Today Turkish Weekly ran an investigative piece on the newly appointed chief of police in Osh-Kyrgyzstan. The new police chief Suyun Omurzakov, who used to be a deputy minister of interior, has been known as a highly influential drug lord, a leader of organized criminal groups, and he was the subject of a criminal investigation in the past:

In October 2009, the Kyrgyznews.com published an article pointing to a direct link between the then Osh city deputy chief of police S. Omurzakov and organized criminal groups engaged into drug trafficking, referring to this person as one of the most influential drug lords in the south of Kyrgyzstan.

Another report that investigates the June 2010 events developed by a coalition of Kyrgyz and Uzbek human right defenders “Oshskaya Initsiativa” (Osh Initiative) speaks of Omurzakov as a leader of an organized Kyrgyz criminal group, along with the mayor of Osh Melis Myrzakmatov, and crime bosses Almanbet Manapiyaev and Kadyr Dusanov (“Jengo”), etc., who were directly involved into plotting, leading, financing and participating in anti-Uzbek pogroms and distributing arms and ammunition among Kyrgyz militia.
…

 

Since 2001 Kyrgyzstan has been hosting the Transit Center at Manas (formerly Manas Air Base) as the transit point for US military personnel coming and going from Afghanistan, and pays 200 million for continued use of the facilities. For years the base has been riddled with scandals and fiascos.  Last December Boiling Frogs Post EyeOpener Investigative Report took a closer look at “The Manas Question: Drugs, Revolution & Terrorism on the Road to Afghanistan”:

But as important as the base is to the Kyrgyz people, the true nature of Manas remains an open question. For years, it has been at the centre of a string of allegations revolving around drug-running, terrorism and stage-managed revolutions.One of the most surprising revelations to emerge from Manas centered around the story of Abdolmalek Rigi, the former leader of the Jundullah terrorist organization who was captured by Iran onboard a flight from the United Arab Emirates to Kyrgyzstan.

Jundullah is a Pakistani tribal militant group that concerns itself with plight of Sunni Muslims in the predominantly Shiite Iran. Despite widely-acknowledged links to al-Qaeda, the CIA has been funding the group for years as a proxy force to commit attacks inside Iran, where it is believed to have killed and injured over 500 civilians since 2003.As Rigi himself told his Iranian captors, his story included the air base at Manas, which he claims the US uses to conduct covert meetings with people like himself.

You can watch the full report here at Boiling Frogs Post.

Last year, Peter Dale Scott wrote a lengthy article outlining how US intervention in Kyrgyzstan, in the name of protecting its strategic air base, has led to the destabilization of Kyrgyz politics and to a drastic increase in the flow of drugs through the country:

“…that there is a deep force behind drug, intelligence, and jihadi activity, would be consistent with the legacy of the CIA’s earlier interventions in Afghanistan, Laos, and Burma, and with America’s overall responsibility for the huge increases in global drug trafficking since World War II. It is important to understand that the more than doubling of Afghan opium drug production since the U.S. invasion of 2001 merely replicates the massive drug increases in Burma, Thailand, and Laos between the late 1940s and the 1970s. These countries also only became major sources of supply in the international drug traffic as a result of CIA assistance (after the French, in the case of Laos) to what would otherwise have been only local traffickers.

As early as 2001 Kyrgyzstan’s location had made it a focal point for transnational trafficking groups. According to a U.S. Library of Congress Report of 2002,

Kyrgyzstan has become a primary center of all aspects of the narcotics industry: manufacture, sale, and drug trafficking. Kyrgyzstan’s location adjacent to major routes across the Tajik mountains from Afghanistan combines with ineffectual domestic smuggling controls to attract figures from what a Kyrgyz newspaper report characterized as “an international organization uniting an unprecedentedly wide circle of members in the United States, Romania, Brazil, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan….These are no half-literate Tajik-Afghan drug runners, but professionals who have passed through a probation period in the mafia clans of the world narcotics system….”

Mr. Scott goes on to shine a further spotlight on the importance of Kyrgyzstan as a critical US “Transit Hub”:

The Badakhshan drug corridor is a matter of urgent concern for Russia. The Afghan opiates entering Russia via Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, the chief smuggling route, come from Badakhshan and other northeastern provinces. The reductions of the last three years in Afghan drug production, while inadequate overall, have minimally impacted the northeast, allowing opiate imports into Russia to continue to grow. Meanwhile the much-touted clearing of opium poppy from the Afghan northern provinces has in some cases simply seen a switch “from opium poppies to another illegal crop: cannabis, the herb from which marijuana and hashish are derived.”

As a result, according to U.N. officials, Afghanistan is now also the world’s biggest producer of hashish (another drug inundating Russia).⁶⁷ This has added to the flow of drugs up the Badakhshan-Tajik-Kyrgyz corridor. In short, the political skewing of America’s Afghan anti-drug policies is a significant reason for the major drug problems faced by Russia today.

