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"If You're Like Me: What You Know About 9/11"

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Minstrel Boy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Jan-20-05 02:17 PM
Original message
"If You're Like Me: What You Know About 9/11"
What You Know About 9/11
If You're Like Me


by Leo Brodie,
January, 2005


If you're like me back in October, 2004, just a few months ago as I write this, you believe that the horrifying events of September 11, 2001 were the result of a successful conspiracy perpetrated by Islamic terrorists, and that any questions about that day were finally put to rest by the 9/11 Commission report.

If you're like me, you probably remember that several FBI whistle blowers, like Coleen Rowley, complained that their investigations into the alleged attackers prior to 9/11 were ignored and seemingly thwarted, but you assumed it was a case of bureaucratic bungling and failing to connect the dots.

...

If you're like me, you may have remembered that for years, up through the final report by the 9/11 Commission, the FAA and NORAD revised their timelines to explain, initially, why no jets were scrambled to intercept the attacking planes, and later, why the jets were scrambled too late. You may have noticed that no one was ever reprimanded for this oversight; in fact, the military commanders involved were promoted. Hearing the frightening reconstructions of the day, like me, you accepted the obvious implication: that the necessary communication channels had never been set up for this kind of emergency.

...

If you're like me, you may have read somewhere that the alleged hijacker who flew the plane into the Pentagon could not graduate from flight school. But you didn't connect that with the fact that the plane followed a bizarre high-speed spiral dive, turning 330 degrees at 530 MPH in order to strike the only part of the Pentagon currently being renovated, causing the least possible damage to the occupants. You were relieved that none of the senior military leadership were injured or killed. You probably didn't know that military pilots who analyzed the flight claim that such precision and speed could be accomplished only by computer control. You may recall hearing that the flight recorders were allegedly unable to produce any information, but you didn't realize how unusual that was.

more:
http://www.punchandbrodie.com/leo/911.php
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hang a left Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Jan-20-05 02:35 PM
Response to Original message
1. ....
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frylock Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Jan-20-05 02:44 PM
Response to Original message
2. kick..
Excellent piece. I'm emailing it to several people.

MB, did you see that Nafeez Ahmed is coming out with a new book in March?

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Minstrel Boy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Jan-20-05 02:58 PM
Response to Reply #2
3. Thanks frylock, I didn't know that. n/t
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Generator Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 04:09 PM
Response to Reply #2
39. Reading DU is always good for something
Thanks-I've got to get that..I thought his first one was the best of the 9/11 books.

Also-the title alone-WAR ON TRUTH sums up the entire nightmare of the last four years....lies are my obsession..lies are the heart of it all.
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-21-05 04:46 PM
Response to Original message
4.  At BEST, Bush's incompetence enabled 9-11
Edited on Fri Jan-21-05 04:52 PM by seemslikeadream
from my friend
Octafish

BFEE Allowed 9-11.


At BEST, Bush's incompetence enabled 9-11. That makes him criminally derelict in his duty as commander-in-chief, an impeachable offense.

There is no doubt the former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and President Clinton personally warned the incoming administration of the dangers posed by bin Laden and Al Quaeda.

Later that summer, DCI George Tenet's hair was afire with all the warnings he was getting. How come he didn't get the info about the flight schools from CIA? Perhaps he'duh warned the airlines or even the flying public?

It's most LIKELY Bush's incompetence was the result of willfull ignorance. That requires no stretch of the imagination. Consider the following evidence, from JUNE-JULY 2001:

Plot to assassinate Bush - reports

Bin Laden: Believed to have a network of guerrillas

July 9, 2001 Posted: 9:23 AM EDT (1323 GMT)

MOSCOW, Russia -- Osama bin Laden has threatened to assassinate U.S. President George W. Bush at a G8 meeting in Italy, the head of Russia's Federal Bodyguard Service has said, according to reports.

The Associated Press said Yevgeny Murov was quoted by Itar-Tass news agency as saying: "Bin Laden is threatening the American president, but we know what international terrorism is today and therefore all the bodyguard units concerned are preparing for this.

"We view the threats as totally serious, but hope that with joint efforts we can solve all the problems."
The Group of Eight summit is meeting between July 20-22 in Genoa, Italy. Leaders from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States are expected to attend the summit.

Murov -- Russian President Vladimir Putin's chief bodyguard -- did not elaborate on the threats. He said agents from Russia's Federal Bodyguard Service have travelled to Genoa to coordinate with their counterparts from the other nations taking part in the summit to investigate the threats.

CONTINUED...

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/06/20/russia.binladen/

Missiles to protect summit leaders

Special report: globalisation

Rory Carroll in Rome
Wednesday July 11, 2001
The Guardian

Italy has installed a missile defence system at Genoa's airport to deter airborne attacks during next week's G8 summit, fuelling hysteria about looming violence.

A land-based battery of rockets with a range of nine miles and an altitude of 5,000 feet has been positioned in the latest security measure against perceived threats from terrorists and protesters.

Unidentified planes, helicopters and balloons risk being shot down should they drift too close to the heads of state from the group of seven leading industrialised nations and Russia.

Colonel Alberto Battaglini, of the ministry of defence, said the precaution was not exces sive. "The measure, which was planned by the previous government, may seem open to criticism, but in reality it is merely to act as a deterrent against any aerial incursion during the summit.

"They are little missiles ... which only have a deterrent function to discourage any aerial-led attack and they do not present any danger to the residents of the city," he said.

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7369,519925,00.html

Then there's John Ashcan who stopped flying commercial in July 2001.

Ashcroft Flying High

WASHINGTON, July 26, 2001
CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart reports on Aschcroft's travel arrangements.

"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines." -- FBI spokesman


(CBS) Fishing rod in hand, Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri Thursday afternoon aboard a chartered government jet, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.

In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.

"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.

A senior official at the CIA said he was unaware of specific threats against any Cabinet member, and Ashcroft himself, in a speech in California, seemed unsure of the nature of the threat.

CONTINUED...
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/07/26/national/main303601.shtml
And then what did BUSH DO POST-9-11?

HE BROKE INTERNATIONAL LAW TO INVADE A NATION WITH WHICH WE WERE AT PEACE TO STEAL THE OIL.


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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 11:53 PM
Response to Reply #4
10. Tears streamed down my face when I found out.
It's weird. I always WANT to believe that people -- especially the puking president of the United States -- are good, honest, well-intentioned people. And even though I had my suspicions of the little turd from Crawford, to discover that Bush -- whether willingly or through incompetence -- knew that bin Laden was going to hijack planes and didn't even warn the flying public was a turning point in my life. It also marks the time I separate friend from foe.



The ocean is not nearly so scary a place with friends.

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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 12:39 AM
Response to Reply #4
11. The Bush Gang Knew and They Let bin Laden Through
Bush, Rice and the Genoa Warning
Documenting a demonstrable falsehood


"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." – Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002"

Late 1980s, throughout the 1990s:
The idea of using hijacked planes as weapons against buildings becomes common. There are attempted kamikaze attacks involving hijacked planes in Israel (1986), Turkey (1993) and France (1994). A suicide Cessna pilot hits the White House on Sept. 12, 1994. Tom Clancy publishes a novel in which the villain crashes an airliner into the Capitol (1994). Pentagon scenario planners bring up the possibility of a kamikaze-hijacking in a variety of reports (twice in 1993; 1999; 2000).

Mid-1990s:
News reports and trial cases reveal that Ramzi Yussef (convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) devised "Project Bojinka," a plot including the idea of crashing hijacked airliners into American targets. Foreign and U.S. intelligence and defense agencies issue warnings and devise defense scenarios relating to the possibility that something like "Project Bojinka" can be attempted anywhere, at any time.

October 2000:
The Department of Defense responds competently to these developments, by rehearsing a MASCAL (mass casualty) exercise based on the scenario of a plane crashing into the Pentagon. The live exercise of Oct. 24, 2000 involves rescue crews directed from a command center. A paper plane is set aflame within a scale model of the building. A military news-site later publishes an article about it. NOTE: The Pentagon is known to be ringed with anti-aircraft batteries.

March 2001:
In the pilot episode of a short-lived TV series, "The Lone Gunmen," the heroes narrowly avert the crashing of a remote-hijacked passenger plane into the WTC North Tower. This shows that even TV writers are speculating that someone could crash a hijacked plane into the Twin Towers.

CONTINUED...

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20040527222832444
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 11:39 AM
Response to Reply #11
19. The Bush Gang - A. B. Krongard
A. B. Buzzy Krongard


But Krongard exhibited the requisite secretiveness when asked
to explain his interest in intelligence and how he came to land
a job in Tenet's inner circle. If you go back to the CIA's origins
during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services, he
explained, "the whole OSS was really nothing but Wall Street
bankers and lawyers."
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16570-2001Ma ...

Supressed Details of Criminal Insider Trading Lead Directly into the CIA’s Highest Ranks
CIA Executive Director “Buzzy” Krongard managed firm that handled “PUT” options on United Airline Stock
by Michael C. Ruppert

FTW - October 9, 2001 – Although uniformly ignored by the mainstream U.S. media, there is abundant and clear evidence that a number of transactions in financial
markets indicated specific (criminal) foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the case of at least one of these
trades -- which has left a $2.5 million prize unclaimed -- the firm used to place the “put options” on United Airlines stock was, until 1998, managed by the man who is
now in the number three Executive Director position at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Until 1997 A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard had been Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown. A.B. Brown was acquired by Banker’s Trust in 1997. Krongard then
became, as part of the merger, Vice Chairman of Banker’s Trust-AB Brown, one of 20 major U.S. banks named by Senator Carl Levin this year as being connected
to money laundering. Krongard’s last position at Banker’s Trust (BT) was to oversee “private client relations.” In this capacity he had direct hands-on relations with
some of the wealthiest people in the world in a kind of specialized banking operation that has been identified by the U.S. Senate and other investigators as being
closely connected to the laundering of drug money.

Krongard joined the CIA in 1998 as counsel to CIA Director George Tenet. He was promoted to CIA Executive Director by President
Bush in March of this year. BT was acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1999. The combined firm is the single largest bank in Europe. And,
as we shall see, Deutsche Bank played several key roles in events connected to the September 11 attacks.
more
http://www.hereinreality.com/insidertrading.html

Follow the Money: Bush, 9/11, and Deep Threat

by Fran Shor
Published on Wednesday, May 22, 2002 by CommonDreams.org

The CIA and Other Deep Pockets

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 a number of news stories appeared concerning investments in “put” options in United and American Airlines. Put options are shares that are bets on falling market prices for specific stocks. In the week before September 11 put options in United and American Airlines went through a furious and unprecedented spasm of investment. In addition put options for Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, two of the biggest occupants of the World Trade Center, also saw abnormal activity. Most of the investments in these put options originated in Germany through the Deutsche Bank. Deutshce Bank had earlier acquired Banker’s Trust, a investment banking firm whose Vice Chairman in charge of “private client relations” in the late 1990’s was A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard. In March of 2001, Krongard was appointed Executive Director of the CIA.

Certainly, the CIA has a history of laundering money and dealings with shady investment characters. What becomes particularly relevant in the lead-up to 9/11 is the August CIA briefing of Bush concerning the potential threat of attacks by bin Laden using hijacked planes on certain sites, such as the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and the fact that the CIA had bugging equipment on bin Laden messages and international banking operations. Although no one has apparently claimed the money from the put options, questions remain about Krongard and the CIA’s involvement.
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0522-07.htm

THE CIA CONFIRMS FTW's MAP --
We Were Right!

NEW CIA UNIVERSITY
REVEALS AGENCY PRIORITIES
July 3, 2002,-- 17:00 PDT (FTW) -- The CIA is now operating a university somewhere in northern Virginia. According to an entry in a June 24 newsletter published by an association of former intelligence officers, some of the courses taught at the university are "economic trends, international banking, the world oil market, and how the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, etc. and other non-governmental organizations work."

For four years FTW has been teaching that the CIA's primary role, it's raison d'etre, was to serve the interests of Wall Street and the major banks. In our recent three-country lecture tour, our documentation of the close links between CIA and Wall Street has taken many by surprise. Thirty years ago Professor Peter Dale Scott of Berkeley disclosed that six out of the first seven deputy directors of intelligence (CIA's number two position) had gone directly from Wall Street into service at the Agency. Since Sept. 11, FTW's disclosure that the CIA's current executive director, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, is a former investment banker has caused deeper rumbles. The firm he once headed, AlexBrown/Deutschebank, has been connected to insider trading on United Air Lines stock just before the Sept. 11 attacks. The NYSE's current executive vice president for enforcement, David Doherty, is a retired CIA general counsel.
more
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/070302_CIA_U.html
procedure used at Deutschebank/AB Brown assured anonymity

"European reporters found that most of the suspicious pre-attack trades passed through Deutschebank and especially via CIA Executive Director A.B. Krongard’s former Alex Brown investment division by means of a procedure called portage, which assures the anonymity of individuals making the transactions. But Congress has not publicly revealed whether they will call Krongard and other Alex Brown traders to testify in open hearings, or whether they will subpoena the pre-attack documents in question."
more
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0207/S00119.htm

A Deutsche Bank executive was convicted of money laundering shortly before 9/11, and the bank laundered heroin money linked to the CIA.

And Shattuck actually resigned on September 12(!) from his three-year $30 million contract as head of AB Brown.


SMOKING GUN BURIED DURING CALIFORNIA RECALL VOTE!

On October 7 while the eyes of America were fixed on the California Recall vote the Securities and Exchange Commission quietly announced it was closing its investigation of suspicious stock trades connected to 911. The SEC's reason for closing the investigation can best be summed up as "What insider trading?".

...

* Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., which occupied 22 floors of the World Trade Center, saw 2,157 of its October $45.00 put options bought in the three trading days before Black Tuesday; this compares to an average of 27 contracts per day before September 6.

* Merrill Lynch & Co., with headquarters near the Twin Towers, saw 12,215 October $45.00 put options bought in the four trading days before the attacks; the previous average volume in these options had been 252 contracts per day.

The CIA routinely monitors stock trades looking for exactly these kinds of suspicious transactions. The fact that these trades failed to sound any alarms is in itself suspicious as the bank which was the trading hub has a man inside the Agency. That man is CIA Executive Director “Buzzy” Krongard and the bank is Deutsche bank.

http://ez-websites.com/grudge /


September 6-10, 2001: Suspicious trading occurs on American and United, the two airlines used in the 9/11 attacks. "Between 6 and 7 September, The Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put option contracts (a speculation that the stock will go down) in UAL versus 396 call options – where a speculator bets on a price rising. Holders of the put options would have netted a profit of $5 million once the carrier's share price dived after September 11. On 10 September, more trading in Chicago saw the purchase of 4,516 put options in American Airlines, the other airline involved in the hijackings. This compares with a mere 748 call options in American purchased that day. Investigators cannot help but notice that no other airlines saw such trading in their put options." One analyst says: "I saw put-call numbers higher than I've ever seen in 10 years of following the markets, particularly the options markets." (Associated Press, 9/18/01, San Francisco Chronicle, 9/19/01) "To the embarrassment of investigators, it has also emerged that the firm used to buy many of the "put" options ... on United Airlines stock was headed until 1998 by "Buzzy" Krongard, now executive director of the CIA." Krongard was chairman of Alex Brown Inc., which was bought by Deutsche Bank. "His last post before resigning to take his senior role in the CIA was to head Bankers Trust – Alex Brown's private client business, dealing with the accounts and investments of wealthy customers around the world." (Independent, 10/14/01)
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/index.html


Let Bin Laden stay free, says CIA man AB “Buzzy” Krongard

January 09, 2005
Tony Allen-Mills

...

