Dig Within

Three years ago, an international team of scientists published a scientific paper that established the presence of thermitic residues in the dust from the World Trade Center (WTC) catastrophe.[1]  Although the paper was only the last in a mutually-supportive evidentiary chain, it gave more hard evidence that energetic materials were used to destroy the WTC buildings.  This conclusion was in agreement with the other scientific articles that had been previously published, and was also in agreement with eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence.

The paper was peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in February 2009. Since that time, it has been personally delivered to many members of the U.S. Congress and to scientists at universities around the world.  In response, the silence has been deafening. The simple fact that professional scientists could publish such evidence, and over a period of three years be met with no answer from government and academic leaders, is an astounding fact that speaks volumes about the mindlessness that pervades society today.

The few unofficial responses that have been made are interesting, however.

About a year after publication, one of the primary creators of the ever-changing, but always transparently false official WTC explanations began to make deceptive attempts to manipulate the authors of the paper.[2]  This was Gene Corley, who apparently gave up after repeated failures to surreptitiously obtain pre-processed samples.

We can only imagine why Corley, who was the first leader of the WTC investigation and had far more access to WTC dust at a far earlier date than any independent researchers, would make such attempts to deceive. But other similar attempts have recently been made by Chris Mohr, a strong supporter of the official conspiracy theory.  Mohr has tried to secure samples that he could say were obtained from me personally, and in doing so has also engaged in deception and has made false statements about our communications.

Mr. Mohr calls himself a proponent of a “natural collapse” explanation for the WTC, and he has promoted that vague hypothesis in debates against those questioning the official accounts.  On the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, Mohr joined the ranks of the dubious “Skeptic Society,” the leader of which I debated in 2007.[3]  Mohr’s article in the September 2011 issue of Skeptic Magazine demonstrated just how far some people are willing to go in order to avoid the problems with the official account of 9/11.[4]   While providing utterly unconvincing and vacuous answers to a dozen straw man questions, Mohr’s article ignores essentially all the evidence presented in ten years by real 9/11 skeptics.

Having failed to make any new converts to the myth behind the “War on Terror,” Mohr has resorted to attempts to refute the science in the 2009 “Active Thermitic Materials” paper.  The problem is, despite being the new scientific spokesman for the “Skeptic Society,” Mohr has no science background at all and struggles with the basic concepts behind the paper.  Because of this, he set out to find an “independent” expert to champion his cause.

Mohr stated in one of his many unsolicited emails that — “It took me months, and contacting over two dozen labs, to find Millette and his lab, who has both the means and the openmindedness to do this right.”[5]  This message refers to Jim Millette, a long-time government scientist who worked for the EPA and now runs his own business called MVA Scientific Consultants.  Unfortunately, although Mohr took months to find this new champion, it took him only seconds to decide that he would say nothing about Millette’s leadership of the government studies on WTC dust.  When Mohr wrote to me in a mass email asking for pre-processed samples to use in his new project, he failed to mention anything about Millette’s past work on WTC dust.

Millette and his colleagues published several government-funded reports on the WTC dust, which represent the official analyses.  For some reason, these don’t mention the strong evidence of molten metal that was found by the USGS, the RJ Lee Corporation, and the international team which published the 2009 paper.  It appears that Millette and company did find such evidence, in the form of the iron spheres which are abundant in the WTC dust, but a decision was made to de-emphasize that evidence.[6]  Of course, Mohr doesn’t tell people that.  He knows that Millette and his colleagues did not report iron spheres in the official WTC dust signature study, despite iron spheres being a prominent and unusual component in the dust.

That is a striking fact in itself, but there have also been accusations of fraud against Millette and his colleagues.  EPA whistleblower Dr. Cate Jenkins used the phrase “deliberate misrepresentation” with regard to their studies in which samples were manipulated through pre-conditioning to lower the pH before testing.  Millette’s name shows up in Jenkins’ report four times because he participated in several EPA-funded studies that Jenkins has charged with fraud.  Millette did a lot of the analytical work on the WTC dust for these government teams, and was the leader in the laboratory for the government-sponsored studies.[7]

Of course, Mohr won’t tell you about the accusations of fraud either.

In any case it is very interesting that it took Mohr several months of contacting dozens of labs to find the one person who did all the government laboratory work on the WTC dust.  We might wonder about the other dozens of labs.  Wouldn’t they take Mohr’s money?  In the end, why did Mohr insist on using this one lab that had been implicated in charges of fraud related to WTC dust analysis?  What made those dozens of other labs unsuitable, or less “open minded,” than the guy who didn’t see the evidence before?

We might never know.  But it appears that Millette will begin to report his new findings for the “skeptic” Mohr next week, at a conference in Atlanta.  It will be interesting to see if Millette will now report the abundant iron spheres, which all other scientists have seen in almost every sample.  As for the possibility of Millette confirming the presence of thermitic materials in the WTC dust, which would indict his own previous work, we probably shouldn’t hold our breath.

In the meantime, we can rest assured that the U.S. government and government-sponsored universities will not respond to the finding of energetic materials at the WTC, or to any of the peer-reviewed scientific articles on the subject.  Three years without a response is response enough.

Detailed investigation reveals unexpected connections among people who played critical roles related to the attacks of September 11, 2001.  Earlier articles have covered some of those connections with respect to the World Trade Center (WTC) and the official reports which were produced to explain the WTC events.[i]^,[ii]  This article will begin to outline a wider set of connections that encompasses more aspects of 9/11.  Readers may find that, with respect to the 9/11 attacks and those who were responsible for protecting us from terrorism, it is a small world after all.

Barry McDaniel came to the WTC security company Stratesec, in 1998, to become its Chief Operating Officer.  In the years before 9/11, Stratesec had contracts to provide security services not only for the WTC, but also for United Airlines, which owned two of the planes hijacked on 9/11, and Dulles Airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off that day.

At the WTC, McDaniel was in charge of the security operation in terms of what he called a “completion contract,” to provide services “up to the day the buildings fell down.”[iii]  McDaniel came to Stratesec directly from BDM International, where he had been Vice President for nine years. BDM was a major subsidiary of The Carlyle Group for most of that time. When Barry McDaniel started at BDM, the company began getting a large amount of government business “in an area the Navy called Black Projects,” or budgets that were kept secret.[iv]

The company that McDaniel now leads is called Lancaster Systems & Solutions (LS2).  As CEO at LS2, McDaniel has a board of directors which is led by Bruce Bradley.[v]  This is an astounding connection due to the fact that Bradley is the founder of Bradley Woods, where Dick Cheney got his start. Cheney worked for Bradley Woods as Vice President during intermittent periods between the times he and Donald Rumsfeld were working for Nixon and running the Ford White House.

It seems an incredible coincidence that the “number two” man for Barry McDaniel today was formerly the closest colleague of Dick Cheney forty years ago.  Of course, people who have studied the attacks in detail no longer believe in coincidences related to 9/11.

It is also odd that LS2 is a company that is so focused on the “response” to 9/11.  In fact, few companies are more focused on the 9/11 aftermath than LS2, whose mission is to “deliver a diversified suite of responsive defense solutions to government organizations and multinational corporations who provide military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and emergency response operations across the globe.”[vi]  The company’s subsidiary, Global Service and Trade, provides equipment for police state operations around the world.

Between the years that he worked with Cheney and McDaniel, Bradley was a director for UBS (mentioned in the review of WTC connections) and Legg Mason, where he was a colleague of Cheryl Krongard, the wife of CIA Executive Director, Buzzy Krongard.

The board of directors which Bradley leads for McDaniel at LS2 includes another former VP of BDM, Ronald Riggin, and several other very interesting people.  One such person is Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and State Department official.  Johnson was a paramilitary CIA officer from 1985 to 1989, but he also directed crisis management for hijackings and helped investigate the Lockerbie Bombing (Pan Am 103).

In 1994, Johnson started scripting Special Operations exercises for the State Department.  From 1996 to 2006, as Deputy Director of Counterterrorism within the State Department, he led terrorism training for senior-level government officials and served as an expert witness in cases against al Qaeda suspects.[vii]

Another director working with Bradley and McDaniel at LS2 is David Pillor, the former director and Executive VP of InVision Technologies (InVision).  As the leading provider of bomb detecting equipment for airports, InVision had an interesting history which included installation of its equipment at most major airports prior to 9/11, including those from which the hijacked planes took off.

Sergio Magistri was the CEO of InVision from 1992 through 2004.  In a court case related to this period, InVision was charged “with authorizing improper payments to foreign government officials in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).”[viii]  The case represented the first, and perhaps only, time that the U.S. Department of Justice decided to not prosecute a company which had violated the FCPA.

