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The RCMP had their hands on one of the key insiders of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, but he was released after he had Mounties call his handler at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Ali Mohamed, a Californian of Egyptian origin who is believed to be the highest ranking al-Qaeda member to have landed in Canada, was working with U.S. counterterrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993.

"The people of the RCMP told me by midnight that I can go now," Mr. Mohamed wrote at the time in an affidavit shown yesterday to The Globe and Mail.

He later confessed in the United States to being a close bin Laden associate and is in a U.S. prison.

The 1993 incident developed after customs agents at Vancouver International Airport detained Essam Marzouk, an Egyptian who had arrived from Damascus via Frankfurt, after they found him carrying two forged Saudi passports.

Mr. Mohamed, who was waiting to pick him up at the airport, inquired of the police about his friend's detention. That made the RCMP curious about Mr. Mohamed, but he dispelled their suspicions by telling them he was a collaborator with the FBI.

Mr. Mohamed, who had a U.S. passport, was called back to Vancouver to testify on behalf of Mr. Marzouk at the latter's refugee-claimant case -- one terrorist vouching for another terrorist at a Canadian refugee hearing, although neither had admitted it.

The story provides evidence that years ago al-Qaeda was using Canada as a logistical transit point for its operations, perhaps to smuggle people into the United States.

Mr. Mohamed, who was a U.S. Army sergeant, eventually would confess to training Mr. bin Laden's bodyguards, helping set up a terrorist cell in Kenya that bombed the U.S. embassy and arranging security for a meeting between Mr. bin Laden and the head of Lebanese Hezbollah.

Mr. Marzouk's name was in the news this month after a business card for his Surrey, B.C., company was recovered in an al-Qaeda safehouse in Kabul. Mr. Marzouk, 33, is in an Egyptian prison after being convicted of terrorism.

The November, 1998, indictment that accused Mr. bin Laden of the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania notes that al-Qaeda "maintained cells and personnel in a number of countries to facilitate its activities, including in . . . Canada" -- but no details are provided.

When Canadian authorities questioned Mr. Mohamed and Mr. Marzouk at the Vancouver airport, "Ali Mohamed was in the Americans' good books," Mr. Marzouk's lawyer, Phil Rankin, said yesterday. "He got away from the RCMP by telling them, phone . . . this FBI agent in the United States and he'll vouch for me. So, Ali Mohamed wasn't so shadowy in those days. He was one of their guys,"

Mr. Mohamed provided Mr. Rankin with an affidavit about the incident. He said he was waiting for "my friend Essam Marzouk . . . but he did not show up, so I went to the customs office to find out."

Plainclothes officers asked him for his papers and called the FBI. The RCMP asked him to come the following day to their Vancouver office for questioning and a search of his car. "They found nothing. I left Canada [at] 4:30 p.m. for the States," Mr. Mohamed wrote.

According to a statement given by Khaled Abu el-Dahab, a defendant in a 1999 Cairo terrorism trial, Mr. Mohamed returned to Canada with money provided by al-Qaeda so Mr. Marzouk could pay his lawyer.

Mr. Rankin denies that, saying that his client paid his fees and bail from $20,000 he was carrying on him. "He [Mr. Mohamed] never gave me one penny, period. Marzouk came with money, and that's the money he used. Now whether he gave Marzouk money is a different issue. I don't know."

Mr. Mohamed, 49, is a former major in the Egyptian army who settled in the United States, married a California woman and enlisted in the U.S. Army, training at Fort Bragg, the base of the U.S. Special Forces, though he never joined that group.

He told a hearing in New York in October, 2000, that he joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group that merged with al-Qaeda at about the same time, in the early 1980s.

In the early 1990s, while he commuted to Vancouver to pick up Mr. Marzouk and to testify at his refugee hearing, Mr. Mohamed conducted military and basic explosives training for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, he confirmed after pleading guilty to five conspiracy charges.

In the al-Qaeda camps, Mr. Mohamed was known as Abu Mohamed al Amriki -- "Father Mohamed the American," a hearing in another trial was told this spring. "He is very, very strict and not gentle," testified one of his al-Qaeda students,L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a Moroccan-born defector who was supposed to become Mr. bin Laden's personal plane pilot.

Mr. Mohamed taught Mr. Kherchtou and others how to case and surreptitiously photograph potential targets.

"In the early 1990s, I assisted al-Qaeda in creating a presence in Nairobi," Mr. Mohamed said after his guilty plea, adding that he conducted surveillance of the embassy that would be bombed in 1998, killing 213 people.

He said he took orders from Mr. bin Laden and from Mohammed Atef, al-Qaeda's chief of military operations who was killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan last week.

Mr. Mohamed admitted to training Mr. bin Laden's security detail and to providing security during a meeting of the Saudi-born millionaire and Imad Mughniyah, the head of security of the Lebanese Hezbollah, alleged to have been behind the Lebanese hostage crisis and the 1983 Beirut bomb attacks that killed 300 U.S. and French troops.

Mr. Marzouk reportedly left Canada in 1998 for the Balkans.

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGABYST9KUC.html

Harvard Expert on Immune System, Viruses Disappears on Trip to Tennessee

By Bill Poovey Associated Press Writer Published: Nov 27, 2001

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) - Harvard molecular biologist Don Wiley was last seen leaving a banquet in Memphis just before midnight on Nov. 15. His rental car was found a few hours later, abandoned on a Mississippi River bridge with the keys in the ignition and the tank full of gas.

His family does not believe he committed suicide and police say there is no evidence that the 57-year-old married father of four with no known financial or domestic problems was kidnapped or killed.

But the disappearance in this time of war and anthrax attacks has attracted the attention of the FBI. Wiley is an expert on how the human immune system fights off infections and had recently investigated such dangerous viruses as AIDS, Ebola, herpes and influenza.

Investigators are reviewing all possibilities to what might have happened, from Wiley jumping from the bridge to him being a target of some kind of terrorist-backed kidnapping because of his research.

"Right now nothing is pointing at anything, except he is missing," police Lt. Walter Norris said Tuesday.

Wiley's wife, Katrin Valgeirsdottir, said "suicide is everybody's first reaction" but she doesn't believe her husband would have killed himself.

She said "there is no connection to terrorist activity. None."

"We don't know what happened. We can speculate until the cows come home but we don't know," she said in a telephone interview from Cambridge, Mass.

Wiley is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics in Harvard University's molecular and cellular biology department. He and another Harvard professor, Dr. Jack Strominger, have won honors for their work on how the human immune system works, including the Japan Prize two years ago.

Wiley was in Memphis to attend a two-day annual meeting of the scientific advisory board of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, a board Wiley has served on for about 10 years.

Dr. William Evans, the hospital's deputy director, said Wiley seemed "in a great frame of mind" and was looking forward to time with his family when he left a Nov. 15 dinner at the Peabody Hotel about midnight.

Four hours later, police found Wiley's abandoned Mitsubishi Galant a few miles from the hotel, in a lane of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge that rises 100 feet above the Mississippi River between Memphis and Arkansas.

Norris said police have no clues as to Wiley's whereabouts during those four hours. He said patrol boats and helicopters have been checking the river, but divers wouldn't be helpful because the current is too swift.

Valgeirsdottir reported her husband missing Nov. 16, the day she and their two children had planned to meet him in Memphis. She said Wiley had been staying with his father in a Memphis suburb.

She said she could think of no reason he would have driven toward Arkansas after the hotel dinner.

Wiley's 85-year-old father, retired chemist Bill Wiley, said his son knew his way around the city from years of visits and attending the hospital meetings.

"We can't accept the suicide theory," Bill Wiley said.

Police Inspector Jerry King said there was nothing to support theories that Wiley was a victim of a crime or he disappeared because of a domestic or financial situation. Investigators have been dusting the rental car for fingerprints and performing other tests, but nothing has turned up so far.

William Woerner of the FBI's office in Memphis said the agency was not conducting an investigation into Wiley's disappearance.

He said the agency was interested in the case because Wiley is a prominent scientist but there was no evidence the disappearance is related to his profession.

FBI spokesman George Bolds said the FBI would assist Memphis police if needed, but the disappearance is a missing persons case for now.

"There are many possibilities and theories as to what could have happened," Bolds said. "There is not a whole lot the FBI can add right now."

---

On the Net:

FBI: http://www.fbi.gov

Harvard: http://golgi.harvard.edu/Faculty/Wiley.html

Memphis: http://www.ci.memphis.tn.us

11/25/01

babs7@ulster.net

Please post/forward...thanks

Barbara Hartwell Legal Defense and Research Fund PO Box 832 Woodstock NY 12498 WEBSITES http://www.ulster.net/~babs7/ http://www.geocities.com/rb_ham/babs.html

THE HEART OF THE WARRIOR

"In order to experience fearlessness, it is necessary to experience fear. The essence of cowardice is NOT acknowledging the reality of fear. True fearlessness is not the reduction of fear, but going beyond fear."

--Chogyam Trungpa from The Sacred Path of the Warrior

It is known among those rich in spiritual wisdom that the true warrior, the one who is divinely inspired to fight for what is right, true and good, is the one whose heart is open. Open, as in the ability to have compassion for the suffering of others. Open to the basic goodness of humanity and of life. Open to perceive the truth, no matter how unpleasant that truth. And perhaps most necessary, the heart must be open in a way which allows the warrior to go beyond fear.

In the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, the reality of fear is something none of us can afford NOT to acknowledge. But as warriors engaged in the fight to protect our most fundamental God- given human rights, to defend our Constitution and civil liberties, the rules of engagement demand that we go beyond our fear. It is the only hope we have to save our country without losing our honor, not just individually, but as a nation.

But before we can take effective action as warriors, we must have a well-designed battle plan. A worthy battle plan first and foremost must be based on a clear perception of the truth and of the enemies we are pitted against. But just perceiving the truth is not enough. We must expose that truth and shout it from the rooftops to all and sundry, making it available to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

As warriors, that is where our responsibility begins. We can't be responsible for those who stick their fingers in their ears, who go running for cover or who stick their heads in the sand. Those who allow themselves to be ruled by fear --and I'm sorry to say, last time I checked, that seems to be the pathetic majority of American citizens--will simply roll out the Red Carpet for Homeland Security, send out the Welcome Wagon for jackboots and swagger sticks. For Tom Ridge, John Ashcroft, Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush and all the rest of the gangstas, who not so long ago might have been called 'crypto- fascists'. Well, things have changed....and now we can drop the 'crypto' part.

Maybe the wimps will awaken from their mind-controlled, boob-tubed, head-up-the butt stupor and maybe they won't. So be it. Either they will or they won't...either they do or they don't.....

But, for those among us who are true warriors, we can and we must first be responsible for ourselves and our own actions. No self- respecting, freedom-loving warrior will just lie down and take it, while the tyrants rape and pillage, slash and burn, and run our Constitution through their shredders.

Though the wimps --both inside and outside our gov't-- seem to be a- dime-a-dozen, thank God, we do have some real warriors among us. And here's where the real story, the real point of this report, begins.

Let's start with Todd Brendan Fahey. His recent article, Where is Our Larry Flynt ? Blackmail as a Public Service Announcement, certainly tells it like it is. If you haven't read it, please do. Here's the link, direct to my website. http://www.ulster.net/~babs7/hartwellreports/larryflynt.htm

And apparently, some of those folks caught in the crosshairs of Todd's scathing and incisive commentary, didn't like what he had to say. But God bless him for saying it ! God bless him for not pulling punches...for not taking prisoners. God bless him.

What our enemies didn't like was that Todd was urging American citizens to "play hardball" with the scumbags, the corrupt faction of our government --the enemy within-- who are running amok, wreaking havoc and doing it with impunity. He was urging --even imploring-- those 'good guys' still left inside the intelligence community and military to come forward and tell the truth, to expose the tyranny and corruption before it's too late.

I for one, will back Todd all the way, as will a number of other patriots I know. Because we too know there are 'good guys' still inside. Guys who know the score. Guys who are aghast with horror and disgust as they watch what unfolds around them. Guys who know in their heart of hearts they don't want to be a part of this anymore. Guys who could blow the whistle, who could rip off the covers.

Well then, I'm asking y'all, good guys.... what are you waiting for ? What on God's green earth are you waiting for ?

And what about you good guys still in the military ? Those of you who fought for your country, fought with honor ? When you get a directive from your C.O. to violate the Constitutional rights of your fellow citizens, are you just going to be 'following orders' ??

Or will you defend the Constitution and all enemies of our Constiutional Republic, foreign and domestic, as you gave your oath of sacred honor, to do ?

Yes, we know you'll be targeted once you come forward. We know how the bad guys defame your character, threaten your family, sic the goons on you, do their damnedest to make your life an all-around living hell. But what kind of 'life' do you think you can expect to be living if you DON'T come forward with the truth ?

And do you really think 'they' don't know who you are ?.....I can guarantee you, they do. They've profiled you, they have your files, they KNOW who you really are. Whether you know it or not, you're hiding in plain sight....and after the takeover is a done deal, you'll be of no use to them anymore. You're expendable. They have no use for good guys, once the game is up, once the fix is in.....don't you get it by now ?

So, good guys, don't be an enabler, don't be a wimp, don't be a wuss. DO THE RIGHT THING, and do it now.

At the very least, good guys, send out those leaks, you don't have to give out your name, rank and serial number, but please...... just send us those leaks, and we'll be happy to take the heat...just send us those leaks....

Now let's hear from another one of those good guys who has come forward, who has done the right thing. Let's listen to him and let's learn what it is to go beyond fear. Let's understand what it means to have the courage to tell the truth, to embody the heart of the warrior.

Here, some excerpts from a report posted on American Patriot Friends Network, just a couple days after Sept 11, from this 'anonymous', insider source.

Now here's a guy I just love, God bless his heart...... on the side of the angels, and who knows how to play hardball......

