It's Time To Put An End To All This War, Criminality, And Ignorance

"The Iraq conflict has wreaked 'terrible damage' on the region - far more than has been acknowledged, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.... A survey published in September 2007 suggested that up to 1.2m people might have died because of the Iraq conflict. Speaking following his visit, Dr Williams also said he regards any further 'deliberate destabilisation' of the region - such as action against Syria and Iran - as 'criminal, ignorant...and potentially murderous folly'. Referring to US political advisers, he added that 'we do hear talk from some quarters of action against Syria, or against Iran'."
Archbishop speaks of Iraq damage
BBC Online, 5 October 2007

'Go Find Me A Way To Do This'

"A year ago, Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on tax cuts. Now, O'Neill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White House is run. Entitled 'The Price of Loyalty,' the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents. But the main source of the book was Paul O'Neill.... he is going public because he thinks the Bush Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made.... Not only did O'Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal documents.... And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations. 'From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,' says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic 'A' 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.....'It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’' says O’Neill."
Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq?
CBS News, 11 January 2003

It's The Energy Crisis Stupid
'Access To Critical Areas Of Europe, The Middle East, And Asia'

"On the afternoon of January 30 [2001], ten days after his inauguration as the forty-third president, George W.Bush met with the principals of his National Security Council for the first time.... He turned to Rice. 'So Condi, what are we going to talk about today? What's on the agenda?' 'How Iraq is destabilising the region, Mr. President,' Rice, said in what several observers understood was a scripted exchange.... The hour almost up, Bush had assignments for everyone.... Rumsfeld and Shelton [Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff], he said, 'should examine military options.' That included rebuilding the military coalition from the 1991 Gulf War, examining 'how it might look' to use U.S. ground forces in the north and the south of Iraq and how the armed forces could support groups inside the country who could help challenge Saddam Hussein.... Meeting adjourned. Ten days in, and it was about Iraq.... Shortly after he returned to his office, O'Neill opened a memo from Donald Rumsfeld.... In describing why the military budget was due for a dramatic increase, Rumsfeld articulated, with a five-point illustration of a dire global landscape, the underlying ideas that were now guiding foreign policy...[including] 'The civil sector, not the defense sector, now creates the enabling technologies for advanced military capabilities. These universally available technologies can be used to create 'asymmetric' responses by small or medium sized states to our conventional military power that cannot defeat our forces, but can deny access to critical areas of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.'.....'There was never any rigorous talk about this sweeping idea that seemed to be driving all the specific actions,' O'Neill said, echoing the comments of several other participants in NSC discussions. 'From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'.... It was Powell and his moderates at the State Department versus hard-liners like Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, who were already planning the next war in Iraq and the shape of a post-Saddam country. Documents were being prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, Rumsfeld's intelligence arm, mapping Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas and listing companies that might be interested in leveraging the precious asset. One document, headed 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,' lists companies from thirty countries - including France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom - their specialities, bidding histories, and in some cases their particular areas of interest. An attached document maps Iraq with markings for 'supergiant oilfield,' 'other oil-field,' and 'earmarked for production sharing,' while demarking the largely undeveloped southwest of the country into nine 'blocks' to designate areas for future exploration. The desire to 'dissuade' countries from engaging in 'asymmetrical challenges' to the United States - as Rumsfeld said in his January articulation of the demonstrative value of a preemptive attack - matched with plans for how the world's second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world's contractors made for an irresistible combination, O'Neill later said. Already by February, the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why, but the how and how quickly. Rumsfeld, O'Neill recalled, was focused on how an incident might cause escalated tensions - like the shooting down of an American plane in the regular engagements between U.S. fighters and Iraqi antiaircraft batteries - and what U.S. responses to such an occurrence might be..... [On], March 19, O'Neill and members of the Vice President's National Energy Policy Development Group filed into the cabinet room to present their findings to the President about the state of energy production and consumption in the United States. This presentation marked the completion of the first two phases (the second would be creating policy recommendations) that had been decided on in late January, when the President officially empowered Dick Cheney to handle energy.... This task force, Cheney's, would operate in utmost privacy.... So, on March 19, at an hour-long meeting in the cabinet room, the President was hearing dark predictions about the economic effects of a looming energy crisis... The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, one of the world's great hotels, offered an oasis of luxury and comfort for the U.S. delegation after an exhausting week of meetings in Beijing with Chinese leaders in early September.... [O'Neill] flipped on the television to CNN. And sat on the edge of the bed. .... Good God, O'Neill thought, this must be the worst FAA mistake in history - some air traffic controller guided a plane into the Twin Towers...Then, as he watched smoke billow into the Manhattan sky, the second plane hit... Military cars arrived at midmorning the next day to pick up the O'Neill delegation..... The next morning, September 13, at 9:45 a.m., the NSC met with Bush in the situation room..... At an NSC meeting the day before, just as O'Neill's C-17 was landing at Andrew's Air Force Base, Rumsfeld, had raised the question of Iraq. The Pentagon had been working for months on a military plan for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."
The Price Of Loyalty
By Ron Suskind - Free Press 2004

"'It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’' says O’Neill."
Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq?
CBS News, 11 January 2003

"Tension Between FBI Chiefs Ex-FBI director Louis Freeh's new book, 'My FBI,' has kicked up controversy over its stinging attacks on Bill Clinton. But it has also frayed relations with current director Bob Mueller. Freeh takes a little-noticed shot at his successor in the book, describing a testy encounter in the early days of the Bush administration with an 'acting deputy attorney general' - a clear reference to Mueller who at the time held that post. In Freeh's account, the acting deputy A.G. tells him the department now has  new top priorities - guns, drugs and juvenile crime. Freeh replies that terrorism and 'just about everything else' are more important. 'Those are our marching orders,' Mueller says, according to Freeh's account. 'Those aren't my marching orders,' Freeh shoots back. Freeh then writes that 'lockstep, blind obedience' by an FBI director to 'potentially unlawful or even 'dumb orders' is a 'formula for disaster.'  Mueller declined an invitation to attend Freeh's book party last week after telling one bureau official that Freeh was 'too controversial,' according to a Freeh associate who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.'"
Fabricated Links?
Newsweek, 26 October 2005

"Under the influence of U.S. oil companies, the government of George W. Bush initially blocked U.S. secret service investigations on terrorism ....In the book 'Bin Laden, la verite interdite ('Bin Laden, the forbidden truth), that appeared in Paris on Wednesday, the authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, reveal that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's deputy director John O'Neill resigned in July [2001] in protest over the obstruction. Brisard claim O'Neill told them that 'the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it'... [Brisard] worked for French secret services, and wrote for them in 1997 a report on the now famous Al Qaeda network, headed by bin Laden. Dasquie is an investigative journalist and publisher of Intelligence Online, a respected newsletter on diplomacy, economic analysis and strategy, available through the Internet"
U.S. Policy Towards Taliban Influenced by Oil - Say Authors
Inter Press Service, 15 November 2001

"... in January 2001, Vice President Cheney allegedly reinstated the intelligence block and expanded it to effectively preclude any investigations whatsoever of Saudi-Taliban-Afghan oil connections. Former FBI counter-terrorism chief John O’Neil resigned from the FBI in disgust, stating that he was ordered not to investigate Saudi-Al Qaida connections because of the Enron pipeline deal. Loftus has confirmed that it was O’Neill who originally discovered the AL Qaida pipeline memo after the Embassy bombings in Africa. O’Neill gave an overview of the Enron block to two French authors who will soon be publishing in the United States..... The Enron cover-up confirms that 9/11 was not an intelligence failure or a law enforcement failure (at least not entirely). Instead, it was a foreign policy failure of the highest order. If Congress ever combines its Enron investigation with 9/11, Cheney’s whole house of cards will collapse".
What Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9/11
Press Release, former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, 31 May 2002

"During the summer of 2001, the U.S. Intelligence Community was in a state of heightened alert, due to concern about an imminent al-Qa’ida attack. However, this concern was not reflected in the FBI’s National Law Enforcement Threat System (NLETS) reports, which are the means through which the FBI communicated terrorist threat information with state and local law enforcement entities."
REPORT OF THE JOINT INQUIRY INTO THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 –
BY THE HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE AND THE
SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE
10 December 2002

"This commission was formed about mid-December, the 9/11 Commission. We were supposed to use the joint inquiry report as a launching pad to get into this issue of not only fixing the intelligence community, but moving beyond, and getting into what is the al Qaeda all about? What is this terrorist global network that we're fighting? A new kind of war and all that. Well, the independent, bi-partisan commission, hello, didn't even get the stuff 'til a few weeks ago. I'm saying that's deliberate. I am saying that the delay in relating this information to the American public out of a hearing… series of hearings, that several members of Congress knew eight or ten months ago, including Bob Graham and others, that was deliberately slow walked… the 9/11 Commission was deliberately slow walked, because the Administration's policy was, and its priority was, we're gonna take Saddam Hussein out.... You can read between the lines and see that there were foreign governments that were much more involved in the 9/11 attack than just supporting Islamic fundamentalist teachings and schools. Now, that has been redacted. A whole 28 page section..... The Administration, the White House, has put several blocks in the road. One, they run all the information to the 9/11 Commission through a political coordinator in Ashcroft's Justice Department..... Secondly, they want to put minders — that's people who sit in the room when we have an interview with people in NSA, FBI, CIA, Department of… in DIA — in the Pentagon, and Immigration and Naturalization Services. They want to put minders in there. That's to shut down information. That's not to reveal information."
Former Senator Max Cleland and member of the 9/11 Commission who later resigned
PBS Interview, 25 July 2003

"FBI information since that time [1998] indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.... "
'Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US'
Presidential Daily Brief received by President George W. Bush on August 6, 2001
THE 9/11COMMISSION REPORT (p.262)

"During the spring as initial policy debates in the Administration began, I e-mailed Condi Rice and NSC Staff colleagues that al Qaeda was trying to kill Americans, to have hundreds of dead in the streets of America. During the first week in July I convened the CSG and asked each agency to consider itself on full alert. I asked the CSG agencies to cancel summer vacations and official travel for the counterterrorism response staffs. Each agency should report anything unusual, even if a sparrow should fall from a tree. I asked FBI to send another warning to the 18,000 police departments, State to alert the embassies, and the Defense Department to go to Threat Condition Delta. The Navy moved ships out of Bahrain.The next day I asked the senior security officials at FAA, Immigration, Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs, and the Federal Protective Service to meet at the White House. I asked the FAA to send another security warning to the airlines and airports and requested special scrutiny at the ports of entry......   Somewhere in the CIA there was information that two al Qaeda terrorists had come to the United States.  Somewhere in the FBI there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools in the United States.  I had asked to know if a sparrow fell from a tree that summer. What was buried in CIA and FBI was not a matter of one sparrow falling from a tree; red lights and bells should have been going off.  They had specific information about individual terrorists from which one could have deduced what was about to happen. None of that information got to me or the White House. It apparently did not even make it up the FBI chain to Dale Watson, the Executive Assistant Director in charge of counterterrorism."
Richard Clarke - White House Head Of Counterterrorism 1992 - 2003
'Against All Enemies'  - Edition first published in Great Britain by The Free Press in 2004

"....[there] was an article in the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief titled 'Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.' It was the 36th PDB item briefed so far that year that related to Bin Ladin or al Qaeda, and the first devoted to the possibility of an attack in the United States..... [the briefing stated] 'FBI information since [1998]  indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.'....No CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] or other NSC [National Security Council] meeting was held to discuss the possible threat of a strike in the United States as a result of this report.... We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. DCI Tenet visited President Bush in Crawford Texas, on August 17 and participated in PDB briefings of the President between August 31 (after the President had returned to Washington) and September 10. But Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period. Most of the intelligence community recognized in the summer of 2001 that the number and severity of threat reports were unprecedented. Many officials told us that they knew something terrible was planned...."
THE 9/11COMMISSION REPORT (p.260 - 262)

"Reprising the scene in the White House on 9/11, [White House head of counterterrorism] Mr. [Richard] Clarke says Dale Watson, the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism chief, called him. 'We got the passenger manifests from the airlines,' Mr. Watson said. 'We recognize some names, Dick. They're Al Qaeda.' Mr. Clarke recalled: 'I was stunned, not that the attack was Al Qaeda but that there were Al Qaeda operatives on board aircraft using names that F.B.I. knew were Al Qaeda.' Mr. Watson told Mr. Clarke that  'C.I.A. forgot to tell us about them.'"
Truth as a Weapon
New York Times, 25 March 2004

"Israeli intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent. The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation...."
Israeli security issued urgent warning to CIA of large-scale terror attacks
Daily Telegraph, 19 September 2001

"Mossad chiefs insist the Israeli spy agency was tracking Osama Bin-Laden's terrorists in America before September 11 and that that the information was passed on to the CIA on Five separate occasions before the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. As late as August 24, less than two weeks before the attacks, a Mossad warning, confirmed by German intelligence, BND, said that 'terrorists plan to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.' The warning alert was passed to the CIA. The warning was also passed to MI6. The agency made its own checks and also informed the CIA. Frustrated by its inability to alert the CIA to an impending attack, Mossad arranged on September 1, according to Tel Aviv sources last week, for Russian intelligence to warn Washington 'in the strongest possible terms of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings.'... According to similar documents shown to the Sunday Express, Mossad was running a round-the-clock surveillance operation on some of the September 11 hijackers. The details, contained in classified papers, reveal that a senior Mossad agent tipped off his counterpart in America's Central Intelligence Agency that a massive terrorist hit was being planned in the US. A handful of the spies had infiltrated the Al-Qaeda organisation while a staggering 120 others, posing as overseas art students, launched  massive undercover operations throughout America... The spying operations first came to the attention of the DEA in January 2001 according to a classified 90-page dossier which has been seen by the Sunday Express."
BUSH: THE IGNORED WARNING THAT WILL COME TO HAUNT HIM
GLOBE-INTEL - NUMBER :- 104 DATE :- 21/05/02
(Globe-Intel is run by Gordon Thomas who writes on intelligence matters for the UK's Sunday Express. Thomas
is an expert on Mossad, the Israel intelligence service. His book on the subject, 'Gideon's Spies', was made into a documentary for Channel 4)

"'We had clearly warned them,' said Mr. Patrushev, who is head of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB. He added that their U.S. counterparts 'did not pay the necessary attention' to their warnings, the Interfax news agency reported."
Russia Gave 'Clear Warning'
Agence France-Presse, 16 September 2001

"Since Sept. 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States. There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance..... "
Carl Cameron Investigates
Fox News, 17 December 2001
(Note, that controversially this four part report was subsequently removed by Fox from its web site)

"It is rather strange that the US media, with one notable exception, seems to be ignoring what may well prove to be the most explosive story since the 11 September attacks - the alleged break-up of a major Israeli espionage operation in the United States.... US officials admitted to reporters that the entire investigation had become 'too hot to handle', but declined to give further details."
Allies and Espionage
Jane's Intelligence Digest, 15 March 2002

"New revelations are putting the CIA in a tight spot. Apparently the Israeli intelligence service Mossad gave early warnings to their American counterparts about the terrorist group around Mohamed Atta. Furthermore, German investigators found out after the attacks that their U.S. colleagues had already known a great deal about the Hamburg students two years in advance of Sept. 11, 2001. The latest discoveries were made by the Hamburg weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT, which on Thursday (Oct. 3) intends to publish an extensive dossier on the failures of the Central Intelligence Agency. Freelance author Oliver Schroem therein sums up the results of his research among various European and American agencies..... Apparently the CIA acquired very specific information on several of the later suicide pilots of Sept. 11. These clues were ignored, although the suspects were already in the United States. Two of the later pilots were on an FBI wanted list starting in August 2001. Nevertheless, they were able to move unrecognized around the country and get on to the death jets using their own real names. The hottest lead would have led the Americans straight to the Hamburg terrorists around Mohamed Atta - if they had listened to their colleagues from the Israeli Mossad. Israeli agents were observing several of the terror pilots in the United States. According to research by ZEIT, between December 2000 and April 2001 a whole horde of Israeli counter-terror investigators, posing as students, followed the trails of Arab terrorists and their cells in the United States. In their secret investigations, the Israelis came very close to the later perpetrators of Sept. 11. In the town of Hollywood, Florida, they identified the two former Hamburg students and later terror pilots Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi as possible terrorists. Agents lived in the vicinity of the apartment of the two seemingly normal flight school students, observing them around the clock. Not long after, however, the [Israeli] agents were discovered by the U.S. authorities and deported to Israel. As is usual in such cases, the discovery was not made public and caused much annoyance between the traditionally competitive intelligence services, Mossad and CIA. .... With the deportation of the agents, the observation of the later terrorists was terminated. The Israelis provided a list including the names of at least four out of the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11, but this was apparently not treated as sufficiently urgent by the CIA and also not passed on to the FBI. What is clear is that the U.S. agencies did not react quickly in following up on the tips from the Israeli agents. The ongoing congressional joint investigation has also found out about the Israeli angle. However, the Israelis also had not yet found out about the specific plan for the Sept. 11 attacks. At the same time, they believed that the 19 persons named in their list were potential terrorists who 'were planning attacks in the United States,' as DIE ZEIT writes. Only later did the American police search for Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. Both were on the Israeli list, and both later sat in the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon in Washington. Although their names were on an FBI national watch list starting in the late summer of 2001, they traveled without trouble in the United States and also boarded the death jets on Sept. 11 with passports in their real names."
Mossad Agents Were On Atta's Tail
Der Spiegel (Germany), 1 October 2002
(original German click here)

"The federal government's 'no-fly' list had 16 names on it on Sept. 11, 2001.... The list...   identifies suspected terrorists seeking to board commercial airplanes...."
Faulty 'No-Fly' System Detailed
Washington Post, 9 October 2004

"If, as has been reported, some of the terrorists used the names by which intelligence agencies knew them, the attacks could have been disrupted, perhaps completely defeated, simply by requiring all airlines to deny them boarding and report their reservations to law enforcement agencies. "
Cathal Flynn, FAA Associate Administrator for Civil Aviation Security 1993 - 2000
9/11 Commission, Seventh Public Hearing

"Richard A. Clarke knows too much, and 'Against All Enemies' is too good to be ignored. The explosive details about President Bush's obsession with Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks captured the headlines in the days after the book's release, but 'Against All Enemies' offers more.... By Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Clarke had become the ultimate White House insider; he was not only a Clinton holdover, he was a holdover from the first Bush administration and had served in the Reagan State Department. He had been working at the National Security Council for about a decade, and in 1998 had been named White House counterterrorism coordinator by President Clinton. He was asked to stay on in the same post by the second Bush administration. But he had quickly become frustrated by the new team's unwillingness to address the mounting threat from Osama bin Laden..... The most controversial incident in 'Against All Enemies' deals with the president's eagerness to link the Sept. 11 attacks to Iraq, and comes on the night of Sept. 12. Clarke writes that he saw Bush wandering alone through the Situation Room. The president then stopped and asked Clarke and a few aides to 'go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this.'... After the president left, one of Clarke's aides said, 'Wolfowitz got to him.'.... the key allegation in the book -- that the Bush team was obsessed with Iraq even when faced with overwhelming evidence that it was Al Qaeda that was attacking the United States -- can't be dismissed by assertions that he was out of the loop. During those early days, Richard Clarke was the loop."
What Clarke Knew and When He Knew It
New York Times, 11 April 2004

"On the eve of a Republican National Convention invoking 9/11 symbols, sound bytes and imagery, half (49.3%) of New York City residents and 41% of New York citizens overall say that some of our leaders 'knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act,' according to the poll conducted by Zogby International. The poll of New York residents was conducted from Tuesday August 24 through Thursday August 26, 2004.... The poll is the first of its kind conducted in America that surveys attitudes regarding U.S. government complicity in the 9/11 tragedy. Despite the acute legal and political implications of this accusation, nearly 30% of registered Republicans and over 38% of those who described themselves as 'very conservative' supported the claim...... Less than two in five (36%) believe that the 9/11 Commission had 'answered all the important questions about what actually happened on September 11th,' and two in three (66%) New Yorkers (and 56.2% overall) called for another full investigation of the 'still unanswered questions' by Congress or Elliot Spitzer, New York's Attorney General."
Zogby Poll: Half of New Yorkers Believe U.S. Had 9/11 Foreknowledge
NewsMax, 31 August 2004

From 9/11 To Iraq And Beyond
The Story Of Sir David Manning

A Visit To Washington
Manning And 9/10

Sir David Manning retired this month as British Ambassador to the United States, a post he has held since 2003.  From 2001 to 2003 Sir David had been chief foreign and security policy adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

It was in that capacity that Manning had been in Washington on the eve of 9/11, and there has long been speculation about the significance of his visit at that critical time. Did it represent anything more than a visit simply to introduce himself to the Bush administration following his new, at that time, Downing St appointment?

Until recently not too much has been known about the trip, other than that he was due to see Richard Armitage, Assistant Secretary of State, on 10 September.

However, on 14  September 2007 the London Times reported on its retirement interview with Sir David. It mentioned that "on the eve of the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, he had stayed so late in Washington discussing policy with Condoleezza Rice that he had to catch a flight to New York the next morning."

At that time Rice was President Bush's National Security Adviser. The apparent length of the meeting with Manning suggests there was a lot to talk about.

One possibility (the Times does not say what was discussed) is that Manning may have brought with him more information about warnings of terrorist attacks on the United States. The Times had earlier reported (14 June 2002) that Britain had received pre-9/11 intelligence that attacks on 'the west' were being planned by al Qaeda and that Britain had shared this intelligence with the US government.

As a former British Ambassador to NATO and Israel, as well having held a suite of other senior Foreign Office positions, Manning is unlikely to have been a stranger to intelligence briefings.

In the run up to the attacks that were to take place the following day, Rice had been a key recipient of threat warnings from other quarters. Her lack of response to those warnings has come under attack from her critics, the most forceful coming from George Tenet, who was Director of the CIA in 2001.

