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.
Showing posts with label Dick Cheney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dick Cheney. Show all posts
Friday, June 18, 2010
Thursday, May 6, 2010
NORAD and 9/11
Robin Hordon, an experienced air traffic controller bluntly claimed, “There is absolutely no way that four large commercial airliners could have flown around off course for 30 to 60 minutes on 9/11 without being intercepted and shot completely out of the sky by our jet fighters unless very highly placed people in our government and our military wanted it to happen.”
There were two jets that made it to New York just as the first hijacked plane went into the Twin Towers. They had expended a great deal of fuel getting there and needed to be refueled. There seems to have been no effort to assess the extent to which the exercises planned for that day made response difficult. There was no plan in place to deal with an air attack on the United States. Time elapsed as the traffic controllers verified that they were dealing with a hijacking, then hijackings. Northeast Air Defense Sector of NORAD was aware of a likely hijacking of Flight 11 at 8:20. Boston lost valuable time trying to get help from Atlanta, which was no longer involved in plans for tracking efforts. Then a decision had to be made to contact NORAD, and within NORAD, there had to be conversations between at least three levels of authority. It is clear that they had trouble trying to round up F-16s and even had to seek them in Toledo, Ohio.
North American Aerospace Defense Command Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart told the 9/11 commission that NORAD could have shot down the hijacked planes had it been notified by NORAD. What either the FAA or NORAD actually did is unclear. There was a standing policy that jets already in the air routinely escort commercial liners that lose radio or transponder contact with control towers. Between September 2000 and June 2001, military aircraft had dealt with civilian breaches of flying regulations 67 times. On June 1, 2001, the Pentagon established new orders for how this was to be done , and the Secretary of Defense was even inserted in the process. There was a long standing policy of shooting down hijacked planes and those thought to be hijacked. This protocol ended the shoot-down policy and replaced it with a stand down policy that could be changed in each instance by the President, Vice Prewsident or Secretary of Defense.
One Boston Center controller said that FAA notified NORAD after it first lost communications with the first plane to be hijacked. A few minutes were lost before the FAA notified NORAD, and the information then went up three levels, one at a time. Sorting through all sorts of contradictory testimony, the 9/11 Commission investigators thought that NORAD learned about the hijacking just 9 minutes before Flight 77 ( N644AA) hit the Pentagon. One would wonder if any military people were looking at their screens or listening to the radio or tv.
Attempting to find out why NORAD did not respond effectively is nearly impossible. It is likely that the FAA was using Ptech software. To interact with the Air Force. For two years personnel from Ptech and their Ptech software had been in the basement of the FAA looking into how well the FAA and Air Force communicate with one another. An accused Al Qaeda bagman was associated with that firm. Later, when the FBI sought to probe the matter, Justice Criminal Division head Michael Chertoff intervened to derail the probe .
At one point in its deliberations, the official 9/11 commission was so alarmed by the many contradictions in the Defense Departments explanations that it considered asking the department of Justice to investigate (Post, Aug 2, 2006). In the end it simply referred its concerns to the Department’s inspector general. So many stories were floated that it is hard to keep them straight. First it was said that no planes went up until after the Pentagon was hit. The next claim was they were scrambled sooner but it was too late.
Major General Larry K. Arnold , who ran NORAD’s responses to the attacks, appears to have misled the commission. He said that NORAD learned about the lost American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentgon, at 9:24, and added that it was distracted then because it was concerned with United Flight 93, which would eventually go down in Pennsylvania. Arnold said that he and “my own staff, we were orbiting over Washington D.C., by this time, and I was personally anxious to see what 93 was going to do, and our intent was to intercept it.” The fact was that NORAD command knew nothing about United 93 until after it had crashed.
When NORAD turned over information to the commission, it neglected to provide any tapes from traffic monitoring stations. When the commission’s investigators learned that those tapes existed, NORAD and the DOD at first refused to turn them over. For a time the staff director , who had friends at the Pentagon, seemed to support issuing a subpoena while also appearing to maneuver to derail that process. Eventually, the commission had to issue the subpoenas, but valuable months of research were lost.
On Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press,” Vice President Cheney said that the FAA had an open line with the White House as soon as the first plane struck. ( at about 8:46) IF the FAA was in communication with the White House by then, it clearly had time and capability to be in touch with NORAD by then. By 9:15, Richard Clarke was holding a teleconference with the Pentagon and FAA. Yet we hear that planes still could not be scrambled because there was no way for the FAA and the military to communicate.
Early in the Bush administration, in May 2001, Vice President Cheney was assigned oversight of NORAD and control of all drills and war games. Some involved simulated airline hijackings, and the games involved placing false blims on controllers’ radar screens. At the time of the attacks, Cheney was controlling the war games in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. He was most probably working through a very top secret computer network called PDAS ( the meaning of which is unkinown). About a hundred people have access to it, and it is reached from about sventy terminals. There were only eight fighters available to the NY-DC area, and the blips seemed to paralyze an effective response. Many planes had been diverted to Alaska and Canada. Only one exercise was mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report footnote.