If the world’s most wanted terrorist is captured or killed, a power struggle among his Al-Qaeda subordinates may trigger a wave of terror attacks, said AB “Buzzy” Krongard, who stepped down six weeks ago as the CIA’s third most senior executive.

“You can make the argument that we’re better off with him (at large),” Krongard said. “Because if something happens to Bin Laden, you might find a lot of people vying for his position and demonstrating how macho they are by unleashing a stream of terror.”

Krongard, a former investment banker who joined the CIA in 1998, said Bin Laden’s role among Islamic militants was changing. “He’s turning into more of a charismatic leader than a terrorist mastermind,” he said. “Some of his lieutenants are the ones to worry about.” Krongard, 68, said he viewed Bin Laden “not as a chief executive but more like a venture capitalist”.

...

Several US officials have privately admitted that it may be better to keep Bin Laden pinned down on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan rather than make him a martyr or put him on trial. But Krongard is the most senior figure to acknowledge publicly that his capture might prove counter-productive.

Krongard also acknowledged that the CIA was still having trouble planting spies in Islamic militant ranks. “There are hundreds and hundreds of (Al-Qaeda) cells — it’s like a living, moving bit of protoplasm,” he said.

more
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1431539,00.html

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kindoki Donating Member (8 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 11:55 AM
Response to Reply #19
21. .
wow!
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 10:43 PM
Response to Reply #19
52. Krongard leads to Riggs...
Public Accountability Initiative

BREAKING NEWS?


On December 31st, the Wall Street Journal's Glenn Simpson reported that Riggs Bank, currently under federal investigation for failure to comply with anti-money laundering laws, has longstanding ties to the CIA. Riggs is being investigated for failing to report suspicious transactions involving the accounts of Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and Teodoro Obiang, the current President of Equatorial Guinea. The relationship was significant enough that top Riggs executives received U.S. government security clearances; Simpson also noted that both Pinochet and Prince Bandar have worked with the CIA in the past. However, the nature of the bank's relationship with the CIA is largely unknown.

It is likely that J. Carter Beese, a director at the bank and the focus of the Public Accountability Initiative's report on Riggs (read it here), is a key player in this relationship. Beese rose up in the business world under the tutelage of A.B. Krongard, the third ranking official at the CIA until September of 2004. Despite his position of compliance oversight, Beese's role at the bank has never been reported.

Press coverage of the Riggs story, and the CIA connection in particular, has been extremely spotty. Few internet journalists have taken note, though Jack Shafer wonders at the lack of coverage in a recent piece for Slate.com. Shafer also reports that no newspapers have built on Simpson's story, which was "inexplicably" buried on page A4 of the WSJ.

This is not for lack of newsworthiness. Now that the U.S. government is implicated in Riggs' shady dealings, the story is about much more than a badly corrupt bank. It is likely that Riggs' failure to report suspicious transactions was authorized by the CIA, which used the bank as a way of supporting U.S. allies—allies of the variety that have a lot of money to hide. In other words, Riggs officials were acting in the interests of national security, at the behest of the U.S. government.

SOURCE:

http://www.publicaccountability.org/



Small world. And very, very bad.
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 11:05 AM
Response to Reply #52
68. The Bush Gang - Jonathan Bush - Riggs Bank - Part 1
Edited on Wed Jan-26-05 11:06 AM by seemslikeadream
Threads on Equatorial Guinea and Riggs Bank


Thatcher: Spain 'secretly backed coup by sending warships'
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=780346

Thatcher case twist as list of alleged coup backers vanishes
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=779708

Mark Thatcher: The money trail
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=780222

Financiers conspired to overthrow oil-flush African government
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=771532

Scorpions say have more info on Equatorial Guinea coup
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=781763

Exiled leader in Spain denies any link to coup attempt
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=780228

Bank with close ties to Bush administration engulfed in scandal
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=775366

NEW details of Thatcher coup plot: London Evening Standard
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=777970

Margaret Thatcher's Son Released on Coup Plot Charges (Update2)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=775803

Mark Thatcher held over coup plot
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=775009

BBC News: Thatcher charged
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=775499

'Petroleum lures dogs of war to Africa'
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=775315

Terrorist Stocks?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=775943

Du Toit admits meeting Thatcher
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=775274

SEC probes Marathon Oil payments in Equitorial Guinea (and HQ burns down)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=728495

WaPo: Allbritton Loses Riggs Bank (front page, day 3)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=691609

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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 12:17 PM
Response to Reply #11
23. The Bush Gang - Michael Chertoff
Edited on Sun Jan-23-05 12:40 PM by seemslikeadream
Michael Chertoff and the sabotage of the Ptech investigation

Remember Ptech? That's the Boston software firm financed by Saudi businessman Yassin Al-Qadi, who also happens to be an al Qaeda bagman, whose clients happened to include numerous sensitive US federal branches and agencies, including the FAA, the FBI, the military and the White House.

A little background, from the mainstream, even, thanks to WBZ-TV:

Joe Bergantino, a reporter for WBZ-TV's investigative team, was torn. He could risk breaking a story based on months of work investigating a software firm linked to terrorism, or heed the government's demand to hold the story for national security reasons. In mid-June, Bergantino received a tip from a woman in New York who suspected that Ptech, a computer software company in Quincy, Mass., had ties to terrorists. Ptech specialized in developing software that manages information contained in computer networks.

Bergantino's investigation revealed that Ptech's clients included many federal governmental agencies, including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Naval Air Command, Congress, the Department of Energy, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, NATO, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service and even the White House.

"Ptech was doing business with every federal government in defense and had access to key government data," Bergantino said.

...

Bergantino was ready to air the story by September, but the government had different plans. Federal authorities told Bergantino not to air the story because it would jeopardize their investigation and would threaten national security. According to federal authorities, documents would be shredded and people would flee if we ran the story, Bergantino said. But Bergantino claims the government's demand to hold off on the story was merely a pretext.

In October 2001, President George W. Bush signed an executive order freezing the assets of individuals linked to terrorism. According to Bergantino, the list identified Saudi Arabian businessman Yassin Al-Qadi as a key financial backer of Osama Bin Laden. As it turns out, Bergantino said, Al-Qadi also is the chief financier of Ptech. The government failed to investigate Ptech in October 2001 and didn't start it's investigation until August 2002 when WBZ-TV's investigation called attention to Ptech.

Bergatino's tipster was Indira Singh, who has said she recognizes the separate command and control communications system Mike Ruppert describes Dick Cheney to have been running on September 11th as having "the exact same functionality I was looking to utilize for Ptech."

Now, how does Chertoff figure in the Ptech story? It goes back to the turf war of two years ago over Operation Greenquest, "the high-profile federal task force set up to target the financiers of Al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups." The aggressive, Customs-led task force was folded into Homeland Security, sending both the FBI and its minders at the Department of Justice into a tizzy. They "demanded that the White House instead give the FBI total control over Greenquest."

Now, consider this, also from Newsweek:

The FBI-Justice move, pushed by DOJ Criminal Division chief Michael Chertoff and Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, has enraged Homeland Security officials, however. They accuse the bureau of sabotaging Greenquest investigations — by failing to turn over critical information to their agents—and trying to obscure a decade-long record of lethargy in which FBI offices failed to aggressively pursue terror-finance cases.

...

One prime example of the tension is the investigation into Ptech, the Boston-area computer software firm that had millions of dollars in sensitive government contracts with the Air Force, the Energy Department and, ironically enough, the FBI. In what turned into a minor embarrassment for the bureau, the firm’s main investors included Yasin Al-Qadi, a wealthy Saudi businessman whom the Bush administration had formally designated a terrorist financier under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Al-Qadi has vigorously denied any connection to terrorism.

The Ptech case turned into an ugly dispute last year when company whistleblowers told Greenquest agents about their own suspicions about the firm’s owners. Sources close to the case say those same whistleblowers had first approached FBI agents, but the bureau apparently did little or nothing in response. With backing from the National Security Council, Greenquest agents then mounted a full-scale investigation that culminated in a raid on the company’s office last December. After getting wind of the Greenquest probe, the FBI stepped in and unsuccessfully tried to take control of the case.

The result, sources say, has been something of a train wreck. Privately, FBI officials say Greenquest agents botched the probe and jeopardized other more promising inquiries into Al-Qadi. Greenquest agents dismiss the charges and say the problem is that the bureau was slow to respond to legitimate allegations that an outside contractor with terrorist ties may have infiltrated government computers.

(And still, there are no charges or indictments against Al-Qadi or Ptech.)

The turf war was won on May 13, 2003, when John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge signed a "Memorandum of Agreement between the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, giving the FBI "unprecedented unilateral control of all terrorist-financing investigations and operations."

Several seasoned government agents fear for the nation’s security should the FBI be tackling most terrorism cases, as their ineptitude in preventing terrorism has been established time and time again. Yet, the memorandum between Ashcroft and Ridge places the FBI in an incredibly powerful position over Homeland Security. According to the memorandum, "all appropriate DHS leads relating to money laundering and financial crimes will be checked with the FBI."

Well, no reason to fear now, now that Michael Chertoff is heading up Homeland Security. Right?

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/01/michael-chertoff-and-sabotage-of-ptech.html


Spreading Mischief from DoJ to the Federal Bench

By ELAINE CASSEL

EXCERPT...

A good place to look for Chertoff's legal philosophy is in the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui , now taking place in the Eastern District of Virginia. Chertoff is not the prosecutor of course, Paul McNulty of the Eastern District is. But Chertoff is McNulty's boss and he is calling the shots. So Chertoff argued the government's case in the super secret hearing before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals last week. The government is trying to block trial judge Leonie Brinkema's ruling that Moussaoui and his lawyers have access to the government's star witnesses against him. The government has refused and appealed. Judge Brinkema, who still believes in the Constitution, rightly ruled that to deny Moussaoui that access is a blatant violation of the Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses.

Brinkema indicates that she will not be a party to making exceptions to the Constitution on a case-by-case basis. She, in effect, suggests that maybe Justice better take Moussaoui to Guantanamo and try him there in secret, in the military tribunals they set up. Easy there to not only try him, but convict him, and execute him . So why is the government insisting on keeping him in federal court?

I have the answer, and it lies in Chertoff. Chertoff's goal, I believe, and the goal of Ashcroft and Bush in supporting this prosecution in federal court, is to subject federal trials, as they see fit, to ad hoc exemptions of whatever laws (be they constitutional, criminal code, or rules of procedure) that will suit their purposes. Their grand scheme is to ultimately cripple and dismantle the federal courts as we know them, one brick at a time.

Support for this theory of mine includes their prosecution of attorney Lynne Stewart, for, in effect, zealously representing her client; rules created by Ashcroft that subject attorneys and their clients to surveillance, be they under secret wiretaps issues by the secret FISA court or monitoring of all contacts in prison settings. These procedures came about by fiat from Ashcroft. They make any attorney who represents someone charged with an act of "terrorism" (and a terrorist crime is one defined by Bush and Ashcroft-that is an ad hoc determination, as well).

The Moussaoui case has many examples of legal changes. Moussaoui and even his attorneys (!) cannot receive all documents related to the case, because of "national security" interests. Witnesses may appear in court behind screens (!) so that they cannot be seen. And, the Fourth Circuit hearing last week was closed-closed-for the first time in history. Under Ashcroft we have had secret warrants (or no warrants), secret hearings denying bail, secret trials, and now secret appellate court arguments. Next, we can expect the Supreme Court to be closed, can't we?

more
http://www.counterpunch.org/cassel06112003.html


Did Bush's New Homeland Security Nominee Protect Terror-Linked Doctor from Prosecution?
Bernard Kerik, Michael Chertoff... Who's Next? Tony Soprano?
Daniel Hopsicker
January 12, 2005 - Venice, FL

Michael Chertoff, appointed by President Bush to head the Homeland Security Department, may have shielded from criminal prosecution a former client suspected by law enforcement of having funneled millions of dollars directly to Osama Bin Laden while in charge of the U.S. Government’s 9.11 investigation.

Egyptian-born Dr. Magdy el-Amir, a prominent New Jersey neurologist, was at the center of terrorist intrigue in Jersey City.

-El-Amir gave money to a conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman.

-His brother in Cairo was caught on tape attempting to buy weapons from an American undercover agent for Islamic militant groups.

-Before being arrested in a terrorist deal involving oil and heroin for guns and training, arms smuggler Diaa Mohsen was paid at least $5,000 by one of Dr. el Amir's companies, NBC’s Dateline reported.

And his HMO was suspected by law enforcement of being used to funnel money directly to Osama bin laden.


Wire Transfers to "Unknown Parties"

Chertoff’s client "caused more than $5.7 million to be paid by wire transfers to unknown parties," said the lawsuit filed shortly before the state took over his failing HMO. News accounts about el-Amir’s legal difficulties contain unanswered questions about undue political influence and its effect on national security.
For example, how did el-Amir, who only the month before had been granted a state license to operate an HMO, finagle a lucrative contract from the state of New Jersey in 1995?

“Why was this doctor allowed to start a health plan?” asked the October 25, 1999 issue of the medical trade journal Medical Economics.

“How could this medical entrepreneur, who had no experience running a managed-care or health insurance company, receive a license for an HMO that now provides care to 44,000 of New Jersey's most vulnerable citizens?" asked The Bergen Record. “Moreover, how could the state pay such a novice $ 6 million a month in taxpayers money to take on such a responsibility?”

Why did Michael Chertoff even take the case?

Skimming for Osama in New Jersey

Answers were slow in coming, until it was revealed that at the same time el-Amir was pitching state business he had begun making generous contributions to the governing Republican party, donating nearly $ 18,000 to various GOP candidates in 1996.

And a foreign intelligence report made available to the Chairman of the House International Committee alleged that an HMO owned by Dr. el Amir in New Jersey was “funded by Ben Laden,” and that in turn Dr. el Amir was skimming money from the HMO to fund “terrorist activities.”’…

http://www.madcowprod.com/01122004.html



Part 2: The Good Doctor Who Wasn’t So Good.

...

So here we have a prominent neurologist who is alleged to have funneled money to Osama Bin Laden through his fraudulent HMO, and we also discover that he has been involved in at least two accident fraud schemes, operated unlicensed MRI centers and had a license revoked by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC license revocation is especially troubling since unauthorized and unlicensed personnel at Dr. Elamir’s clinics were handling nuclear materials.....