On 1 October 2006 the Washington Post reported that:

"... two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately. Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director....

Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: 'It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one.' But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence....

On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined 'Bin Laden Threats Are Real.' Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden. The United States had human and technical sources, and all the intelligence was consistent, the two men told Rice.... Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies....

Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place. Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk.... The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda....

Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, but she just didn't get it in time, Tenet thought. He felt that he had done his job and had been very direct about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA. Black later said, 'The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.'"

What this account would have us consider (although Tenet himself is not a disinterested party, with a reputation to defend in his handling of the worst 'intelligence failure' in modern American history) is that Rumsfeld and Rice were obstacles to the United States taking up an appropriate defensive posture to a known domestic threat to the United States.

Wilful Neglect
'Counterterrorism' At The White House

Like Tenet, Richard Clarke was one of the few holdovers from the Clinton administration. He was to hold the post of head of counterterrorism at the White House from 1992 - 2003.

In the summer of 2001 he convened a special meeting at the White House, described by the Washington Post 17 May 2002 as follows:

"On July 5 of last year, a month and a day before President Bush first heard that al Qaeda might plan a hijacking, the White House summoned officials of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room. 'Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon,' the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, told the assembled group, according to two of those present. The group included the Federal Aviation Administration, along with the Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service. Clarke directed every counterterrorist office to cancel vacations, defer nonvital travel, put off scheduled exercises and place domestic rapid-response teams on much shorter alert. For six weeks last summer, at home and overseas, the U.S. government was at its highest possible state of readiness -- and anxiety -- against imminent terrorist attack. That intensity -- defensive in nature -- did not last. By the time Bush received his briefing at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, the government had begun to stand down from the alert."

In July that summer Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had tried to downplay the seriousness of the warnings. Two years later he was to find himself becoming the Jerusalem Post's Man of the Year for his role in precipitating the invasion of Iraq out of the aftermath of 9/11.

At the time of making the award the paper observed, "No question: This was Paul Wolfowitz's year. On September 15, 2001, at a meeting in Camp David, he advised President George W. Bush to skip Kabul and train American guns on Baghdad. In March 2003, he got his wish. In the process, Wolfowitz became the most influential US deputy defense secretary ever - can you so much as name anyone else who held the post?.... There's a downside. Earlier in the year, the notion took hold that the president was taking the country to war at the urgings of his Jewish advisers, themselves shills for Israel. 'Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol [are]... the clique of conservatives who are driving this war,' wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. She may as well have written 'the clique of Jews,' some felt. Other critics of the war were more explicit. 'If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war in Iraq,' said Democratic Congressman Jim Moran, 'we would not be doing this.' In this year when anti-Semitism is once again a fact of life, the name 'Wolfowitz has become its lightning rod'."

But, as we will see later, Wolfowitz was more likely to have been interested in securing the future of Persian Gulf oil production for the benefit of the American and world economy, than in doing any alternative bidding from Tel Aviv (Wolfowitz is indeed Jewish, but his partner is Arab - in the words of the Daily Telegraph in 2004, "Shaha Ali Riza is a senior World Bank official who was born in Tunis, grew up in Saudi Arabia and holds an international relations masters degree from St Anthony's College, Oxford. Close acquaintances of the couple have told The Telegraph that she is romantically linked with Mr Wolfowitz, 61, a fellow divorcee with whom she has been friends for several years. Even by the discreet standards of Washington's powerful inner circle, it is a remarkably closely guarded secret.").

Yet if there was any validity in the concerns of the Jerusalem Post, it seems Wolfowitz was more than happy to turn the issue to his advantage. For it transpires he was quick to use the 'anti-Semitic' card even in debate at the highest levels of Bush administration in order to get the focus of national security discussion switched away from al Qaeda and on to Iraq.

In 2004 Clark published a book about his counterterrorism experiences at the White House entitled  'Against All Enemies'. The following episode occurred at the meeting of Deputy Secretaries at the White House in April 2001, convened to discuss the al Qaeda threat, as described in Chapter 10:

"I could hardly believe it but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.

It was getting a little too heated for the kind of meeting Steve Hadley [Condoleezza Rice's deputy] liked to chair, but I thought it was important to get the extent of the disagreement out on the table: 'Al Qaeda plans major acts of terrorism against the U.S. It plans to overthrow Islamic governments and set up a radical multination Caliphate, and then go to war with non-Muslim states.' Then I said something I regretted as soon as I said it: 'They have published all of this and sometimes, as with Hitler in Mein Kampf, you have to believe that these people will actually do what they say they will do.'

Immediately Wolfowitz seized on the Hitler reference. 'I resent any comparison between the Holocaust and this little terrorist in Afghanistan.'

'I wasn't comparing the Holocaust to anything.' I spoke slowly. 'I was saying that like Hitler, bin Laden has told us in advance what he plans to do and we would make a big mistake to ignore it.'"

By July, Wolfowitz was still trying to change the subject.

The official 9/11 Commission report says, "Tenet told us that in his world 'the system was blinking red.' By late July, Tenet said, it could not 'get any worse.' Not everyone was convinced. Some asked whether all these threats might just be deception. On June 30, the SEIB [Senior Executive Intelligence Brief] contained an article titled 'Bin Ladin Threats Are Real.' Yet Hadley told Tenet in July that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz questioned the reporting. Perhaps Bin Ladin was trying to study U.S. reactions. Tenet replied that he had already addressed the Defense Department’s questions on this point; the reporting was convincing.  To give a sense of his anxiety at the time, one senior official in the Counterterrorist Center told us that he and a colleague were considering resigning in order to go public with their concerns."

Meanwhile it was clear that Clarke was expecting an attack on the United States itself. "Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon," he said.

But it was not just in the US that alarm bells were ringing. The style of attack that the broader international intelligence community was anctipating was telling.

Later that month Bush attended the G8 Summit meeting in Genoa, Italy. Trouble from anti-globalisation protestors was only one of the anticipated security risks the Summit had to deal with. An al Qaeda air attack on the US President and other world leaders was feared.

The BBC reported 18 July 2001 that "The huge force of officers and equipment which has been assembled to deal with unrest has been spurred on by a warning that supporters of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden might attempt an air attack on some of the world leaders present. Anti-aircraft missiles have been deployed at the airport, and naval vessels are patrolling the seas."

Bush seemed to be the key target. CNN reported the same day that "The head of Russia's Federal Bodyguard Service has warned of a plot by terrorist Osama bin Laden to assassinate George W. Bush at the summit."

The concerns were sufficiently acute that a no-fly zone was set up around the Summit and Bush slept on a US aircraft carrier in the Adriatic.  Shortly after 9/11 Italian Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini said on television that "Many people were ironic about the Italian secret services. But in fact they got the information that there was the possibility of an attack against the U.S. president using an airliner. That's why we closed the airspace and installed the missiles." Subsequently it was disclosed, so the 9/11 Commission hearings report, "that President Mubarak of Egypt had warned of a potential suicide flight using explosive-packed airplanes to fly into the summit meeting".

On 6 August the President, by now back home and on vacation at his ranch in Texas, received an intelligence briefing headed "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US".  The brief says "Al Qaeda members - including some who are U.S. citizens - have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks". It refers to FBI information indicating "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

The following month, on 11 September, four commercial aircraft were near simultaneously hijacked in the United States and three were flown into prominent American national landmark buildings.

In the first chapter of his book Clarke gives a particular account of a fundamental security hole left open in the period running up to 9/11. It was one which effectively gave the terrorists a clear run. He stumbled across the hole on the day of the attacks themselves.

After the first strike on the World Trade Center Clarke reports that "Bursting in on the Vice President and Condi - Condoleezza Rice, the President's National Security Advisor - alone in Cheney's office, I caught my breath.... In June I had given her a checklist of things to do after an attack, in part to underline my belief that something big was coming and we needed to go on the offensive."

After an exchange with Rice and Cheney Clark then set up and chaired a secure video teleconference from the White House Situation Room. The conference was of the 'CSG', the Counterterrorism Security Group, comprising the leaders ('principals') of each of the federal government's counterterrorism and security organisations. Clarke had chaired the group since 1992.

Clarke launched the conference saying, "Let's begin. Calmly. We will do this in crisis mode, which means keep your microphones off unless you are speaking. If you want to speak, wave at the Camera. If it's something you don't want everyone to hear, call me on the red phone."

And indeed later in the morning that proved to be necessary.

Clarke wrote that "Dale Watson, counterterrorism chief at the FBI, was waving at the Camera indicating he had an update. 'Go ahead, Dale'..... Dale had something he did not want to share with everyone in the conference.  Frank Miller took over the video conference and I stepped out and called Watson on a secure line. 'We got the passenger manifests from the airlines. We recognise some names, Dick. They're al Qaeda.' I was stunned, not that the attack was al Qaeda, but that there were al Qaeda operatives on board aircraft using names that FBI knew were al Qaeda. 'How the f*** did they get on board then?' I demanded. 'Hey, don't shoot the messenger, friend. CIA forgot to tell us about them.'"

The role of the CIA therefore deserves some closer scrutiny.

What the world was to learn in due course was that the CIA had known, firstly, the names of at least some of the hijackers in advance of 9/11; secondly, that they were members of al Qaeda; and thirdly, that they were in the US. CIA director George Tenet also knew that Zacarias Moussaoui, a known Islamist extremist, had been arrested by the FBI after behaving suspiciously at a flight school in Minnesota.

Moussaoui was held in custody for three weeks before 9/11.

According to whistleblower FBI agent Coleen Rowley, "George Tenet was briefed on the facts of the investigation surrounding Moussaoui's detention in August with a powerpoint entitled something like 'Fundamentalist Learns to Fly.' At the time, DCI Tenet inexplicably took no action and did not even seek to confer with the Acting FBI Director about the case. But Tenet IS reported to have immediately linked Moussaoui to the Al Qaeda attack on 9/11 as soon as he was informed at breakfast of planes flying into the World Trade Center. " 

Newsweek reported 20 May 2002 that "[Moussaoui] had been arrested in August on immigration charges after a Minnesota flight instructor reported that he showed a suspicious interest inlearning how to steer large airliners. When agents learned, from French intelligence, that he had radical Islamic ties, they sought a national-security warrant to search his computer—and got turned down.... The agents were 'in a frenzy,' 'absolutely convinced he was planning to do something with a plane,' said a senior official. One agent wrote that 'one possibility' was that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers."

Local FBI agents were repeatedly denied permission to search Moussaoui's possessions. Yet when searched after 9/11 these were found to include valuable information that could have been used to unravel the 9/11 conspiracy.

In his book Richard Clarke states that "For years George Tenet had called me directly when he read a piece of raw intelligence about a threat ". But on this occasion, the one that turned out to be the most important of all, Tenet didn't.

TIME Magazine commented 4 Aug 2002 that "The extraordinary thing about Moussaoui's case - like the Phoenix memo - is that it was never brought to the attention of top officials in Washington who were, almost literally, sleepless with worry about an imminent terrorist attack. Nobody in the FBI or CIA ever informed anybody in the White House of Moussaoui's detention. That was unforgivable. 'Do you think,' says a White House antiterrorism official, 'that if Dick Clarke had known the FBI had in custody a foreigner who was learning to fly a plane in midair, he wouldn't have done something?' In blissless ignorance, Clarke and Tenet waited for the meeting of the Principals.'".

Except that in reality Tenet knew about Moussaoui, and Clarke didn't.

This is how Clarke described the emerging situation in his book:

"During the first week in July I convened the CSG and asked each agency to consider itself on full alert. I asked the CSG agencies to cancel summer vacations and official travel for the counterterrorism response staffs. Each agency should report anything unusual, even if a sparrow should fall from a tree. I asked FBI to send another warning to the 18,000 police departments, State to alert the embassies, and the Defense Department to go to Threat Condition Delta. The Navy moved ships out of Bahrain.

The next day I asked the senior security officials at FAA, Immigration, Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs, and the Federal Protective Service to meet at the White House. I asked the FAA to send another security warning to the airlines and airports and requested special scrutiny at the ports of entry. We considered a broad public warning, but we had no proof or specificity.....

Somewhere in the CIA there was information that two al Qaeda terrorists had come to the United States.  Somewhere in the FBI there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools in the United States.   I had asked to know if a sparrow fell from a tree that summer. What was buried in CIA and FBI was not a matter of one sparrow falling from a tree; red lights and bells should have been going off.  They had specific information about individual terrorists from which one could have deduced what was about to happen. None of that information got to me or the White House. It apparently did not even make it up the FBI chain to Dale Watson, the Executive Assistant Director in charge of counterterrorism."

The President's intelligence brief of 6 August referred to hijackings and potential bin Laden sponsored attacks within the United States. Despite this, it transpired that none those names of al Qaeda suspects already known to be in the United States were put on the national  'no-fly' list. So even if the hijackings been 'only' conventional ones, rather than suicide missions, they would still not have been stopped under these circumstances (the unconventional nature of the hijackings is often pleaded in mitigation by the Bush administration as having wrong footed it).

Yet Newsweek reported 27 May 2002 that that as many as 10 to 12 warnings "were issued to all U.S. airlines and major airports in the period between June 2001 and September 11" and that "more than two of the warnings specifically mentioned the possibility of hijackings."

Cathal Flynn was Associate Administrator for Civil Aviation Security at the Federal Aviation Administration from 1993 to 2000. He later told the 9/11 Commission Seventh Public Hearing that "If, as has been reported, some of the terrorists used the names by which intelligence agencies knew them, the attacks could have been disrupted, perhaps completely defeated, simply by requiring all airlines to deny them boarding and report their reservations to law enforcement agencies. "

Pre-Attack Warnings From
British, Russian, And Israeli Intelligence

With the names of potential attackers already in its hands before 9/11 it is clear that the Bush had administration failed to adopt the most basic of defensive measures at its disposal, despite the flood of warnings coming from foreign intelligence services at the time (at least eleven countries issued warnings). Russia and Israel were prominent among these.

According to Britain's Daily Telegraph 19 September 2001, "Israeli intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent. The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation...."

Only in 2007 did it become known that up to 60 officials within the CIA had been aware of at least two of the eventual nineteen 9/11 hijackers prior to the attacks, and it may well have been aware of more. Yet the information was not shared with the parts of the organisation able to do anything about it, according to the agency's own subsequent internal investigation.

Germany's Diet Zeit reported 1 October 2002 that as part of its August 2001 warnings Israel in fact gave the CIA four names who turned out to be part of the hijacking team (a related by Der Spiegel refers to "19 persons named" in the Israeli list, with "at least four out of the 19 hijackers").

Despite the CIA having been given the names of at least some the hijackers, all the individuals concerned boarded their scheduled flights unimpeded on 9/11. None of the names were added to the already existing federal government 'no-fly' list (which only had 16 names on it at the time, according to a later report by the Washington Post). .

The Telegraph's report of the Israeli tip-off was later supplemented by another from Gordon Thomas, an intelligence reporter for Britain's Sunday Express. Thomas is also the author of the book on Israeli intelligence 'Gideon's Spies', which was later turned into a TV documentary for Channel 4.

On 21 May 2002 Thomas wrote a piece for his online intelligence journal entitled 'Bush: The Ignored Warning That Will Come To Haunt Him', which ran as follows:

"Mossad chiefs insist the Israeli spy agency was tracking Osama Bin-Laden's terrorists in America before September 11 and that that the information was passed on to the CIA on Five separate occasions before the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. As late as August 24, less than two weeks before the attacks, a Mossad warning, confirmed by German intelligence, BND, said that 'terrorists plan to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.' The warning alert was passed to the CIA. The warning was also passed to MI6. The agency made its own checks and also informed the CIA. Frustrated by its inability to alert the CIA to an impending attack, Mossad arranged on September 1, according to Tel Aviv sources last week, for Russian intelligence to warn Washington 'in the strongest possible terms of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings.'... According to similar documents shown to the Sunday Express, Mossad was running a round-the-clock surveillance operation on some of the September 11 hijackers. The details, contained in classified papers, reveal that a senior Mossad agent tipped off his counterpart in America's Central Intelligence Agency that a massive terrorist hit was being planned in the US. A handful of the spies had infiltrated the Al-Qaeda organisation while a staggering 120 others, posing as overseas art students, launched  massive undercover operations throughout America... The spying operations first came to the attention of the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] in January 2001 according to a classified 90-page dossier which has been seen by the Sunday Express."

Although not disclosing any potential link up with Israel, the Russians have themselves confirmed that they warned the United States of the impending attacks.

A few days prior to Thomas's report, the conservative Fox TV network covered the matter in the US.  On 17 May 2002 Fox reported that "Russian President Vladimir Putin has said publicly that he ordered his intelligence agencies to alert the United States last summer that suicide pilots were training for attacks on U.S. targets."

In a domestic press interview the day after 9/11 the head of the Russian air force, Anatoli Kornukov, had previously expressed astonishment that the US air force had not intercepted the hijacked airliners, stating that "Generally it is impossible to carry out an act of terror on the scenario which was used in the USA yesterday. We had such facts too.  As soon as something like that happens here, I am reported about that right away and in a minute we are all up [in our fighter aircraft]."

Only later did it become apparent what facts Kornukov was referring to - namely, it can now be assumed, the intelligence that Russia had passed to Washington.

Certainly the Israeli arts-student spying operation within the US referred to by Thomas has been reported on by several other sources, including the highly respected intelligence journal 'Jane's Intelligence'. Even greater coverage was provided in a three part TV report run by Fox News, details of which Fox later removed from its web site (although these are still available on the internet having been downloaded and reposted elsewhere on the web by others, including video footage posted to YouTube).

However, especially interesting within Thomas's account of the advance warnings from Mossad is the claim that British intelligence's MI6 was in on the loop regarding the information held by the Israelis. If so, then this was information potentially available to Sir David Manning at the time of his meeting with Condoleezza Rice on 9/10.

The following account from the London Times 14 June 2002 is additionally relevant.

"Britain's spy chiefs warned the Prime Minister less than two months before September 11 that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda group was in 'the final stages' of preparing a terrorist attack in the West, it was disclosed yesterday....Their warning was included in a report sent to Tony Blair and other senior Cabinet Ministers on July 16..... The JIC [Cabinet Office Joint Intelligence Committee] prediction of an al-Qaeda attack was based on intelligence gleaned not just from MI6 and GCHQ but also from US agencies, including the CIA and the National Security Agency, which has staff working jointly with GCHQ. The CIA sometimes has a representative on the JIC. The contents of the July 16 warning would have been passed to the Americans, Whitehall sources confirmed. ... John Scarlett, who took over as chairman of the JIC a few days before the attacks in America, told the committee, according to the report, that there was 'an acute awareness in the period before September 11' that bin Laden and his associates 'represented a very serious threat' and that there was 'planning activity'..."

In addition Thomas's reference to the Israeli tip-off having been confirmed by the BND (German intelligence) may also give a clue as to where the German newspaper Die Zeit obtained its own story on the matter, as summarised here by the BBC 2 October 2002:

"The American intelligence agency, the CIA, could have prevented the 11 September attacks if it were not for systematic failures, according to the German newspaper Die Zeit. The paper has uncovered details of a major Israeli spy ring involving some a 120 agents for the intelligence service Mossad operating across America and some masquerading as arts students. The ring was reportedly hard on the heels of at least four members of the hijack gang, including its leader Mohammed Atta. But the Israeli agents were detected by their American counterparts and thrown out of the country, it says."

The Israeli spies (or at least some of them) may have been thrown out of the US earlier in the year, but what about the subsequent Mossad warnings of August 2001? George Tenet appears to have made no public comment on the matter. Neither does there appear to be any reference in the official 9/11 Commission report, despite all the above accounts having emerged into the public domain before the Commission had conducted its own inquiry.

In its report of 1 October 2002 Die Zeit claimed to have acquired testimonies and reports seen by the US House and Senate intelligence committees investigating the attacks. The paper says that:

"[On 23 August 2001] The Israeli intelligence service Mossad presents to its American counterpart a list of names of terrorists who are living in the United States and seem to be planning to carry out an attack in the near future. According to documents obtained by DIE ZEIT, Mossad agents in the United States were following at least four of the 19 hijackers, including Almihdhar. The CIA now finally does what it should have done 18 months earlier. It informs the State Department, the FBI and the INS about Almihdhar and Alhazmi.... The immigration service writes back that according to its documents, both of the wanted men are currently in the United States.... One of the New York FBI agents calls headquarters in Washington and asks for reinforcements. He wants to widen the dragnet cast for Almihdhar. The FBI agent knows how dangerous Almihdhar is, for he spent months working on the [USS] Cole case. As a result he met CIA agents who mentioned the name Almihdhar. When he reads the name again on the watch list, with the additional notation that Almihdhar is suspected of involvement in the Cole bombing, the FBI agent becomes annoyed at his CIA colleagues, for having previously kept this information from him. But he becomes even more annoyed when his own headquarters refuses any support.... ".

Put simply, it would appear from these various reports that the CIA only informed the FBI of known key suspects after being pressured by Mossad with its warning that "terrorists plan to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture".

Israel's concern was hardly surprising.

The New York City area is home to the word's largest Jewish Community outside Israel. Manhattan had already been established as a terrorist target with the earlier bombing attempt on the World Trade Center in 1993 (two hours before the World Trade Center was hit on the morning of 9/11, two employees at a Tel Aviv office of the Israeli telecoms and instant messaging company Odigo received a electronic message predicting that the attack would happen).

But what does remains surprising, given the nature and urgency of the threat warnings, is that it appears that at no point did the CIA or FBI pass over the names of the suspects provided by Israel for inclusion on the national no-fly list for US airports.

Tenet 'Forgets'
Intelligence Briefings To Bush

So by this stage in 2001 the picture was looking distinctly odd - or rather, distinctly odder.

The previous month, John O'Neill, the FBI's leading al Qaeda investigator, had decided to quit the FBI.

John Loftus is a former federal prosecutor who has represented a large number of whistleblowers in the intelligence community over the years, as well as working as an intelligence expert for a variety of governmental and media organisations, including major television networks.