On 9/11 NORAD, along with elements under Central Command, was training on how to deal with planes crashing into important buildings. NORAD was simulating multiple hijackings on 9/11 Radar screens were showing up to 22 hijacked airliners. This was one of five or six training exercises were going on that day. In Operation Northern Vigilance ( Vigilant Guardian), jets were moved from the east coast to Canada and Alaska. One was the annual testing of Global Guardian, the system that coordinates use of the nuclear arsenal. In the Global Guardian of 1999, the system reacted to airplanes being used to crash into the World Trade Center—something the Bush administration claimed had been unthinkable. In March, a military paper reported it had been scheduled for October 2001. In Tripod II, a biowarfare exercise, FEMA staff were prepositioned in New York City on September 10. In another, F-16s were simulating bombing runs near Atlantic City.
Some might find the fact that multiple war games and disaster drills were planned for that day a “bizarre coincidence.” One of the people coordinating these activities was John Fulton of the Reconnaissance Office. His expertise was in satellite data and very sophisticated global positioning systems, or the’smart GPS.” Another figure with similar expertise was Under Secretary of the Air Force Peter B. Teets, who could report directly to the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence.
According to Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, Vice President Richard Cheney was already in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. They knew a hijacked plane was approaching Washington, and someone was announcing that it was 50 miles out, then 30, and then. Cheney was operating a command, control, and communications center that could override the National Military Command Center (NMCC) and the White House situation room.
On a television interview, Cheney said that through a standing arrangement the Secret Service had open lines with the FAA immediately after the World Trade Center was hit. This means that Cheney would have known about the strike almost immediately. NORAD claimed it had no knowledge of the hits for some time—something that is very hard to believe. 10. A young man asked Cheney “do the orders still stand?’ and Cheney whipped his neck around and said “Of course, the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary?” There is no way to determine what this meant. Did it mean should the training exercises continue? Was there a standing order that the plane should not be shut down? Mineta’s testimony about what went on in that room was not included in the 9/11 Commission report, which said that Cheney was rushed to the PEOC when after the attacks began. After the Pentagon was hit, Cheney was moved to another bunker.
Perhaps the exercises occupied so many jets that nothing could be done about the hijackers. Some argue that the multiple (9) war games occurring at once created so much confusion that NORAD could not respond to a real threat. In fact, the US has intercept procedures that work flawlessly about 100 times a year. The evidence seems to indicate that NORAD stood down that day for exercises. Why couldn’t the exercises have been interrupted to intercept these planes. If the US intercept procedures had been in place only a few years, it might be understandable why a complete and unalterable stand down was needed. One of the exercises was Vigilant Guardian,” which should have had the effect of shortening response times, as the planes and pilots were on the ready.
There is some confusion about whether Andrews Air Force Base was capable of defending Washington on September 11. Normally two units of fighter jets --the 121st Fighter Squadron and the 321st Marine Fighter Attack Squadron . The day after the attack, the Base removed those two units from its web site, only to subsequently restore them.
Some airplane parts were found near the World Trade Center. Those parts are numbered and time-tracked, so it would be possible to prove once and for all that they came off the planes said to have hit the towers. That would dispose of some of the outrageous theories that some sort of constructs, looking like Boeings, hit the towers. But if the FBI released that information, it would also have to be as precise about material found at the Pentagon. For whatever reason, full data on parts at the three locations has not been released.
There were two jets that made it to New York just as the first hijacked plane went into the Twin Towers. They had expended a great deal of fuel getting there and needed to be refueled. There seems to have been no effort to assess the extent to which the exercises planned for that day made response difficult. There was no plan in place to deal with an air attack on the United States. Time elapsed as the traffic controllers verified that they were dealing with a hijacking, then hijackings. Northeast Air Defense Sector of NORAD was aware of a likely hijacking of Flight 11 at 8:20. Boston lost valuable time trying to get help from Atlanta, which was no longer involved in plans for tracking efforts. Then a decision had to be made to contact NORAD, and within NORAD, there had to be conversations between at least three levels of authority. It is clear that they had trouble trying to round up F-16s and even had to seek them in Toledo, Ohio.
North American Aerospace Defense Command Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart told the 9/11 commission that NORAD could have shot down the hijacked planes had it been notified by NORAD. What either the FAA or NORAD actually did is unclear. There was a standing policy that jets already in the air routinely escort commercial liners that lose radio or transponder contact with control towers. Between September 2000 and June 2001, military aircraft had dealt with civilian breaches of flying regulations 67 times. On June 1, 2001, the Pentagon established new orders for how this was to be done , and the Secretary of Defense was even inserted in the process. There was a long standing policy of shooting down hijacked planes and those thought to be hijacked. This protocol ended the shoot-down policy and replaced it with a stand down policy that could be changed in each instance by the President, Vice Prewsident or Secretary of Defense.
One Boston Center controller said that FAA notified NORAD after it first lost communications with the first plane to be hijacked. A few minutes were lost before the FAA notified NORAD, and the information then went up three levels, one at a time. Sorting through all sorts of contradictory testimony, the 9/11 Commission investigators thought that NORAD learned about the hijacking just 9 minutes before Flight 77 ( N644AA) hit the Pentagon. One would wonder if any military people were looking at their screens or listening to the radio or tv.