" America, you are being played for a fool, again, by a Government whose true goal, and only goal for that matter is your complete enslavement. Stop playing the role, America, it's unbecoming....... In fact, you all look like a bunch of blubbering idiots running here and there. Which is precisely what they want you to look like.

The so-called terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 against this grand country of ours are ALL carefully planned and orchestrated events ..... creating chaos, confusion and fear. The ultimate outcome of which will be Legislation that will further strip America of it's civil and Constitutional rights.

Other examples of this carefully planned and orchestrated Psychological Warfare (or PsyOps) against the American people are such events as the OKC bombing, every school shooting to this date, every Post Office and MacDonalds shooting, the Bio-Chemical warfare against Americans via the airborne spraying of EBD, JP8 and various other deadly chemicals by aircraft from every branch of the Service as well as Delta and United airlines (haven't you noticed the 'chemtrails', those contrails that linger for hours after a Jet has passed, when they normally dissipate within minutes? And how the sky will turn various, very odd colors?) and many, many other such incidents.

Ultimately what these Satanic Freemason's are hoping for is that the people of America will beg the Government to step in and end all this violence, this bloodshed, this chaos. Which they will be more than willing to do. At the expensive of your freedoms, your rights, your humanity. And many of you will end up in FEMA concentration camps, I assure you.

In the case of these most recent "terrorist" attacks (the only terrorists in the United States are operatives of the CIA, FBI, NSA, ATF, DOD, the KGB and MI6 and their trained goons), what we have is a trial run of events that will be orchestrated in order to usher in Martial Law. And the final rise to power of the New World Order. I'd have to say that it was a fairly successful exercise, wouldn't you?

However, if one stops and thinks for a moment one will quickly realize that this term "Terrorism" is now being used not only in reference to some mysterious group or individual(s) who bombed the Trade center buildings, but to Militia group(s) and their members, to survivalists, gun owners, Christians - in other words to anyone, or any group that would dare think for itself and have the courage to defend itself from the dictums and the tyranny of the 'State'. Just as in Germany from the years of 1932-1945, and just as in what is going on in America, and through the world today.

What better way to scrap what little remains of our Constitution than to orchestrate such hideous events, implement Martial Law and take complete control of the country?

America is under attack, all right, and has been since 1947, by the very Government that purports to govern and care for it's citizens that conducted the events of Sept. 11, 2001. DO NOT believe the utter nonsense, the lies the evil filth that spews fourth from the lips of the Mainstream media - for they are nothing more than that, lies.....they will still be uttering the same filth, the same lies after Martial Law has been instituted and Red Chinese guards patrol your streets.

Frankly the spokespeople of the Government make me sick - knowing full well most of them know the truth - and they stand in front of the world and lie. And especially when the supposed Christian, Ashcroft, is spewing fourth the same lies, the same filth as everyone else.

These cowards and traitors make me puke.....

We, the people, can stop this. It is all up to us, now. Perhaps living as a slave, as chattel of the New World Order appeals to you, it does not to me. I will not live as a slave, ever. If we were to unite, this evil plan of very evil men can be stopped, but only if we unite. To not do so endeavors our collective death, both as a country and culture and as a free people. The choice is yours. Lock and load fellow Americans, Satan is here....."

Amen ! Yes, Satan is here, in whatever form we choose to name him. He is the emobodiment of all that is corrupt, treacherous, deceptive and evil, and who seeks to place a stranglehold on the sacred breath of the Spirit of Liberty and Justice, which mocks God and all that is true and righteous.

Will we just let this bastard and his henchmen take over our country ? Or will we get right with God, and with the heart of the warrior, go into battle knowing our victory is fated.....signed sealed and delivered.....

I have a secret to tell you, which I've known for as long as I can remember...those on the side of the angels win.

--Barbara Hartwell

Order consists in celestial things ruling over spiritual things, through these over natural things and through these over corporeal things; but when corporeal and natural things rule over spiritual and celestial things, order is destroyed and then the man is an image of hell; and therefore the Lord restores order by means of regeneration and then the man becomes an image of heaven. --Emmanuel Swedenborg

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself --Emerson

Nurture your minds with heroic thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes. --Benjamin Disraeli

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http://www.guerrillanews.com/counter_intelligence/231.html

Above the Law Bush’s Racial Coup D’Etat and Intell Shutdown

By Greg Palast

Did Jeb Bush fix the Florida election long before any votes were cast? Did President Bush shut down the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies’ investigations into terror networks prior to 9-11, leaving America wide open to the attacks?

In a conversation with GNN Executive Editor Anthony Lappé, journalist Greg Palast breaks down two of the biggest scoops you’ve never heard and explains how they, and other groundbreaking stories, are ignored by most mainstream news outlets.

Palast is no conspiracy nut. His special investigations regularly lead the BBC’s Newsnight program. His bi-weekly column for London’s Observer newspaper has earned him numerous awards including the Financial Times David Thomas Prize. Last year, Salon.com selected his report on the U.S. elections as politics story of the year.

Yet despite all the props, Palast, a Canadian, works in exile in London - unable to find work in what he calls the “gutless” North American media. Like the best muckrakers, he is angry, opinionated and armed with a tireless desire to expose the truth. His stories about Bush’s election theft and intelligence cover-up - both backed up with smoking gun documents, inside sources and on-the-record interviews - will shock even the most informed GuerrillaNews reader:

http://www.guerrillanews.com/counter_intelligence/231.html

Above the Law Bush’s Racial Coup D’Etat and Intell Shutdown

Lappé: Thanks Mr. Palast for talking with us today.

You have broken two major stories concerning President Bush in the last year - both of which have gotten little play here in the U.S. Let’s start out by looking back at Florida: Last week, the final report on the Florida recount funded by a consortium of various media outlets was released. They found: Bush would have won if you only recounted the counties the Gore team had requested, Gore would have won if it was statewide.

But prior to all this, you reported a story that looked into something that went down before the election that in many ways makes these findings insignificant.

What did you find?

Palast: Yeah, insignificant. No kidding. Maybe that’s what The New York Times sub-heading should be “All the news that’s insignificant we print.”

First of all, the story I broke was simple:

After looking at my evidence printed in Britain, the Civil Rights Commission said the issue is not the count of the votes in Florida – the issue is the no-count. What the commission meant by the no-count is that it looks like maybe 100,000 people, at least 80,000 people, most of them black, were not permitted to vote who had a legal right to vote in Florida.

That story was simply not covered in the U.S. press. And that is how the election was won.

I reported that story for the main paper of the nation. Unfortunately, it was the wrong nation. I reported that story for the Guardian newspapers of Britain, and its related sister paper The Observer, where I have a column on Sunday. I also reported it for BBC television at the top of the nightly news, but again, it was the nightly news of Britain where they found out who really won that election, just not in the U.S.

Here’s how they did it:

A few months before the election, Katherine Harris’ office used computer systems to make up a list of people to purge from the voter rolls of people who were supposedly felons – people who committed serious crimes and therefore in Florida were not allowed to vote. We now know those lists were as phony as a three-dollar bill. That maybe approximately 90% of the people on those lists, and there were 57,700 people on that list, approximately 90% were not felons and had the right to vote. Surprise, surprise. At least 54% of the names on that list were black. We know that because Florida is one of the few states under the U.S. Civil Rights Act that actually has to track the race of each voter.

They used this racial targeting system as a way to target and purge black voters. This was a very sophisticated Jim Crow operation done by computers, completely hidden from the public eye. And when they were asked about it they basically lied. The Governor, the Secretary of State, and the head of the Florida Department of Elections all lied under oath to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission about how that was done.

Now that was completely covered in the British and European press. That is one of the reasons why when Bush came over to Europe he was seen as a usurper and a pretender to the presidency - not elected, but a guy who had conducted a sort of racial coup d’etat.

He was not seen as legitimate.

The U.S. press did little bits of the story and then buried it. My sister paper the Washington Post, (the Guardian papers co-publish with the Washington Post) did run my story, buried, 7 months after the election. I wrote the story within 3 weeks of the election and they didn’t publish it until seven months later, when it didn’t really mater. And they only published it because the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said my findings were correct. If I didn’t have that official approval, I don’t think we would have seen that story at all.

And now these newspapers, including the Washington Post and The New York Times, spent easily a couple of million dollars doing what they called a “recount.” But in fact it was not a recount. There were 180,000 votes in Florida that were never counted on order of Katherine Harris, the Republican Secretary of State. These were 180,000 votes that were never counted because they had some kind of technical error in them – like a stray mark in it, or someone circled Al Gore’s name instead of punching a hole, and it was not counted as an Al Gore vote.

Now you have to know I did not support Al Gore, I am not here carrying his flag. I don’t care if he was elected either way. That is not my interest. I am concerned about democracy.

The thing that those ballots showed was something very simple: by a notable majority the people in Florida voted for, and believed they voted for, and assumed their ballots would be counted for, Al Gore.

Now how in the heck after spending more than a million dollars and going through each of those ballots that these so-called news organizations decided that Bush would have won it anyway? What they said was under state of Florida rulings we exclude what people wanted to do, we exclude what we see on the ballots, and we go by the Florida rulings on what ballots should be excluded for technical reasons – and Bush wins. Well, we knew that. We knew that because Katherine Harris already said that Bush won on technical grounds. So we didn’t need to spend a million dollars.

We have to remember that these news organizations had this information for months and withheld it. And then in the middle of a war they release information and futsed with it so it looked like Bush would have won anyway, or it’s hard to see, or Bush would have won one way and Gore would have won another way. That’s nonsense. In a democracy the intent of the voter is all that counts. In fact, the U.S. took that position in two other elections in 2000: when Slobodan Milosevic disqualified ballots and therefore won the presidency of Yugoslavia we refused to recognize his government. And when Alberto Fujimori of Peru knocked out counting of rural ballots for technical reasons, once again the U.S. refused to recognize his presidency. The U.S. said you cannot win a presidency on a technicality. We said that for Milosevic and for Fujimori but somehow we didn’t say that to Mr. Bush.

It’s the votes that count in a democracy. If the votes don’t count then it’s not a democracy.

If you go to my web site, www.gregpalast.com, you can read my reports and watch the BBC reports for yourself. I also have a book coming out called “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” (Pluto Press) which will be out in a couple of months in which I detail as I did on BBC television, which you never saw in the U.S., how they had planned to knock out the black voters well in advance and paid a Republican firm $4 million to come up with a computer program to come up with a computer program that would zoom in like a cruise missile and knock out these black voters.

They were so good knocking out black voters they should hire this firm to knock out bin Laden. They were so good at ferreting out democratic voters and purging them from the voter rolls, we should have turned them on Al-Qaeda and maybe that would have made a difference.

Lappé: Speaking of which, let’s jump to the present and to another bombshell you recently reported: that Bush has hindered the FBI’s investigation into various terrorist organizations. What did you find?

Palast: We obtained documents from inside the FBI showing that investigations had been shut down on the bin Laden family, the royal family of Saudi Arabia - and that is big because there are 20,000 princes in the royal family - and their connections to the financing of terrorism.

Now there is one exception. The FBI, the CIA and all the rest of the agencies are allowed to investigate Osama, the so-called black sheep of the family. But what we were finding was that there was an awful lot of gray sheeps in this family – which is a family of billionaires which is tied in with the Saudi royal household which appears to be involved in the funding of terrorist organizations or organizations linked to terrorism. If you go the BBC site you will see me holding up documents from the FBI talking about Abdullah bin Laden, Omar bin Laden and an organization called the World Assembly of Muslim Youth which may or may not be a conduit for funds to terrorists. Now the problem was the investigations were shut down. There were problems that go back to Father Bush - when he was head of the CIA, he tried to stop investigations of the Saudis, continued on under Reagan, Daddy Bush’s president, and it continued under Clinton too, but not as severely. What I was told by agents was that under Clinton agents were constrained but not prohibited from taking on these investigations into the Saudis.

Lappé: Now what would be behind all of this?

Palast: Let me get to this one final point. While we did say FBI [in the article], I have to add it was also CIA and all the other international agencies. You should know we were attacked by friends of Bush for just mentioning the FBI. I have been trying to protect my sources. But I can say that the sources are not just FBI trying to get even with the other agencies, but in fact other agencies. The information was that they were absolutely prohibited, until Sept. 11, at looking at the Saudi funding of the Al-Qaeda network and other terrorist organizations.

There is no question we had what looked like the biggest failure of the intelligence community since Pearl Harbor but what we are learning now is it wasn’t a failure, it was a directive. Now I am not part of the conspiracy nut crowd that believes George Bush came up with a plan for an attack on the United States to save his popularity. There is no evidence of that. That is completely outside of any evidence I have seen. But what we find is something that, in a way, where the effect is just the same – and it’s chilling. Which is that they blinded the intelligence agencies and said you cannot look at the Saudis. Now the question is why . . .

Now the answer kept coming back with two words: One is Arbusto. The other was Carlyle. Now Arbusto is Arbusto Oil. Arbusto means shrub in Spanish. Arbusto was the company that made young George W. his first million. Now he had millions inherited from daddy and grandpa, but this was his first million. He had established this basically worthless company that kept digging dry holes in Texas and suddenly it got financing from the Gulf region and Saudi Arabian-connected financiers and it was taken over by a company called Harken Oil, which then received a very surprise contract to drill in the Gulf. Suddenly, Arbusto Oil shares became worth quite a bit.