.....I then took a closer look at the articles and court documents I had collected on Dr. Magdy Elamir and they revealed who his lawyer was.

“Elamir did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment. But his
attorney, Michael Chertoff, said several of the five MRI centers may be
exempt from licensing requirements

http://www.opednews.com/duncan_0090304_NJ_terrorism1.htm

jesselyn radack vs. chertoff

listen here for awwhile at AAR

http://airamericaradio.com/layout.asp?baseurl=Unfiltere...

in which Chertoff won't listen to advice from this woman, regarding the JW Lind case, then LIES about it during his senate confirmation hearings


The New York Times today looked into the case of Jesselyn Radack, the Justice Department ethics attorney who challenged the department's handling of the interrogation of John Walker Lindh and told her supervisor that documentation of her advice had been withheld from a federal judge. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who, as we reported last month, had asked Attorney General John Ashcroft for answers on why she was forced out of her job, got to ask his questions again when Michael Chertoff, the head of Justice's criminal division and now a federal judicial nominee, came before the Judiciary Committee. But at the hearing last week, Chertoff claimed he had no knowledge of the e-mail dialogue between his subordinate and Radack. Kennedy said he was troubled by Chertoff's lack of active involvement in the case, according to the Times account. "I'm very concerned about this Radack situation," Kennedy later told the Times. "It appears she was effectively fired for providing legal advice that the department didn't agree with."

The dispute has slowed but not derailed Chertoff's nomination. Kennedy, who got the confirmation delayed for one week over dissatisfaction with Chertoff's responses, told the Times that he planned to vote in favor of the nomination, and Chertoff's nomination passed the committee later today. But by the time of the vote, six Democrats -- including Kennedy -- decided they needed more information on a late allegation about the prosecutor's conduct when he was a U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, and only responded "present" when the vote was taken.

At today's confirmation hearing, the Times account of the Radack story came in for special abuse by committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, who opined, "It's disgraceful that at this last minute The New York Times is attempting to impugn anybody," and later noted that Eric Lichtblau, the author of the article, had "shared bylines with the infamous Mr. Blair," the reporter who has admitted faking a number of Times articles. That remark reportedly prompted Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) to warn his colleague about avoiding "McCarthyism."

The Times had also reported that a "senior Justice Department official said today that Ms. Radack's accusations regarding the possible concealment of documents and retaliation against her were recently referred to the department's Office of Professional Responsibility for an investigation." Better late than never; the investigation of leaks of Justice's concealment has been underway for a few months now
more
http://www.rcfp.org/behindthehomefront/index.php?list=337,245,157


Chertoff ran the criminal division of the Justice Department


Chertoff, 51, ran the criminal division of the Justice Department for the first three years of Bush's tenure and was instrumental in crafting the administration's legal response to the terrorist attacks, including the USA Patriot Act. Some critics charge Chertoff trampled on civil liberties while prosecuting a legal war on terrorism at Justice.

more
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/01/12/MNGMSAOR8O1.DTL


Chertoff played key role on 9/11
By Kevin Johnson and Mimi Hall, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — In the minutes after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, while Attorney General John Ashcroft was rushing back from Milwaukee, Michael Chertoff was calling the shots.
Chertoff, then chief of the Justice Department's criminal division, breached the prickly territorial lines that have long divided the Justice Department from the FBI. From a fifth-floor office at FBI headquarters, above the streams of panicked people who flooded Pennsylvania Avenue, he set up shop in the bureau's crisis center. For the next 20 hours, he directed the government's initial response to the most lethal terrorist attack in U.S. history.
more
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-01-11-chertoff-side_x.htm

Department of Justice

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2003
WWW.USDOJ.GOV
CRM
(202) 514-2008
TDD (202) 514-1888

DEFENDANT PLEADS GUILTY TO ISSUING FALSE ANTHRAX PRESS RELEASES

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff of the Criminal Division and United States Attorney Carol C. Lam of the Southern District of California announced today that Charles W. Kallmann, the former Chief Executive Officer of 37Point9, Inc., pleaded guilty in federal court in San Diego, California, to a criminal information charging him with two counts of securities fraud for issuing false press releases in an effort to bolster his company's sagging stock price during the anthrax scare in 2001.

37Point9 Inc., was a holding company headquartered in San Diego. The common stock of 37Point9 was registered with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and was traded on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board, a quotation service operated by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD).

According to the criminal information, Kallmann exploited the publicity generated by the October 2001 anthrax incidents to fraudulently promote the sale of 37Point9 shares through the issuance of false press releases promoting an anti-anthrax product. In October 2001, Kallmann drafted two press releases which made false and misleading claims about the development, testing and effectiveness of a product named "SurfaceShield" which was purportedly designed to have a long term killing effectiveness against anthrax, as well as a wide variety of bacteria, viruses, germs and fungi. One of the press releases stated that a wholly owned subsidiary of 37Point9 had entered into an agreement with a laboratory "to develop an addition to its SurfaceShield product that will enable the enhanced SurfaceShield to kill bacillus anthracis (anthrax) while it is in its vegetative state and prior to release and sporulation of vegetative cells." In fact, 37Point9 had not entered into such an agreement.

37Point9 was a thinly traded "penny stock."Around the time of the issuance of the false press releases, the volume of trading in 37Point9 shares increased approximately 1500 percent to over 32 million shares and the price of 37Point9 shares increased approximately 300 percent.

"The defendant in this case brazenly manipulated his company's stock price," said Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff. "Worse still, he did it by exploiting public fears about the anthrax scare."

John R. Kingston, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's San Diego Division, added: "This case illuminates the FBI's commitment to corporate fraud investigations and particularly those who attempt to exploit the public's anxieties."

Kallmann faces a maximum sentences of 10 years in prison on each of the securities fraud counts. A sentencing hearing has been scheduled for June 9th before U.S. District Judge Gonzalez.

This case was investigated by the FBI, in cooperation with the NASD. The matter was referred by NASD to the Fraud Section, Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice, and prosecuted by DOJ Trial Attorney Raja Chatterjee.


http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2003/March/03_crm_149.htm


from NYT, via AAR's Unfiltered, who had Radack on the other dthis WRT one of Chertoff's confirmation hearings:

At that time, Senate Democrats questioned him extensively about concerns in the department that the F.B.I. might have improperly questioned Mr. Lindh in Afghanistan even though his family had hired a lawyer for him. The questioning yielded potentially damaging admissions from Mr. Lindh that factored into his decision in July 2002 to plead guilty to felony charges, resulting in his 20-year prison sentence.

Mr. Chertoff, chosen this week by President Bush to succeed Tom Ridge as homeland security secretary, earned strong endorsements from important lawmakers in both parties and appears quite likely to be confirmed. Some Senate Democrats said they wanted to examine his counterterrorism record at the Justice Department closely before voting to confirm, and he is likely to face fresh scrutiny over the Lindh case then.

At his confirmation hearing in 2003, Mr. Chertoff said he and his deputies in the criminal division did not have an active role in discussions about ethics warnings in the case from lawyers elsewhere in the department.

But in previously undisclosed department documents, provided to The New York Times by a person involved in the case who insisted on anonymity, a longtime lawyer in the division who worked under Mr. Chertoff detailed numerous contacts he had with lawyers inside and outside the division on Mr. Lindh's questioning.

more
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/politics/13home.html?...



The agreement, he told Leahy, no longer held.

The next morning Leahy sat in his office across a polished wood conference table from Ashcroft, Hatch, Michael Chertoff, chief of the Justice Depart-ment's criminal division, and Gonzales, the White House counsel. They'd come together to sign off on the deal. But Ashcroft was having second thoughts about some of Flanigan's concessions. The agreement, he told Leahy, no longer held.

....

On October 17, the capital was confronting a new threat: anthrax. It was contained in a letter mailed to Daschle, and no one knew how many people might have been exposed. Were there more letters? Were anthrax spores floating through the Capitol's ventilation system? Suddenly, it became more urgent than ever to get the Patriot Act to the president's desk.

Amid the panic, Leahy, Daschle, Flanigan, Dinh and others gathered in House Speaker Dennis Hastert's office to smooth out the differences between the Senate and House versions of the bill. The House bill, which passed in the early morning hours of October 12, included sunset and court-oversight provisions Leahy had been unable to get in the Senate.



The Washington Post Magazine | Oct 27, 2002
Six Weeks in Autumn
by Robert O'Harrow, Jr.

more
http://www.muckraker.org/one_investigation.php?id=3&topic_id=7&show_all=0


http://www.opednews.com/duncan_090504_njterrorism2.htm


more
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+Jesselyn+Radack+michael+chertoff&btnG=Google+Search
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 10:37 PM
Response to Reply #23
28. The sacrifice of the few is necessary for the good of the many...
...OK, the fewer.

Remember, Chertoff is Bushler's SECOND CHOICE! The first guy they picked was too crooked to pass muster. So, we know this Chertoff fellow is slicker than snot on a doorknob.

Thanks for the info. Here's hoping to see it mentioned in the indictments. Speaking of the treasonous little rat:

Published on Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Mike Chertoff's Dirty Little Secrets

Bush's New Homeland and Security Czar


by Doug Ireland
 
The Bush White House thinks they’re being clever by naming a prosecutor instead of a criminal to head the Department of Homeland Security: Mike Chertoff, whose appointment as DHS czar in the wake of the failed nomination of scandal-plagued Bernie Kerik (now under investigation by multiple law-enforcement agencies) was announced as the Weekly went to press. But Chertoff is as political an appointment as one can imagine--especially for those who know the arcana of politics in New Jersey, where Chertoff was U.S. Attorney, and where his naming to the DHS job caused jaws to drop.

Chertoff was a political attack dog in that job, indicting and convicting a raft of Democratic officeholders. But one who Chertoff deliberately let get away was his big buddy, Bob “The Torch” Torricelli, forced to resign his U.S. Senate seat from Sopranoland in a major corruption scandal. Nick Acocella, editor of the respected insider newsletter New Jersey Politifax, recalls that, at the height of the Torricelli scandal, and while Chertoff was U.S. Attorney, he saw The Torch and Chertoff together at a South Jersey Jewish banquet where they embraced and huddled intimately “like twins separated at birth.” One would have thought a federal prosecutor would have kept his distance from a target of criminal investigations that were making daily headlines in the Jersey press.

When Chertoff was named by Bush to head the Justice Department’s Criminal Division--partly because he was a skilled political hitman, who’d also raised a ton of money as financial vice-chair of Bush’s Garden State campaign in 2000-- it’s an open secret in Jersey that he squelched an indictment of Torricelli as a reward for The Torch’s support of key Bush legislation the Democratic Party leadership opposed, including tax cuts for corporations and the very rich. (Many of the fat-cats Chertoff shook down for Bush had also been huge givers to The Torch.)

Long active in the Federalist Society--a conspiratorial brotherhood of legal reactionaries--Chertoff, at Justice, helped to write the civil liberties-shredding Patriot Act. He was John Ashcroft’s honcho in the indiscriminate grilling of over 5000 Arab-Americans after 9/11, cooked up the use of “material witness” warrants to lock up people of Middle Eastern descent and hold them indefinitely without trial, and on behalf of the Justice Department wrote a brief (in Chavez v. Martinez) arguing there was no Constitutional right to be free of coercive police questioning.

SNIP...

Why would Chertoff give up a lifetime seat on the federal bench to take a job in the hornet’s nest of problems that is the DHS? According to a top Jersey Democratic pol who knows Chertoff well, Chertoff--described as being “as cold-blooded as they come“-- has a personal agenda that includes becoming U.S. Attorney General and, eventually, grabbing a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. But there’s a problem for Chertoff with conservative Republicans--he happens to be pro-choice. So, taking the DHS job is Chertoff’s way to “make his bones,” as they say in Jersey, and grab headlines as a hard-line persecutor of “the towel-heads” to please the right and neutralize his abortion stance.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0112-20.htm

The BFEE let 3,000 die on 9-11. They killed thousands in Afghanistan who had zero to do with 9-11. They killed 100,000 in Iraq who had less than zero to do with 9-11. So, remember: There's no BFEE and Bush is not like Hitler.
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SpiralHawk Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 11:25 PM
Response to Reply #28
29. Chertoff gives me chills up and down my spine, Octy.
Thanks for your post, and for the depth of this overall thread -- what makes DU worth coming back for again and again.
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 10:32 PM
Response to Reply #29
49. He's one twisted BFEE screw, all right.
Like Smirk and Sneer, the guy's turned all he touches into doo-doo. And like all the unctuous scum, he rises to the top of the barrel. Here's something on the guy from CounterPunch:

Failing Upwards

The Rise of Michael Chertoff


By MIKE WHITNEY
Weekend Edition
January 22 / 24, 2005

Michael Chertoff's record at the Justice Dept. has followed the same downward arc as a belly-flop. He's managed to botch every major case he's handled and elicit the well-deserved scorn of civil liberties groups. Only in the gravity-defying world of G.W. Bush, where reality is routinely run through a public relations shredder, would a bungler like Chertoff reach the top-spot at Homeland Security. Even so, his appointment should come as no surprise to the wary American public. It's just one more horse-nugget added to an already ample mound of political manure.

Chertoff is credited with authoring the Patriot Act, the 300-plus page blueprint for the modern National Security State; patterned to great extent on the successes of the KGB in the Soviet system. He's admired among his Bush cadres for making sure that government surveillance operates at maximum efficiency. Under his stewardship at the Dept of Justice, the 4th amendment has withered like summer grass. The long-held belief that citizens, have a right to a "reasonable expectation of privacy" has buckled under the demands of "Big Brother" and the new "intrusive" security paradigm.

Chertoff is a member in good standing in the Federalist Society; a cabal of radical lawyers devoted to the systematic dismantling of the Bill of Rights. Already, they've provided much of the legal rationale for the unlawful detention of aliens, the enhanced powers of the Executive, the indefinite incarceration of POW's and the cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners. They've also made strides in crushing what few regulations still exist to protect both consumers and environment.

Chertoff has been an effective conduit for the Federalist ideology. Following 9-11, he masterminded the round-up of 1100 Muslim suspects; dumping them in prison without bothering to file charges. None of the suspects were provided with attorneys or allowed to challenge the terms of their detention. Instead they were held in solitary confinement, abused, and either deported or released after secret tribunals. Chertoff effectively rescinded the Bill of Rights to pursue his blinkered witch-hunt. His actions made no one any safer, nor were they intended to. They were designed to show how easily legal protections are eviscerated during a national emergency. Don't think Chertoff and co. haven't monitored the affects of hysteria on public sensibilities. For the Bush team, demagoguery is the primary tenet of good governance.

Months after the illegal detentions, the Justice's Dept's Inspector General harshly criticized the draconian and unproductive steps that Chertoff authorized. The General dismissed the arrests as "indiscriminate and haphazard"; a clear violation of basic human rights and civil liberties. His reprimand was shrugged off by the impervious Chertoff, who later admitted to Congress that he would have done the same thing all over again.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney01222005.html

Thanks for the kind words, SpiralHawk! In our virtual community, you've been a real friend and as big a contributor as anybody.
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 01:35 PM
Response to Reply #11
31. The Bush Gang - Jeb Bush
Jeb Bush seized flight school records at 2 AM on September 12.