Attempting to find out why NORAD did not respond effectively is nearly impossible. It is likely that the FAA was using Ptech software. To interact with the Air Force. For two years personnel from Ptech and their Ptech software had been in the basement of the FAA looking into how well the FAA and Air Force communicate with one another. An accused Al Qaeda bagman was associated with that firm. Later, when the FBI sought to probe the matter, Justice Criminal Division head Michael Chertoff intervened to derail the probe .
At one point in its deliberations, the official 9/11 commission was so alarmed by the many contradictions in the Defense Departments explanations that it considered asking the department of Justice to investigate (Post, Aug 2, 2006). In the end it simply referred its concerns to the Department’s inspector general. So many stories were floated that it is hard to keep them straight. First it was said that no planes went up until after the Pentagon was hit. The next claim was they were scrambled sooner but it was too late.
Major General Larry K. Arnold , who ran NORAD’s responses to the attacks, appears to have misled the commission. He said that NORAD learned about the lost American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentgon, at 9:24, and added that it was distracted then because it was concerned with United Flight 93, which would eventually go down in Pennsylvania. Arnold said that he and “my own staff, we were orbiting over Washington D.C., by this time, and I was personally anxious to see what 93 was going to do, and our intent was to intercept it.” The fact was that NORAD command knew nothing about United 93 until after it had crashed.
When NORAD turned over information to the commission, it neglected to provide any tapes from traffic monitoring stations. When the commission’s investigators learned that those tapes existed, NORAD and the DOD at first refused to turn them over. For a time the staff director , who had friends at the Pentagon, seemed to support issuing a subpoena while also appearing to maneuver to derail that process. Eventually, the commission had to issue the subpoenas, but valuable months of research were lost.
On Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press,” Vice President Cheney said that the FAA had an open line with the White House as soon as the first plane struck. ( at about 8:46) IF the FAA was in communication with the White House by then, it clearly had time and capability to be in touch with NORAD by then. By 9:15, Richard Clarke was holding a teleconference with the Pentagon and FAA. Yet we hear that planes still could not be scrambled because there was no way for the FAA and the military to communicate.
Early in the Bush administration, in May 2001, Vice President Cheney was assigned oversight of NORAD and control of all drills and war games. Some involved simulated airline hijackings, and the games involved placing false blims on controllers’ radar screens. At the time of the attacks, Cheney was controlling the war games in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. He was most probably working through a very top secret computer network called PDAS ( the meaning of which is unkinown). About a hundred people have access to it, and it is reached from about sventy terminals. There were only eight fighters available to the NY-DC area, and the blips seemed to paralyze an effective response. Many planes had been diverted to Alaska and Canada. Only one exercise was mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report footnote.
On 9/11 NORAD, along with elements under Central Command, was training on how to deal with planes crashing into important buildings. NORAD was simulating multiple hijackings on 9/11 Radar screens were showing up to 22 hijacked airliners. This was one of five or six training exercises were going on that day. In Operation Northern Vigilance ( Vigilant Guardian), jets were moved from the east coast to Canada and Alaska. One was the annual testing of Global Guardian, the system that coordinates use of the nuclear arsenal. In the Global Guardian of 1999, the system reacted to airplanes being used to crash into the World Trade Center—something the Bush administration claimed had been unthinkable. In March, a military paper reported it had been scheduled for October 2001. In Tripod II, a biowarfare exercise, FEMA staff were prepositioned in New York City on September 10. In another, F-16s were simulating bombing runs near Atlantic City.
Some might find the fact that multiple war games and disaster drills were planned for that day a “bizarre coincidence.” One of the people coordinating these activities was John Fulton of the Reconnaissance Office. His expertise was in satellite data and very sophisticated global positioning systems, or the’smart GPS.” Another figure with similar expertise was Under Secretary of the Air Force Peter B. Teets, who could report directly to the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence.
According to Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, Vice President Richard Cheney was already in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. They knew a hijacked plane was approaching Washington, and someone was announcing that it was 50 miles out, then 30, and then. Cheney was operating a command, control, and communications center that could override the National Military Command Center (NMCC) and the White House situation room.
On a television interview, Cheney said that through a standing arrangement the Secret Service had open lines with the FAA immediately after the World Trade Center was hit. This means that Cheney would have known about the strike almost immediately. NORAD claimed it had no knowledge of the hits for some time—something that is very hard to believe. 10. A young man asked Cheney “do the orders still stand?’ and Cheney whipped his neck around and said “Of course, the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary?” There is no way to determine what this meant. Did it mean should the training exercises continue? Was there a standing order that the plane should not be shut down? Mineta’s testimony about what went on in that room was not included in the 9/11 Commission report, which said that Cheney was rushed to the PEOC when after the attacks began. After the Pentagon was hit, Cheney was moved to another bunker.
Perhaps the exercises occupied so many jets that nothing could be done about the hijackers. Some argue that the multiple (9) war games occurring at once created so much confusion that NORAD could not respond to a real threat. In fact, the US has intercept procedures that work flawlessly about 100 times a year. The evidence seems to indicate that NORAD stood down that day for exercises. Why couldn’t the exercises have been interrupted to intercept these planes. If the US intercept procedures had been in place only a few years, it might be understandable why a complete and unalterable stand down was needed. One of the exercises was Vigilant Guardian,” which should have had the effect of shortening response times, as the planes and pilots were on the ready.