After 9/11 Loftus claimed that O'Neill had resigned from the FBI because he was being obstructed by his superiors from investigating al Qaeda (a claim also made by two French intelligence journalists whom O'Neill had been in contact with).

Having made his decision in July, O'Neill left the FBI on 22 August. Almost immediately he took up a job as head of security at the Word Trade Center, where he was shortly to be killed in one of the collapsing twin towers on 9/11.

Also in July an FBI agent in Phoneix, Arizona, had issued a memorandum to his Washington headquarters warning about suspicious activities involving a group of Middle Eastern men taking flight training lessons in Arizona. The memo is sub-titled "Osama bin Laden and Al-Muhjiroun supporters attending civil aviation universities/colleges in Arizona.” The agent, Ken Williams, warns of a possible "effort by Usama bin Laden to send students to the U.S. to attend civil aviation universities and colleges."

Williams' memo recommended that “FBI should accumulate a listing of civil aviation universities and colleges around the country. FBI field offices with these types of schools in their area should establish appropriate liaison. FBI [headquarters] should discuss this matter with other elements of the US intelligence community and task the community for any information that supports Phoenix’s suspicions.” (after 9/11 it was found that at least one of the hijackers, Hani Hanjour, had attended a flight school in Phoenix in early 2001). The recommendations were not adopted. William's memorandum on the subject later became known as the 'Phoenix memo', infamous for the way the advice it contained had been rejected by his superiors.

The following month Zacarias Moussaoui (a Muslim French national, later known as the '20th hijacker') was arrested on immigration charges by other FBI agents. He had aroused suspicion at a Minnesota flight school, asking to learn to fly a Boeing 747 and paying in cash. The local FBI became concerned that he might be part of larger hijacking conspiracy. French intelligence warned the FBI that Moussaoui was connected to militant Islam. One local agent told FBI headquarters that Moussaoui might “fly something into the World Trade Center.”

On 26 May 2002 the Observer in Britain reported on a letter sent that had been sent (also in May 2002) to FBI director Robert Mueller by Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent in Minnesota who had warned her superiors during August 2001 about Moussaoui:

"In a scathing indictment, Rowley accused her supervisor of altering her application to investigate Moussaoui in order to play down the significance of information provided by French intelligence that Moussaoui was a suspected terrorist - not merely a radical Islamic fundamentalist. Rowley accused Mueller of making 'misleading' statements on how the FBI handled the Moussaoui case before and after 11 September, and claimed Mueller had covered up FBI mistakes.... Furthermore, Rowley disputes FBI claims that their failure to act last summer did not make a difference in preventing the attacks. After her application to investigate Moussaoui was turned down, Rowley took her suspicions to the CIA. She was later reprimanded for going to the rival agency.  The impression of incompetence at FBI headquarters in Washington is further underscored by new revelations that Rowley's 'Minnesota memo' was sent to the same counter-terrorism supervisor who received the now infamous 'Phoenix memo' that warned of Arab nationals enrolled in flight schools who should be urgently investigated. For unknown reasons, David Frasca, who heads the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit, did not see Agent Kenneth Williams's 'Phoenix memo' until after 11 September, officials said yesterday."

Not everyone thinks this was necessarily down to mere incompetence, however.

In her letter to Mueller Rowley wrote that the FBI supervisory special agent concerned "seemed to have been consistently, almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents' efforts" to push the Moussaoui investigation. Despite Moussaoui's detention neither a criminal search warrant nor a special national security warrant to search his computer and other possessions were authorised prior to the attacks.

Two other FBI personnel, Robert Wright and Sibel Edmonds, have since tried to speak out about the deliberate internal sabotage of FBI investigations into al Qaeda and 9/11. Both have had government gagging orders imposed upon them to ensure their silence.

The FBI is not an innocent party in all of these matters. There are strong indications that the Bureau is aware of who funded 9/11, and that this information is being suppressed (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are the prime suspects, with the widow of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl most recently taking out a law suit against Pakistan's Habib Bank, an institution 49% owned by the Pakistani government, in order to try and gain the release more of information in this area. A particularly sensitive issue is the question of any governmental involvement).

In 2001 Senator Bob Graham was Chairman of the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence. He later co-chaired the joint congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks.  On 11 December 2002 Graham told a PBS television programme in the US that:

"I was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States. I am stunned that we have not done a better job of pursuing that to determine if other terrorists received similar support and, even more important, if the infrastructure of a foreign government assisting terrorists still exists for the current generation of terrorists who are here planning the next plots. To me that is an extremely significant issue and most of that information is classified, I think overly-classified. I believe the American people should know the extent of the challenge that we face in terms of foreign government involvement. .... I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing -- although that was part of it -- by a sovereign foreign government .....  It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now."

What is not known is why this information is being suppressed by the Bush administration, although many have offered educated guesses.

In the first chapter of  'Against All Enemies' (this simple title turns out to refer both to terrorists, and to those "who would use the terrorist threat to assault the liberties the Constitution enshrines.") Richard Clarke says that John O'Neill was his closest friend at the FBI, and that he was "a man determined to destroy al Qaeda until the Bureau had driven him out because he was too obsessed with al Qaeda and didn't mind breaking crockery in his drive to get USA bin Laden. O'Neill did not fit the narrow little mold that Director Louis Free wanted for his agents."

What Clarke does not mention is that Freeh's instructions for a narrow law-enforcement role for the FBI were coming from a higher authority. Newsweek gave this account 26 October 2005:

"Tension Between FBI Chiefs Ex-FBI director Louis Freeh's new book, 'My FBI,' has kicked up controversy over its stinging attacks on Bill Clinton. But it has also frayed relations with current director Bob Mueller. Freeh takes a little-noticed shot at his successor in the book, describing a testy encounter in the early days of the Bush administration with an 'acting deputy attorney general' - a clear reference to Mueller who at the time held that post. In Freeh's account, the acting deputy A.G. tells him the department now has new top priorities - guns, drugs and juvenile crime. Freeh replies that terrorism and 'just about everything else' are more important. 'Those are our marching orders,' Mueller says, according to Freeh's account. 'Those aren't my marching orders,' Freeh shoots back. Freeh then writes that 'lockstep, blind obedience' by an FBI director to 'potentially unlawful or even 'dumb orders' is a 'formula for disaster.'  Mueller declined an invitation to attend Freeh's book party last week after telling one bureau official that Freeh was 'too controversial,' according to a Freeh associate who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.'"

Yet under the Clinton administration Freeh had made counterterrorism the Bureau's top priority announcing in May 1998 that “Some terrorism now comes from abroad. Some terrorism is home-grown. But whatever its origin, terrorism is deadly and the FBI has no higher priority than to combat terrorism, to prevent it where possible. Our goal is to prevent, detect and deter.”

The downgrading of counterterrorism efforts in 2001 appears to have been a conscious decision by the Bush administration, rather than the result of some more general bureaucratic decline within the FBI. Far from it.

In an article 27 May 2002 Newsweek indicated that similar pressure were being placed on the FBI by Attorney General John Ashcroft: "When FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents, they got shot down even as Ashcroft began, quietly, to take a privately chartered jet for his own security reasons. The attorney general was hardly alone in seeming to de-emphasize terror in the young Bush administration."

Before And After 9/11
The Cheney And Mueller Effects

In the words of the BBC, Freeh later "surprised observers on 1 May [2001] by announcing his resignation well in advance of the end of his term in 2003. Mr Freeh did not give specific reasons for his decision to leave".

He departed  25 June. Freeh had been a supporter of John O'Neill, and the next month O'Neill was to make his decision to leave as well.

Subsequently Freeh told the tenth public hearing of the 9/11 Commission that in the years 2000 and 2001 the subject of  'planes as weapons' was "always one of the considerations in the planning" of security for 'National Security Special Events'  (e.g. major sporting events), and that "resources were actually designated to deal with that particular threat." He confirmed that the use of aeroplanes, either packed with explosives or otherwise, in suicide missions, was "part of the planning for those events".

Freeh also told a congressional hearing into 9/11 in October 2002 that “the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by foreign terrorists clearly demonstrated the effort to target America and Americans. Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwah, calling for the deaths of Americans anywhere, left no doubt that terrorist attacks within the United States were as likely as those in Saudi Arabia, East Africa, Yemen and elsewhere.... Before the end of 1999, the FBI and the intelligence community clearly understood the foreign-based al-Qaeda threat regarding targets within the United States. Congress and the Executive were fully briefed as to this threat analysis…The radical fundamentalist threat posed a clear and present danger here, and everyone knew it and understood it to be the same.... In several appearances before this committee, I used a chart to depict the locations around the United States where radical fundamentalists cells were active.”

After a temporary interregnum run by the FBI's Deputy Director Thomas Pickard, the vacancy left by Freeh was taken by Robert Mueller, an experienced insider at the Department of Justice (from where, in an earlier posting, he had overseen the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 bombing prosecution, a case now increasingly thought to have been used to frame Libya using false evidence).

Muller took over the FBI one week before 9/11. His performance since has been 'interesting'.

Under his watch the FBI has been 'pursuing' an investigation of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks. The attacks killed or infected 22 people, and further traumatised an already deeply shaken nation. The anthrax had been delivered through the simple expedient of letters in the post, which then released spores when opened.

On 18 August 2002 the BBC reported that the FBI had discovered that the anthrax case traced back to two suspects who had worked for the US Department of Defense and the CIA. From that point on little further has been heard of the investigation. Postal union workers are currently demanding that the FBI and Justice Department publicly disclose what they know about the unresolved case, which is now six years old.

It is easy to forget about the anthrax attacks which took place immediately after 9/11. But at the time they proved to be of great political importance to the Bush administration.

The attacks created a particular climate of hysteria which helped to bounce the authoritarian Patriot Act through the US legislature without proper scrutiny. Two senior Senators, Tom Daschle (Senate Majority Leader) and Patrick Leahy (Chairman of the Senate Judicial Committee), both Democrats, had been sent letters through the post containing anthrax.

The attacks resulted in the closure of the House of Representatives for the first time in its history, further embedding the scare deep into the minds of lawmakers and the public alike. "The fear of anthrax is sweeping America" reported the BBC. News media offices were also targeted, in a move which encouraged maximum press coverage.

Senator Leahy has been far from impressed with the subsequent investigation. In September 2007 he said in an interview that "I wish they had turned this investigation over to some good sheriff or police chief somewhere. I think it’s been very badly handled..... What I want to know — I have a theory. But what I want to know is why me, why Tom Daschle, why Tom Brokaw [NBC news anchor]?... I don’t think it’s somebody insane..... I think there are people within our government — certainly from the source of it — who know where it came from."

But if the scare had helped to get the Patriot Act through with the minimum of amendment and delay that was not the full extent of the political ramifications.

The attacks were also sensitising the American public to the issue of biological weapons, a dimension that would soon become important in the emerging 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' propaganda campaign against Iraq. As one sixth anniversary press report in Palm Beach Florida put it, "the anthrax scare ratcheted up the nation's nerves by about 2,000 percent" (at the time former CIA Director James Woolsey, one of the leading forces behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq, quickly promoted the idea that Iraq was responsible for the US anthrax attacks).

Robert Stevens, a Briton, was a media worker who had been killed in one of the anthrax attacks. His widow is currently suing the Bush administration to release more information on the FBI's investigation. The Palm Beach anniversary press report on her case concluded that, "It boils down to this.  Attorney Richard Schuler is alleging that the strain of anthrax that killed Stevens was the Ames strain, which can be traced to Fort Dietrich, the Army's biowarfare defense lab outside Washington. Government lawyers have nickel-and-dimed Schuler's legal team, he says, stalling with motion after motion. But he thinks it will eventually get to court, and a fairly important piece of the case should be heard before the Florida Supreme Court early next year..... Top guys in the field, from a noted handwriting expert to a key anthrax guy, have been told not to discuss the government's investigation. In court, Schuler will do this questioning using subpoenas. That's what Maureen Stevens wants. Some answers to her questions."

Too bad Mrs Stevens and her attorney are grappling with Robert Mueller.

Professor Francis Boyle, an international law expert at the University of Illinois who worked under the first Bush administration as a bioweapons advisor in the 1980s, has accused the FBI of authorising the destruction of the Ames cultural anthrax database in Iowa.  Boyle maintains that destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, from which the Fort Dietrick laboratory got its pathogens, constitutes blatant destruction of evidence - a federal crime.

Boyle told the Middle East Times 11 December 2006 "the trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret but officially-sponsored US government biowarfare program.... I believe the FBI knows exactly who was behind these terrorist anthrax attacks upon the United States Congress in the Fall of 2001, and that the culprits were US government-related scientists involved in a criminal US government biowarfare program".

A claim of a US secret biowarfare programme may seem something of a stretch. But just a week before 9/11, on 5 September, the London Times had reported that:

"The Pentagon has secretly built a germ factory capable of producing enough deadly bacteria to kill millions of people, it was revealed yesterday. The project is one of a number of covert biological initiatives pursued by the United States over recent years. One proposal awaiting final approval is to manufacture a more potent version of anthrax using genetically engineered biological agents. Last night, Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, confirmed that the Administration planned to proceed with these tests. The disclosure suggests that the US has been severely testing the spirit, and possibly the letter, of the 1972 convention on biological weapons. The treaty forbids nations from developing or acquiring weapons that spread disease, but allows work on vaccines and other protective measures. The White House insisted yesterday that all research conducted by military and CIA scientists in the field of biological warfare was 'purely defensive'....Yesterday’s disclosure was seen as one reason why Mr Bush had also refused to sign up to a draft agreement strengthening the 29-year-old convention on biological weapons, even though it had been ratified by 140 other countries. By signing, the US would have had to reveal if, and where, it was conducting defensive germ research."

The hypocrisy of this in the context of the subsequent chemical and biological weapons propaganda campaign waged against Iraq stands in a league of its own.

Meanwhile the Middle East Times report expanded on the subject, saying that after the attacks Boyle "contacted senior FBI official Marion 'Spike' Bowman, who handles counter-terrorism issues, and provided him with the names of the scientists working with anthrax. Boyle told Bowman the Ft. Detrick scientists were not to be trusted. In addition to then destroying the anthrax, the FBI 'retained every independent life-scientist it could locate as part of its fictitious investigation, and then swore them all to secrecy so that they cannot publicly comment on the investigation or give their expert opinion,' Boyle said.  Boyle pointed out that Bowman is the same FBI agent 'who played a pivotal role in suppressing evidence which in turn prevented the issuance of a search warrant for the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th Al Qaeda hijacker on 11 September 2001, which might otherwise have led to foreknowledge and therefore prevention of those terrorist attacks in the first place.'"

In a subsequent radio interview Boyle claimed Bowman had 'sabotaged' the Moussaoui search warrant application.

Bowman was given the Presidential Rank Award and a cash bonus by Mueller in 2003, the award having been recommended to the White House by Mueller.

Shortly before the award, the joint congressional inquiry into 9/11 had published its report. In the report Senator Shelby (the Republican Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) had accused Bowman’s unit of giving Minneapolis FBI agents pursuing the Moussaoui case “inexcusably confused and inaccurate information”, and said that the legal advice given was "was patently false".

The award lead to a formal complaint submitted to Mueller by Senator Grassley.

Mueller's 'dedication to duty' was illustrated long ago in a 10 November 1991 TIME magazine article. This shed some light on his efforts to 'co-ordinate' the Justice Department's investigation into the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) banking scandal, when Muller was head of the Department's criminal division under George Bush Snr. TIME recounts the situation as follows:

"B.C.C.I. was the largest criminal enterprise in history, a bank whose principals stole an estimated $12 billion from their depositors....

TIME reported in July that the Justice Department was understaffing FBI and U.S. attorneys' teams assigned to the case. Morgenthau's complaints that Justice was withholding potential witnesses and blocking access to critical records led then Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to pledge greater cooperation. That promise has not been kept, according to Morgenthau's investigators and Justice Department officials in the field, who have declined to speak on the record for fear of retaliation.....

.... long-standing grand jury probes of B.C.C.I. in Miami and Washington have languished, some for as long as two years without visible progress.

The frustration has spread to the ranks of federal law enforcement. In October a U.S. Customs officer wrote to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, (chairman of the Senate subcommittee on terrorism, narcotics and international operations), and complained that 'tons of documents were not reviewed . . . and the CIA put a halt to certain investigative leads' in a 1988 Florida inquiry that eventually led to the indictment of five mid-level B.C.C.I. officers. 'We had drug traffickers, money launderers, foreign government involvement, Noriega and allegations of payoffs by B.C.C.I. to U.S. government political figures. I will not elaborate on who these U.S. government figures were alleged to be, but I can advise you that you don't have all of the documents. Some were destroyed or misplaced.'

Similar reports, coupled with the Justice Department's heavy censoring of B.C.C.I.-related documents subpoenaed by the Senate, have angered Kerry, who claims that the Justice Department is stonewalling his investigation. Kerry, who has held several hearings into the B.C.C.I. affair, is battling a Justice Department decision to prohibit him from taking testimony from former U.S. Customs Service agent Robert Mazur.

Mazur, who led the undercover sting operation that produced the first indictments of B.C.C.I. in 1988, quit the agency to work for the Drug Enforcement Administration. He reportedly was disgusted over the government's failure to pursue leads concerning secret B.C.C.I. ownership of U.S. banks and alleged payoffs to U.S. politicians. Although Kerry has declined to release correspondence from Mazur, sources who have seen Mazur's allegations about a cover-up say they are political dynamite.....

Several federal attorneys and agents contend that they have been told by Justice Department officials that B.C.C.I. is a 'political' case and that prosecutorial and investigative decisions must be made in Washington. 'We are constantly flabbergasted that the Justice Department says we should go forward and yet we never get the permission from Washington,' says a senior investigator. Others complain that applications to subpoena witnesses, suspects and records have backed up in Washington. Reporters on the B.C.C.I. story find as they interview former officers of the bank who possess critical knowledge that these people have never been contacted by law-enforcement officials. 'None of us can figure out why the department has become a roadblock on B.C.C.I.,' says another high-level investigator. 'Why hasn't there been a departmental priority on B.C.C.I.?'

But according to the Justice Department official who heads the B.C.C.I. investigation, such bickering from the field is the result of Washington's efforts to centralize and coordinate the far-flung investigation. 'The orders from the top are to aggressively pursue this investigation and not to spare resources,' says Robert S. Mueller, head of the Justice Department's criminal division. 'There may be people who are frustrated, but the investigation is not being held up, it's being coordinated. We've got some blemishes, but we have not covered up.' .....

The question that has not been answered is why the Justice Department has limited its inquiry and allowed the law-enforcement community to believe the B.C.C.I. case is too sensitive to be handled in a routine manner. Former  B.C.C.I. officers have told investigators that they believe the bank's extensive U.S. intelligence connections -- which figured importantly in such undertakings as the Pakistan-based supply operation to the Afghan rebels, the bank's role in the covert resupply of the Nicaraguan contras, and the sale of arms to Iran -- help explain why the Justice Department is treating the inquiry so gingerly."

The Iran-Contra crowd, of course, came back into power with the arrival of Bush Jnr in the White House in 2001. And by then it seems there was a new can of worms developing.

John Loftus claims that a previous block on investigating al Qaeda was re-instituted and expanded by Vice President Dick Cheney in January 2001, as a result of sensitive negotiations which had begun during the Clinton administration between Enron and the Taliban over the construction of an oil and gas pipeline through Afghanistan. If so, then access to hydrocarbons was clearly taking precedence over national security (it is a matter of remarkable record that during 2001 the National Security Council had indeed established its own Enron-focused 'working group' concerning the Enron power station in India that was due to be supplied by the pipeline).

In May 2002 Loftus wrote:

"A captured Al Qaida document reveals that US energy companies were secretly negotiating with the Taliban to build a pipeline. The document was obtained by the FBI but was not allowed to be shared with other agencies in order to protect Enron.   Multiple sources confirm that American law enforcement agencies were deliberately kept in the dark and systematically prevented from connecting the dots before 9/11 in order to aid Enron’s secret and immoral Taliban negotiations....

..... In the early 1990’s, a consortium of American oil companies (lead by Unocal) had hired Enron to determine the profitability of building an oil and gas pipeline across Afghanistan so that America could have access to the Caspian Sea Basin, holding 1/8^th of the worlds energy supplies.....

Former Afghanistan CIA agent Robert Baer has recently published a book charging that the cover-up of the 1990’s pipeline negotiations revealed extensive financial corruption inside the Clinton administration, and contributed to the lack of intelligence before 9/11. The Taliban negotiations temporarily collapsed in 1999 after Clinton reversed his NSC [National Security Council] advisor’s policy, and ordered a missile strike against terrorists in Afghanistan.

However, in January 2001, Vice President Cheney allegedly reinstated the intelligence block and expanded it to effectively preclude any investigations whatsoever of Saudi-Taliban-Afghan oil connections. Former FBI counter-terrorism chief John O’Neill resigned from the FBI in disgust, stating that he was ordered not to investigate Saudi-Al Qaida connections because of the Enron pipeline deal. Loftus has confirmed that it was O’Neill who originally discovered the Al Qaida pipeline memo after the Embassy bombings in Africa.

O’Neill gave an overview of the Enron block to two French authors who will soon be publishing in the United States. The FBI is currently investigating Loftus’ links to John O’Neill, and is also refusing FBI agent Robert Wright permission to publish his own findings about the Enron block.

Loftus asserts that the Enron block, which remained in force from January 2001 until August 2001 when the pipeline deal collapsed, is the reason that none of FBI agent Rowley’s requests for investigations were ever approved. As numerous British and French authors have concluded, the information provided by European intelligence sources prior to 9/11 was so extensive, that it is no longer possible for either CIA or the FBI to assert a defense of incompetence.