The second company is Carlyle. While people know companies like Boeing Aircraft and Lockheed, Carlyle is just about the biggest defense contractor in the U.S. because behind a lot of these companies like United Technology is the Carlyle investment group. Carlyle is headed by Frank Carlucci who was Secretary of Defense under Daddy Bush and it includes on its payroll James Baker, the Secretary of State under Daddy Bush, who was very pro-Arab and pro-Saudi when he was in power. They have on their payroll Daddy Bush, who is an advisor to their Asian panel, and he also represented the company to the Saudi royal household in a couple of trips he made there. In addition, our president George W. was collecting money from the company by being on the Board of Directors of one of its subsidiaries, where I am sure he added a lot of his business acumen to their operations. He picked up $15,000-plus a year for showing up to a couple of board meetings. What is also interesting in this company is that you have investment in the company by the bin Laden family.

Now, let’s be careful I am not a conspiracy nutter. I don’t think completely ill of the Bush family, and I don’t think what happened here is that the bin Laden family and the Saudis bought themselves two presidents of the United States, a simple purchase: “We give you money and you call off the dogs and don’t let the CIA look at us.”

That is not what is going on.

What is going on is the Bush family is an oil family. They have a natural business and political inclination to support the royal household and their retainers like the bin Laden family. These relationships are cemented by joint business ventures, by the Saudis making your son, who becomes president, rich. It is not a pay-off. But let’s put it this way: would you think that the people who just made your family wealthier than it already is, made you a couple of a million bucks, would you immediately think these people are also happen to be funding people who are blowing up buildings in New York? You tend to say to your agencies which you control: “Those are really good guys, leave them alone” – especially because if we annoy them they will cut off our oil.

There seems to be this great fear that the Saudi royal family will, I don’t know, fold their tents, get in their Leer jets and go off to Monaco and let the fanatics take over Saudi Arabia . . .

Lappé: Or if this comes out this will weaken the rest of the American government’s resolve to support them which will further weaken their ability to control the more radical forces within the country . . .

Palast: Yeah, one of the problems is exactly what is their relationship to the terror networks. One thing you should know is that the Saudis say that they have removed Osama bin Laden’s citizenship in Saudi Arabia. Of course, there are no citizens of Saudi Arabia, there are only subjects. So he is not allowed to be a subject of the king of Saudi Arabia. What a loss. And they have frozen his assets, supposedly. But the information I am getting from other sources is that they have given tens of millions of dollars to his networks. This is being done as much as a protection racket as anything else.

Lappé: Some of this was reported, or at least alluded to, in the recent Frontline report.

Palast: There was a little bit of whispering in the Frontline by my buddy Lowell Bergman. He could go further. At least you got a little bit of it on PBS. What is interesting is Bergman, who is also a reporter for The New York Times, did not have this in The New York Times.

Lappé: That is interesting, I actually noticed that myself.

Palast: Now here is a guy who has an agreement that whatever he puts on Frontline by contract can be put in The New York Times exclusively. And here The New York Times skips the report. Now we went further on BBC Newsnight, we had some of the same sources, and we have been digging further. We are allowed to dig further.

We also had another source explaining a meeting that was held, and I can’t give the details because I would be scooping myself. But I got particulars of a meeting in which Saudi billionaires up who would be responsible to paying what to Osama. And apparently around the time of the meeting is when Osama blew up the Kohbar Towers in Saudi Arabia killing 19 American servicemen. It was seen by the group as not so much a political or emotional point, but as a reminder “to make your darn payment.”

Osama is often compared to Hitler but he should be seen as John Gotti times one hundred. He is running a massive international protection racket: Pay me or I will blow you up. The fact these payments are made is one of the things the Bush administration is trying very hard to cover-up.

Now whether these payments were paid because they want to or it was coercion the Bush administration does not want to make a point of it. I have to tell you the Clinton administration was not exactly wonderful on this either. One of the points I made on the BBC was there was a Saudi diplomat who defected. He had 14,000 documents in his possession showing Saudi royal involvement in everything from assassinations to terror funding. He offered the 14,000 documents to the FBI but they would not accept them. The low-level agents wanted this stuff because they were tremendous leads. But the upper-level people would not permit this, did not want to touch this material. That is quite extraordinary. We don’t even want to look. We don’t want to know. Because obviously going through 14,000 documents from the Saudi government files would anger the Saudis. And it seems to be policy number one is we don’t get these boys angry. Unfortunately, we see the results. We are blowing up Afghanistan when 15 of the 19 bombers were from Saudi Arabia.

Not that I am friends of the Taliban, who are vicious, brutal maniacs, but 15 of the 19 were Saudis and we seem to be giving these guys a full and complete pass.

Lappé: Now let’s take these two stories, the Florida election theft and the Saudi cover-up, together as a backdrop. Paint me a picture of the Bush crew and how they operate. Are they above the law?

Palast: Well, they are our law. Remember they are two presidents of the United States, they go back generations to the Mayflower. The Bush family is the one of the true royal families of America. They have a long-term idea of what is good for us. Other countries think it is quite spooky that we have a guy who came out of the CIA to head of the nation. Just like Americans have a lot of doubts about Putin because he was the head of the KGB. These people are used to secrecy and not letting America know what would be frightening and troubling to us in our sweet innocence.

The problem is Sept. 11 took away our innocence. The question is will it take away our blinders?

The U.S. press does not seem capable of wanting to dig.

Lappé: Now why is that? From an outsider looking in, you have the BBC, a news organization owned by the government, and you have the American media, which has this great tradition of Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate. They are independent organizations that are not answerable to any government organization. Why is there this chasm between investigative reporting in the U.K. and in America?

Palast: Well, first of all you hit a good one. Woodward and Bernstein, which everyone comes back to, was three decades ago! What has happened in thirty years? When have we had a story in thirty years that has come close to that? I gave a talk with Seymour Hersh, who is one of the guys who broke the My Lai story. That was thirty years ago. He cannot work for an American newspaper. He writes for the New Yorker magazine. Think about that. One of our best investigative reporters in America, he has won at least two Pulitzer prizes, can’t even work for an American newspaper. What is going on?

Investigative reporting is so rare in America we had to make a movie out of it. I was on a panel at Columbia University School of Journalism and there was a reporter who worked on both continents who said that the odd thing he found was the worst thing you could be called in an American newsroom is a “muckraker.” Someone who looks like they are going after someone, someone who looks like they are getting too enthusiastic about going after someone. No one likes that guy.

Look what happened to Lowell Bergman. As soon as he said, ‘gee we really have to push a story that will make corporate America a bit unhappy.’ They killed it. After all 60 Minutes for the most part does mostly small potatoes stories. Small-time operators are the ones basically in their sights. But when they took on a big operation like tobacco they killed the story. I can tell you other stories with 60 Minutes that are just insane that have gone by the boards. I did a story about George Bush’s connections to a brutal gold mining company out of Canada. And 60 Minutes said, “Oh we want to do a big story.” And I said, “Oh, no you don’t.” And three days later they said, “Oh, we can’t do that story.”

Lappé: Why?

Palast: They’re gutless. No one has ever advanced their career in the last thirty years by coming up with a great investigative piece. That is a way to get unemployed. Anyone who thinks it’s all Murphy Brown and “All the President’s Men” out there is wrong. That’s the fantasy. That’s all television and the movies. It’s not in the newsrooms. If you say what I want to do is expensive and difficult and involves getting inside documents, and upsetting the established order, you are not going to get anywhere. Businessmen are the hardest ones to go after. You can go after a crooked politician but go after a corporation . . .

Lappé: And their lawyers will bury you . . .

Palast: Well, we have the First Amendment, which by the way there is no First Amendment in Britain. There is no freedom of speech or the press. Very difficult here legally, even though culturally it’s easier to report the news here in Britain, even though you don’t have the protection. But there is a great fear in the U.S. of corporate power, which I think has a lot to do with losing advertisers. There is a legal question because they can’t win lawsuits but they can cost you a lot of money. You are looked at like some kind of left-wing, muckraker, conspiracy nut if you decide to go past an official denial and say, “I don’t accept that. I want to see a document.”

I got to tell you, I have seen this over and over again: my story on the Florida elections - one of the things I found out was that Jeb Bush had deliberately excluded at least 50,000 voters, 94% of them democrats, because they had been convicted of a crime in another state. Now Florida under the U.S. constitution and its own constitution they cannot do that – punish someone for a crime in another state by taking away their right to vote in Florida. You can’t do that. They know that. When we spoke to Jeb Bush’s functionaries they said we know we can’t do that, and then quietly they said, but we do it anyway under instructions from our superiors. The papers I was working for said, “Well, Jeb Bush denied it.” And flat out denial from an official was enough to stop all these investigations. Dead cold. I was with Salon.com. They killed the story. And it was only later when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said I was correct, and then the state of Florida admitted what they did, and then I was vindicated.

The New York Times did a story about how gold mining companies out of Nevada have tremendous influence over the Bush administration. Nowhere in the story did they mention that George Bush Sr. was on the board of the biggest gold mining company in Nevada. They didn’t mention the name of the company. Here they are doing a story on gold mining in Nevada and they don’t mention the name of overwhelmingly the biggest company in Nevada, which by the way is called Barrick. And it had on its advisory George Bush Sr.. It left out the name of the company and the fact it had on its board a former president.

How did that happen? I can tell you because that company sued my paper when I ran a story, and I have the same lawyer as The New York Times. You can bet that The New York Times figured out it was going to cost them money or create controversy. God forbid you create controversy, that would be considered disastrous in a newsroom. When you get a letter from a lawyer who says we disagree, the story gets blocked. The Globe and Mail, which is the number one paper in Canada, was going to run the story. I was told that the top people in the Globe and Mail killed the story. So you have absolute direct corporate influence killing stories.

Most reporters understand that it is not a career-maker to have these letters coming in. In other words, you never want to have your killed. Because if your story is killed by corporate big shots, from then on you are marked as a troublemaker and a problem, and your career is in deep trouble. When a guy like Seymour Hersh can’t get a job with an American newspaper. When Lowell Bergman has to work in the PBS ghetto. When Greg Palast has to work in exile, there is a pretty evil pattern here.

What you see is institutionalized gutlessness. I’m pissed off about it because I want to come home and work. My kids have British accents. I wanna get home already.

Lappé: On that note, we’ll wrap up. It seems that with this new war all of these trends you have talked about are getting worse. Do you have any hope for the future of journalism?

Palast: My only hope for the future of journalism is one word: the Internet.

The big boys are trying to grab it and seize it and control it and own it and stop it and freeze it and fill it up with corporate, commercialized crap and junk. But it is still the conduit of the real information of the real information, the real news. You are always being warned about things you read on the Internet. But be warned what you read in The New York Times. At least when you read the Internet you know you are getting all kinds of voices, some nuts, some real, and you evaluate it. The problem with something like The New York Times is it is coming to you as the stone-cold truth. It isn’t true that Bush would have won Florida anyway. When the people voted they voted for Al Gore. He should have been inaugurated as president, not because I like him, but because he got the vote nationwide and in Florida, and they knew it and they didn’t tell you that.

I can tell you right now the information I broadcasted on the BBC about the chilling of the investigation of the FBI and the CIA of the bin Laden family and the Saudi royal family, and I have more coming up, I can tell you that information was given to The New York Times. They didn’t use it. It was given to 60 Minutes. Not that they aren’t going to use it. It’s like my story about the elections. They run it seven months later in the back of the paper. Or it’s just like the Florida vote count. If you go to The New York Times web site you can get all the information that shows that Gore won, but they either don’t run it, or eviscerate it, or they give it to you chopped up and spin it so the order of things are not disturbed.

I can’t tell you all the reasons why that happens. I’m not sure myself. I think a lot of it is these guys hang out together. They go to the same clubs and they go to each others’ daughters weddings.

It makes me ill.

It makes me want to throw up when I watch Tom Brokaw, that fake fucking hairdo, go to dinner with Jiang Zemin at the White House. He’s a reporter. What the fuck is he doing eating spring rolls with a dictator? He should be reporting the story not breaking bread with the powers-that-be. These guys can’t seem to find the distinction between being in with the power and reporting on it.

So there you go.

Lappé: Thanks so much.

***

http://www.paknews.org.pk/main.php?id=7&date1=2001-11-04

Mossad behind Sep 11 attacks: Report Updated on 2001-11-04 10:17:31

RIYADH, Nov 4 (PNS): A Saudi newspaper charged Saturday that the Israeli secret service Mossad was behind the September 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington that killed thousands of people.

The mass-circulation Okaz said in an editorial that an attack on such a scale could not have been carried out with such accuracy and precision without the help of parties inside the United States or with strong links in Washington.

"Six Israelis suspected of involvement in the attacks on New York and Washington were arrested in the US, to be later released. This confirms our strong suspicions about the involvement of Israel's Mossad in the ugly crime," Okaz said.

"If we look carefully into this matter, we can find no more influential sides in the US than the Israeli Mossad agents, who have the ability to penetrate and the capability to execute with high efficiency," the daily said.

The paper said there was not sufficient evidence that Arabs and Muslims were behind the attacks, but it did not rule out the possibility that Mossad may have recruited some Muslims to carry out the atrocities.

"The main purpose of the conspiracy (attacks) is to undermine ties between Arabs and Muslims, especially moderate states, on the one hand and the US on the other, and to turn the Muslim and Christian civilizations against each other and incite hatred between their adherents," it said.

The positive change in Washington's policy on Middle East peace and its support for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state confirms that the United States has laid its hands on important leads indicating a direct role by the Mossad in the attacks, the paper asserted.

"We don't think we will wait too long before (the United States) reaches this result. This crime should not pass without knowing its actual masterminds, instead of focusing on 'stupid' tools," Okaz said.

also see: on Israeli Terrorism http://groups.yahoo.com/group/agentsmiley/message/1238

World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org

WSWS : News & Analysis : The US War in Afghanistan

US atrocity against Taliban POWs: Whatever happened to the Geneva Convention?

By Jerry White 28 November 2001

Despite the silence in the American media and the lies from Bush administration officials, there is growing international outrage over the systematic massacre of hundreds of Taliban prisoners of war in Mazar-i-Sharif on Sunday and Monday. This act of mass murder was carried out by US warplanes and helicopter gunships, directed by US Special Forces and CIA personnel, and backed by several thousand soldiers of the Northern Alliance. As many as 800 prisoners were killed at the Qala-i-Janghi fortress.