…

IN July 2010 I wrote a lengthy investigative piece at Boiling Frogs Post on Kyrgyzstan, Bakiyev, Mina Corp and the connected US operatives:

When we talk about the strategic importance of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and other ‘stans’ we are not talking only about strategic in the sense of traditional resources-oil, we also talk about ‘narcotics resources’:

At the moment the stock of pure heroin in Afghanistan is estimated at slightly below 3,000 tons, and the revenues of Afghan drug suppliers reach around $3 bn annually. The international drug mafia earns at least $100 bn annually on heroin from Afghanistan, the money nourishing organized crime not only in Afghanistan but also across Central Asia – in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

And no, the real lords of these resources are not the farmers in Afghanistan or the mules transporting them. The real lords of heroin enterprises happen to be those who’ve been ‘groomed and planted’ to rule the source and transit nations, and the ones who rule those rulers who reside in the United States and other Western countries:

The revenues generated by the drug business are distributed among the criminal groups controlling various segments of the supply chain linking poppy farms to narcotics consumers. While Afghan poppy growers are enduring extreme poverty, the owners of the fields mostly reside in the US, Great Britain, and other Western democracies.

…

I encourage you to take the time and read the entire investigative report on Kyrgyzstan here. Once you do that you’ll understand why it makes perfect sense to have a drug boss lead Kyrgyzstan’s police force. It takes far more than a few mules to transport tens of billions of dollars worth of poppies-heroin. And it takes more than a third-world shack to house-base the loads as a transit hub. What you need is a major airbase and a massive hub. A la USA.

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The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is frequently described as a ‘private, not-for-profit foundation.’  At least, at its website, NED acknowledges funding from the US Congress.  In NED’s latest IRS Form 990 filing, over $135 million of their $136 million in revenue is identified as coming from government sources.

NED was founded in 1983.  It was founded not by private action, but by an Act of Congress.  Yet its authorizing legislation seems a bit ambiguous, stating in part that “Nothing in this title shall be construed to make the Endowment an agency or establishment of the United States government.” 

At its website, NED couches its goals in noble terms:  “NED is dedicated to fostering the growth of a wide range of democratic institutions abroad, including political parties, trade unions, free markets and business organizations, as well as the many elements of a vibrant civil society that ensure human rights, an independent media, and the rule of law.”

Following heated debate in its early years, and charges that it was dominated by Republican interests, NED has worked to involve labor unions in its support, and tries to communicate a broader, encompassing set of stated goals.   At its website today, NED emphasizes that “From its beginning, NED has remained steadfastedly bipartisan.  Created jointly be Republicans and Democrats, NED is governed by a board balanced between both parties and enjoys Congressional support across the political spectrum.”

Whether or not a ‘steadfastedly bipartisan’ organization is necessarily independent or unbiased remains a good question, however, in light of the proved ability of both our major parties to be captured by special interest groups. 

The current Chairman of the Board of NED is Richard Gephardt, formerly Majority as well as Minority Leader in the US Senate, and Senator from Missouri.  In 2005, after his final term in the Senate, Gephardt became a consultant and lobbyist.  One of his clients has been the Republic of Turkey.  Norm Coleman, formerly a Senator from Minnesota whose service included a role as Chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, is another board member.  The entire roster of board members for NED can be seen here.

NED has been open in its expression of concern about recent developments in Russia; for example, see its Eurasia overview here, and a listing of its grants for projects in Russia here.   Whether taxpayers should be funding these efforts, however noble they may appear, remains a matter of debate.   Noble-sounding goals can become a form of advertising for more intense, concentrated special interests.  And the energy-rich Central Asia region certainly has its share of attention from Americans who care primarily about their own wallets, and are happy to try to have taxpayer resources applied in ways that may make their own wallets fatter, at general expense.

Bill Bergman has 10 years of experience as a stock market analyst sandwiched around 13 years as an economist and financial markets policy analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He earned an M.B.A. as well as an M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago in 1990. Mr. Bergman is currently working with Social Movement Sciences LLC, a new enterprise developing evaluation and funding services for not-for-profit organizations.

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Israel emerged in the post-War period due to a great many complex domestic and international political reasons: to provide a place to direct the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, to allow the British to formally end the Mandate over Palestine which they held as their empire was crumbling, and to serve as a ‘buffer state’ for Western nations in the Middle East, a region of the world which was identified as a necessity to control in order to secure its vast oil resources and strategic position in relation to the East. America in the post-War period, however, was deeply divided in its strategic-imperial circles on whether or not to support the State of Israel, which did not become a stated and strong policy until the later 1950s. The State Department, in particular, full of individuals who were familiar with the politics and changes in the Middle East, were worried that support for Israel would threaten America’s interests in the region by antagonizing the Arab states and ruining America’s good reputation following the War. Others, however, won out in the end, largely by arguing that such a state in the Middle East would be a significant support to American interests, acting as a powerful ‘buffer’ against the spread of Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism. In its first years, Israel walked a balance of receiving support from both the United States and the Soviet Union. With the rise of Nasser in Egypt, however, America saw its imperial interest in supporting Israel.

