News Of Great Interest Page XVI

While jet fighters drop bombs on Afghanistan in the wake of the World Trade Center tragedy and FBI agents search for the source of anthrax letters, an incredible tale has been unfolding in a Toronto courtroom.

It draws together the threads of a narrative some describe as "stunning and fantastic," while others wonder if it isn't just the ravings of a lunatic.

The man telling the tale in sworn court affidavits is Delmart Edward Vreeland, who faces credit fraud charges in Canada and in the United States, where officials are attempting to extradite him.

The 35-year-old American claims to be a lieutenant in a U.S. Navy intelligence unit — a spy who says he knew in advance about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In his affidavit, he says he tried to warn Canadian intelligence about possible terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, along with targets in Ottawa and Toronto, but was written off as a petty criminal.

So he wrote the warning on a piece of paper, sealed it in an envelope, and handed it to jail guards a month before the attacks. They opened the letter Sept. 14 and immediately forwarded the information to Ottawa.

His lawyers, Rocco Galati and Paul Slansky, are fighting extradition, telling the court he could face treason charges and the death penalty in the U.S.

In the first stage of hearings, federal prosecutor Kevin Wilson yesterday told Mr. Justice Archie Campbell of the Superior Court of Justice that he was skeptical of Vreeland's claims.

"Is his story possible? I can't go so far as to say it's not possible, but it's not plausible," Wilson said.

The prosecutor said he has seen no evidence to back Vreeland's claim that Canadian embassy official Marc Bastien was murdered in Moscow in December. Canadian officials said the 35-year-old computer specialist died of natural causes.

So, who is Delmart Edward Joseph Michael Vreeland II?

According to court documents, Vreeland was 18 when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1984.

Two years later, Vreeland says in his affidavit, he joined a special unit investigating drug smuggling into the U.S. by naval personnel. But the navy says Vreeland was "unsatisfactorily discharged" in 1986.

Vreeland also claims he gathered information on a crime family in Detroit and testified against them in 1998.

Late last year, he says, he came to Canada to help smuggle Russian military secrets out of Moscow, including Russia's plan to counter the American "Star Wars" missile defence system. While in Moscow, Vreeland says, he met Bastien.

Vreeland was arrested by a police fugitive squad nine months ago. While in Toronto (Don) Jail, he met Nestor Fonseca, who was facing drug smuggling charges and extradition to the U.S. The court documents say Fonseca allegedly told Vreeland of his plans to kill a Toronto judge and others. Fonseca was charged with counselling to commit murder.

Galati and Slansky said in the documents that Vreeland should be put into the witness protection program in Canada because he is the main witness against Fonseca.

Galati writes in one document: "Neither myself, nor Mr. Slansky ... have seen anything as incomprehensibly frustrating, inexplicable and irresponsibly absurd ... as the RCMP's position that they are not interested in reviewing Mr. Vreeland's information."

It would appear, Galati says in the brief, that the Canadian and American governments have written Vreeland off as a "nut case," which he says is a "patently absurd conclusion."

http://www.bk2k.com/bushbodycount/bodies.html

http://www.petitiononline.com/SSSCA/petition.html

http://www.blythe.org/afghan-maps/index.html

http://www.sacredfools.org/CrimeScene/CaseFiles/ShipOfFoolsStory.htm

http://www.cortland.edu/www/philosophy/prisons.htm http://eurasianews.com/erc/0afghan.htm

From: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Five Israelis Held In New York

Five young Israelis are "on the verge of collapse," according to family members, as their incarceration in New York on charges relating to the Bin Laden attacks continues. They were arrested on Sept. 11, only hours after the World Trade Center attack, on charges of "plotting to blow up" a New York bridge.

Katie Shmuel of the Galilee town of Yokne'am, southeast of Haifa, says that her son Yaron is in "a very critical psychological situation," given that they are not allowed to have visitors and the difficult conditions in which they are being held. "Even the Israeli Consul-General in New York was allowed to visit only after asking several times and receiving a special permit," Katie told Arutz-7's Yosef Zalmanson today. "He was allowed to talk to them only in English, and only from behind a glass partition. The Consul told me that the boys are in a bad state and that they are being held under difficult conditions."

When asked why the five youths, aged 22-26, are being held, Katie replied with despair: "It's ludicrous. They were on the George Washington Bridge [between upper Manhattan and New Jersey] at the time of the bombing, and the FBI had warnings of a terrorist plot, of guys in a white van, to blow up the bridge. So when the FBI saw this van, with my son and his four friends - one of them had a large sum of money, there were two razor knives in the van, and one of the boys is named Omer, which the FBI guys thought was Omar - they put one and one together and got three, and immediately arrested them... For the first few days, the boys were held in an FBI dungeon, tied up, with no clothes and no food." She said that original reports that they had been arrested while boisterously watching the disaster from a rooftop "are totally fabricated. For one thing, they weren't even on a roof, they were in a van..."

When asked how she explains her son's continued incarceration and that of his friends, she said, "I truly have no explanation for this incredible story - except this: The Americans are using them as pawns to pressure the Israeli government. Am I being clear enough?" She said that President Moshe Katzav and others had attempted to intervene, but there have been no results so far. The youths are being held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

A spokesperson for the Israeli Consulate in New York told Arutz-7 that in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, "the Americans now have different procedures for dealing with the detention of anyone arrested in connection with the attacks. Every single request of ours must go through the FBI and the State Department's legal team." She said, "We are doing as much as we possibly can on their behalf," including, she said, getting local Jewish leaders involved in the cause of the imprisoned young Israelis.

http://www.trufax.org/avoid/manifold.html http://globalcircle.net/1gnn1014kg.htm

http://www.realchange.org/bushjr.htm http://prorev.com/bush2.htm http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIA_ThirdWorld.html http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIAdrug_fallout.html

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/

Dubya Dubya Three - Are Americans The Victims Of A Hoax?

WhatReallyHappened.com 10-23-1 http://www.whatreallyhappened.com

"Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen aknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all." - Michael Rivero

The time has come to stop using the flag as a blindfold, to stop waving our guns and our gods at each other, to take a close look at the facts which have emerged from the attacks on the World Trade Towers and to recognize the very real possibility, indeed probability, that We The People are the victims of a gigantic and deadly hoax.

In a normal terrorist event, the terrorists cannot wait to take credit, in order to link the violence to the socio-political intent of the terrorist organization. Yet the prime suspect in the New York Towers case, ex(?) CIA asset Osama Bin Laden (whose brother is one of George W. Bush's Texas business partners), has issued only two statements regarding the September 11th attacks, and both of those are denials of any involvement.

Huge problems are emerging in the official view of events. It's known that the United States was planning an invasion of Afghanistan long before the attacks on the World Trade Towers. Indeed the attacks on the World Trade Towers perfectly fit the timetable of an invasion by October stated by US officials just last summer.

The 19 names of suspected hijackers released by the FBI don't point to Afghanistan. They come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates; all across the middle east without a focus in any one region. Indeed, even as the FBI was admitting that its list of 19 names was based solely on identifications thought to have been forged, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saudi Al-Faisal insisted that an investigation in Saudi Arabia showed that the 5 Saudi men were not aboard the four jetliners that crashed in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania on September 11. "It was proved that five of the names included in the FBI list had nothing to do with what happened," Al-Faisal told the Arabic Press in Washington after meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush at the White House. A sixth identified hijacker is also reported to still be alive in Tunisia, while a 7th named man died two years ago!

In a recent development, the BBC is reporting that the transcript of a phone call made by Flight Attendant Madeline Amy Sweeney to Boston air traffic controls shows that the flight attendant gave the seat numbers occupied by the hijackers, seat numbers which were NOT the seats of the men the FBI claimed were responsible for the hijacking!

FBI Chief Robert Mueller admitted on September 20 and on September 27 that at this time the FBI has no legal proof to prove the true identities of the suicidal hijackers. Yet in the haste to move forward on the already planned war in Afghanistan, our government and the FBI (which does not have the best record for honesty in investigations to begin with, having been caught rigging lab tests, manufacturing testimony in the Vincent Foster affair, and illegally withholding/destroying evidence in the Oklahoma Bombing case) are not taking too close a look at evidence that points away from the designated suspect, ex(?) CIA asset Osama Bin Laden.

In particular, the FBI, too busy harassing political dissenters to find spies in its midst, the long rumored mole inside the White House, or plug leaks in high-tech flowing to foreign nations, has willfully and criminally ignored the implications of some vital pieces of information the FBI is itself waving around at the public.

We are being told that this crack team of terrorists, able to breeze past airport security as if it wasn't there, wound up leaving so much evidence in its wake that the bumbling Inspector Clouseau (or the FBI) could not fail to stumble over it. The locations where the terrorists supposedly stayed are so overloaded with damning materials that they resemble less a crimes scene, and more a "B" detective movie set, with vital clues always on prominent display for the cameras.

Yet another problem lies with the described actions of the hijackers themselves. We are being told on the one hand that these men were such fanatical devotees of their faith that they willingly crashed the jets they were flying into buildings. Yet on the other hand, we are being told that these same men spent the night before their planned visit to Allah drinking in strip bars, committing not just one, but two mortal sins which would keep them out of Paradise no matter what else they did. Truly devout Muslims would spend the day before a suicide attack fasting and praying. Not only does the drinking in strip bars not fit the profile of a fanatically religious Muslim willing to die for his cause, but the witness reports of the men in the bars are of men going out of their way to be noticed and remembered, while waving around phony identifications.

Because of the facts of the phony identifications, we don't really know who was on those planes. What we do know is that the men on those planes went to a great deal of trouble to steal the identities of Muslims, and to make sure those identities were seen and remembered, then to leave a plethora of planted clues around, such as crop dusting manuals, and letters in checked baggage (why does a terrorist about to die need to check baggage?) that "somehow" didn't get on the final, fatal, flight.

Fake terror is nothing new. According to recently released files, our government planned Operation NORTHWOODS to stage phony terror attacks against American citizens in the wake of the Bay Of Pigs, to anger Americans into support for a second invasion of Cuba. The plan was spiked by JFK. If our government has ever actually carried out such plans to stage phony terror attacks, the documents have remained classified. But given the reality of Operation NORTHWOODS, or the manner in which FDR maneuvered Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor, one cannot rule out the possibility that, once again, the people of the United States are being lied to by their own government, to manufacture consent for a war of invasion already being discussed with other nations the previous summer.

It is also quite possible, indeed likely, that the United States is being spoofed by a third party to trigger a war. It has happened before. According to Victor Ostrovsky, a defector from Israel's secret service, Mossad, Israel decided to mount a false flag operation designed to further discredit Libya, and provoke the US to attack an Arab nation. A transmitter loaded with pre-recorded messages was planted in Tripoli, Libya, by a Mossad team.

The `Trojan Horse' beamed out fake messages about Libyan-authorized bombings and planned attacks that were immediately intercepted by US electronic monitoring. Convinced by this disinformation that Libya was behind the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco in which a US soldier died, President Ronald Reagan ordered massive air attacks on Libya, including an obvious- and illegal (under US law) attempt to assassinate Qadaffi himself. Some 100 Libyan civilians were killed, including Qadaffi's two year old daughter. Libyan officials had no idea why they were attacked.

It is worth remembering the motto of the Mossad is, "By way of deception, thou shalt do war."

Whether they were involved in the attacks or not, it cannot be doubted that Israel has benefited from the attacks in New York. While world attention is focused on what the US will do in Afghanistan, Israel has escalated its attacks against Palestinians towns. Israel has repeatedly tried to claim that Palestinians were involved in the New York attacks, hoping to bury the Palestinian cause under the rubble of the World Trade Towers.

Because of the faked IDs and stolen identities, we don't really know who planned the World Trade Towers attacks. We only know who they wanted us to blame.

And we know that the United States has been tricked in the past into bombing someone who did not deserve the attack, and that those who were bombed then embarked on what from their point of view was justified retaliation that culminated over Lockerbie. And while bombs were falling and planes were crashing, Israel was laughing at us that we had been so easily fooled into bombing Israel's targets for them.

Are we being hoaxed again, by Israel, or by our own government, or by both? It's impossible to rule that out. Right now there are a lot of people who want war. Oil companies want Afghanistan's petroleum products. Our corporations want "friendlier" markets. The CIA wants all that opium. And all those war-mongers, with all their greed and agendas, will not hesitate in the least to pour your tax dollars and your children's blood all over Afghanistan, to get those "friendlier" markets, oil, and opium.

Because of the vested interests at work here, American citizens must, more than at any other time in recent history, rely on themselves to decide what is happening in our nation. Too many of those who purport to report the "truth" to us are eager to grab more tax money and more children to pour into a war of invasion, poised at a region which has swallowed up every army that has tried to conquer it since the time of Alexander The Great.

And one more thing. Take a good look at the map of Eurasia and plot out where the United States has military deployments. They march in a straight line through the middle of Eurasia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan.

The United States is prepared to cut the Russian Federation off from the oil rich middle east, and to control transportation routes from China and India into the Middle East. When Russia realizes that this is the real agenda, that's when "Dubya Dubya Three" will really get going!

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Published on Tuesday, October 16, 2001

Week One: Operation Infinite Disaster by Chris Kromm

President Bush's war planners have struggled to find a fitting code name for our latest military venture. But after a week of war, there's only one appropriate label for the nightmare that has transpired: Operation Infinite Disaster. Leave aside, for the moment, the moral shortcomings and Orwellian implications of bombing starved people to "fight for freedom" or honor the dead of the September 11 tragedy. What's even more striking about the War Against ... Somebody is that, even on the Bush administration's own terms, the bombing of Afghanistan has thus far been a failure -- a series of tactical blunders guaranteed to make a bad situation much, much worse.

A quick inventory of the week's events tell the story:

BOMBING PEOPLE WITH FOOD: The first sign of trouble was news that Bush -- in a move to give the brutal bombings a humanitarian spin -- had opted to drop food supplies along with cluster bombs. This public relations stunt quickly backfired, however, when every major relief agency in the world derided the drops for 1) being insufficient (enough to feed about .5% of the starving population for a single day, provided the rations got to the intended "targets"); 2) containing food Afghan people never eat (hello, peanut butter?!); and 3) having the disadvantage of landing in fields strewn with land mines, adding injury to insult.

HIGH-TECH STRIKES IN A LOW-TECH WORLD: Then came evidence that U.S. bombs are hitting worthless targets -- when they hit at all. This may surprise U.S. readers, who, much like during the Gulf War, have been treated to giddy media reports cooing over the Pentagon's high- tech "smart" weaponry: gee-whiz gadgets like satellite targeting which supposedly make military strikes "surgical" -- and blood-free. (Although, in 1991 the Pentagon admitted that under six percent of Gulf War weapons used "smart" technology -- and even among these brilliant bombs, fully 20% missed their mark.)

The Pentagon says they've gotten better; time -- if not the media -- will tell. But what have these intelligent machines of destruction been hitting? A few terrorist training camps, which, as journalist Robert Fisk noted, our planes had "no difficulty spotting ... because, of course, most of them were built by the CIA when Mr. bin Laden and his men were the good guys."

But overall, the Taliban is a low-tech army -- and bombing their outdated airstrips and archaic phone systems has had little impact on how they control their terrain. And technology is only as good as the fallible humans who use it, which leads to the next mistake:

KILLING INNOCENT PEOPLE: "Serious blunders by American warplanes may have killed at least 100 civilians in Afghanistan," according to eye- witness accounts obtained by The Observer of London and reported on Sunday, October 14. (U.S. newspapers have been slow to report evidence of innocent people dying.) These deaths -- in Karam village, 18 miles west of Jalalabad -- came after news of the four workers killed in a U.N. building devoted to clearing land mines.

A total of 400 civilian deaths have been confirmed. Personal testimony from fleeing refugees suggest hundreds more.

What has been the effect of these deaths, besides belying the notion that war can be waged without ending innocent lives? According to The Guardian of London, the Karam killings are straining ties between the U.S. and its shaky allies in the anti-terrorism coalition.

And among the Arab and Muslim populace, the response is predictable: "Reports of between 50 and 150 deaths" the Guardian reports, have "provoked rage and grief throughout Afghanistan and throughout the Muslim world."