Why did Jeb Bush and federal agents seize records from Huffman Aviation - Florida flight school of Mohammed Atta, and other 9/11 hijackers - in the middle of the night following the attacks of September 11th and load them onto a C-130? And why did Jeb Bush know, hours after the attack, where to look?

"Whatever secrets Dekkers may possess about the terrorists, records from his flight school were deemed sensitive enough to have merited being escorted back to Washington by Florida Governor Jeb Bush aboard a C-130 cargo plane, which left Sarasota less than 24 hours after the September 11 attack."
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0212/S00058.htm

Valentine:
The federal authorities came in and grabbed up all of the records of the flight school.

Hopsicker:
That’s right. They flew them out on a plane that also had Jeb Bush aboard.

Valentine:
The federal authorities told the local law enforcement authorities to keep their noses out of the investigation, didn’t they?

Hopsicker:
That’s correct. I sat down with two Southern lawmen, a current sheriff and his immediate predecessor. These two guys looked me dead in the eye and said that, based on what they have seen with a lot of CIA-connected covert operations in the area, the CIA was somehow involved in, if not responsible for, the World Trade Center attacks. You might expect some wild-eyed leftist radical to say that. But these are two Southern sheriffs. They have spent years watching CIA activities that they could not interfere with.
http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=new...

And what are the linkages between the flight school and its Republican owner, Wally Hilliard, to US covert agencies and the covert drug trade?

"A Learjet belonging to the true owner of the Venice flight school that trained both terrorist pilots who flew into the World Trade Center was seized with more than 30 pounds of heroin onboard by Federal Agents in July of 2000 at the Orlando Executive Airport."

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/archive/scoop/stories/92/eb/200210310005.2ee1e73a.html
What's the largely unexplored connection between Atta, the CIA, al Qaeda and drugs?

From Sander Hicks:

...what makes Ben-Veniste such an intriguing player on the 9/11 Commission (The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States) is his experience with rogue drug-running CIA operatives. Ben-Veniste defended Barry Seal, the notorious smuggler who flew C-123 military cargo planes filled with cocaine into Mena, Arkansas on behalf of the contras.

Al Qaeda's lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, was allegedly partying with CIA-connected pilots while he got his flight training in fall/winter 2000 at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Fla., where two of the other 9/11 hijacker pilots trained. Atta wasn't acting much like a holy martyr: He wore jeans and sneakers, played video games, bought himself a red Pontiac and was said to be a hedonist. The Press posed the question to Ben-Veniste: If Atta belonged to the fundamentalist Muslim group, why was he snorting cocaine and frequenting strip bars?

"You know," said Ben-Veniste, as he smiled a little. "That's a heck of a question."
http://www.911citizenswatch.org/print.php?sid=82

And Daniel Hopsicker:

FBI agents harassed and intimidated witnesses to the 9/11 terrorist conspiracy’s activities in Florida, issuing warnings to avoid talking with reporters, say current and former residents in Venice, Florida. At least one eyewitness, who knew Mohamed Atta because he lived next door for a time, received regular visits for over six months after the attack from FBI agents eager to ensure she continued to remain silent. Several said they felt unfairly singled out because what they saw and heard is at considerable variance with the official story of the terrorist cadre’s time in Florida.

An American girl named Amanda Keller, for example, briefly lived with Mohamed Atta in Venice, according to both local news reports and numerous eyewitnesses.

http://www.madcowprod.com/issue44.html


Jeb's cozy relationship with Hilliard, the flight school owner:

At the same time their planes were flying back and forth from Venezuela with illegal cargo Hilliard's charter service was also, unbelievably, being utilized at virtually no cost--despite the fact that rentals for Lear jets can run as high as $1,800 an hour--by Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Even stranger, both Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris were providing celebrity endorsements to Hilliard's operation well after the company's Lear (N351WB) had been busted by DEA agents armed with machine guns.

...

One would think a sitting Governor seems well-advised to steer well clear of anything to do with heroin trafficking. Yet Governor Jeb Bush honored Hilliard's operation--called at various times Florida Air, Sunrise Airlines and Discover Air--with a personal visit, even posing for photos with the "Discover Air family."


Is it just incredible bad luck that these two prominent Florida politicians endorsed an operation that both trained murderous terrorists AND brought heroin into America?

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/archive/scoop/stories/92/eb/200210310005.2ee1e73a.html

local detective "won't confirm or deny" on the record

From Sander Hicks:

After the 9/11 planes slammed into American landmarks, Battuello began to see a possible connection between the terrorists, their flight school, owner Wally Hilliard and his associate Du Bain. She left her comfortable Napa Valley home and went hunting for the truth. In Florida, she says, she found cab driver and Navy veteran Bob Simpson, who had driven Mohamed Atta around on multiple occasions. Simpson told Battuello that Rudi Dekkers, president and CEO of Huffman, was hanging out in nightclubs with Atta and other Saudis as recently as August 2001. According to Keller, Atta's ex-girlfriend, Dekkers and Atta did cocaine and went to strip clubs together quite a bit.

Hopsicker went looking for more on Dekkers, a Dutch citizen. Did the Huffman CEO have any prior arrests in Sarasota County, Fla.? Sgt. Michael Treanor, of the Venice Police Department, frustratedly told him they wouldn't be able to answer that question. Two of his detectives had removed all of Dekker's files and loaded them onto a plane for the FBI. One of those detectives, now promoted to Sergeant, was Tom McNulty. McNulty tells the Press, "I seized the files with the FBI because of some contacts I have in this area." But McNulty won't confirm or deny Hopsicker's reporting that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was involved in the seizure of Dekkers' files.

Will any of this information find a place in the 9/11 Commission's official report, due out in July? Don't get your hopes up.
http://tinyurl.com/3bk4r

"They loaded two Ryder trucks (of Huffman Aviation and Venice Police Department documents) right outside that (police station) window," one Venice law enforcement official told us. "And then they drove them right onto a C130 military cargo plane at Sarasota airport which flew out with Jeb Bush aboard. The FBI took all our files. Everything."
http://www.onlinejournal.com/archive/04-19-02_Hopsicker...


More on drugs, Jeb, and the family business

According to Terry Reed, author of Compromised, "the FBI had inserted a female undercover agent into the inner circle of Medellin Cartel founder Pablo Escobar. Her name was Darlene Novinger and she got very close to an Escobar cousin named Steve Plata."

"Thanks to the 'uc', as undercovers are called, Barry Seal and Terry Reed were sent on a drug sting to meet some wealthy Texans," writes Ruppert. "It turns out that the wealthy Texans were George W. and Jeb Bush who flew in on the family owned King Air to pick up the cocaine themselves. Hidden DEA cameras filmed the whole incident, including the tail number of the aircraft and both Bushes participation. According to Reed, nobody knew in advance who the buyers were. Reed states that he has both the tail number of the aircraft and the DEA case file number and he strongly suspects that tape to turn up during the 2000 presidential election."

Former CIA operative Terry Reed had worked closely with the late Barry Seal, a notorious drug smuggling pilot who also worked for the CIA.... Reed describes a conversation he had with Seal about his 'insurance" aka blackmail, in case the Bush Family Crime Syndicate would try to double-cross him.

...

Reed was incredulous. "... Barry, are you telling me George Bush's kids are in the drug business?" he asked.... "Yup, that's what I'm tellin ya. A guy in Florida who flipped for the DEA has got the goods on the Bush boys. Now I heard this from a reliable source in Colombia, but I just sat on it then, waiting to use it as a trump card if I ever needed it. Well I need to use it now. I got names, dates, places, even got some tape recordings. I even got surveillance. videos catchin' the Bush boys redhanded. I consider this stuff my insurance policy, " said Seal.
http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma/offline9.htm

More good reading: "Why Does George W. Bush Fly in Drug Smuggler Barry Seal's Airplane?"

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/W_plane.html


"...what makes Ben-Veniste such an intriguing player on the 9/11 Commission (The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States) is his experience with rogue drug-running CIA operatives. Ben-Veniste defended Barry Seal, the notorious smuggler who flew C-123 military cargo planes filled with cocaine into Mena, Arkansas on behalf of the contras."

Seal was gunned down in 1986.

As for undercover agent Novinger, she was threatened, family members were killed and she was forced to resign. She died of cancer in January 2003.

Here's a passage from Rodney Stitch's book Defrauding America:

"Darlene Novinger said to me that she discovered during an FBI investigation that George Bush and two of his sons were using drugs and prostitutes in a Florida hotel while Bush was vice president. She said that when she reported these findings to her FBI supervisors they warned her not to reveal what she had discovered. Novinger had been requested to infiltrate drug trafficking operations in South America and the United States. She was pressured to quit her FBI position; her husband was beaten to death; and four hours after she appeared on a July 1993 talkshow describing her findings (after she was warned not to appear), her father mysteriously died. A dead white canary was left on his grave as a warning to her. After receiving death threats she went into hiding, from where she occasionally appeared as guest on talk shows, and called me from undisclosed locations." - page 469

More details from later in the book:

Novinger had been an investigator with the Federal Crime Task Force, and then was recruited by the FBI to work in an undercover capacity.

She worked on Operation Nimbus, investigating large-scale drug smuggling on the Eastern seaboard. The investigation revealed the narcotic operation of a powerful Lebanese family living in Miami and Jamaica, which was also tied to the Lebanese fascist Phalange. Family's name is Smatt, headed by William Smatt. And Novinger said the Smatt operation implicated VP Bush and son Jeb.

After submitting her report, orders came to cease the investigation and destroy all reports. She says someone in the FBI's Miami office leaked to the Smatt group that she had penetrated the operation.

Before Operation Nimbus was shut down, veteran US Customs investigator Joe Price filed corroborating reports implicating Bush. After he filed in Sept 1983, FBI agents arrested him on a narcotics trafficking charge.

The election’s less than six months away. To help ensure a fair election, it makes sense to spread the truth about what kind of people make up the Bush Organized Crime Family. Here's a bit on the "brains" of the new generation.

Jeb Bush is friends with terrorists, drug-dealers and election stealers.

The Bush Family's Bloody Pals
Florida a Sanctuary for Terrorists

by Jack McCarthy

Florida is not only a sanctuary for retirees and tourists. It is also a haven for terrorists, some retired some still active.

Now Florida doesn't harbor the kinds of terrorists who would interest our bumbling "Homeland Security" inspector Tom Ridge mind you.

These are the kinds of terrorists who would be welcomed at a backyard BBQ thrown those WASP Sopranos, the Bush family.

CONTINUED…

http://www.counterpunch.org/mccarthy0709.html


The Bush Dynasty and the Cuban Criminals
New book reveals links of two presidents and the governor of Florida with exiled hardliners

by Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles

The brother of President George Bush, the Florida governor, Jeb Bush, has been instrumental in securing the release from prison of militant Cuban exiles convicted of terrorist offences, according to a new book. The Bush family has also accommodated the demands of Cuban exile hardliners in exchange for electoral and financial support, the book suggests.

Last year, after September 11, while the justice department announced a sweep of terrorist suspects, Cubans convicted of terrorist offences were being released from US jails with the consent of the Bush administration, according to the book, Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana, by Ann Louise Bardach, the award-winning investigative journalist who has covered Cuban and Miami politics for the New York Times and Vanity Fair.

The Bush family connections go back to 1984 when Jeb Bush began a close association with Camilo Padreda, a former intelligence officer with the Batista dictatorship overthrown by Fidel Castro.

Jeb Bush was then the chairman of the Dade county Republican party and Padreda its finance chairman. Padreda had earlier been indicted on a $500,000 (£320,000) embezzlement charge along with a fellow exile, Hernandez Cartaya, but the charges were dropped, reportedly after the CIA stated that Cartaya had worked for them.

CONTINUED…

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1202-05.htm

Terrorist Connections Resurface In Florida

by Jane Franklin; June 29, 2002

Governor Jeb Bush is about to choose a Florida State Supreme Court judge. There are five finalists and his deadline is August 12. Since there is no Hispanic on the Court, most people expect Jeb Bush will want to name a Hispanic. There is only one Hispanic among the finalists. That one Hispanic is of course a Cuban- American. He is Raoul Cantero III, a corporate lawyer for a Miami firm, Adorno & Yoss--the only one of the five who is not a judge.

Governor Jeb Bush might consider it more important for a Supreme Court judge to have Cantero's experience working for Hank Adorno, who had a long association with the family businesses of Jorge Mas Canosa and his son Jorge Mas Santos, late chair and current chair, respectively, of the Cuban American National Foundation, the wealthiest and most influential right-wing Cuban-American organization.

Is Raoul Cantero ready to enforce the law even against Cuban- American terrorists? This is a matter of major importance because terrorism against Cuba is one of the issues that confronts the Florida court system with astonishing regularity. The U.S. Neutrality Act forbids launching military expeditions from U.S. territory against any nation with which the United States is at peace. Nevertheless, in Florida, the prevailing jurisprudence is that it's o.k. to commit terrorist acts against Cuba. In Florida courts, those who carry out armed attacks against Cuba are treated as freedom fighters. Contrariwise, anyone tried for attempting to find out about those plans and warn Cuba about them is quite likely to end up in prison, as have five Cubans recently sentenced to long prison terms, including life behind bars.

Now that White House Resident George Bush is supposedly waging a War on Terror, one might think that brother Jeb would not want to select anyone with a record that suggests approval of terrorism.

This one Hispanic on the final list for Florida's Supreme Court just happens to be the grandson of former Cuban dictator, General Fulgencio Batista. And his father served under Batista as an intelligence officer in the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities or BRAC, notorious for torture and assassination. Of course it would not be fair to assume that Raoul Cantero shares the politics of his father and his grandfather Batista. But his own record indicates that he is continuing the family tradition of favoring terrorism against the Cuban people.

CONTINUED...
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=2049

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Part III
A Black-List Burning for Bush: The Unreported Story of How They Fixed the Vote in Florida

EXCERPT…

Especially with a President named “Bush.” ChoicePoint’s board, executive suite and consultant rosters are packed with Republican stars, including former New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir and former ultra-Right congressman Vin Weber, ChoicePoint’s Washington lobbyist.

Thursday, 2 a.m., December 7, 2000. On the other end of the line, heavy breathing, then a torrent of words too fast for me to catch it all. “Vile . . . lying . . . inaccurate . . . pack of nonsense . . . riddled with errors . . .” click! This was not a ChoicePoint whistleblower telling me about the company’s notorious list. It was Choice- Point’s own media communications representative, Marty Fagan, communicating with me about my “sleazy disgusting journalism” in reporting on it.

Truth is, Fagan was returning my calls. I was curious about this company that chose the president for America’s voters.

They had quite a pedigree for this solemn task. The company’s Florida subsidiary, Database Technologies (now DBT Online), was founded by one Hank Asher. When U.S. law enforcement agencies alleged that he might have been associated with Bahamian drug dealers -- although no charges were brought -- the company lost its data management contract with the FBI. Hank and his friends left and so, in Florida’s eyes, the past is forgiven.