Magistri and LS2’s Pillor are now both board members at Vidient Systems, Inc (Vidient), a video surveillance company that serves the “homeland security” industry.  Vidient is in strategic partnership with Autonomy Corp, where we find the “Prince of Darkness,” Richard Perle.  Fellow directors at Vidient include several people who played critical roles related to the events of September 11.

One director at Vidient is Richard Clarke, the former “Counterterrorism Czar,” whose job for nine years prior to 9/11 was to protect the United States from a terrorist attack.  There are many important questions that need to be answered regarding Clarke and his associations and actions leading up to 9/11.[ix]  Clarke’s role in the international failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 is another matter that needs further investigation.[x]

At Vidient we also find The Lord Paul Condon.  In September 2000, Condon became a director at the British security company, Securicor (now G4S).  Three months later, in December 2000, Securicor bought a company called Argenbright which ran security on 9/11 at Dulles and Newark airports where Flight 77 and Flight 93, respectively, took off that day.  Argenbright also managed some, perhaps unrelated, security checkpoints at Logan Airport in Boston, where the two other 9/11 planes took off.

The year before 9/11, Securicor was allowing criminals to operate security, and three of its executives pled guilty to conspiracy.[xi]  And prior to 9/11, Argenbright pled guilty to falsifying employee records so that it could hire those convicted of drug possession and assault.[xii]  These facts are startling considering that just weeks after 9/11, officials were evaluating the possibility that the hijackings might have been “inside jobs” in that “the hijackers may have had accomplices deep within the ‘secure’ areas of airports.”[xiii]

Securicor faced about 30 lawsuits from victim’s families after 9/11.  Another director that Condon supervised at Securicor, Trevor Dighton, said of the company’s liability – “I’m not worried about it (the litigation) one little bit.  The two planes involved weren’t those that crashed into the towers – that’s the first thing.”  Dighton’s confidence might have had something to do with his opinion of Condon, whom Dighton said was “brilliant and knows what he’s doing.”[xiv]

Vidient director Condon came to Securicor directly from having served as the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London for seven years.  Corruption was rampant in Condon’s police force during the time he led it.[xv]  Condon himself was accused of being a racist and of withholding evidence related to the death of Princess Diana.  Although the official report on the racism accusations (The MacPherson Report) found that the police force that Condon led for years was “institutionally racist,” British Home Secretary Jack Straw refused to fire Condon.

Another Vidient director working with Pillor, Clarke and Condon is Michael Sheehan, the former U.S. State Department Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism.  Sheehan was a long time member of the U.S. Army Special Forces.  He also served on the National Security Council for two presidents, George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1992, and Clinton from 1995 to 1997.  After 9/11, Sheehan became the Deputy Commissioner of Counter Terrorism for the New York City police department.

Today, Sheehan is primarily associated with Torch Hill Investments.  Recently, Stephen Kappes, the “unusually powerful deputy CIA director” who was also the CIA’s Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence from 2000 to 2002, joined Torch Hill.  When signing on with Sheehan, Kappes claimed that — “Many of the al-Qaeda seniors still maintain that another crippling blow to New York City will cripple the United States. They think that this is the key.”[xvi]

Hopefully, Kappes is not as good at predicting these things as Sheehan has been.  After the bombing of the USS Cole, Sheehan asked Richard Clarke –“What’s it going to take to get them to hit al-Qaeda in Afghanistan?  Does al-Qaeda have to hit the Pentagon?”[xvii]  That certainly seems like a prescient statement considering that, less than one year later, that was exactly what happened.

Speaking of the Pentagon, the little discussed British company called AMEC had some interesting personnel.  It was AMEC’s subsidiary AMEC Construction NA that was responsible for reconstructing Wedge 1 of the Pentagon just before (and after) Flight 77 hit that exact spot in the building.  AMEC Construction NA was also immediately hired to clean-up the WTC site at Ground Zero, within hours of the destruction there.[xviii]

The British parent company, AMEC, provides “engineering and project management services to the world’s energy, power and process industries.”^[xix] It is a major international player in the oil and gas industry, as well as in other natural resource industries.  AMEC had a significant presence in Saudi Arabia dating back to the late 1970s, providing support to the national oil company Saudi Aramco, which is by far the richest company in the world.^[xx]  Executives and board members at AMEC included former directors of NM Rothschild, Kellogg Brown and Root (now Halliburton), and SG Warburg.

AMEC Construction NA was run out of Toronto, Ontario by a man named Peter Janson.  The company had offices in New York, Fort Lauderdale, and Phoenix.

From 1990 to 2001, Janson was a fellow director of Donald Rumsfeld at the Swiss-Swedish engineering company, ABB.   For the 11 years prior to 9/11, Rumsfeld was the only American director at ABB.  In an alarming turnabout, Rumsfeld helped ABB sell nuclear technology to North Korea in 2000 and, two years later, declared the same country a terrorist state and part of the “axis of evil.”[xxi]

Janson had been the president and CEO of an ABB predecessor, the Swedish company ASEA.  Interestingly, ASEA had used the swastika as its company logo until the 1930s.  Today, Janson is enjoying the fruits of the “War on Terror” as a director of Teekay Corporation, an oil and gas transport company that operates throughout the world.  Additionally, he “reports to the Prime Minister of Canada in his role as a member of the National Advisory Board on Science and Technology.”[xxii]

There will be more about AMEC and the Pentagon renovation project in future articles, but it is sufficient to say that much has been left uncovered in the official investigations into 9/11.  A simple review of the people whose roles were critical to the success of the attacks, and their associations before and after 9/11, brings to light surprising connections between companies that were responsible for security and construction, and the people most responsible for protecting the nation.

Due to the incredible number of coincidences proposed by the official reports on the events of September 11, 2001, it makes good sense for citizens to question any improbable claims related to that day.  We have been given at least two such odd stories about flights that left Andrews Air Force Base that morning.  One represents a highly improbable flight path and the other has produced a contradiction in official accounts.

The first of these flights concerns a large military cargo plane, a C-130H, called Gofer 06.  This plane was from the 133rd airlift wing of the Minnesota Air National Guard.  The 9/11 Commission Report claims that the Gofer 06 pilot and crew were first-hand witnesses to the demise of both Flight 77 and Flight 93.

It was said that the C-130H pilot, Lt. Col Steve O’Brien, was returning from delivering supplies to the Carribean, which more specifically meant the U.S. Virgin Islands.  Air Force Magazine recently reported that seven other crew members were on board, including copilot Maj. Robert Schumacher and flight engineer MSgt Jeff Rosenthal.[i]

The official timeline of this improbable flight begins as follows:  Just after 09:30, Gofer 06 took off from Andrews AFB and Flight 77 flew “right in front of [it], a mile and a half, two miles away.”[ii]  Air traffic controllers (ATCs) from Reagan National Airport (in Arlington, VA) asked the C-130H pilot to identify and follow the “suspicious aircraft.”[iii] According to the Commission report, Gofer 06 identified the aircraft as a Boeing 757 and, seconds after impact, Lt. Col. O’Brien said — “it looks like that aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, sir.”  In the recent Air Force Magazine article, Rosenthal claims that – ”We saw it crash into the Pentagon.”

Therefore, thirty minutes after millions of Americans had witnessed a second aircraft crash in the World Trade Center (WTC), routine flights were taking off from Andrews AFB, the military base with several interceptor jets at the ready only 10 miles from the Pentagon. The interceptor jets would not take off from Andrews until approximately 90 minutes later. This was all happening just minutes after a series of exchanges between Vice President Cheney and a “young man,” which Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta witnessed and testified were focused on “the plane that came into the Pentagon.”[iv]

Numerous questions come to mind when reading just this small part of the official narrative.

• Why would Andrews AFB launch a cargo plane instead of interceptor jets at a time when three airliners had been hijacked and two of them had crashed into the WTC 30 minutes earlier?
• How could civilian ATCs expect an unwieldy cargo plane, which had a cruise speed of 336 mph (and a maximum speed of 366 mph), to keep up with a Boeing airliner which the official report says was traveling at 530 mph?
• Even if Gofer 06 had time to reach its maximum speed immediately, the difference in speeds would have put the two aircraft 3 miles apart for every minute that passed.
• Some reports state that copilot Schumaker looked down on Flight 77.[v]  How could he look down on something that was at first right in front of him, at a distance of two miles, and five minutes later was up to 15 miles (more than was possible) further ahead of him?
• And if military cargo planes could take orders from civilian ATCs, why didn’t the ATCs ask Andrews AFB to launch its at-the-ready interceptors, which could travel several times faster than the errant airliner?