Which brings us to what the U.S.-led strikes *have * succeeded in doing:

IGNITING AN EXPLOSIVE BACKLASH: I'm not referring to the 30,000 protesters who marched in England against the U.S.-led bombing, the 70,000 who marched in India, the 70,000 who marched in Germany, or similar protests which have filled the streets in "friendly" turf like Italy, Greece, and our own cities.

I'm also not referring to the boomerang response to U.S. bombing in the form of terrorist counter-attacks, which have plunged America into dread fear of powdery envelopes and exposed nuclear reactors.

No, more troubling are the 20,000 students who took over the streets of Egypt yelling "U.S. go to hell!" The Jakarta Muslims threatening to kill U.S. tourists and embassy workers. The millions of Arab- Americans and Muslims who are raging -- violently -- against the U.S. in Jordan, South Africa, Iran, Bangladesh, Pakistan (brought to the brink of civil war) and Nigeria, where "hundreds" may be dead due to rioting.

President Bush's reaction has instilled little confidence. When asked in a press conference last Friday for his response to the vitriolic hatred that has mushroomed around the globe, Bush could only mumble: "I'm amazed. I just can't believe it because I know how good we are" -- which, in the world's eyes, must bring profoundly new meaning to the word "naiveté."

This disheartening string of missteps, feeding an upswell of moral outrage, led everyone's favorite war-watching website -- www.debka.com -- to post this headline over the weekend: "First Week of U.S. Offensive in Afghanistan is Inconclusive Militarily, Earthshaking Geo-Politically."

And for what? To the Pentagon's dismay, Bin Laden hasn't been "flushed out." The Taliban isn't waving a white flag. Our supposed allies, the opium-running North Alliance, seem confused about whether or not they should take over the country.

Amidst such chaos, the Bush camp has resorted to the time-tested tactic of creating a diversion, suggesting the blame for September 11 may lay elsewhere -- Iraq (surprise) being the favorite fall guy. This comes just weeks after every media mouthpiece instructed us that "ONLY the resources and skills of Osama bin Laden" and the "al- Quaeda network" could have been responsible.

The U.S. may or may not be able to reverse its miserable military fortunes in Afghanistan. But the more dangerous consequences of the U.S. bombing campaign -- a world aroused into anger against American arrogance, in part the very reason for the September 11 tragedy -- will stay with us for a very long time.

Chris Kromm is Director of the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, North Carolina.

*****

Published on Tuesday, October 16, 2001

in the Guardian of London

Gagging the Skeptics The US, founded to protect basic freedoms, is now insisting that its critics are its enemies.

by George Monbiot

If satire died on the day Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize, then last week its corpse was exhumed for a kicking. As head of the United Nations peacekeeping department, Kofi Annan failed to prevent the genocide in Rwanda or the massacre in Srebrenica. Now, as secretary general, he appears to have interpreted the UN charter as generously as possible to allow the attack on Afghanistan to go ahead. Article 51 permits states to defend themselves against attack. It says nothing about subsequent retaliation. It offers no license to attack people who might be harboring a nation's enemies. The bombing of Afghanistan, which began before the UN security council gave its approval, is legally contentious. Yet the man and the organization who overlooked this obstacle to facilitate war are honored for their contribution to peace.

Endowments like the Nobel Peace Prize are surely designed to reward self-sacrifice. Nelson Mandela gave up his liberty, FW de Klerk gave up his power, and both were worthy recipients of the prize. But Kofi Annan, the career bureaucrat, has given up nothing. He has been rewarded for doing as he is told, while nobly submitting to a gigantic salary and bottomless expense account.

Among the other nominees for the prize was a group whose qualifications were rather more robust. Members of Women in Black have routinely risked their lives in the hope of preventing war. They have stayed in the homes of Palestinians being shelled by Israeli tanks and have confronted war criminals in the Balkans. They have stood silently while being abused and spat at during vigils all over the world. But now, in this looking-glass world in which war is peace and peace is war, instead of winning the peace prize the Women in Black have been labeled potential terrorists by the FBI and threatened with a grand jury investigation.

They are in good company. Earlier this year the director of the FBI named the chaotic but harmless organizations Reclaim the Streets and Carnival Against Capitalism in the statement on terrorism he presented to the Senate. Now, partly as a result of his representations, the Senate's new terrorism bill, like Britain's Terrorism Act 2000, redefines the crime so broadly that members of Greenpeace are in danger of being treated like members of al-Qaida. The Bush doctrine - if you're not with us, you're against us - is already being applied.

This government by syllogism makes no sense at all. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida have challenged the US government; ergo anyone who challenges the government is a potential terrorist. That Bin Laden is, according to US officials, a "fascist", while the other groups are progressives is irrelevant: every public hand raised in objection will from now on be treated as a public hand raised in attack. Given that Bin Laden is not a progressive but is a millionaire, it would surely make more sense to round up and interrogate all millionaires.

Lumping Women in Black together with al-Qaida requires just a minor addition to the vocabulary: they have been jointly classified as "anti-American". This term, as used by everyone from the US defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Daily Mail to Tony Blair and several writers on these pages, applies not only to those who hate Americans, but also to those who have challenged US foreign and defense objectives. Implicit in this denunciation is a demand for uncritical support, for a love of government more consonant with the codes of tsarist Russia than with the ideals upon which the United States was founded.

The charge of "anti-Americanism" is itself profoundly anti-American. If the US does not stand for freedom of thought and speech, for diversity and dissent, then we have been deceived as to the nature of the national project. Were the founding fathers to congregate today to discuss the principles enshrined in their declaration of independence, they would be denounced as "anti-American" and investigated as potential terrorists. Anti-American means today precisely what un-American meant in the 1950s. It is an instrument of dismissal, a means of excluding your critics from rational discourse.

Under the new McCarthyism, this dismissal extends to anyone who seeks to promulgate a version of events other than that sanctioned by the US government. On September 20, President Bush told us that "this is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom". Two weeks later, his secretary of state, Colin Powell, met the Emir of Qatar to request that progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom be suppressed. Al-Jazeera is one of the few independent television stations in the Middle East, whose popularity is the result of its uncommon regard for freedom of speech. It is also the only station permitted to operate freely in Kabul. Powell's request that it be squashed was a pre-emptive strike against freedom, which, he hoped, would prevent the world from seeing what was really happening once the bombing began.

Since then, both George Bush and Tony Blair have sought to prevent al- Jazeera from airing video statements by Bin Laden, on the grounds of the preposterous schoolboy intrigue that they "might contain coded messages". Over the weekend the government sought to persuade British broadcasters to restrict their coverage of the war. Blair's spin doctors warned: "You can't trust them [the Taliban] in any way, shape, or form." While true, this applies with equal force to the techniques employed by Downing Street. When Alastair Campbell starts briefing journalists about "Spin Laden", it's a case of the tarantula spinning against the money spider.

If we are to preserve the progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom which President Bush claims to be defending, then we must question everything we see and hear. Though we know that governments lie to us in wartime, most people seem to believe that this universal rule applies to every conflict except the current one. Many of those who now accept that babies were not thrown out of incubators in Kuwait, and that the Belgrano was fleeing when it was hit, are also prepared to believe everything we are being told about Afghanistan and terrorism in the US.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. The magical appearance of the terrorists' luggage, passports and flight manual looks rather too good to be true. The dossier of "evidence" purporting to establish Bin Laden's guilt consists largely of supposition and conjecture. The ration packs being dropped on Afghanistan have no conceivable purpose other than to create the false impression that starving people are being fed. Even the anthrax scare looks suspiciously convenient. Just as the hawks in Washington were losing the public argument about extending the war to other countries, journalists start receiving envelopes full of bacteria, which might as well have been labeled"a gift from Iraq". This could indeed be the work of terrorists, who may have their own reasons for widening the conflict, but there are plenty of other ruthless operators who would benefit from a shift in public opinion.

Democracy is sustained not by public trust but by public skepticism. Unless we are prepared to question, to expose, to challenge and to dissent, we conspire in the demise of the system for which our governments are supposed to be fighting. The true defenders of America are those who are now being told that they are anti-American.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

Published: Sunday, October 21, 2001 6:39 a.m. EDT

Al-Qaeda terrorist duped FBI, Army

By JOSEPH NEFF AND JOHN SULLIVAN, Staff Writers

FORT BRAGG - Ali Mohamed lived a double life that seemed more fiction than fact. He served in the heart of the U.S. military at Fort Bragg and in the inner circle of Osama bin Laden's Islamic fundamentalist terrorists' network.

Long before he was arrested in connection with the 1998 car-bombing attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, there were questions about Ali Mohamed, a retired U.S. Army sergeant. He had puzzled fellow soldiers with his haughty attitude toward America and avowed Islamic fundamentalist beliefs.

Now, as the United States wages war on terrorism, the case of Mohamed shows what the CIA and FBI are up against: terrorist operatives who weave themselves into the fabric of America.

After al-Qaeda's car-bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, it became clear where his allegiance lay. Investigators linked Mohamed to the attacks, which killed 224 people and injured more than 4,500. He was arrested 34 days later and has since pleaded guilty and described his central role in the attack.

Even more than the hijackers of Sept. 11, Mohamed lived and trained in the United States. He had training as a Green Beret officer and turned those skills against the United States. Although law enforcement and intelligence agencies collected information on Mohamed, they assembled the pieces of the puzzle too late -- after the embassies had been bombed.

Identifying such terrorists resembles police work more than traditional warfare, experts say. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to cooperate and not compete over turf, if they are to apprehend terrorists like Mohamed.

"He was an active source for the FBI, a double agent," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA agent and director of counterterrorism at the State Department during the elder Bush's administration.

The FBI "did a lousy job of managing him," Johnson said. "He was holding out on them. He had critical information years ago and didn't give it up."

The FBI declined to be interviewed for this article.

So just who is this educated soldier, fluent in at least four languages, who trained on the drill grounds and red-clay firing ranges of Fort Bragg and taught Green Berets about the Middle East and Islamic fundamentalism? And how did he move back and forth between an outwardly normal immigrant's existence and the hidden world of al-Qaeda?

Mohamed's relationship with the FBI and intelligence services remains wrapped in secrecy. His plea agreement is sealed, as are many of the court documents and much of the testimony. Mohamed was expected to testify -- but did not -- at the trial where the four others were convicted. Mohamed and his lawyer have declined all interview requests.

But a picture emerges from court documents, interviews, trial transcripts and published accounts.

Ever since the attacks Sept. 11, Jason T. Fogg has found himself thinking about Ali Mohamed. He remembers a tall, serious former Egyptian Army major with a haughty attitude toward America.

Fogg, who knew nothing about Mohamed's role in al-Qaeda until a reporter told him, said he and Mohamed had spent three months together in Army training. Mohamed constantly compared the U.S. military with his own, and the former officer always found the American military wanting.

"To be in the [enlisted ranks] and have so much training was weird," said Fogg, now a supervisor with a freight company in Spring Hill, Tenn. "And to be in the U.S. military and have so much hate toward the U.S. was odd. He never referred to America as his country."

Mohamed was quiet but with a ferocious temper and very religious, Fogg said. This echoes court testimony by admitted al-Qaeda members earlier this year about the man they called "Abu Mohamed al Amriki" -- Mohamed the American.

Some al-Qaeda members, however, found spiritual shortcomings in the salty-tongued Mohamed.

"He is not a good practitioner of Islam," testified L'Houssaine Khertchou, a witness in the embassy bombings trial. "You can hear from him some bad words."

Egyptian army experience

Born in Alexandria in 1952, Mohamed joined the Egyptian army in 1971. With a bachelor's in psychology and two years of training at Egypt's military academy, he rose to major in the Egyptian special forces.

Sometime in the early 1980s, after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel in the Camp David accords, Mohamed joined the fundamentalist group Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

About this time, the Egyptian army sent Mohamed to Fort Bragg for special forces training -- common for officers from countries the United States regards as friendly. Training beside U.S. Green Berets, he learned how to command elite soldiers on difficult missions such as special reconnaissance, unconventional warfare and counterinsurgency operations. After four months, he received a diploma with a green beret on it.

Returning home, he served in the Egyptian army for three more years. In 1984, he left to work as a security expert for Egypt Air -- and started to make contact with the CIA.

"This individual approached the CIA to offer information," a U.S. official told The News & Observer, speaking on condition that no further identification be provided. "Some time later, we found out he was talking to known terrorists and had identified himself as a CIA agent. We felt him to be untrustworthy, and we put him on the State Department watch list."

The CIA also warned other U.S. government agencies about Mohamed and urged them to detain him if possible, the official said.

The next year, in 1985, Mohamed managed to get a visa to enter the United States. One year later, he enlisted as a regular soldier in the U.S. Army at the age of 34, unusually old for a recruit. He was assigned to the U.S. Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, the home of the Green Berets and the Delta Force, the elite counterterrorism squad.

Fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, French and English, Mohamed brought extensive knowledge of the Arab world. Though officially a supply sergeant, he spent much of his time teaching soldiers about the Mideast.

Robert Anderson, a retired lieutenant colonel, remembers him vividly. Anderson said Mohamed made no secret of his religious views.

"He had identified himself as a fundamentalist, but after I interviewed him I identified him as a fanatic," said Anderson, who lives in Fayetteville. "So after the interview I said, 'Well, there's one thing I would like to say: Anwar Sadat was a hero to Egypt and to the United States.' He looked at me with these steely eyes and said, 'Sadat was a traitor, and he had to die.' "

Mohamed's beliefs were not just talk.

In 1988, he told Anderson and others that he was using his leave to join the war in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation. The United States was then secretly supporting the Afghan rebels and supplying them with weapons; but it was highly irregular, if not illegal, for an active-duty U.S. soldier to fight in a foreign war. If the Soviets captured him and learned his identity, it would embarrass the United States and further aggravate international tensions.

Anderson and another of Mohamed's superiors speculated that Mohamed would end up in a military prison if he went. Anderson said he submitted an intelligence report to his superiors two weeks before Mohamed departed, but it was ignored.

Mohamed returned about a month later, Anderson said. He had clearly lost weight, suggesting that the trip had been strenuous.

"He comes back and brings me a belt from a Russian special forces soldier that he said he killed," Anderson said.

Anderson wrote up a second report and again heard no response.

Questions about Mohamed

Other soldiers who served with Mohamed said they had unanswered questions about him.

Lamar A. Wood, who worked in the motor pool attached to the 5th Special Forces Group, recalled a time when Mohamed was shipped back to the United States in 1988 during the annual Egypt-U.S. desert war games known as Operation Bright Star.

"He had to come back to the states only after three days or so," Wood said. "There was some trouble there."

Near the end of his tour at Bragg, Mohamed apparently got busier in his work with terrorist groups. Documents from court cases show that he traveled on weekends to New Jersey, where he trained other Islamic fundamentalists in surveillance, weapons and explosives.

He continued this training after he was honorably discharged in 1989 with commendations in his file, including one for "patriotism, valor, fidelity and professional excellence."

Mohamed spent the next five years in the Army Reserves. For nine years after he left active duty, until his arrest in 1998, Mohamed shuttled between California, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia and at least a dozen other countries, the court records show.

It was through his contacts with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad that he met bin Laden, but the date is not clear. It may have been in 1991, when Mohamed again went to Afghanistan to fight. That year, Mohamed helped move bin Laden from Afghanistan to Sudan.

Mohamed was soon handling some of bin Laden's most sensitive security matters, details of which he made public during his guilty plea. After a failed 1994 assassination attempt on bin Laden, Mohamed trained the inner circle of bodyguards for the Saudi exile.

He handled security when bin Laden moved his al-Qaeda entourage from Sudan back to Afghanistan in 1996, as well as when bin Laden met the Hezbollah chief who had directed the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.

Mohamed also shared his extensive military knowledge. He gave basic explosives training for al-Qaeda soldiers in Afghanistan in 1992 and translated training manuals from English to Arabic. In 1993, he trained Somali clansmen in the months leading up to a furious gun battle that took the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers.

Mohamed taught the terrorists how to create cell structures that preserved secrecy and how to move undercover in Western countries. He taught surveillance techniques: how to case targets, photograph them and write attack plans.

And he played a central role in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. In the early 1990s, he set up a cell in the Kenyan capital to support al-Qaeda's operations in Somalia, using a car business and a charity as cover.

