on international relations and philosophy, his latest is The Hydra of Carnage: Bush’s Imperial War-making and the Rule of Law - An Analysis of the Objectives and Delusions of Empire. He has appeared on over 12,000 hours of TV and Radio: The History Channel “De-Coded”; He is a regular on Coast to Coast AM w/ George Noory and Coffee Talk KBKW; CNN, C-Span ; European Television "American Dream" and The Arsenio Hall Show; The Carl Nelson Show live in DC and Trending with Carl Nelson syndicated live; he has written for Soldier of Fortune Magazine, International Combat Arms, Financial Security Digest, etc.; Hulet served in Vietnam 1969-70, 101st Airborne, C Troop 2/17th Air Cav and graduated 3rd in his class at Aberdeen Proving Grounds Ordnance School MOS 45J20 Weapons. He remains a paid analyst and consultant in various areas of geopolitical, business and security issues: terrorism and military affairs. Hulet lives in the ancient old growth Quinault Rain Forest.