It was reported that Lt. Col. O’Brien turned on the news after he witnessed Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, and that’s when he and his crew finally learned what most of us already knew — that the nation was under attack.  It was claimed by MSgt Rosenthal that, at this time, “We circled. We loitered briefly.”[vi]

One of the documents released by the 9/11 Commission in response to FOIA requests is the flight tracking strip from Andrews AFB for September 11, 2001.  This tracking strip indicates that Gofer 06 took off from Andrews at 9:33 am.[vii]  Given that the flight engineer for the cargo plane stated that they circled after witnessing the crash, and a large aircraft takes a few minutes to circle, we must assume that Gofer 06 could not have left the vicinity of the Pentagon any earlier than 9:41 am.

Originally the crew had planned to return to their home station in Minnesota. But then they decided “the prudent thing to do was to get to a safe haven and take a time out.”[viii]  They did not go to the nearest safe haven, however, but instead continued on in an improbable path that ended in landing at Cleveland airport, approximately one hour later.

One problem with this new self-determined route taken by the Gofer 06 crew was that Benedict Sliney, the FAA’s national operations manager, had issued a ground stop at 9:42 am, just as Gofer 06 was leaving the Washington area.  Per the 9/11 Commission Report, this meant that all aircraft were ordered to land at the nearest airport. Gofer 06 did not land as required by the FAA.  Instead, it flew for another hour and passed over numerous airports in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Of course the truly amazing thing is that Gofer 06 is credited for witnessing not only the crash of Flight 77, but the smoke from the crash of Flight 93.  At 10:05, just 27 minutes after seeing the Pentagon crash, the crew of Gofer 06 witnessed black smoke from United 93 at a distance of only 17 miles.

The Andrews AFB flight tracking strip does indicate that Gofer 06’s approved flight plan was from Andrews to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.  A direct route between these two points would take the cargo plane right by Meyersdale, PA, which is in a direct line to Minneapolis/St. Paul and about 17 miles away from Shanksville.

The direct distance, as the crow flies, between the Pentagon and Shanksville is 127 miles. If we accept that Gofer 06 “circled and loitered” for only 3 minutes starting at 9:38, then it would have had just 24 minutes to reach Meyersdale, PA at 10:05, which is the time that its crew is said to have seen the black smoke from United 93 at a distance of approximately 17 miles.  At its rated cruise speed of 336 mph, Gofer 06 would have needed 23 minutes to make this trip.  So it is just barely possible.

One might ask a few more questions about this though.

• For example, of all the flight paths that an aircraft taking off from Andrews AFB might have taken, what are the odds that the one plane that was asked to tail Flight 77 just happened to be vectored directly toward the crash site of Flight 93?  Just taking the radial probability of all possible flight paths away from the Andrews/Pentagon area would seem to put the odds at 1 in 360, or about 1 in 180 for only land-based paths.

• What are the odds that this one plane that happened to be vectored directly between the crash of Flight 77 and the crash of Flight 93 would have just exactly the time needed to fly between these two historic events?  Most military aircraft and any commercial airliner would have been traveling much faster and would have missed seeing the smoke from Flight 93.  Therefore, since a C-130H is an unusual type of plane and is relatively slow, the probability would seem to drop considerably lower.

• Why did the crew of Gofer 06 immediately respond to a civilian request to follow Flight 77 but then, for nearly one hour, ignore the FAA’s national operations manager’s order to land at the closest airport?  It ultimately landed at Cleveland, another 181 miles (32 minutes at cruising speed) away, after passing by several cities including Pittsburgh.

It could be that these questions amount to nothing more than coincidence and that Gofer 06 really was just a spectacularly improbable flight on the most spectacular day in U.S. aviation history.  But another flight that took off from Andrews that morning is the center of yet another paradox.  And with regard to that flight, someone seems to either be lying or spectacularly mistaken.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11, Hugh Shelton, was reported to have been one of the many national leaders who were absent or indisposed on that fateful morning. The official line is that he had taken off from Andrews AFB to fly to a NATO meeting in Hungary and was 1.5 hours out when he was told about the first WTC event.  After being told about the second plane going into WTC 2, he told his crew to turn around and go back. Apparently he had to tell them again after they heard about the Pentagon crash, possibly because they had not yet gotten clearance to fly back.[ix]

In any case, Shelton’s plane, a modified C-135 called the Speckled Trout, was about two hours away from Andrews AFB when it turned around.  Yet Shelton did not return to the National Military Command Center (NMCC), where his leadership was desperately needed, until 5:40 pm. The exact time that the Speckled Trout landed has not been officially reported although it was listed in the FOIA-released document noted above.

Upon return, Shelton’s plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base, and from there, three patrol cars and about a dozen motorcycle cops escorted him and his staff to the Pentagon. It was said that when Shelton got back to the Pentagon, he initially went to his office and then visited the site of the attack to see the wreckage. After re-entering the building, he finally headed to the NMCC.

Therefore, Shelton’s account appears to say that it took him about six hours to return to the NMCC, after taking only about two hours to return to Andrews on the Speckled Trout. It seems odd that he would spend six hours (8 minus the 2 needed to fly back) in his office and examining wreckage before reporting to the command center when he was in charge.

Shelton’s 2010 autobiography, coincidentally named “Without Hesitation,” confirms this timeline and adds a few more details.  On page 433, Shelton describes what happened after his initial order to return to the U.S., when he learned of the second WTC crash.  He wrote — “Ten minutes later they called back with confirmation that we had been officially cleared to fly through the shutdown airspace. One of our pilots stuck his head out of the cockpit and announced, ‘Sir, our flight path will take us right over Manhattan, if you’d like to come up here about ten minutes from now.’”

Furthermore, Shelton elaborated on the return journey in that he claims to have flown right over the WTC site just minutes after the buildings were destroyed.  “We flew directly over what had been the Twin Towers, just a few minutes after they collapsed,” he wrote.  And then — “We vectored directly back to Andrews.”

Shelton furthered described what happened when he arrived at Andrews.  He claims that an entourage of DC patrol cars met him there and he was escorted immediately to the Pentagon, “which was still ablaze and spewing plumes of thick gray smoke.” And (interestingly) “...the smell of cordite was overwhelming.“

Suzanne Giesemann, an aide to Shelton who was on the Speckled Trout that morning, has confirmed Shelton’s account in her own book.  In this account, she reiterates that the plane was routed over the WTC site seemingly just minutes after the towers fell.  There is even a photograph of smoke rising from Ground Zero that is attributed to Shelton’s personal photographer, named Jones.[x]

Unfortunately, the September 2011 edition of Air Force Magazine, mentioned earlier, contradicts both of these accounts.[xi]  Another article in this issue includes comments from Captain Rob Pedersen, who was the flight navigator for Shelton’s plane on 9/11.  This article states that after Shelton instructed his pilot to return to the U.S., the crew didn’t get clearance to return for several hours.  This article also claims that the plane did not have any destination and “so we went into a holding pattern near Greenland,” Pedersen said.  The new report says that it was Pederson’s, job as the navigator, to come up with a list of alternative landing sites, the possibilities for which included Thule AB, Greenland and NAS Keflavik, Iceland.

The new article suggests that Speckled Trout finally came back through Canada hours later, but was still being denied entry to US airspace, and therefore it was placed in another holding pattern.  Pederson states that – “It took a little bit of time, and I’m sure there were a lot of phone calls made, before they let us back in.”  The article does mention that the return flight from Canada took the plane over the WTC site and that Pederson took his own photograph out one of the small windows.  It is interesting that the route through Canada and the route back over the Atlantic would both go over the WTC site, but the new story concludes that — “By early afternoon, they had made their way to Andrews.”

The flight tracking strip from Andrews AFB indicates that the Speckled Trout, call name “Trout 99,” took off at 7:09 am ET (11:09 Zulu time). The official time that Trout 99 landed back at Andrews is recorded as 4:40 pm.

Many obvious questions arise when considering these contradictory reports.

• Why does Pederson now claim that it took hours to get clearance to return when Shelton said in his book that it took only ten minutes?
• If the Speckled Trout had flown over the WTC just minutes after the buildings were destroyed, meaning before 11 am, how could it have taken nearly six hours to land at Andrews AFB?
• If Shelton’s account was true and the plane landed much earlier, what was he doing for the next six hours, before arriving at the NMCC at 5:40 pm?
• If he did not fly back until hours later after having been in a long holding pattern over Greenland and then another in Canada, why did he not mention any of this in his autobiography?  Did he not know what the plane was doing?
• How could Shelton not know the difference between “just minutes” and a period of five or six hours?
• If Shelton’s 2010 account was correct, why would Air Force Magazine make up a story in September 2011 about his plane having been delayed in Greenland for hours and not landing at Andrews until the afternoon?