The notion of a “Jewish State” as a ‘buffer’ for the West had been a long-held desire among imperial strategists and was even a popular means of promoting the Zionist cause from leaders within the Zionist movement. In the early 20^th century, the Zionists, keenly aware of the British and French imperial rivalry in the Arab East, “knew how to convince London of the value of a British-controlled Jewish buffer-state in Palestine for the protection of the Suez Canal and imperial communications to India.”[1] In 1907, the London Colonial Conference emphasized the increasing interest in establishing a ‘buffer state’ for British imperial interests in the Near East. The Conference agreed “to establish a strong but alien human bridge in the land that links Europe with the Old World which would constitute, near the Suez Canal, a hostile power to the people of the area and a friendly power to Europe and its interests.”[2]

British imperial strategists were increasingly alarmed with the growing “Arab Awakening” emerging in the context of Arab indigenous nationalism. These fears of a growing and developing Arab nationalism informed British Prime Minister Campbell Bannerman when he stated at the 1907 Colonial Conference:

Empires are formed, enlarged and stabilized so very little before they disintegrate and disappear… Do we have the means of preventing this fall, this crumbling, is it possible for us to put a halt to the destiny of European colonialism which at present is at a critical stage?[3]

The answer Bannerman received from the commission he established to look at the question, was that it was necessary

[to fight] against the Union of popular masses in the Arab region or the establishment of any intellectual, spiritual or historical link between them… [and thus recommended] all practical ways of dividing them as such as possible should be taught, and one way of doing so would be to construct a powerful, human ‘barrier’ foreign to the region – a bridge linking Asia and Africa – thus creating in this part of the world, and near the Suez Canal, a force friendly towards imperialism and hostile towards the inhabitants of the region.[4]

The report submitted to Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman recommended the following actions:

1) To promote disintegration, division and separation in the region.

2) To establish artificial political entities that would be under the authority of the imperialist countries.

3) To fight any kind of unity – whether intellectual, religious or historical – and taking practical measures to divide the region’s inhabitants.

4) To achieve this, it was proposed that a “buffer state” be established in Palestine, populated by a strong, foreign presence which would be hostile to its neighbors and friendly to European countries and their interests. [5]

In 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration as a statement of support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine (though it also stipulated that it was not to disadvantage or remove the Arab inhabitants of the land). In 1922, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution endorsing the Balfour Declaration, though the State Department subsequently issued a notice stating that the resolution “did not constitute a commitment to any foreign obligation or entanglement.”[6] In 1936, the Arabs resorted to armed resistance within Palestine, and the British responded by crushing them. During World War II, under the British Mandate of Palestine, the Zionists were “forming, training and arming their forces under the ‘British Shield’.” At the same time, during the War, Zionists increasingly focused on promoting their cause in America, taking note of the declining influence of Britain and rising dominance of America.[7]

It was during the 1940s that America increasingly recognized the importance of the oil resources of the Middle East to the developing plans and concepts of American global hegemony following the War. Thus, American approaches to the region were “developed within an anti-Arab nationalist and hegemonic framework designed to protect American access to oil.”[8]

The Zionist leadership recognized this vital interest to the United States, and thus began to promote the Zionist cause along similar lines of securing American access to Middle Eastern oil. In the 1940s, American oil companies were largely against the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, which they viewed as inimical to their interests in the region. In 1933, the Saudi King had granted the Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil exclusive rights over Saudi oil prospecting and extraction in the east of the country. The eventual formation of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) as a joint venture between the House of Saud and Standard Oil (the House of Rockefeller) took place in 1943. The oil companies stressed the importance of American security over and for Saudi Arabia. Zionist leaders in America held several meetings with oil company executives in an attempt to secure their support for a Jewish state, but to little avail. In fact, an oil industry publication, Oil Weekly, editorialized in 1946 that, “a Jewish state established with American support might endanger the ability of the US to assure a steady supply of oil from the Middle East.”[9]

In 1946, an agreement was established between the American government and Aramco to build a pipeline between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean coast, though this ran into problems with the U.S. Congress blocking such efforts, leading Aramco to decide to build the pipeline separate from U.S. involvement. As it was deduced, “the best place to offload the oil would be Haifa bay in the north of Palestine, and an agreement to this effect was signed with Sir Allan Jordan Cunningham, the British High Commissioner for Palestine.” Zionists, simultaneously, sought to advocate the pipeline project as necessarily transporting through areas of Jewish settlement in Palestine, and thus, the promotion of a Jewish state along the pipeline route “would introduce a stable element loyal to the United States into the project,” and reduce security costs for America.[10]

A confidential memo produced for the Jewish Agency in Palestine in 1947, in close proximity of the United Nations partition of Palestine, was titled, “The Jewish National Home and American Oil in the Middle East,” which stated that the purpose of the Zionist movement:

…was to establish in Palestine a democratic society whose citizens would enjoy the living standard of advanced western states, in an economy based on modern agriculture, industry and scientific development.[11]

In 1945, a profoundly prophetic article was written by an American philosopher, William Ernest Hocking, in the journal The Muslim World, in which he explained the emerging conflict of “Arab Nationalism and Political Zionism.” Hocking stressed that with the increased pressures in the U.S. Congress to support the Zionist cause, America may be rushing into a situation which it does not fully understand, stressing the need to weigh humanitarian concerns for the remaining European Jews following the Holocaust with the political objectives that exist in the complex circumstances of the Middle East, “and consider to what extent the proposed means will serve the humanitarian end, and to what extent it will serve other ends.” While acknowledging that “a place or places of refuge for Jews driven from Europe must be provided,” the question of Palestine needs a wider context.[12]

In examining the economic conditions upon which the Jews would find themselves thrust into within Palestine, Hocking explained that for a country roughly the size of New Hampshire, only half of the land is cultivable, and yet, planners desired “a program of intensive industrialization” to be undertaken. Hocking questioned the viability of imposing a “forced industrialization” on a location with little rainfall, requiring imported fuel, and few water resources as “an appropriate center for an industry based on the resources of the wider Near East.” Further, Hocking noted that while the notion of Palestine as the natural home for the Jewish people is based upon religious principles, “a Palestine heavily industrialized is a Palestine defaced from this point of view for Jew, Moslem, and Christian alike,”[13] as industrialization would be an affront to the spiritual significance of the location for all peoples.