"We used various code names to conceal our identities," Mohamed said in his guilty plea. "I used the name 'Jeff.' " In late 1993, al-Qaeda ordered Mohamed to scour Nairobi for targets that would avenge the U.S. involvement in Somalia.

Mohamed conducted surveillance of the U.S. Embassy, the U.S. Agency for International Development and two French facilities. He drew maps and diagrams and rigged a darkroom in a colleague's apartment to avoid dealing with a commercial developer. He later showed the photos to bin Laden in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.

"Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber," Mohamed told the court last year.

Bombings planned patiently

In planning the embassy attacks, Mohamed and his al-Qaeda associates showed the kind of patience that would later characterize the 2001 attacks in America. It was not until August 1998 -- four years later - - that Mohamed's partners parked a truck full of plastic explosives in the very spot bin Laden had chosen. The suicide bomb crumpled buildings, twisted and incinerated buses and shattered windows as far as five blocks away. The blast killed 224 people and injured more than 4,500.

Within two weeks, FBI agents led a squad of 10 into Mohamed's apartment in Sacramento, Calif., using a key provided by his apartment manager, according to testimony at the trial. They copied computer files and photographed documents.

The evidence they found of Mohamed's terrorist activities included documents from his cell in Kenya and materials on how to run terrorist cells and penetrate security cordons. Mohamed was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury on Sept. 10, 1998. He was arrested as he left the grand jury room.

At the request of the U.S. Attorney, federal judges kept the arrest secret for almost a year, filing his case as "United States v. John Doe" and clearing the courtroom whenever it came up. Much of the case remains sealed.

Mohamed would have come first to the attention of the FBI in late 1990 after the murder of the Rabbi Meier Kahane, a radical Jewish leader. When authorities searched the home of El Sayyid Nosair, who was charged with Kahane's murder, they found U.S. Army training manuals, videotaped talks that Mohamed delivered at the Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, an operation plan for Operation Bright Star and other materials marked "Classified" or "Top Secret."

Mohamed, who often stayed in New Jersey with Nosair, was the source of these documents. The documents didn't surface during Nosair's 1991 trial when he was acquitted of killing Kahane, but they did in 1995 when Nosair was convicted of conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center and other New York landmarks in 1993.

Roger Stavis, Nosair's attorney, argued to the jury that the U.S. Army sent Mohamed to New Jersey to do the training. One witness, Khalid Ibrahim, testified that he was trained by Mohamed in New Jersey and then saw him later in Afghanistan.

"He's on active duty, helping Muslims train to help Muslims in Afghanistan, as part of a U.S. government effort," Stavis said in an interview.

The FBI has acknowledged in court filings that its agents interviewed Mohamed several times after he left active duty. In 1993, he told the FBI that bin Laden "ran an organization called al-Qaeda and was building an army which may be used to overthrow the Saudi Government." In 1994, he told the FBI that he had moved bin Laden out of Afghanistan in 1991.

In a 1997 interview, Mohamed admitted to a much deeper involvement in al-Qaeda. An FBI agent wrote that Mohamed said that "he loved Bin Laden and believed in him" and that "one did not need a fatwah [religious ruling] to go against the United States since it was 'obvious' that the United States was the enemy."

However, not all of Bin Laden's people trusted Mohamed. In 1994, Mohamed Atef, the al-Qaeda commander credited with engineering the attack Sept. 11 on New York and Washington, refused to let Mohamed know what name and passport he was traveling under.

Atef "doesn't want Abu Mohamed al Amriki to see his name, because he was afraid that maybe he is working with United States or other governments," L'Houssaine Khertchou testified at the embassy bombing trial in February.

Defense lawyers and many other observers believe that Mohamed, who has not yet been sentenced, is now cooperating with the United States, though the government has never confirmed this. When he is finally sentenced, Mohamed could receive as little as 25 years under his plea agreement, which would allow him to be free at 73.

David Ruhnke, attorney for one of the four embassy bombing defendants, said that Mohamed's deal with the government might strike the jury as unfair, because the the government was seeking the death penalty for two defendants.

"Some of the things [Mohamed] admitted were so serious," Ruhnke said. "The government worried it would impact the jury."

But Larry Johnson, the former State Department counterterrorism chief, has a more skeptical interpretation: Putting Mohamed on trial would unearth material extremely embarrassing for the government.

"The reason he didn't testify was so they wouldn't have to face uncomfortable statements on the FBI," Johnson said. "They are more interested in covering their ass."

There are lessons to be learned, Johnson said. The FBI should have polygraphed Mohamed and used counterintelligence techniques to see if he was forthcoming. The CIA and the FBI should have worked together on Mohamed.

Mohamed has not spoken in public since his guilty plea, but his prior statements carry warnings to the country in whose military he served.

"He knows, for example, that there are hundreds of 'sleepers' or 'submarines' in place who don't fit neatly into the terrorist profile," a 1997 FBI report said. "These individuals don't wear the traditional beards and don't pray at the mosques."

Staff writer Joseph Neff can be reached at <mailto:jneff@newsobserver.com >

News researchers Becky Ogburn, Brooke Cain, Susan Ebbs, Toby Lyles and Lucy Reid contributed to this report.

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Terrorism Meets Reactionism

by Michael Parenti

When almost-elected president George W. Bush announced his "war on terrorism" in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, he also was launching a campaign to advance the agenda of the reactionary Right at home and abroad. This includes rolling back an already mangled federal human services sector, reverting to deficit spending for the benefit of a wealthy creditor class, increasing the repression of dissent, and expanding to a still greater magnitude the budgets and global reach of the US military and other components of the national security state. Indeed, soon after the terrorist attacks, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial (September 19), calling on Bush to quickly take advantage of the "unique political climate" to "assert his leadership not just on security and foreign policy but across the board." The editorial summoned the president to push quickly for more tax-rate cuts, expanded oil drilling in Alaska, fast-track authority for trade negotiations, and raids on the Social Security surplus.

More for War

Bush himself noted that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon offer "an opportunity" to "strengthen America." As numerous conservatives spoke eagerly of putting the country on a permanent war footing, the president proudly declared "the first war of the twenty- first century" against an unspecified enemy to extend over an indefinite time frame. Swept along in the jingoist tide, that gaggle of political wimps known as the US Congress granted Bush the power to initiate military action against any nation, organization, or individual of his choosing, without ever having to proffer evidence to justify the attack. Such an unlimited grant of arbitrary power—in violation of international law, the UN charter, and the US Constitution--transforms the almost-elected president into an absolute monarch who can exercise life-and-death power over any quarter of the world. Needless to say, numerous other nations have greeted the president's elevation to King of the Planet with something less than enthusiasm.

And King of the Planet is how he is acting, bombing the already badly battered and impoverished country of Afghanistan supposedly to "get" Osama bin Laden. Unmentioned in all this is that US leaders have actively fostered and financed the rise of the Taliban, and have long refused to go after bin Laden. Meanwhile, the White House announces that other countries may be bombed at will and the war will continue for many years. And Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz urges that U.S. armed forces be allowed to engage in domestic law enforcement, a responsibility that has been denied the military since 1878.

Under pressure to present a united front against terrorism, Democratic legislators are rolling over on the issue of military spending. Opposition to the so-called missile defense shield seems to have evaporated, as has willingness to preserve the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The lawmakers seem ready to come up with most of the $8.3 billion that the White House says it needs to develop the missile defense shield and move forward with militarizing outer space. Congress is marching in lockstep behind Bush's proposal to jack up the military budget to $328.9 billion for 2002, a spending increase of $38.2 billion over the enacted FY 2001 budget. Additional funds have been promised to the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other skulduggery units of the national security state.

Having been shown that the already gargantuan defense budget was not enough to stop a group of suicidal hijackers armed with box cutters, Bush and Congress thought it best to pour still more money into the pockets of the military-industrial cartel. (Incidentally, the next largest arms budget is Russia's at $51 billion. If we add up the defense allocations of all the leading industrial nations, it comes to less than what the United States is already spending.)

Many of the measures being taken to "fight terrorism" have little to do with actual security and are public relations ploys designed to (a) heighten the nation's siege psychology and (b) demonstrate that the government has things under control. So aircraft carriers are deployed off the coast of New York to "guard the city"; national guardsmen dressed in combat fatigues and armed with automatic weapons "patrol the airports"; sidewalk baggage check-ins and electronic tickets are prohibited supposedly to create greater security. Since increased security leads to greater inconvenience, it has been decided that greater inconvenience will somehow increase security—or at least give the appearance of greater security.

Then there is that biggest public relations ploy of all, the bombing of hillsides and villages in Afghanistan, leaving us with the reassuring image of Uncle Sam striking back at the terrorists. To stop the bombing, the Taliban offered to hand over bin Laden to a third country to stand trial, but this was rejected by the White House. It seems that displaying US retaliatory power and establishing a military presence in that battered country are the primary US goals, not apprehending bin Laden.

Lost in all this is the fact that US leaders have been the greatest purveyors of terrorism throughout the world. In past decades they or their surrogate mercenary forces have unleashed terror bombing campaigns against unarmed civilian populations, destroying houses, schools, hospitals, churches, hotels, factories, farms, bridges, and other nonmilitary targets in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, East Timor, the Congo, Panama, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and numerous other countries, causing death and destruction to millions of innocents. Using death squad terrorism US leaders have also been successful in destroying reformist and democratic movements in scores of countries. Of course hardly a word of this is uttered in the corporate media, leaving Bush and company free to parade themselves as the champions of peace and freedom.

In time, the American people may catch wise that the reactionaries in the White House have not the slightest clue about how they are going to save us from future assaults. They seem more interested in—and are certainly more capable of---taking advantage of terrorist attacks than in preventing them. They have neither the interest nor the will to make the kind of major changes in policy that would dilute the hatred so many people around the world feel toward US power. They are too busy handing the world over to the transnational corporate giants at the expense of people everywhere. And as of now, they have no intention of making a 180 degree shift away from unilateral global domination and toward collective betterment and mutual development.

Reactionary Offensive on the Home Front

Several bills pending in Congress are designed to expand the definition of terrorism to include all but the most innocuous forms of protest. S 1510, for example, treats terrorism as any action that might potentially put another person at risk. The bill gives the Feds power to seize the assets of any organization or individual deemed to be aiding or abetting "terrorist activity." And it can be applied retroactively without a statue of limitations. A telephone interview I did with Radio Tehran in mid-October, trying to explain why US foreign policy is so justifiably hated around the world, might qualify me for detention as someone who is abetting terrorism. Other bills will expand the authority of law enforcement officials to use wiretaps, detain immigrants, subpoena email and Internet records, and infiltrate protest organizations. In keeping with the reactionary Right's agenda, the war against terrorism has become a cover for the war against democratic dissent and public sector services. The message is clear, America must emulate not Athens but Sparta.

One of the White House's earliest steps to protect the country from terrorist violence was to cut from the proposed federal budget the $1 billion slated to assist little children who are victims of domestic abuse or abandonment. Certainly a nation at war has no resources to squander on battered kids or other such frills. Instead Congress passed a $40 billion supplemental, including $20 billion for "recovery efforts," much of it to help clean up and repair New York's financial district.

Bush then came up with an "emergency package" for the airlines, $5 billion in direct cash and $10 billion in loan guarantees, with the promise of billions more. The airlines were beset by fiscal problems well before the September attacks. This bailout has little to do with fighting terrorism. The costs for greater airport security will mostly likely be picked up by the federal government. And taken together, the loss of four planes by United and American Airlines, the impending lawsuits by victims' families, and higher insurance rates do not of themselves create industry-wide insolvency, and do not justify a multibillion dollar bailout. The real story is that once the industry was deregulated, the airlines began overcapitalizing without sufficient regard for earnings, the assumption being that profits would follow after a company squeezed its competitors to the wall by grabbing a larger chunk of the market. So the profligate diseconomies of "free market" corporate competition are once more picked up by the US taxpayer—this time in the name of fighting terrorism.

Meanwhile some 80,000 airline employees were laid off in the several weeks after the terrorist attack, including ticket agents, flight attendants, pilots, mechanics, and ramp workers. They will not see a penny of the windfall reaped by the airline plutocrats and shareholders, whose patriotism does not extend to giving their employees a helping hand. At one point in the House debate, a frustrated Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) shouted out, "Why in this chamber do the big dogs always eat first?" Inslee was expressing his concerns about the 20,000 to 30,000 Boeing workers who were being let go without any emergency allocation for their families. Sen. Peter G. Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) expressed a similar sentiment when casting the lone dissenting vote in the Senate against the airline bailout: "Congress should be wary of indiscriminately dishing out taxpayer dollars to prop up a failing industry without demanding something in return for taxpayers." It remained for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) to explain on behalf of the Bush warmongers why the handout was necessary: "We need to look at transportation again as part of our national defense."

The post-September 11 anti-terrorism hype is serving as an excuse to silence any opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Our nation needs oil to maintain its strength and security, we hear. Against this manipulative message, the environment does not stand much of a chance. Likewise, US Trade representative Zoellick enlisted the terrorism hype in the White House's campaign to surrender our democratic sovereignty to corporate dominated international trade councils. In a Washington Post op-ed (September 20) Zoellick charged that opposition to fast track and globalization was akin to supporting the terrorists. House Republican leaders joined in, claiming that trade legislation was needed to solidify the global coalition fighting terrorism. Here was yet another overreaching opportunistic attempt to wrap the flag around a reactionary special interest.

Actually it is the free trade agreements that threaten our democratic sovereignty. All public programs and services that regulate or infringe in any way upon big-money corporate capitalism can be rolled back by industry-dominated oligarchic trade councils. Corporations can now tell governments---including our federal, state, and local governments---what public programs and regulations are acceptable or unacceptable. The reactionaries do not explain how giving private, nonelective, corporate-dominated trade councils a supranational supreme power to override our laws and our Constitution will help in the war against terrorism.

Looting the Surplus

The bailout to the airline industry is only part of the spending spree that the White House has in store for us. Bush now endorses a "stimulus" of $60 billion to $75 billion to lift the country out of recession by "recharging business investment." He also has called for an additional $60 billion tax cut which, like previous tax reductions, would give meager sums to ordinary folks and lavish amounts to fat cats and plutocrats. Where is all this money for defense, war, internal security, airlines, rebuilding lower Manhattan, tax cuts, and recharging the economy coming from? Much of it is from the Social Security surplus fund—which is why Bush is so eager to spend.

It is a myth that conservatives are practitioners of fiscal responsibility. Rightwing politicians who sing hymns to a balanced budget have been among the wildest deficit spenders. In twelve years (1981-1992) the Reagan-Bush administrations increased the national debt from $850 billion to $4.5 trillion. By early 2000, the debt had climbed to over $5.7 trillion. The deficit is pumped up by two things: first, successive tax cuts to rich individuals and corporations---so that the government increasingly borrows from the wealthy creditors it should be taxing, and second, titanic military budgets. In twelve years, the Reagan-Bush expenditures on the military came to $3.7 trillion. In eight years, Bill Clinton spent over $2 trillion on the military.

The payments on the national debt amount to about $350 billion a year, representing a colossal upward redistribution of income from working taxpayers to rich creditors. The last two Clinton budgets were the first to trim away the yearly deficit and produce a surplus. The first Bush budget also promised to produce a surplus, almost all of it from Social Security taxes. As a loyal representative of financial interests, George W., like his daddy, prefers the upward redistribution of income that comes with a large deficit. The creditor class, composed mostly of superrich individuals and financial institutions, wants this nation to be in debt to it--the same way it wants every other nation to be in debt to it.

Furthermore, the reactionary enemies of Social Security have long argued that the fund will eventually become insolvent and must therefore be privatized (We must destroy the fund in order to save it.) But with Social Security continuing to produce record surpluses, this argument becomes increasingly implausible. By defunding Social Security, either through privatization or deficit spending or both, Bush achieves a key goal of the reactionary agenda.

How Far the Flag?