These may or may not be the most critical questions to answer regarding the events of 9/11.  But the story of Gofer 06 has been used to provide evidence for the official accounts, and the question of why so many of the nation’s leaders were absent on that morning should be of great concern to anyone who is interested in the truth.  Getting to the truth will require that all such improbable scenarios and contradictions be investigated.

When Underwriters Laboratories fired me for challenging the World Trade Center (WTC) report that it helped create with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it said “there is no evidence” that any firm performed the required fire resistance testing of the materials used to build the Twin Towers. Of course, that was a lie.

With this experience in mind, I checked to see how many times the 9/11 Commission Report used the phrase “no evidence,” and noted in particular the times the Commission claimed to have “found no evidence” or that “no evidence was uncovered.”  I discovered that the phrase “no evidence” appears an amazing 63 times.  An example is the dubious statement — “There is no evidence to indicate that the FAA recognized Flight 77 as a hijacking until it crashed into the Pentagon (p 455).”

Of these 63 instances, some variation of “we found no evidence” appears three dozen times.  This seems to be an unusually high number of disclaimers begging ignorance, given that the Commission claims to have done “exacting research” in the production of a report that was the “fullest possible accounting of the events of September 11, 2001.”

The number of times these “no evidence” disclaimers appear in the report is doubly amazing considering how infrequently some of the most critical witnesses and evidence are referenced.  For example, the FAA’s national operations manager, Benedict Sliney, who was coordinating the FAA’s response that day, appears only once in the narrative (and twice in the notes).  And the FAA’s hijack coordinator, Michael Canavan, appears only twice in the narrative, with neither of those citations having anything to do with Canavan’s assigned role as the key link between the military and the FAA, a role whose failure the Commission says caused the attacks to succeed. Similarly, the testimony of FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who says Bin Laden worked with the U.S. government up until the day of the attacks, is mentioned only once in the notes. William Rodriguez, the WTC janitor who has publicly testified to basement level explosions, is not mentioned at all despite having given testimony to the Commission.

It seems a good idea to look more closely at the instances in which the attorneys, myth experts and military intelligence operatives who wrote the 9/11 Commission Report said that they did not find evidence.  Here are a few of the most interesting examples.

• “We found no evidence, however, that American Airlines sent any cockpit warnings to its aircraft on 9/11.” p11
• Concerning the hypothesis that one of the alleged hijackers was sitting in the cockpit jump seat since takeoff on Flight 93:  “We have found no evidence indicating that one of the hijackers, or anyone else, sat there on this flight.” p12
• Within minutes of the second WTC impact, Boston Center asked the FAA Command Center (Benedict Sliney’s team) to advise aircraft to heighten cockpit security, but the Commission said:  “We have found no evidence to suggest that the Command Center acted on this request or issued any type of cockpit security alert.” p23
• With respect to requests to warn aircraft to heighten cockpit security — “While Boston Center sent out such warnings to the commercial flights in its sector, we could find no evidence that a nationwide warning was issued by the ATC system.” p455

These first four examples highlight the little discussed fact that the 9/11 Commission did not explain how any of the alleged hijackers entered the cockpits of any of the four hijacked planes.

With regard to Flight 11 the Commission states — “We do not know exactly how the hijackers gained access to the cockpit (p 5)” and — “FAA rules required that the doors remained closed and locked during the flight.”  Based on a recording attributed to flight attendant Betty Ong, the report speculates that they might have “jammed their way in.”  One problem with this hypothesis is that the act of breaking down the locked cockpit door would certainly have given the professional flight crew plenty of time to enter the four-digit hijack “squawk code” into the transponder.  This is a simple, standard operating procedure which the crew was trained to follow but none of them accomplished.

Yet another problem is that, according to the story, Atta and his co-conspirators disagreed with the “jamming” hypothesis.  The report states that Atta “had no firm contingency plan in case the cockpit door was locked” and …”he was confident the cockpit doors would be opened and did not consider breaking them down to be a viable idea (p 245).”  These were, apparently, very bold and optimistic hijackers who walked onto the plane assuming that normal operating procedures would not be followed and who did not have any kind of back-up plan in case they were wrong.  In any case, these claims certainly seem to contradict the words of Acting Director of the FBI, Thomas Pickard, who testified that – “these 19 and their superiors operated flawlessly in their planning, communications and execution of this event. They successfully exploited every weakness from our borders to cockpit doors.”

For Flight 175, the Commission report does not describe how the alleged hijackers got into the cockpit nor does it even mention that this first critical step in a hijacking was omitted from the explanation.   Similarly, for Flight 77 and Flight 93, the alleged hijackers just appear in the cockpit and in control of the aircraft.  As with Flight 11, all three crews failed to follow the simple procedure to squawk the hijack code.

What makes this even less believable is that the Commission admits that Flight 93 received and acknowledged a warning (although not from the FAA Command Center) to secure the cockpit four minutes before the hijacking began.  This means that 37-minutes after the third plane was hijacked, and 25-minutes after the second plane crashed into the WTC, the crew of the fourth plane could not secure it’s cockpit or enter the hijack squawk code despite having four minutes warning that hijackers might try to break in.

• “Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding, but we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.” p171
• Concerning the origins of the funding for the attacks, the report says — “Ultimately the question is of little practical significance.”  But it clarifies that – Similarly, we have seen no evidence that any foreign government – or foreign official – supplied any funding.”  p172
• “We have found no evidence that Saudi Princess Haifa al Faisal provided any funds to the conspiracy, either directly or indirectly.” p498

Recently, the world’s leading insurance provider, Lloyd’s of London, filed a lawsuit alleging the exact opposite of these claims made by the 9/11 Commission.  Although Lloyd’s dropped the lawsuit just days later without explanation, one would think that at least some small amount evidence must have been available for the company to have gone to all the trouble of putting together a case and filing it against the Saudis.  If there was no such evidence, Lloyd’s could be sued for false or frivolous litigation.

Lloyd’s was not the first to contradict the Commission on this topic, however, as the many of the 9/11 victims’ relatives had joined together not long after the attacks to file a 15-count, $116 trillion lawsuit against Saudi royals, including some who were among top government leaders in Saudi Arabia.  That lawsuit was thrown out on a technicality related to the ability to sue a foreign government and, later, the Obama Administration backed the Saudis during the appeal.  What’s important to realize, however, is that it was only the 9/11 Commission that claimed no evidence for Saudi financing could be found.  Obviously, such evidence could be found, it just could not be used to prosecute the Saudi government in the United States.

• “Exhaustive investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, FBI, and other agencies have uncovered no evidence that anyone with advance knowledge of the attacks profited through securities transactions.” p172

The “exhaustive investigations” conducted by the FBI, on which the 9/11 Commission report was based, were clearly bogus.  The FBI did not interview the suspects and did not appear to compare notes with the 9/11 Commission to help make a determination if any of the people being investigated might have had ties to al Qaeda.  The Commission’s memorandum summary suggests that the FBI simply made decisions on its own regarding the possible connections of the suspects and the alleged terrorist organizations.  Those unilateral decisions were not appropriate, as at least three of the suspected informed trades involved reasonably suspicious links to Osama bin Laden or his family.  Another suspect was a soon-to-be convicted criminal who had direct links to FBI employees who were later arrested for securities-related crimes.

The FBI also claimed in August 2003 that it had no knowledge of hard drives recovered from the WTC, which were publicly reported in 2001.  According to the people who retrieved the associated data, the hard drives gave evidence for “dirty doomsday dealings.”

The evidence for informed trading on 9/11 includes many financial vehicles, from stock options to Treasury bonds to credit card transactions made at the WTC just before it was destroyed.  Today we know that financial experts from around the world have provided strong evidence, through established and reliable statistical techniques, that the early expert suspicions were correct, and that 9/11 informed trading did occur.

• “First, we found no evidence that any flights of Saudi nationals, domestic or international, took place before the reopening of national airspace on the morning of September 13, 2001.”  p329
• “Second, we found no evidence of political intervention [with regard to the Saudi flights which did not occur before national airspace was reopened].”  p329
• “We found no evidence that anyone at the White House above Richard Clarke participated in a decision about the departure of the Saudi nationals.”  [Clarke claimed -- “I asked the FBI, Dale Watson, to handle that…” and “I have no recollection of clearing it with anybody at the White House.”]  p329
• “Third, we believe the FBI conducted a satisfactory screening of Saudi nationals who left the United States on chartered flights….They have concluded that none of the passengers was connected to the 9/11 attacks and have since found no evidence to change that conclusion.” and “Our own independent review of the Saudi nationals involved confirms that no one with known links to terrorism departed on those flights.”  p329

For the 9/11 Commission to have made four separate “no evidence” claims related to the widely-reported flight of Saudi nationals out of the U.S. just after 9/11, there must have been a strong reason for this failure of “exacting research.”