Asserting that the reasons for the support of a Jewish state are not humanitarian, but political, Hocking examined how the Jewish National Fund in Palestine had increasingly deprived land from Arab labourers, as land granted to Jewish settlers was, by law, only allowed to be cultivated by Jewish labourers, and thus, it “cease[d] automatically to be a place of possible residence or work to those [Arab] laborers.” As Sir John Simpson reported on that matter:

It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either nor or at any time in the future… He is deprived forever from employment on that land… Nor can anyone help him by purchasing the land and restoring it to common use. The land is in mortmain and inalienable. [14]

Thus, wrote Hocking, “the Arab masses as a whole have felt their relative position deteriorating,” and the true question, then, was “of the attitude of the slowly advancing power,” that is, the Zionist power. “Its strength, intelligence, cash backing, splendid equipment, render it in Arab eyes the more formidable” because of this exclusionary and discriminatory attitude: “Hence they have come to face the future with concern.” As to the question, increasingly discussed within the West, as to why the Arabs and Muslims cannot simply grant this small piece of land to the Jews and go elsewhere, Hocking explained:

Those who are promoting this view do not explain what they propose to do with the extensive religious establishments of Islam in Palestine, including the great mosques and various schools. These establishments are not, like those of the Christians, primarily of a memorial nature: they are important educational and devotional centers for a living religion, within the region of its central activity. To maintain such establishments a considerable local population is required and assumed: to deport the million Arabs to Iraq would be another way of strangling these institutions. [15]

Further, in terms of those arguments which favour deportation due to the “immense domain” of the Arab people, Hocking explained that the domain, in fact, is mostly desert, with the “cultivable portions” being strewn around the rim, “whose northern arch is known as the Fertile Crescent.” Thus, the advantages of Palestine for Jew and Arab alike come from its position on the Mediterranean coast:

Commercially it belongs to the European Area. Palestine stands in an important strategic position between Europe and the budding industrial development, not so much of Palestine itself as of the lands behind Palestine, Arab lands which are entering on a new economic era… If the future economic importance of Palestine is to be, as I surmise, commercial rather than agricultural or industrial, its prosperity will depend to a large extent on its relations to this growingly important hinterland. And vice versa, the prosperity of that hinterland might depend to a considerable extent on its relations with the financial powers, the warehouses, and the commercial lanes centering in Palestine and vicinity.[16]

This emphasizes the notion of a Jewish state in Palestine as a buffer between the West and the Near East, between the imperial powers and the growing spread of Arab nationalism. Thus for the Arabs, leaving Palestine to exclusive Zionist control would “amount to acceptance of a barrier between them and Europe at the outset of their newer national career.” Yet, even with all of the Palestinian and Arab desires for, like the Jews themselves, a “new beginning,” they are increasingly portrayed as “nomadic,” “backward,” and “half-civilized,” ignoring the fact that “it was the Arabs who for six hundred years preserved the classical culture of Greece for a dark Europe,” or that they are still emanating out of the oppressive domination of four centuries of Turkish rule. Thus, what was being asked of the Arabs was to accept their entire potential for progress as being entirely dependent upon the political state of Zionism, which had thus far shown enormous animosity and disregard for the Arab peoples within Palestine. Hocking concluded by writing:

I believe the political Zionists at this moment as distinct from the cultural Zionists who have built the noble Hebrew University and who know what a National Home must be, – I believe the political Zionists to be the chief enemies of the cause of Zionism as well as of the Jewish interests in the world of tomorrow. What can they hope to gain by extricating their brethren from the prejudices of Europe only to build a community in Palestine which has to be protected by Western force (and if we intervene, then by American force also) because it is cradled in an environment of distrust and fear cultivated by their own methods of realizing a misplaced nationalistic ambition? [17]

In the Truman administration in 1947, as the United Nations recommended the partition of Palestine into two states, the CIA released an assessment of the situation in one of its first major reports, which predicted that if a Jewish state were created, “war would break out between Arabs and Jews, and the Arabs would win.” While the former turned out to be true, the latter, of course, did not. However, without stating it outright, the CIA report essentially led to the assumed conclusion that, as Thomas Lippman wrote, “partition would be detrimental to the long-term interests of the United States and would ultimately augment rather than alleviate the suffering of the world’s Jews.”[18]

The United States, in 1947, had reached a point where a decision finally had to be made on the issue of a Jewish state in Palestine. Within Palestine itself, Jewish gangs (such as the Hagana, the Irgun, and the Stern Gang), “were waging a guerrilla war against the British,” and thus, the issue became central to the United Nations and global politics. In the White House, some of Truman’s closest advisers supported the Zionists, though his national security and foreign policy advisers, especially within the State Department, had opposed partition and the formation of a Jewish state, arguing that, “such an outcome would alienate the Arabs, jeopardize American strategic and economic interests throughout the Middle East, open the door to the political penetration of the Arab world by the Soviet Union, and possibly lead to the loss of the American oil bonanza in Saudi Arabia.” As the State Department chief for the Bureau of Near East and Africa Affairs, Loy Henderson, wrote to Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1945:

In case the government of the United States should continue to press for the mass immigration of Jews into Palestine at this time, on humanitarian or other grounds, much of the work done in the Near East in recent years in building up respect for, and confidence in, the United States and in increasing American prestige, will be undone… The mere resentment of the Near Eastern peoples towards the United States on the ground that we have decided to disregard the Arab viewpoint with regard to Palestine would be unpleasant… It would be much more serious, however, if we should give them ground to believe that we do not live up to our firm promises already given. [19]

Henderson here was referring to the promise from the United States to engage in “full consultation” with the Arab states, primarily Saudi Arabia, in the lead up to any potential decision the United States would make on the issue. As the CIA report emphasized, partition would “solve nothing and would only intensify support for Zionist expansion,” and the report further stressed the importance of regional implications for the Arab states:

Arab nationalism is the strongest political force in the Arab world. It grew up in secret societies under Ottoman rule, came out into the open in the Arab Revolt of World War I, and has been the major factor in the independence movement in the Arab world ever since. Because of the strong ties between the various Arab states, political developments in any one country are of vital concern to Arabs everywhere. Palestinian independence is, consequently, the major aim not only of the Palestinian Arabs but also of Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Transjordanians, Egyptians and Saudi Arabians. It would be political suicide for any Arab government to ignore this situation. [20]

Tellingly, the report also predicted that the Arabs “fear that the Jews will consolidate their position through unlimited immigration and that they will attempt to expand until they become a threat to the newly won independence of each of the other Arab countries.” The CIA felt that this perception was, indeed, correct: “In the long run no Zionists in Palestine will be satisfied with the territorial arrangements of the partition settlement.” The CIA felt that such a partition would inevitably create “instability and hostility” in the Arab world.[21] In the immediate aftermath of partition, the CIA report predicted that “war would break out” between the Arabs and the Jews, that the Jewish populations in other Arab nations would be in danger, “American oil interests would be damaged,” and that the Zionists would “continue to wage a strong propaganda campaign in the US and Europe,” and that, “whatever the actual circumstances may be,” the Arabs would, said the report, “be accused of aggression,” which would “doubtless continue to influence the US public, and the US government [could], consequently, be forced into actions which [would] further complicate and embitter its relations with the entire Arab world,” and finally, the Soviet Union could make considerable political gains in the region as a result. Further, the report stated that eventually the Arabs could turn to “religious fanaticism,” which could become “an extremely powerful force.”[22]

Where the report was wrong, however, was in predicting that the Jewish state would fail in a war with the Arab states, having mistakenly underestimated the organizational capabilities of the military Zionist groups in Palestine, as well as over-estimating the cooperation of the Arab states, which actually had many suspicions of one another. As early as 1943, a special envoy dispatched by President Roosevelt to the Arab leaders to discuss Palestine, Colonel Harold Hoskins, stated that, “only by military force can a Zionist state be imposed upon the Arabs.”[23] This logic, of course, was not lost upon the Zionist military and strategic leaders, who had immense national ambitions.

These ambitions, however, were not merely political, but racial. In a disturbing parallel with the Nazi German state from which many European Jews would later escape to the Holy Land, several Zionist leaders were themselves drawing up plans for a program of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Palestine. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappé documented, Plan D, as it was called, “was the fourth and final version of vaguer plans outlining the fate that was in store for the native population of Palestine.” The first three plans involved obscure and vague means for dealing with the Palestinians, whereas the fourth plan – the final plan – was a detailed military document written and plotted out by less than a dozen Zionist leaders, led by David Ben-Gurion. Plan D was emphatic and adamantine in its purpose: to remove the Palestinian population from the land. Ethnic cleansing, as defined by the U.S. State Department, is “the systematic and forced removal of the members of an ethnic group from communities in order to change the ethnic composition of a given region.”[24] By definition, then, the Zionist leaders were preparing a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People’s Book Project.

Notes

[1]            Ibrahim Ibrahimi, “Review: The Making of the Jewish State,” Journal of Palestine Studies (Vol. 1, No. 1, Autumn 1971), page 122.

[2]            Adnan Amad, “History and Fiction in Boasson’s Comments on Galtung,” Journal of Peace Research (Vol. 10, No ½, 1973), page 151.

[3]            Anwarul Haque Haqqi, West Asia Since Camp David (Mittal Publications, 1988), pages 104-105.

[4]            Ibid, page 105.

[5]            Robert I. Rotberg, Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict: History’s Double Helix (Indiana University Press, 2006), page 220.

[6]            Michael C. Hudson, “To Play the Hegemon: Fifty Years of US Policy Toward the Middle East,” Middle East Journal (Vol. 50, No. 3, Summer 1996), pages 333-334.

[7]            Ibrahim Ibrahimi, “Review: The Making of the Jewish State,” Journal of Palestine Studies (Vol. 1, No. 1, Autumn 1971), pages 124-125.

[8]            Ibrahim I. Ibrahim, “The American-Israeli Alliance: Raison d’etat Revisited,” Journal of Palestine Studies (Vol. 15, No. 3, Spring 1986), page 23.

[9]            Zohar Segev, “Struggle for Cooperation and Integration: American Zionists and Arab Oil, 1940s,” Middle Eastern Studies (Vol. 42, No. 5, September 2006), pages 820-821.

[10]            Ibid, pages 822-823.

[11]            Ibid, pages 824-825.

[12]            William Ernest Hocking, “Arab Nationalism and Political Zionism,” The Muslim World (Vol. 35, No. 3, July 1945), page 216.