The government of Pakistan, under intense public pressure because hundreds of Pakistani volunteers were among the Taliban troops taken prisoner, strongly condemned the prison massacre and declared that it contravened UN Security Council resolutions urging respect for the Geneva Convention. President Pervez Musharraf, the military strongman who seized power in Pakistan two years ago, has backed the US military onslaught against his former allies in the Taliban, and US forces used Pakistani bases as part of the campaign against the prisoners in Mazar-i-Sharif.

A columnist in the Pakistani newspaper The Nation declared that the killings at Mazar-i-Sharif "can only be quantified as a conspiracy and premeditated genocide." Rejecting the claims that the prisoners caused their own deaths by engaging in a suicidal uprising, he wrote, "it is most unlikely that only recently surrendered captives would rise in sudden and open revolt against their captors—unless their very lives were at stake."

No matter how US officials try to gloss over what happened, there could be no justification, even from a military standpoint, for the wanton slaughter of hundreds of captured soldiers. News accounts acknowledge the 19th century fortress was encircled by thousands of heavily armed Northern Alliance troops, as well as US and British special forces, whose base is located at a military airport just outside of the fort.

Even if some prisoners had seized their guards' weapons, as US officials and the media claim, they did not have the manpower or ammunition to hold out against the tanks, jets and the superior ground forces arrayed against them. The only proper designation for the action taken by the US military is a premeditated war crime.

What was done in Mazar-i-Sharif was entirely in line with the policies advocated by top US officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has repeatedly said that he favors the killing of Taliban soldiers, especially those from outside of Afghanistan, rather than their capture and imprisonment.

Almost as sickening as the massacre itself is the universal silence on the part of the American media, including the so-called liberal press, about the cold-blooded murder of Taliban prisoners. Not a single US newspaper or media outlet—many of which had reporters on the scene who know exactly what happened—has raised any serious questions about the action.

Demonstrating a racist contempt for the lives of hundreds of Afghan and foreign prisoners killed by bombs and bullets, the US news media focused its attention on half a dozen American military and CIA personnel hit by friendly fire when US warplanes bombed the compound. While CNN broadcast pictures of dozens of mutilated corpses strewn around the inside of the prison, as well as earlier scenes of Northern Alliance and US and British forces firing over the walls of the compound at prisoners, there was much more media interest in the possible death of one CIA interrogator. One could only imagine how the US media would have reported the killing of Northern Alliance prisoners by Taliban troops if the sides had been reversed.

The two leading US daily newspapers offered radically different explanations of the massacre. The New York Times quoted a Red Cross official claiming "the prisoners started the fight" and that the Northern Alliance troops had not sought to attack them. It cited the controlling role of American Special Forces and CIA personnel, who "took over the operation," as though this guaranteed that no extrajudicial killings could have taken place.

The Washington Post, on the other hand, essentially admitted that the prisoners were murdered, but attributed the killings to the Northern Alliance: "A precise death toll could not be determined, but the apparently large number of Taliban deaths, compared to the reported killing of about 40 Northern Alliance fighters, raised questions here about the whether the violence was less an uprising than a massacre orchestrated by alliance troops," the Post wrote Tuesday.

These accounts are diametrically opposite presentations of the facts, but they serve an identical political purpose: to deny that the US forces were responsible for a monstrous war crime. This perfectly expresses the role of the American media, which takes as its starting point, not providing objective information to the American people, but justifying, through every manner of lie and distortion, the actions of the American government.

A few important facts did make their way into the Times account, however. The newspaper reports that the presence of CIA interrogators in the prison yard seemed to be the spark to the rebellion:

"By midmorning, some prisoners were being interviewed by the chief of intelligence for the area from the Northern Alliance, Said Kamal, together with two C.I.A. operatives, alliance officials said.

"The presence of the Americans may have caused anger or desperation among some of the foreign Taliban, who may be part of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network or who fear extradition to their home countries.

"One group of Northern Alliance fighters who were inside the compound at the time said the sight of the C.I.A. officials led to the revolt."

And the Times further notes that the rebellion began while the prisoners were being searched on Sunday morning: "About 250 prisoners had been checked, and their arms were tied, said foreign journalists who had been allowed to witness the scene." This strongly suggests that many of those who died—600 to 800 Taliban compared to only a few dozen Northern Alliance troops—were killed while they were bound and unable to defend themselves.

POWs and the laws of war

It is particularly noteworthy that no one in the media or liberal establishment has raised the obvious violation of international law concerning the treatment of prisoners of war, including the Geneva Convention, on the part of both the Northern Alliance and the American forces.

Article 3 of the Convention states that "members of the armed forces who have laid down their arms ... shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, color, religion or faith ... or any other similar criteria."

This is precisely the procedure that was carried out by the Northern Alliance forces at the surrender of the Taliban troops in the besieged city of Kunduz. Several thousand Afghan Taliban were immediately paroled upon surrender, and either incorporated into the ranks of the Northern Alliance or allowed to return to their home villages. The foreign-born Taliban, however, were either killed singly, in acts of individual murder, or rounded up in large groups and trucked away for subsequent interrogation, torture and execution.

During the week-long siege of Kunduz, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made repeated statements calling for the killing or imprisonment of all captured foreign Taliban—in other words, he demanded that the Northern Alliance systematically violate the Geneva Convention.

The Convention specifically prohibits "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture" and the "passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."

The torture of POWs is specifically prohibited in Article 17, which states: "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind."

Finally, of particular relevance to the events of the last few days, the Geneva Convention states in Article 23 that no prisoner of war may "be sent to, or detained in areas where he may be exposed to fire or the combat zone" and that prisoners of war must be afforded protection against "air bombardment and other hazards of war."

This is not the first time in recent years that US military forces have systematically disregarded these "laws of war." In the final days of the Persian Gulf War US warplanes massacred thousands of retreating Iraqi troops in what one US pilot compared to "shooting fish in a barrel." The road north from Kuwait City was so littered with the charred remains of Iraqi soldiers, trucks, cars and other vehicles that it became known as the "Highway of Death."

The Geneva Convention was drawn up in the aftermath of World War II in an effort to place some restrictions on the murderous proclivities of the great powers. Today the Bush administration brazenly disregards international law and carries out war crimes, with barely a word of protest coming out of the US.

In the absence of any significant international outcry against the massacre at Mazar-i-Sharif, there is the danger that an even bigger bloodbath will be perpetrated at Kandahar, the second largest city of Afghanistan, where several thousand US Marines and US Special Forces and their newly recruited (and well-paid) allies among the Pushtun tribal chiefs are closing in on the last Taliban stronghold.

http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,605618,00.html

Victorious warlords set to open the opium floodgates

Paul Harris in Peshawar Sunday November 25, 2001 The Observer

Sayed Ali welcomed the fall of the Taliban, but the new political and social freedoms now on offer mean little to the poverty-stricken Afghan farmer. What is important is that he can grow opium poppies again - he has already planted his first crop. In the small mud-brick village of Chinar Khalia, near the eastern city of Jalalabad, Ali and other local farmers are now looking forward to a bumper harvest around mid-April. The Taliban ban on poppy-growing, which slashed Afghan opium production by 94 per cent last year, is over. And the impact on the West will be huge - 90 per cent of Europe's heroin comes from opium grown in Afghanistan.

'The Taliban order on poppy-growing was false,' Ali said. 'It hurt many farmers that they could not grow poppies. Now I will earn money again.'

But the wrinkled old farmer, whose leathery skin has been baked nut- brown after a lifetime in the fields, is not the only one set to cash in. The new warlords, who have replaced the Taliban across large swaths of Afghanistan, will earn millions of dollars too. The Northern Alliance has always indulged in opium production, but now it has captured some of the richest opium-growing lands in the country.

Of Afghanistan's 29 provinces, 10 grow poppies. Of these the richest are Helmand in the south, still under Taliban control, and Nangrahar in the east, which has fallen to local warlords. With massive potential riches from opium at stake, the province is experiencing fierce factional fighting.

Ali expects the new rulers of the province to encourage him to grow as much opium as possible. 'Before the ban the government used to collect taxes on my poppies, now the warlords will collect them. We will have no problems from them,' he said.

Opium-growing has a long history in Afghanistan, a tradition shattered by last year's sudden Taliban ban on poppy planting after several years of unofficial tolerance and profit from the crop. 'Last year was the first time in 50 years that poppies had not been grown in my village,' Ali said.

During the ban the only source of poppy production was territory held by the Northern Alliance. It tripled its production. In the high valleys of Badakhshan - an area controlled by troops loyal to the former President Burhannudin Rabbani - the number of hectares planted last year jumped from 2,458 to 6,342. Alliance fields accounted for 83 per cent of total Afghan production of 185 tonnes of opium during the ban.

Now that the Alliance has captured such rich poppy-growing areas as Nangrahar, production is set to rocket. Helmand, too, is being replanted by its Taliban rulers, who have abandoned their anti-opium stance and want to cash in on their remaining sources of revenue.

Western and Pakistani officials fear that, within a year or two, Afghanistan could again reach its peak production figures of 60,000 hectares of poppies producing 2,800 tonnes of opium - more than half the world's output.

Alliance factions and other warlords deny benefiting from opium production, but it is an open secret that nearly all tolerate it. Most are happy just to cream off the taxes, but others have been more directly involved. Hazrat Ali, one of the new warlords in control in Nangrahar, ran Jalalabad airport in the mid-Nineties at a time when weekly flights to India and the Gulf carried huge amounts of opium to Western markets. During the war against the Russians, the huge and illicit drugs trade nurtured by the mujahideen was ignored and tolerated by the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies in return for their commitment to fight the Soviet Union.

Now, with the Taliban ban on poppy- growing lifted, it would appear that Afghanistan is facing a return to those days. The main Nangrahar opium bazaar of Ghani Khel has reopened for business. Afghan opium traders arriving in the Pakistani city of Peshawar claim 100 of the market's 300 stalls now sell opium blocks stockpiled during the ban. The same is true of Kandahar, where the city's main opium bazaar escaped the US bombing.

'All our evidence is consistent. They are replanting in a major way,' said Bernard Frahi of the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention located in Islamabad.

For Afghan farmers it is a simple choice. A farmer can earn £6,000 for a hectare of opium, compared to just £34 for wheat.

Ali knows opium produces heroin and disapproves of drug use, but he has a family of 14 to feed and his land has been gripped by three years of drought. 'I am poor and need money for clothes and food. Perhaps if Afghanistan becomes rich and there is peace, I will not need to grow poppies,' he said.

In the quiet Peshawar suburb of University Town, nestled between the offices of Western aid agencies, a crowd gathers each morning outside a forbidding steel gate. Inside, the roof of a sprawling mansion can be seen. The beggars are here for alms. The man who lives here is Peshawar's most powerful drugs baron and the poor know he can afford to be generous. Other large houses dotted around Peshawar tell the same story. Locals refer to them as 'the houses that drugs built'. Peshawar lies on the main smuggling route south. It was also the home of the Afghan opposition during Soviet and Taliban rule.

In the lawless Pashtun tribal areas just outside the city limits, opium is sold openly. It is easy, although illegal, to buy. In a shop on the main road to Afghanistan, 26-year-old Imran cuts off a 50g piece of sticky, dark brown opium resin, known as tor . It costs just £7.

Foreigners are not allowed here, but it is just a short drive over the tribal boundary past police guards who pay no attention to the traffic. On the wall behind Imran hang a Kalashnikov machine gun and a shotgun - a sign of the dangers of the drugs trade. But business will soon be good, he says. The Northern Alliance warlords will see to that. 'They would be stupid to try and ban the poppies. They make so much money.'

It is estimated that when production picks up, about one million Afghan farmers will earn £70 million from growing poppies. That is a huge industry in a country with little other obvious sources of foreign money exchange.

The ENRON Black Magic - Part One By Sherman H. Skolnick

skolnick@ameritech.net

http://www.skolnicksreport.com

12-2-1

In the often evil world of oil and natural gas, and other energy, they became the seventh largest of the Fortune 500. What has happened to put them as the largest of the No Fortune 100? How did they become, so far, the biggest loser?

The real operators of Enron Corporation are, to some, great sorcerers. They have waved their magic wand, and turned paper promises into black gold and vice versa. Sort of latter day alchemists. Later in this series we will explore the role of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Now just look at some of the other names.

A Director of Enron has been Wendy Gramm, wife of U.S. Senator Phil Gramm [R., Texas]. A former Professor, supposedly adept in economics and banking, Senator Gramm has been the Chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and member of the Budget and the Finance Committees. He has blocked laws against money laundering. Convenient to the Enron mess, he decided ahead of time not to run for re-election.

For some twelve years during the Reagan/Daddy Bush Administrations, Wendy was Chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. As a highly corrupt federal regulatory agency, CFTC wields great power and influence over markets, often little understood by common Americans.

Spreading out in the 1980s worldwide was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI. Some called them, with their hundreds of branches round the world, the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. They were actually a huge money laundry for political assassination and dirty tricks funding, as well as espionage proprietaries, for the American CIA, British MI-6, French CIA, and The Mossad of Israel.

BCCI had or were planning some five branches in the U.S. For their U.S. agenda, they needed to put the arm on the U.S. government. Elsewhere in the world, BCCI had already honed the real world specialty of buying and bribing public officials.