As of October 2001, almost-elected president Bush sported a 90 percent approval rating, as millions rallied around the flag. A majority support his military assault upon the people of Afghanistan, in the mistaken notion that this will stop terrorism and protect US security. But before losing heart, keep a few things in mind. There are millions of people who, though deeply disturbed by the terrible deeds of September 11, and apprehensive about future attacks, are not completely swept up in the reactionary agenda. Taking an approach that would utilize international law and diplomacy has gone unmentioned in the corporate media, yet 30 percent of Americans support that option, compared to 54 percent who support military actions (with 16 percent undecided) according to a recent Gallup poll. Quite likely a majority of Americans would support an international law approach if they had ever heard it discussed and explained seriously.

In any case, there are millions of people in the US who want neither protracted wars nor a surrender of individual rights and liberties, nor drastic cuts in public services and retirement funds. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets not to hail the chief but to oppose his war and his reactionary agenda. Even among the flag- waivers, support for Bush seems to be a mile wide and an inch deep. The media-pumped jingoistic craze that grips the United States today is mostly just that, a craze. In time, it grows stale and reality returns. One cannot pay the grocery bills with flags or pay the rent with vengeful slogans.

My thoughts go back to another President Bush, George the first, who early in 1991 had an approval rating of 93 percent, and a fawning resolution from Congress hailing his "unerring leadership." Yet within the year, he was soundly defeated for reelection by a garrulous governor from Arkansas. Those who believe in democracy must be undeterred in their determination to educate, organize, and agitate. In any case, swimming against the tide is always preferable to being swept over the waterfall.

Among Michael Parenti's recent books are History as Mystery, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, and the 7th edition of Democracy for the Few.

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Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com

Letter From President Saddam Hussein To An American Citizen

10-22-1

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate

From: Saddam Hussein

To: Christopher J. Love CLove@escint.com

Dear brother in the family of mankind,

I read your e-mail message of October 2nd carefully and I have well pondered over your emotions regarding the victims of the two towers.

All I can say is presenting my condolences to you, and to reiterate the Muslims linguistic formula on occasion, like this: (God has created us, and to him we return. May God give you long life )

In a letter of reply like this, there may be no room to say all I want, not to acquaint you with Saddam Hussein's and his comrades in the leadership way of thinking, or of how Iraqis think through them, and of the kind of principles they believe in.

Nevertheless, as you have come to me to know about things, as I understood from your message: the way my people, the Arabs and Muslims, for whom the Arabs are a model, think. You wanted an answer to these questions by addressing yourself to an official in the leadership of this people, and this religion, as well as to someone from the region, you call the Middle-East.

I may give you an explanation to what happened to the two towers, and made America mourn, and inflicted pain and sorrow on others, because such an event has been inflicted on other people in the past, including Arabs and Muslims, in many cases.

I began this letter, by addressing you by the word "brother", although you are neither Iraqi or Arab, nor a Muslim, as can be seen by your name.

Christopher, do you know why I called you brother? Because I never forget, that all mankind come from Adam and Eve. They are all brothers, although they later became different nations and adherent to different religions. Hence, to our understanding,, we are one family within the peoples of our earth.

In this family, there is vice and virtue, good and bad people. As long as a man safeguards his rights and duties, within himself, and with humanity, avoids transgressing other peoples' rights, greed, and harming others, and tries to be useful to others, only if they ask for his help, he becomes their brother. But, when any member of this family of mankind oppresses, exploits, unjustly wages wars on them, or lies and deceives others, he would be acting like a devil in the form of man.

We, Arabs, have learned this, brother Christopher, before any nation on earth. We have taught it to you, and to all the adherents of divine religions in the Universe, because God the Almighty, had created Adam and Eve on our land.There is no other chronicle or religion, that pretends, or can prove the contrary. Abraham, the friend of God and the father of all prophets, is one of us, as are all the other prophets. Whenever, God made a revelation, the Arabs were the people to undertake the mission of spreading it to other non Arab nations, after believing in it themselves. Again, I say that this the fundamental basis of the humanitarian viewpoint of, not only Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people with him, but also of all Arabs, in all their great homeland, which was divided by British and French colonialism, and which the US is trying to halt its people's unity, and forbid them from enjoying their rights which God bestowed on them on their proper land.

Once again I say, that the basic general rule is that, he who wants to avoid the harm of others, must not harm them. He who wants to enjoy the fruits of his crops must not damage the corps of others. In Iraq, and in the Arab rural regions, and that could be true in different degrees, all over the world, people would fight each other, and some of them maybe killed, but no one ever burns the corps of others. If a criminal ever did so, he would be considered an outcast, and his blood would be shed. Why is such an act so severely judged, although, in comparison, the killing of a man is much more a serious act than the burning of crops?

This customary law in the Iraqi countryside, and maybe in the Arab and world also, is based on two reasons: First: a man, can think, hide, and confront others, while crops cannot run, hide, or draw a gun on who wants to harm them. Second: a man cannot live without crops, and for this reason, burning his crops is equal to depriving him from his right to live, and also, because more than one family may have a share in these crops. The damage would be inflicted, not only on the share of the person who is meant to be harmed. It would include the shares of the entire family: women, children, old people, or even young men, who can carry weapons. It is for this reason, that our religion prohibits the killing of woman, children and old men, as well as the uprooting of trees, when a war is fought, by necessity, between two armies.

Do you know, brother Christopher, that your administration, in its war against the people of Iraq, has been burning not only the cereals in silos, but even the harvest by throwing flares in order to make Iraqi people starve?

Do you know what does this mean? It means collective death. Your successive administrations have killed one million and a half Iraqis in eleven years as a result of the blockade it has imposed on Iraq, according to statistics published international organizations, including American humanitarian organization. You can ask them for details, by Internet.

Food is important and holy to people, because it is related to man's right to live. In the same way medicine has the same sanctity. This is something we have learned from our history and civilization which are thousands of years old, Hence I remind you of the Crusades in 1096-1291 by which the western aggressors came to occupy the land of Arabs, under the pretext of saving Al-Quads from the infidel Muslims as confirmed by documents issued by the west itself. Notice the motto, dear Christopher: "Saving Al-Quads >from the infidel Muslims"! So, the Muslims are infidels, not in the eyes of the church, but in the eyes of the Western leaders who mobilized the nations of the West to come as invaders to the holy land of Al-Quads, which is the land on which landed Prophet Mohammed "Peace be upon him" in his divine nocturnal journey.

An individual person in a nation, may be fanatic because of a wrong reasoning, or awareness, but could leaders be so too?

You may say that this is something that happened a very long time ago. But what made me mention it in my letter to you, is what I saw, and heard of some leaders, not ordinary Western citizens. It seems that as if those leaders have recalled all this inventory of fanaticism and hatred of the times of the Crusades, in which the Western leaders considered the Arabs, who are the people of the country and the owners of the land, as infidels who must be expelled from their land by force.

They have, now, planted the Zionist entity in our land to replace that hatred. They have revived the memory of the old Crusades wars by a new war of Crusades, called for by the highest ranking rulers in your country, and in other countries of the west.

Isn't it a paradox, and double standards, to accuse a citizen of fanaticism, to denounce his fanatic attitude and than to mobilize armies against him, and against the country in which he is living, on the basis of nothing but suspicions, while waging an outrageous campaign of hatred and fanaticism to the maximum, which even includes calling for, and the recalling the old Crusades wars against Arab and Muslims, as we mentioned ? !

Nevertheless it is well-known, that when the Arabs and Muslims leader Salahdin Al-Ayoubi, was told that the leader of Crusades, Richard, who was called the (Heart of Lion), was ill, he sent him a doctor, and that when his horse was killed in a battle, he refused to fight anyone before mounting another horse.

But do you know that your administration has, one way or the other, deprived the people of Iraq from food and medicine?

Do you know the meaning of the death of one million and a half human beings, in addition to those who are killed by bombs and missiles?

Maybe, you and the majority of the peoples of America, do not know that American bombardmen, and death harvest caused by fighter jets, and missiles, are ongoing in Iraq for the last eleven years, and have not stopped until the moment of writing this letter? Do you know why you don't know?! Because the media in your country which is controlled by Zionism, do not want you to known. And because your administration, which says that it is necessary for the peoples of the world to know, does not want you to know. You should ask your administration, why doesn't it speak to you about facts ? Why doesn't present you any information except its devilish fancies ?

As for me, I can tell you why Zionism doesn't want you to know the harm inflicted on the people of Iraq. The Zionist and the American administration believe that it is necessary that Iraqis die. The Jewish Albright, the former US Secretary of State, spoke in this way, or in a similar case, when she said that the objectives of the US foreign policy, justify the death of Iraqi children. The reason is that the Iraqis refused the Zionist usurpation of Arab and Palestinian territories. They refuse to accept the crimes of occupying Palestine, the Golan, and the Lebanese territories, and refuse do accept the Zionists confiscation of the holy places of the believers in God, including Muslims there.

Hence, whenever Zionism has the upper hand over high ranking officials in America, it pushes the administration toward a confrontation with the Arabs, and reinforces Zionist entity, at the expense of Arab and Palestinian rights.

By the way, please ask for the videotapes to see how the Jews, in the occupied territories, kill old men, children and women, in front of the cameras. Do you know that all these crimes have been perpetrated since 1935 by using Western weapons, and in fact, American weapons in particular, weapons that cost billions of dollars, the administration takes from American tax-payers to be granted as an aid to the Zionist entity ?

So, the Arabs and Muslims did not cross the Atlantic, as invaders or aggressors. They did not colonize America. It is America that brought them all kinds of sufferings. If any of your rulers says something different, please discuss it with them. For example, if they say that they crossed the Atlantic to make sure that you get your oil supplies, tell them that oil is guaranteed by mutual interests and non-aggression, not by aggressions, killing, violating other people's rights, and destroying all sanctities.

If your rules say that , they crossed the Atlantic in the past to fight Communism so that it does not invade the West, tell them that the ex-Soviet Union has fallen apart, as has the Warsaw Pact, although I personally don't accept the contradiction between the call for the freedom of thinking, and saying that the Western way of thinking is more vital and modern, as the intellectuals and leaders of the West say, and between fearing Communism.

Do you know, brother Christopher, that the NATO, which was created under the pretext of confronting Communism, still exists, and was even enlarged after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. Decisions of death are taken in its name, against some peoples of the world sometimes, as was the case against Yugoslavia, because it is an independent, and Slovak country, and because the majority of its people are Orthodox, not because their oppression of Muslims in Bosnia, as was claimed, to fool the Muslims, and falsely win their support in international forums?

If we go on, we can give thousands of examples on the blind fanaticism exported by the West to the world with American participation during the last 50 years. But I don't want to burden you. I only want to tell you that the people of Iraq are against all kinds of fanaticism, whether based on religion, nationality or race. They are against the use of fanaticism as a cover for harming people whom God does not accept to harm. They call for love between the peoples and nations of the world. Nevertheless, we do not believe in love on one side only.

Iraq has been harmed severely by the fanaticism of others, including America. It was also severely harmed by terrorism. Maybe you don't know that many the members of our leadership were victims of terrorism and terrorists. Some of them escaped death, by the will of God, after being injured or missed by the terrorists, in addition to the pain inflicted to our people.

Do you know brother, that your administration's reaction to that, was one of encouraging it and rejoicing ? Do you know that your administration has been encouraging terrorism against us for the past eleven years, calling to overthrow us by force, allocating special funds to do so, and boasting about not fearing God, as it publicly announces that on TV screens, because Iraq does not have the same destructive force and armament of America ? The Palestinians, whose right to resist the occupation forces are guaranteed by the international law, promulgated by America and the other big powers, are considered terrorists because they resist the Zionist occupation of their territories, and holy places.

Tell me, brother, if the Vatican is occupied by Arabs, or non-Arab Muslims, wouldn't its people fight the occupying forces? Wouldn't the English people fight for the Westminster cathedral? Or wouldn't the French people, defend Notredame? I say they must fight for them ! Why, then, are your armies occupying Mecca and the land of our Prophet? Why are you occupying the regional waters in the Arab Gulf, in addition to territories in its countries ? Why is your ally, the Zionist entity, occupying our holy places, and territories, in Palestine, by using your arms, andfinancial, political, media, and moral support? And, why are your administration killing people, including children in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Palestine now, just as it did, before that, in Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia and Libya, and the list of Arabs and Muslims to be killed is long ?!

I know that Arabs are far from being fanatic. Do you know why? Because, God, the Almighty, assigned them with the mission of delivering the messages of all religions to humanity, and not to Arabs alone. They have fulfilled their mission, so that all Christians are now indebted to Arabs for guiding them to Faith, which God wanted them to have when, He made it possible for them to reach you, or for you to reach them, so that you know what they believe in, and be affected by it.

I know that Arabs, in general, do not adopt fanatic stances against any people for religious reasons. But, can anyone guarantee that one fanaticism does not create another ? Can anyone guarantee that the death toll and killing, inflicted upon Arabs and Muslims by the American armies, would not lead to a counter-reaction, whether that reaction is well guided, or is a random one, that pleases no one except those who carry it out?

These words are general rules and principles, although I still do not know who is behind what happened to the towers on September 11, 2001. Your government did not help me, or anyone else, by showing, or communicating the information it possesses, so that we can elaborate an opinion, if it needed to know the opinion of those whose people it daily attacks with bombs, starves to death, and deprives from the right to live, construct, and deploy their creativity.

Our law, which is borne of our religion and heritage, and of our reasoning which is thousands of years deep, stipulates: " the Plaintiff should present evidence and the defendant should take an oath." But the plaintiff, which is your administration did not present any evidence so far. Nevertheless, it accused the people it accused, without showing us, or anyone else, any evidence, except for Blair and the ruler of Pakistan, as they both said. The people accused have not pleaded guilty.

Anyhow, I don't think that your administration deserves the condolences of Iraqis, except if it presents its condolences to the Iraqi people for the one million and a half Iraqis it killed, and apologizes to them, for the crimes it committed against them. As for the American people, we have sent them our condolences through Mr. Tareq Aziz's letter to the Voices in the Wilderness Organization MrRamsi Clark, the former Attorney General, on Sept. 18, 2001.

Dear brother,

He who does not want his harvest to be burned must not set fire to the harvest of others. He, who wants to live in security, should accept the right of others to live in security, and he who is irritated, or raged by an aggression, should not aggress others. He who cherishes the lives of his people, should remember that God created all people equal at birth, in death, and in their human values, that's why he should remember that the lives of others are also cherished by their people. He who strikes people with remote control missiles should expect, that there would be someone to seek revenge, for his dignity and the dignity of his people, and consequently does something harmful, or fatal, by stabbing a dagger in his body, or taking his life by a sword.

He who sees himself as a man, who revenges his dignity, should not deprive other men from their dignity, and he who calls for the respect of his people, men and women, should respect the people of other nations.

He who remembers God, must not ignore or forget, that God the Almighty, is capable of everything, and of providing the weak with what makes those who underestimate them, make heed of their rights and respect them.

In any case, the security of humanity is, in our view, a responsibility on the shoulders of all good people. Any irresponsible action on the part of superpowers may give way to a counter irresponsible action by the people, even if the smaller nations do not take such a course of action.

Finally there is something in your letter that you asked to be corrected, if it was wrong about the ex President Bush, is giving us reason to believe that he was our ally in the issue of Kuwait, but he was forced to abide with the United-Nations.The Fact, Mr. Christopher, is that, it was President Bush who adopted the logic of war, right from the first day of those events. He refused solving the problem politically, and entering into a dialogue with us. The resolutions of the United Nations were, in fact, adopted under pressure from Bush and his administration. He then waged the war against Iraq, in a way that had nothing to do with the issue of Kuwait. His objective was to destroy all Iraq, and to deprive its people of the edifice they built, in several decades, and not merely getting the Iraqi armed forces out of Kuwait. He did that in 1991, and he later committed similar things, and he and his administration, are still doing so under different pretexts and justifications.

Wishing that you will have the opportunity to see the facts as they are, and not as your administration present them,

Yours truly

Saddam Hussein Baghdad, Shabban 2,1422 H. Oct. 18, 2001

http://www.konformist.com

Robalini's Note: For those who are unaware, the American Free Press is the new version of The Liberty Lobby, a right-wing populist organization who have a deserved reputation for anti-Semitism. Having said that, noted Zionist underground journalist Barry Chamish personally stated that for all its faults, "I trust The Liberty Lobby more than I trust the New York Times."