There is some confusion about whether Andrews Air Force Base was capable of defending Washington on September 11. Normally two units of fighter jets --the 121st Fighter Squadron and the 321st Marine Fighter Attack Squadron . The day after the attack, the Base removed those two units from its web site, only to subsequently restore them.
Some airplane parts were found near the World Trade Center. Those parts are numbered and time-tracked, so it would be possible to prove once and for all that they came off the planes said to have hit the towers. That would dispose of some of the outrageous theories that some sort of constructs, looking like Boeings, hit the towers. But if the FBI released that information, it would also have to be as precise about material found at the Pentagon. For whatever reason, full data on parts at the three locations has not been released.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
A Natural Gas Pipeline, 9/11, and the Afghan War
The terrorist attack on the United States that occurred on September 11, 2001 was successful in part because of flaws in this nation’s counterinsurgency efforts. There was a deliberate policy of avoiding careful scrutiny of what Saudis were doing in the United States. Saudi ties to Al Qaeda were not examined closely. Friendship with Saudi Arabia was considered crucial for a number of reasons. One important priority was obtaining Saudi help in advancing an American controlled pipeline to bring Caspian natural gas to Pakistan and India.
Al Qaeda & the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline
The US had obtained a report written by Mohammed Atef, head of military operations for Al Qaeda. It stated that the terrorist organization was alarmed by secret Taliban negotiations with the American oil companies who wanted to build the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline , fearing it increase US influence in Afghanistan. The August, 1998 bombing of the two embassies in Africa were most probably an effort to end the Taliban-US talks about the pipeline. It was clear that Al Qaeda had great influence within the Taliban and that it was working against an American-controlled pipeline.
This made it essential that the US obtain the help of the Saudis, who were pumping money into Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia was in a position to help the United States bring about the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline, The Saudis had a standing interest in moving oil across Afghanistan going back to their funding of the Taliban in the 1970s and 1980s. They were doing this even before the US. Later, the American companies used the Saudi intelligence people to begin talks with the Taliban. Enron served as a consultant for Unocal. Price Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, made several trips to Afghanistan on behalf of the energy firms. He was close to the Bin Laden family and it is said that he promised them the construction contract in return for a kickback for the Saudi royal family. Some link his firing to the breakdown of pipeline talks in August, 2001.
Red Herring magazine reported that George W. Bush and his father were not in agreement on the importance of keeping close ties to Saudi Arabia and that they argued about this at Kennebunkport. After this, the Boston Herald, prompted by friends of the young president ran an expose of the ties of some White House officials to Saudi Arabia and called it an “obscene conflict of interest.” The expose was part of a debate going on at the highest levels of government. There were also leaks from the White House about Saudi ties to terrorism.
Cheney succeeded in changing the president’s view of the Saudis perhaps by pointing out all his family’s ties to the Saudi royal house. King Abdullah’s visit to the Bushes demonstrates that a shift had occurred. The angered Israelis started leaking information on Saudi ties to terrorism.
“Hands-Off” Investigating the Saudis
Since the administration of George H.W. Bush, there had been a policy of not looking closely into the activities of Saudis in the United States. In 1998, Clinton backed away from that policy; he permitted the FBI to examine the activities of Saudis in the US and Saudi ties to Al Qaeda. The Bush administration reverted to the “hands off” policy and strengthened it. An American intelligence source told the Guardian that the “hands off” order was necessary to prevent it from becoming public that some Saudis were paying protection money to bin Laden. According to Greg Palast, an American journalist working in London, “A group of well-placed sources -- not-all-too-savory-spooks and arms dealers --told my BBC team that before September 11 the U.S. government had turned away evidence of Saudi billionaires funding Osama bin Laden’s network. ” He continued, “we got our hands on documents that backed up the story that FBI and CIA investigations had been slowed by the Clinton administration, then killed by Bush Jr. when those inquiries might upset Saudi interests.” Another reason was allegedly “Arbusto” and ”Carlyle,” terms that refer to the Bush’s business ties with Saudis.
John Loftus, a former federal prosecutor who claims to have sources within the intelligence community, claimed that Vice President Cheney ordered the FBI and intelligence agencies not to investigate Al Qaeda from January to August because these probes might endanger efforts to negotiate a pipeline deal with Afghanistan. Loftus also reported that Enron was involved in these investigations. Unfortunately, we only have the former prosecutor’s word for all this. We do know that after the brief US War in Afghanistan that the pipeline project was again live and well and slated to terminate at a Pakistan city not too far from an Enron power plant in India that was in desperate need of cheap fuel.