It is time for Congress to face the truth: In order to give Enron one last desperate chance to complete the Taliban pipeline and save itself from bankruptcy, senior levels of US intelligence were ordered to keep their eyes shut and their subordinates ignorant...

... The two rebels,  Baer of CIA and O'Neill of FBI,  were of course, driven into retirement.  

Much of the Saudi information was blacked out of Baer's book by CIA censors, but enough remains to thoroughly document  the brazen avarice of senior Clinton NSC officials for a Caspian Basin pipeline.  

Baer names a few names, but he was driven into retirement before he could learn too much. Still, he learned that both Republican and Democratic officials were involved with the pipeline coverup to the great detriment of American intelligence....

Most of my sources say that Bush and Rice may have been deliberately kept out of the loop by Cheney. For example, it was Cheney, not Rice, who saw the Phoenix memo before 9/11."

Robert Baer is the author of the book 'Sleeping With The Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude'. Baer believes that because of its dependence on Middle Eastern oil the US will not impose a peace plan on Israel and leave the region. 

Baer was at one time considered perhaps the best on-the-ground CIA field officer in the Middle East (the film 'Syriana' is based loosely on his experience, with Baer, aka Bob Barnes, being played by George Clooney). Baer led an aborted coup d'etat plot against Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 1995 on which the Clinton administration pulled the plug at the last minute. 

On 30 September 2002 United Press International reported on Baer's prior-knowledge of al Qaeda's Khalid Sheik Mohammed's (the alleged mastermind of 9/11) preparations for hijackings before 9/11:

"According to Baer, he was first informed of [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed's role as a key aide to terrorist mastermind bin Laden as early as December 1997 when he met a former police chief from Doha, Qatar, at a dinner in Damascus. In 1997, Baer had left the agency to become a consultant in Beirut. Terrorism was Baer's field and Baer began to meet the ex-Doha police chief from time to time. The ex-Doha police chief, who Baer declined to identify by name, told Baer that during the course of his work he found that there was a bin Laden cell in Qatar, being sheltered by the Qatari government. The two main members of the cell were Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Shawqui Islambuli..... what worried the former police chief was the fact that Mohammed and Islambuli were experts in hijacking commercial planes. The ex-police chief told Baer that Mohammed 'is going to hijack some planes.' The ex-police chief said his basis for this was evidence developed by police and Qatari intelligence.... Baer sent this information to a friend in the CIA Counter-terrorist Center who forwarded the information to his superiors. Baer heard nothing. 'There was no interest,' he said."

Well before the 9/11 Commission was established Congress had conducted its own inquiry into the attacks. It published its report 10 December 2002. The report is infamous for 28 pages which have been redacted (censored). This was against the wishes of one of the joint chairman of the committee that conducted the inquiry, Senator Bob Graham.

Former Senator Max Cleland (appointed as one of the Commissioners for the more well known 9/11 Commission inquiry, from which he later resigned and accused the Bush administration of engineering a cover-up) was also unhappy with the level of obstruction.

Cleland had spoken to PBS TV 25 July 2003 about both the then new 9/11 Commission and the previous congressional joint inquiry. He said, "This commission was formed about mid-December, the 9/11 Commission. We were supposed to use the joint inquiry report as a launching pad to get into this issue of not only fixing the intelligence community, but moving beyond, and getting into what is the al Qaeda all about? What is this terrorist global network that we're fighting? A new kind of war and all that. Well, the independent, bi-partisan commission, hello, didn't even get the stuff 'til a few weeks ago. I'm saying that's deliberate. I am saying that the delay in relating this information to the American public out of a hearing… series of hearings, that several members of Congress knew eight or ten months ago, including Bob Graham and others, that was deliberately slow walked… the 9/11 Commission was deliberately slow walked, because the Administration's policy was, and its priority was, we're gonna take Saddam Hussein out.... You can read between the lines and see that there were foreign governments that were much more involved in the 9/11 attack than just supporting Islamic fundamentalist teachings and schools. Now, that has been redacted. A whole 28 page section..... The Administration, the White House, has put several blocks in the road. One, they run all the information to the 9/11 Commission through a political coordinator in Ashcroft's Justice Department..... Secondly, they want to put minders — that's people who sit in the room when we have an interview with people in NSA, FBI, CIA, Department of… in DIA — in the Pentagon, and Immigration and Naturalization Services. They want to put minders in there. That's to shut down information. That's not to reveal information."

The 28 page redaction that Cleland refers to is the one in the original congressional inquiry report, and the censored section is widely believed to concern the role of the Saudi and Pakistani governments in 9/11. In his remarks to PBS Cleland refers to 'foreign governments' in the plural (in 2002 Graham himself had already made similar remarks to PBS, also referring to the involvement of 'foreign governments' in the plural).

One interesting section of the original congressional inquiry report which is not redacted, however, reads as follows: "When the FBI did complete analytic products, the quality was inadequate. During the summer of 2001, the U.S. Intelligence Community was in a state of heightened alert, due to concern about an imminent al-Qa’ida attack. However, this concern was not reflected in the FBI’s National Law Enforcement Threat System (NLETS) reports, which are the means through which the FBI communicated terrorist threat information with state and local law enforcement entities. In a May 2001 NLETS report, for example, the FBI assessed the risk of terrorism as 'low,' and, in a July 2, 2001 NLETS report, stated that the FBI had no information indicating a credible threat of terrorist attack in the United States, although the possibility of such an attack could not be discounted. Additional FBI notices that were issued later in July 2001 indicated that there was a potential for attacks against U.S. interests abroad, but again that the possibility of an attack in the United States could not be discounted."

It appears that Clarke's 5 July warning to the meeting of the various federal agencies convened at the White House, including the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration, that 'Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon,' had fallen on deaf ears.

In his book Richard Clarke does not describe an intelligence block, but nonetheless he does present a picture which a reader could easily interpret as such, albeit it one masquerading as disinterest or distraction. Cheney is once again a key figure:

"In January 2001, with the Florida fiasco behind us, I briefed each of my old friends and associates from the first Bush administration, Condi Rice, Steve Hadley, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell.  My message was stark: al Qaeda is at war with us, it is a highly capable organization, probably with sleeper cells in the U.S., and it is clearly planning a major series of attacks against us; we must act decisively and quickly, deciding on the issues prepared after the attack on the [USS] Cole, going on the offensive.

Each person reacted differently. Cheney was, as ever, quiet and calm on the surface. The wheels were spinning behind the mask. He asked an aide to arrange for a visit to CIA to learn their view of the al Qaeda threat. That was fine by me because I knew that George Tenet would be even more alarmist than I had been about what al Qaeda was planning. Cheney did make the trip up the Parkway to CIA Headquarters, one of many he would make. Most of the visits focused on Iraq and left midlevel managers and analysts wondering whether the seasoned Vice President was right about the Iraqi threat; perhaps they should adjust their own analysis. In the first weeks of the Administration, however, Cheney had heard me loud and clear about al Qaeda. Now that he was attending meetings chaired by Condi Rice (something no Vice President had ever done), I hoped he would speak up about the urgency of the problem, put it on a short list for immediate action. He didn't.....

Now Condi Rice was in charge [of the National Security Council]. She appeared to have a closer relationship with the second President Bush than any of her predecessors had with the presidents they reported to. That should have given her some manuver room, some margin for shaping the agenda. The Vice President, however, had decided to be involved at the NSC Principals level. The Secretary of Defense also made clear he didn't care about anyone else's relationship with the President; he was doing what he wanted to do."

In other words Cheney had 'gate crashed' himself onto the National Security Council in unprecedented fashion, and promptly focused on Iraq, not terrorism. At the same Rice had also downgraded the post of National Coordinator for Counterterroism, effectively leaving Clarke marooned without direct access to the top-decision making meetings. Clarke writes, "Rice decided that the position of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism would also be downgraded. No longer would the Coordinator be a member of the Principals Committee. No longer would the CSG report to the Principals, but instead to a committee of Deputy Secretaries."

Clarke had been White House head of counterterrorism since 1992. At one point in his book he compares the inclusive management style of Clinton with the exclusive style of Bush. Although he doesn't use the term 'cabal' Clarke observes that "Bush was informed by talking to a small set of senior advisors" and that "thinking back to the ten months that I had served President Bush as his National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Infrastructure Protection, I am still amazed that I had never been given the chance to talk with him about terrorism until September 11. In fact, during that time I had only three meetings where I developed the agenda and briefed him on issues, but each time on subjects other than terrorism."

So despite having given very strong warnings of the growing terrorist threat to both Cheney and Rice, Clarke was kept away from the President on the subject of terrorism until after 9/11.

Yet Clarke's warnings were relating specifically to the American 'homeland'. He had made that clear at the major inter-agency meeting he was to convene in July 2001. Clarke also writes that "During the spring [of 2001] as initial policy debates in the Administration began, I e-mailed Condi Rice and NSC Staff colleagues that al Qaeda was trying to kill Americans, to have hundreds of dead in the streets of America."

But whether or not there was intelligence stonewalling within the US, outside it at least eleven foreign countries had tried to issue warnings of impending al Qaeda attacks. We now know that Israel and Russia had played an especially important role here.

Yet, if Israel was sufficiently alarmed as to attempt to use Russia (America's old cold war enemy) to get the threat message through to the Bush administration, would it not also have tried to use Britain as well, given the long-standing 'special relationship' between Washington and London? It would have been a more obvious choice.

The brings us back to the question of Sir David Manning's meeting with Condoleezza Rice in the 24 hours before the attacks of 9/11.

If the accounts from the Telegraph, Die Zeit, and Gordon Thomas are at least partially true (and they don't appear contradictory), it is difficult to imagine what issue could have been more pressing at that time in a discussion between the National Security Adviser of the United States and her British counterpart.

Competing For The President's Attention
Zacarias Moussaoui V Iraq

In his preface to 'Against All Enemies' Clarke unambiguously states that "President Bush did little or nothing about terrorism before 9/11" and that "the Bush administration began plotting to invade Iraq early in their term, well before 9/11". 

The latter claim is well supported by others involved, most notably Paul O'Neill who, as Bush's original Treasury Secretary, attended meetings of the National Security Council. O'Neill confirms that regime change in Iraq was right at the top of the agenda of the very first meeting of NSC at the end of January 2001. Iraq also took up the whole of the second meeting in early February.

After resigning in December 2002 O'Neill eventually let the press know that the goal of removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq was already self-evident in those early stages of the Bush administration. CBS quoted O'Neill in 2004 as saying, "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this."

Additional reporting by the BBC TV's flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, has also revealed that the Bush administration had been planning regime change right from the outset (the BBC broadcast the account of a witness who had been tasked to interview potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration. Secret meetings took place in California, Washington and the Middle East).

Yet the 9/11 Commission report states that "Every official we questioned about the possibility of an invasion of Afghanistan said that it was almost unthinkable, absent a provocation such as 9/11 .... because they believed the public would not support it."

If that was true of a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan with strong ties to Bin Laden and al Qaeda, how much more true was it in respect of an invasion of Iraq, a country which had no such connections?

Although we know now that military planning against Iraq had been going on since that first NSC meeting in January described by Paul O'Neill (of which a bit more later), there would be no opportunity to market such a 'high octane' venture to the American public until after the national trauma of 9/11.

Whilst 9/11 clearly opened the door to that opportunity, there are some unresolved questions as to what opened the door to 9/11.

On 14 April 2004 the BBC reported that "The head of the CIA [George Tenet] has told the 9/11 commission that ..... he did not speak to George Bush in the month before the attacks, when Mr Bush was on holiday in Texas. 'He's in Texas and I'm either here [in Washington] or on leave for some of that time,' Mr Tenet said in response to a question from commissioner Tim Roemer. 'In this time period, I'm not talking to him, no.' "

Forgetfulness is not one of the most obvious personal characteristics that might be sought when choosing a Director of Central Intelligence for the world's sole remaining superpower. But it turns out Tenet had 'forgotten' about some of his briefings to Bush during that very sensitive time. It also appears that when Tenet did brief the President he also 'forgot' to mention the FBI's detention of Zacarias Moussaoui, although he himself had been briefed on the matter.

On 16 April 2004 the Salt Lake Tribune published a Hearst Newspapers report which went as follows:

"CIA Director George Tenet met with President Bush at least eight times in the 42 days before the catastrophic terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, a CIA spokesman said Thursday, correcting Tenet's testimony that he hadn't talked with the president during the entire month of August.... Tenet's contacts with Bush during that period are significant because the CIA director was the highest ranking U.S. official who was aware of both the FBI's arrest of flight student Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota and the CIA warning to Bush that Osama bin Laden was 'determined to strike' inside the United States.  The CIA warning memo to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001, also noted that the FBI had detected 'patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.'.... Tenet learned of Moussaoui's arrest on Aug. 23 or Aug. 24 in a CIA memo entitled 'Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly,' investigators disclosed Wednesday.... Former Acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard, who served as acting director for 10 of the 11 weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, told the inquiry Tuesday that he had learned of Moussaoui's arrest in Minnesota on the afternoon of Sept. 11 -- after the attacks. Word of Moussaoui's arrest never reached the White House National Security Council's interagency Counterterrorism and Security Group, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke testified on March 24. After the Sept. 11 attacks, FBI agents obtained the legal go-ahead to examine the hard drive on his laptop. It contained information on using crop-dusting airplanes."

It is, to say the least, curious that having been detained by local FBI agents, the head of the CIA was briefed (several times) on Moussaoui's arrest before 9/11, but not apparently the head of the FBI.

Tenet himself does not seem to have been much interested in discussing it with anyone outside of the CIA. News of Moussaoui reached neither the President nor Richard Clarke at the CSG. Yet, this was more than a 'sparrow' falling.

The report of the 9/11 Commission itself provides a further disconcerting description of the level of inaction at this time: "....[there] was an article in the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief titled 'Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.' It was the 36th PDB item briefed so far that year that related to Bin Ladin or al Qaeda, and the first devoted to the possibility of an attack in the United States..... [the briefing stated] 'FBI information since [1998]  indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.'....No CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] or other NSC [National Security Council] meeting was held to discuss the possible threat of a strike in the United States as a result of this report.... We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. DCI Tenet visited President Bush in Crawford Texas, on August 17 and participated in PDB briefings of the President between August 31 (after the President had returned to Washington) and September 10. But Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period."

Yet the next sentence of the report reads, "Most of the intelligence community recognized in the summer of 2001 that the number and severity of threat reports were unprecedented. Many officials told us that they knew something terrible was planned."

News of some of the more alarming parts of the Moussaoui 'dropped ball' episode had emerged into the public domain soon after the publication of Clarke's book on the eve of the 9/11 Commission hearings (although the book itself does not discuss Moussaoui). Contemplating these various matters, one book reviewer for Forbes exclaimed at the time "I am astounded that Tenet did not pass on his own staff's discovery that an Arab terrorist was taking flying lessons". Tenet's staff had, of course, learned of the situation from staff at the FBI.

In the event local FBI agents were prevented by their own headquarters from obtaining a warrant to search Moussaoui's possessions.

But it was not until September 2007 that it became fully apparent as to how important those possessions were. Only then was it disclosed that the post- 9/11 search of Moussaoui's paper notebook had unearthed details of wire transfers from Ramzi Binalshib, one of the principal overseas organisers of the attacks. A McClatchy report published by the Seattle Times 11 September summed up the significance of all this as follows:

"Two numbers scrawled in a notebook that belonged to terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui could have given the FBI a chance to identify several of the Sept. 11 hijackers before they struck six years ago, according to officials familiar with the bureau's investigation of the attacks. The notebook entries recorded the control numbers for two Western Union wire transfers in which suspected al-Qaida coordinator Ramzi Binalshibh, using an alias, sent Moussaoui $14,000 from Germany in early August 2001, before he went to a Minnesota flight school to learn to fly a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. A check of Western Union records probably would have uncovered other wires in the preceding days for similar sums of money to Binalshibh — who had been turned away at the U.S. border four times because he was a suspected terrorist — from an al-Qaida paymaster in Dubai. On one of those receipts, the paymaster listed a phone number in the United Arab Emirates that several of the hijackers had called from Florida. FBI headquarters, however, rejected Minneapolis FBI field agents' repeated requests for a national security warrant to search Moussaoui's belongings after he was arrested Aug. 16, 2001. One agent, Harry Samit, was so convinced Moussaoui was a terrorist that he sent scores of messages to FBI headquarters pressing for a search warrant. It's not clear whether the FBI would have been able to trace the money and telephone calls fast enough to pre-empt the Sept. 11 attacks, but the decision to reject the requests for a warrant meant they never had the chance. Instead, Moussaoui's tattered, blue spiral notebook sat in a sealed bag at an immigration office — unopened until after four hijacked jets slammed into New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside. On Monday, FBI spokesman Rich Kolko said the bureau had 'worked diligently on the case' but 'the trail of evidence was complex, and additional information was not available until after the 9/11 events.' He declined further comment. Officials familiar with the Sept. 11 investigation and the items in Moussaoui's possession when he was arrested provided the most detailed description to date of FBI agents' pre-Sept. 11 path toward the hijackers. The officials declined to be identified because the decision not to seek the warrant has caused friction and embarrassment within the FBI."

If there was a block on al Qaeda investigations, as claimed by John Loftus and John O'Neill, then this is where the tip of the iceberg appeared to be poking out of the water.

Tenet's lack of interest in discussing Moussaoui with Bush does not seem to have upset the President, who later presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom despite having presided over the biggest 'intelligence failure' in modern American history.  Rather it was a case of medals all round for both Tenet at the CIA, and Bowman at the FBI, both of whose inactions had resulted in Moussaoui remaining below Richard Clarke's pre-9/11 counterterrorism radar.

Bush, after all, had soon had some things other than al Qaeda on his mind after the attacks.

Clarke writes in his book about a scene which took place the day after 9/11: "Later, on the evening of the 12th, I left the Video Conferencing Center and there, wandering alone around the Situation Room, was the President. He looked like he wanted something to do. He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. 'Look', he told us, 'I know you have a lot to do and all .... but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way....' 'Look into Iraq, Saddam,' the President said testily and left us. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty stared after him with her mouth hanging open. Paul Kurtz walked in, passing the President on the way out. Seeing our expressions, he asked, 'Geez, what happened here.' 'Wolfowitz got to him, ' Lisa said shaking her head."

Meanwhile Tenet is not the only one who appears to have been, at best, ineffectual before the attacks. Rice was at this time working beneath the dominant influence of Cheney and Rumsfeld. Despite her reputed closeness to the President, and her position as chair of the National Security Council, she was clearly of no use to Clarke in trying to gain access to Bush.

Clarke writes that "I realized then that until today [9/11] I had not ever briefed the President on terrorism, only Cheney, Rice, and Powell".

Clarke had infact developed a plan "to go after bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership." He says, "Bush had never seen the plan, the pieces of which had first been briefed to Cheney, Rice, Powell, and others on his team in January.  It had taken since January to get the Cabinet-level meeting that I had requested 'urgently' within days of the inauguration to approve an aggressive plan to go after al Qaeda. The meeting had finally happened exactly one week earlier, on September 4."

So it seems Cheney got to see parts of Clarke's plan as the Bush presidency began, but the plan only reached Cabinet level a week before the attacks. In short, Clarke was to find himself as frustrated as John O'Neill was at the FBI.

The 6 September 2007 edition of the British political periodical the New Statesman maintains that during this period Condoleezza Rice was largely an irrelevance despite her status as National Security Advisor to the President. The journal is blunt in its assessment of her: "[Bush] is genuinely fond of her, but that doesn't mean he has ever paid any serious attention to what his inexperienced appointee has had to say. He always listened much more closely to hugely experienced Washington infighters such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom considered foreign policy to be part of their portfolios. As national security adviser, Rice flailed around desperately in the middle, letting both men trample all over her, and took command of US foreign policy away from Colin Powell, theoretically Bush's secretary of state..."

The New Statesman adds "In some desperation, he [Tenet] took a senior CIA undercover man as part of a deputation to warn Rice at her White House office on 10 July 2001 that al-Qaeda was planning 'spectacular' attacks 'designed to inflict mass casualties' against the United States, and that 'multiple and simultaneous attacks are possible and they will occur with little or no warning'. Rice turned to [Richard] Clarke and asked: 'Dick, is this true?' Clarke leaned forward and buried his face in his hands before managing to croak out, 'Yes.' In what has been a pattern of duplicity and truth-shading unrivalled even by the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld, Rice has subsequently repeatedly denied and/or played down that she received multiple briefings (and memos) such as these."

Gulf Oil
And Wolfowitz's State Sponsored Terrorism

In reality the small neoconservative group (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their associates), who were actually running the Bush show, were barely the slightest bit interested in countering al Qaeda pre-9/11. And it is apparent that in reality even immediately after the attacks, the so-called 'war on terror' was still not their first priority despite all the public rhetoric to the contrary. Clarke writes:

"On the morning of the 12th, DOD's [Department of Defense] was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, with out a state sponsor - Iraq must have been helping them.

I had a flashback to Wolfowitz saying the very same thing in April when the administration had finally held its first deputy secretary-level meeting on terrorism. When I had urged action on al Qaeda then, Wolfowitz had harked back to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, saying al Qaeda could not have done that alone and must have had help from Iraq. The focus on al Qaeda was wrong, he had said in April, we must go after Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. He had rejected my assertion and CIA's that there had been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism since 1993. Now this line of thinking was coming back."

In other words Wolfowitz (and by implication his closest associates, Rumsfeld and Cheney) had been spuriously gunning for Iraq, not al Qaeda, all year. In fact for much longer.

In 1998 Rumsfeld and Woolfowitz had signed an open letter to Present Clinton (co-written with several others who also became important figures in the ensuing Bush Administration) urging “a willingness to undertake military action” against Iraq, and citing Saddam Hussein as a threat to US allies in the Middle East. Otherwise, these and “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard”.

This, of course, was 'unfinished business' from the first Gulf war in 1991.