BCCI as a foreign entity not only dealt in secret transactions in banking but were a highly mostly covert player on the world markets, particularly the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, and on markets such as LIFFE in London. Through six La Salle Street brokers, BCCI bribed and blackmailed its way into the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Key law-makers were invited to come to Chicago, all expenses paid, to supposedly give a speech for the CME, or "Merc" as some call it, and the CBOT. While in the Windy City, the law-makers were informed that their hosts, the market honchos, were opening "courtesy" accounts for them. And, that they would be informed of the good results that developed. In some instances, the so-called "courtesy" account was not told to the Representatives and Senators, but was set up in their name anyway as a blackmail device on the date of their Chicago visit.

Through a hocus-pocus series of transactions, the Chicago accounts showed a supposed loss while the London acounts showed a huge profit. In the lingo of the markets, it was called a "straddle". The Senators and Congressmen themselves, or most often their known agents, from time to time personally picked up the huge profits in London. On other occasions, someone identifying themselves with credentials as their known agents, likewise picked up the heavy profits from the "courtesy" accounts, in the British money center. It was either a direct provable bribery payment to the law-makers or verifiable record-kept blackmail. Either way, twenty five per cent of both houses of the American legislature were "hooked".

By the time BCCI supposedly collapsed in the summer of 1991, some five billion dollars had disappeared. It was used in great part to buy, that is, to bribe, 28 U.S. Senators and 108 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Bank of England, by a series of circumstances, became the kingpin in supervising and overseeing the supposed demise of BCCI. [BUT, see Foonote One, how BCCI rose from the ashes under another name.]

Notice the strange happenings. For only thirty days, the Bank of England had as an open record, the list of those bought and bribed, whether directly or through the blackmail devices, of the legislative branch of the U.S. Government. A major media correspondent got wind of this and before secrecy was clamped on the records, got a copy of the entire list of bribery/blackmail.

Part of one of the largest media operations worldwide, he went to his media editor with the details. The editor was thunder-struck. Here was documented proof that twenty five per cent of the House and Senate were bribed. "We cannot publish the list and the details that go with it", the journalist was told. The media mogul added the obvious, "It would cause the scandal downfall of the American Government", as the journalist later related the editor's statements to an independent-minded confidant.

As a last resort, the journalist gave the list and the corroborating details to our group. [This type of thing has happened again and again during the forty years our group has operated to open up deeply censored stories. I as head of the group have been jailed some eight times for contempt of court, wheelchair and all, for refusing to divulge witnesses and sources.]

Using the list and substantiating details, we began directly confronting members of the House and Senate. We began receiving threats of great harm to us after the time when we confronted Senator Phil Gramm, who was on the list and we brought up about the apparent bribery cover up of his wife Wendy, as head of the CFTC.

In going over the specifics, we discovered that BCCI was a sizeable secret funder of Ted Turner, making possible his idea for a television super-station via satellite from Atlanta, Georgia. And, that this was done through part-owner of Turner's empire, the then cable monster, TCI of Denver. In an interview with the former chief accountant of one of the La Salle Street brokers arranging the bribery, we learned that TCI also owned part of the brokers fronting for BCCI in Chicago.

We learned plenty in the process of exploring the details. We found out, for example, that BCCI, through their Chicago branch, greatly funded the television campaign commercials for the 1988 Presidential campaign for Democrat candidate Michael Dukakis. To cut off money for the badly needed television ads for Dukakis, his opponent, GOP Presidential candidate George Herbert Walker Bush, at the time Vice President, arranged on a holiday, Columbus Day, right before the Election, to mysteriously close up BCCI's Chicago branch, source of the tv money for Dukakis, claiming "corruption" but not disclosing details.

In putting the complex matter together, we found out about the threat of an internatinal scandal. GNP Commodities, headquartered in Chicago, wanted to merge with French entity, Bank Indo-Suez. The merger was opposed by CFTC Chairperson, Wendy Gramm, and the head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. At a hearing in Chicago as to the merger, an attorney for GNP was heard hollaring outside the CFTC office, that if Wendy Gramm and the Fed do not get off GNP's back, there would be an "international incident". GNP, then headed by the former chieftain of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, was reportedly in a position to know about the BCCI bribery of both houses of Congress covered up not only reportedly by Wendy Gramm but by Alan Greenspan as well.

A watered down version of the GNP Commodities incident was published in the Wall Street Journal in November, 1989.

From long past experiences, I knew only one publication would run my exclusive story about the BCCI bribery of Congress. I turned it over to the populist paper, Spotlight, headquartered in the nation's Capitol. I gave them the Bank of England BCCI bribery list. In October, 1991, they ran my story minus the list which they had but the list nevertheless began circulating elsewhere anyway.

Here are some of the names from the Bank of England's reported BCCI bribery list, that included 108 members of the House and 28 U.S. Senators:

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Congressman DAN ROSTENKOWSKI (D-Illinois) Two of his daughters supposedly worked in the Chicago markets although apparently not doing much actual work. Rosty as he was called for many years headed the House tax-writing committee and put through a near-private law for the markets as a tax-loophole as to "straddles". He has been a major owner of Garfield Ridge Trust & Savings Bank of Chicago, a reputed transit point for CIA dope money from Mena, Arkansas, headed for laundering disguised as soybean and currency trading through the Chicago markets. Rosty was later sent to federal prison for defrauding the private bank of the House of Representatives.

Cong. MARTY RUSSO (D-Illinois)

Cong. THOMAS FOLEY (D-Washington)

Cong. GLENN ENGLISH (D-Oklahoma)

Cong. CARDISS COLLINS (D-Illinois) As to her, see our website series on the "Secret History of Airplane Sabotage". She reportedly went along with the cover up of the Watergate Plane Crash, Chicago.

Cong. E (Kika) de la GARZA (D-Texas)

Cong. RICHARD GEPHARDT (D-Missouri) For 2004, is he planning to run for President? What does HE know about the murder of Mel Carnahan on the eve of the year 2000 Election debate? Carnahan had records that would have scandalized Presidential Candidate George W. Bush at a presidential candidate debate in St. Louis.

Cong. JAMES WRIGHT (D-Texas) He left Congress later in another scandal.

Cong. DAN GLICKMAN (D-Kansas) In the Clinton administration he became head of the Department of Agriculture. BCCI/Banca Nazionale del Lavoro were implicated in a huge Atlanta scandal where billions of U.S. dollars disguised as "Agriculture" loans, were used by Daddy Bush to supply weapons to Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Glickman was reportedly part of the coverup.

Cong. ROBERT MICHEL (R-Illinois) When faced with an apparent Chicago U.S. Bankruptcy scandal also involving his son, he left Congress.

Cong. RICHARD DURBIN (D-Illinois)

U.S. SENATE

Senator THOMAS DASCHLE (D-South Dakota) Does HE plan to run for President in 2004?

Sen. JAMES JEFFORDS (R-Vermont) In 2001, he changed from Republican to Democrat, upsetting the GOP control of the U.S. Senate.

Sen. LLOYD BENTSEN (D-Texas) Big-time bank owner leading up to Enron.

Sen. ALFONSE D'AMATO (R-New York) Law enforcement personnel contended D'Amato was the mafia's man in the Senate.

Sen. JESSE HELMS (R-North Carolina) Records reportedly seem to support the claim that Sen. Helms receives funding from international terrorist groups.

Sen. RICHARD LUGAR (R-Indiana)

Sen. ROBERT BYRD (D-West Virginia) There is strong reason to believe that he and some of his staff members know a lot about the murder in 1991 of Journalist/Author Danny Casalaro in West Virginia, also about the apparent frame-up of computer wizard Michael Riconosciuto.

Sen. DONALD RIEGLE (D-Michigan)

Sen. PATRICK LEAHY (D-Vermont) He has been the long-time Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. See BCCI/BNL details at listing of Cong. DAN GLICKMAN.

Sen. ALAN DIXON (D-Illinois) He previously had been Illinois Secretary of State, issuing auto and drivers licenses. Some of his family members allegedly ran stolen auto parts businesses, called "chop shops" which were covered up by fake auto registrations and such. Dixon also arranged for the mafia to slow down FBI investigations in that mafioso, through Dixon, got untraceable auto tags.

Reputed experts on covering up high crimes have been Federal Reserve Commissar Alan Greenspan (we call him REDSPAN) and former CFTC Chairperson Wendy Gramm, a Director of Enron. Through complicated dealings, were billions sucked out of Enron to try to prop up the failing U.S. Stock Markets?

FOOTNOTE ONE - Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI, did NOT actually disappear despite monopoly press accounts stating so. BCCI re-emerged as PINNACLE BANC GROUP, with their flagship the highly corrupt, gangster-linked FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF CICERO (Cicero being the long-time mafia-enclave adjoining Chicago, known as Al Capone Land.) Lots of details about this on our website in prior stories. For example, dominating the bank in Cicero has been Bishop Paul Marcinkus, until 1991, head of the Vatican Bank, recently identified as a major criminal money laundry for mafia/CIA and others. To confuse matters, the bank in Cicero has changed their name several times since 1991.]

More coming.

Stay tuned.

The Enron Black Magic -Part Two

By Sherman H. Skolnick

skolnick@ameritech.net http://www.skolnicksreport.com 12-8-1

What did they think of themselves? In their heart of hearts, did they consider that THEY were great heroes? Saintly warriors, were they in their own estimation, opposing the barbarians of fatal finger pointing and the stone hurlers of biblical Judgment?

On his throne of monopoly, a major media rajah, in clamping his un- elected fist of censorship on it, as if weighing its value in diamonds, haughtily proclaimed, "It would cause the scandal downfall of the American Government".

A foreign bank entity, enlisted in the secret funding of the deceptions of bloody espionage and political assassinations, had purchased and procured, by bribery and blackmail, one-fourth of all the members of the U.S. parliament. This done, amidst the nuclear winter's bitter destruction of the law-maker's solemn oath to support the organic law of this continent, namely, the U.S. Constitution. [See Part One of this series.]

As earlier set forth, this is the prologue of this deadly drama, played out as it has been over a dozen years and more. In the current act, some of the same players are before us again, but now unmasked and face-paint peeled or scrubbed off. And their masquerading co- conspirators will be on stage as well.

How did Enron become such a worldwide monstrous edifice? And where did it go, the billions and billions of dollars, and euros, and Swiss francs, and trillions of yen? Does Wendy Gramm, a Director of Enron, know? Does Federal Reserve commissar, Alan Redspan, his stage-act soon ending---did HE know? From their background, they cannot be described or perceived as incompetent. Hence, knowledge has to be presumed, even in contradiction to their public statements, if any.

And again, in their weather-reacting bones, or in their gut, did they again consider themselves the white hats of these events? To comprehend all this is needed a simple lesson, if that is possible, in esoteric banking and finance.

The Federal regulators require approximately three cents on the Dollar, to support each Dollar of banks of deposit. By this financial sleight of hand, even as a book entry alone, twenty billion of U.S. Dollars (actually, Federal Reserve hot-air notes) are thus multiplied into about six hundred billion financial fish. It is called fractional reserves, some say fictional reserves. And no economics professor, with a straight face, can really apply the sanctity of logic to explain all this.

Even if they used a yesteryear abacus, the stone money experts would have to admit, at least privately, that in late September and early October, 2001, the U.S.stock markets were facing an expected collapse, and then jointly with the rest of the planet. Yes, the events of September 11, 2001, took our attention elsewhere. And the prior knowledge some of us feel as a certainty was involved in that bloody day, support the idea of intending to divert us. The occupant and resident of the White House has been George W. Bush. And the "Gang of Five" on the high court in Washington, as some sneer at them, that installed Bush to the highest office had added hardly a sliver of legitimacy to the event.

Some contend Bush, Jr., pronounced quickly as DUBYA, would not know how to handle a financial collapse. And Daddy Bush, after all, can make his bowlegged puppet go only so far. With the ghosts of unlawful election still howling, the nation would obviously face a paranormal anarchy.

Directly and through confederates, the Bush Family and Dick Cheney have a large financial stake in Enron. The market regulators, subject to political realities and their own career futures, are not about to effectively investigate. Some of the Enron insiders, without apparently reporting the same as federal regulations require, purchased or procured or obtained an interest in "put" options or other forms of short selling, of Enron stock, or indices, or equivalents, when the shares had drifted down from a high of 90 dollars per share to somewhere between 18 and 36 dollars a share.

Prosecutors (cynics call them black-mailers) in two or more states, if media reports are to be believed at all, claim to be interested in investigating any criminality involved in the downfall of Enron. Of course, the oil-soaked monopoly press is not about to report that a form of supposed "national security" has been invoked by the White House to stop any so-called "investigation" from going across the line to deep Oval Office scandal, that would sweep away the central Government.

Again, like the bribery of both houses of Congress by the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International, BCCI, there is a practical necessity, in the view of some in high places, for a cover up. All, supposedly to save the Established Government and the peace, prosperity, and tranquility of America as a Republic.

Of the billions apparently secretly sucked out of Enron, the bulk went disguised as at least 600 billion dollars, if not even more, at key moments, to temporarily prop up the U.S. stock markets. That is, some 20 billion dollars, multiplied by the black magic of fractional reserves to 600 billion dollars. Some who count beans faster than others, contend it is actually many trillions of dollars, supported by fractional/fictional reserves piled on derivatives piled on drifting sand in some uncharted oily desert.

[As a young man, having been taught mathematics by a protege of Albert Einstein, I might have years ago understood the illogic of multiplying 20 billion dollars of purloined corporate funds into 600 billion dollars as part of a trip on the way to many trillions. As I recall, there is a mathematics symbol for negatives that cannot otherwise be balanced or explained in a math equation. I think they used to call it the "j" operator or such. Nowadays, I would label it the JACKASS SUBTRACTOR.]