The Guardian obtained FBI documents that indicated there were restrictions on investigating possible terrorist plots. Shown on the BBC television program NewsNight, the file was coded “199,” which was a designation for national security cases. The material indicated the FBI could not investigate two of bin Laden=s relatives who lived in Falls Church, Virginia. Abdullah and Omar bin Laden were associated with a suspected terrorist organization, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) which had an office there. Abdullah was the director of the US branch of WAMY. Two of the September 11 hijackers used a false address several blocks away from the office. The public statements of two Chicago-based FBI men indicate that from the late 1990s on there was a policy of not opening criminal investigations of potential Islamic terrorists or the financial networks that supported them. It seems clear that the White House had put counterterrorism planning on the back burner.
John P. O’Neill’s Frustrations
The late John P. O’Neill was the most active FBI agent in investigating Al Qaeda. He eventually rose to the rank of assistant director. Earlier than almost anyone else, he saw Osama bin Laden for what he was—a great threat to the security of the United States. He was obsessed with Bin Laden and told anyone who would listen about the terrorist and his vile network. In 1997, O’Neill was special agent in charge of national security programs in the New York office. Working around the clock, he coordinated the effort to catch Ramzi Yousef. When ABC News interviewed Osama bin Laden, the producer formulated questions based on discussions with O’Neill. His messy personal life and tendency to bend the rules slowed his advancement. O’Neill could be brutally honest and his direct ways alienated people. When returning from an unsuccessful trip to Saudi Arabia with Director Louis Freeh, he said , “ They didn’t give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.”’ The director had said it was a successful operation, and did not speak to O’Neill for the next twelve hours of flight.
O’ Neill was aware of the Mohammed Atef document, which made it clear that Al Qaeda did not want a US-dominated dual pipeline crossing Afghanistan. He thought concerns about oil led the administration to prevent investigations of Saudi activities in the US. John O’Neill resigned shortly after an article criticizing him appeared in the New York Times. He had already been removed from the fast career advancement track, and he thought that interim director Tom Pickard planted the article because incoming director Robert Mueller wanted to replace O’Neill with a minion of the Bushes. O’Neill became director of security at the World Trade Center and died trying to save lives on September 11. The truth of O’Neill’s claims about the Bush administration’s quashing of anti-terrorist activities may have gone to the grave with him.
John O’Neill’s knowledge of the Mohammed Atef document would have led him to see the connection between oil and terrorism and to focus on the Saudi-Taliban-Al Qaeda connection. He later confided to French investigators that concern for oil was behind the Bush Administration’s reluctance to do much about possible terrorism. His investigations were continually shut down, and he began seeking information from French intelligence by using two reporters, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie. Both journalist cut-outs were experts on oil and terrorism and were consultants for French intelligence. They later wrote The Forbidden Truth. Perhaps the French government permitted O’Neill to learn more because it had been cut out of the Caspian oil deals. O’Neill and another dissenter Robert Baer of the CIA would be forced into retirement in part due to their efforts to probe Saudi ties to terrorists. Much relevant information in Baer’s book, See No Evil, was blacked out by t he CIA.
Since 1995, the FBI and CIA operated a computer program called “Alex” that tracked Al Qaeda communications. O’Neill was the chief CIA link to the program and Michael Scheuer, was the key CIA figure in “Station Alex” at Langley. They soon learned that Al Qaeda was involved in the diamond trade, drug and arms smuggling, and teen sex businesses. Scheuer and his CIA people, in the words of an O’Neill associate “ despised the FBI and they despised John O’Neill.” A CIA officer added that the working relationship with the flashy O’Neill was often very poor. When O’Neill began to learn too much about Al Qaeda, his access to Alex information was lifted. O’Neill took to asking French intelligence to monitor Al Qaeda telephone calls. Scheuer resigned when he decided that the Bush administration was not doing enough about Al Qaeda. Soon the Bush Administration shut down Alex, just as it closed its military counterpart, “Able Danger.”
O’Neill had learned that his own agency continually stymied his investigative leads and he had taken to relying on the DEA and French intelligence for help. His frustrations began to mount when he was sent to Aden in 2000 to investigate the attack on the USS Cole. He received little cooperation there from local authorities and was ordered out of Yemen by the US Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who gave him the cold shoulder from the outset. Bodine wanted him to dismiss his bodyguard even though O’Neill thought Mossad might move against him because he was open to the possibility that Israel was behind the Cole incident. O’Neill foolishly spoke openly about Abu Nidal, leader of Black September, probably being a Mossad operative. She did not back him when the Yemeni authorities refused to let him interview the people who saw the explosion, to see the hat of one of the alleged attackers, or to sample sludge in the area. He wanted an explosives analysis done on the mud beneath the ship and a DNA study of hat of one of the two alleged bombers. One former FBI agent believes O’Neill was removed out of fear that he would discover that the ship had been hit by an Israeli missile. In 2001, he wanted to return to Yemen but Bodine would give him a clearance. In February, 2001, the Yemeni Minister of the Interior announced that he had found no evidence linking the attack to Al Qaeda.
