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