At the time of that war Richard Clarke was Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs. In 'Against All Enemies' he writes about America's reaction to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait during the tenure of the first President Bush:

"President Bush was hesitant about how America should respond. His foreign policy alter ego, Secretary of State Jim Baker, and his Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney, were reluctant to act. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, however, thought that Iraq had just changed the strategic equation in a way that could not be permitted. So did British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The two argued that nothing stood between the advance of units of the Iraqi army in Kuwait and the immense Saudi oil fields. If we did nothing in response to Iraq's seizing Kuwait, Saddam Hussein would think that he could get away with seizing the Saudis' eastern oil fields. If that happened, Baghdad would control most of the world's readily available oil. They could dictate to America.

Reluctantly, Bush and his team decided that they needed to defend the Saudi oil fields, and do so quickly. They needed Saudi permission for the defensive deployment, but there were some in the Pentagon and White House who thought U.S. forces needed to protect the Saudi oil with or without Saudi approval.

The mission to persuade the Saudi King to accept U.S forces was given to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. He assembled a small team, including Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Central Command head Norman Schwarzkopf, Sandy Charles of the NSC, and me, then the Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs...

Cheney concluded the presentation [to the King], promising that U.S forces would come only to defend the Kingdom. President Bush wanted the King to know that he had the President's word that the U.S. forces would leave as soon as the threat was over, or whenever ordered to do so by the King.

..... Unknown to the Americans at the time, the intelligence chief, Prince Turki, had been approached by the Saudi who had recruited Arabs to fight in the Afghan War against the Soviets, Usama Bin Laden....

.... When Kuwait was invaded, he offered to make them available to the King to defend Saudi Arabia, to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. After we left the palace, perhaps bin Laden was told of the King's decision.

His help would not be required. He could not believe it; letting nonbelievers into the Kingdom of the Two Holy Mosques was against the beliefs of the Wahhabist branch of Islam. Large numbers of American military in the Kingdom would violate Islam, the construction magnate's son thought. They would never leave."

After the first Gulf War American troops did not leave Saudi Arabia as proposed. Many thousands remained.

Ultimately the long-term basing of ‘infidel’ US troops in ‘the land of the two Holy Places’, Saudi Arabia’s Mecca and Medina, precipitated Bin Laden’s 1996 Fatwa (entitled 'Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places') and the ensuing attacks of 9/11.

Ironically, and unnoticed by most, the withdrawal of US combat troops from Saudi Arabia was announced little more than a month after the invasion of Iraq.

De facto, this was America conceding to bin Laden's principal political demand, a striking situation which Britain's Daily Telegraph 30 April 2003 reported on as follows: "America's announcement of its intention to withdraw its military bases from Saudi Arabia answers Osama bin Laden's most persistent demand. More than any other cause it was the presence of 'crusader' forces in the land of Islam's holiest sites - Mecca and Medina - that turned bin Laden from Afghan jihadi into an international terrorist. A wealthy Saudi with royal connections, bin Laden fell out with the House of Saud largely because it permitted US bases in the country. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden offered his own forces to the Saudi regime to help expel the Iraqis from the Gulf. He was enraged when the Saudi royal family turned instead to Washington and more than 500,000 US troops were sent. The same year the Americans arrived, bin Laden fled Saudi - where he faced house arrest - and established his base in Sudan. He and his al-Qa'eda forces moved to Afghanistan in 1996, issuing the first of his international fatwas through the London-based Al Quds Al Arabi newspaper."

In another article the same day the Telegraph commented that "America began a historic reshaping of its presence in the Middle East yesterday, announcing a halt to active military operations in Saudi Arabia and the removal of almost all of its forces from the kingdom within weeks. The withdrawal ends a contentious 12-year-old presence in Saudi Arabia and marks the most dramatic in a set of sweeping changes in the deployment of American forces after the war in Iraq. Withdrawal of 'infidel' American forces from Saudi Arabia has been one of the demands of Osama bin Laden, although a senior US military official said that this was 'irrelevant'.... Behind the dry talk of rearranging America's military 'footprint' in the Gulf, the great imponderables were bin Laden and Muslim radicals' complaints about the presence of 'infidels' in the birthplace of Islam. That presence was cited as one of the main justifications for the September 11 attacks. Despite American insistence that the withdrawal had not been 'dictated' by al-Qa'eda and that bin Laden was 'irrelevant', there can be little doubt that undercutting a central plank of al-Qa'eda's platform is one of several advantages offered by withdrawal from Saudi Arabia."

On several other levels the move looked attractive.

The world's largest reserves of conventional oil reside in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq.

Between the 1991 and 2003 Gulf wars the list of countries around the world where oil production had reached a peak and was plateauing or entering decline, particular in the non-Opec world, had expanded and the importance of Middle Eastern oil to the global economy was intensifying. To make matters worse the emergence of China as an economic power meant that it had become a net importer of oil in 1996, later overtaking Japan as the world's second largest importer of oil.

Within the Middle East Iraq had the largest quantity of unexploited reserves yet to be brought into production. But that was not its only, or most important, feature.

At the time of the 2003 invasion Iraq was notable for its secular civic society, and also its key strategic location situated in between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Logistically Iraq was a much better location to establish permanent military bases from where the whole of Gulf oil production could be policed.

In March 2006 General John Abizaid, Commander of the United States Central Command overseeing US operations in Iraq, was asked by a congressional committee: "But in the long run, do you believe that it's in our national interest to have permanent bases in the Middle East?" Abizaid's repines was, "Sir, we've been in the Middle East more than 50 years. We've been in the Middle East ever since the - however you would like to call the dependency upon oil has developed. And our forces have been there either as naval, air or land forces in one way or another for an awful long time. And once the British pulled out the Arabian gulf, it became more and more necessary for us to provide more and more force in the region..... And ultimately, it comes down to the free flow of goods and resources on which the prosperity of our own nation and everybody else's depends upon.... We need to maintain a presence that protects the small nations and ensures the continued stability of the region and the flow of those resources that are essential to our well-being."

Moreover (although this was not referred to by Abizaid) moving out of Saudi Arabia wood reduce the chances of the oil-pumping-US-friendly Saudi government being toppled by an Islamic revolution agitated from below by bin Laden supporting jihadists.

Unfortunately swapping the military occupation of one Arab country for another has not proved acceptable to al Qaeda.

Although there remains in place a general political pretence that the 2003 invasion was not about oil, a large proportion of the general public are able see through it.

'Weapons of Mass Destruction' were supposed to have been the issue, but if such had still existed in Iraq what do most people think those weapons would have been a threat to, other than Gulf oil supplies? There was absolutely no chance of such weapons being able to strike America itself.

The original Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz letter to Clinton is quite clear on the issue.  It was not so much that the neoconservatives thought Saddam had WMDs (for it is clear now that they had no evidence), but rather they feared that sooner or later he would get them again.

The letter to Clinton states that "As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections.  Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished.... As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons..... It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard."

So the concern was the potential threat to US troops, Middle East allies, and oil supplies. But in reality the first two of these three derive their significance in most part from their role in protecting and delivering the third.

Some of the more prominent public figures who have openly ventured to try and prick the balloon of this 'not for oil' patent fiction include Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve; Hans Blix, former Chief weapons inspector for the UN in the run up to the invasion; and most recently President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

On 19 October 2007 the London Times reported, "Vladimir Putin signalled the return of the arms race yesterday when he boasted of developing new nuclear weapons and warned the United States not to ignore Russia’s objections to a missile defence shield in Europe. The Russian President announced a 'grandiose plan' to restore Russia’s armed forces, which he appeared to link to the US invasion of Iraq. He described the invasion as an attempt to seize control of oil supplies and warned that Russia could defend its energy reserves against external threats."

Today a transcript of the 1998 letter to Clinton sits proudly on the web site of 'The Project For The New American Century' (PNAC), a neoconservative group openly backed by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other members of the Bush administration. A few months before Bush entered the White House the same group published a lengthy paper entitled 'Rebuilding America's Defenses'.

The PNAC document articulates aspirations to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. Having emphasised America's role in "the preservation of a favorable balance of power in Europe, the Middle East and surrounding energy producing region", the text says "the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The document's accompanying proposal for US military 'transformation' (i.e. re-equipping with new weapons technology, on the back of an aspired-to increase in defence budgets) was, however, seen as likely to be a hard sell to the American public. The report states that "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions."

Domestic politics in America were transformed on 9/11 like they have never been transformed before.

The fundamental driver behind the neoconservative's interest in the Persian Gulf is not a mystery as can be seen from the 1998 Clinton letter. But Ron's Suskin's book 'The Price Of Loyalty' puts a little more flesh on the bones.

The book is based mostly on interviews with Bush's former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and on thousands of White House internal documents provided by O'Neill after his resignation from that post. Suskin, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, describes one particular experience which O'Neill encountered after returning to his office shortly after the first meeting of Bush's National Security Council on 30 January 2001:

".... O'Neill opened a memo from Donald Rumsfeld.... In describing why the military budget was due for a dramatic increase, Rumsfeld articulated, with a five-point illustration of a dire global landscape, the underlying ideas that were now guiding foreign policy...[including] 'The civil sector, not the defense sector, now creates the enabling technologies for advanced military capabilities. These universally available technologies can be used to create 'asymmetric' responses by small or medium sized states to our conventional military power that cannot defeat our forces, but can deny access to critical areas of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.'....."

Those "critical areas of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia", including the Persian Gulf, Russia, and the Caspian Sea region, are where most of the world's conventional oil and gas resources reside. Also located within them are the equally crucial pipeline corridors required to transport those resources to international shipping ports.

Further on in the book O'Neill is more specific about the Bush's administration's particular interest in Iraqi oil right from the start:

"Beneath the surface was a battle O'Neill had seen brewing since the NSC meeting on January 30. It was Powell and his moderates at the State Department versus hard-liners like Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, who were already planning the next war in Iraq and the shape of a post-Saddam country.

Documents were being prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, Rumsfeld's intelligence arm, mapping Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas and listing companies that might be interested in leveraging the precious asset.

One document, headed 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,' lists companies from thirty countries - including France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom - their specialities, bidding histories, and in some cases their particular areas of interest. An attached document maps Iraq with markings for 'supergiant oilfield,' 'other oil-field,' and 'earmarked for production sharing,' while demarking the largely undeveloped southwest of the country into nine 'blocks' to designate areas for future exploration. The desire to 'dissuade' countries from engaging in 'asymmetrical challenges' to the United States - as Rumsfeld said in his January articulation of the demonstrative value of a preemptive attack - matched with plans for how the world's second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world's contractors made for an irresistible combination, O'Neill later said.

Already by February, the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why, but the how and how quickly. Rumsfeld, O'Neill recalled, was focused on how an incident might cause escalated tensions - like the shooting down of an American plane in the regular engagements between U.S. fighters and Iraqi antiaircraft batteries - and what U.S. responses to such an occurrence might be....."

Eventually it would not be agent provocateur US fighters over Iraq, but rather US commercial aircraft over America, which would provide the necessary 'incident' to begin the war.

The ultimate backdrop to this emerging situation was, however, the onset of an anticipated American energy crisis identified by Dick Cheney's secretive energy task force, established at the beginning of the Presidency. This scenario is described in another chapter of 'The Price of Loyalty', which reads as follows:

"[On], March 19 [2001], O'Neill and members of the Vice President's National Energy Policy Development Group filed into the cabinet room to present their findings to the President about the state of energy production and consumption in the United States. This presentation marked the completion of the first two phases (the second would be creating policy recommendations) that had been decided on in late January, when the President officially empowered Dick Cheney to handle energy.... This task force, Cheney's, would operate in utmost privacy.... So, on March 19, at an hour-long meeting in the cabinet room, the President was hearing dark predictions about the economic effects of a looming energy crisis... "

Some of the task force papers regarding Iraq eventually came into the public domain as a result of litigation, here described by the Daily Telegraph in the summer of 2003: “Documents released under America's Freedom of Information Act reveal that an energy task force led by vice-president Dick Cheney was examining Iraq's oil assets two years before the latest war began. The papers were obtained after a long battle with the White House by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal charity that opposes government secrecy and which is suing for the dealings of the task force to be made public. The emergence of the documents could fuel claims that America's war in Iraq had as much to do with oil as national security. It also indicates that the Bush administration is beginning to lose the battle to keep its internal workings secret. The 16 pages, dated March 2001, show maps of Iraq oil fields, pipelines, refineries and terminals. A document titled Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts is also included, listing which countries were keen to do business with Saddam's regime. Judicial Watch requested the papers two years ago as part of its investigation into links between the Bush administration and senior energy executives including Enron's former chairman Ken Lay. Mr Cheney has fought the release of the documents at every stage."

Global Education Fund
Manning Sees Through And Beyond The Bush Administration

If Cheney really had put a block on al Qaeda investigations, as Loftus claims, then the consequences were there for all to see on 9/11.

Yet to a degree not possible in more poorly informed circles, Sir David Manning, the British Prime Minister's personal foreign policy and security adviser, was able to see almost immediately where those consequences might well lead.

Between 2001 and 2005 Tyler Drumheller had been head of the CIA's Clandestine Operations for Europe. After quitting the agency he published a book entitled 'On The Brink' in 2006. In the second chapter he discloses that on 12 September 2001, the day after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, George Tenet and others (including Drumheller) received a "powerful delegation from a very close European ally" on the seventh floor of the CIA's headquarters at Langley, Virginia.

Drumheller did not say which ally was involved (the matter being classified), but he quoted the head of the delegation as saying, "I hope we can all agree that we should concentrate on Afghanistan and not be tempted to launch any attacks on Iraq."

Drumheller further writes that at the meeting "Everyone at the CIA was of the opinion that we should concentrate on Afghanistan and avoid the temptation of Iraq. No one needed to be reminded of who was on the other side of this argument - Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld,  Vice President Dick Cheney, and the others..."

Subsequently two former intelligence officials told Newsweek (30 October 2006) that the delegation had been led by Britain's Sir David Manning, and the head of Britain's MI6 foreign intelligence service, Sir Richard Dearlove (Newsweek also confirmed from a British source that the delegation had visited Tenet that day).

Only later still did it emerge that the prescient comment about Iraq had come from Manning, with the last piece of the puzzle eventually being reported by the Guardian in Britain on 4 August 2007.

Everyone now knows that such fears were well founded. But few outside such circles were discussing Iraq the day after 9/11. For the general public at that time, it was only 'Bin Laden' on almost every news bulletin.

What is so striking is that Manning, a non-American official, seems to have recognised almost instantly exactly what the score was regarding Iraq.

The geopolitical and international security disaster that has since flowed from that secret military agenda has had many dramatic consequences. One is that the United States is left with considerably fewer enthusiastic friends around the world. Not least Manning himself.

In his September 2007 interview with the Times Manning dares to publicly criticise the Bush administration for the failings of its 'muscular' foreign policy. He advocates introducing a more constructive approach which, in stark contrast, includes a proposal for the establishment of a global education fund for the furtherance of world peace. Manning is keen to think "outside the box" as an alternative to what he clearly regards as America's counterproductive 'war on terror'.

Indeed, right from the start, Manning appears to have seen through and beyond a lot of what he can only privately consider to be the, at best, crass actions of the Bush Administration. But only by talking to the press as his diplomatic career was coming to an end, did he venture to make his views more openly known. By then little of his tenure remained, but his remarks were nonetheless notable for having been made whilst still in post. As such they were clearly intended to be heard widely and taken seriously.

Firm and open criticism of the Bush administration from such an 'impeccable' quarter is rare. But it is Manning's understanding of the problems faced by America and his perception of the necessary alternative way forward which offers the greatest grounds for hope.

Manning told the Times, "It’s not enough just to go on about terrorism and the Middle East peace process . . . we need to find new ways of bridging and reaching out.... When I see how much money we’re spending on other things, it does seem to me to be a very poor investment on our part.  How many schools could you get for an aircraft carrier?'"

The Times reports that Manning's proposal for a world education fund "could also attract investment from big corporations, particularly those with a stake in security of energy supplies".  In effect this particular observation (presumably originating from Manning himself) articulates a direct conceptual link between foreign policy, 'the war on terror', and global energy supplies. This recognition is fundamental to finding solutions to America's most pressing domestic and international problems (and, of course, to those of many other nations who are facing similar difficulties, not least of which is China).

This is not the first reference to such linkages by Manning.

On 13 March 2006 Manning gave an important foreign policy speech at Standford University in which he explicitly spoke about the subject of 'peak oil' - the point at which global oil production reaches a ceiling and then begins to decline. Part of his speech ran as follows:

"The scarcity of energy supplies and the energy imbalance between nations is a threat to our prosperity and national security. As resources contract, oil-hungry economies will compete for dwindling supplies of hydrocarbons. Competition for fossil fuels will increase.... Energy resources have long been a major strategic concern: access to secure sources, control over supply lines: these are issues of national security.... The energy challenge is now more pressing than ever.... Global oil production is apparently nearing its peak.... current estimates seem to be converging on some point between 2010 and 2020.... [there] are five factors which are changing the energy landscape: rising demand; dwindling supply; greater concentration of resource in the hands of a few; limited spare capacity; and the environmental impacts of energy use..... This is not a problem that can wait ten years."

Also notable is the fact that as he begins Foreign Office retirement it is clear that Manning is prepared to let it be publicly known that he does not regard the Bush Administration as trustworthy.

The day before publishing details of its interview with Manning, the Times also ran an article entitled "Washington ‘misled’ Blair over plans for postwar Iraq".  This in turn reported on a piece about Manning in the New Statesman entitled "Stitch-Up".

According to the Times, Manning "claimed that Mr Blair never wanted to go to war in Iraq and instead wanted a diplomatic solution". Manning also accuses the Bush Administration of misleading the British Prime Minister over its much-criticised plans for the reconstruction of Iraq after the invasion of 2003. Britain was not informed that it would be the Pentagon, rather than the State Department, that would be given the task.

Manning may have an outstanding grievance against the Bush administration over this issue. The New Statesman piece reports that "Even as the defence department (DoD) prepared to take over the running of Iraq, using Rumsfeld's infamous 'invasion-lite' idea, Blair and Manning were being assured by Bush that the state department would take the lead role and that he was 'very confident' about the postwar plans. They believed him. 'We now know that the preparations were all blocked. There were plans made and deployed in the state department, but in the end the state department wasn't allowed to take the job.'"

Manning resists the suggestion put to him that he and Blair were duped (a particularly tricky state of affairs for a Prime Minister who, by his own indignant admission, has boasted of having  'no reverse gear'). Manning replies with, "Was it a double-cross? I don't think they set out to double-cross the prime minister." However, it's clear the British were kept in the dark, as Manning adds, "I did not know that the DoD was going to take over the running of the country. We didn't have any sense that that was about to be the way postwar Iraq was going to be run."

There also remains the bigger question as to whether Blair, as commonly believed, signed up in principle to Bush's war aims when the two men met at the presidential ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, a full 11 months before the war began.  Manning accompanied Blair on that trip. Referring to the meeting, but acknowledging that Blair and Bush dined alone on the night in question, Manning tells the New Statesman: "If he did, he didn't do it in my hearing."

On the morning of 11 September 2001, some seven months or so after Vice President Dick Cheney had taken charge of his confidential energy task force, Sir David Manning took a flight from Washington to New York following his overrun meeting with Condoleezza Rice the day before. As he flew in Manning saw the burning World Trade Center. He was witnessing at first hand what was soon to become known as America's 'New Pearl Harbor'.

The live TV coverage of the ensuing pulverisation of the Twin Towers, with their unimaginable collapse to the ground at near free-fall speed, was to traumatise the collective American psyche in unprecedented fashion. And, as quickly feared by Manning, the door to the war in the Persian Gulf which the neoconservatives in the Bush administration had been secretly planning from their very first days in office was prised open.

It was a door which opened onto the vast canvass of mindless violence and destruction that the whole world has witnessed ever since.

We will probably never know whether Sir David had brought more British warnings of the impending attacks on America to his meeting with Condoleezza Rice on 9/10. But if he did, it can only be hoped that, six years later, his advocacy of a global education fund to move beyond the disastrous response which followed, will prove to be more timely.

NLPWESSEX

'The Special Relationship'
What Did Britain Know About 9/11?

