Friday, June 18, 2010

PTECH: 911 Software?

PTECH: 911 Software?
We know less about Ptech software than we do about PROMIS. But the new software is much more powerful and important, because our defense against terror depends upon its effectiveness. Unlike PROMIS, it appears to be owned by private interests. However, we should not be surprised if the US government somehow had some ownership rights.

Ptech is a high tech command and control system is probably the most advanced command and control and data mining software in the world. Experts call this “data blueprinting software”. This software combines artificia.l intelligence and interoperability, the capacity to read, modify source codes, and operate other programs --all without being detected thereafter. It is commonly called "Ptech" after the name of the firm that builds it. . It is a very advanced version of PROMIS and its progeny. It is used in a variety of areas including finance, medicine, intelligence, warfare, and aviation. The military uses it in a number of ways and looks to the day when it can be used from space to provide a "God's-eye view" of the battlefield. Some might think that reliance on this Saudi-owned computer software company might be more dangerous to the US than having most ports operated by a UAE company.

A version of Ptech is headquartered in the basement of the FAA. It is intended for use when planes were hijacked and it is intended link and coordinate the activities of the FAA, NORAD, and the Secret Service. As a firm, Ptech works with DARPA, the Department of Defense's research group and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency uses Ptech software.

This software was built in Quincy, Mass. Ptech ( now GoAgile), which emerged in 1994 with ample funding, is an outfit financed by Yassin Al-Qadi, a Saudi businessman with ties to Al Qaeda, who invested $5 in 1994 and $18 million in 1998. Ptech is currently harvesting significant profits with its Playstation products. Apparently it produces toys for all ages.

Al-Qadi appeared on the Bush administration's first terrorist list, and his US assets were frozen. He was also head of Saudi Arabia's Blessed Relief Foundation ( Muwafaq). Qadi claims that he met Dick Cheney in Jeddah and that they remain on good terms. He also has a stake in Ptech through BMI, a real estate investment firm in New Jersey, that had links to BCCI. Governor Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission , used BMI to sell a property. Qadi's lawyer said his client had no direct storck in the firm by 2000. Yaqub Mirza, a director of Ptech, is also on the terrorist list.Suheil Laher and Muhammed Mubayyid, two people the F.B.I. sought after 9/11, turned out to be Ptech employees. Directors and investors also had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

For two years, consultants Ptech were working in the basement of the FAA. They had access to the FAA's computer systems and would have been in a position to find holes in the nation's domestic air defenses Others who use the software are the F.B.I. and Air Force.

Whistleblower Indira Singh is a computer software who started with JP Morgan in the mid-1990’s and stayed with the firm when it became Morgan/Chase. She was trying to develop interceptive software for the bank that would prevent PROMIS progeny software from stealing data. She first became familiar with Ptech six months after 9/11, when she was asked to permit Ptech to give a demonstration at JP Morgan/Chase. That bank was considering the use of the software to detect terrorist money transfers. A team from Ptech appeared that was lead by Dr. Hussein Ibrahim, co-founder of BMI. After the Ptech people were on the premises half an hour, their behavior alarmed her. Ibrahim wanted to demonstrate the program on his laptop by using proprietary Morgan Chase data. Singh learned through her calls that Yasin al- Qadi had a major interest in the firm. Yasin was a Saudi financier, previously involved in BCCI, who would have his assets in the US frozen after 911 because the government believed he was financing terrorists. Treasuryofficials said his charity was an Al Qaeda front. Indira Sngh eventually concluded that Ptech was a C.I.A. cut-out.

She took her security concerns to the MorganChase’s General Auditor who advised her to forget about it and keep quiet or she was out. She continued to pursued the matter and was fired. She then became a senior consultant for Interoperability Clearing House. Why Morgan Chase covered for a firm that seemed to have terrorist ties remains unexplained.

Ms. Singh had an apartment near Ground Zero and was a volunteer EMT there on September 11. She claims that her apartment is contaminated and that her lungs were damaged by working as an emergency EMT that day. She developed strong feelings about what happened that day and took her concerns about Ptech to the Boston F.B.I., where someone finally told her there was nothing they could do as " Saudis have been given a free pass for 9/11." Then she contacted Joe Bergantino a reporter the local CBS station, WBZ who was also investigating Ptech.

At one point, people Singh thought the Secret Service debriefed her. She wanted to tell them about the people behind Ptech, but they told her “:We can't investigate the people behind Ptech. Just trust me, lets focus on the software.” She later decided her questioners were from military intelligence.
A former Ptech employee and several current employees called the Boston office soon after 9/11 and that there was no follow up. Two F.B.I. agents in Chicago in Chicago encountered many problems when they reported that al- Qadi was funding terrorist organizations. They were told they could keep writing reports but not to make arrests. Their supervisor apparently shouted at them, “You will not open criminal investigations against any of these intelligence subjects.” Al Qadi was working with the C.I.A. in the U.S., Albania, Kosovo, and Bosnia. He helped get funds to the Kosovo Liberation Army. Subsequently, the US, Albania, and Turkey froze his assets. He was a C.I.A. operative at time, but who knows what else he was doing. It is clear now that Ali Mohammed, once a C.I.A. employee, appears to have been a skilled double agent for Al Qaeda, who took advantage of both the C.I.A. and F.B.I., making both appear inept.

They had also been probing BMI, and concluded that it had financed the bombings to two embassies in East Africa. In 2002, one of them Robert Wright, stood weeping on the US Capitol steps, apologizing that he did not do more to save lives on September 11, 2002. He was then muzzled. On the other hand, an agent born in Egypt was twice promoted after refusing to wear a wire while talking to one terrorist suspect and refusing to tape a telephone conversation with another.