[13]            Ibid, pages 216-217.

[14]            Ibid, pages 219-220.

[15]            Ibid, page 220.

[16]            Ibid, pages 220-222.

[17]            Ibid, pages 222-223.

[18]            Thomas W. Lippman, “The View From 1947: The CIA and the Parititon of Palestine,” Middle East Journal (Vol. 61, No. 1, Winter 2007), page 17.

[19]            Ibid, pages 18-19.

[20]            Ibid, pages 19-21.

[21]            Ibid, pages 21-22.

[22]            Ibid, pages 22-23.

[23]            Ibid, pages 25-26.

[24]            Ilan Pappé, “The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies (Vol. 36, No. 1, Autumn 2006), pages 6-7.

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The Manas Air Base, situated near the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, has played a key role in the increasingly important Central Asian region since its inception. First opened in December 2001 to support the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the Manas Air Base plays host to the US Ninth Air Force and serves primarily as a transit point for US goods and personnel coming and going from Afghanistan. As part of the so-called Northern Distribution Network, a key supply route for NATO troops in Afghanistan that bypasses the now-blockaded Pakistani borders, Manas continues to be a strategically vital asset for the US. At the same time, the base has also been a point of contention with the locals for years, and the controversy doesn’t seem likely to die down any time soon.

As important as the base is to the Kyrgyz people, the true nature of Manas remains an open question. For years, it has been at the centre of a string of allegations revolving around drug-running, terrorism and stage-managed revolutions.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting Kyrgyzstan’s Manas Air Base, and exploring its reported position as a center where the US conducts covert meetings and operations with various militant Islamic groups such as Pakistani Jundullah, its importance as a major transit point for Western controlled and routed Afghan heroin, the true nature of the Tulip Revolution, the incoming Kyrgyz president’s latest threats to close the base, and the nation’s position on a fault line in the tectonics of geopolitics.

Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here:

*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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A cohesive American imperial strategy to manage the “Grand Area” of Latin America in the post-War period was established by the newly formed Eisenhower administration in the National Security Council’s draft paper, “U.S. Policy With Respect to Latin America,” in January of 1953. In March, a final draft was submitted as NSC 144, a report on “United States Objectives and Courses of Action With Respect to Latin America.” As the strategy document was produced through the NSC, the highest policy-planning body in the American government, it necessarily involved the participation of high-level officials from the Departments of State, Defense, Treasury, the C.I.A., the Mutual Security Agency, and the Office of Defense Mobilization.[1]

Issued on March 18, 1953, the “Statement of Policy by the National Security Council” outlined the primary threat posed to American interests in Latin America:

There is a trend in Latin America toward nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the masses of the population. Concurrently, there is an increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses, with the result that most Latin American governments are under intense domestic political pressures to increase production and to diversify their economies… [Thus, a] realistic and constructive approach to this need which recognizes the importance of bettering conditions for the general population, is essential to arrest the drift in the area toward radical and nationalistic regimes. The growth of nationalism is facilitated by historic anti-U.S. prejudices and exploited by Communists [emphasis added].[2]

Thus, the true threat – far from the “strategic sham” of Cold War rhetoric (as Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to it) – was the actualized and very realistic challenge to American domination posed by “nationalistic regimes” which support “the masses of the population” of various Latin American countries. Worse still, the masses were demanding “immediate improvement in [their] low living standards,” thus threatening the traditional elite-dominated system of control and subordination which had been established in Latin America for so many centuries. These “radical and nationalistic regimes” had to be prevented from meeting the demands of the masses. Almost as an afterthought, the document stated that – by the way – these “radical and nationalistic regimes” are given strength “by historic anti-U.S. prejudices and exploited by Communists,” as if to simply brush over the immediate imperial threat with the common rhetoric. The use of the word “prejudices” also portends to portray such views of the United States as unwarranted and unjustified, as if the United States were the victim. Indeed, for the strategists in the National Security Council, the threat of radical nationalism had the potential to victimize them of their vast imperial domains.

Thus, the NSC-144 document listed a number of “Objectives” for the United States to undertake in this highly threatening situation where the poor masses of an entire continent no longer wanted to be subjected to the ruthless domination of a tiny domestic and foreign minority. These ‘objectives’ included: “Hemisphere solidarity in support of our world policies, particularly in the UN and other international organizations,” which, in other words, means towing the line with the United States in regards to American foreign policy around the world; “An orderly political and economic development in Latin America so that the states in the area will be more effective members of the hemisphere system and increasingly important participants in the economic and political affairs of the free world,” which can be roughly translated as supporting the development of a Western-oriented middle class which would support the elites and keep the lower classes – the masses – at bay; “The safeguarding of the hemisphere… against external aggression through the development of indigenous military forces and local bases necessary for hemisphere defense,” which implies allowing America to establish military bases throughout the continent – naturally for “defensive” purposes – in offensively defending America’s resources (which happen to be in other countries), as well as establishing local military proxies through which America can exert regional hegemony. Further objectives included: “The reduction and elimination of the menace of internal Communist or other anti-U.S. subversion,” which equates to purging and liquidating the countries of dissenters, a patently fascistic policy objective; “Adequate production in Latin America of, and access by the United States to, raw materials essential to U.S. security,” which means that American corporations get unhindered access to exploit the region’s resources; and “The ultimate standardization of Latin American military organization, training, doctrine and equipment along U.S. lines,” which implies making every country’s military structure and apparatus of internal repression dependent upon U.S. support, and thus, it would ensure a structure of dependency between domestic elites and the American Empire, as the domestic elites would need the military and police apparatus to repress the “masses” whom they rule over and exploit. Therefore, America would need to essentially subsidize Latin America’s systems and structures of repression.[3]