It was natural for O’Neill to rely upon the French because they had the best information in the West on Arab terrorists. They had concluded that an Arab team of 10 under a Yemeni was trained to assault a ship in 1999 at Al Qaeda’s Darounta, Afghanistan base. However, the team did not use its training and was not responsible for the Cole bombing. O’Neill probably learned this from them. The French looked into two of their nationals who were at the Darouta training camp and found that these people worked with Muslim rebels in Bosnia. The insurgency was largely supported by western intelligence agencies and many of the funds came from the Riggs Bank account of the Bosnian Defense Fund, which was operated by American Neo-Conservatives. Much of their money came from the Middle East, including the Saudi and Egyptian governments. Some of these funds spilled over to Al Qaeda, which had operative in Bosnia working with the Islamic insurgency. Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill took steps to dry up Al Qaeda funds and was putting pressure on Middle Eastern governments to provide information on how money from that region reached Al Qaeda. It is likely that these investigative activities generated enough opposition to result in his ouster. David D. Aufhauser, Treasury’s General Counsel, soon followed O’Neill into the private sector. He has spearheaded the effort to look into Al Qaeda financing.
In 2000, John O’Neill joined 150 other FBI agents in attending a retirement seminar in Orlando. His briefcase was stolen there, and it contained classified e-mail and a report on anti-terrorist activities. Ninety minutes after he missed the briefcase, it turned up in another hotel. A cigar cutter, a lighter and pen were missing, but the sensitive material was there. It had to be assumed that this information could have been copied. The bureau investigated the matter and cleared O’Neill of all charges of negligence. It also said the documents had not bee touched, but it is hard to imagine how that could have been established. Still, his reputation had been badly tarnished. The loss of the briefcase was used to force him to go through with retirement, and the story was later leaked when there was a chance that he would replace Richard Clarke as the new Bush administration’s chief anti-terrorism advisor. Clarke and O’Neill were friends and allies, and Clarke wanted O’Neill to be his replacement. The FBI refused to investigate the leak, despite a request to do so from the bureau chief in New York City. As it turned out, Clarke remained at the NSC but with a less important title.
The briefcase also had information that showed that O’Neill knew about Michael Dick’s investigation of Israeli agents, working for a moving company in New York and New Jersey. Dick was also aware of the Israeli agents who came to the United States under the cover of marketing art. They were shriveling all sorts of federal facilities, especially those of the DEA. They were also spying on DEA agents and FBI agents. The “Israeli artists” also followed Arabs who would later be accused of involvement in the 9/11 plot.
By 2000, he was busy trying to find Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States, but he was soon taken out of action and assigned to deskwork. Janet Parker, a Seattle veterinarian and O’Neill friend, said that O’ Neill’s superior, Tom Picard, prevented O’Neill from getting a wire tap on Shadrack Manyathella, who was tied to probably double agent Ali Mohammed and Mohammed Atta, possible ring leader of 9/11. Parker and O’Neill were keeping track of one cell through her foster-daughter, who had previous ties with the terrorists.
John O’Neill resigned soon after the second Bush took power. O’Neill told two respected French investigators “All of the answers, all of the clues allowing us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia..” O’Neill was extremely frustrated by the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism , claiming the administration had also made it more difficult to investigate Saudis.
O’Neill retired on August 22, after thirty years of service. He immediately took up his duties as head of security at the World Trade Center on behalf of Kroll Associates and occupied his office on the 34th floor of the North Tower. While trying to rescue people in the South Tire, he lost his life. In November 2001, weapons inspector Richard Butler told TV investigator Paula Zahn, “The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush administration -- the present one, just shortly after assuming office slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan in order to do a deal with the Taliban on oil -- an oil pipeline across Afghanistan."
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Al Qaeda & the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline
The US had obtained a report written by Mohammed Atef, head of military operations for Al Qaeda. It stated that the terrorist organization was alarmed by secret Taliban negotiations with the American oil companies who wanted to build the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline , fearing it increase US influence in Afghanistan. The August, 1998 bombing of the two embassies in Africa were most probably an effort to end the Taliban-US talks about the pipeline. It was clear that Al Qaeda had great influence within the Taliban and that it was working against an American-controlled pipeline.
This made it essential that the US obtain the help of the Saudis, who were pumping money into Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia was in a position to help the United States bring about the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline, The Saudis had a standing interest in moving oil across Afghanistan going back to their funding of the Taliban in the 1970s and 1980s. They were doing this even before the US. Later, the American companies used the Saudi intelligence people to begin talks with the Taliban. Enron served as a consultant for Unocal. Price Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, made several trips to Afghanistan on behalf of the energy firms. He was close to the Bin Laden family and it is said that he promised them the construction contract in return for a kickback for the Saudi royal family. Some link his firing to the breakdown of pipeline talks in August, 2001.
Red Herring magazine reported that George W. Bush and his father were not in agreement on the importance of keeping close ties to Saudi Arabia and that they argued about this at Kennebunkport. After this, the Boston Herald, prompted by friends of the young president ran an expose of the ties of some White House officials to Saudi Arabia and called it an “obscene conflict of interest.” The expose was part of a debate going on at the highest levels of government. There were also leaks from the White House about Saudi ties to terrorism.
Cheney succeeded in changing the president’s view of the Saudis perhaps by pointing out all his family’s ties to the Saudi royal house. King Abdullah’s visit to the Bushes demonstrates that a shift had occurred. The angered Israelis started leaking information on Saudi ties to terrorism.