Countries which provided advance warning of the 911 attacks to America include
Argentina, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Israel and Afghanistan

"As time passes it becomes increasingly clear that the British government knew a great deal about was in the offing by the end of the summer of 2001, and that it was communicating its knowledge to the Bush administration. A few press reports provide something of an outline in this respect: - According to the London Times, 14 June 2002 'Britain's spy chiefs warned the Prime Minister less than two months before September 11 that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda group was in 'the final stages' of preparing a terrorist attack in the West, it was disclosed yesterday....Their warning was included in a report sent to Tony Blair and other senior Cabinet Ministers on July 16.....The JIC [Cabinet Office Joint Intelligence Committee] prediction of an al-Qaeda attack was based on intelligence gleaned not just from MI6 and GCHQ but also from US agencies, including the CIA and the National Security Agency, which has staff working jointly with GCHQ. The CIA sometimes has a representative on the JIC. The contents of the July 16 warning would have been passed to the Americans, Whitehall sources confirmed. ... John Scarlett, who took over as chairman of the JIC a few days before the attacks in America, told the committee, according to the report, that there was 'an acute awareness in the period before September 11' that bin Laden and his associates 'represented a very serious threat' and that there was 'planning activity'...' - The London Times 17 July also relays some of Prime Minister Blair's own comments made to a recent meeting of the House of Commons Liaison Committee. These shed further light on the extent of Britain's prior knowledge: 'We knew about al-Qaeda for a long time. They were committing terrorist acts, they were planning, they were organising. Everybody knew, we all knew...'"
'What Did Britain Know About 9/11?'
Fight Smart, 28 August 2007

The Silence Of George Tenet
9/11 And The Russian-Israeli Connection

Tenet 'Forgets'

"As many as 60 people within the CIA read a cable referring to two of the 19 hijackers involved in the attacks on America on September 11 2001 before the event, yet the information was not shared with the parts of the organisation able to do anything about it, according to the agency's own internal investigation."
CIA blew chances to spot 9/11 threat, says report
Guardian, 22 August 2007

"The head of the CIA [George Tenet] has told the 9/11 commission that ..... he did not speak to George Bush in the month before the attacks, when Mr Bush was on holiday in Texas. 'He's in Texas and I'm either here [in Washington] or on leave for some of that time,' Mr Tenet said in response to a question from commissioner Tim Roemer. 'In this time period, I'm not talking to him, no.' "
US was 'unprotected' on 9/11
BBC Online, 14 April 2004

"CIA Director George Tenet met with President Bush at least eight times in the 42 days before the catastrophic terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, a CIA spokesman said Thursday, correcting Tenet's testimony that he hadn't talked with the president during the entire month of August.... Tenet's contacts with Bush during that period are significant because the CIA director was the highest ranking U.S. official who was aware of both the FBI's arrest of flight student Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota and the CIA warning to Bush that Osama bin Laden was 'determined to strike' inside the United States.   The CIA warning memo to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001, also noted that the FBI had detected 'patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.'.... Tenet learned of Moussaoui's arrest on Aug. 23 or Aug. 24 in a CIA memo entitled 'Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly,' investigators disclosed Wednesday.... Former Acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard, who served as acting director for 10 of the 11 weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, told the inquiry Tuesday that he had learned of Moussaoui's arrest in Minnesota on the afternoon of Sept. 11 -- after the attacks. Word of Moussaoui's arrest never reached the White House National Security Council's interagency Counterterrorism and Security Group, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke testified on March 24. After the Sept. 11 attacks, FBI agents obtained the legal go-ahead to examine the hard drive on his laptop. It contained information on using crop-dusting airplanes."
CIA's Tenet did speak to Bush before 9-11, spokesman says
Salt Lake Tribune, 16 April 2004

"Israeli intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent. The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation...."
Israeli security issued urgent warning to CIA of large-scale terror attacks
Daily Telegraph, 19 September 2001

"Mossad chiefs insist the Israeli spy agency was tracking Osama Bin-Laden's terrorists in America before September 11 and that that the information was passed on to the CIA on Five separate occasions before the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. As late as August 24, less than two weeks before the attacks, a Mossad warning, confirmed by German intelligence, BND, said that 'terrorists plan to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.' The warning alert was passed to the CIA. The warning was also passed to MI6. The agency made its own checks and also informed the CIA. Frustrated by its inability to alert the CIA to an impending attack, Mossad arranged on September 1, according to Tel Aviv sources last week, for Russian intelligence to warn Washington 'in the strongest possible terms of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings.'... According to similar documents shown to the Sunday Express, Mossad was running a round-the-clock surveillance operation on some of the September 11 hijackers. The details, contained in classified papers, reveal that a senior Mossad agent tipped off his counterpart in America's Central Intelligence Agency that a massive terrorist hit was being planned in the US. A handful of the spies had infiltrated the Al-Qaeda organisation while a staggering 120 others, posing as overseas art students, launched  massive undercover operations throughout America... The spying operations first came to the attention of the DEA in January 2001 according to a classified 90-page dossier which has been seen by the Sunday Express."
BUSH: THE IGNORED WARNING THAT WILL COME TO HAUNT HIM
GLOBE-INTEL - NUMBER :- 104 DATE :- 21/05/02
(Note: Globe-Intel is run by Gordon Thomas who writes on intelligence matters for the UK's Sunday Express. Thomas
is an expert on Mossad, the Israel intelligence service. His book on the subject, 'Gideon's Spies' was made into a documentary for Channel 4)

"'We had clearly warned them,' said Mr. Patrushev, who is head of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB. He added that their U.S. counterparts 'did not pay the necessary attention' to their warnings, the Interfax news agency reported."
Russia Gave 'Clear Warning'
Agence France-Presse, 16 September 2001

"The American intelligence agency, the CIA, could have prevented the 11 September attacks if it were not for systematic failures, according to the German newspaper Die Zeit. The paper has uncovered details of a major Israeli spy ring involving some a 120 agents for the intelligence service Mossad operating across America and some masquerading as arts students. The ring was reportedly hard on the heels of at least four members of the hijack gang, including its leader Mohammed Atta. But the Israeli agents were detected by their American counterparts and thrown out of the country, it says."
Report details US 'intelligence failures'
BBC, 2 October 2002

"New revelations are putting the CIA in a tight spot. Apparently the Israeli intelligence service Mossad gave early warnings to their American counterparts about the terrorist group around Mohamed Atta. Furthermore, German investigators found out after the attacks that their U.S. colleagues had already known a great deal about the Hamburg students two years in advance of Sept. 11, 2001. The latest discoveries were made by the Hamburg weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT, which on Thursday (Oct. 3) intends to publish an extensive dossier on the failures of the Central Intelligence Agency. Freelance author Oliver Schroem therein sums up the results of his research among various European and American agencies..... Apparently the CIA acquired very specific information on several of the later suicide pilots of Sept. 11. These clues were ignored, although the suspects were already in the United States. Two of the later pilots were on an FBI wanted list starting in August 2001. Nevertheless, they were able to move unrecognized around the country and get on to the death jets using their own real names. The hottest lead would have led the Americans straight to the Hamburg terrorists around Mohamed Atta - if they had listened to their colleagues from the Israeli Mossad. Israeli agents were observing several of the terror pilots in the United States. According to research by ZEIT, between December 2000 and April 2001 a whole horde of Israeli counter-terror investigators, posing as students, followed the trails of Arab terrorists and their cells in the United States. In their secret investigations, the Israelis came very close to the later perpetrators of Sept. 11. In the town of Hollywood, Florida, they identified the two former Hamburg students and later terror pilots Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi as possible terrorists. Agents lived in the vicinity of the apartment of the two seemingly normal flight school students, observing them around the clock. Not long after, however, the [Israeli] agents were discovered by the U.S. authorities and deported to Israel. As is usual in such cases, the discovery was not made public and caused much annoyance between the traditionally competitive intelligence services, Mossad and CIA. .... With the deportation of the agents, the observation of the later terrorists was terminated. The Israelis provided a list including the names of at least four out of the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11, but this was apparently not treated as sufficiently urgent by the CIA and also not passed on to the FBI. What is clear is that the U.S. agencies did not react quickly in following up on the tips from the Israeli agents. The ongoing congressional joint investigation has also found out about the Israeli angle. However, the Israelis also had not yet found out about the specific plan for the Sept. 11 attacks. At the same time, they believed that the 19 persons named in their list were potential terrorists who 'were planning attacks in the United States,' as DIE ZEIT writes. Only later did the American police search for Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. Both were on the Israeli list, and both later sat in the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon in Washington. Although their names were on an FBI national watch list starting in the late summer of 2001, they traveled without trouble in the United States and also boarded the death jets on Sept. 11 with passports in their real names."
Mossad Agents Were On Atta's Tail
Der Spiegel (Germany), 1 October 2002
(original German click here)

"...the Central Intelligence Agency... learned about plans for an attack 18 months before Sept. 11, and did nothing against the terrorists. In the meantime, the joint investigation of the House and Senate intelligence committees is investigating this matter. ZEIT has acquired the testimonies and reports seen by the committee. Almost on a daily basis, the joint investigation is revealing new details that are slowly showing the certainty of what at first seemed like a nasty insinuation: The CIA could have prevented the attacks of Sept. 11, had it not committed a series of systematic mistakes..... [9/11 hijacker] Almihdhar is well-known to the CIA. Long before his appearance in Malaysia, the American spy agency knew his name, his passport number and other personal data. The CIA also knows that Almihdhar has for a long time  possessed the multiple re-entry visa that allows him to travel to the United States at will. He received the visa from the U.S. consulate at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.... Almihdhar and Alhazmi .... line up for passport control. Both have U.S. visas in their own names, which the CIA knows by now. Although they have come in under their own names, the passport control lets them through without problems. The Customs computers do not show that the two Saudi Arabian citizens are actually terrorists. For reasons still unknown to this day, the CIA did not inform either the FBI or the INS or the State Department that the two were something other than respectable students. This is surely the most fateful error in a whole chain of omissions and mistakes by which the American services allowed the later Sept. 11 hijackers to get away..... Although the CIA can see from its own reports that Almihdhar possesses a valid U.S. visa and Alhazmi must still be in the United States, the investigators do not set off any alarms, and they do not pass the names on to the FBI. Under the law, the CIA as a foreign intelligence agency is not allowed to be active within the United States.... New York, June 11, 2001. FBI agents from the New York office and from Washington headquarters meet to exchange information with CIA representatives, with the aim of advancing the investigation into the Cole bombing. The CIA agents show the photos from Malaysia to their colleagues from the FBI and name Khallad as the mastermind of the attack. The CIA agents also mention Almihdhar, who can see in one of the photos together with Khallad. When the FBI agents ask for more exact information, the CIA people fall silent. They do not tell their FBI colleagues that Almihdhar possesses a valid U.S. visa and is at that same moment presumably in the United States. One year later, one of the CIA agents will be on the brink of tears as he tells a congressional committee that his group were not yet authorized to tell this information to the FBI.... Crawford, Aug. 6, 2001. U.S. president George W. Bush is on vacation. He wants to spend the whole month at his ranch in Texas. Every morning, however, he still receives his Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB, wherein the CIA informs the president about the country's security situation. On this morning, the report is straight from the CIA director. His PDB runs 11 and one-half printed pages, instead of the usual two to three, and carries the title, 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.' Therein the CIA chief explains that al Qaeda has decided to carry out attacks within the United States, and that presumably members of the terrorist organization have been in the country for some time. It is unclear whether the CIA director informed the president about the statements of arrested al Qaeda members. According to their confessions, the terrorist organization for some time has been thinking about hijacking planes and using them as missiles... Langley, Aug. 23, 2001. The Israeli intelligence service Mossad presents to its American counterpart a list of names of terrorists who are living in the United States and seem to be planning to carry out an attack in the near future. According to documents obtained by DIE ZEIT, Mossad agents in the United States were following at least four of the 19 hijackers, including Almihdhar. The CIA now finally does what it should have done 18 months earlier. It informs the State Department, the FBI and the INS about Almihdhar and Alhazmi, who are immediately put on a watch list as presumed members of al Qaeda. In Almihdhar's case, the warning adds that he most likely participated in the Cole bombing. A response does not take long. The immigration service writes back that according to its documents, both of the wanted men are currently in the United States.... One of the New York FBI agents calls headquarters in Washington and asks for reinforcements. He wants to widen the dragnet cast for Almihdhar. The FBI agent knows how dangerous Almihdhar is, for he spent months working on the Cole case. As a result he met CIA agents who mentioned the name Almihdhar. When he reads the name again on the watch list, with the additional notation that Almihdhar is suspected of involvement in the Cole bombing, the FBI agent becomes annoyed at his CIA colleagues, for having previously kept this information from him. But he becomes even more annoyed when his own headquarters refuses any support.... Washington, D.C. June 4, 2002. The FBI does not want to serve as the sole scapegoat for what the CIA has burdened it with. After all, the CIA committed the decisive mistake by not passing on the information about Alhazmi and Almihdhar for 18 months. This information is leaked to NEWSWEEK, which quotes an FBI man, 'No question, if we had gotten the information in time, we would have bagged all 19 of the hijackers.' The spies have started to sling mud at each other. Did the CIA and FBI fail disastrously? A joint commission of Senate and House members is supposed to explore these questions.... Washington, D.C., Sept. 11, 2002. The joint investigation began its work more than three months ago, but is being torpedoed by the Bush administration, says the Republican Senator Richard C. Shelby, vice-chairman of the committee to the New York Times. The government refuses to reveal just what information was passed on to President Bush in advance of the attacks. 'I am certain that so far our questions have only scratched the surface,' says Shelby. 'I am sure that one or two bombshells are still going to go off.' As more information about mistakes and omissions of the CIA and FBI end up leaking to the media, an investigation is initiated against the congressional committee members. The FBI begins an investigation and asks the senators and House members if they are prepared to take polygraphs. Washington, D.C., Sept. 18, 2002. The joint investigation's public hearings begin. Relatives of the victims of Sept. 11 also get to testify. 1,300 of them have joined an interest group, their spokesperson is Stephen Push, who lost his wife. She sat in the plane that was hijacked by the group around Almihdhar. 'If the intelligence community had been doing its job, my wife would be alive today.' FBI and CIA agents then testify before the committee. They have been promised anonymity and testify from behind a wall that conceals them from the eyes of the attending public. Many relatives of the victims sit there, silently holding photos. As a few agents confess how they were kept from investigating by their superiors, the widow of a firefighter who died in the WTC is overwhelmed. 'These people are guilty of negligence in their jobs,' she says. 'They should be put in front of a court. They are at least partly responsible for the death of 3,000 people.'"
Deadly Mistakes
U.S. Investigators Knew About Planned Terror Attacks, Let the Suspects Get Away. More Clues That CIA and FBI Could Have Prevented the Attack on America
Die Zeit (Germany), 1 October 2002

"Since Sept. 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States. There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance..... "
Carl Cameron Investigates
Fox News, 17 December 2001
(Note, that controversially this four part report was subsequently removed by Fox from its web site)

"It is rather strange that the US media, with one notable exception, seems to be ignoring what may well prove to be the most explosive story since the 11 September attacks - the alleged break-up of a major Israeli espionage operation in the United States.... US officials admitted to reporters that the entire investigation had become 'too hot to handle', but declined to give further details."
Allies and Espionage
Jane's Intelligence Digest, 15 March 2002 

Why Condoleezza Rice's Pre-9/11 Priority
Was Oil And Gas, Not Counterterrorism

"But by the summer, policy reviews were hardly what was needed. Intelligence services were picking up enough chatter about a terrorist attack to scare the pants off top officials..... In mid-July, Tenet sat down for a special meeting with [Condoleeza] Rice and aides. 'George briefed Condi that there was going to be a major attack,' says an official ..... Tenet couldn't rule out a domestic attack..... One date already worrying the Secret Service was July 20, when Bush would arrive in Genoa for the G-8 summit; Tenet had intelligence that al-Qaeda was planning to attack Bush there. The Italians ..... closed airspace around the town and ringed it with antiaircraft guns."
Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?
Time Magazine Online, 4 Aug 2002

".... for the foreseeable future oil will remain an essential commodity. Greater attention must therefore be given to increasing supplies of oil in ways that diversify supplies from areas other than the Persian Gulf. The most promising new source of world supplies is the Caspian region, which appears to contain the largest petroleum reserves discovered since the North Sea."
Commission on America's National Interests, July 2000
Co-Authored by Condoleeza Rice

"I'm very proud of my association with Chevron, and I think we should be very proud of the job that American oil companies are doing in ... making certain that we have a safe energy supply."
Condoleeza Rice
Fox News 'Sunday', 27 August 2000

"'We can't live without oil' -- nearly any member of George W. Bush's administration might be given to such a declaration, which seeks to place our favorite fossil fuel in the rarefied company of food, water, and air. The speaker in this case was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, responding matter-of-factly to the revelation last summer that Chevron, on whose board of directors she served for nine years, had named an oil tanker in her honor. Capable of carrying 130,000 tons of cargo, the Condoleezza Rice, whose certificate of survey is pictured here, is one of more than 3,400 oil tankers operating worldwide; these tankers generally run from the Third World, where most oil is located, to the First World -- presumably the 'we' in Rice's formulation where most oil is consumed. Seen from the stem of the Condoleezza Rice, the world would doubtless seem more distressed by its life with oil than by the thought of a life without it..... 'I'm very proud of my association with Chevron, and I think we should be very proud of the job that American oil companies are doing in ... making certain that we have a safe energy supply,' Rice continued last summer, in her (and Chevron's) defense. Perhaps she did not care to contemplate her namesake's pernicious wake, as it were -- the oil spills, labor exploitation, and political destabilization endemic to the global oil trade, not to mention the smog, global warming, and other consequences of the West's reliance on hydrocarbon fuels. At any rate, the mutual pride in Rice's association with Chevron appears to have dimmed; in late April, Chevron quietly renamed the ship, gracing it with the pleasingly generic moniker Altair Voyager. Henceforth, it seems, Condoleezza Rice's good name will have to serve the interests of Big Oil in person."
A Crude Likeness - oil tanker named for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice
Harpers Magazine, July 2001

"The situation in the Balkans raises a number of questions, and some of these relate to the role played by Condoleeza Rice. One such question, particularly in the light of a report by former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bisset published in Canada's National Post 13 November 2001, was why in the weeks of high security alerts immediately prior to 911 was Rice apparently giving such high priority to protecting Muslim terrorists in Yugoslavia closely connected to Osama Bin Laden - specifically the ethnic Albanian KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army)... From Bisset's point of view America was clearly determined to make sure that Macedonia was forced to capitulate to these terrorists and Condoleeza Rice played a crucial part in this concerted effort. On the face of it Rice was prepared to travel personally to Kiev for the purpose. This she did even during the days leading up to 911, the very period when warnings of terrorist attacks on US targets were pouring into Washington from foreign countries - in other words precisely the time when intense focus on homeland security was most urgently required. Far from the priority being counter-terrorism, the US government was in fact continuing to covertly back Islamic militants in their strikes against a European sovereign state in whose region it had pressing oil related geo-strategic ambitions.... The grim reality is that both the Bush and Clinton administrations have indeed been focused on the importance of Islamic militancy, but as often as not their interest has been in the covert co-opting of Islamic jihad as a vehicle for pursuing US global geopolitical ambitions by proxy. Even post 911 this tendency quietly continues in some quarters .... Ultimately had Rice's priorities been more focused on National Security instead of US economic development, 911 might have been prevented. More than that. There is strong evidence that certain actions of the Bush administration in this area appear to have directly contributed to the success of the attacks on 911. This is particularly so when taking into account (as we shall see below) the information concerning Enron and an FBI intelligence block allegedly imposed by Vice President Cheney that former Federal prosecutor John Loftus claims to have in his possession. The US government was not only highly focused on securing pipeline routes coming west out of the Caspian Sea region via the Black Sea and the Balkans, into the Mediterranean. Just as importantly it was also focused on other routes for the Caspian Sea region travelling east and down to the Indian ocean, a priority of particular importance to Enron."
Rice Must Explain Pre-911 National Security Priorities
'Fight Smart', 5 April 2004

"Did those who died on September 11 do so as a consequence of a wider effort by the Bush Administration to promote Enron's overseas business interests as an integral part of emerging US energy and foreign policy? ....... at the very least it seems clear (as reported in the Washington Post 19 and 25 January) that the US National Security Council had established its own Enron-focused task force during 2001. The purpose of the so-called 'Dabhol Working Group' was to try and rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast. This was a power plant whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas - gas that was due to pass into the region from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan had it not been for been for the failure of the US administration to agree terms with the Taliban, followed by the US threatening them with war shortly before September 11. The National Security Council is the President's nerve center for international crises and strategy. Its direct intervention on behalf of Enron in this way is extraordinary. In the words of the Washington Post: 'The India episode demonstrates the ability of Enron -- once one of the nation's most aggressive and innovative firms, and one of the biggest political donors -- to command the attention, and sometimes the intervention, of the nation's highest government officials.'     It also suggests that the activities of Enron were regarded by the Bush Administration as of key relevance to the implementation of US government foreign and trade policy."
Did Sept 11 victims die for Enron?
'Fight Smart', 8 March 2002

"Rice, U.S. President George W. Bush's in-house specialist on the former Soviet Union, was in Kiev on a two-day working visit.... She hinted U.S. aid might be forthcoming to maintain stability in the former Soviet republic during the run-up to the election. 'The administration of the United States understands the importance of financing civil society in Ukraine, especially on the eve of elections,' she said.... Rice also discussed .... an oil pipeline across Ukraine connecting the Black Sea to Europe with her Ukrainian counterpart."
U.S. Security Advisor Rice Hits Ukrainian on Journalist Deaths
Deutsche Presse Agentur, 26 July 2001

"According to contemporary political lore, the Bush clan exalts loyalty above every other virtue....This is how dynasties are built to endure....But at the highest level, in the inner councils, such feudal allegiances often require awful sacrifice and compromise. For those who now work for George W. Bush, loyalty means surrendering professional integrity and accepting public humiliation. Loyalty means uttering words and phrases that nobody can believe. Loyalty means misleading the people and the press about the gravest matters of state. Loyalty means lying. Consider the poignant case of Condoleezza Rice [click here for details]...."
To show loyalty, Rice lies for Bush
Dr. Rice soils previously unblemished record with string of deceptions
New York Observer, 16 July 2003

"These regimes [like North Korea and Iraq] are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence -- if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration."
Condoleeza Rice - Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest
Council On Foreign Relations, January/February 2000

"Both Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam Hussein was no threat - to America, Europe or the Middle East. In Cairo, on February 24 2001, Powell said: 'He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours'. This is the very opposite of what Bush and Blair said in public. Powell even boasted that it was the US policy of 'containment' that had effectively disarmed the Iraqi dictator - again the very opposite of what Blair said time and again. On May 15 2001, Powell went further and said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to 'build his military back up or to develop weapons of mass destruction' for 'the last 10 years'. America, he said, had been successful in keeping him 'in a box'. Two months later, Condoleezza Rice also described a weak, divided and militarily defenceless Iraq. 'Saddam does not control the northern part of the country,' she said. 'We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.'"
The Big Lie
Mirror, 22 September 2003