SNIP…

“They” is Florida State, not ChoicePoint. Let’s not get confused about where the blame lies. Harris’s crew lit this database fuse, then acted surprised when it blew up. Swedlund says ChoicePoint had a professional responsibility to tell the state to test the list; ChoicePoint says the state should not have used its “raw” data.

CONTINUED…
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=15363


FDLE hires former drug smuggler

The computer expert with strong ties to law enforcement will help the state track terrorists.

By LUCY MORGAN
St. Petersburg Times
published August 2, 2003

TALLAHASSEE - In an attempt to identify potential terrorists, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is using the services of a former drug smuggler turned millionaire.

Hank Asher, 48, a computer technology expert who lives in a $3-million Boca Raton house, has founded several companies that retrieve huge amounts of electronic information about individuals.

He also has become a close friend to former FDLE director James T. "Tim" Moore.

"Hank Asher has done more to facilitate intelligence and information sharing for police in the country than anyone I've ever known. He's a patriot, a true friend," Moore told recently told the crowd at his FDLE retirement party.

CONTINUED…
http://www.sptimes.com/Channel10/2003/08/02/State/FDLE_hires_former_dru.htm


Kevin Phillips, Author of "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush"

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

"Now what I get a sense of from all of this -- and then topped obviously by spending all the money in 2000 to basically buy the election -- is that this is not a family that has a particularly strong commitment to American democracy. Its sense of how to win elections comes out of a CIA manual, not out of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution." -- Kevin Phillips

SNIP...

BuzzFlash: The title of your new book is "American Dynasty." You make the argument that the return of George W. Bush to the presidency restores, in essence, a Bush dynasty. What is wrong with that?

Kevin Phillips: Well, dynasties are something that the United States came into being fighting against. We have George III in 1775 and 1776. I don't see any reason why, in the last 25 years, we should have George I and George II, and think about Jeb I and so forth. It's pernicious, almost, by definition of what America's all about. It's doubly pernicious when you start thinking about the legacy of economic politics and bias, the legacy of association with the national security state intelligence agencies, the legacy of involvement in the Middle East in a way that may send some horrible chickens coming home to roost. I just don't think there's anything good about a dynasty in this country at all.

BuzzFlash: You frequently reference European dynasties in the book -- and as you mentioned, we rebelled against one of those. You mentioned the Hapsburgs, the Stuarts, the Bourbons, and so forth. Every dynasty had its characteristics of rule. You spend a good part of the book detailing what are some of the hallmarks or characteristics of the Bush dynasty, going back four generations to the founder of the Bush dynasty -- who, you mentioned at one point, I think, was a Democrat? Is that right?

Kevin Phillips: Well, it's hard to say. You're talking about George Herbert Walker in Missouri and Sam Bush in Ohio. And because they were the two great-grandfathers of the current President, attention is merited to them. And one was clearly a Democrat -- that was Sam Bush in Ohio. It's not so clear what George H. Walker was. By the time he got to New York in the 1920s, he seemed to be supporting more Republicans, but his origins in Missouri -- St. Louis -- had him a Democrat there. It's probably not terribly meaningful what he was. He was a financier in that era, and, I think, a real piece of work.

CONTINUED...

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/01/int04001.html

From Right-Web.com:

Highlights & Quotes

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a founding member of the Project for the New American Century and the brother of George W. Bush, has been a trailblazer--along with his brother--of so-called compassionate conservatism. After he lost his first bid to be Florida’s governor in 1994, Bush converted to Catholicism (his wife’s religion), began urging his fellow Republicans to pay more attention to minorities, became a godfather to a poor black boy, and opened a charter school in one of Miami’s most destitute neighborhoods. (During the 1994 governor’s race he had said he would probably do “nothing” for blacks.) (1)

But compassionate conservatism apparently has its limitations. In the 1996 book Profiles in Character, which Jeb Bush coauthored with Brian Yablonski, Bush laid out his view of “modern victim movements”: “The surest way to get something in today’s society is to elevate one’s status to that of the oppressed. ... Many of the modern victim movements -- the gay rights movement, the feminist movement, the black empowerment movement -- have attempted to get people to view themselves as part of a smaller group deserving something from society. ... Eventually there will come a time when everybody will be able to claim some status as a victim of society, leaving few in society who will actually be considered the victimizers.” (4)

Bush has also called for fewer death row appeals and faster executions while at the same time arguing that Florida should withdraw from Aid to Families with Dependant Children and replace it with “temporary assistance.” (5)

Jeb is widely considered to have aided his brother’s controversial election victory in Florida by disqualifying thousands of predominately African American voters who were falsely accused of being convicted felons. According to a Salon.com investigation of Florida's voter rolls, “many voters, perhaps thousands, lost their right to vote because their names appeared on a flaw-ridden list generated by DBT Online (which has tight Republican ties) that included purported ‘felons.’ The investigation revealed that the lists were used in different ways at each of the state's 67 individual county election boards. Some found the list too unreliable and didn't use it at all, but most used the file as a resource to purge names from their voter lists. A disproportionate number of the voters purged were Democrats.” (7)

CONTINUED...

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/bush_j/bush_j.php

BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI AND ALFONSO CHARDY
aviglucci@herald.com
Posted on Sat, Oct. 05, 2002

It was 1991, dad was in the White House, and Jeb Bush was hopscotching through Nigeria in a corporate jet, on his way to meet government officials he hoped would buy $74 million worth of water pumps from his South Florida business partner.

On the jet with Bush was a Nigerian associate in the deal, Al-Haji Mohammed Indimi, who carried several heavy Hartmann suitcases. At least one of the bags, the airplane's pilot says, was packed with cash to bribe the Nigerian officials.

Did Jeb Bush know about the cash in the suitcase? Did he understand what the money was for?

Bush declined to be interviewed for this story. His campaign emphatically denied that he knew anything about suitcases full of bribe money.

CONTINUED...

http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/4221945.htm?1c

Jeb is a signee to PNAC.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

THE MIAMI NARCO-BANKING NETWORK

In 1979, the Nugan Hand Bank took as its president Donald Beazley, then president of the Great America Bank of Miami, which was indicted in 1982 for its cocaine-laundering operations. When Nugan Hand collapsed in 1980, Beazley moved on to become president of the City National Bank of Miami. The bank's new owner was Alberto Duque, a Colombian wheeler-dealer who also became involved with George Bush's son Jeb in the construction of a downtown Miami high-rise.

Scandals constantly surrounded the bank. In 1982, Duque's former New York partner, Eduardo Orozco, was arrested and convicted of running the largest money laundering operation ever uncovered in the U.S. Most of the funds were deposited with the CIA-linked exchange firm Deak Perera. In 1986, Duque was found guilty on 60 counts of fraud and conspiracy.

Throughout the years, the Miami narco-banking network enjoyed considerable political clout with both U.S. political parties. In the 1950s and 60s, Kuomintang money from Thailand and Burma came via Hong Kong to be laundered through south Florida property firms. The Somozas and other South American dictators bought Well out of the glare of public scrutiny, leading banks have sinister connections with up Miami mansions and filled up local banks. One Florida real estate agent estimated that of all foreign purchases in 1979, only 20% were the product of legitimate money.

The drug laundry World Finance Corporation that helped finance CORU in the 1970s had high-level connections to both the Democratic Party in Georgia and Washington (when Carter was president) and also to the Miami circles of the Republicans under Nixon.

Northside Bank of Miami was owned by Gilberto Rodriguez Orejula of the Cali drugs cartel. The Popular Bank and Trust Company, which was owned by deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza until his death in 1980, was used by the State department to transmit funds to the Contras.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wakeupmag.co.uk/articles/ciadrugslaunder.htm


Then there's THIS one, with the greasy fingerprints of Jebthro:

How the Bush Family Coddled a Major Foreign Terrorist on US Soil

EXCERPT...

When Bosch helped found the terrorist umbrella network CORU in 1976, it began to receive funding from WFC , which printed and sold "bonds" to finance Bosch's terrorist work.

CORU founders, including Bosch, were implicated in the terrorist horrors of 1976 - the Cubana Airlines bombing and the assassination in Washington, D.C., of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier. The deaths of Letelier and his research assistant, Ronni Moffitt, in a car bombing brought to seventy-six the number of people CORU claimed to have killed in North and South America since its founding barely four months earlier.

John Dinges and Saul Landau, in their book on the Letelier case, Assassination on Embassy Row, concluded that CORU had the "active support of the CIA" and was "allowed to operate to punish Castro for his Angola policy without directly implicating the United States."

At the time of the assassination, not-directly-implicating-the-United-States in the terrorist activities of CIA surrogates was George Bush 's job. If CIA dads in their old age tell their sons war stories, George Bush had a good one to relate to Jeb about how back in 1976 he came to save the bacon of Jeb's later-life hero Orlando Bosch and his Cuban exile pals. CIA Director Bush had to work overtime to keep the agency out of the storms when Letelier's murder on Embassy Row brought death squad politics to the nation's capital.

-- Hinckle and Turner, "Deadly Secrets," p. lii.

Source:

http://afghanistanwar.com/archive/index.php/t-26071.htm...
10 Reasons Not to Vote for Jeb Bush in 2002

BY ROCHELLE RENFORD / http://www.weeklyplanet.com/current/cover.html

Make no mistake. Americans do love their royalty. Our founding fathers may have given the finger to the royals in England, but generations later the monarchy still rules. The lack of an official king and queen has only allowed the American public to anoint several unofficial royal lines instead. As much as Americans extol the virtues of hard work, most of us probably would have preferred the silver spoon route. Work is fine, but really, wasn't leaving the womb hard enough? For some lucky sperm, the birth canal is the last tight spot they'll have to find their way out of. Like the Kennedys and the Rockefellers, the Bush clan is a monument to unearned privilege and power, but they've distinguished themselves with their capacity for denial.

Gov. Jeb Bush has said that after college, he was on his own financially and made his own way through his own hard work. So what if that "hard work" was for his father's campaign, and for corporations run by his father's friends. While working at IntrAmerica Investments, a real estate development firm owned by Bush Sr. supporter Armando Codina, Bush's salary jumped six figures in about six years. He has said his family name wasn't an advantage but spent much of his career wooing clients who wanted to get next to his family. He was cut in on investment deals, even though he didn't actually have any cash to invest, and he walked away from scandals involving attempts to defraud the U.S. government, claiming that he wasn't a fraud but a dupe. Only he knows which is true, but it's clear that if he hadn't used his family connections to do favors for his wealthy comrades, some of the scandals wouldn't have happened. When developer Hiram Martinez Jr. requested $18-million in federal loan insurance for an apartment development in 1985, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development questioned its land value and delayed the request. Rather than allow HUD to do its job, Bush wrote a letter to the U.S. agency's undersecretary on Martinez's behalf. The loan was approved, the land values were inflated and Martinez got six years in prison on fraud charges. Bush has amnesia about the letter. Later he made a call to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to help another associate looking to get out of following some pesky federal rules.

Bush denies that he received special treatment in both of those incidents, but any citizen who's dealt with either agency knows that's not true. It's pretty damn special to have a top manager take your call, instead of getting a clerk who transfers your call or tells you to fill out forms.

It's his denial that makes Bush an ineffective governor. It's not possible to see why minorities would need affirmative action when you refuse to see that alumni and legacy admissions are a form of affirmative action too. It's easy to focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation when you've never had to be accountable for your own questionable dealings. Recognizing every citizen's right to vote is harder when you really believe that the only rights that count are yours.

CONTINUED...
http://www.whoseflorida.com/10_reasons_not_to_vote_for_jeb_b.htm
ht


Israel Jared and the Emperor's Clothes website

EXCERPT...

Some conclusions and relationships

* Jeb Bush worked for Texas Commerce Bank as the assistant to the founder and head of the South America division.
* Texas Commerce Bank linked was linked to Saudi and drug money.
* Texas Capital Bank is linked to SOCO International PLC and its offshore North Korea oil leases through John C. Snyder and Snyder Oil.
* The "Forbidden Truth" links current terrorism to Saudi Banks and BCCI.
* Peter Dale Scott and other have Texas Commerce Bank linked to BCCI.
* Texas Capital Bank is linked to Texas Commerce Bank through John C. Snyder and Jody M. Grant.

Texas Capital Bank looks like a reinvention of Texas Commerce Bank. Same miraculous Enron like story of success, same "oil men/Bush supporter" links, maybe the same domestic and international Oil Exploration clients. When Texas Commerce Bank started popping up in mid 90s drug money investigations, it got sold off to Chase Manhattan. A year later (1998) Texas Capital Bank appears in full Texas glory. Probably just in time to help finance GW campaign. Peter Dale Scott has got a great website on BCCI Saudi terrorist Financing Links and a new book coming out in 2003:"Drugs, Oil, and War". Wayne Madsen covers Saudi - Bin Laden ties here: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD202B.html . Professor Michael Chossudovsky (who has a new book out: WAR AND GLOBALISATION THE TRUTH BEHIND SEPTEMBER 11) also links Bush new chosen investigator to the Saudis and BCCI:
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Chossudovs...

Source:
http://www.rmfdevelopment.com/political/SOCO_SICO_NCB_BCCI_TCB1_TCB2.htm

Osceola County, Fla., Commissioners to Stop Talks with Development Firm

Willoughby Mariano
The Orlando Sentinel, Fla.

Dec. 10--KISSIMMEE, Fla. -- Osceola County commissioners voted Monday night to kill talks on a $100 million convention center with an Orlando firm because of its possible ties to Osama bin Laden.

For two months, Xentury City Development had tried to fend off allegations that its Saudi-owned parent company has links to a bank that the United States alleges helps finance terrorism.

SNIP...

Yet Xentury's plans unraveled after researchers from the Local 362 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union submitted a report to the county suggesting Xentury's parent company, Xenel International, may have links to banks that finance terrorists. A researcher for the union discovered a potential connection between Xentury's parent company, Saudi Arabia-based Xenel International, and an overseas bank the U. S. Department of State thinks was used to finance Al-Qaeda.

The CEO of Xenel is Abdullah Alireza. Alireza sits on the nine-member board of supervisors of an Islamic bank called Dar Al-Maal Al-Islami Trust. A subsidiary, Faisal Bank Sudan is among the co-founders of a third bank, Al Shamal Islamic Bank, according to published reports. State Department records showed Al Shamal Islamic Bank has been used to finance global terror.

CONTINUED...

http://www.enr.com/news/otherSources/2002/12/10/krtbn/0000-0515-OR-DEVELOPER.asp

http://www.maebrussell.com/Bibliography%20Sheets/840s2.html


BCCI, Jebthro and Smirko – Robert Morgenthau for USAG


Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau knows Jebthro, Smirko and Poppy are tied to BCCI -- the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, called by DCI Robert Gates "the bank of crooks and criminals international." Morgenthau was a great US attorney, but the Reagan-Bush DoJ doesn't like the good apples, if you know what I mean.