Months before the Commission report was published, it was well known that numerous members of the Bin Laden family were among those flown out of the U.S. at a time when no other commercial or private flying was allowed.  “Counter-terrorism Czar” Richard Clarke was the one to make this decision, although he did not coordinate it with Dale Watson of the FBI.  Clarke’s FBI coordinator for these flights was Michael Rolince, the assistant director of the International Terrorism Operations Section (ITOS).

It was reported that Rolince decided the Saudis could leave the country and required only the most superficial examination of their passports and checking for their names on terrorist watch lists.  The fact that many of them were the relatives of the man accused of perpetrating the 9/11 attacks did not lead to any concern or even to basic interviews of the passengers by the FBI.

Rolince, who now works for Booz Allen Hamilton, appears to have been behind several of the inexplicable failures of the FBI to track down the alleged 9/11 conspirators before the attacks.  In 1999, the FBI failed to follow-up on information provided to Rolince about fundraising done in the U.S. by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the alleged “number 2” of al Qaeda.  In April 2001, Rolince also failed to follow-up on a memo sent to him by Dale Watson that warned of a terrorist operation that might have been the plan for the 9/11 attacks.  Dave Frasca, one of Rolince’s direct reports, was the one who disrupted the Minneapolis FBI’s attempt to search the belongings of Zacharias Mousaoui, and Rolince is apparently the one who failed to let the FBI directors know of the arrest of Mousaoui.

•  “Although Whitman told us she spoke with White House senior economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay regarding the need to get the markets open quickly” – “We found no evidence of pressure on EPA to say the air was safe in order to permit the markets to open.”  P555

Like some of the other carefully worded claims in the Commission report, this might be technically true, but the premise is probably false.  Christine Whitman, who was director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency just after 9/11, did claim that the air in lower Manhattan was safe to breathe when it was known that was not the case.  This was probably not done for the purpose of re-opening the stock market, however.  It is far more likely that these false claims were made in order to expedite the removal of evidence at the WTC site.

In any case, interested citizens should examine the many “we found no evidence” disclaimers from the 9/11 Commission Report more closely.  Doing so leads one to a better understanding of  how false that report really is, and the Commission’s feigned ignorance of evidence might help lead us to the truth about what happened that day.

A few years ago, I had a chance to debate the issue of 9/11 Truth on Air America radio’s Thom Hartmann show.  My opponent was Skeptic Magazine’s Michael Shermer, an avowed supporter of the government story.  It was an interesting experience and some good information was communicated, although the format did not allow for a detailed discussion. The debate did not fully settle the question of which outrageous conspiracy theory was the most plausible, but it did provide another helpful example of how Americans are continually being asked to accept the opposite of what they know to be true.

The debate was widely anticipated in some circles, partly because it took months for Hartmann’s producer to find a legitimate defender of the official version of 9/11. Apparently those who knew something of the official story would not publicly support it, and those who would publicly support that official story didn’t know anything about it. That fact in itself is a testament to the progress made by the 9/11 Truth Movement.

After receiving an unsolicited email from Shermer, I invited him to join me for the Hartmann debate. From Skeptic Magazine’s “9/11 Conspiracies” issue in 2006, it was clear that Shermer was also unaware of many facts about 9/11, and the official explanations for the events of that day. But he was well known for his stance on the issue, and I felt this was a chance to follow-up on Hartmann’s offer. With that in mind, I approached the debate carefully, with respect for my opponent, the audience and the host.

It didn’t take long to understand Shermer’s position on 9/11. He didn’t bother with facts about the events themselves, and appeared to be motivated only through a monster-under-the-bed perception of “conspiracy theories”. Even after admitting that the official version of events is itself a conspiracy theory, he maintained that conspiracy among oil company executives and politicians is somehow unbelievable, while conspiracy solely among people who just happen to live on the last remaining oil-rich land is to be expected.

Additionally, my opponent’s performance showed that he is not what most people would call a skeptic, at least not in matters that are important to people. I had suspected this myself, and had to check the definition of skepticism to be sure. What I found was that skepticism is about questioning claims that are generally accepted, or are given by supposedly authoritative sources. Skeptics are not people who simply take contradictory positions without regard for evidence, however, and after rational discussion skeptics usually agree with the case that best fits the evidence.

At the start of our debate, Shermer responded to my own skepticism about the history of al Qaeda by suggesting that our government gets in bed with bad people all the time. At that point, I wasn’t sure whose side of the debate he was on. But it soon became clear that he was only ready to talk about the demolition hypothesis, and then only in the sense that he wanted me to prove that hypothesis. It was gratifying to know that this last remaining, relatively legitimate defender of the official story had only a few points of unsubstantiated speculation to support his supposedly reasoned skepticism.

My opponent was clearly not skeptical of any of the claims made by the only authoritative source on the topic, the U.S. government. He had no response when I asked how each and every member of the U.S. chain of command could have been indisposed for just those two hours on September 11th, or how al Qaeda could have been behind the effective stand-down of the nation’s air defenses during that time. He could not say why the 9/11 Commission left so many of the most important facts out of their report, or what it meant for US government scientists to finally admit that they could not explain the “collapse” of the Twin Towers. His final plea was that we just accept that al Qaeda did it because they said they did it, and we should take them at their word.

This strange approach to skepticism is a good example of the growing attempt by some government and corporate media representatives (Shermer also works for FOX TV) to convince us to believe the opposite of what we see and hear. We’re told that the best way to stop terrorism is to start endless wars in the Middle East, and the best way to protect our freedoms is to give up our freedoms. We’re also led to believe, paradoxically, that anyone who questions the government’s conspiracy theory is a “conspiracy theorist”.

Shermer’s take on 9/11 shows us what happens when people simply believe things without evidence.  He responded to factual information by generating diversionary questions of motivation, and by appealing to authority.  Oddly enough, Dr. Shermer deferred to Popular Mechanics, the subject of my last blog post.  In Shermer’s case, this “believing brain” approach also means making wild, and obviously false, claims such as that he had watched all of several thousand online videos during the 2-minute break in the debate, and that they all supported his contention that demolitions could only be top-down.

It is only on this absurd playing field that we can possibly accept Michael Shermer as an exemplary skeptic. His Skeptics Society is not skeptical of authoritative claims that affect the lives of average people, like 9/11 or electronic voting machines or corporate media consolidation. Instead, Shermer and his group are skeptical of random non-authoritative claims, like those about UFOs, or the belief in God. It seems possible that his skepticism has more to do with supporting business interests than it has to do with reason.

Regardless, when someone who is clearly non-skeptical is promoted as the ideal skeptic, we are being asked to take another step away from reality. That may smell like a pile of manure to some, but as a Buddhist teacher might say, it is exactly the kind of manure that we can work with. That is, when we have an opportunity to notice the root causes of our own weaknesses, the ones that ultimately cause us the most pain and suffering, we can use that opportunity to help find our way back to reality, and back to a greater truth. Therein lies the real value of 9/11 skepticism.

In the end Shermer and I did agree on one thing, and that is that the truth about 9/11 is likely to be simple. His version of simple, however, is that terrorism amounts to just so many astoundingly lucky acts of random vengeance, with the Gods of Science turning a few blind eyes here and there. On the other hand, to me the simple truth is more likely to be that terrorism is a co-opted tool, used by a powerful few to help secure their long term strategic interests. In any case, when such truth becomes not only simple but also painfully obvious, it is imperative that we all become true skeptics.

A transcript of the Air America/Thom Hartman 9/11 Truth Debate can be found at 911Research.com.

Just before the 10th anniversary, I was asked to be on National Public Radio (NPR) to represent “9/11 Skeptics.”  When I first was asked to do this, in a 40-minute call with producer Alex Kingsbury, he said I would be on from 11 am to noon ET.  That was later changed by the replacement producer to twenty minutes starting at about 11:10.  James Meigs, from Popular Mechanics, was to be on before me for a longer period.  At the last minute, I was told I’d be on for only 10 minutes and that the conservative Canadian columnist, Jonathan Kay, would also be on.

I was the only guest questioning the official reports on this show about “9/11 Skeptics” and, in the end, I was only allowed to be on the air for five minutes.  But the audio clips from the show tell the story.

The author is indebted to the good people at History Commons for their “Complete 9/11 Timeline.”  If a reference is not evident below, it can probably be found there.

A recent interview with former “Counterterrorism Czar,” Richard Clarke, is making a splash in the alternative media.[1]  In this interview, Clarke speculates about CIA malfeasance related to the pre-9/11 monitoring of two alleged September 11 hijackers.  This interview is somewhat interesting due to Clarke’s vague suggestion that the CIA had courted 9/11 suspects as sources, but it is far more interesting for what was not said with regard to Clarke’s personal history and associations.