Enron became the all-purpose, world-circling trading desks for energy, a contractor for oil, natural gas, and electric services, a near-limitless investment machine, a telecom, a biggie piggy bank, an insurer. In short, as major newsfaker Time Magazine described it in their 12/10/01 issue "the brash energy-trading giant called Enron". And, "After weeks of escalating financial troubles, business had effectively collapsed in many of Enron's most important markets. Only months earlier, Enron was considered one of the most innovative U.S. companies, having brought new-economy tools [or was it old-economy embezzling and money laundering?-ed.] such as Internet and sophisticated hedging strategies to the old business of matching producers and consumers of electricity, oil, natural gas-and eventually some 800 other commodities and services. Its operations directly or indirectly touch almost every American home and business." AND, how many members of the U.S. Congress and OTHER foreign parliaments do they also touch? Is Enron a latter day Bank of Crooks and Criminals International, BCCI?

Like phantom money ship BCCI, Enron did their elaborate game of changing currencies hidden in a smokescreen of black art.

Dick Cheney up to August, 2000, had been CEO of Halliburton, among other things, a supplier of oil industry machinery. [Hey, as of the posting of this story, is Halliburton another BCCI/ Enron device?] Through Halliburton's overseas units, Cheney, a major stockholder of Halliburton, has apparently treasonously supplied Iraqi strongman, Saddam Hussein, a disgruntled former private business partner of Daddy Bush, what Saddam needed to break the embargo on oil shipments. [As to Daddy Bush/Saddam Hussein, see our website story, "The Secrets of Timothy McVeigh."]

Dictators, like some political condiments gathering in a mythical Chinese-style restaurant, seem to have private business partnerships off and on mixing with one another, at times sweet, at times sour.

Cheney, Daddy Bush, Bush, Jr., and their circle hovering around Big Oil, used Enron as an accomplished cruise ship. Like those Love Boats sailing the Caribbean, U.S.S. Enron asked no questions of those who brought on-board their steamer-trunks of dirty money. The unwritten deal was, Enron was supposed to keep a per centage as a fee. In the real world, there is a most serious non-statutory offense, never violated by those hoping to go up in the Establishment, called FAILURE TO BRIBE. [I once startled what I call a court victim, stating YOU ARE GUILTY, after all of THAT, right?]

Various "investment houses", actually money laundries, have been bloodied by Enron's collapse but are mostly silent. Did some brokers screw some Enron stock owners?

"The Enron episode further damages the credibility of Wall Street analysts. Richard Gross, an analyst at Lehman Brothers...kept a 'strong buy' rating on Enron's stock throughout the decline. Lehman stood to earn a hefty fee for advising Dynegy to buy Enron, until Dynegy withdrew its offer. A Lehman spokesman said it was the firm's policy not to change its rating on a company involved in a deal where Lehman is an adviser. BUT ANYBODY WHO TOOK LEHMAN'S ADVICE ON ENRON'S STOCK IN RECENT MONTHS WOULD HAVE LOST ALMOST EVERYTHING." New York Times story, "With Enron's Fall, Many Dominoes Tremble", 12/2/01 (Emphasis added.)

Enron, while sinking, became the vessel from which was covertly extracted (or embezzled?) huge sums, multiplied by financial witchcraft, to temporarily prop up the failing stock markets. In 1929, many suckers really believed the bigshots who said they would bail out the markets. Except in 1929, it was done out front, in 2001, secretly or not publicly spoken. [See the book "The Great Crash-1929" by Kenneth Galbraith, how that great fraud empire, J.P. Morgan, fooled the suckers into staying in a collapsing market.]

Hey, Greenspan/Redspan! Tell your wife, Andrea Mitchell, it is okay to pass along this "more than pillow talk" to General Electric, the boss of her boss NBC Network. And while you are at it, as Federal Reserve commissar, order G.E. to stop selling what some curse, their damned "too-often-burning-out" light bulbs.

Hey, Wendy Gramm! Call Enron, hurry up, before the phones are disconnected. [Wait a minute. Would a telecom giant like Enron have dead phones?]

Is a tidal wave of Enron/Halliburton about to wreck the White House? More coming.

Stay tuned.

***

MEDIUM RARE

By Jim Rarey

December 6, 2001

MAILED ANTHRAX FINALLY THE TRUTH?

By Jim Rarey

It has too often been the case in the last decade or so, the truth about important events is first published either on the Internet or in a foreign newspaper. And it usually is in direct contradiction to the (authorized) leaks from "knowledgeable" but unidentified government officials propagated by the "mainstream" media. The subject of mailed anthrax has followed this pattern.

Many (too many) Americans will only accept "facts" when they see them on the eleven o’clock network news or read them in the establishment newspapers, e.g. The New York Times, Washington Post or Los Angeles Times. One of the earliest bits of misinformation that probably resulted in several deaths was the assurance that those not in the vicinity where the envelope containing the anthrax spores was opened had nothing to worry about.

That had to be revised when victims hundred of miles from the capitol came down with anthrax poisoning. Cross contamination was finally acknowledged, but the danger was downplayed contending that treatment with Cipro (and later other antibiotics) was 100% effective in those cases.

We were told that inhalation of anthrax would require a concentration of eight to ten thousand spores in the lungs to be potentially fatal. We were told initially that the anthrax mailed was "crude" in form and could easily have been used by foreign terrorists. This was reinforced by repetitive showings of the crude lettering on the envelopes on TV.

As test results began to filter out, the focus of the media changed to the "weaponization" of anthrax spores, i.e. milling them down to a diameter of one to three microns. (A micron is one millionth of a meter.) This required a degree of expertise beyond that of a single individual without access to a fairly sophisticated laboratory.

After a spate of "speculation" in the media that a "right wing fanatic" might have been responsible, the FBI released a "profile" of its suspect. Predictably, they postulated a "loner" who may have worked in a laboratory and acquired a couple of test tubes of anthrax he kept in his basement for all these years. After the 911 tragedy this person, for his own reasons might have mailed the anthrax.

As test results confirmed the (Ames) strain of anthrax used in the mailings, attention began to focus on the army’s top-secret bioweapon laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The Ames strain is one of the most virulent (deadly) strains available and was in high demand both for developing weapons and vaccines to protect against all strains. Ft. Detrick’s records are incomplete but it is known to have furnished the Ames strain to Britain’s Porton Down laboratory, a number of university and private labs and probably to Iraq.

During the cold war, Ft. Detrick, Britain’s Porton Down, Russia and South Africa produced and stockpiled large amounts of toxic biological and chemical weapons including anthrax. In 1969, in contemplation of a treaty signed in 1972, President Nixon ordered Ft. Detrick to cease production and destroy the stockpiles. Although research and development was done at Ft. Detrick, the actual production and storage was at the army’s facility in the Pine Bluffs Redstone Arsenal in Arkansas.

Now, some thirty years later, the U.S. Government appears to be relying on the expertise of two cold war bioweapon veterans, Dr.’s William C. Patrick III, and Kenneth Alibek, President and CEO of Advanced Biosystems Inc. (ABS).

Patrick was in charge of the anthrax "weaponization" program at Ft. Detrick. He developed a process that resulted in anthrax far more potent than that known to have been produced by Britain or Russia. He holds five secret patents on the process. The army’s anthrax comprised up to one trillion spores per gram, double the amount other programs reached. To put that in perspective, if 10,000 spores is a lethal dose, then the two grams said to have been in the envelope addressed to Senator Daschle had enough for 200 million lethal doses. A gram is just one-twenty-eighth of an ounce.

But even the 8 to 10 thousand spore number is misleading the public according to Edgar W. "Bud" Larson, one of several other Ft. Detrick veterans who granted on the record interviews to Scott Shane of the Baltimore Sun. Larson says that number (which he helped develop) is an average for lethal doses. Depending on several factors, 100 spores or less could be fatal. Larson was head of the aerobiology division at Detrick. Another veteran of the biowars, Norman M. Covert, adds that their experiments showed that spores of one to four microns easily escaped from ordinary envelopes, which have pores of ten microns.

Another former Detrick expert is Manuel S. Barbeito who was in charge of decontaminating 75 to 100 buildings at Ft. Detrick after the program was shut down. He has doubts about the chlorine dioxide cleanup method that the EPA has chosen for the Hart Senate Office building. Barbeito says he experimented with many methods before settling on formaldehyde gas.

All three experts are puzzled as to why the government has only contacted Patrick and not taken advantage of other expertise available.

Patrick has been a long time consultant to the government on bioweapons and bioterrorism. When the First Deputy of the USSR’s bioweapons program (Kanatjan Alibekov) defected to the U.S. in 1992, Patrick was called in by the intelligence agencies to help debrief him.

Alibekov, now known by his Americanized name of Kenneth Alibek has become a colleague of Patrick as President and CEO of Advanced Biosystems a wholly owned subsidiary of Hadron, Inc. Hadron, a large defense contractor describes itself as, "specializing in developing innovative technical solutions for the intelligence community, analyzing and supporting defense systems (including intelligent weapons systems and biological weapons defense)."

Alibek’s Advanced Biosystems has received more than $3 million in government grants (including one for $800,000 this October) for work on defenses against anthrax. Yesterday (Wednesday Dec. 5, 2001) Alibek testified before the House International Relations Committee. An Associated Press dispatch quotes him as saying of the mailed anthrax, "It was a primitive process, but it was a workable process. I would say that they are not very highly trained professionals," Alibek said of whoever sent the anthrax letters.

Alibek’s statement is in direct contradiction to the opinion of Dr. Richard Spertzel, former head of the U.N. weapons inspection program in Iraq and experts cited by the New York Times in a Dec. 3 article this week. Spertzel supported those experts contention that the mailed anthrax was top quality saying, "(This) is not the kind of thing you mess around with in a university lab." Spertzel, who also testified at the hearing, said the FBI’s profile of the anthrax killer as a deranged loner "is a lot of hokum."

Lab experts cited by the New York Times say the mailed anthrax reached the one trillion spores per gram threshold and could only have been made using Patrick’s patented process.

While no other countries are known to have duplicated Patrick’s process, there is an interesting sidelight involving one of the pieces of equipment involved in it.

Charlie Trie, the Little Rock restaurant owner, long time friend of, (illegal) fund-raiser for Bill Clinton, and member of a Mafia-like Chinese Triad, according to the FBI, helped the Chinese germ warfare program obtain a 132-gallon medical fermentation tank. The equipment is an integral part of the process of producing toxic bacteria and export to China required a permit from the Department of Commerce.

Trie met several times in China with Zhang Jianming, director of China’s germ warfare program. He later arrange a trip to the United States for Zhang and accompanied him in his travels. One stop was Little Rock, Arkansas where Zhang was introduced to an American scientist.

In a February 26th article last year, WorldNetDaily’s Paul Sperry revealed that the American scientist named Peter Fu had invested $40,000 in a shell company set up by Trie to obtain the equipment for transshipment to China. Fu’s wife worked for the company for a short time but dropped out after a few weeks. When interviewed by the FBI, Fu claimed the $40,000 was a loan to Trie.

This sidebar is not meant to imply that China was the source of the mailed anthrax. Rather, its possible significance lies in the fact that Peter Fu (at that time) was the Deputy Director of the FDA’s Division of Biochemical Toxicology in its National Center for Toxicological Research. The center is located on the grounds of the Pine Bluffs Redstone Arsenal, the site of anthrax production and storage. Fu’s first loyalties may not lie with the U.S. According to his biography on the FDA website, Fu is still at that location as a research chemist.

Are there dots to be connected in this mystery of the mailed anthrax? At the very least, there are a number of questions that need to be asked….and answered.

Permission is granted to reproduce this article in its entirety.

The author is a free lance writer based in Romulus, Michigan. He is a former newspaper editor and investigative reporter, a retired customs administrator and accountant, and a student of history and the U.S. Constitution.

If you would like to receive Medium Rare articles directly, please contact us at jimrarey@provide.net.

Although not necessary, we would appreciate an indication of the city and/or state or country (If outside the USA) in which you are located to give us an idea as to where our articles are being received.

***

THIS "PIPELINE" WAR HAS BEEN PLANNED FOR THREE YEARS

It's been three years since Congress discussed removing the government of Afghanistan to make way for an oil pipeline: (See the Hearing before the Sub-Commitee on Asia and the Pacific of the Commitee on International Relations of the House of Representatives, February 12, 1998.) http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa48119.000/hfa48119_0f.htm

It's been six months since the US Government told India there would be an invasion of Afghanistan in October: (See the Special Report in the Public Affairs Magazine: indiareacts.com called "India in anti-Taliban military plan", June 26, 2001) http://www.indiareacts.com/archivefeatures/nat2.asp?recno=10&mp;ctg=policy

It's been five months since BBC heard about the planned invasion of Afghanistan: (See the BBC News' article by George Arney quoting Niaz Naik, former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, who was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action would go ahead by the middle October, September 18, 2001.) http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1550000/1550366.stm

It's been nine months since Jane's Defense News got word of the planned invasion of Afghanistan: (See artcle by Rahul Bedi called "India joins anti-Taliban coalition" March 15, 2001.) http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jir/jir010315_1_n.shtml

and of course, only three months since the attacks on the World Trade Towers that got the American people angered into support of the war that everybody on the planet BUT Americans had been told was on the way before September 11. http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ifiwere.html

During these last three months, the same American media that waved non-stop Gary Condit in front of our faces to keep us from finding out that plans for a war were being announced to other governments, is now trying to keep the level of fear in the American public so high that they cannot think.

The media has been pounding us all non-stop with Osama (you know, the CIA's main asset in Afghanistan) in a fashion eerily similar to the mythical dictatorship's use of Emmanual Goldstein and the "Two Minute Hate" in George Orwell's "1984". The media's "scare-orrism" has continued with the endless dire warnings regarding the Anthrax being sent in letters, which in retrospect has to be the weakest form of Anthrax, having killed far fewer people in the entire nation in the last three months than are gunned down in Washington DC in any given week. But the problem with using fear to keep people from thinking is that sooner or later fear tires itself out. People habituate to it. They get used to it. And they start thinking again. And, as people stop fearing and start to think, they start to notice those things which the government would prefer they don't. Things like the convenient timing of the attacks on the World Trade Towers and the perfect fit into the timetable of the war announced to other nations earlier in the year. People are remembering that Osama bin Laden is a creation of the CIA, the same CIA once headed by the President's father (who also got us into a pointless war in the oil-rich regions of the middle east), the same CIA that imports drugs and sells them to our children, the same CIA now advocating the use of torture.