Whatever the faults of the philosophy of the philosophy of American Free Press may be - just as, as so many have recent whined, whatever the faults of the philosophy of the WSWS - this is some of the most important questions and stories I have seen printed yet about the 911 tragedy. So long as the American Free Press continues to do such important work, The Konformist will pass on their work without any reservations.

http://www.americanfreepress.net

Evidence Hard to Come by in WTC Case

Much of the case against the Muslim terrorists in the Trade Center attacks is based on copies of a letter considered by experts to be a fraud.

By Christopher Bollyn

It has been exactly one month since four passenger planes were involved in an atrocious act of terrorism on American soil and yet no hard evidence has been presented associating the prime suspect, Osama bin Laden, with the events of Sept. 11.

A case has been built, largely in the media, blaming Muslim terrorists for hijacking the passenger planes and flying them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The much-awaited scientific evidence from the planes' flight data recorders, the "black boxes," has yet to be presented.

An FBI spokesman told American Free Press on Oct. 11 that only two black boxes had been retrieved from the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania crash sites but the information they contain has not been released, although AFP was told that it would be-"eventually."

In the eye of the public, much of the government's case against the 19 Muslim Arabs named as suspects rests on copies of a suspicious and possibly spurious five-page letter, hand-written in Arabic, which has turned up in three different locations. However, the document itself raises more questions than it answers, leading one expert to say that it could be "the greatest falsification in history."

A law enforcement official described the letter to the press as "a spiritual instruction manual" giving the terrorists step-by-step instructions for their suicide mission and preparing them spiritually for death. The document contained a mission checklist and instructions for mental and spiritual preparation, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, according to USA Today on Oct. 2.

One copy was found in Mohammed Atta's suitcase, which "mysteriously" was left behind at the airport in Portland, Maine. Another copy was found in the wreckage in Pennsylvania and a third was found in the car of one of the suspects.

Muslim scholars and specialists question the authenticity of the letter saying the phraseology and style are "un-Islamic." "This is not the way Muslims speak or think, there is a mysterious element here, and the FBI knows it for sure," Mohammed Hurub, a Muslim scholar from Bethlehem said.

There are serious questions and problems with a number of foreign and peculiar phrases and ideas contained in the text of the letter.

If the letter, which is described as "part theological, part mission statement" is genuine, "then the men who murdered more than 7,000 innocent people believed in a very exclusive version of Islam-or were surprisingly unfamiliar with their religion," Middle East expert and journalist Robert Fisk says.

The problems first arise in the opening lines of the letter, "In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate . . . in the name of God, of myself, and of my family." No Muslim would include his family in such a prayer, Fisk says, but would mention the Prophet Mohammed immediately after he mentioned God.

Furthermore, the letter lacks any mention whatsoever of the specific political reasons for the planned actions that could tie the suspects to the agenda advocated by Osama bin Laden. Why is there no mention of the political reasons that would compel these men to take such drastic action?

Although the original letter has not been found, the copied text reads "remind yourself that in this night you will face many challenges. But you have to face them and understand it 100 percent . . ."

American scholars raise doubts about the use of "100 percent" noting that it is "hardly a theological term to be found in a religious exhortation," according to Fisk.

The letter urges the reader to recite the morning prayer and then goes on to quote from it. A devout Muslim would hardly need to be told of his duty to say his prayers and would certainly not need to be reminded of the text of those prayers. It is as if a Christian would have to be reminded of The Lord's Prayer.

In some respects similar to the suspicious "diaries" of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, there are many other problems with this letter which is now being used as "evidence" to tie the suspects together in a religiously-motivated conspiracy.

STILL ALIVE?

FBI Mixed Up on True Identities of Perpetrators

Some of the men the FBI claims hijacked planes on Sept. 11 and crashed them into hubs of U.S. finance and defense are still alive.

Exclusive to American Free Press

http://www.americanfreepress.net

By Christopher J. Petherick

At least six men the FBI says were part of the ring of 19 hijackers who seized passenger jets with box cutters on Sept. 11 and crashed them into the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon are "alive and well," report Mideast officials.

Information Times, an on-line publication, reported that Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal told the Arabic Press after meeting with President George W. Bush on Sept. 20: "It was proved that five of the names included in the FBI list had nothing to do with what happened."

According to The Orlando Sentinel, the Saudi Arabian embassy confirmed that four of the five mentioned by Al-Faisal -Saeed Alghamdi, Mohand Alshehri, Abdul aziz Alo mari and Salem Alhazmi-are not dead and had nothing to do with the heinous terror attacks in New York and Washington.

Saudi officials at the embassy were un able to verify the whereabouts of the fifth accused hijacker, Khalid Al-Mihdhar. However, Arab newspapers say Al-Mihd har is still alive.

NUMBER SIX

A sixth person on the FBI's list, Saudi national Waleed Alshehri, is living in Casablanca, according to an official with the Royal Air Moroc, the Moroccan commercial airline. According to the unnamed official, Alshehri lived in Dayton Beach, Fla., where he took flight training at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Now he works for a Moroccan airline.

On Sept. 22, Associated Press reported that Alshehri had spoken to the U.S. embassy in Morocco.

The FBI acknowledges that the identities of some of the purported hijackers are still in question because some of the suspects' names on flight rosters had been reported stolen months before the attacks took place.

Why the FBI still lists these men as suspected hijackers who were killed during the terrorist assault remains a mystery.

The following contains the FBI's list of suspected hijackers:

American Airlines No. 77, Boeing 757

1) Khalid Almihdhar-Possible Saudi national
o Possible resident of San Diego, California, and New York
o Alias: Sannan Al-Makki; Khalid Bin Muhammad; Addallah Al-Mihdhar;
Khalid Mohammad Al-Saqaf
2) Majed Moqed-Possible Saudi national
o Alias: Majed M.GH Moqed; Majed Moqed, Majed Mashaan Moqed
3) Nawaf Alhazmi-Possible Saudi national
o Possible resident of Fort Lee, New Jersey; Wayne, New Jersey; San
Diego, California
o Alias: Nawaf Al-Hazmi; Nawaf Al Hazmi; Nawaf M.S. Al Hazmi
4) Salem Alhazmi-Possible Saudi national
o Possible resident of Fort Lee, New Jersey; Wayne, New Jersey
5) Hani Hanjour
o Possible resident of Phoenix, Arizona, and San Diego, California
o Alias: Hani Saleh Hanjour; Hani Saleh; Hani Hanjour, Hani Saleh H.
Hanjour

American Airlines No. 11, Boeing 767

1) Satam M.A. Al Suqami-Possible Saudi national
o Dates of birth used: June 28, 1976; Last known address: United Arab
Emirates
2) Waleed M. Alshehri-Possible Saudi national
o Dates of birth used: Sept. 13, 1974; Jan. 1, 1976; March 3, 1976;
July 8, 1977; Dec. 20, 1978; May 11, 1979; Nov. 5, 1979
o Possible residence(s): Hollywood, Florida; Orlando, Florida;
Daytona Beach, Florida
o Believed to be a pilot
3) Wail M. Alshehri
o Date of birth used: Sept. 1, 1968
o Possible residence(s): Hollywood, Florida; Newton, Massachusetts
o Believed to be a pilot
4) Mohamed Atta-Possible Egyptian national
o Date of birth used: Sept. 1, 1968
o Possible residence(s): Hollywood, Florida; Coral Springs, Florida;
Hamburg, Germany
o Believed to be a pilot
o Alias: Mehan Atta; Mohammad El Amir; Muhammad Atta; Mohamed El
Sayed; Mohamed Elsayed; Muhammad Muhammad Al Amir Awag Al Sayyid
Atta; Muhammad Muhammad Al-Amir Awad Al Sayad
5) Abdulaziz Alomari-Possible Saudi national
o Dates of birth used: Dec. 24, 1972 and May 28, 1979
o Possible residence(s): Hollywood, Florida
o Believed to be a pilot

United Airlines No. 175, Boeing 767

1) Marwan Al-Shehhi
o Date of birth used: May 9, 1978
o Possible residence(s): Hollywood, Florida
o Believed to be a pilot
o Alias: Marwan Yusif Muhammad Rashid Al-Shehi; Marwan Yusif Muhammad
Rashid Lakrab Al-Shihhi; Abu Abdullah
2) Fayez Rashid Ahmed Hassan Al Qadi Banihammad
o Possible residence(s): Delray Beach, Florida
o Alias: Fayez Ahmad; Banihammad Fayez Abu Dhabi Banihammad; Fayez
Rashid Ahmed; Banihammad Fayez; Rasid Ahmed Hassen Alqadi; Abu Dhabi
Banihammad; Ahmed Fayez; Faez Ahmed
3) Ahmed Alghamdi
o Alias: Ahmed Salah Alghamdi
4) Hamza Alghamdi
o Possible residence(s): Delray Beach, Fla.
o Alias: Hamza Al-Ghamdi; Hamza Ghamdi; Hamzah Alghamdi;Hamza
Alghamdi Saleh
5) Mohand Alshehri
o Possible residence(s): Delray Beach, Fla.
o Alias: Mohammed Alshehhi; Mohamd Alshehri; Mohald Alshehri

United Airlines No. 93, Boeing 757

1) Saeed Alghamdi
o Possible residence: Delray Beach, Florida
o Alias: Abdul Rahman Saed Alghamdi; Ali S Alghamdi; Al- Gamdi; Saad
M.S. Al Ghamdi; Sadda Al Ghamdi; Saheed Al-Ghamdi; Seed Al Ghamdi
2) Ahmed Ibrahim A. Al Haznawi - Possible Saudi national
o Date of birth used: Oct. 11, 1980
o Possible residence: Delray Beach, Fla.
o Alias: Ahmed Alhaznawi
3) Ahmed Alnami
o Possible residence: Delray Beach, Fla.
o Alias: Ali Ahmed Alnami; Ahmed A. Al-Nami; Ahmed Al- Nawi
4) Ziad Samir Jarrah
o Believed to be a pilot
o Alias: Zaid Jarrahi; Zaid Samr Jarrah; Ziad S. Jarrah; Ziad Jarrah
Jarrat, Ziad Samir Jarrahi H

What Does Bin Laden Really Want?

While the U.S. government and mainstream media refuse to discuss the foreign policies that breed resentment against America in the Islamic world, ignoring these fundamental issues can only perpetuate the conflict.

Exclusive to American Free Press

http://www.americanfreepress.net

By Christopher Bollyn

It was late on Sunday morning when President George W. Bush began his "war against terrorism" by launching 50 cruise missiles and bombing raids on Taliban targets in Afghanistan.

Within hours, Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind behind the terror attacks of Sept. 11, responded with an effective counter- offensive in the war of words. Bin Laden spoke to the world through a taped message broadcast by Al Jazeera, the most widely watched television news channel in the Arab world.

The American mass media portrays bin Laden as "consumed by hatred for the West" and misrepresents his primary political goals of restoring integrity to Saudi Arabia and confronting American abuses in the Middle East.

"Bush and Blair may tell the world they are going to win the 'war against terrorism' but in the Middle East, where Osama bin Laden is acquiring almost mythic status among Arabs, they have already lost," Robert Fisk of The Indepen dent said on Oct. 10. A resident of Cairo told Fisk that Arabs believe America "is trying to kill the one man ready to tell the truth."

Bin Laden, who "is hardly a madman," according to experts, despises the Saudi royal family, which he regards as corrupt surrogates of American rule. In 1998, bin Laden said he expects "for the ruler of Riyadh the same fate as the shah of Iran." Because the Saudi royal family "sells the interests of its own people and betrays the nation," bin Laden said, "They shall all be wiped out."

"The United States is committed to defending the House of Saud against any internal political movement that might want to get rid of it, or perhaps even reform it," Writes Said K. Aburish, author of The Rise, Corruption, and Coming Fall of the House of Saud. The American troops in Saudi Arabia are seen as protecting the royal family, which "is becoming less acceptable by the day," Aburish says. The House of Saud is not unlike the regime of Saddam Hussein, according to Aburish, "People still disappear in the middle of the night in Saudi Arabia; people are imprisoned without being charged; people have no voice in the running of the government, and they have squandered the country's wealth . . . the country is not only broke, they are heavily in debt.

"Saudi Arabia operates in very mysterious ways. . . . We are talking about a closed society ," he said. The royal family is dedicated to keeping the kingdom closed because "outside influences would include calls for human rights, equality, democracy and things of this sort that the House of Saud is not about to tolerate," Aburish said.

The oppressive conditions in the country are causing massive unrest, although due to suppression by the government, Islamic fundamentalism provides the only vehicle for political reform movements-and these are becoming increasingly violent. "Osama bin Laden is the prophet of these movements," Aburish says, whose "number one issue" is that American troops should leave Saudi Arabia, and secondly that "there should be a Muslim Jerusalem where Islamic holy places are protected."

Bin Laden has "developed a stunningly deceptive regional war calculus that stands a reasonable chance of success," according to Paul M. Wihbey of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Washington.

"His strongest belief is that Saudi Arabia can be brought to its knees, the House of Saud deposed," Wihbey says. His "overriding goal" is to return to Saudi Arabia in triumph and put an end to the existing regime.

Support for bin Laden's political program to reform Saudi Arabia comes from all levels of society, Aburish says, including from members of the House of Saud who belong to Islam ic fundamentalist groups.

There is an ongoing power struggle between two competing factions in the Saudi royal family over how to deal with American requests to neutralize bin Laden, Wihbey said. One week after the terror attacks it was reported that the ailing Saudi king, Fahd, had flown to Geneva with a massive entourage and is now in seclusion.

If bin Laden survives and returns to Saudi Arabia, his supporters will greet him as a Mahdi (messiah). This would mark "a dramatically new geopolitical landscape," Wihbey said.

Bin Laden today stands accused by the U.S. government of masterminding the kamikaze terror attacks in New York and Washington although evidence linking him to the crimes has not been presented to the public.

"Neither I nor my organization Al-Qaida is involved in the attacks and the U.S. has traced the attackers within America," bin Laden told the Karachi daily Ummat. "The attackers could be anybody, people who are part of the American system yet rebel against it, or some group that wants to make this century a century of confrontation between Islam and Christianity."

Bin Laden has always carefully denied involvement in terror attacks such as the U.S. embassy bombings saying it is not his job to organize such attacks. His role is "to create awareness about the injustices done by the U.S. to Muslims." He rails against the "corrupting influence of the West" on the Muslim world. "What has the West given the world? A lust for power and a license to loot and plunder the poorer countries," he said in a recent interview with an Arab journalist, as reported in The Washington Times.

"We are against the American system but not the American people. Islam does not allow killing of innocent people, men, women and children even in the event of war," he said to Ummat.

Although bin Laden denied personal responsibility for the terror attacks, in the taped speech, broadcast as Bush began the bombing of Afghanistan, he accused the United States of hypocrisy, murder, and occupation of Islamic lands, articulating widely held grievances which resonate throughout the Islamic and Arab world.

Bin Laden said that the suffering America is "tasting now" is insignificant compared to the humiliation and degradation the Islamic world has suffered for more than 80 years. "Its sons are killed, its blood is shed, its sanctuaries are attacked, and no one hears and no one heeds.

"Millions of innocent children are being killed as I speak. They are being killed in Iraq without committing any sins," bin Laden said about the human toll of the 11 years of U.S.-led sanctions on Iraq.

"Israeli tanks infest Palestine," bin Laden said, "in Jenin, Ramallah, Rafah, Beit Jalla, and other places in the land of Islam, and we don't hear anyone raising his voice or moving a limb.

"To America, I say only a few words to it and its people," bin Laden concluded. "I swear by God, who has elevated the skies without pillars, neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine, and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Mohammed, peace be upon him.

"The enmity between us and the Jews," bin Laden said in 1998, "goes far back in time and is deep rooted. There is no question that war between the two of us is inevitable. The leaders in America and in other countries as well have fallen victim to Jewish Zionist blackmail," he said, "They have mobilized their people against Islam and against Muslims. "Our mothers and daughters and sons are slaughtered every day with the approval of America and its support," he said. "And, while America blocks the entry of weapons into Islamic countries, it provides the Israelis with a continuous supply of arms allowing them thus to kill and massacre more Muslims.