The seeming point of these new statements from Clarke is that the CIA might have withheld information from him, the FBI, and the Department of Defense (DOD) in the twenty months leading up to the 9/11 attacks.  Clarke is not suggesting that the CIA did this maliciously, but only that his good friend, George Tenet, and two others made a mistake in their approach.  Clarke says of these CIA leaders — “They understood that al Qaeda was a big threat, they were motivated, and they were really trying hard.”  The mild twist that Clarke now puts on the story is that  the CIA’s diligent effort to secure much needed sources within the al Qaeda organization was pursued without any suspicion that these sources might turn out to be “double agents.”

Clarke claims that if the CIA had simply told him, the FBI and the DOD, “even as late as September 4th, [2001]” they would have “conducted a massive sweep, we would have conducted it publicly, we would have found those assholes.  There’s no doubt in my mind.  Even with only a week left.”

There are many obvious problems with these new claims from Clarke.  For one thing, the evidence we have indicates that FBI headquarters did everything it could to protect the alleged 9/11 hijackers in the months leading up to 9/11. Another spectacularly obvious problem is that those “assholes” lived with an FBI asset for at least four months and there are reasons to believe the FBI knew that.  More importantly, Richard Clarke personally thwarted two of the attempts the CIA made to capture Osama bin Laden (OBL) in the two years before 9/11.  It seems disingenuous at best that Clarke would say he didn’t have enough information to capture two of OBL’s underlings in 2000 when he was responsible for preventing the capture of OBL just the year before. 

In an attempt to make sense of these matters, we should take a closer look at Richard Clarke.  His own history might shed some light on why he is trying to confuse us today.

Not just another COG

Clarke began his government career in the Ford Administration’s DOD as a nuclear weapons analyst.  At the time, several characters that were central to the events of 9/11 were in the highest positions of that administration.  Toward the end of that era, White House chief of staff Dick Cheney and DOD secretary Donald Rumsfeld were fighting a war of public perception to preserve the increasingly unpopular aspects of the CIA.  Nuclear policy was a big issue at the time as well, and at least one of Clarke’s closest colleagues in later years, Paul Wolfowitz, worked to present false “Team B” information.

After getting his MA from MIT, Clarke went on to become President Reagan’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence.  In this role, Clarke negotiated US military presence in Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.  He asked these foreign governments for “access” agreements and the right to enhance existing facilities.  As a result, the US moved large numbers of contractors into Saudi Arabia.  One such contractor, Bernard Kerik, the New York City police commissioner and “9/11 hero” who had worked for Morrison-Knudsen’s Saudi group in the mid-seventies, went back for another three year tour as the “the chief investigator for the royal family of Saudi Arabia.”[2]

During his half a dozen years in Reagan’s State department, Clarke called Morton Abramowitz, the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, his boss and mentor.  Abramowitz, who was said to be influential in the career of Clarke, had worked as Assistant Secretary for Defense under Donald Rumsfeld in the seventies when Clarke worked in the DOD.  Abramowitz left his position at State in 1989 to become the Ambassador to Turkey.  The next person for whom Abramowitz was boss and mentor was his Deputy Ambassador, Marc Grossman, who is a 9/11 person of interest according to Sibel Edmonds.

In 1984, Clarke was selected to take part in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration.  This was the highly secret Continuity of Government (COG) program run by the National Program Office that continued up to and after the attacks of September 11.[3]  The members of the COG group included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Oliver North, George H.W. Bush, Kenneth Duberstein, James Woolsey, and Richard Clarke.  Although Cheney and Rumsfeld were not government employees throughout the twenty years that Clarke participated in this official government program, they both continued to participate anyway.

COG was developed to install a shadow “government in waiting” to replace the US Congress and the US Constitution in the event of a national emergency like a nuclear war. The first and only time that COG was put into action was when Richard Clarke activated it during the 9/11 attacks.  Clarke had been the one, in 1998, to revise the COG plan to use it as a response to a terrorist attack on American soil.  Apparently, COG and the shadow government these men created are still in play to this day. [4]

In 1989, Clarke was appointed by George H.W. Bush to be the Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs, under James Baker. Clarke was in this position until 1992, and his role was to link the Department of Defense and the Department of State by providing policy in the areas of international security, security assistance, military operations, defense strategy, military use of space, and defense trade.  One important aspect of his job during this time was that Clarke coordinated State Department support of Operation Desert Storm and led the efforts to design the international security structure after the Gulf War.

Throughout the years of the George H.W. Bush Administration, Clarke worked intimately with many people who should be investigated with regard to the events of 9/11 and the crimes that followed. This included:

• James Baker, the Secretary of State who went on to join the Carlyle Group
• Donald Rumsfeld, the State Department “Foreign Policy Consultant” who was Chairman Emeritus of the Carlyle Group at that time, and Secretary of Defense on 9/11
• Dick Cheney, the Reagan Secretary of Defense who, later as Vice President, coordinated the response to the 9/11 attacks
• Paul Wolfowitz, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy who, in the week before 9/11, ran meetings with Pakistani ISI General Ahmed
• Duane Andrews, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence who left to run SAIC
• Robert Gates, the CIA Director who was implicated in the Iran-Contra crimes and later also worked with SAIC
• Senate Intelligence Committee representatives George Tenet and William Cohen, the latter of whom, in 1997, dramatically reduced the number of jet fighters protecting the US
• And Reagan advisor, Richard Armitage, who participated in the failed air defense teleconference on 9/11

According to his book, Clarke remembers that “Wolfowitz and I flew on to Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Salaleh” to coordinate relations with the UAE, at Cheney’ request.  Over the following decade, Clarke negotiated many deals with the Emirates, essentially becoming an agent of the UAE, and he was “particularly close to the UAE royal family.”[5] 

Not long after Clarke began going there, the royal family of Abu Dhabi took over full ownership of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).  BCCI is significant relative to 9/11 because it was involved in funding terrorists in the late 1980s and was linked to the Pakistani intelligence network from which several alleged 9/11 conspirators came including Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In fact, Time magazine reported that, relative to BCCI — “You can’t draw a line separating the bank’s black operatives and Pakistan’s intelligence services.”[6]

More importantly, there are strong suspicions that the CIA was involved in the founding of BCCI.[7]  The CIA connection to the origins of the BCCI terrorist network is interesting in this context because the royal family of the UAE was also said to have played a primary role in the creation of BCCI.  As the official US government report on the subject pointed out — “There was no relationship more central to BCCI’s existence from its inception than that between BCCI and Sheikh Zayed and the ruling family of Abu Dhabi.”[8]

As stated before, Clarke’s friends in the UAE royal family not only created the BCCI terrorist network, they took it over when the Bank of England shut it down.  “By July 5, 1991, when BCCI was closed globally, the Government of Abu Dhabi, its ruling family, and an investment company holding the assets of the ruling family, were the controlling, and official “majority” shareholders of BCCI — owning 77 percent of the bank. But since the remaining 23 percent was actually held by nominees and by BCCI’s alter-ego ICIC, Abu Dhabi was in fact BCCI’s sole owner.”[9]

Not long after this, in 1992, Clarke was named to the National Security Council staff as Special Assistant to the President for Global Affairs and chairman of the Interagency Counterterrorism Committee.  One might think that Richard Clarke’s close relationship to the royal family of the UAE, and this new role as the NSC head of counterterrorism, might have posed a slight conflict of interest.  But no one seemed to notice.

Similarly, few have noticed that the attacks attributed to al Qaeda began just before the first Bush Administration left office.  It was in December, 1992, that al Qaeda (as such) is said to have first committed an act of terrorism by bombing US troops in Yemen.  Attacks and plots in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and many others places located near the production and transport routes of fossil fuels have been attributed to al Qaeda since that time.[10]

Clarke was not interested in pursuing the BCCI terrorist network and, instead, he had a different approach to combating terrorism.  In 1993, the United States began a practice known as “rendition.”  Throughout the rest of the world, rendition is known as torture.  Interestingly, the policy behind this program was proposed by Richard Clarke, who worked to get “snatch teams” in place to kidnap suspects for torture.  The success of Clarke’s rendition proposal led to today’s US program of secret kidnappings and torture around the world.