Ever hear of CenTrust? Jeb has. And an honest US Attorney General will make sure the whole BFEE remembers, too – from Leavenworth.


Background:
Investigating BCCI and Savings and Loan Fraud

The BCCI scandal and the savings and loan crisis are complicated by near-incomprehensible numbers, multitudes of players, and the heightened secrecy that often protects negligent and criminal behavior. Allan Dodds Frank, a business investigative reporter and producer at ABC News, observed that "(these) people are spending lifetimes constructing complex crimes....(I)f it were so easy, they wouldn't have made them so complicated."

In spite of the magnitude of numbers, names, and places, the BCCI affair and the savings and loan crisis can be reduced to a few basic themes. Reporters who discussed the coverage of these stories at The Annenberg Washington Program provided brief overviews of the scandals and tried to distill the issues for conference participants in much the same way they would for viewers or readers.

Although the scandal surrounding the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) is perhaps the biggest banking scandal in history, it received limited media coverage. BCCI was a Pakistani-managed, Middle East-financed international bank with branches in 70 countries. Peter Truell, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who has written some of the most significant stories on BCCI, described the essence of the scandal:

It is a story about stealing very large amounts of money and using it for a multitude of illegal purposes, perverting governments, corrupting politicians, corrupting regulators, corrupting bank regulators.

CONTINUED…

http://www.annenberg.nwu.edu/pubs/news/news03.htm


BCCI IN THE UNITED STATES, PART TWO

ACQUISITION, CONSOLIDATION, AND CONSEQUENCES

Initial Plan For BCCI in the U.S. After the Takeover

BCCI worked make these branch offices high-profile from the beginning. In Miami, for example, the bank deliberately sought out well-known public officials and invited them to visit the bank. Both past and present Florida governors accepted the invitation, as did a U.S. Senator, and the then-son of the Vice President of the United States, Jeb Bush, who was at the time Florida's Secretary of State. Miami branch chief Abdur Sakhia said although BCCI had only been in south Florida a short time before its opening, it was already growing rapidly and becoming profitable, and political figures were glad to help the bank celebrate its growth.

We started in April 1982, but our formal opening in August 1982. Governor Graham came to that opening. Jeb Bush came to that opening too, along with Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young. Oil ministers from Venezuela, Abu Dhabi, the minister of economy and finance from Jamaica, Barbados, officials from Central Banks from all over the region. We had eight to ten ministers and central bank governors and leading businessmen from Venezuela and Peru and Trinidad, everywhere. It was a very successful opening. . .I have a videotape of portions of those in which Graham is being introduced to all BCCI people. Jeb Bush is also in those videotapes. Dante Fascell came to my house. We had met socially a couple of times. Reuben Askew came to the bank several times and had been to my house. Paula Hawkins came to the bank several times separately.(6)

SNIP…

CenTrust: BCCI Schemes With A Dirty S&L

Throughout the 1980's, BCCI had wanted to establish a foot-hold in Florida through owning a bank in that state with the ability to take deposits from Americans, a power precluded BCCI's branch operation there under federal bank laws applying to foreign banks, which are outside the U.S. federal deposit insurance system. Internal memoranda at BCCI begin referring to a variety of possible acquisitions of banks in South Florida, and a number of different BCCI officials, including Abdur Sakhia, who testified before the Subcommittee, began investigating possible target banks in Florida for BCCI's acquisition. A memorandum from Sakhia to Abedi in early 1986, entitled, "Future Plans in the United States," describes BCCI's intentions:

SNIP…

In point of fact, BCCI had expanded its branch offices to three in Florida -- Miami, Tampa and Boca Raton -- but was unable to find a suitable target bank in Florida over the remainder of 1986. Moreover, BCCI had decided by early 1986 that whatever it did in Florida would have to be secret, because the Treasury losses discovered by BCCI's auditors in 1985 and announced publicly in December 1985 had made BCCI even more notorious in international banking circles, and would subject any proposed purpose of a U.S. bank by BCCI to even more scrutiny.(52) Sakhia, as well as others affiliated with BCCI, had already begun meeting with CenTrust chief David Paul beginning in early 1985 and continuing through 1986, socializing with Paul. According to Sakhia, nothing came of these meetings. (53)

CONTINUED…
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/07later.htm
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Minstrel Boy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 02:02 PM
Response to Reply #31
36. now there's a data dump worthy of a truth warrior!
thanks! :hi:
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DemonFighterLives Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 10:41 PM
Response to Reply #31
50. I'm Speechless
Great Work! :kick:
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 05:35 PM
Response to Reply #11
78. That would make a great chant.
Like the one. George Bush. We know you! Your daddy was a killer too!
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smirkymonkey Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-21-05 04:49 PM
Response to Original message
5. Another kick...
:kick:
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RBHam Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-21-05 04:58 PM
Response to Original message
6. Minstrel Boy...
You once again display your genius at scatology...
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poe Donating Member (554 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-21-05 05:11 PM
Response to Original message
7. my first thoughts about 9-11
had to do with the anti-globalization movements that were not only vexing the powers that be directly but also exposing the whole show as well as giving great momentum to people's movements all over the world. this all came to a halt on 9-11 and i think about that. Seattle drove the globalizers nuts and now the movements and protests are somewhat emasculated. many purposes have been served but i just kept thinking about how the protests just shriveled up, not entirely, post 9-11.
thanks for keeping it alive.
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sadiesworld Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-21-05 05:16 PM
Response to Original message
8. .
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RBHam Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-21-05 05:26 PM
Response to Original message
9. If you're like me...
Then you realize we're screwed. All of us. As a Canadian I feel like an Austrian citizen screaming warnings into the wind about Hitler's true agenda, just before the Anschluss...

A more modern, sophisticated and technologically driven Fascist expansion for sure - but the paralells between the rise of the Nazi philosophy in Germany and the Neo-Con-Fundie philosophy in the USA are more than just passing strange...

The winds of another World War are forming and darkening and the twice-unelected Dictator of Amerikka promises that "much more will be expected" from his cannon fodder underclass and that "there's no turning back" from his unilateralist doctrine of pre-emptive war...

Also, let it be understood what the unacountable Pentagon Offices of Special Plans and their Official Disinformation campaign are planning. There will be an endless barrage of false flag terrorist provocations worldwide and a deafening domestic campaign of manufactured terror alerts. If not even more inside Black Ops like 9-11. All the while, torturing "confessions" out of "non-combatants" to prop up the well crafted myth of a Just War against radical Islamists.

Stalin's minions would recognize THAT tactic...

"Those that fail to learn from history are condemened to repeat it."

-George Santayana
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American liberal Donating Member (915 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-28-05 10:47 AM
Response to Reply #9
87. After reading parts of the timeline, I'm beginning to think the same thing
Who will be the "100th Monkey" that will spur the corporate media into action?
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Al-CIAda Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 01:14 AM
Response to Original message
12. If he didn't know then, he has to know by now.


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jdots Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 01:30 AM
Response to Original message
13. Case closed damn it single bullet......
Alot of us have a little bit of inside info about 9/11 that just can't be dumbed down. Anyone who can not ask questions is doomed.
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porkrind Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 03:00 AM
Response to Original message
14. Wow. All these posts and no hint
of the DU anti-MIHP/LIHOP "It's not a conspiracy, why can't you just believe the official story and stop embarrasing me" crowd? :)
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 10:21 AM
Response to Reply #14
15. Perhaps they're at the inaugural balls...
...or their daughters' coming out parties.

:-)
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rman Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 11:26 AM
Response to Reply #14
18. if you can't mock it, ignore it...
and hope it'll quickly sink into the archives.
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SammyWinstonJack Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 01:42 PM
Response to Reply #14
32. I'm wondering where they are too. n/t
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 01:58 PM
Response to Reply #14
34. Maybe they've seen the results of this poll
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oblivious Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 09:58 PM
Response to Reply #14
45. Just a reminder of the main strategy they use to stop investigation.
Associate all conspiracies theories (i.e. anything that questions the official line) with ETs, space aliens, wacko religions, etc. The following article started off treating the murder of another key microbiologist in a serious way, but finished by associating all conspiracy theories with wackos.

Author airs conspiracy theory on Im’s death

...MU history Professor Jeff Passley, who teaches a course about conspiracy theories and conspiracies, said mysteries invite speculation. "It’s always more interesting to think of something weird than the more obvious,"...

...For example, he said, some people in the communist-fearing 1950s thought extraterrestrial beings wanted to enslave the planet. In the ’60s, people started viewing aliens as peace-loving "space brothers." And in the ’70s, aliens were suspected of performing sexual experiments to breed with humans.

"It’s true that almost every sort of religion or belief system purports to explain the unexplainable and to give you a sense of control," Passley said. "These conspiracy theories are just a version of that. They try to impose rationality upon the unexplainable."


http://www.columbiatribune.com/2005/Jan/20050123News004.asp
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MsConduct Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 10:40 AM
Response to Original message
16. Here's another interesting 9/11 site....
http://thewebfairy.com/killtown/oddities/911.html

Don't let the site name throw you off.
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leesa Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 11:13 AM
Response to Original message
17. Thanks. No doubt in my mind BushCo did 9-11
The fact that they refuse to investigate it, refuse to answer the questions and willfully tampered with evidence says it all. Where are those two black boxes you found at the WTC, boys? Why did you haul away all the rubble before the investigation?
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Pastiche423 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 03:06 PM
Response to Reply #17
27. And why was Daschle
told not to push an investigation soon after September 11, 2001?

Why did the BFEE do everything in their power to stomp out an investigation? An investigation owed to the American people?

IMHO, it is willful ignorance to believe the caveman theory.
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Hippo_Tron Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 10:52 PM
Response to Reply #27
53. If Dick Clarke had come out in 2002 Bush would've never had 80% approval
Max Cleland, Jean Carahan, and Wellstone/Mondale would've never lost their senate seats. Bottom line he would've had MUCH more effect coming out against Bush when it wasn't an election year.
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ailsagirl Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 10:10 PM
Response to Reply #17
48. Wellstone was one of the strongest proponents of an
investigation into 9/11.

Nuff said?
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Just Me Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 11:51 AM
Response to Original message
20. My presently firm LIHOP position was based upon "facts",...
,...revealed over time. I do believe MIHOP is a possibility; but, have not yet garnered enough "facts" to personally adopt that position.

I definitely believe, without a shadow of doubt, that this neoCONimperialist tyranny LIHOP!!! :mad:
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DemonFighterLives Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 12:43 PM
Response to Reply #20
24. Lihop, mihop either way
The BFEE loves it! SEC stops investigating the put options, 9/11 commission makes a big report as interesting as the Warren Commission.
I thought they were going to dig more after the election? I thought Kenny Boy was going to be prosecuted? I thought the poppy fields in Afghanistan were going to be leveled? What ever happened to the Iraqi War Declarations missing pages? What happened to the 28 missing pages from the Senate intelligence committees findings relating to Saudi Arabia?
Instead of any follow up, we get crooked elections after an initial silent coup. The fraud continues unabated and insurance was attained by purging the Cia. I've got to get my hat. :tinfoilhat:
If we can't stop them, we'll have to grind them down.
:dem:
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Karenina Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 02:48 PM
Response to Reply #24
25. America is now controlled
by a fascist regime.
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smallprint Donating Member (778 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 12:11 PM
Response to Original message
22. Kick, plus a link
http://www.questionsquestions.net/

This site is basically a constructive criticism of the 9/11 truth movement... makes a lot of interesting points. Definitely worth a look.
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RPM Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 02:52 PM
Response to Original message
26. Airbus vs. Boeing
Thought about this on the plane (an airbus) the other day... All 4 planes on 9/11 were Boeings, with different sets of controls between the 767s and the 757s.

Why would the terrorists try to train and fly on those, when they could have more easily trained and flown airbuses?

Statistically, with as many airbusses as are currently in service, shouldnt 1 of the 4 9/11 planes been an Airbus?

Is there something to the fact that they were all boeings?
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Carl Brennan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 12:02 AM
Response to Original message
30. Jeb Bush's link to terrorist flight school
That's right. They flew them out on a plane that also had Jeb Bush aboard.

Filmmaker Hopsicker Discusses Odd Activities Of 911 'Ringleader'


Radio Transcript Published In The American Free Press
By Tom Valentine with Daniel Hopsicker and Michael C. Piper
American Free Press
January 6 & 13, 2003


Investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker, producer of the new video, "Mohamed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus," was a guest on the Dec. 15 broadcast of Radio Free America, the weekly call-in talk forum sponsored by American Free Press with host Tom Valentine.
Joining Valentine as co-host for the evening was AFP Correspondent Michael Collins Piper. The two discussed Hopsicker's shocking discoveries - outlined in his video - that prove, beyond any question, that the U.S. government has been officially covering up explosive facts about the activities and associations of reputed 9-11 hijacking ringleader Mohamed Atta.
Excerpts:
Valentine:
For all intents and purposes, as your research into Barry Seal has shown - along with the work of many others who have dared to look into the subject matter - the world's largest cargo airline has been run by the CIA. Intelligence officials have a definite link to this little Venice airport, don't they? Some people would argue that it was "just a coincidence" that Atta and the 9-11 boys would come there to learn to fly.
Hopsicker:
It's beyond coincidence at this point. In fact, you'll even find that the owner of the flight school in Venice, Wallace J. Hilliard, was in business with a key figure in the Whitewater scandal, Truman Arnold, a Bill Clinton crony from Arkansas who had been the finance chairman of the Democratic Party.
Arnold's attorney in Whitewater was longtime Washington figure Richard Ben-Veniste, who was just named to sit on the 9-11 investigation panel.
So, Ben-Veniste has ties to people he is supposed to be investigating. So when you are talking, in this case, about the owner of the "terror flight school" you are talking about a person that anyone might naturally consider a possible suspect.
Hilliard, a 70-year-old multimillionaire health insurance executive and a self-styled Mormon bishop, inexplicably went into business three years ago with a Dutch native living in America, Rudy Dekkers, and began buying flight schools which shortly thereafter were flooded with Arab student pilots.