In identifying “courses of action” to achieve America’s “objectives” in Latin America, the NSC document stated that the United States could achieve a “greater degree of hemisphere solidarity” – i.e., hegemony – if it utilizes the Organization of American States (OAS) “as a means of achieving our objectives,” because this would “avoid the appearance of unilateral action and identify our interests with those of the other American states.” It further recommended undertaking consultations with Latin American states, “whenever possible,” before America took unilateral action within Latin America. The “consultations,” it should not be confused, were not designed to weigh the opinions of Latin American states in the decision-making processes of the empire, but rather to explain “as fully as security permits the reasons for our decisions and actions.” So essentially, it’s more of a courtesy call, a polite announcement of imperial actions.[4]

Importantly, one major “course of action” included the encouraging – via ‘consultation,’ assistance, and “other available means” – of “individual and collective action against internal subversive activities by communists and other anti-U.S. elements.” What this amounts to, then, as a “course of action,” was for America to undertake a comprehensive program aimed at advising (“consulting”), financing, arming, and organizing Latin American states to internally and regionally oppress, control, or eliminate dissidents and activists. Not unrelated, of course, the “courses of action” also stated that the United States should work to “encourage” Latin American nations to “recognize” (i.e., submit) to the idea that the “best” way to “development” for them is through “private enterprise,” which required “a climate which will attract private investment,” which meant to grant favourable concessions, low tariffs, and easy exploitation of resources to foreign conglomerates, namely, American. The document even directly recommended simplifying “customs procedures and reduction of trade barriers” in order to “[make] it easy for Latin American countries to sell their products to us,” which is kind of like saying, “If I give you a large loan, it will make it easier for you to pay a higher interest to me.” What it really implies, then, is not to improve conditions for Latin American countries in “selling” products, but in making it “easier” for Northern countries to buy products, as in, making them much cheaper, and thus, Latin American countries will get less for them, and their resources could be appropriated with greater ease than previously. Naturally, the “courses of action” in the economic realm also stipulated that the United States should “assist” Latin America in playing “a more vigorous and responsible role in economic development of the area.”[5]

The notion of “responsible” development means that the nations would not be attempting to nationalize their resources or impose strict trade controls over their national wealth and products so as to industrialize and develop internally (as the United States did following the American Revolution), because this is “irresponsible” behaviour. It is irresponsible precisely because it is effective in the process of national development, as evidenced by the fact that every major industrial economy in the early 20^th century had been established through state protections and interventions into the economy, and this is what allowed them to rise as industrial giants and become powerful global powers. Thus, the notion of a ‘Third World’ state possibly becoming a powerful industrial nation in its own right is not a “responsible” way to establish oneself as a vassal state for a regional and global empire, which requires its protectorates to be dependent, not self-sufficient.

Conveniently for the United States, then, which articulates the rhetoric of “free market” capitalism (which it does not practice, with heavy state subsidies, trade restrictions, and market controls), the Soviet Union – its new ideological ‘enemy’ – overtly imposed and openly advocated state control of the economy (though in practice it relied quite heavily upon American industrial corporations for support), and thus, any state which nationalized resources or imposed state controls and interventions in the economy could be said to be following the path of the Soviet Union, and subsequently be presented to the domestic American populace as a “Communist threat.” This is, indeed, exactly what took place throughout the Cold War period.

On this very note, the NSC-144 document directly stated that in relation to its propaganda efforts in the region – “Information and Cultural Programs for Latin American states” – the United States “should be specifically directed to the problems and psychology of specific states in the area,” of which the objective would be to ‘alert’ these states and their populations “to the dangers of Soviet imperialism and communist and other anti-U.S. subversion,” and thus, indirectly “convincing them that their own self-interest requires an orientation of Latin American policies to our objectives.” In other words, unless following the strict dictates of the United States, these states will be branded as Communist or “subversive.” Subversive elements, as the NSC-144 document stipulates, were to be dealt with largely through military means. The United States recommended as a “course of action” to “provide military assistance to Latin America,” which would “be designed to reduce to a minimum the diversion of U.S. forces for the maintenance of hemispheric security,” or in other words, building up domestic Latin American military and police forces so that the American military won’t have to directly respond to every threat to its hegemony in the region. On this note, it was also vital to ensure that America had several military bases in the region, and, as the document suggested, “the United States should take political, economic or military action, as appropriate, to insure the continued availability of U.S. bases in Latin America.”[6] What this implied was that if U.S. military bases were threatened in the region, that was reason enough to take military action against any entity which challenged the presumed permanence of the bases.

NSC-144 even directly stated that, “where necessary,” the United States should directly protect certain resources and industries and their transportation routes to the United States, but that each Latin American country “should organize its own civil defense.” One example of this would be the American bases along the Panama Canal. The United States should also, according to the document, “establish where appropriate, military training missions in Latin American nations,” as well as “to provide training in the United States for selected Latin American personnel.” Ultimately, then, a key aim of U.S. military assistance to the region was to “seek the ultimate standardization along U.S. lines of the organization, training, doctrine and equipment of Latin American armed forces,”[7] a very typical imperial phenomenon, along the notion of God creating man “in his own image.”