In September 1994, high-ranking UAE and Saudi government ministers, such as Saudi Intelligence Minister Prince Turki al-Faisal, began frequent bird hunting expeditions in Afghanistan. It was reported that — “They would go out and see Osama, spend some time with him, talk with him, you know, live out in the tents, eat the simple food, engage in falconing, some other pursuits, ride horses.”  Two members of the UAE royal family that participated in these trips were Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, ruler of the UAE.[11]

As these UAE meetings with OBL occurred, Clarke’s relationship with the UAE royals blossomed.  At the same time, he engaged in apparent preparations for terrorist events on US soil.  In 1998, he chaired a tabletop exercise in which a Learjet filled with explosives would be flown on a suicide mission into a target in Washington, DC.  At a conference in October 1998, Clarke predicted that America’s enemies “will go after our Achilles’ heel” which is “in Washington.  It is in New York.”  That was quite a prediction.

Clarke had updated the COG plans in early 1998, to ensure that the shadow government would be put in power in the event of a terrorist attack like the one he predicted that year (and that occurred in 2001).  National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who was later caught stealing documents that had been requested by the 9/11 Commission, was the one to suggest that Clinton create the new Counterterrorism Czar position that Clarke would fill at the time of his prediction.  Berger was also the one to introduce Clarke’s COG partner, James Woolsey, to Clinton.  Woolsey went on to become Clinton’s CIA director.

In early February 1999, Clarke met with Al Maktoum, one of the UAE royals who was known to hunt with Bin Laden, in the UAE.  Al Maktoum was a big supporter of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.  And although people often forget, two of the 9-11 hijackers were citizens of the UAE and the vast majority of money supporting the attacks flowed through the UAE.

The 9/11 Commission Report has six references to the UAE, most of which can be found on page 138. One of these suggests that “but for the cooperation of the UAE, we would have killed Bin Ladin two years in advance of September 11.”

Therefore it is difficult to understand why the leading authority on counterterrorism in the US would be meeting, and maintaining close personal relationships, with the UAE friends of Bin Laden just two years before 9/11.  This was three years after Bin Laden had first declared holy war against the United States,[12] and one year after his more recent such proclamation.[13]

It is more difficult to understand why Clarke was personally behind the failure of two CIA attempts to kill or capture Bin Laden in 1999. The first of these occurred just a few days after Clarke’s visit to the UAE.  The CIA obtained information that OBL was hunting with UAE royals in Afghanistan at the time, and President Clinton was asked for permission to attack the camp.  Clarke voted down that plan, and others within the US government speculated that his ties to the UAE were behind his decision.[14]

The next month, when the CIA had tracked Bin Laden’s whereabouts again and was prepared to take him out during another of the Afghanistan hunting trips, Richard Clarke took it upon himself to alert his UAE friends about the CIA monitoring their meetings with Bin Laden.  Of course, the UAE royals tipped off Bin Laden and the US lost another opportunity to kill or capture its number one enemy.[15]  Considering that CIA plans are top secret national security priorities, and that OBL was wanted for the bombings in East Africa, Clarke’s action should have been seen as treason.

Somehow, Clarke’s two efforts to keep OBL from being captured or killed in 1999 slipped his mind when he testified to the 9/11 Commission.  Apparently, these events were also not important enough for Clarke to mention when recently discussing the two “asshole” hijackers whose presence in the US he now says the CIA kept from him and the FBI.

Who knew about Almihdar and Alhazmi?

Interestingly, although only two of the alleged 9/11 terrorists were said to be from the UAE, those being Marwan al-Shehhi and Fayez Banihammad, others of the alleged hijackers, including Almihdar, Alhazmi, and Ziad Jarrah, spent time in the UAE.  And as stated before, the vast majority of money that financed the attacks flowed through the UAE. 

The new interview with Clarke begins with discussion of the CIA’s monitoring of a January, 2000 meeting in Malaysia among top al Qaeda operatives.  Khalid Almihdar and Nawaf Alhazmi attended the meeting, as did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several other al Qaeda leaders.  Clarke claims in the interview that the CIA followed the alleged 9/11 hijackers out of the meeting in Malaysia but then lost them in Bangkok.  Two months later, Almidhar and AlHazmi arrived in Los Angeles, according to the CIA, and Clarke says many CIA agents knew about this.

Clarke claims that the CIA — “stopped [information about Almihdar and Alhazmi] from going to the FBI and the Defense Department.” He then cryptically states — “We therefore conclude that there was a high level decision, in the CIA, ordering people not to share that information” and “I would have to think it was made by the Director [Tenet]”.  To clarify why he suddenly thinks this lack of information sharing was unusual, Clarke says — “You have to understand…we were close friends, he called me several times a day, and shared the most trivial of information.”

But it was not only the CIA that knew about this meeting and the attendees.  According to the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Michael Hayden — “In early 2000, at the time of the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, we had the Alhazmi brothers, Nawaf and Salem, as well as Khalid Almihdar, in our sights.  We knew of their association with al-Qaeda, and we shared this information with the [intelligence] community.”  The NSA knew about these guys well before that, however, because an early 1999 NSA communications intercept referenced “Nawaf Alhazmi,” so it was clear that the NSA knew about him for more than two years before 9/11.  Oddly enough, the Washington Post reported that Alhazmi, Almihdar and four of the other alleged hijackers were “living, working, planning and developing all their activities” near the entrance to NSA headquarters in Laurel, Maryland, in the months prior to the 9/11 attacks.[16]

Alhazmi had been seen in San Diego as early as 1996 and he traveled extensively throughout the US, spending time in Cody, Wyoming and Phoenix, Arizona, and making a truck delivery to Canada.  He and Almihdar lived openly in the United States, using their real names and credit cards.  They had season passes to Sea World and the San Diego Zoo and liked to hang out at a nude bar in San Diego.  They went to a flight school there and said they wanted to learn how to fly Boeings.  Instructor Rick Garza of Sorbi’s Flying Club turned down that request because he said they were “clueless”, didn’t even know how to draw an airplane and could not communicate in English.

Alhazmi even worked at a Texaco gas station, although he didn’t need the money because someone in the UAE was regularly sending him thousands of dollars.

The money Alhazmi received was said to come from a UAE citizen named Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (a.k.a. Ammar al Baluchi), who was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and cousin of Ramzi Yousef.  Apparently, a majority of money that came to the hijackers was transferred through Ali Abdul Aziz Ali or another UAE citizen named Mustafa al-Hawsawi.  The 9/11 Commission reported that Ali “helped them with plane tickets, traveler’s checks, and hotel reservations“, and “taught them about everyday aspects of life in the West, such as purchasing clothes and ordering food.“

Whether he was protecting his UAE friends or not, Clarke failed to act on information about al Qaeda operatives living in the US, just one month before the meeting in Malaysia.  After an al Qaeda “millennium plot” was said to be broken up in Jordan, Clarke authorized an investigation of one of the plotters, Khalil Deek, who lived in Anaheim, CA for most of the 1990s. The investigative team reported to Clarke and the NSC directly in December, 1999, stating that Deek’s next door neighbor was operating an al Qaeda sleeper cell in Anaheim.  No action was taken by Clarke or the NSC.

A few months later, in April 2000, Clarke was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that terrorists – “will come after our weakness, our Achilles Heel, which is largely here in the United States.”  Although this was a bold statement, it was unfortunate that Clarke did not have time to track down and capture the terrorists that he knew were living and plotting in the US.

The bombing of the USS Cole, which took the lives of 17 American sailors, occurred in October, 2000. It was reported by the Washington Post that Almihdar had received training in Afghanistan in 1999 along with the operatives who were responsible for the Cole bombing.  The Guardian reported that the Prime Minister of Yemen accused Almihdar of being “one of the Cole perpetrators.”

At the time, Clarke was part of a high level meeting to discuss the response to the Cole bombing, which included William Cohen, George Tenet, the State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, Michael Sheehan, and several others.  In this meeting, Clarke was the hawk, proposing attacks throughout Afghanistan in response.  None of the voting attendees supported Clarke’s plan and, after the meeting, Sheehan told Clarke – “What’s it going to take to get them to hit al-Qaeda in Afghanistan?  Does al-Qaeda have to hit the Pentagon?”[17]   Once again, that was quite a prediction. 

In May 2001, the CIA gave its photos of the January 2000 Malaysian meeting to an intelligence operations specialist at FBI headquarters.  One of the photos was of Almihdar, who FBI Director Mueller would later say was likely responsible for coordinating the movements of all the non-pilot hijackers.  In June 2001, FBI and CIA officials discussed these photos and one FBI agent remembers that Almihdar was mentioned in these discussions. 

Phoenix FBI agent Ken Williams wrote a memo to FBI headquarters, in July 2001, saying that Bin Laden’s followers were going to flight schools to train for terrorist attacks.  If the FBI had followed through on this, it would have found Alhazmi very easily, as he had been reported as staying in Phoenix with Hani Hanjour over a period of months from January to June 2001. The memo was reviewed by the agency’s Bin Laden and Islamic extremist counterterrorism units, but it has been reported that neither Attorney General John Ashcroft nor newly appointed FBI Director Robert Mueller briefed President Bush and his national security staff about these revelations.  Of course, this was well before the September 4^th date that Clarke now claims was the best chance for him and the FBI to have first found out. 