"Under the influence of U.S. oil companies, the government of George W. Bush initially blocked U.S. secret service investigations on terrorism, while it bargained with the Taliban the delivery of Osama bin Laden in exchange for political recognition and economic aid, two French intelligence analysts claim. In the book 'Bin Laden, la verite interdite' ('Bin Laden, the forbidden truth'), that appeared in Paris on Wednesday, the authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, reveal that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's deputy director John O'Neill resigned in July in protest over the obstruction. Brisard claim O'Neill told them that 'the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it'. The two claim the U.S. government's main objective in Afghanistan was to consolidate the position of the Taliban regime to obtain access to the oil and gas reserves in Central Asia. They affirm that until August, the U.S. government saw the Taliban regime 'as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia', from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. Until now, says the book, 'the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia have been controlled by Russia. The Bush government wanted to change all that'. But, confronted with Taliban's refusal to accept U.S. conditions, 'this rationale of energy security changed into a military one', the authors claim. 'At one moment during the negotiations, the U.S. representatives told the Taliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs',' Brisard said in an interview in Paris....The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place in August, five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington, the analysts maintain.....Bush's family has a strong oil background. So are some of his top aides. From the U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, through the director of the National Security Council Condoleeza Rice, to the Ministers of Commerce and Energy, Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham, all have for long worked for U.S. oil companies. Cheney was until the end of last year president of Halliburton, a company that provides services for oil industry; Rice was between 1991 and 2000 manager for Chevron; Evans and Abraham worked for Tom Brown, another oil giant.... The book confirms earlier reports that the U.S. government worked closely with the United Nations during the negotiations with the Taliban.....These meetings, also called '6+2' because of the number of states (six neighbours plus U.S. and Russia) involved, have been confirmed by Naif Naik, former Pakistani Minister for Foreign Affairs. In a French television news programme two weeks ago, Naik said during a '6+2' meeting in Berlin in July, the discussions turned around 'the formation of a government of national unity. If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid. And the pipe lines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come,' he added. Naik also claimed that Tom Simons, the U.S. representative at these meetings, openly threatened the Taliban and Pakistan. 'Simons said, 'either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option'. The words Simons used were 'a military operation', Naik claimed.".
U.S. Policy Towards Taliban Influenced by Oil - Say Authors
Inter Press Service, 15 November 2001

"A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened. She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was 'an outrageous lie'.  Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used 'state secrets privilege'. She told The Independent yesterday: 'I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily.' She added: 'There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used ­ but not specifically about how they would be used ­ and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities ­ with skyscrapers.' ...... 'President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September,' she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away.... in an opinion piece in The Washington Post on 22 March, Ms Rice wrote: 'Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack planes to try and free US-held terrorists.' Mrs Edmonds said that by using the word 'we', Ms Rice told an 'outrageous lie'. She said: 'Rice says 'we' not ' I '. That would include all people from the FBI, the CIA and DIA [Defence Intelligence Agency]. I am saying that is impossible."
'I saw papers that show US knew al-Qa'ida would attack cities with aeroplanes'
Whistleblower the White House wants to silence speaks to The Independent
Independent, 2 April 2004

"The Bush Administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 -- not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks, as has been previously reported. That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider.... In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. 'It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,' says O'Neill in the book.... "
Saddam Ouster Planned Early '01?
CBS News, 10 January 2003

".... it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation. The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested... All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft. It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.... The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11.... Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance.... the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into 'tomorrow's dominant force' is likely to be a long one in the absence of 'some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor'. The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the 'go' button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement. The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies."
Michael Meacher, former Blair government Minister - 'This war on terrorism is bogus'
Guardian, 6 September 2003

John Pilger Exposes 9/11 'Protocolgate' In The New Statesman - 15 November 2004

"Stanley Hilton, a San Francisco attorney and former aide to Senator Bob Dole, filed a $7 billion lawsuit in U.S. District Court on June 3rd. The class-action suit names ten defendants, among whom are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Norman Mineta. Hilton's suit charges Bush and his administration with allowing the September 11th attacks to take place so as to reap political benefits from the catastrophe.... Hilton's plaintiffs in this case are the families of 14 victims of 9/11, numbering 400 people nationwide. These are the same families that rallied in Washington recently to advocate for an independent investigation into the attacks. The current 9/11 hearings are being conducted by Congress behind closed doors, a situation these families find unacceptable...."
All Along the Watchtower
T r u t h o u t, 20 June, 2002

“Documents released under America's Freedom of Information Act reveal that an energy task force led by vice-president Dick Cheney was examining Iraq's oil assets two years before the latest war began. The papers were obtained after a long battle with the White House by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal charity that opposes government secrecy and which is suing for the dealings of the task force to be made public. The emergence of the documents could fuel claims that America's war in Iraq had as much to do with oil as national security. It also indicates that the Bush administration is beginning to lose the battle to keep its internal workings secret. The 16 pages, dated March 2001, show maps of Iraq oil fields, pipelines, refineries and terminals. A document titled Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts is also included, listing which countries were keen to do business with Saddam's regime. Judicial Watch requested the papers two years ago as part of its investigation into links between the Bush administration and senior energy executives including Enron's former chairman Ken Lay. Mr Cheney has fought the release of the documents at every stage. A court ordered two weeks ago that at least some of the task force's working papers should be made public. Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said: ‘People will draw their own conclusions about the documents, but that is what an open society is about. Given the delay in their release, the Bush administration clearly did not want them to come out.’ A spokesman for Mr Cheney did not return calls yesterday…Until now it had been assumed that the US government was stonewalling over the energy task force papers because they would show the extent to which major party benefactors, including Enron, effectively wrote national energy policy…. Maps of oil fields and pipelines in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and a list of energy development projects in those two countries are also included. Mr Cheney argues that his consultations with the energy industry should be private so that all parties can speak freely. A US court recently described this invoking of executive privilege ‘extraordinary’ and ‘drastic’.”
Cheney had Iraq in sights two years ago
Telegraph, 22 July 2007

"On the eve of a Republican National Convention invoking 9/11 symbols, sound bytes and imagery, half (49.3%) of New York City residents and 41% of New York citizens overall say that some of our leaders 'knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act,' according to the poll conducted by Zogby International. The poll of New York residents was conducted from Tuesday August 24 through Thursday August 26, 2004.... The poll is the first of its kind conducted in America that surveys attitudes regarding U.S. government complicity in the 9/11 tragedy. Despite the acute legal and political implications of this accusation, nearly 30% of registered Republicans and over 38% of those who described themselves as 'very conservative' supported the claim...... Less than two in five (36%) believe that the 9/11 Commission had 'answered all the important questions about what actually happened on September 11th,' and two in three (66%) New Yorkers (and 56.2% overall) called for another full investigation of the 'still unanswered questions' by Congress or Elliot Spitzer, New York's Attorney General."
Zogby Poll: Half of New Yorkers Believe U.S. Had 9/11 Foreknowledge
NewsMax, 31 August 2004

The Desperate World of James Woolsey
Ex-CIA Chief And Iraq War Hawk Predicted 'Peak' Oil Crisis In 1999 CFR Paper

"If you speak to people in the industry, they will conceed that whatever my company may say publicly, we understand that we are facing decline in our own production and worldwide, we are not going to be able to produce more fuel liquids or crude oil in the near future... I was recently at a conference in New Mexico, sitting next to one of the recent CEOs of a major oil company and he, in response to a question from the audience, said 'of course I am a peakist, it is just a question of when it is coming' and I think that that is illustrative of once one is retired as a CEO, one is freer than one was in position to say I am a peakist. And what you hear privately from almost all people is we are coming to it.... I think that many of these politicians will ultimately find that the public blames them for its failure to warn them. Of course in a sense the public is responsible because it is the present public attitude to which politicians play up, and tell them what they want to hear but when the view of the world changes, what the public wanted to hear some time ago is no longer what they want to hear in the future."
James Schleshinger, former US Energy Secretary
Interview with David Strahan, ASPO 6, September 2007

"Optimists about world oil reserves, such as the Department of Energy, are getting increasingly lonely. The International Energy Agency now says that world production outside the Middle Eastern Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) will peak in 1999 and world production overall will peak between 2010 and 2020. This projection is supported by influential recent articles in Science and Scientific American. Some knowledgeable academic and industry voices put the date that world production will peak even sooner—within the next five or six years. The optimists who project large reserve quantities of over one trillion barrels tend to base their numbers on one of three things: inclusion of heavy oil and tar sands, the exploitation of which will entail huge economic and environmental costs; puffery by opec nations lobbying for higher production quotas within the cartel; or assumptions about new drilling technologies that may accelerate production but are unlikely to expand reserves. Once production peaks, even though exhaustion of world reserves will still be many years away, prices will begin to rise sharply. This trend will be exacerbated by increased demand in the developing world..... The recent report by the President's Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology... concluded  'A plausible argument can be made that the security of the United States is at least as likely to be imperiled in the first half of the next century by the consequences of inadequacies in the energy options available to the world as by inadequacies in the capabilities of U.S. weapons systems.  It is striking that the Federal government spends about 20 times more R&D money on the latter problem than on the former.'... The nearly $70 billion spent annually for imported oil represents about 40 percent of the current U.S. trade deficit.... Research is essential to produce the innovations and technical improvements that will lower the production costs of ethanol and other renewable fuels and let them compete directly with gasoline. At present, the United States is not funding a vigorous program in renewable technologies.... The United States cannot afford to wait for the next energy crisis to marshal its intellectual and industrial resources....Our growing dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil is a fool's game—there is no way for the rest of the world to win. Our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily through price increases, agonizingly through developing-nation poverty, relentlessly through climate change—or through all of the above."
Richard G. Lugar and R. James Woolsey (Former Director of the CIA)
The New Petroleum - Foreign Affairs January/February 1999

"Even some of the people and countries are the same. And the methods - particularly the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals of a covert, parallel foreign policy that is at odds with official policy - are definitely the same. Boiled down to its essentials, the Iran-Contra affair was about a small group of officials based in the National Security Agency (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran an 'off-the-books' operation to secretly sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. They used the proceeds to sustain the Nicaraguan contras - U.S. sponsored rebels fighting Managua's left-wing government - in defiance of both a congressional ban and of official U.S. policy as enunciated by the State Department and President Ronald Reagan. It was never clear whether Reagan understood, let alone approved, the operation. The picture emerging from the latest reports about the manipulation of intelligence in the drive to war with Iraq, as well as efforts by administration hawks to deliberately aggravate tensions with Syria, Iran, and North Korea in defiance of official State Department and U.S. policy, suggest a similar but much more ambitious scheme at work. As with Reagan, in this case, too, it is difficult to determine whether Bush  or even his NSC director, Condoleezza Rice - fully understands, let alone approves, of what the hawks are doing.  There was some hint of a parallel policy apparatus dating back just after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001. It was known early on, for example, that the Pentagon leadership, without notice to the State Department, the NSC, or the CIA, convened its advisory Defense Policy Board (DPB), headed by Richard Perle, to discuss attacking Iraq within days of the attacks. The three agencies were also kept in the dark about a mission undertaken immediately afterward by former CIA director and DPB member James Woolsey to London to gather intelligence about possible links between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, as if the CIA or the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) could not be trusted."
  Iran-Contra, Amplified
Inter Press Service News Agency, 9 August 2003

Peak Oil And Energy Crisis News - Click Here

Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill
On How The Bush Administration Began Preparing For Military Acton Against Iraq
Within Days Of The President's Inauguration

"A year ago, Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on tax cuts. Now, O'Neill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White House is run. Entitled 'The Price of Loyalty,' the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents. But the main source of the book was Paul O'Neill.... he is going public because he thinks the Bush Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made....  Suskind says he interviewed hundreds of people for the book – including several cabinet members. O'Neill is the only one who spoke on the record, but Suskind says that someone high up in the administration – Donald Rumsfeld - warned O’Neill not to do this book.... Not only did O'Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal documents.... And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations. 'From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,' says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic 'A' 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.....'It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’' says O’Neill."
Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq?
CBS News, 11 January 2003

The Majority Of The World's Oil And Gas
Is In Russia, The Middle East, And Central Asia

"On the afternoon of January 30, ten days after his inauguration as the forty-third president, George W.Bush met with the principals of his National Security Council for the first time.... The designated topic was 'Middle East Policy,' but the agendas that had been sent round over the preceding days had offered only thin details.... He turned to Rice. 'So Condi, what are we going to talk about today? What's on the agenda?' 'How Iraq is destabilising the region, Mr. President,' Rice, said in what several observers understood was a scripted exchange. She noted that Iraq might be the key to reshaping the entire region. Rice said that CIA director Tenet would offer a briefing on the latest intelligence on Iraq. Tenet pulled out a long scroll, the size of an architectural blueprint, and flattened it on the table. It was a grainy photograph of a factory. Tenet said that surveillance planes had taken this photo. The CIA believed the building might be 'a plant that produces either chemical or biological materials for weapons manufacture.'... Cheney motioned to the deputies, the backbenchers, lining the wall. 'Come on up,' he said with uncharacteristic excitement, waving his arm. 'You have to take a look at this.'... After a moment, [Treasury Secretary Paul] O'Neill interjected, 'I've seen a lot of factories around the world that look a lot like this one. What makes us suspect that this one is producing chemical or biological weapons?' Tenet mentioned a few items of circumstantial evidence - such as the round-the-clock rhythm of shipments in and out of the plant - but said there was 'no confirming intelligence' as to the materials being produced... The hour almost up, Bush had assignments for everyone.... Rumsfeld and Shelton [Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff], he said, 'should examine military options.' That included rebuilding the military coalition from the 1991 Gulf War, examining 'how it might look' to use U.S. ground forces in the north and the south of Iraq and how the armed forces could support groups inside the country who could help challenge Saddam Hussein.... Meeting adjourned. Ten days in, and it was about Iraq. O'Neill walked back to Treasury, running scenes from the situation room through his head. 'Getting Hussein was now the administration's focus, that much was already clear,' he recalled... The meeting had seemed scripted. Rumsfeld had said little, Cheney nothing at all, though both men had long entertained the idea of overthrowing Saddam. Rice orchestrated, and Tenet had a presentation ready. Powell seemed surprised that we were abandoning the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and making Iraq the focal point. General Shelton appeared concerned. Was there already an 'in group' and an 'out' group.?... Shortly after he returned to his office, O'Neill opened a memo from Donald Rumsfeld. It was titled 'Talking Points, FY01 and FY02-07 Budget Issues.' For the most part, however, it was not a traditional budget document. In describing why the military budget was due for a dramatic increase, Rumsfeld articulated, with a five-point illustration of a dire global landscape, the underlying ideas that were now guiding foreign policy...'The civil sector, not the defense sector, now creates the enabling technologies for advanced military capabilities. These universally available technologies can be used to create 'asymmetric' responses by small or medium sized states to our conventional military power that cannot defeat our forces, but can deny access to critical areas of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.'.....The next meeting of the NSC principals was called for 3 p.m. on Thursday, February 1, in the White House Situation Room. O'Neill arrived a few minutes early and read the cover sheet of his briefing materials [which indicated that the whole meeting was concerned with Iraq including 'Political-Military Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq Crisis (interagency working paper) - SECRET'.].... Powell began by discussing the new strategy for 'targeted sanctions.' But, after a moment, Rumsfeld interrupted. 'Sanctions are fine,' he said. 'But what we really want to think about is going after Saddam.' He then launched into an assessment of the broader U.S. goal of getting rid of Saddam and replacing the current regime with one more inclined towards cooperative relations with the United States and its Western allies.... Rumsfeld began to talk in general terms about post-Saddam Iraq, dealing with the Kurds in the north, the oil fields, the reconstruction of the country's economy, and the 'freeing of the Iraqi people'. The hanging question was how to arrive at this desired goal.... O'Neill thought about Rumsfeld's memo.... A weak but increasingly obstreperous Saddam might be useful as a demonstration model of America's new, unilateral resolve.... 'There was never any rigorous talk about this sweeping idea that seemed to be driving all the specific actions,' O'Neill said, echoing the comments of several other participants in NSC discussions. 'From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'"
Chapter 2 - A Way To Do It
The Price Of Loyalty - Free Press 2004
(Ron Suskin's book about Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill based on interviews with O'Neill and copies of over 19,000 Bush Administration documents provided by O'Neill - the book was vetted for accuracy by O'Neill prior to publication and serves as his own insider account of the workings of the Bush administration)

"Beneath the surface was a battle O'Neill had seen brewing since the NSC meeting on 30 January. It was Powell and his moderates at the State Department versus hard-liners like Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, who were already planning the next war in Iraq and the shape of a post-Saddam country. Documents were being prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, Rumsfeld's intelligence arm, mapping Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas and listing companies that might be interested in leveraging the precious asset. One document, headed 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,' lists companies from thirty countries - including France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom - their specialities, bidding histories, and in some cases their particular areas of interest. An attached document maps Iraq with markings for 'supergiant oilfield,' 'other oil-field,' and 'earmarked for production sharing,' while demarking the largely undeveloped southwest of the country into nine 'blocks' to designate areas for future exploration. The desire to 'dissuade' countries from engaging in 'asymmetrical challenges' to the United States - as Rumsfeld said in his January articulation of the demonstrative value of a preemptive attack - matched with plans for how the world's second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world's contractors made for an irresistible combination, O'Neill later said. Already by February, the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why, but the how and how quickly. Rumsfeld, O'Neill recalled, was focused on how an incident might cause escalated tensions - like the shooting down of an American plane in the regular engagements between U.S. fighters and Iraqi antiaircraft batteries - and what U.S. responses to such an occurrence might be. Wolfowitz was pushing for the arming of Iraqi opposition groups and sending in U.S. troops to support and defend their insurgency. He had written in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1999 that 'the United States should be prepared to commit ground forces to protect a sanctuary in southern Iraq where the opposition could safely mobilise."
Chapter 3 - No Fingerprints
The Price Of Loyalty - Free Press 2004
(Ron Suskin's book about Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill based on interviews with O'Neill and copies of over 19,000 Bush Administration documents provided by O'Neill - the book was vetted for accuracy by O'Neill prior to publication and serves as his own insider account of the workings of the Bush administration)

"Any student of the presidency knows it is extremely rare for a campaign pledge to be broken in the first one hundred days, the time when a newly elected leader carries, most forcefully, the banner of vox populi, ready to do 'what I was elected to do.'... Yet Bush's campaign positions, that the United States would be noninterventionist ... were the very opposite of the policy that O'Neill, Powell, and the other NSC principals now saw unfolding. Actual plans, to O'Neill's astonishment, were already being discussed to take over Iraq and occupy it - complete with disposition of the oil fields, peacekeeping forces, and war crimes tribunals..."
Chapter 4 - Base Elements
The Price Of Loyalty - Free Press 2004
(Ron Suskin's book about Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill based on interviews with O'Neill and copies of over 19,000 Bush Administration documents provided by O'Neill - the book was vetted for accuracy by O'Neill prior to publication and serves as his own insider account of the workings of the Bush administration)

"Later that afternoon, March 19, O'Neill and members of the Vice President's National Energy Policy Development Group filed into the cabinet room to present their findings to the President about the state of energy production and consumption in the United States. This presentation marked the completion of the first two phases (the second would be creating policy recommendations) that had been decided on in late January, when the President officially empowered Dick Cheney to handle energy. The Vice President, upon receiving his charge, had vowed it wouldn't be the way it was before. In this case, before meant the energy task force that the first President Bush called into action in 1989 to assess what powered America and how to wean the country from dependence on oil. Back then, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins was in charge. There were eighteen public hearings. Four hundred and ninety-nine individuals from forty-three states participated in the forums..... In this Bush administration, Dick Cheney looked to keep it simple. Also quiet and efficient. He had been in both the Nixon and Ford administrations in periods of energy crises. He had witnessed sound and fury on energy policy during Bush I that in the end amounted to nothing. He'd run an energy company, Halliburton, for five years in the 1990s, and - all things considered - viewed himself an expert. That meant no public hearings or debate from opposing factions were required. Cheney was sure he knew all he needed to know..... O'Neill thought Cheney's task force was oddly constructed: made up solely of government officials. Most task forces go in the other direction: their strength is in creating a structure for government officials to mix with leading experts, former top public officials, or respected businessmen. Such entities are covered under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FCA, which mandates that the activities of groups that combine governmental and nongovernmental officials be fully disclosed to the public; lists of members, advisers, agendas, and minutes of meetings must be made available. Because this was a task force with only government employees, there were no reporting requirements. O'Neill knew Cheney liked it that way... This task force, Cheney's, would operate in utmost privacy. Not that other voices didn't join in the conversation. Industry representatives - in bureaucratic language, the 'nonfederal stakeholders' - were just outside the door.... According to documents in O'Neill's files, along with those obtained in various disclosure actions filed against the Cheney task force, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham met with Corporations and trade groups, including Chevron, the National Mining Association, and the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, each of which delivered policy recommendations in detailed reports... If process drives outcomes - an axiom O'Neill and his fellow pragmatists live by - this combination of confidentiality and influence by powerful interested parties would define the task force's analysis of energy issues... So, on March 19, at an hour-long meeting in the cabinet room, the President was hearing dark predictions about the economic effects of a looming energy crisis... For today's meeting, the stage direction had come from the Vice President's office and, as expected, Dick went first, sitting in the chair directly across from the President. He talked about the task force's structure, its methodology, and the sources it had relied upon. He said that the goal of phase one had been to 'assess more clearly what the energy needs are of a growing country and how to meet them.' O'Neill then talked, as scripted, about the way rising energy costs would cripple the economy and how the California crisis could spread to other regions, driving up energy costs for the coming summer. Spencer Abraham addressed the beleaguered coal industry, which still produces half the nation's energy, and how rising gas prices could be caused by 'unfolding supply constraints' in the United States. Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman offered a short rendition of how rising fuel prices would affect agriculture. Larry Lindsey described how energy costs washed through many parts of the U.S. economy and hit certain areas of manufacturing particularly hard. And around the table they went."
Chapter 4 - Base Elements
The Price Of Loyalty - Free Press 2004
(Ron Suskin's book about Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill based on interviews with O'Neill and copies of over 19,000 Bush Administration documents provided by O'Neill - the book was vetted for accuracy by O'Neill prior to publication and serves as his own insider account of the workings of the Bush administration)

"The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, one of the world's great hotels, offered an oasis of luxury and comfort for the U.S. delegation after an exhausting week of meetings in Beijing with Chinese leaders in early September.... [O'Neill] flipped on the television to CNN. And sat on the edge of the bed. He stared at the flaming building, and his mind reeled backward to 1945, when he was a kid in Missouri and saw a newsreel at the movie theatre of a plane hitting the Empire State Building. The plane looked so small, like a penknife stuck in a sequoia. Good God, O'Neill thought, this must be the worst FAA mistake in history - some air traffic controller guided a plane into the Twin Towers...Then, as he watched smoke billow into the Manhattan sky, the second plane hit...There were no commercial flights available back to the States, many airports were closed. 'How do we get our hands on a military plane?' O'Neill asked.... Military cars arrived at midmorning the next day to pick up the O'Neill delegation..... The next morning, September 13, at 9:45 a.m., the NSC met with Bush in the situation room..... At an NSC meeting the day before, just as O'Neill's C-17 was landing at Andrew's Air Force Base, Rumsfeld, had raised the question of Iraq. The Pentagon had been working for months on a military plan for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."
Chapter 5 - The Scale Of Tragedy
The Price Of Loyalty - Free Press 2004
(Ron Suskin's book about Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill based on interviews with O'Neill and copies of over 19,000 Bush Administration documents provided by O'Neill - the book was vetted for accuracy by O'Neill prior to publication and serves as his own insider account of the workings of the Bush administration)

Wolfowitz Claimed Sophistication Of 9/11 Required State Sponsors
But Who If Not Iraq?