People are remembering that the initial Anthrax "attack" on the US Congress occurred just as the draconian USA PATRIOT bill was about to be voted on. People have noticed that the US Congress, out of their own fear, voted to pass that bill without reading it at all!

(The second congressional Anthrax attack was sent to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) "coincidentally" right after he announced hearings on the military tribunals directive.)

People are remembering that the first suspects to be arrested after the WTC attacks were not Arabs, but Israelis, and that Israelis (in one case a known Mossad agent) were also arrested inside the Mexican Congress carrying guns. Yet more suspected Mossad agents were arrested with plans for US Nuclear power plants inside the US, but were strangely let go! People are remembering that the Mossad has a past history of staging fake terror attacks to blame on a third party, such as the successful planting of fake radio traffic which tricked the US into bombing Libya, and a failed attempt to blow up a US facility and blame it on Arabs in 1956.

Reports continue to circle in the foreign press blaming the Mossad for the WTC attacks. People are noticing that the US Government does not really have a case against Osama bin Laden having ANYTHING to do with the attacks on the World Trade Towers. After announcing the evidence would be made public, the US Government backtracked, and claimed that the evidence had to remain secret to protect "National Security". Then it turned out that what evidence existed was being destroyed by the NSA and by the FBI! While the only actual video tapes of Osama bin Laden mentioning the WTC attacks consist of denials, a report was recently published in the media that Osama had confessed and claimed to have nukes. Both claims turned out to be hoaxes; an effort to manufacture a phony confession to fill in the gap of any real evidence to justify the bombing of Afghani civilians. The video taped confession claimed to be the source of the transcript does not exist, and the BBC found no mention of nuclear weapons in the original version. Careful examination of what evidence has been presented shows it to be a total farce of unsubstantiated and non-court-worthy claims, circumstantial at best.

And, as people stop being made blind by fear, they are starting to realize that bombing the innocents of Afghanistan makes no sense at all no matter what Osama bin Laden may have done, whether he still works for the CIA or not. After all, were American citizens able to prevent the CIA from killing 80 civilians, many of them children, with a car bomb in Beirut in 1985. Had the CIA knocked on the doors of American citizens and asked, "Is it okay if we blow up a bunch of kids to get at this one target", I feel safe in saying that most Americans would have replied that they didn't think it was a good idea (The intended target survived the CIA's bomb). Likewise, had Osama bin Laden knocked on the doors of the Afghani people and said, "Is it okay if we blow up a bunch of kids to get at this one target", I feel safe in saying that most Afghanis would have replied that they didn't think it was a good idea. Doubtless the response was more agreeable from Osama's pals at Langley.

As people stop being made blind by fear, they are taking a closer look at the US Government's purported "humanitarian" effort to feed the starving people of Afghanistan, an effort exemplified by the shutting down of all truck routes into the region and the bombing (twice) of the Red Cross food warehouse, then lying about it afterwards. This has removed all sources of outside food for the starving people living along the proposed oil pipeline route except one' the food packages being dropped from American planes. But there is a problem with those food packages. Ignoring for a moment that most of those packages are either destroyed on hitting the ground or simply fall where they cannot be found, they happen to look like the unexploded munitions the US is also dropping all around Afghanistan. Same size, same color, same type face.

Now, if you are a starving Afghani child, you cannot read English, and you have seen the leaflets that claim those yellow packages being dropped from the planes are a gift of food from the wonderful people of the United States, which package would you pick up? And if perchance you grab the wrong one and lose a hand, or your eyes, how will you feel about those wonderful people of the United States? This deception of having the unexploded bombs looking like the food packs is not aimed at Osama Bin Laden and it's not aimed at the Taliban; it is aimed at the non-combatant citizens of Afghanistan, including women and children, who are starving slowly to death because of the US-created REDUCTION in humanitarian aid to the region, and who out of that starvation won't hesitate to pick up an unexploded cluster munition, thinking it may be something to eat.

But most of all, as the people of the United States cease to be afraid, they will realize that the greatest danger they face isn't Osama bin laden or starving Afghani women and children, but Presidents connected to oil companies who always seem to get us into wars in regions where oil happens to be, and who are willing to do anything, including destroying the civil protections of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to get that war and that oil.

There are warning signs everywhere that the real agenda of the attacks on the WTC on 9/11 was to pave the way for a transformation of the United States into something no rational Americans would or could ever support. President Bush has done away with the civil protections mandated by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by creating a new court system, outside the jurisdiction of the Constitution. Even more alarming is the strident and continuing calls for the use of torture on suspected terrorists coming from sources such as Allen Dershowitz, from the Los Angeles Times, and from that master of South American torture squads, the CIA.

The problem is that while these secret courts and torture squads are supposed to be directed at terrorists, with "terrorists" being defined in the disengenuously named "USA PATRIOT" act as anyone critical of the government! So loose are the definitions being applied under the new laws that people are being denied their Constitutional right to travel freely based on political views or just for carrying the wrong book!

So egregious has been the grab for dictatorial power by the Bush Presidency that even the normally obeisant and MOCKINGBIRD controlled mainstream US press is starting to express doubts, with the New York Times using words like "dictatorial", while MSNBC likens the present regime to that of a third world nation. Even > newspapers in Bush's home state are saying he has gone too far. Pravda, the major newspaper of the former USSR, once the most feared enemy of our freedoms, warns that America is losing her freedoms to her own government.

Support for the war in Afghanistan is rapidly diminishing. Even the much-vaunted "coalition" intending to mask the ambitions of a single nation behind the illusion of multi lateral action, has started falling apart. What is an emerging dictatorship to do? The more people stop being afraid, the more they think. The more people think, the more they realize that something is very wrong with the official version of the WTC attacks. The more people think, the more they realize that something is very wrong with the convenient timing of the attacks with regard to the invasion of Afghanistan already planned and discussed with other nations last March.

The more people think, the more they realize that something is very wrong with the manner in which the government is attacking the civil protections in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The more people think, the more they realize that something is very wrong with the demand for the use of torture on "terrorists" and the very loose definitions of what a terrorist is, able to be applied to anyone who disagrees with the policies of the state.

In order to continue the grab for, as the New York Times describes it, "dictatorial" power, the government has to make the people STOP thinking. And the only way to make the people stop thinking is to make them afraid again, so afraid that they CANNOT think. Which is why I greatly fear that as we head into the holiday season, full of potent American symbols and media coverage of traditional holiday parades and celebrations, that opportunity exists for phony staged terrorist events, staged events designed to keep Americans afraid, keep them surrendering their civil rights, keep them in support of a war for oil, a war for the agenda to, as the current Fortune Magazine describes it, "break OPEC's grip". Sun Tzu, in "The Art Of War", comments that all war is based on deception. the people of an invading nation have to be deceived into thinking that they act in their own self defense; that they are the ones to have been attacked. The United States government has a long history of using such deceptions to start wars, from claiming that the USS Maine, sunk by a coal bin fire, was sunk by a Spanish mine, to the Gulf Of Tonkin and the torpedoes which never were, to Operation NORTHWOODS, in which the Joint Chiefs planned to stage fake terror attacks to manufacture American support for a war against Cuba.

The present government of the United States NEEDS the American people to be afraid, to be blindly afraid, to react and respond, and not to reason. There is only one way for the government to achieve this, through a phony terror attack such as those planned by Operation NORTHWOODS, and I greatly fear that we will see one in the very near future.

Because once a government resorts to terrorizing its own population to control them, it must keep on doing so. A government that uses terror to control its own population cannot ever stop using terror to control its own population, out of fear that a population no longer afraid will start to think clearly about what is going on. Terror has to become legal. Terror has to become accepted as necessary for domestic policy. Hence the call for torture, secret courts, and the abandonment of the protections of the Bill of Rights. Terror becomes an addiction to those governments who use it on their own people. Which is why I am certain we will see more of it.

The fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were from Saudia Arabia, not Afghanistan, shows that the installation of a "puppet" government in Afghanistan, that will let Unocal and the other Bush/Cheney oil buddies, put the pipeline in.......is the real reason for this "war". The starving innocent people of Afghanistan don't matter at all.

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ifiwere.html

[The following is a transcript of a Fox News Channel report on Israeli espionage in America and its possible relation to the events of 9/11.]

Carl Cameron Reports

Wednesday, December 12, 2001

BRIT HUME, HOST: It has been more than 16 years since a civilian working for the Navy was charged with passing secrets to Israel. Jonathan Pollard pled guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage and is serving a life sentence. At first, Israeli leaders claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but later took responsibility for his work.

Now Fox News has learned some U.S. investigators believe that there are Israelis again very much engaged in spying in and on the U.S., who may have known things they didn't tell us before September 11. Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron has details in the first of a four-part series.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARL CAMERON, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Since September 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States.

There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are "tie-ins." But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, "evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information."

Fox News has learned that one group of Israelis, spotted in North Carolina recently, is suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs who the United States is also investigating for links to terrorism. Numerous classified documents obtained by Fox News indicate that even prior to September 11, as many as 140 other Israelis had been detained or arrested in a secretive and sprawling investigation into suspected espionage by Israelis in the United States.

Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a working group that's been compiling evidence since the mid '90s. These documents detail hundreds of incidents in cities and towns across the country that investigators say, "may well be an organized intelligence gathering activity."

The first part of the investigation focuses on Israelis who say they are art students from the University of Jerusalem and Bazala Academy. They repeatedly made contact with U.S. government personnel, the report says, by saying they wanted to sell cheap art or handiwork.

Documents say they, "targeted and penetrated military bases." The DEA, FBI and dozens of government facilities, and even secret offices and unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel. The majority of those questioned, "stated they served in military intelligence, electronic surveillance intercept and or explosive ordinance units."

Another part of the investigation has resulted in the detention and arrests of dozens of Israelis at American mall kiosks, where they've been selling toys called Puzzle Car and Zoom Copter. Investigators suspect a front.

Shortly after The New York Times and Washington Post reported the Israeli detentions last months, the carts began vanishing. Zoom Copter's Web page says, "We are aware of the situation caused by thousands of mall carts being closed at the last minute. This in no way reflects the quality of the toy or its salability. The problem lies in the operators' business policies."

Why would Israelis spy in and on the U.S.? A general accounting office investigation referred to Israel as country A and said, "According to a U.S. intelligence agency, the government of country A conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the U.S. of any U.S. ally."

A defense intelligence report said Israel has a voracious appetite for information and said, "the Israelis are motivated by strong survival instincts which dictate every possible facet of their political and economical policies. It aggressively collects military and industrial technology and the U.S. is a high priority target."

The document concludes: "Israel possesses the resources and technical capability to achieve its collection objectives."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

A spokesman for the Israeli embassy here in Washington issued a denial saying that any suggestion that Israelis are spying in or on the U.S. is "simply not true." There are other things to consider. And in the days ahead, we'll take a look at the U.S. phone system and law enforcement's methods for wiretaps. And an investigation that both have been compromised by our friends overseas.

HUME: Carl, what about this question of advanced knowledge of what was going to happen on 9-11? How clear are investigators that some Israeli agents may have known something?

CAMERON: It's very explosive information, obviously, and there's a great deal of evidence that they say they have collected — none of it necessarily conclusive. It's more when they put it all together. A bigger question, they say, is how could they not have know? Almost a direct quote.

HUME: Going into the fact that they were spying on some Arabs, right?

CAMERON: Correct.

HUME: All right, Carl, thanks very much.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,40684,00.html

NATIONAL LIBERATION NEWS (ezine)

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redbrown

From: Computerworld

FBI is developing a combination computer worm/Trojan horse called Magic Lantern

Feds boost online surveillance activity

Efforts to ferret out sleeper cells raise civil liberties concerns, say experts

By Dan Verton (Dec. 10, 2001)

Significant changes are under way in the federal government's war on terrorism, including unprecedented electronic surveillance measures designed to uncover terrorist cells in the U.S.FBI officials have acknowledged that the agency is developing a combination computer worm/Trojan horse called Magic Lantern that's designed to capture keystrokes on a target computer and encryption keys used to conceal data. The increased focus on domestic surveillance and cyberintelligence tools comes as the war on terrorism enters a new phase designed to ferret out sleeper cells—small groups that live legally in the U.S. for years poised to conduct terrorist attacks. The Justice Department has called increased electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists a must-have capability.

But some experts worry that the new focus may not produce desired results and that it poses a threat to privacy and other civil liberties. "To the degree there are any al-Qaeda sleeper cells here, they do use the Internet to communicate frequently," said Vince Cannistraro, former director of counterintelligence at the CIA. "They also encrypt their messages. So surveillance tools are potentially useful if the FBI knows what it is looking for and knows where to look. That, of course, is a big if." "I am very concerned about civil liberties at this point and certainly about increased penetration of online activities," said Steve Kobrin, a professor of multinational management and an online privacy expert at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "The odds that our privacy is being invaded by the U.S. [government] have certainly gone up, and the odds that we will ever know about it have gone down." Phil Zimmermann, inventor of Pretty Good Privacy encryption software, said that although there was an initial push by some in Congress and the White House to clamp down on encryption exports in the aftermath of Sept. 11, he doesn't foresee a change in U.S. policy on that front. Zimmermann also said the government won't insert back doors in commercial software. "We've already won this battle," he said. But concerns about other measures linger. "

The availability of new surveillance technologies and the government's eagerness to employ them certainly do pose a challenge to traditional civil liberties," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. "There is some danger that the surveillance impulse will take on a life of its own, producing an unwholesome mutation of our political system."