Zacarias Moussaoui visited Malaysia too, and stayed at the same condominium where the January 2000 meeting took place.  The owner of the condo even signed letters that convinced the INS to allow Moussaoui into the US.  Alhazmi and Almihdar were referenced in papers that the FBI confiscated, in August 2001, from Moussaoui when he was arrested.  FBI headquarters refused multiple requests from the FBI agents pursuing the case to search Moussaoui ‘s possessions.  Those confiscated possessions and papers would have immediately led the FBI agents to Atta, Almihdar, Alhazmi and the other alleged hijackers.

But the FBI had to know about these alleged hijackers well before that, because Alhazmi and Almihdar lived with an FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, for at least four months in late 2000. Shaikh was a “tested” asset working with the local FBI.  Shaikh had regular visits from Mohammed Atta and Hani Hanjour as well, and even introduced Hanjour to a neighbor. [18]

Newsweek reported that, once, when Shaikh was called by his FBI agent handler, Shaikh said he couldn’t talk because Almihdar was in the room. This suggests that the FBI knew full well that this future 9/11 hijacker was living with an FBI asset.  But a more damning fact is that the FBI refused to allow the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry to interview either Shaikh or his FBI handler.

The FBI absolutely knew about the movements of these alleged 9/11 hijackers.  In January, 2001, it was the FBI that gave information to the CIA about how USS Cole bombing operatives had delivered money to al Qaeda planners at the time of the January 2000 Malaysia meeting.  CNN reported, in 2002, that “At that point, the CIA – or the FBI for that matter – could have put Alhazmi and Almihdar and all the others who attended the meeting in Malaysia on a watch list.”

In the new interview, Clarke further speculates that the reason that the CIA information was not shared with him, the DOD and the FBI was because CIA (i.e. Cofer Black as of June, 1999) was courting these two as sources within al Qaeda.  Some might wonder why Clarke never thought of his good friends within the UAE royal family, who met with OBL regularly, as sources on al Qaeda.  Surely people who met with OBL personally in the two years before 9/11, and were big supporters of al Qaeda like Clarke’s friend, Al Maktoum, might have some information to provide!

In any case, Clarke goes on in the interview to suggest that Tenet and Black might have recruited Alhazmi and Almihdar (who had been accused of perpetrating the USS Cole bombing) as inside sources on al Qaeda.  To the CIA’s chagrin, Clarke implies, they at some point became double agents.  It is amazing that Clarke insinuates that Black and Tenet were too dim-witted to see that these two Saudis might also be working for the Saudis.  Clarke appears to be making the absurd suggestion that a CIA director could not predict that the Saudi, who arranged housing for Alhazmi and Almihdar, arranged payments for them, and arranged to move them to San Diego, might have turned them into double agents.

When Alhazmi and Almihdar arrived in Los Angeles in early 2000, they were met by a strange benefactor named Omar Al-Bayoumi who brought them to Parkwood Apartments in San Diego.  It is Al-Bayoumi that Clarke is referring to when he suggests the — “Saudi has connections to the Saudi government, and some people believe that this guy was a Saudi intelligence officer.  If we assume that this Saudi intelligence officer was the handler for these two, then presumably he would have been reporting to the CIA office in Los Angeles.  There was a strong relationship between the CIA director and the minister of intelligence of Saudi Arabia [Prince Turki al Faisal].”

Better questions about strong relationships

Ignoring Clarke’s own strong relationship to the UAE, and therefore to the BCCI network, support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, and OBL, one interviewer then asked: “How long do you think it would take [the CIA] to decide — this isn’t working”?  Clark replied: “I don’t know. I do know that in August of 2001 they decide they’re gonna tell the FBI.”

This remark refers to the idea that it was not until August 21 that the FBI figured out that al Qaeda operatives were in the United States.  This claim is transparently false as we know they were, at the very least, aware of Moussaoui and the Phoenix memo saying that terrorists were taking flight lessons in the US.  But in August, it was said that an FBI analyst assigned to the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center suddenly determined that Alhazmi and Almidhar had entered the US in January 2000.

Additionally, on August 23, 2001, the Israeli Mossad gave US officials an urgent warning in the form of a list of terrorists known to be living in the US and panning to carry out an attack in the near future.  The list included the names of Alhazmi, Almihdra, Alshehhi and Atta.

An “all points bulletin” was issued that same day, instructing the FBI and other agencies to put Alhazmi and Almihdar on the watch list.  Doing so would have made certain that these two were caught before the attacks.  The FBI did not do so, however.  The FBI did not even use this information to check national databases of bank records, drivers license records or the records of the credit cards that were used to purchase the 9/11 tickets.  These facts seem to render Clarke’s new, vague insinuations moot, because the FBI wasn’t going to act on such information no matter what it was told.

In yet another example, on August 28, a report was received by the New York FBI office requesting that an investigation be conducted “to determine if Almihdar is still in the United States.”  FBI headquarters immediately turned down the request.  An FBI agent wrote an email in response, saying “someday someone will die [because of this]. Let’s hope the [FBI’s] National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since UBL [Osama bin Laden] is now getting the most protection.”  

All this was before September 4th, the date that Clarke now says would have given plenty of time for him and the FBI to catch Alhazmi and Almihdar, if only they had known the two were in the US. But those of us who have been looking into the events of 9/11 and the history behind those events are not likely to put much credence in Mr. Clarke’s new tale.

Clarke’s most recent interviewers didn’t seem too troubled by his statements though, and one of them finished off asking –“ Have you asked George Tenet, Cofer Black or Richard Blee about any of this after the fact?”  Clarke responded: “No”.

The second interviewer then asked –” Kind of the facts tripped out to you over time, right, over these investigations”?  A smirking Clarke replied — “Took a while.”

For the rest of us, it will still take a while to get to the bottom of all this and Mr. Clarke’s interview does not appear to help.  In the meantime, here are a dozen questions for whoever conducts Clarke’s next interview:

1.  Is the COG plan that you and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Oliver North, George H.W. Bush, Kenneth Duberstein, and James Woolsey created, and that you implemented on 9/11, still in effect?
2.  Do you have any information on how your friends in the UAE royal family used the terrorist network BCCI after they bought it?
3.  Do you have any explanation for how you could have predicted in 1998, at the same time that you updated the COG plan to be a response to a terrorist attack, that America’s enemies “will go after our Achilles’ heel” which is “in Washington.  It is in New York.”?
4.  When you met with UAE Defense Minister Al Maktoum in February 1999, just days before the CIA planned to kill or capture Bin Laden as he was meeting with UAE royals, who else did you meet with?
5. Why did you vote down the CIA plan to kill or capture Bin Laden while he was hunting with UAE royals in February 1999?
6.  Why did you expose the CIA’s secret plan, without approval from the CIA or the president, to kill or capture Bin Laden in March 1999 as he was meeting with UAE royals again?
7. Don’t you think those two actions on your part were far more detrimental to the United States than any of your current, vague speculations?
8. Did you ever communicate with NSA Director, Michael Hayden, between January 2000 and the attacks of 9/11?  If so, why did you not, in your recent interview, accuse him of withholding information on Alhazmi and Almihdar?  He has spoken openly of having known about their presence in the US and said that he did share it with the intelligence community.
9. Why did you take no action in December 1999, as “Counterterrorism Czar”, when you and the NSC were given evidence that Khalil Deek’s next door neighbor was operating an al Qaeda sleeper cell in Anaheim, CA?
10. You appear to be saying that neither you nor the FBI knew that Almihdar and Alhazmi lived with Abdussattar Shaikh, a tested FBI asset, for at least four months in the year 2000. Is that correct and, if so, don’t you think that contradicts your claim in this interview that – “I know how all this stuff works, I’ve been working it for 30 years. You can’t snowball me on this stuff.”?
11. Do you know why the FBI would not allow Abdussattar Shaikh or his FBI handler to be interviewed as part of the 9/11 investigation?
12. These days, when you’re talking with your UAE friends in your own offices in the UAE, do you ever discuss 9/11, the hijackers that spent their time there, and the UAE money that financed the 9/11 attacks?

Clarke currently works with his COG partner and former CIA Director, James Woolsey, at Paladin Capital, which has offices in New York and the UAE.  Clarke is also the chairman of Good Harbor Consulting, where he is in partnership with many people who are making a fortune off the war on terror.  Good Harbor Consulting has had an office in Abu Dhabi since 2008, and Clarke is known to have a “big footprint” in the UAE.[19]