"The American government is leading the country toward hell. We say to the Americans as people and to American mothers, if they cherish their lives and if they cherish their sons, they must elect an American patriotic government that caters to their interests, not the interests of the Jews."

Al Jazeera, often called the CNN of the Arab world, reaches 35 million viewers and is the only news organization with a correspondent and direct satellite link in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Secretary of State Colin Powell appealed to the emir of Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based, to stop the flow of information the network was sending from Afghanistan.

Al Jazeera resisted American censorship saying that in order to be seen as credible by its viewers it must show both sides of the conflict. Bin Laden is a party to the conflict and has a point of view that deserves to be heard, a spokesman for the network said.

The Voice of America, however, pulled an interview with Mullah Omar Mohammed, the Taliban leader, following objections from the U.S. deputy secretary of state and senior officials of the National Security Council.

"America controls the governments of the Islamic countries . . . they are in the grip of the United States," Omar said. "America has created the evil that is attacking it. The evil will not disappear even if I die and Osama dies and others die. The U.S. should step back and review its policy. It should stop trying to impose its empire on the rest of the world, especially on Islamic countries."

Iran's supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei condemned the American-led attack on Afghanistan as cruelty and a major mistake for the United States and Britain. The government of Iran is opposed to the Taliban but is not assisting in the U.S.-led attack on Afghanistan.

Khamenei said that it was not true that the strikes are part of a campaign against terrorism. "Their real purpose is to expand their [U.S. and U.K.] power and domination," he told a meeting of clerics in Tehran the day after the bombing began.

"What can justify this oppression that will lead to the killing and wounding of people and forcing many innocent Afghans to leave their homes?

"The Americans must know that they might be able to achieve their short-term goals with military strikes," he said. "But they will be hurt in the long run. Without doubt, their acts will bring instability for them."

Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi condemned the attacks and expressed Iran's concerns that such military operation could "provoke extremist reactions."

"We stressed from the beginning that terrorism cannot be eradicated through military actions," he said at a news conference the day after the bombing began. "Its causes must be identified and eliminated."

Reproduced From: http://www.americanfreepress.net

What's So Complex About It?

By Michael Albert ZNet

In the past few weeks I have minutely explored, often with Stephen Shalom, multifold concerns about September 11 and the "war on terrorism." With him I have tried to calmly and soberly respond to all kinds of concerns people feel. I recommend doing it. We all need to become adept at rebutting the insanely manipulative media messages that crowd into so many people's minds, and into our own as well. But going straight to the uncomplicated heart of the matter sometimes has merit, too.

The U.S. bombing of Afghanistan is a barbaric assault on defenseless civilians. It threatens a nearly incomprehensible human calamity. It is pursuing abominable goals.

The bombing is not a "just war,' as Richard Falk labels it in The Nation, but a vigilante attack. No, it is not a vigilante attack; it is a vigilante lynch-mob assault writ large. No, it is not even a vigilante lynch mob assault writ large--even vigilante lynch mobs go after only those they think are culprits and not innocent bystanders. The bombing of Afghanistan is a gargantuan repugnance hurled against some of the poorest people on the planet. And this gargantuan repugnance is undertaken not out of sincere if horrendously misguided desires to curtail terrorism--since the bombing undeniably manifests terror and feeds the wellsprings of more terrorism to come--but out of malicious desires to establish a new elite-serving logic of U.S. policy-making via an endless War on Terrorism to replace the defunct Cold War. This is rehashed Reaganism made more cataclysmic than even his dismal mind could conceive.

When people say, but doesn't the U.S. have a right to defend itself? Don't we have to do something?, I understand their hurt, pain, anger, and confusion. But I also have to admit that I want to scream that the U.S. is increasing the likelihood that a million or more souls will suffer fatal starvation. That is not self defense. Doing something does not entail that we be barbaric. We can do something desirable rather than horrific, for example.

Put differently, what kind of thinking sees denying food to humans as self defense, as the only "3something" at our disposal? The answer is thinking like Bush's, thinking like bin Laden's, thinking that treats innocent human lives as chess pieces, as checkers, as tidily winks, in pursuit of its own deadly agendas. Thinking that is willing to rocket a plane into a building to take 6,000 innocent lives, or thinking that is willing to drop bombs into an already devastated country abetting cataclysmic starvation is terrorist thinking. Or, more often in the case of average upset folks, it is thinking that has been systematically denied the most basic information relevant to the issues at hand, and that is too fearful, depressed, angry, or cynical to admit disturbing truths and reason through real options and values.

You think I exaggerate?

Jean Ziegler, Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said October 15, "The bombing has to stop right now. There is a humanitarian emergency." Lest anyone miss the point, he continued, "In winter the lorries cannot go in any more. Millions of Afghans will be unreachable in winter and winter is coming very, very soon." As Reuters reported (and AP carried as well, but not any U.S. newspaper or other major media outlet, as best I can tell), "the United Nations has warned of a catastrophe unless aid can get through for up to seven million Afghans." Ziegler continues, "We must give the (humanitarian) organizations a chance to save the millions of people who are internally displaced (inside Afghanistan)," adding that he was echoing an (essentially unreported) appeal made by U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson a few days earlier, who was in turn echoing reports that go back to before the bombing. Ziegler called the bombing "a catastrophe for humanitarian work." Or in the words of Christian Aid Spokesman Dominic Nutt (quoted in the Scotsman but again in no U.S. papers): "We are beyond the stage where we can sit down and talk about this over tea. If they stop the bombing we can get the food aid in, it's as simple as that. Tony Blair and George Bush have repeatedly said this is a three-stringed offensive--diplomatic, military and humanitarian. Well the diplomatic and military are there but where is the humanitarian? A few planes throwing lunchboxes around over the mountains is laughable." You can look at reports from one AID agency after another, it is all the same story. Impending calamity, stop the bombing.

So what's complicated in all this?

Perhaps someone with a more subtle mind than mine can clarify it for me. But assuming one has the above information at hand, to me it seems to boil down to this. If we bomb (or even just threaten to bomb), they are more likely to starve. If we don't bomb (or threaten to bomb), they are less likely to starve. If we continue bombing, we are telling the innocent civilians who may starve--not thousands but millions of them--you just don't count. Compared to Washington's agenda, you are nothing.

And what is Washington's agenda? Remarkably the stated aim is to get bin Laden and to try him or perhaps just execute him ourselves. We could stop the bombing and have him tried in a third country, the Taliban has noted, but that's not acceptable. So for this minuscule gradation of difference, we are told that Washington is willing to risk 7 million people. Behind the rhetoric, to me the real goals appear to be to delegitimate international law, to establish that Washington will get its way regardless of impediments and that we can and will act unilaterally whenever it suits us--the technical term for which is to ensure that our threats remain "credible"--and to propel a long-term war on terrorism to entrench the most reactionary policies in the U.S. and around the globe, and, along with all that, to terminate bin Laden and others. Risking seven million people's lives for these aims is worse than doing it only for the minuscule gradation of trying bin Laden ourselves rather than having a third country do it, because the additional reasons are all grotesquely negative, supposing such calculus is even manageable by a sane mind.

When I was a kid and first learned about Nazi Germany, like many other kids, I asked how the German population could abide such horrors. I even wondered if maybe Germans were somehow genetically evil or amoral. I have long since understood that Germans weren't different than Brits or Americans or anyone else, though their circumstances were different, but for those who still don't understand mass subservience to vile crimes induced by structural processes of great power and breadth, I have to admit that I mostly just want to shout: Look around, dammit!

We live in a highly advanced country with means of communication that are virtually instantaneous and vastly superior to what the German populace had. We don't have a dictator and brownshirts threatening everyone who dissents. Dissent here can be somewhat unpleasant and may involve some sacrifice and risk, but the price is most often way less than incarceration, much less death. That's fact one. Fact two is that our country is risking murdering a few million civilians in the next few months--every serious commentator knows it, no serious commentator denies it--and we are pursuing that genocidal path on the idiotic or grotesquely racist pretext that by so doing we are reducing terrorism in the world, even as we add millions to the tally of civilians currently terrorized for political purposes and simultaneously breed new hate and desperation that will yield still more terror in the future. Does anyone remember "destroying the city to save it"? What's next? Terrorize the planet to rid it of terrorists? For people of my generation, in the Vietnam War the U.S. killed roughly 2 million Vietnamese over years and years of horrible violation of the norms of justice, liberty, and plain humanity. The utterly incomprehensible truth is that the U.S. could attain that same level of massacre in the next few months, and, whether it happens or not, our leaders, our media moguls and commentators, in fact most of our "intelligentsia" are quite sanguine about doing so.

It is possible, with considerable effort, for the average person to discover that this "war" is potentially genocidal. One can easily get much more background, context, and analysis from ZNet, sure--but of course only one out of roughly every five hundred or one thousand U.S. citizens has ever encountered ZNet--but one can get that single insight, the possibility that genocidal calamity is imminent, even from the NY Times or Washington Post or any major paper that one might read, if one digs deep into it and reads it very carefully, that is. Of course, the fact that such information isn't prime time news in every outlet in the land reveals how supinely our media elevate obedience above truth. Our media pundits are seeing the AID and UN reports and calls for a bombing halt I mentioned above, they are seeing stories about these in newspapers from Scotland to India, of course, and they are simply excluding the information from U.S. communications. Yet even with this massive media obfuscation, which says volumes about our society, how hard is this war to comprehend, supposing one actually tries to comprehend it?

Shortly after September 11 there was a letter in the NYT that a grade school child wrote to the editor, and I paraphrase from memory: "If we attack them aren't we doing to them what they did to us?" This child wasn't a genius, just a normal elementary school student. The Times probably ran the letter to show how cute kids can be, but of course the child was correct, not cute. The real question is why don't more of us see what the child instantly saw, even now, weeks later, with the horror before our eyes?

Yes, a never-ending trumpet beat of patriotism proclaiming U.S. virtues and motives contributes to our blindness. Of course accumulated confusions, augmented daily, cloud our understanding and push the sad facts of potential starvation out of our field of vision. And yes the human capacity for self deception to avoid travail contributes, no doubt, to the process, as does anger and fear. But I suspect most people's blindness is largely due to resignation. The key fact, I suspect, isn't that people don't know about the criminality of U.S. policies, though there is an element of that at work, especially in the more educated classes, to be sure. But even among those carefully groomed to be socially and politically ignorant -- which is to say those who have higher educations -- I think many people do know at some broad level Washington's culpability for crimes, and of those who don't know, many don't in part because they are deceived, sure, but also in part because they are more or less actively avoiding knowing. And in my view the key factor causing this avoidance isn't that people are sublimating comprehension to rationalizations due to cowardly fearing the implications of dissent and wanting to run with the big crowd instead of against it. I think instead that people can find deep resources of courage if they think it will do some good. Witness those firefighters, average folks, running up the stairs of the WTC.

No, to me the biggest impediment to dissenting is that people feel that they can't impact the situation in any useful way. If one has no positive hope, then of course it appears easiest and least painful and even most productive to toe the line and get on with life, trying to ignore the injustices perpetrated by one's country, or to alibi them, or even to claim them to be meritorious, while also trying to do what one can for one's kids and families, where we believe we can have an impact. To admit the horror that our country is producing seems to auger only alienation and tears. Here is one of many examples -- at the end of an email that I got from a young woman as I was finishing writing this essay, the author laments: "I've never had a huge amount of trust in governmental actions. But what I do know is that I have no control over anything. And all I can do is hope."

It follows that the task of those who understand the efficacy of dissent is not only to counter lies and rationalizations by calmly and soberly addressing all kinds of media-induced confusions that people have, but also to demonstrate to people their capacity to make a difference. We have to escort people, and sometimes ourselves too, over the chasms of cynicism and doubt to the productivity of informed confidence.

We do not face, as some would claim, a transformed world turned upside down and inside out. There is no new DNA coursing through us and our major societal institutions are as they were yesterday, last week, and last year. In fact, the main innovation in this month's events is that major violence based in the third world hit for the first time in modern history people in the first world. But the problem of civilians being attacked is all too familiar. And all too often the perpetrator is us, or those we arm and empower, including in this case since bin Laden is a prime example of monstrous blowback. And now the problem is being replicated, writ ever larger, as if by a berserk Xerox machine.

What we have to do is precisely what we would want others to do: oppose barbaric policies with our words and deeds, arouse ever greater numbers of dissenters, and nurture ever greater commitment to dissent, until elites cannot sensibly believe that a "War on Terrorism" will lead to anything but a population thoroughly fed up with and hostile to elites. People all over the world are embarking on this path…we should too.

Whom the Gods Would Destroy

by Clyde Wilson

"The Afghan air defences still pose a threat to the United States." So Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld, the latest in a long line of robotic technocrats who have held his post (remember McNamara?), informed the world on the airways recently. If you resist Americans bombing you, then you are a threat to the United States. To resist the U.S. government is to embrace prima facie evil and to deserve destruction. Doubtless, General Sherman is smiling through the sulphur fumes. You can hear "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in the background.

And the President himself is so incoherent that he can nasal on about enemies that are "cowardly," "faceless," and to be understood simply and only as "evil" attackers of "freedom." The first moment of clear thought tells anyone that the perpetrators were not cowardly, whatever else may be said about them. And they were not "faceless" either. They were known to the government and had been operating freely in our country. September 11 was a vicious attack on life and property. It was an attack on freedom only if we allow it to be. To misconceive your enemy is a dangerous fault.

Words are not everything, and can be used for evil (remember Clinton). However, Bush’s crippled style indicates more than a problem of articulation. It indicates a lack of thought, a lack of focus, a disconnection between the words and the realities for which they are counters. And that betrays an inability to encompass the big picture, to grasp the essential elements of the situation, which is the sine qua non of good leadership and administration. Every successful statesman (and soldier) that I can think in history has been eloquent (though often laconic) in crisis, for eloquence is simply clear thought. In the President we have not a lack of articulateness, but a lack even of simple plain-speaking shrewdness.

Was ever so much deadly power at the command of one so lacking in wisdom and gravitas?

After briefing by his handlers, the President shifted from describing the situation as terrorism to describing it as "war." In law, international and domestic, "war" has a rather exact meaning. Constitutionally, that grave evocation can come only from a declaration by Congress of the existence of such a state between the United States and another state.

But the rhetorical "war" allows a shift from hunting terrorists to a war against the institutions and civil population of another state alleged to have sheltered the terrorists and one that is surely not on board the "New World Order" proclaimed by George Senior.

George Senior had the same disconnect. I recall his fuming about Panamanian rowdies harrassing the wife of an American officer. There was an unacknowledged racist implication, but the disconnect was that, thanks to the federal government, such incidents occur a thousand times a day in the United States. And Senior was "sickened" by the video of Los Angeles police officers’ tactics in subduing a muscular felon high on PCP. At the same time he was authorizing the "turkey shoot" that murdered thousands of unresisting non-felonious Iraqui soldiers (not to mention the civilians).

And then, our born-again leader proclaims "Operation Infinite Justice." One would think that a Christian would understand that there is only one Source of infinite justice. But America and God are the same thing in minds like those of our leaders. We had to get rid of that slogan, not because it offends a Christian majority but because it offends Muslim sensibilities.

And while fighting a war against Muslim terrorists, we must be so obedient to ethnic sensibilities that airport security must body search little old ladies whose families have been in the country since the 1600s – to avoid "profiling." And how about the disconnect between fighting Muslim terrorists in the East while killing Christian men, women, and children in the Balkans in aid of Muslim terrorists?

A few weeks ago, our long-time member of the US House of Representatives from my district in South Carolina, Floyd Spence, passed away. He was, as politicians go, a pretty plain and honest man. He left instructions that a Confederate flag be displayed and "Dixie" be played at his funeral in the country town near which I live. However, one of the princes, Vice Emperor Cheney, refused to make his ceremonial appearance at the occasion if anything reflecting the South appeared. So, the family, the community, and the wishes of the dead must defer to the ideology of an imperial government that, with billions in treasure, cannot fend off murderous mass attacks on the population. One would think that in a crisis, some of the best American symbols of courage and loyalty would be celebrated (as they were in World War II).

Instead of correcting and punishing the incompetence and failures of the bureaucrats, Congress rises to the crisis by voting them still more billions. And our solons, in peacetime, blithely vote away personal liberties against search and seizure that are the products of a millennium of struggle, in pursuit of an illusory security.