“Hands-Off” Investigating the Saudis
Since the administration of George H.W. Bush, there had been a policy of not looking closely into the activities of Saudis in the United States. In 1998, Clinton backed away from that policy; he permitted the FBI to examine the activities of Saudis in the US and Saudi ties to Al Qaeda. The Bush administration reverted to the “hands off” policy and strengthened it. An American intelligence source told the Guardian that the “hands off” order was necessary to prevent it from becoming public that some Saudis were paying protection money to bin Laden. According to Greg Palast, an American journalist working in London, “A group of well-placed sources -- not-all-too-savory-spooks and arms dealers --told my BBC team that before September 11 the U.S. government had turned away evidence of Saudi billionaires funding Osama bin Laden’s network. ” He continued, “we got our hands on documents that backed up the story that FBI and CIA investigations had been slowed by the Clinton administration, then killed by Bush Jr. when those inquiries might upset Saudi interests.” Another reason was allegedly “Arbusto” and ”Carlyle,” terms that refer to the Bush’s business ties with Saudis.
John Loftus, a former federal prosecutor who claims to have sources within the intelligence community, claimed that Vice President Cheney ordered the FBI and intelligence agencies not to investigate Al Qaeda from January to August because these probes might endanger efforts to negotiate a pipeline deal with Afghanistan. Loftus also reported that Enron was involved in these investigations. Unfortunately, we only have the former prosecutor’s word for all this. We do know that after the brief US War in Afghanistan that the pipeline project was again live and well and slated to terminate at a Pakistan city not too far from an Enron power plant in India that was in desperate need of cheap fuel.
The Guardian obtained FBI documents that indicated there were restrictions on investigating possible terrorist plots. Shown on the BBC television program NewsNight, the file was coded “199,” which was a designation for national security cases. The material indicated the FBI could not investigate two of bin Laden=s relatives who lived in Falls Church, Virginia. Abdullah and Omar bin Laden were associated with a suspected terrorist organization, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) which had an office there. Abdullah was the director of the US branch of WAMY. Two of the September 11 hijackers used a false address several blocks away from the office. The public statements of two Chicago-based FBI men indicate that from the late 1990s on there was a policy of not opening criminal investigations of potential Islamic terrorists or the financial networks that supported them. It seems clear that the White House had put counterterrorism planning on the back burner.
John P. O’Neill’s Frustrations
The late John P. O’Neill was the most active FBI agent in investigating Al Qaeda. He eventually rose to the rank of assistant director. Earlier than almost anyone else, he saw Osama bin Laden for what he was—a great threat to the security of the United States. He was obsessed with Bin Laden and told anyone who would listen about the terrorist and his vile network. In 1997, O’Neill was special agent in charge of national security programs in the New York office. Working around the clock, he coordinated the effort to catch Ramzi Yousef. When ABC News interviewed Osama bin Laden, the producer formulated questions based on discussions with O’Neill. His messy personal life and tendency to bend the rules slowed his advancement. O’Neill could be brutally honest and his direct ways alienated people. When returning from an unsuccessful trip to Saudi Arabia with Director Louis Freeh, he said , “ They didn’t give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.”’ The director had said it was a successful operation, and did not speak to O’Neill for the next twelve hours of flight.
O’ Neill was aware of the Mohammed Atef document, which made it clear that Al Qaeda did not want a US-dominated dual pipeline crossing Afghanistan. He thought concerns about oil led the administration to prevent investigations of Saudi activities in the US. John O’Neill resigned shortly after an article criticizing him appeared in the New York Times. He had already been removed from the fast career advancement track, and he thought that interim director Tom Pickard planted the article because incoming director Robert Mueller wanted to replace O’Neill with a minion of the Bushes. O’Neill became director of security at the World Trade Center and died trying to save lives on September 11. The truth of O’Neill’s claims about the Bush administration’s quashing of anti-terrorist activities may have gone to the grave with him.
John O’Neill’s knowledge of the Mohammed Atef document would have led him to see the connection between oil and terrorism and to focus on the Saudi-Taliban-Al Qaeda connection. He later confided to French investigators that concern for oil was behind the Bush Administration’s reluctance to do much about possible terrorism. His investigations were continually shut down, and he began seeking information from French intelligence by using two reporters, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie. Both journalist cut-outs were experts on oil and terrorism and were consultants for French intelligence. They later wrote The Forbidden Truth. Perhaps the French government permitted O’Neill to learn more because it had been cut out of the Caspian oil deals. O’Neill and another dissenter Robert Baer of the CIA would be forced into retirement in part due to their efforts to probe Saudi ties to terrorists. Much relevant information in Baer’s book, See No Evil, was blacked out by t he CIA.
Since 1995, the FBI and CIA operated a computer program called “Alex” that tracked Al Qaeda communications. O’Neill was the chief CIA link to the program and Michael Scheuer, was the key CIA figure in “Station Alex” at Langley. They soon learned that Al Qaeda was involved in the diamond trade, drug and arms smuggling, and teen sex businesses. Scheuer and his CIA people, in the words of an O’Neill associate “ despised the FBI and they despised John O’Neill.” A CIA officer added that the working relationship with the flashy O’Neill was often very poor. When O’Neill began to learn too much about Al Qaeda, his access to Alex information was lifted. O’Neill took to asking French intelligence to monitor Al Qaeda telephone calls. Scheuer resigned when he decided that the Bush administration was not doing enough about Al Qaeda. Soon the Bush Administration shut down Alex, just as it closed its military counterpart, “Able Danger.”