Initially, I thought that Dekkers owned the flight school. But Hilliard was always the true owner of the flight school where Atta and one of the other 9-11 hijackers trained.
There was another hijacker who trained next door at the Florida Flight Training Center which - coincidentally, you might say - is also owned by a Dutch native.
It appears that Zaccarias Moussaoui who is scheduled to go on trial for conspiracy in the 9-11 attacks was also here.
Valentine:
The federal authorities came in and grabbed up all of the records of the flight school.
Hopsicker:
That's right. They flew them out on a plane that also had Jeb Bush aboard.
Valentine:
The federal authorities told the local law enforcement authorities to keep their noses out of the investigation, didn't they?
Hopsicker:
That's correct. I sat down with two Southern lawmen, a current sheriff and his immediate predecessor. These two guys looked me dead in the eye and said that, based on what they have seen with a lot of CIA-connected covert operations in the area, the CIA was somehow involved in, if not responsible for, the World Trade Center attacks.
You might expect some wild-eyed leftist radical to say that. But these are two Southern sheriffs. They have spent years watching CIA activities that they could not interfere with.
(snip)
Piper:
I'd like to make a comment about your video, "Mohamed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus." I have to say it was riveting. There are a lot of people who are looking into 9-11, focusing on various theories and propositions that run contrary to the official government version of the events.
However, what Daniel Hopsicker has done in this video has taken a very specific set of circumstances and events linked specifically to the people who are alleged by the government to have committed the 9-11 atrocity and has uncovered all of these remarkable facts - not theories. If you look at this aspect of the whole 9-11 story, the portion that Daniel has assembled, and you see all the holes in the "official" story in the context of what Daniel has presented, then you know that there is a much bigger cover-up and a much bigger scandal beyond what Daniel has covered.
Valentine:
Who are these Dutch fellows? How did they get involved?
Hopsicker:
That's the question. Who are these guys? Why were they training hundreds of Arabs here in America to fly? There aren't that many flight jobs in the Arab world, yet they were training hundreds of men for only a handful of jobs. So something else was really going on. And what they did simply did not make business sense. They paid twice what the flight school in Venice was worth, clearly throwing around somebody else's money.
If you were the CIA and you were running some secret operation in this country and you wanted to create plausible deniability, then why not bring in two Dutch men to come to the United States and run the flight school for you?
It's a big story. I will tell you that I have just completed a three-hour taped interview with Atta's American girlfriend.
Valentine:
I didn't even know that Atta had an American girlfriend.
Hopsicker:
Well, there you go again. You have to ask yourself why you didn't know that. Don't you think you would have seen a ton of stories - at least in the supermarket tabloids - about this woman under titles such as "I Dated a Terrorist." The truth is that this woman is in hiding. I had to track her down and convince her to talk to me.
Valentine:
One would normally think that you can sell that to The National Enquirer.
Hopsicker:
I don't think they are interested.
Valentine:
No, they probably are not interested. I think the Enquirer is a front for these operations, too. In fact, my colleague here, Michael Collins Piper, did a pioneering story for the old Spotlight pointing out that all of the tabloids are owned by one company - most people don't realize that - which is controlled by a Wall Street banker named Roger Altman, who, as a deputy treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, was - again - a key figure in the Whitewater scandal.
Piper:
That's correct. The fact is that the tabloids have a long-standing relationship with the CIA that goes back to the early years of both the tabloids and the CIA itself.
Valentine:
So the tabloids probably won't be interested in any stories that might implicate the CIA in any covert activities involving the circles around Atta.
Hopsicker:
Atta's girlfriend was a pink-haired stripper. She lived with him for two months before she kicked Atta out when she found a new boyfriend.
From what she described, we've been able to positively identify five people who were close associates of Atta. I don't mean fellow student pilots. I'm talking about people he went to meetings with. They are all still alive and I will tell you this: they are not Arabs. They are all Germans.
Here's Atta, who spent eight years in a two-year urban planning collegiate program in Hamburg, Germany. What was Atta doing in German for all those years? Didn't anyone in Germany notice that this foreign national had spent eight years in a two-year program? Of course they did. Atta was an intelligence agent.
And from what his girlfriend told me. Atta was psychopathic enough to have done what he is said to have done. And he did hate the United States. I have no proof that he was the guy who flew into the World Trade Center, but everything I have shows that he could have.
Valentine:
Does anyone really have any proof as to who the hijackers are who were aboard those planes?
Hopsicker:
Not to my knowledge. I haven't followed that end of it.
Piper:
All we really know is that persons - using the passports and identities of foreign nationals, mostly Saudis - were aboard those ill-fated planes and that they spoke Arabic. But Israel's Mossad has a long documented record of infiltrating Arab terrorist organizations with Arabic-speaking Jews who pose as Arabs.
And it should be noted that even many Arabs had some real doubts about whether Ramzi Yousef, who organized the first World Trade Center bombing, was really even an Arab.
That fact is not very well known nor is it mentioned by people such as Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch who is trying to connect Yousef and Saddam Hussein to the Oklahoma City bombing.
Valentine:
What is this German connection?

<http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_government&Number=387736&t=-1>
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itzamirakul Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 02:59 PM
Response to Reply #30
37. Unbelievably believable!
All of this information in this thread could make a book on its own in addition to all of the books and other information linked to.

Shouldn't this thread be archived in Demopedia?
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Carl Brennan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 06:20 PM
Response to Reply #37
41. Here is a picture of Jebby with head of Terror airways
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geek tragedy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 02:11 AM
Response to Reply #30
54. Nice Nazi site. Care to cite to Mein Kampf while you're at it?
American Free Press citations are banned at DU.
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Carl Brennan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 12:28 PM
Response to Reply #54
56. Well, even a broken clock is correct
twice a day. That is as long as it doesn't have an am/pm function. That being the case it is correct once a day, which will suffice for this topic. ;)
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geek tragedy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 12:34 PM
Response to Reply #56
58. If the American Free Press is the only one saying it, it is false.
People who rely upon NAZI, HITLER-LOVING propagandists have ZERO credibility, and should expect no respect.
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Carl Brennan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 12:32 PM
Response to Reply #54
57. Here is something from Mein Kampf
that seems on target:

The size of a lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.
Adolf Hitler - From Volume One, Chapter X of Mein Kampf
http://www.heretical.com/miscella/ahbiglie.htmlS
http://www.heretical.com/miscella/ahbiglie.htmlhttp://www.heretical.com/miscella/ahbiglie.html

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geek tragedy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 12:35 PM
Response to Reply #57
59. You're the one relying on Nazi propaganda, not me. eom
Nazi propaganda is against DU rules, btw. Please respect Forum Rules.
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Carl Brennan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 02:54 PM
Response to Reply #59
62. Ah, geek, my friend, you need to take a break

Yer just a little to hung-up on rules. Repeating something from Mein Kampf is not, in and of itself, promoting Nazi propoganda; it depends, it always depends, on the context.
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geek tragedy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 04:54 PM
Response to Reply #62
63. Repeating stories from NAZI sources like THE AMERICAN FREE PRESS
is against the rules.
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Carl Brennan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 06:08 PM
Response to Reply #63
64. Well, I must be privileged, because they haven't pulled my posts.
Or maybe they just haven't noticed yet. :eyes:
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geek tragedy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 07:20 PM
Response to Reply #64
65. Well, I forgot to hit notify. Thanks for the reminder.
Of course, the fact remains that you still are spreading NAZI, white supremacist propaganda on a progressive website.

A decent person would be ashamed.
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Carl Brennan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 12:41 PM
Response to Reply #65
73. Your welcome, but there seems to be a divergence of
opinion on whether I'm violating DU rules seeing as how my posts havent' been deleted.

Either I'm privileged or you are wrong.
Which do you think it is?
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geek tragedy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 05:12 PM
Response to Reply #73
75. Actually, I'm right and the moderator didn't do their job.
FYI,

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=printer_friendly&forum=125&topic_id=15557&mesg_id=15581

Is it fair to say that you sympathize with the people who run the American Free Press, and find them credible?
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geek tragedy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 05:16 PM
Response to Reply #73
76. I'm right--the moderators just aren't doing their job.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=printer_friendly&forum=125&topic_id=15557&mesg_id=15581

Now, I suggest you take your act to stormfront.org or other places where Nazi filth is appreciated.
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Carl Brennan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 02:39 PM
Response to Reply #57
61. delete
Edited on Tue Jan-25-05 02:41 PM by Carl Brennan
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 05:32 PM
Response to Reply #30
77. pressed by Schudt on whether more evidence existed,Walsh conceded it did
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ElsewheresDaughter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 01:51 PM
Response to Original message
33. clone here
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miksong78 Donating Member (1 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 02:02 PM
Response to Original message
35. wow
Thanks for the info!
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 03:05 PM
Response to Original message
38. At a minimum 9/11 was simply a case of LIHOP imo and life experiences
and the lame excuse is a "worldwide intelligence failure" followed by a neo-conservative purge of our national security community bigger than it's formation in 1947 and the agenda of PNAC being implemented.
:grr::puke::argh:
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reprobate Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 07:44 PM
Response to Reply #38
42. I disagree. It's not LIHOP. There are too many interwoven threads.

To many interwoven threads that all add up to keeping secret from the American people that there was a conspiracy afoot. If you have that many people cooperating in secrecy you have, by definition, a conspiracy. And if you have a conspiracy, it does not stand to reason that it is a conspiracy to just 'let' something happen. That much planning and forethought had to have been to 'make' something happen.

On a slightly different topic, it's apparent to me that since the media did not publicize any of the information in this thread, they were in the employ of the administration from the start of this attack on America. They are responsible as well.

None dare call it treason. Well I sure do. These bastards conspired to attack America for the sole reason of taking the country over in a fascist coup. 9/11 was the American Reichstag. Everything started from there. And let to here.
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 07:48 PM
Response to Reply #42
43. As I said-"at a minimum" it was LIHOP, it could have been MIHOP
at clandestine levels.
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ailsagirl Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 10:06 PM
Response to Reply #42
46. You always have to ask, "Who benefited?"
Edited on Mon Jan-24-05 10:15 PM by ailsagirl
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Sterling Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 10:08 PM
Response to Reply #42
47. I agree. Media accountability will be crucial.
nt
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latebloomer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 04:41 PM
Response to Original message
40. kick n/t
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Sterling Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 07:50 PM
Response to Reply #40
44. Kick
for freedom of speech.
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RBHam Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 10:42 PM
Response to Original message
51. Resurrected Hijackers
Several Suicide Hijackers Later Turn Up Alive in the Middle East
Of the 19 alleged hijackers identified by the FBI, at least six turned up alive after the attack. The FBI's identifications included names, photographs, and, in several cases, other personal details -- all of which matched the six persons who surfaced after the attack to proclaim their innocence.

Abdulaziz Alomari
Abdulaziz Alomari was identified by the FBI as the hijacker who accompanied Mohamed Atta from the connecting flight from Portland and helped him hijack and pilot Flight 11 into the North Tower. Abdulaziz told the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper: "The name is my name and the birth date is the same as mine, but I am not the one who bombed the World Trade Center in New York." 1 2 Saudi Embassy officials in Washington defended the innocence of Alomari, saying that his passport was stolen in 1996 and that he had reported the theft to the police. 4

Saeed Alghamdi
Saeed Alghamdi, a Saudi Airlines pilot, was identified by the FBI of being a hijacker of Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. Alghamdi was "shocked and furious" to learn this three days after the attack, noting that his name, place of residence, date of birth, and occupation matched those described by the FBI. "You cannot imagine what it is like to be described as a terrorist - and a dead man - when you are innocent and alive," said Alghamdi, who considered legal action against the FBI. 2

Salem Al-Hamzi
Al-Hamzi was identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers of Flight 77, thought to have crashed into the Pentagon. Al-Hamzi said: "I have never been to the United States and have not been out of Saudi Arabia in the past two years." 2

Ahmed Al-Nami
Al-Nami was identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers of Flight 93. Al-Nami said: "I'm still alive, as you can see. I was shocked to see my name mentioned by the American Justice Department. I had never even heard of Pennsylvania where the plane I was supposed to have hijacked." 2

Waleed Alshehri
Waleed Alshehri, a Saudi Arabian pilot, was identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers of Flight 11. Alshehri turned up in Morocco after the attack where he contacted both the Saudi and American authorities to tell them he was not involved in the attack. 3 6

Abdulrahman al-Omari
Abdulrahman al-Omari, a Saudi Airlines pilot, was identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers of Flight 11. After learning this, he visited the US consulate in Jeddah to demand an explanation. 7

Ameer and Adnan Bukhari
Ameer and Adnan Bukhari were named by CNN as suspected hijackers of Flight 175, the jetliner which crashed into the South Tower, in an article dated 9/13/01. In a correction, CNN stated that Ameer Bukhari died in a small plane crash in Florida, and that Adnan was still alive in Florida, having passed a polygraph test to confirm his innocence. 8

http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/deceptions/identities.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References

1. Who Did It?, ABCnews.com,
2. Revealed: the men with stolen identities, telegraph.co.uk, 9/23/01
3. Hijack 'suspects' alive and well, BBC, 9/23/01
4. The hijack suspects, BBC, 9/28/01
5. Les Américains se trompent sur 5 des 19 terroristes, AllAfrica.com, 9/21/01
6. Dead Saudi Hijack Suspect Resurfaces, Denies Involvement, AllAfrica.com, 9/24/01
7. 'Suicide hijacker' is an airline pilot alive and well in Jeddah, Independent.co.uk, 9/17/01
8. Arrests made at New York airports, CNN.com, 9/13/01
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itzamirakul Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 03:17 AM
Response to Reply #51
55. Kick!
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oblivious Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 09:39 PM
Response to Reply #51
66. If I had the money and time, I'd do a documentary interview of these guys.
I think that's the only way to make this register with the masses. Interview each one, showing he is alive, and having him explain where he was on 911 etc. It could wake up tens of millions more people to the fact that the official story is a fraud, a laughable, pathetic fraud.
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spooked911 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-25-05 12:36 PM
Response to Original message
60. I guess I am like him.
and probably even worse.
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Karenina Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 06:56 AM
Response to Reply #60
67. Sitting in front of the TV
My 80 year-old neighbor and I suddenly turned to each other and said "CIA" in perfect unison.
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hector459 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 12:03 PM
Response to Original message
69. I hope this gets more widespread distribution.
Amazing!
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Beam Me Up Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 12:16 PM
Response to Reply #69
70. Believe it or not
Edited on Wed Jan-26-05 12:18 PM by Beam Me Up
there are many of us who were on top of this BEFORE 9/11/01. We had been anticipating a 'significant event' orchestrated by covert operatives from deep within the national security state. (None of us anticipated the vents of 9/11 precisely). (EDIT: I'm referring to people on a yahoo group dedicated to following the CIA's involvement in drugs and other activities.)

Now, as Michael Ruppert points out, the charging elephant of 9/11 is behind us and we need to turn our attention toward those other elephants that are charging toward us. This is not to say (as some insist on emplying) that one should forget where the 9/11 elephant came from or what its intent was, much less ignore the deaths of 3,000 people. But we would be foolish to not focus our attention toward what is unfolding now.

My personal prediction is that there will be another so called 'terrorist' event, most likely nuclear, that will claim the lives of an estimated half million people. They've already created the 'back story' via bin Laden's fatwa. It will probably be inside the US but there is some chance it could be elsewhere. In any case, the consequence of it will be used to militarize the entire US society and to completely nullify the possibility of any meaningful dissent.
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 12:33 PM
Response to Reply #70
72. One must perceive and understand reality to survive.
~ Ayn Rand
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 12:31 PM
Response to Reply #69
71. The pathos of politics and the art of self-delusion
Edited on Wed Jan-26-05 12:58 PM by seemslikeadream
from Carl Brennan

Sometimes when I discuss politics I feel like a doctor stuck with the job of telling a terminally ill patient the bad news. What do you do? Well, you don't want to frighten or dishearten them I guess, but you also don't want to lie. But then, like me, you look at how people don't mind being lied to in America and you think, shiiiit, why not one more lie. What good does the truth do if it makes people feel bad? Then you have to consider the mental and physical state of the patient to handle the bad news. Needless to say being a bringer of bad news is not fun.