I hope I am wrong, but so far as one can tell, the people at large have not displayed much reason or morality in their responses to the crisis. Enthusiasm to get the enemy (never mind which) resembles the fervor displayed for the favorite athletic team – a stupid but potent force. (In my area lots of people now have two flags on their vehicles – the Stars and Stripes and the banner of their favorite college team.) In decadent Rome the citizens engaged in bloody battles over the respective merits of the Blue and Green chariot racing teams with the same zeal they held against the foreign enemy.

"The increase in barbarity goes on until everything is dissolved in blind violence...and the pleasure of destroying and punishing," wrote Richard Weaver in contemplation of World War II. The end result, he said, is nihilism, the loss of all humane values. Long before Weaver it was common wisdom that: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

October 29, 2001

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

Robert Sterling Editor,

The Konformist http://www.konformist.com

Senate OKs anti-terror bill

By Jesse J. Holland

Oct. 25, 2001 | WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate sent President Bush a package of anti-terror measures Thursday that gives police sweeping new powers to search people's homes and business records secretly and to eavesdrop on telephone and computer conversations.

Bush said he will sign the bill "so that we can combat terrorism and prevent future attacks.''

The Senate approved the bill 98-1 a day after the House signed on. But lawmakers, worried about possible abuse of the new wiretapping and surveillance powers, decided to place a four-year cap on that part of the legislation.

"It gives us the time to investigate whether there were any outrageous abuses," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said.

The legislation, somewhat weakened from the administration's original proposal, expands the FBI's wiretapping and electronic surveillance authority and imposes stronger penalties for harboring or financing terrorists. It also expands the number of crimes considered terrorist acts and increases the punishment for committing them.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said the Justice Department will begin using the new powers immediately.

"Upon the president's signature, I will direct investigators and prosecutors to begin immediately seeking court orders to intercept communications related to an expanded list of crimes under the legislation," he said.

The House and Senate approved Bush's anti-terrorism package in less than two months, skipping much of the normal committee process in their haste. Lawmakers say they still came up with a good bill.

"The gestation period has been a few weeks. But it's a heck of a lot better than to have given birth to a monster, and we didn't do that," said Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

Critics disagreed. "It is still dangerous legislation, and unfortunately there are still too many weaknesses in the bill that could end up curbing and infringing fundamental civil rights and liberties," said Ralph Neas, president of the liberal People For the American Way.

Russ Feingold, D-Wis., was the only senator to vote against the package. "This bill does not strike the right balance between empowering law enforcement and protecting civil liberties," Feingold said.

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, retorted: "I don't know anybody in this country who's afraid of their law enforcement people at this time."

"They're afraid of terrorism. And frankly, this bill will go a long way to giving the tools to our law enforcement community to be able to do what really needs to be done, to give us the maximum protection that we can get in this society," Hatch said.

The new legislation give police not only new powers to fight terrorism but ways to help curb other crimes, too. "This bill can be an effective tool against terrorism, and against drug trafficking, and against organized crime, and it should have been done a long time ago," said Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md.

The new legislation allows nationwide jurisdiction for search warrants and electronic surveillance devices, including legal expansion of those devices to e-mail and Internet. It also authorizes the use of roving wiretaps, in which officials get orders that allow them to tap whatever telephone a person uses instead of one telephone at a time.

The legislation also relaxes rules to allow the FBI and intelligence officials to share grand jury and wiretap information more easily.

Senators also insisted on tacking money-laundering stipulations into the bill to thwart the flow of money to terrorist groups and protect the U.S. banking system from illicit money. "The modernization of our money-laundering laws is long overdue," said Sarbanes, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

The House inserted an expiration date for the new wiretapping and electronic surveillance powers. Under the bill, Congress has to renew the anti-terrorism legislation before Dec. 31, 2005, or the eavesdropping sections expire.

Ashcroft and Bush fought strongly against that provision, but Republican leaders in the House told them the bill could not muster a majority without it.

The attorney general also wanted to detain indefinitely any non- Americans suspected of terrorism. House and Senate negotiators decided instead to give prosecutors only seven days to start deportation procedures or charge an immigrant with a crime. Otherwise, the person has to be released.

Human rights complained that the bill still allows authorities to keep immigrants in jail throughout the deportation process.

That "can result in a virtual life sentence, and the bill provides only the barest of judicial oversight of the attorney general's new power," said Elisa Massimino, director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., did not vote.

*****

Ashcroft To Order US Police To Begin Using Broad New Powers

10-26-1

WASHINGTON (UPI) - Attorney General John Ashcroft says he will order U.S. law enforcement to immediately use broad new police powers contained in an anti-terrorism bill once it becomes law.

"History's judgment will be harsh ... if we fail to use every available resource to prevent future terrorist attacks," the attorney general said Thursday at the U.S. Conference of Mayors. "... Our enemies now have new reason to fear."

Congress is expected to deliver the bill to President Bush today. The president is expected to sign the legislation into law immediately.

Civil libertarians have pledged to challenge some of the new law's provisions in court on constitutional grounds.

Ashcroft said once the bill has Bush's signature, he will order the 94 U.S. attorney's office and the 56 FBI field offices in the United States to begin implementing its provisions.

Citing the war against organized crime under then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Ashcroft said the current Justice Department has adopted the same tactics against terrorism.

'We Will Use All Our Weapons'

"Let the terrorists among us be warned," Ashcroft said. "If you overstay your visa, even by one day, we will arrest you. If you violate a local law, you will be put in jail and kept in custody as long as possible.

"We will use every available statute. We will seek every prosecutorial advantage. We will use all our weapons within the law and under the Constitution to protect life and enhance security for America."

Ashcroft suggested that the Justice Department, which has charged no one directly in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, believes some of those arrested on minor charges since then might be terrorists.

"To date, our anti-terrorism offensive has arrested or detained nearly 1,000 individuals as part of the Sept. 11 terrorism investigation," Ashcroft said. "Those who violated the law remain in custody. Taking suspected terrorists in violation of the law off the streets and keeping them locked up is our clear strategy to prevent terrorism within our borders."

As for the new police powers contained in the legislation headed for Bush's desk, "a new era in America's fight against terrorism, made tragically necessary by the attacks of Sept. 11, is about to begin," Ashcroft said.

The attorney general said he would seek court-ordered wiretaps on communications "related to an expanded list of crimes under the legislation. Communications regarding terrorist offenses such as the use of biological or chemical agents, financing acts of terrorism or materially supporting terrorism will be subject to interception by law enforcement."

Ashcroft said the department would immediately begin seeking "roving" wiretaps of suspected terrorists. Previously, federal judges could authorize wiretaps on a particular telephone number in a particular jurisdiction. Under the new legislation, judges can order wiretaps against an individual, and the FBI can conduct surveillance on that individual on any phone in any jurisdiction.

Focus on Internet

"Investigators will be directed to pursue aggressively terrorists on the Internet," Ashcroft said. "New authority in the legislation permits the use of devices that capture senders' and receivers' addresses associated with communications on the Internet.

"Law enforcement will begin immediately to seek search warrants to obtain unopened voice mail stored on a computer, just as they traditionally have used search warrants to obtain unopened e-mail. They will also begin to use new subpoena power to obtain payment information such as credit card or bank account numbers of suspected terrorists on the Internet."

Ashcroft appeared to be anticipating challenges from civil libertarians against some provisions of the new legislation, but said the provisions were necessary.

"Some will ask whether a civilized nation, a nation of law and not of men, can use the law to defend itself from barbarians and remain civilized," Ashcroft said. "Our answer, unequivocally, is 'Yes.' Yes, we will defend civilization, and yes, we will preserve the rule of law because it makes us civilized."

*****

http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine2.html

[Douglas Valentine is the author of The Phoenix Program, a highly recommended book]

Homeland Insecurity By Douglas Valentine

Under Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, the Homeland Security Office will coordinate 46 government agencies against terrorist suspects in the United States. Ridge will perform this function in conjunction with Bush's deputy national security advisor, Army Gen. Wayne Downing. Bush Administration officials are still working out the "lines of authority" between the two new positions, but it's clear that from now on, the military is going to have a central role in domestic anti- terrorism activities.

The reason for the military's prominence is simple: Bush wants to establish special, extra-legal military tribunals that can try suspected terrorists without the ordinary legal constraints of American justice. These military tribunals apparently would have the authority to execute terrorists within 30 days of their conviction.

The Bush Administration denied considering a national identification card system that would empower our Big Brothers with the omnipotence required to catch terrorists before they strike. But you can be sure that some system will be devised to enable Ridge at Homeland Security, and Downing on behalf of the Pentagon, to keep track of every suspects every move." The problem is that no one has yet defined "suspect".

The Usual Suspects During the Vietnam War, under the CIA's Phoenix Program --which is the model for the Homeland Security Office -- a terrorist suspect was anyone accused by one anonymous source. Just one. The suspect was then arrested, indefinitely detained in a CIA interrogation center, and tortured until he or she (or in some cases children as young as twelve) confessed, informed on others, died, or was brought before a military tribunal (such as Bush is proposing) for disposition. In thousands of cases, innocent people were imprisoned and tortured based on the word of an anonymous informer who had a personal grudge, or was actually a Viet Cong double agent feeding the names of loyal citizens into the Phoenix blacklist.

At no point in the process did suspects have access to due process or lawyers, and thus, in 1971, four US Congresspersons stated their belief that the Phoenix Program violated that part of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war. I repeat, in time of war. But those sorts of abuses can't happen here, during Bush's newly declared war on terrorism, right?

Yeah, right. Symbolically, the terror attacks of 11 September wiped the psychological slate clean. All the moral prohibitions on the reactionary right wing have been lifted. The same thing happened in the Fatherland after the First World War -- and that is the real threat of anti-terrorism we're facing in America today. In the name of anti-terrorism, all of the nation's pent-up anger and frustration over Vietnam, and a host of other "cultural" issues, is poised to be unleashed on the Enemy Within. And the Bush Administration and its propagandists have already defined the Enemy Within in very clear terms: "We're all Israelis now," they say, adding that, "You're with us or you're against us," in the declared war against terrorism. And being "against us" is a dangerous proposition.

As noted, Bush is considerating the formation of Phoenix-style military tribunals that operate beyond due process of law. The system was tested in Vietnam thirty years ago, and perfected in Israel on the Palestinians, and is ready for application here and now.

The New Psywar As stated twelve years ago in the October 1989, Marine Corps Gazette (p 22-26a), Bush's New War will be "widely dispersed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point." There will be no "definable battlefields or fronts," and the distinction between "civilian" and "military" will disappear. "Success will depend heavily on effectiveness in joint operations (such as Bush proposes between Ridge at Homeland Security and Downing at the Pentagon) as lines between responsibility and mission become very blurred." According to the Gazette article, success in the New War against undefined suspects will also depend on "psychological operations" manifest "in the form of media/information intervention." One must be "adept at manipulating the media to alter domestic and world opinion...." On the psywar battlefield, "Television news may become a more powerful operational weapon than armored divisions."

The TV "hawks" love to blame the anti-war movement for Americas defeat in Vietnam, and they assert in these do-or-die times that dissent promotes terrorism. In terms of the psywar strategy outlined above, this is exactly how nationalists and even pacifists became equated with terrorists in Vietnam, and thus subject to indefinite detention and torture in an interrogation center, and -- in the case of some 40,000 plus individuals -- assassination under the CIA's Phoenix Program.

The Bush Administration claims that a war against terrorism requires different justice. The strategy is working in Israel, but in Vietnam it turned an entire population against its government and engendered a tragedy of epic proportions. One can only wonder how Americans will react if due process is abandoned through the Office of Homeland Security, under the direction of the Pentagon.

*****

Terror Act Has Lasting Effects

By Declan McCullagh

2:00 a.m. Oct. 26, 2001 PDT

WASHINGTON -- Legislators who sent a sweeping anti-terrorism bill to President Bush this week proudly say that the most controversial surveillance sections will expire in 2005.

Senate Judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) said that a four- year expiration date "will be crucial in making sure that these new law enforcement powers are not abused." In the House, Bob Barr (R- Georgia) stressed that "we take very seriously the sunset provisions in this bill."

But the Dec. 2005 expiration date embedded in the USA Act -- which the Senate approved 98 to 1 on Thursday -- applies only to a tiny part of the mammoth bill.

After the president signs the measure on Friday, police will have the permanent ability to conduct Internet surveillance without a court order in some circumstances, secretly search homes and offices without notifying the owner, and share confidential grand jury information with the CIA.

Also exempt from the expiration date are investigations underway by Dec. 2005, and any future investigations of crimes that took place before that date.

On Thursday, Attorney General John Ashcroft vowed to publish new guidelines as soon as the president signs the bill, which is expected to happen Friday. "I will issue directives requiring law enforcement to make use of new powers in intelligence gathering, criminal procedure and immigration violations," Ashcroft said.

President Bush said this week that he looks forward to signing the USA Act, which his administration requested in response to the Sep. 11 hijackings, "so that we can combat terrorism and prevent future attacks."

During the Senate debate Thursday, the lone critic of the bill was Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin), who introduced an unsuccessful series of pro-privacy amendments earlier this month.

"We in this body have a duty to analyze, to test, to weigh new laws that the zealous and often sincere advocates of security would suggest to us," Feingold said. "This is what I have tried to do with this anti-terrorism bill. And that is why I will vote against this bill."

Feingold said the USA Act "does not strike the right balance between empowering law enforcement and protecting constitutional freedoms."

But not one of his colleagues joined him in dissent. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) seemed to speak for the rest of the Senate when saying "the homefront is a war front" and arguing that police needed new surveillance powers.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) did not vote.

Other sections of the USA Act, which the House approved by a 357 to 66 vote on Wednesday, that do not expire include the following:

Police can sneak into someone's house or office, search the contents, and leave without ever telling the owner. This would be supervised by a court, and the notification of the surreptitious search "may be delayed" indefinitely. (Section 213)

Any U.S. attorney or state attorney general can order the installation of the FBI's Carnivore surveillance system and record addresses of Web pages visited and e-mail correspondents -- without going to a judge. Previously, there were stiffer legal restrictions on Carnivore and other Internet surveillance techniques. (Section 216)

Any American "with intent to defraud" who scans in an image of a foreign currency note or e-mails or transmits such an image will go to jail for up to 20 years. (Section 375)

An accused terrorist who is a foreign citizen and who cannot be deported can be held for an unspecified series of "periods of up to six months" with the attorney general's approval. (Section 412)

Biometric technology, such as fingerprint readers or iris scanners, will become part of an "integrated entry and exit data system" with the identities of visa holders who hope to enter the U.S. (Section 414)

Any Internet provider or telephone company must turn over customer information, including phone numbers called -- no court order required -- if the FBI claims the "records sought are relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism." The company contacted may not "disclose to any person" that the FBI is doing an investigation. (Section 505)

Credit reporting firms like Equifax must disclose to the FBI any information that agents request in connection with a terrorist investigation -- without police needing to seek a court order first. Current law permits this only in espionage cases. (Section 505)

The current definition of terrorism is radically expanded to include biochemical attacks and computer hacking. Some current computer crimes -- such as hacking a U.S. government system or breaking into and damaging any Internet-connected computer -- are covered. (Section 808)

A new crime of "cyberterrorism" is added, which covers hacking attempts causing damage "aggregating at least $5,000 in value" in one year, any damage to medical equipment or "physical injury to any person." Prison terms range between five and 20 years. (Section 814)

New computer forensics labs will be created to inspect "seized or intercepted computer evidence relating to criminal activity (including cyberterrorism)" and to train federal agents. (Section 816)

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New WTC Evidence Raises Questions Of Evidence Destruction Here New, Stongest-Possible Evidence Of US Corporation Executive's Guilt In WTC Destruction - Destruction Of Evidence The Certain Motive

From Dick Eastman eastman@wolfenet.com 10-26-1

The evidence that the destruction of the WTC was to destroy evidence contained on the 23rd and 24th floors of the North Tower is now incontrovertible. This message is the first revelation of the evidence that makes this conclusion a certainty. As yet no one has contacted any authorities with this information. (I want to make sure it is well in the public sphere before I show up at the FBI office here in Yakima.)