"There is 'no credible evidence' that Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq collaborated with the al Qaeda terrorist network on any attacks on the United States, according to a new staff report released this morning by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Although Osama bin Laden briefly explored the idea of forging ties with Iraq in the mid-1990s, the terrorist leader was hostile to Hussein's secular government, and Iraq never responded to requests for help in providing training camps or weapons, the panel found in the first of two reports issued today.The findings come in the wake of statements Monday by Vice President Cheney that Iraq had 'long-established ties' with al Qaeda, and comments by President Bush yesterday backing up that assertion. The commission issued its report on al Qaeda's history at the start of a two-day round of hearings this morning. In a separate report on the planning and deliberations for the Sept. 11 plot, the panel cited numerous pieces of FBI evidence in concluding that ringleader Mohamed Atta never met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague on April 9, 2001, as Cheney and some other Bush administration officials have alleged....In testimony before the commission, CIA and FBI officials said they agreed with the staff report's assessment of the abortive relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq. A CIA counterterrorism analyst who testified using the pseudonym Ted Davis said, 'We’re in full agreement with the staff statement,' which he said did 'an excellent job' of representing the agency’s current understanding of the al Qaeda-Iraq relationship. John Pistole, the FBI's executive assistant director for counter-terrorism, concurred."
No Evidence Connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda, 9/11 Panel Says
Washington Post, 16 June 2004

".... I was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States. I am stunned that we have not done a better job of pursuing that to determine if other terrorists received similar support and, even more important, if the infrastructure of a foreign government assisting terrorists still exists for the current generation of terrorists who are here planning the next plots. To me that is an extremely significant issue and most of that information is classified, I think overly-classified. I believe the American people should know the extent of the challenge that we face in terms of foreign government involvement. .... I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing -- although that was part of it -- by a sovereign foreign government .....  It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now."
Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of the Senate Select Committe On Intelligence
Improving Intelligence
PBS Online, 11 Dec 2002

"This [9/11] commission was formed about mid-December, the 9/11 Commission. We were supposed to use the joint inquiry report as a launching pad to get into this issue of not only fixing the intelligence community, but moving beyond, and getting into what is the al Qaeda all about? What is this terrorist global network that we're fighting? A new kind of war and all that. Well, the independent, bi-partisan commission, hello, didn't even get the stuff 'til a few weeks ago. I'm saying that's deliberate. I am saying that the delay in relating this information to the American public out of a hearing… series of hearings, that several members of Congress knew eight or ten months ago, including Bob Graham and others, that was deliberately slow walked… the 9/11 Commission was deliberately slow walked, because the Administration's policy was, and its priority was, we're gonna take Saddam Hussein out.... You can read between the lines and see that there were foreign governments that were much more involved in the 9/11 attack than just supporting Islamic fundamentalist teachings and schools. Now, that has been redacted. A whole 28 page section..... The Administration, the White House, has put several blocks in the road. One, they run all the information to the 9/11 Commission through a political coordinator in Ashcroft's Justice Department..... Secondly, they want to put minders — that's people who sit in the room when we have an interview with people in NSA, FBI, CIA, Department of… in DIA — in the Pentagon, and Immigration and Naturalization Services. They want to put minders in there. That to shut down information. That's not to reveal information."
Former Senator Max Cleland and member of the 9/11 Commission who later resigned
PBS Interview, 25 July 2003

"... After September 11, I thought the arguments would be over, that finally everyone would see what had to be done and go about doing it.....Roger Cressey, my deputy at the NSC Staff, came to me in early October, after the time that I had intended to switch from the terrorism job to Crtical Infrastructure Protection and Cyber Security. The switch had been delayed by September 11.... Replacing me as the senior NSC counterterrorism official was Wayne Downing, the retired four-star Army general who had led Special Operations Command.... Withing months of replacing me, Wayne Downing quit the White House in frustration at the Administration's continued bureaucratic response to the threat. Wayne was replaced by two people, John Gordon and Randy Beers... Beers called from the White House months later and asked if he could stop by my house for a drink and some advice.... When Beers sat down next to me his first words were, 'I think I have to quit.' I thought I knew why, but I asked. His answer flowed like a river at flood: 'They still don't get it. Insteada goin' all out against al Qaeda and eliminating our vulnerabilities at home, they wanna f**kin' invade Iraq again. We have a token force in Afghanistan, the Taliban are regrouping, we haven't caught bin Laden, or his deputy, or the head of the Taliban. And they aren't going to send more troops to Afghanistan to catch them or to help the government in Kabul secure the country. No, they're holding back, waiting to invade Iraq.  Do you know how much it will strengthen al Qaeda and groups like that if we occupy Iraq? There's no threat to us now from Iraq, but 70 percent of the American people think Iraq attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. You wanna know why? Because that's what the Administration wants them to think!'"
Richard Clarke - White House Head Of Counterterrorism 1992 - 2003
'Against All Enemies'  - Edition first published in Great Britain by The Free Press in 2004

"In a statement made to the Web site patriotsquestion911.com, University of Massachusetts Geosciences professor Lynn Margulis called for a new investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks.... [which she descirbed as] 'the most effective television commercial in the history of Western civilization.'"
UMass professor questions 9/11 attack
Daily Collegian (Massachusetts), 14 September 2007

"On the eve of a Republican National Convention invoking 9/11 symbols, sound bytes and imagery, half (49.3%) of New York City residents and 41% of New York citizens overall say that some of our leaders 'knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act,' according to the poll conducted by Zogby International. The poll of New York residents was conducted from Tuesday August 24 through Thursday August 26, 2004.... The poll is the first of its kind conducted in America that surveys attitudes regarding U.S. government complicity in the 9/11 tragedy. Despite the acute legal and political implications of this accusation, nearly 30% of registered Republicans and over 38% of those who described themselves as 'very conservative' supported the claim...... Less than two in five (36%) believe that the 9/11 Commission had 'answered all the important questions about what actually happened on September 11th,' and two in three (66%) New Yorkers (and 56.2% overall) called for another full investigation of the 'still unanswered questions' by Congress or Elliot Spitzer, New York's Attorney General."
Zogby Poll: Half of New Yorkers Believe U.S. Had 9/11 Foreknowledge
NewsMax, 31 August 2004

Pakistan And 9/11
America's Leading Ally In The 'War On Terror'

"Significantly, [Omar] Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Why not? Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Washington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White House, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs. When Ahmed was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as having sent the money to the hijackers, he was forced to 'retire' by President Pervez Musharraf. Why hasn't the US demanded that he be questioned and tried in court?.... It has been rumoured that [murdered jounalist Daniel] Pearl was especially interested in any role played by the US in training or backing the ISI. Daniel Ellsberg, the former US defence department whistleblower who has accompanied Edmonds in court, has stated: 'It seems to me quite plausible that Pakistan was quite involved in this ... To say Pakistan is, to me, to say CIA because ... it's hard to say that the ISI knew something that the CIA had no knowledge of.' Ahmed's close relations with the CIA would seem to confirm this. For years the CIA used the ISI as a conduit to pump billions of dollars into militant Islamist groups in Afghanistan, both before and after the Soviet invasion of 1979. W ith CIA backing, the ISI has developed, since the early 1980s, into a parallel structure, a state within a state, with staff and informers estimated by some at 150,000. It wields enormous power over all aspects of government. The case of Ahmed confirms that parts of the ISI directly supported and financed al-Qaida, and it has long been established that the ISI has acted as go-between in intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA.  Senator Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate select committee on intelligence, has said: 'I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted, not just in financing ... by a sovereign foreign government.' In that context, Horst Ehmke, former coordinator of the West German secret services, observed: 'Terrorists could not have carried out such an operation with four hijacked planes without the support of a secret service.' That might give meaning to the reaction on 9/11 of Richard Clarke, the White House counter-terrorism chief, when he saw the passenger lists later on the day itself: 'I was stunned ... that there were al-Qaida operatives on board using names that the FBI knew were al-Qaida.' It was just that, as Dale Watson, head of counter-terrorism at the FBI told him, the 'CIA forgot to tell us about them'."
Michael Meacher, former Blair Minister
The Pakistan connection
Guardian, 22 July 2004

What Geostrategic Goals Do Pakistan And The Bush Administration Share? - Click Here

"An FBI official has told a Senate hearing here that investigators had 'traced the origin of the funding of 9/11 back to financial accounts in Pakistan, where high-ranking and well-known Al Qaeda operatives played a major role in moving the money forward, eventually into the hands of the hijackers located in the US.'  John S. Pistole, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counter terrorism division, did not specify how those accounts in Pakistan were funded. He was testifying before the Senate Governmental Affairs committee on Thursday."
Pakistan linked to 9/11 funds
Daily Times (Pakistan), 2 August 2003

"Pakistan's Habib Bank Ltd. denied on Thursday allegations by the widow of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl that it transferred funds on behalf of charities supporting 'terrorist organisations'. Mariane Pearl filed a lawsuit at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York on Wednesday against al Qaeda, other radical groups and Habib Bank Ltd. over the 2002 abduction, torture and murder of her husband. The government holds a 49 percent stake in the bank, though it plans to sell up to 7.5 percent of the bank through an initial public offering later this month....Among those sued is Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, or Sheikh Omar, who was convicted and sentenced to death in a Pakistani court for his role in the abduction and murder. Three others were jailed for life. Another defendant is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a suspected high-ranking al Qaeda leader and Sept. 11 mastermind who is in U.S. custody. Mohammed admitted to a U.S. military tribunal that he beheaded Pearl, the U.S. military said."
Pakistan's Habib Bank denies Pearl allegations
Associated Press, 19 July 2007

'Smoking Gun' 9/11 Commission Report One Year On Key Witnesses Blatantly 'Overlooked' In Official Cover-Up Of 9/11 Money Trail www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WAT911OmmissionReport.htm John O'Neill, John Pistole, Robert Wright, Sibel Edmonds, Lt General Mahmood, Omar Sheikh, Daniel Pearl, Robert Baer The Inner Secrets Of 9/11 Are Held By The FBI
Wanted 'Dead Or Alive' Evidence Omitted From The Official 9/11 Report From Watergate To 9/11 The Truth Resides Within The Ranks Of The FBI Including 3 Hours Of  Personal Testimony From Former FBI Translator Sibel Edmonds Why Was None Of This Covered In The Official 9/11Report? The Omission Of Key Evidence Is The 'Smoking Gun' Clue Of The 9/11 Report Below Are Some of The People Who Held Crucial Missing Elements Of The 9/11Story But Whose Pivotal Knowledge Was Not Reported By The Official 9/11Commission Even Though Known By Witnesses Within The FBI
John O'Neill - FBI (Dead)	John Pistole - FBI (Alive)	Robert Wright - FBI (Alive)	Sibel Edmonds - FBI (Alive)
Lt General Mahmoud - ISI (Alive)	Omar Sheikh - ISI (Death Sentence)	Daniel Pearl - WSJ (Dead)	Robert Baer - Ex CIA (Alive)
Click Here To Read Details Of Their Missing Evidence

"A top FBI counter-terrorism official told the US Senate governmental affairs committee on Thursday that investigators have 'traced the origin of the funding of 9/11 back to financial accounts in Pakistan.' John S Pistole, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counter-terrorism division, however, did not specify how those accounts in Pakistan were funded, or the role of Pakistani elements. The Times of India first reported on October 10, 2001 that India told the US that some $100,000 had been wired to the leader of the hijackers, Mahmud Atta, by British-born terrorist Ahmad Saeed Umar Sheikh. Indian authorities also told the US that the trail led back from Sheikh to the then chief of ISI, Lt Gen Mahmud Ahmad who was subsequently forced to retire by Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf. The FBI had been provided with the details, including Sheikh’s mobile numbers. But Pistole’s testimony is silent on these issues.... The FBI has estimated the September 11 attacks cost between $175,000 and $250,000. That money — which paid for flight training, travel and other expenses — flowed to the hijackers through associates in Germany and the United Arab Emirates. Those associates reported to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who managed much of the planning for the attacks from Pakistan, US officials have said. The Bush Administration is being cagey about declassifying 28 secret pages in a recent report on the 9/11 incident which officials say outline connections between Saudi charities, royal family members and terrorism. US authorities are silent about the role some Pakistanis may have played in the conspiracy. The role of Sheikh and Lt Gen Ahmad has yet to see the light of the day. Sheikh, wanted for kidnapping and terrorist conspiracy in India, has since been sentenced to death in Pakistan for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl."
9/11 funds came from Pakistan, says FBI
Times of India, 1 August 2003

"In London's prestigious The Guardian (July 22, 2004), Michael Meacher, a Labor MP writing a piece on 'The Pakistan Connection' has made [the] sensational disclosure that a British Pakistani Islamist Omar Saeed Sheikh, waiting to be hanged in Pakistan for the alleged murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 [is] held by both the US government and Pearl's wife not responsible for the murder while Islamabad refuses to try other suspects newly implicated in Pearl's kidnap and murder for fear the evidence they produce in court might acquit Sheikh. Sheikh is the man who knows too much and Pakistani authorities fear that if he gets out of their hands, he might spill their secret beans since he had been involved in their key operations. According to Meacher Sheikh had been the conduit for transferring US$100,000 by Gen Mahmud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to Mohammed Atta, the [9/11] lead hijacker'. Meacher wants General Mahmud to be questioned and put on trial.... For years the CIA used the ISI as a conduit to pump billions of dollars into militant Islamist groups in Afghanistan, both before and after the Soviet invasion of 1979.... The case of Ahmed confirms that parts of the ISI directly supported and financed Al-Qaeda, and it has long been established that the ISI has acted as go-between in intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA."
Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Former Pakistan High Commissioner to UK
Is Aziz the Continuity Factor For Washington After Musharraf
South Asia Tribune, 29 July 2004

From Manning To Lynch - 'Education For Peace'
David Lynch Awarded 'Legion D'Honneur' By Sarkozy
Tours UK On Peace Initiative With Donovan October 2007

Fear Or Peace? - Education's Greatest Challenge

"The [British] Ambassador to Washington tells our correspondent that warfare alone is not enough to counter world terrorism.... Sir David Manning, formerly Tony Blair’s right-hand man on foreign policy, said: 'It’s not enough just to go on about terrorism and the Middle East peace process . . . we need to find new ways of bridging and reaching out.'... 'When I see how much money we’re spending on other things, it does seem to me to be a very poor investment on our part.' He asked: 'How many schools could you get for an aircraft carrier?' Sir David, who leaves his post as British Ambassador to the United States next month, has rarely spoken out publicly in such forceful fashion during an illustrious 35-year diplomatic career. Indeed, as Tony Blair’s chief foreign and security policy adviser in 2001-03 and thereafter Ambassador to Washington, he has been at the heart of decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.... In an interview with The Times he emphasised that existing foreign policy priorities remain 'terribly important', but added: 'We have to move beyond that. I suppose at the end of my time I’m allowed to think outside the box.'. Sir David, 57, does not know what he will do when he quits the Foreign Office next month and denied that his idea for a world education fund is a pitch for a new job. But he does not need much invitation to expand on the scheme: A global education fund would have to operate like the World Bank, he said, without 'any one country’s fingerprints all over it'."
'Muscular diplomacy failing the West'
London Times, 14 September 2007

"Children at primary schools are being forced to grow up too soon and face 'intolerable pressure' from both the regime of testing in schools and fears about commercialism in the outside world, research suggests.   There is widespread concern that family life is breaking down and the culture of respect is disappearing, according to a review of primary school education published today by Cambridge University and the Esmée Fairbairn charitable foundation. The review, based on discussions with children, teachers, parents and community groups, revealed a 'pervasive anxiety' and a 'sense of deep pessimism' about modern childhood."
Pressure of tests ‘means primary school pupils lose their childhood’
London Times, 12 October 2007

"Forty per cent of children struggle to write their own name or to sound out letters to form simple words such as 'dog' or 'red' by the age of 5, government figures show.... The findings raise serious questions about the effectiveness of flagship government schemes such as Sure Start to boost the development of the under-5s... Around £21 billion has been invested in a series of initiatives but the latest results for schools in England show little improvement in children’s language and literacy and personal, social and emotional development."
Children who can’t write their own name
London Times, 12 October 2007

"More than 200,000 young people aged 16 to 18 have virtually no hope of getting a foot in the door to the world of work after leaving school with no qualifications, the Chief Inspector of Schools said yesterday. Christine Gilbert, head of Ofsted, said the fate of these young people, known as Neets (not in education, employment or training), highlighted the enormous challenge facing society in closing the gap in educational attainment between rich and poor. Publishing her annual report yesterday, Ms Gilbert said the barren prospect facing these young people, who represent more than ten per cent of all 16 to 18-year-olds, was 'alarming and unacceptable'. Her predictions for their immediate future were even more gloomy. It was hard, she said, “to find encouragement from inspection evidence” that things would get better for young people on the cusp of adult life."
Stark link between poverty and failure in school is highlighted by Ofsted chief
London Times, 18 October 2007

Is The David Lynch Foundation
Already One Step Ahead Of Sir David Manning?
Newsweek On The David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness Based Education
Click Here

"The acclaimed US film-maker David Lynch has been awarded France's top civilian honour, the Legion d'Honneur. Lynch is famed for productions such as The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive, plus cult hit TV series Twin Peaks. French President Nicolas Sarkozy hailed his eclectic 'genius'. Lynch replied in halting French: 'My French is poor, but my heart is rich today thanks to you.'...Mr Sarkozy told the director that seeing Elephant Man as a teenager had 'definitively convinced' him that 'cinema was a highly important matter'." France honours US director Lynch BBC Online, 1 October 2007

David Lynch Tours UK October 2007 With Donovan
To Promote His Education For World Peace Fund

"In today’s world of fear and uncertainty, every child should have one class period a day to dive within himself and experience the field of silence – bliss – the enormous reservoir of energy and intelligence that is deep within all of us. This is the way to save the coming generation.... The stresses of today’s world are taking an enormous toll on our children right now. There are hundreds of schools, with thousands of students, who are eager to relieve this stress and bring out the full potential of every student by providing this Consciousness-Based Education today.... Individual peace is the unit of world peace. By offering Consciousness-Based Education to the coming generation, we can promote a strong foundation for a healthy, harmonious, and peaceful world.  For this, the Foundation also supports the establishment of Universities of World Peace that will train the coming generation in a new profession: that of professional peacemaker.... And please remember that Consciousness-Based Education is not a luxury. For our children who are growing up in a stressful, often frightening, crisis-ridden world, it is a necessity.”
David Lynch

It's Time To Put An End To All This War, Criminality, And Ignorance

"The Iraq conflict has wreaked 'terrible damage' on the region - far more than has been acknowledged, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.... A survey published in September 2007 suggested that up to 1.2m people might have died because of the Iraq conflict. Speaking following his visit, Dr Williams also said he regards any further 'deliberate destabilisation' of the region - such as action against Syria and Iran - as 'criminal, ignorant...and potentially murderous folly'. Referring to US political advisers, he added that 'we do hear talk from some quarters of action against Syria, or against Iran'."
Archbishop speaks of Iraq damage
BBC Online, 5 October 2007

"Director David Lynch (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr.) appeared on the Dutch TV program 'Wereldgasten' Sunday, December 3, 2006 to discuss his questions regarding 9/11.... The Dutch host asked if Lynch believed the U.S. Government carried out 9/11. He responded, 'It's too big for people to think about. It's too big.' The host then asked for further clarification and a somewhat hesitant Lynch clarified, 'It's-- you know-- something no one wants to think about.'"
Hollywood Making a Move on 9/11 Truth
Jones Report, 6 December 2006

"Auteur film director David Lynch has recently gone public with 9/11 questions on Danish TV.... He has also designated part of his website as the 'Interesting Questions' art gallery, giving users a space to reflect on 9/11 and submit works of art that range in style and depth. ..... Though Lynch expressed in his TV interview that 9/11 was not something that changed his life, it is clear from his reaction that he wants an answer to these disturbing variations from the government Official Story. His interesting website allows users to browse through a virtual gallery in and glance at the submissions on the wall, or take a closer look. (Choose Floor 'A' in the elevator to find your way to the gallery, which may take a moment to load). The gallery is in interesting blend of art from all different perspectives." David Lynch Website Gallery Focuses on 9/11 Truth Art Jones Report, 3 January 2006

A Picture Depicting The Blinding Effect Of 9/11 From David Lynch's 9/11 'Interesting Questions' Online Art Gallery