Some of the owners of Ptech, she found had funded the Afghan mujahadeen in the eighties, and she joined others in suggesting that they pumped some money into the Brooklyn cell that attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. That organization morphed into a firm known as Mitre, and with Booz & Hamilton, now operates Ptech. James Woolsey is a director of Booz and Hamilton. Joe Bergantino hired an investigator to keep track of the Ptech people and found that they had a warehouse in a area from whence drugs were shipped. Governmentofficials persuaded WBZ not to air his story, and ABC's Brian Ross and NBC's Lisa Myers= stories on Ptech met the same fate.

In Octobeer, 2001, some former Ptech employees told the F.B.I. that the firm had ties to terrorists. For some reason, the F.B.I. appears to have done nothing about these claims. In the Spring of 2002, Ptech people were at Morgan Chase drumming up business—the event that made Singh get involved. Singh became so upset by the F.B.I.'s bungling of the case that she went to Senator Charles Grassley, who promised to look into it. He also found someone to be her bodyguard. Nothing ever came of his investigation. This writer has found several other touchy cases where he has tried to do the right thing and also protect the whistleblower. In most of these instances, the senator seemed to find it necessary to back off.

Bergantino found that Ptech's software was used by many federal agencies, but federal investigators told him not to air his findings at they would damage an on-going investigation. However the government delayed even looking into Ptech and the firm had almost a year to destroy records. As a result of Singh and Bergantino's work, Ptech was finally raided by Operation Greenquest ( a program to find those who finance terrorism) on December 6, 2002. Bergantino was not alerted, and someone else got the exclusive coverage of the story. After the raid, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer almost immediately said Ptech was clean. Green Quest was a Customs-led operation, and Michael Chertoff at Justice had unsuccessfully tried to seize control of it. Powerful Republican strategist Grover Norquist denounced the raid.

A few take her surmise that Cheney was operating a Ptech program in the White House bunker to mean that he was interfering with FAA-NORAD efforts to respond. Her information on Ptech and its ownership is not disputed. She clams that intelligence sources told her that the people who financed the firm had drug business ties to the C.I.A. that extended back to BCCI days, but she has remained deliberately vague on that subject.

One reason there is so much interest in Ptech software is that air traffic controllers saw more than the usual number of unidentified flights that day. But most interesting was the "phantom flight 11" mentioned in the 911 Commission report. It was still on screens at 9:24 AM , after the NORAD war games had ceased and after the Pentagon had been struck. Was the FAA getting mistaken information provided by manipulation of its Ptech software by other Ptech software? Singh thinks the reports on what Cheney was doing in the White House bunker suggest he was using Ptech software. Perhaps he was trying to track what was going on. There was also the possibility that someone else was using it to confuse the FAA and NORAD. We're not likely to know if this occurred.

The anti-Israeli writer Christopher Bollyn found that a Jew , Michael S. Goff , was running Ptech and concluded that Mossad was really running the firm through an Arab cut-out because the US government would never permit someone with possible terrorist ties to run such a sensitive firm.
In 2006, Neil Entwistle, an English computer techni C.I.A.n who worked on Ptech, was accused of shooting his wife and 9 month old daughter while they were asleep in bed in their Hopkinton, Massachusetts home. He then fled to England, where authorities first said the Americans just wanted to question him. He was subsequently extradited and returned to the US on a Gulfstream jet the C.I.A. had used for renditions. He was flown from Gatwick to Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. On June 26, 2008, he was convicted of first degree murder, which means incarceration for life without parole.

He worked for Embedded New Technologies (ENT) in Boston, which is connected to InQtel in Braintree, a firm believed to be a C.I.A. proprietary. He was working on Internet surveillance software. Before 9/11 he allegedly helped wire backdoors into the P-Tech systems used by the White House, FAA , NORAD, and Pentagon. His wife told her mother he had large amounts of money if off-shore accounts.
Entwistle plead innocent and said his wife was depressed and shot herself and the daughter. He claimed to removed the .22 semi automatic from the crime scene to protect her reputation. His parents questioned the jury selection process, and his lawyer called not one witness.

Singh later appeared at a Canadian conference on 911 and said, “I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me.” She has not expanded on that theme. Later, her friend Michael Corbin, a radio host, was found dead in his car at the side of a road.
There was a little discussed Treasury raid of Ptech. Immediately after that, Secretary of the Treasury Paul O Neill wasw fired. However, his firing may have been because he had just been to Saudi Arabia where he angered members of the House of Saaud by asking to see the financial records of some Islamic charities.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wooooah! Nice work. Is there a Muslim-Nazi cabal at work inside the CIA?

Anonymous said...

Well done.
You sure can follow a narrow line.

That this is in "plain site" and still not reported is astounding. Although being threatened has that result.

Not sure if Norman M. verified what Dick C. was doing "computer wise" in the bunker?

The recently obtained PTech cache results could shed more light.

Thank you, for what had to be considerable work.

Anonymous said...

I was an executive at Ptech in 1996/97 and I directed Ptech at a program called Mobis. We had cool modelling technology that was used for code generation and I steered them into the knowledge management space. The reason we went after the federal business is that a new salesman I hired was familiar with marketing there and we were trying to stay in business. Any ties to terrorism through an investor is an unfortunate coincidence. There was nothing shady or diabolical about Ptech. It's CEO and VP of development were hard working technologists trying to live the american dream. To suggest their sales VP (a friend of mine) was in a secret society of some sort is completely ridiculous.