O’Neill had learned that his own agency continually stymied his investigative leads and he had taken to relying on the DEA and French intelligence for help. His frustrations began to mount when he was sent to Aden in 2000 to investigate the attack on the USS Cole. He received little cooperation there from local authorities and was ordered out of Yemen by the US Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who gave him the cold shoulder from the outset. Bodine wanted him to dismiss his bodyguard even though O’Neill thought Mossad might move against him because he was open to the possibility that Israel was behind the Cole incident. O’Neill foolishly spoke openly about Abu Nidal, leader of Black September, probably being a Mossad operative. She did not back him when the Yemeni authorities refused to let him interview the people who saw the explosion, to see the hat of one of the alleged attackers, or to sample sludge in the area. He wanted an explosives analysis done on the mud beneath the ship and a DNA study of hat of one of the two alleged bombers. One former FBI agent believes O’Neill was removed out of fear that he would discover that the ship had been hit by an Israeli missile. In 2001, he wanted to return to Yemen but Bodine would give him a clearance. In February, 2001, the Yemeni Minister of the Interior announced that he had found no evidence linking the attack to Al Qaeda.
It was natural for O’Neill to rely upon the French because they had the best information in the West on Arab terrorists. They had concluded that an Arab team of 10 under a Yemeni was trained to assault a ship in 1999 at Al Qaeda’s Darounta, Afghanistan base. However, the team did not use its training and was not responsible for the Cole bombing. O’Neill probably learned this from them. The French looked into two of their nationals who were at the Darouta training camp and found that these people worked with Muslim rebels in Bosnia. The insurgency was largely supported by western intelligence agencies and many of the funds came from the Riggs Bank account of the Bosnian Defense Fund, which was operated by American Neo-Conservatives. Much of their money came from the Middle East, including the Saudi and Egyptian governments. Some of these funds spilled over to Al Qaeda, which had operative in Bosnia working with the Islamic insurgency. Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill took steps to dry up Al Qaeda funds and was putting pressure on Middle Eastern governments to provide information on how money from that region reached Al Qaeda. It is likely that these investigative activities generated enough opposition to result in his ouster. David D. Aufhauser, Treasury’s General Counsel, soon followed O’Neill into the private sector. He has spearheaded the effort to look into Al Qaeda financing.
In 2000, John O’Neill joined 150 other FBI agents in attending a retirement seminar in Orlando. His briefcase was stolen there, and it contained classified e-mail and a report on anti-terrorist activities. Ninety minutes after he missed the briefcase, it turned up in another hotel. A cigar cutter, a lighter and pen were missing, but the sensitive material was there. It had to be assumed that this information could have been copied. The bureau investigated the matter and cleared O’Neill of all charges of negligence. It also said the documents had not bee touched, but it is hard to imagine how that could have been established. Still, his reputation had been badly tarnished. The loss of the briefcase was used to force him to go through with retirement, and the story was later leaked when there was a chance that he would replace Richard Clarke as the new Bush administration’s chief anti-terrorism advisor. Clarke and O’Neill were friends and allies, and Clarke wanted O’Neill to be his replacement. The FBI refused to investigate the leak, despite a request to do so from the bureau chief in New York City. As it turned out, Clarke remained at the NSC but with a less important title.
The briefcase also had information that showed that O’Neill knew about Michael Dick’s investigation of Israeli agents, working for a moving company in New York and New Jersey. Dick was also aware of the Israeli agents who came to the United States under the cover of marketing art. They were shriveling all sorts of federal facilities, especially those of the DEA. They were also spying on DEA agents and FBI agents. The “Israeli artists” also followed Arabs who would later be accused of involvement in the 9/11 plot.
By 2000, he was busy trying to find Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States, but he was soon taken out of action and assigned to deskwork. Janet Parker, a Seattle veterinarian and O’Neill friend, said that O’ Neill’s superior, Tom Picard, prevented O’Neill from getting a wire tap on Shadrack Manyathella, who was tied to probably double agent Ali Mohammed and Mohammed Atta, possible ring leader of 9/11. Parker and O’Neill were keeping track of one cell through her foster-daughter, who had previous ties with the terrorists.
John O’Neill resigned soon after the second Bush took power. O’Neill told two respected French investigators “All of the answers, all of the clues allowing us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia..” O’Neill was extremely frustrated by the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism , claiming the administration had also made it more difficult to investigate Saudis.
O’Neill retired on August 22, after thirty years of service. He immediately took up his duties as head of security at the World Trade Center on behalf of Kroll Associates and occupied his office on the 34th floor of the North Tower. While trying to rescue people in the South Tire, he lost his life. In November 2001, weapons inspector Richard Butler told TV investigator Paula Zahn, “The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush administration -- the present one, just shortly after assuming office slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan in order to do a deal with the Taliban on oil -- an oil pipeline across Afghanistan."
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