I guess there comes a time when a person has to simply admit that all of the shit done to date has been a complete waste of time. The next thing to do is to stop doing it. That is my final analysis of the past few years of my activities in regards to politics. This specie is just to fucking bent on doing the wrong thing at the wrong time for the wrong reasons and doing it with a vigor that cannot be impeded much less abated. That is what is happening at DU and to the Democratic party IMHO. DU looks like it is going to try to take a more "moderate tone" with the Democratic Party leading off. 9/11 is no longer a "relevant" topic according to heretofore esteemed cop on the beat Mike Ruppert. The Democratic party's only hope, though a forlorn one at best, was to move more to the left. It has become an inane body of jabbering idiots and the gutless asshole John Kerry swindled his backers out of 52 million bucks.



For instance: What does it mean to be a "liberal" is the big question of late. Taking the bait the non-fascists go "Wow!, lets talk about it, then they all sit around and show how fractious they are even when it comes to their own "identity".
Message to the public: "How could people who don't even know who or what they are run the country?"

Not one democrat I saw considered the political implications of answering the question. With fascists you do not engage in political discussion, you either find a way of turning their asinine questions around on them and put them in the hotseat and show the world how shit-for-brains stupid they are or SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!

Any suggestions on how to do that with this question about what it means to be a liberal?
Hint: look in the second sentence.

How about: "Wow!neato question. Let me see. I think that being a liberal is, at least, to be a non-fascist".
Then you say: "OK, I went first, now I want you to answer a question."
"What does it mean to be a fascist Republican? "

Then you yank out the 14 characteristics of fascism and begin a discussion and get them to prove they are not fascists.

YOU ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS PUT THE BALL BACK IN THEIR COURT, frame the argument, OR shut the fuck up!!!!

This simple lesson has been drilled here at DU and elsewhere for as many years as I can count and not one person has learned a thing from it, including the Democratic leadership. Carville, the head honcho for Clinton's campaign, wrote a book: "Buck up, suck up or fuck up" about framing the arguement and the democrats just never fucking get it. That, IMHO, is because they do not understand how the Repukes operate and what they are.

And PLEEEEEEZE do not call these democrats "liberals". The Clintons, Kerry, Dean and the rest are all moderate to conservative democrats covering their own asses and just cruising along playing the game. What has happened over the past few decades is that the society depicted in the corporate controlled press has, purportedly, become more conservative/non-thinking so that what was once a moderate becomes a liberal and what was once a liberal becomes a lunatic fringe, and what was lunatic fringe becomes a traitor, terrorist or some other El Draque. Princess Laya in Star Wars seemed to think that the tighter the Empire made its grip the more people would slip through its fingers, if only that were true.


The US is headed for huge and unheard of disasters IMO. Big problems will occur when we go bankrupt from fighting wars and the public is forced to pay up. The defeat in Iraq will not be a learning phase as it was in Vietnam; it will be a time when the inertia of fear sets in and anyone questioning the Fuerher will be labeled a traitor. Much like what happened to Germany's economy after WWI and II will happen in the US. The Fuerher in the present case will stay in power because the utterly gutless Democratic Party does not care and probably couldn't do anything now if they did they are to busy sniffing the political wind to gauge how conservative they need to be to keep in a majority. All they care about is the same things the Repukes care about: their own fat asses. The Repukes have a total lock on the voting system no matter how people vote, so that ends any possibility of change from that aspect, even if the political will was there. I cannot beleive I see people on this message board jabbering about "elections" in 2006 or 2008. Maybe they are just Psy-ops types trying to confuse the issue, or dems simply to stupid to realize that there are no elections anymore: IT IS OVER!!!THE FUCKING GAME IS RIGGED!! THE GAME IS RIGGED AT EVERY LEVEL !! Democracy is dead!! There is no legitimacy whatsoever in this fascist dictatorship, there is no competing with them fairly, fairmindedness = foolishness when you play with Repukes.

The Democratic Party is a pathetic joke. I will NEVER again discuss another political point with anyone on or about the Democratic Party as a vehicle for meaningful change. It is, essentially, no different than the Repukes. The more I read history the more I'm convinced of this. When your town has its drinking water contaminated, or river polluted and you cannot even file a lawsuit because it violates some code of capitalism and the fascists say: "SHUT THE FUCK UP AND DRINK"! then it is your fault! Throughout US history the Democratic Party has been a tool of industry: bought off at nearly every turn, with a few exceptions like FDR and the brief interlude of JFK. Just look at the Harriman's and Bush's cozy relationship for profit from "speculative swindles" and financing Nazi's in the pre-WWII period. Averell Harriman was a fakin' "moderate"??????? The bankers own the whole system people lock, stock and barrel.

They own the Media as well and have controlled it since the Spanish American War or before. One need only compare the MSM coverage of the governor's race in Washington State to the non-coverage of the Presidential election fraud in Ohio and elsewhere to see who controls the Media. The MSM even engaged in a little pre-emptive war against the non-MSM by labeling the people who voiced concerns about the shit going on in Ohio "conspiracy theorists". The Pentagon sits in the CNN newsroom. The CIA control of the media is most vividly illustrated with this quote from ex-CIA director William Colby:

"There are no major news media in the US that are not controlled by the CIA.

Colby died in a mysterious boating accident. His body was found without a life jacket and those who boated with him said he was religious about wearing it. Conclusion: Colby was murdered for breaking the faith with the Christians in Action (CIA). That is what happened. Now if I use the same "rules of evidence" for pinning this on the CIA fascists as the Bush admin used for attacking Iraq.......


The Democrat's are in a race to the moral bottom that the Repukes have a huge headstart in both in mindset and money.

The whole system is a farce set up by bankers to make one of the most incredibly dense specimens of humanity-- "Homo Bureaucratis Americanus"-- think that we have a diverse political environment in the US based on fair play. It is all an illusion meant to pacify, akin to religion or voodoo. That pacification process gets easier and easier the less informed people are. In it's present form the US Empire had its beginnings in the Spanish American War a war staged by the Rupert Murdoch of his day William Randolph Hearst. In his lust to beat Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper sales in New York and add to his already considerable success as a media mogul Hearst innundated America with war propoganda and a total disregard for the facts. Hmmmmmm......sound familiar? Hearst told his photo journalist in Cuba--a guy named Frederic REMINGTON--: "Give me the pictures and I will give you a war". Years later US Navy Admiral Rickover did an investigation of the USS Maine explosion, the incident that started the war, and concluded that it probably was caused by an internal explosion, not, as was heralded in the Hearst press from an attack on the ship from outside. Hearst wrote an editorial piece promoting political assasination .....then President McKinley, "the last intellectual president", started to investigate the Maine explosion and poof......he was killed by a "lone nut". Teddy Roosevelt rose to fame on the "splendid little war". Thirty years later the nasty old fart Hearst was game for one last hoorah and hired Italian fascist dictator Mussolini's whore Margarita Sarfatti to write for his newspapers and radio shows. He also consulted with Hitler's press agents to see if the Fuerher was game for being a contributing columnist, but the deal fell through for some reason. The issue certainly wasn't because Hearst thought Hitler too extreme. Hitler probably just didnt' like being toyed with. After meeting Hitler Hearst issued orders to his very large news network to not say anything untoward about fascism and continued to promote fascism up until the eve of WWII. A supporter of these operations was the National Association of Manufactures (NAM) whose first president was...............Samuel Bush.....great-grandpoppy of our sitting fascist dictator. That is how empires work, that is how they have always worked.

.....NAM along with the National Industrial Information Committee picked up the banner of du Pont's free enterprise dogma. It was Fulton Lewis Jr. a former employee of NAM, who became the mouthpiece for NAM. Using his radio program on the Mutual Network, Lewis spread the NAM propaganda to roughly three million people daily. Lewis denied the truth put forth by the La Follette and the Truman committees and instead aired NAM's propaganda under the guise of "Your Defense Reporter."21 At their 1942 convention, NAM went on record of supporting du Pont's Free Enterprise fully. The convention adopted a plank of full support for free enterprise, even if it hindered the war effort. In contrast, the 1942 CIO convention went on record for winning the war first, ahead of any union issues. 24 In other words labor was willing to make the sacrifices needed to win the war, while big business wasn't, and put profits ahead of the war effort. ........

http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/1930sp4.html

Note: Mutual Network was owned by Hearst:




But even if you do manage to become informed what are you going to do about it working within the system?


You can't do anything about it within the system. All you can do is leave the system and set up your own community, alternative Press, etc., but even then you, inevitably, have to deal with the effects of the larger system which is destroying the planet at a helluva rate. The Caspian Sea will become an environmental dead zone: a stinking cesspool of toxic shit and the world will simply nod its immensely dense fuckhead and continue business as usual and have an inaugural ball for the most vile idiot of their lot. Shit maybe they'll fire the environmentalists for not doing there job, or put them in jail for dereliction of duty.


When the dead zones in the oceans start showing up that will be the signal for the end of days, the Texassification of the world will have begun. But it appears that is what most people want, they really don't care and that is their right. If you listen to them they talk about the same old stupid superficial shit they always have. It will be interesting to see how the fascists handle these kinds of crisises. Probably like they did the tsunami: run around and talk shit, then wait a week or two until something on Seinfeld distracts the amoebabrains. One thing the fascists know how to do and that is destroy or despoil the environment and get away with it. Just look at Texass, the worst cesspool in the country, homestate of our fascist dictator. This world will turn into an environmental shithole and the vast majority of the people will never have a clue about its causes.

How about another political party? That kind of gets back to my first sentence. It is worthless. This specie simply does not have what it takes to get past its own desire for suicide. First and foremost of its problems is how easily it is corrupted once $ signs appear. Just look at Black Box voting. Or look at Kerry's "marrying into money" and being coy about it. What is the message? The message is: SELLING OUT IS COOL. Like "Greed is good".

The Green Party is probably little more than an organ of the Repuke Party meant to divide the Left.

One thing that needs to be done is to shut down, in one way or another, key industries: CIA, Yale (Skull and Bones) , Diebold, Fox News......blah, blah, blah, but you can't do that because the all seeing eye would not let that happen. They simply sow confusion to their addlebrained enemy. Then the chaos capitalists will put their money in prison stocks and watch the demand for that industry skyrocket. There will be no mass movement that will cause structural change; it will only be transient political change that is possible.


Another possible thing is for Blue States to secede from the Union, but that requires an enormous political effort that would be wrought with problems. The Left is just to fractious to mount such a campaign and there are no prominent political leaders who have voiced an interest and none can be expected to because they don't care about doing anything for the betterment of the people, they just want to appear as if they are and get paid for it. If it were tried though it would be hard for the US Government in its current state to stop it and the Right would probably like to see it happen so they can have Jesusland all to themselves. Maybe we could have a "political prisoner exchange" where Democrats in the Red States are exchanged with REpukes from the Blue States. There are a few Repuke fascists in Washington I'd like to "deport" with the toe of my boot.



CB

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1524933
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Carl Brennan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 02:54 PM
Response to Original message
74. Were the 9/11 attackers CIA recruits??!!
http://propagandamatrix.com/alleged_hijackers_may_trained_us_bases.html
Here is an excellent analysis of 911, with evidence showing that the "hijackers" were, in fact, CIA recruits, and 911 was a covert operation.

"15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, mostly from wealthy families. In
fact, most of the hijackers are typical of the wealthy, high-rolling,
hedonistic Saudis who turn up over and over again in covert operations
sponsored by the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr.
and Jr. These scandals include Iran-Contra, the Savings and Loan
Scandal (by far the most massive financial rip-off in history), the
massive money-laundering that led to the collapse of BCCI, a Pakistani
bank with strong ties to the CIA, and, more recently, the Enron
scandal. The connection to U.S. intelligence is more than speculative;
several of the hijackers had training at secure military installations
in the U.S.<2> The locations where the hijackers received training
include:

- The Pensacola Naval Air Station
- Lackland Air Force Base
- Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama
- Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama
- The Defense Language Institute in Monterey
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 05:37 PM
Response to Original message
79. I used to be LIHOP. Now I'm MIHOP.
be bopp be bopp
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RBHam Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 05:41 PM
Response to Original message
80. "OSAMAGATE"
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robertpaulsen Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 05:49 PM
Response to Original message
81. Great article! Here's a 9/11 lie he didn't mention: courtesy of Karl Rove
White House lied about threat to Air Force One
By Jerry White
28 September 2001


In a further column in the New York Times on September 13, entitled “Inside the Bunker,” Safire described a conversation with an unnamed “high White House official,” who told him, “A threatening message received by the Secret Service was relayed to the agents with the president that ‘Air Force One is next.’” Safire continued: “According to the high official, American code words were used showing a knowledge of procedures that made the threat credible.”

Safire reported that this information was confirmed by Rove, who told him Bush had wanted to return to Washington but the Secret Service “informed him that the threat contained language that was evidence that the terrorists had knowledge of his procedures and whereabouts.”

Two weeks after these astonishing claims, the administration has all but admitted it concocted the entire story. CBS Evening News reported September 25 that the call “simply never happened.”

snip

One thing is clear: the government lied to the people of America and the world. Either it lied on September 12 when it issued the story of the threat to Air Force One, or it lied two weeks later when it retracted the story. The millions of people who are being told they must accept unbridled militarism and the gutting of their democratic rights in the name of a holy war against terrorism must draw the appropriate conclusions from this indisputable fact.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/sep2001/bush-s28.shtml

So, which lie do you think is actually the truth? Taking into account the "coincidence" that these 19 hijackers just happened to pick a date to attack at the same time Operation Vigilant Warrior and four other similar wargame exercises were being conducted involving the hijacking of airline jets, I'd have to go with the first.



Any guesses as to who Safire's unnamed "high White House official" could possibly be? :)
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robertpaulsen Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-26-05 06:50 PM
Response to Reply #81
82. Kick!
:kick:
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American liberal Donating Member (915 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Jan-27-05 10:05 PM
Response to Original message
83. thanks for the resources
I stumbled across Thompson's timeline project (http://www.cooperativeresearch.org) while doing research on what's really happening with Iraq'a oil (show me the money trail).

It's chilling. really. Thank God for the internets (sic).
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Djinn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Jan-27-05 10:21 PM
Response to Original message
84. you would think
that after the Gulf of Tonkin and the Kennedy assasination (many other examples but with these two there's no controversy) that the fact that governments lie and kill their own wouldn't be that surprising.

I guess you can't tell people what they don't want to hear
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Haymare22 Donating Member (133 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Jan-27-05 10:59 PM
Response to Original message
85. This whole thing.....
...has been bullshit from the get-go.
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AuntiBush Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Jan-27-05 11:07 PM
Response to Original message
86. Thank you, all!
Been figuring it out myself... I don't understand "how" they are getting away w/all of it, and "why" no one of elite status hasn't stepped-up to the plate and go public.

One of them must love their children, too? Just 1... no?

:scared:
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