From: Computerworld

http://www.e-venthorizon.net/terrorism/binladen.tape.html

TRANSCRIPT OF USAMA BIN LADEN VIDEO TAPE

Courtesy of the US Department of Defense & CNN

8:00 a.m. December 15, 2001 PDT The following transcript of a videotape of Osama bin Laden talking with others, translated from Arabic into English, was issued by the U.S. Department of Defense. CNN spells the al Qaeda leader's name Osama bin Laden, but the Defense Department spelling—Usama bin Laden— is retained. He is identified as UBL in the transcript.

(Transcript and annotations independently prepared by George Michael, translator, Diplomatic Language Services; and Dr. Kassem M. Wahba, Arabic language program coordinator, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. They collaborated on their translation and compared it with translations done by the U.S. government for consistency. There were no inconsistencies in the translations.)

In mid-November, Usama Bin Laden spoke to a room of supporters, possibly in Qandahar, Afghanistan. These comments were videotaped with the knowledge of bin Laden and all present.

Note: The tape is approximately one hour long and contains three different segments: an original taping of a visit by some people to the site of the downed U.S. helicopter in Ghazni province (approximately 12 minutes long); and two segments documenting a courtesy visit by bin Laden and his lieutenants to an unidentified Shaykh, who appears crippled from the waist down. The visit apparently takes place at a guesthouse in Qandahar. The sequence of the events is reversed on the tape—the end of his visit is in the beginning of the tape with the helicopter site visit in the middle and the start of the Usama bin Laden visit beginning approximately 39 minutes into the tape. The tape is transcribed below according to the proper sequence of events.

Due to the quality of the original tape, it is NOT a verbatim transcript of every word spoken during the meeting, but does convey the messages and information flow.

CNN EDITOR'S NOTE: 39 minutes into tape, first segment of the bin Laden meeting, begins after footage of helicopter site visit.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shaykh: (...inaudible...) You have given us weapons, you have given us hope and we thank Allah for you. We don't want to take much of your time, but this is the arrangement of the brothers. People now are supporting us more, even those ones who did not support us in the past, support us more now. I did not want to take that much of your time. We praise Allah, we praise Allah. We came from Kabul. We were very pleased to visit. May Allah bless you both at home and the camp. We asked the driver to take us, it was a night with a full moon, thanks be to Allah. Believe me it is not in the country side. The elderly...everybody praises what you did, the great action you did, which was first and foremost by the grace of Allah. This is the guidance of Allah and the blessed fruit of jihad.

UBL: Thanks to Allah. What is the stand of the Mosques there (in Saudi Arabia)?

Shaykh: Honestly, they are very positive. Shaykh Al-Bahrani (phonetic) gave a good sermon in his class after the sunset prayers. It was videotaped and I was supposed to carry it with me, but unfortunately, I had to leave immediately.

UBL: The day of the events?

Shaykh: At the exact time of the attack on America, precisely at the time. He (Bahrani) gave a very impressive sermon. Thanks be to Allah for his blessings. He (Bahrani) was the first one to write at war time. I visited him twice in Al-Qasim.

UBL: Thanks be to Allah.

Shaykh: This is what I asked from Allah. He (Bahrani) told the youth: "You are asking for martyrdom and wonder where you should go (for martyrdom)?" Allah was inciting them to go. I asked Allah to grant me to witness the truth in front of the unjust ruler. We ask Allah to protect him and give him the martyrdom, after he issued the first fatwa. He was detained for interrogation, as you know. When he was called in and asked to sign, he told them, "don't waste my time, I have another fatwa. If you want me, I can sign both at the same time."

UBL: Thanks be to Allah.

Shaykh: His position is really very encouraging. When I paid him the first visit about a year and half ago, he asked me, "How is Shaykh Bin-Ladin?" He sends you his special regards. As far as Shaykh Sulayman 'Ulwan is concerned, he gave a beautiful fatwa, may Allah bless him. Miraculously, I heard it on the Quran radio station. It was strange because he ('Ulwan) sacrificed his position, which is equivalent to a director. It was transcribed word-by-word. The brothers listened to it in detail. I briefly heard it before the noon prayers. He ('Ulwan) said this was jihad and those people were not innocent people (World Trade Center and Pentagon victims). He swore to Allah. This was transmitted to Shaykh Sulayman Al (('Umar)) Allah bless him.

UBL: What about Shaykh Al-((Rayan))?

Shaykh: Honestly, I did not meet with him. My movements were truly limited.

UBL: Allah bless you. You are welcome.

Shaykh: (Describing the trip to the meeting) They smuggled us and then I thought that we would be in different caves inside the mountains so I was surprised at the guest house and that it is very clean and comfortable. Thanks be to Allah, we also learned that this location is safe, by Allah's blessings. The place is clean and we are very comfortable.

UBL: (...Inaudible...) when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse. This is only one goal; those who want people to worship the lord of the people, without following that doctrine, will be following the doctrine of Muhammad, peace be upon him.

(UBL quotes several short and incomplete Hadith verses, as follows): "I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad." "Some people may ask: why do you want to fight us?" "There is an association between those who say: I believe in one god and Muhammad is his prophet, and those who don't (...inaudible...) "Those who do not follow the true fiqh. The fiqh of Muhammad, the real fiqh. They are just accepting what is being said at face value."

UBL: Those youth who conducted the operations did not accept any fiqh in the popular terms, but they accepted the fiqh that the prophet Muhammad brought. Those young men (...inaudible...) said in deeds, in New York and Washington, speeches that overshadowed all other speeches made everywhere else in the world. The speeches are understood by both Arabs and non-Arabs-even by Chinese. It is above all the media said. Some of them said that in Holland, at one of the centers, the number of people who accepted Islam during the days that followed the operations were more than the people who accepted Islam in the last eleven years. I heard someone on Islamic radio who owns a school in America say: "We don't have time to keep up with the demands of those who are asking about Islamic books to learn about Islam." This event made people think (about true Islam) which benefited Islam greatly.

Shaykh: Hundreds of people used to doubt you and few only would follow you until this huge event happened. Now hundreds of people are coming out to join you. I remember a vision by Shaykh Salih Al-((Shuaybi)). He said: "There will be a great hit and people will go out by hundreds to Afghanistan." I asked him (Salih): "To Afghanistan?" He replied, "Yes." According to him, the only ones who stay behind will be the mentally impotent and the liars (hypocrites). I remembered his saying that hundreds of people will go out to Afghanistan. He had this vision a year ago. This event discriminated between the different types of followers.

UBL: (...Inaudible...) we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. (...Inaudible...) due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for.

Shaykh: Allah be praised.

UBL: We were at (...inaudible...) when the event took place. We had notification since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day. We had finished our work that day and had the radio on. It was 5:30 p.m. our time. I was sitting with Dr. Ahmad Abu-al-((Khair)). Immediately, we heard the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We turned the radio station to the news from Washington. The news continued and no mention of the attack until the end. At the end of the newscast, they reported that a plane just hit the World Trade Center.

Shaykh: Allah be praised.

UBL: After a little while, they announced that another plane had hit the World Trade Center. The brothers who heard the news were overjoyed by it.

Shaykh: I listened to the news and I was sitting. We didn't...we were not thinking about anything, and all of a sudden, Allah willing, we were talking about how come we didn't have anything, and all of a sudden the news came and everyone was overjoyed and everyone until the next day, in the morning, was talking about what was happening and we stayed until four o'clock, listening to the news every time a little bit different, everyone was very joyous and saying "Allah is great," "Allah is great," "We are thankful to Allah," "Praise Allah." And I was happy for the happiness of my brothers. That day the congratulations were coming on the phone non-stop. The mother was receiving phone calls continuously. Thank Allah. Allah is great, praise be to Allah. (Quoting the verse from the Quran)

Shaykh: "Fight them, Allah will torture them, with your hands, he will torture them. He will deceive them and he will give you victory. Allah will forgive the believers, he is knowledgeable about everything."

Shaykh: No doubt it is a clear victory. Allah has bestowed on us...honor on us...and he will give us blessing and more victory during this holy month of Ramadan. And this is what everyone is hoping for. Thank Allah America came out of its caves. We hit her the first hit and the next one will hit her with the hands of the believers, the good believers, the strong believers. By Allah it is a great work. Allah prepares for you a great reward for this work. I'm sorry to speak in your presence, but it is just thoughts, just thoughts. By Allah, who there is no god but him. I live in happiness, happiness...I have not experienced, or felt, in a long time. I remember, the words of Al-Rabbani, he said they made a coalition against us in the winter with the infidels like the Turks, and others, and some other Arabs. And they surrounded us like the days...in the days of the prophet Muhammad. Exactly like what's happening right now. But he comforted his followers and said, "This is going to turn and hit them back." And it is a mercy for us. And a blessing to us. And it will bring people back. Look how wise he was. And Allah will give him blessing. And the day will come when the symbols of Islam will rise up and it will be similar to the early days of Al-Mujahedeen and Al-Ansar (similar to the early years of Islam). And victory to those who follow Allah. Finally said, if it is the same, like the old days, such as Abu Bakr and Othman and Ali and others. In these days, in our times, that it will be the greatest jihad in the history of Islam and the resistance of the wicked people.

Shaykh: By Allah my Shaykh. We congratulate you for the great work. Thank Allah.

Tape ends here

Second segment of Bin Laden's visit, shows up at the front of the tape .

UBL: Abdallah Azzam, Allah bless his soul, told me not to record anything (...inaudible...) so I thought that was a good omen, and Allah will bless us (...inaudible...). Abu-Al-Hasan Al-((Masri)), who appeared on Al-Jazeera TV a couple of days ago and addressed the Americans saying: "If you are true men, come down here and face us." (...inaudible...) He told me a year ago: "I saw in a dream, we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots!" He said: "So I wondered if that was a soccer game or a pilot game? Our players were pilots." He (Abu-Al-Hasan) didn't know anything about the operation until he heard it on the radio. He said the game went on and we defeated them. That was a good omen for us.

Shaykh: May Allah be blessed.

Unidentified Man Off Camera: Abd Al Rahman Al-(Ghamri) said he saw a vision, before the operation, a plane crashed into a tall building. He knew nothing about it.

Shaykh: May Allah be blessed!

Sulayman ((Abu Guaith)): I was sitting with the Shaykh in a room, then I left to go to another room where there was a TV set. The TV broadcasted the big event. The scene was showing an Egyptian family sitting in their living room, they exploded with joy. Do you know when there is a soccer game and your team wins, it was the same expression of joy. There was a subtitle that read: "In revenge for the children of Al Aqsa', Usama Bin Ladin executes an operation against America." So I went back to the Shaykh (meaning UBL) who was sitting in a room with 50 to 60 people. I tried to tell him about what I saw, but he made gesture with his hands, meaning: "I know, I know..."

UBL: He did not know about the operation. Not everybody knew (...inaudible...). Muhammad ((Atta)) from the Egyptian family (meaning the Al Qa'ida Egyptian group), was in charge of the group.

Shaykh: A plane crashing into a tall building was out of anyone's imagination. This was a great job. He was one of the pious men in the organization. He became a martyr. Allah bless his soul.

Shaykh (Referring to dreams and visions): The plane that he saw crashing into the building was seen before by more than one person. One of the good religious people has left everything and come here. He told me, "I saw a vision, I was in a huge plane, long and wide. I was carrying it on my shoulders and I walked from the road to the desert for half a kilometer. I was dragging the plane." I listened to him and I prayed to Allah to help him. Another person told me that last year he saw, but I didn't understand and I told him I don't understand. He said, "I saw people who left for jihad...and they found themselves in New York...in Washington and New York." I said, "What is this?" He told me the plane hit the building. That was last year. We haven't thought much about it. But, when the incidents happened he came to me and said, "Did you see...this is strange." I have another man...my god...he said and swore by Allah that his wife had seen the incident a week earlier. She saw the plane crashing into a building...that was unbelievable, my god.

UBL: The brothers, who conducted the operation, all they knew was that they have a martyrdom operation and we asked each of them to go to America but they didn't know anything about the operation, not even one letter. But they were trained and we did not reveal the operation to them until they are there and just before they boarded the planes.

UBL: (...inaudible...) then he said: Those who were trained to fly didn't know the others. One group of people did not know the other group. (...inaudible...) (Someone in the crowd asks UBL to tell the Shaykh about the dream of ((Abu-Da'ud)).

UBL: We were at a camp of one of the brother's guards in Qandahar. This brother belonged to the majority of the group. He came close and told me that he saw, in a dream, a tall building in America, and in the same dream he saw Mukhtar teaching them how to play karate. At that point, I was worried that maybe the secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream. So I closed the subject. I told him if he sees another dream, not to tell anybody, because people will be upset with him. (Another person's voice can be heard recounting his dream about two planes hitting a big building).

UBL: They were overjoyed when the first plane hit the building, so I said to them: be patient.

UBL: The difference between the first and the second plane hitting the towers was twenty minutes. And the difference between the first plane and the plane that hit the Pentagon was one hour.

Shaykh: They (the Americans) were terrified thinking there was a coup.

[Note: Ayman Al-Zawahri says first he commended UBL's awareness of what the media is saying. Then he says it was the first time for them (Americans) to feel danger coming at them.]

UBL (reciting a poem):

I witness that against the sharp blade They always faced difficulties and stood together... When the darkness comes upon us and we are bit by a Sharp tooth, I say... "Our homes are flooded with blood and the tyrant Is freely wandering in our homes"... And from the battlefield vanished The brightness of swords and the horses... And over weeping sounds now We hear the beats of drums and rhythm... They are storming his forts And shouting: "We will not stop our raids Until you free our lands"...

Bin Laden visit footage complete. Footage of the visit to the helicopter site follows the poem.

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