Dick Eastman 223 S. 64th Ave Yakima, Washington

I want you to provide me with lists of names I can contact in government and elsewhere around the world. I also want you to work by your own avenues to get to any officials or law enforcement agencies with jurisdiction in this case. A war and the greatest crime in history are involved, and many of the people responsible are standing in the way of justice.

Here is evidence supplied by the Head of Security of the WTC on network television indicating that the FBI floors (the 22nd, 23rd and 24th floors) of the North Tower -- 70 floors below the crash-bombing impact -- had been devastated and reduced to debris that this same Head of Security himself dug through to get to trapped persons (whom he saved).

But it was on these floors that the entire accumulation of evidence and investigation briefs on two highly important cases were being stored:

1) the case against Mobil Oil and James Giffen on illegal oil swaps between Iran and Kazakhstan (at that time before a New York grand jury as described in great detail by Seymore Hersh in the July 9 New Yorker magazine);

2) and even more important, the evidence in the investigation of GOLD PRICE FIXING stemming from charges brought against Alan Greenspan, Morgan & Company, Goldman Sachs.

(see below for full reconstruction of this crime -- that is now all but confirmed by this revelation of a bomb devastating the FBI floors of the North Tower before the tower collapsed.)

At noon I received a phone call from New England from Steve. He was reviewing recorded footage of coverage of the destruction of the WTC on NBC's program "48 Hours." Steve has reviewed the footage many times and taken detailed notes.

I took notes at my computer as he spoke. After the south tower collapsed, men went up to the 22nd floor of the WTC and "dug" someone out of the "rubble" he found there. {It is known that these floors contained the New York FBI offices -- Peter Jennings actually did a two-day network news story on the effects of the destroyed evidence and files on American financial crime investigations around the world.] -----

The 48 Hours anchor was interviewing the Head of Security of the WTC about the evacuation who had received a call, after the South tower was down, from the Port Authority's Command Center on the 22nd floor asking for rescue. The Head of Security himself traveled to that floor in the company of a NY Fireman where they found the offices devastated to the point where they had to "tunnel through debris" to "dig out" the two or three Port Authority workers who were trapped there. All of this happened 73 floors below crash-bombing impact. ---

The man who called me about this -- Steve from Maine -- said that he had received a copy detailing the evidence for a terror frame-up from one of the hundreds of people pester with my posts each day (whose name I recall from my address book) -- and that he had been reviewing three lists of occupants of the WTC.

He gave the sites for two different listings of WTC tower occupants, which I copied as follows:

Tenants by floor and square footage - www.cnn.com/special/2001/trade.center/tenants1.html

and

Occupation by tenancy - www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/article/tower1.html

He noticed from these that listings were given for all floors EXCEPT floors 23 and 24, immediately above the location of the call for "digging out" rescue -- indicating that the debris had fallen down from a destructive event occurring on the floor directly above. Steve left off with this statement (which I am not able now to confirm or disconfirm): "The Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was where all of the records of the Waco Siege were being kept. I think this is their MO." Meaning their modus operandi -- i.e., their distinctive pattern of crime. ____

Here is the post that prompted Steve's phone call:

Below I present what I think are incontrovertible reasons for concluding that the WTC/Pentagon crash-bombings were a frame-up designed to benefit members of, at least, these four groups:

1) people profiting from the opium trade of the Northern Alliance drug-lords and the money-laundering through global investment channels that the opium trade and the derivative heroin trade supports;

2) people seeking control of the $6 trillion worth of oil and natural gas in Central Asia;

3) people seeking to win back support to increasingly unpopular Sharonist policies in Israel; and

4) people arraigned before a grand jury on charges of fixing gold prices, illegal involvement in oil swaps between Kazakhstan and (sanctioned) Iran, and bribery in cases where all incriminating documentary evidence was stored in FBI files and data banks in one of the twin towers of the WTC.

All four of these groups have fluid secret channels of communication through networked integration of banking, politics, the CIA and Mossad connections. The fact is if one of these groups was complicit the other three would have to be also.

Here are three independently developed arguments:

I. Best guess origins of the WTC/Pentagon crash-bombing frame-up.

Mossad and the CIA were supporting traffic in Afghan-opium-derived heroin -- devoting public resources to protect and assist the suppliers and distributors of the multi-trillion-dollar money- laundered drug revenue deposits backing the global investments of American and British elite finance. The Afghan Northern Alliance drug-lords grow 70 to 90 percent of the worlds opium, the prime ingredient of heroin The opium which is moved across the small China- Afghan boarder for processing and distribution by the giant People's Liberation Army, that amazing transnational corporation, Triad drug cartel-and military super military establishment all in one. Against the tremendous- stake interests this giant outlaw network, the morally conservative Taliban had been eradicating Afghan opium production, suppressing supply to drug-lords and the drug-revenue flow money- laundering establishment bankers and global investors alike.

Thus "crisis" became the initial motivation of a renegade group of CIA and/or Mossad in seeking ways to defeat Afghanistan's Talibanist government. (Nothing absurd so far, right?)

Next, the Russian and Kazakh mafias have criminal ties to U.S. executive James Giffen in Kazakhstan -- a man under investigation by a New York grand jury in the months before September 11 for illegal involvement in an oil swaps between Kazakhstan and (sanctioned) Iran (source: the Aug. 9 New Yorker Magazine for a full account of this by Seymore Hershe -- and all of the evidence for this crime was being kept at the WTC on the 20th through 25th floor of one of the twin towers where the FBI had its New York Offices. And James Giffen is the key man everyone has to go through to get any oil agreement with Kazakhstan -- including any pipelines built that would traverse Afghanistan.

(There is $6 trillion dollars worth of oil and gas in Central Asia.)

Giffen certainly understood -- if he did not originate the idea -- that if he could get operatives (even "captured" vengeful Islamic activists whose rage could be shaped and directed to use of terror) to destroy the FBI offices in the WTC building and the documentation evidence it contained, then he would be escape grand jury indictment - - and, as an powerful added benefit, the (framed) Taliban would get replaced with a regime in Afghanistan that would permit a pipeline to be built -- preferably a Northern Alliance drug-lord government that would harmonize with Giffen's own unethical (murderous) entrepreneurial style. (See the New Yorker article for details of Giffen's history.)

(So far this super-crime scheme involves only a small group of people- - Russian Mafia and perhaps a Giffen - renegade CIA or a Giffen "dark- side" Mossad link. But other, even more powerful players may have had involvement -- certainly they stood to gain tremendously if the crash-bomb frame-up were successfully accomplished.

(Prior to September 11 charges had been brought against Alan Greenspan (forgive me -- in a previous post I said "Milton Friedman" instead of Greenspan -- Friedman is a great and honest and honorable academic scholar and Nobel Prize winner -- who, very superficially, looks like Greenspan) -- at any rate, Alan Greenspan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan & Co. and other powerful American financial figures and institutions had charges brought against them -- reportedly a very well-documented case -- over the fixing of gold prices -- with evidence for that case too stored by the FBI on the FBI floors of the WTC! These parties would not only profit heavily from the "carrot" of both oil and drug monies circulating through their great financial institutions, but they also would gain from avoiding the "stick" of one of the most threatening lawsuits ever to confront the U.S. financial establishment (realize what a guilty verdict in this case would mean to these leading financial families and to the Establishment in general!) -- these parties would welcome predictable and certainly substantial benefits from the the destruction of the evidence in the WTC and of some of the witnesses and researchers on the case as well.)

Notice that so far we have powerful men with powerful incentives who characteristically operate in secret and under the protection of wealth, status and power -- both the carrot ($2 trillion in annual drug revenues funneled through the banking system -- which has funded much of the proceeds to fund the development of the Princeling-Triad dictatorship in China, btw, -- (The Chinese communists have been in the opium business since the 1930's -- Mao pioneered the model later followed by Peru's Shining Path and Colombia's Maoist F.A.R.C. narco- terrorists. And Zhou Enlai devised the plan in the 1950's of weakening American society through a drug invasion.)

"China white" heroin distributed by the People's Liberation Army, made from Afgan opium links all banker and oilman to the corrupt and renegade the secret state agencies, CIA, FBI, and Mossad -- renegade agents of either agency may have seen this opportunity for mutual gain and found the way -- having profiles of each of the players -- to propose the crash-bombing frame-up as the best "solution" to each of players most troublesome problems, while making enormous profits besides.

Note that the Bush's are tied to both the CIA and oil and, through Mena Arkansas drug smuggling and through the Iran-Contra drugs and arms deals etc. (drug-world investigator Daniel Hopsicker, as well as Noam Chomsky and many others have exposed this thoroughly -- at least in the broad strokes necessary to support this reconstruction of the crime.)

(The facts of the drug connections are known to everyone from the Russians, to the John Birchers, to Wired Magazine, Harpers, New Yorker, the Village Voice, the Nation, and Rolling Stone Magazine, all having explored the drug - Establishment connections in great detail.)

Which brings us to Ariel Sharon. His hard-head policy of retaliation regardless of 'collateral damage' and his provocation at the mosque cost him dearly in world opinion. In fact, the Bush administration was very close to initiating a major policy shift -- obviously known to Sharon from the greatest intelligence organization in the world -- Bush was planning the recognition/sponsorship of a separate Palestinian state. Also war crime charges had been brought against Sharon in international court, further putting his hard-line policy against the Palestinians in unfavorable light.

Mindful of Ariel Sharon's self-made hard spot, it is entirely possible that the same CIA or Mossad mastermind that thought of the crash-bombing frame-up plan in the first place decided to take the risk of telling Sharon about the plan, offering it as a solution to the trapped old "freedom fighter's" problems as well. If the U.S. could be made to think that the hated Osama bin Laden -- that Islamic fundamentalism itself -- is responsible for destroying twin towers of the WTC and the American government itself, then, Sharon would certainly grasp, American opinion would radically swing to an extremely hard line against all Moslem and Arab entities not securely under their thumb, and most particularly, from Sharon's viewpoint, against Palestinians.

No profile of Sharon gives any indication that he would not close on such a deal, such a serving of his higher good, his prime directive.

And that is all that was needed to carry off this operation.

The getting and conditioning/deceiving of hijackers is an easy affair.

Mossad has infiltrated bin Ladin's forces in Central Asia and the Mideast -- but it is a radically decentralized organization (as it must be to remain viable) and so it was an easy matter for this "dark- side" Mossad, with Sharon's clandestine approval, to trick some very angry and vengeful Arabs into thinking they were doing bin Ladens or some other anti-Zionist or anti- Globalization radicals to agree to hijack the four planes. Millions in the world hated the America and the globalization that the World Trade Center represents. These recruited hijackers need not have been Arabs -- there are Croats, Serbs, Latin Americans, and Iranians and any number of other victim- pool people who could have volunteered to conduct the hijacking -- possibly without fully understanding the end result of the mission -- they need not have "signed on" for a suicide bombing. (Many aviation experts on the net are describing a system built into commercial airliners for taking over control of flight from the ground, a system developed to combat terrorism. It is possible that the course of the plane's flight was taken over by this system installed to thwart hijackers (detailed in several reports on the web.) But if the crashes were not effected in this way, psychological-control methods, wholly sufficient for the job, were also available. The technology of behavior control is further advanced than the popular press has made people aware. Skilled psy op agents can get subjects angry enough and convinced enough of the justice and good effects of "acts' represented as serving their 'cause" to be willing to undertake even suicidal missions. (Activist Alan Yu has researched this technology as have other researchers from a broad spectrum of political orientation.)

And this is all that is needed to conduct the terror act.

But then what?

When the crashes take place -- word merely has to be put out by those involved (the CIA, Mossad, Sharon and those complicit in the Bush Administration, (based on his behavior, my money is on Paul Wolfowitz) to push the theme that bin Ladin was responsible and that this aggressive war to overthrow the Taliban is the only immediate appropriate reaction -- since, the spin goes, the Afghans are responsible for "harboring" bin Laden and that "harboring is exactly the same as terrorism" and that for that reason the entire Afghan government must be terminated (must be "ended as a state" to use Wolfowitz's revealing phrasing of September 12.)

The frame-up has all sorts of collateral benefits for the perpetrators. Now the perpetrators can tell the unsuspecting that bin Ladin's guilt has been established beyond doubt -- that for the sake of the security and safety of Israel and the United States that it is necessary that the impression of an "open and shut case" must be spun. (The news media is exhorted to be patriotic and exemplary "wartime correspondents" and sets about selling the blaming of bin Ladin and advocating war and overthrow in Afghanistan -- because they have been deceitfully led to believe they really know who bombed the buildings; and among the elite of the news publishers, they "know" it is in the best interests of Israel and Wall Street that this be the response, that this be the spin.

And Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair each benefit enormously, politically.

And trillions of dollars are enough to subdue and suppress criticism of the investigation -- after all, who would know better than the CIA and Mossad exactly who is responsible? (The fact has been reported -- in a different context, of course -- that the U.S. intelligence receives all of its ground intelligence from Central Asia through Mossad's network of infiltrator spies -- in other words, whatever "proofs" the U.S. has (and has shown Tony Blair and NATO) has come exclusively through Sharon via Mossad. The "evidence" so- called, thus, is no counterweight to this reconstruction of the crime. The "evidence" comes exclusively from the prime "frame-up" suspect.

Has Mossad done this kind of thing before? Remember the USS Liberty, an American ship with flag flying, deliberately attacked and sunk (in multiple attack waves) with efforts to kill every sailor aboard -- either to destroy information that the ship may have intercepted or to frame Arab states to gain the support of American public opinion. (There are other cases involving the blowing up of a disco dance nightclub, again to frame targeted enemies -- a case actually brought to light by the non-renegade "good side" Mossad.

The cover-up apparently has unlimited resources. Two Mossad men caught red handed days after the WTC crash-bombings, were carrying explosive charges and detonation controls in the government chambers of the Mexican legislature? Apparently big bribes have been, because these men have been set free.

One surmises that appeals are made to the bodey man of a "destabilizing international crisis" is the truth were to get out. This is ancient cloak of deviant ruling elites.

How many readers -- even if they strongly suspect that this reconstruction fits the facts -- would not deny the conclusion anyway because of fear of what this fact would do to Israel's reputation and thus to her security and survival?

Yet this view may be wrong. If Israeli's on the "good side" were to arrest Sharon and chase down the renegades of the Mossad "dark side" and bring them to justice -- tensions in the Mideast would dissolve, and good-faith restored -- good faith that will never return to the world as long as the greatest terror frame-up in history is not corrected by justice and the truth.

Also, if this reconstruction is valid, then that certainly raises the likelihood that Ariel Sharon was also the man who gave the order for the murder of Yhitzak Rabin. Israel's greatest peacemaker (if that title does not go to Began for his treaty with Sadat.)

Conviction of Sharon would mean that the warmongering "take-no- prisoners" school of Zionism would at last be discredited and that the humanitarian way of Rabin could again be given another chance -- with the Palestinians gaining restored faith in Israel to be fair and just after seeing Sharon removed and brought to justice.

I know that at this point you are poised to throw the usual tomatoes and call me a "loon" and a "nazi" -- but I know that those who call me those names are themselves fearful that this analysis may be right.. (And I forgive you in advance for having to through those tomatoes out of loyalty and not knowing what else to do in your uncertainty.)

It is a rotten world all around -- but my advice is to seek the truth wherever it leads and then to enforce justice -- justice against the real authors of the Sept 11 terror, whoever they may be -- to go after Sharon just as strenuously as you were recently ready to hunt down bin Laden.

And of course, the United States has a similar house cleaning of its topmost shelves of power and influence -- a job that we have been putting off since the 1870's. (How the entire world will benefit from that job!)

(And I should make this clearer: The media are not silent because they are complicit in the terror -- they are silent because they are "yes men" who "know where their bread is buttered" and they are not about to jump up and say "Sharon did it" until they see others in their positions doing so. This is consistent with today's "Dilbert" world of Establishment-monopolized organizations. Only an earth shaking event, like the exposing of the Establishment's role in the WTC terror, will shake down this system.)

Now, let's discuss this intelligently.

Dick Eastman Yakima, Washington Every man is responsible to every other man.

Next I will supply information on the two criminal cases in which critical evidence and files were destroyed.

(The Iran Oil Swap case and the gold price fixing case.)

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