The NSC-144 document of 1953 and its appendage in NSC 5432/1 of 1954 were incredibly important in establishing a method and process of United States hegemony in Latin America during the Cold War period. With the Eisenhower administration in power in 1953, America took a hard-line approach to Latin America. His Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, stated – following the Caracas Conference in 1954 which adopted an “anticommunist resolution” for the OAS – that the United States could “operate more effectively to meet Communist subversion in the American Republics.”[8] One of the most important examples of American imperialism in Latin America almost immediately followed NSC-144, with the 1954 coup in Guatemala.

Guatemala: Democracy is not in the “American Interest”

In 1950, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was elected President of Guatemala under the popularly supported pretense of continuing socio-economic reforms such as instituting land reform, an extremely popular policy among the people. President Eisenhower identified the ‘threat’ posed by the Arbenz regime to the “American interest” when he wrote that, “the Arbenz government announced its intentions, under an agrarian reform law, to seize about 225,000 acres of unused United Fruit Company land.”[9]

The Council on Foreign Relations had many interests in the issues presented by Guatemala, as the Council’s early “studies on Latin America had focused precisely on United States economic interests there.” As Shoup and Minter wrote:

In 1952 and 1953, Spruille Braden, former assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs and a consultant for the United Fruit Company, led a Council study group on Political Unrest in Latin America… the first meeting, in the fall of 1952, was devoted to Guatemala, with John McClintock of the United Fruit Company as the discussion leader.[10]

One member of the study group wrote in his journal, following one of the meetings, that “the Council on Foreign Relations the other night agreed generally that the Guatemalan government was Communist,” and that the United States “should welcome” the overthrow of the Arbenz government, “and if possible guide it into a reasonably sound channel.” Those most involved in deciding U.S. policy towards Guatemala within the U.S. government were also members of the Council:

Most important were President Eisenhower himself, the CIA head Allen Dulles, who continued on the Council’s board of directors at the same time, and Frank Wisner, another Council member who was the CIA’s deputy director for plans (the man in charge of clandestine operations).[11]

It should also be noted that U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, while not a member of the Council, was the brother of Council board member and CIA Director Allen Dulles. Arbenz in Guatemala represented exactly the “threat” as identified in NSC-144 of, “nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the masses of the population,” and was thus considered to be a “radical and nationalistic” regime. The immense threat posed by such a regime to America was in the Arbenz government’s willingness to direct its policies to meet “an increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses,” as the NSC-144 identified as the key trend in Latin America.

Operation PBSUCCESS, authorized by Eisenhower in August 1953, boasted a $2.7 million budget for “psychological warfare and political action” and “subversion,” among the other components of a small paramilitary war.[12] As the CIA officer in charge of the operation, E. Howard Hunt (later infamous for the Watergate burglary), explained in an interview some years later, “What we [the CIA] wanted to do was to have a terror campaign… to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops, much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland, Belgium and Poland at the onset of World War Two.”[13]

In December of 1953, an organization established by the U.S. government called the National Planning Association on the Guatemala Situation produced a report proclaiming that, “Communist infiltration in Guatemala constitutes a threat not only to the freedom of that country but to the security of all Western Hemisphere nations.” With twenty-two committee members signing this statement, fifteen of them were Council on Foreign Relations members.[14]

In short, the Council on Foreign Relations made the argument that the “improvement in the low living standards of the masses” presented a Communist threat to the entire Western Hemisphere and threatened the “freedom” of Guatemala itself. While the notion of “Communism” here is a metaphor for “radical nationalism,” such nationalistic regimes which were listening to and acting on the needs of the “masses of the population” – what can be called democracy – are indeed a major security threat to the United States and its hegemony over the entire region, and this is no metaphor.

It is not an exaggeration to say that a comparatively small country presents such an enormous threat to American regional and even global hegemony if it were to actually meet the “demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses,” and this is so not in spite of the country being a small Central American nation, but because it was a small, seemingly insignificant nation to the course of global affairs. This is precisely so because if a small nation could successfully chart its own path separate from the United States, especially one so geographically close to the United States, it could serve as an example to other nations in the region and around the world as presenting a method of independence and autonomy which could become increasingly attractive, especially to the “masses” of the world. Such an example could not be permitted to exist, least of all in such close regional proximity to the United States, for if a nation could successfully resist American dominance in its own “backyard” – as Latin America was established to be with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 – then it could happen anywhere. Nothing would appear to be a greater threat to a large global power than a successful resistance by a small, local actor: David and Goliath.

In regards to U.S. policy toward Guatemala, the ties between the government, United Fruit Company and the Council on Foreign Relations were well established so as to create a consensus on defining the “national interest” as seeking to replace the Arbenz regime:

Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, a future President of Guatemala, recorded that his cooperation in the coup was sought by Walter Turnbell, a former executive of United Fruit, who came accompanied by two CIA agents… [U.S. Secretary of State] John Foster Dulles, while at [Wall Street law firm] Sullivan and Cromwell, had represented the United Fruit Company in negotiating a contract with Guatemala some years before. [Assistant Secretary of State] John M. Cabot’s brother was a director and former president of the United Fruit Company. Spruille Braden [at the State Department] served as a United Fruit Company consultant. Former CIA director Walter Bedell Smith, after leaving the government, became a director of United Fruit, as did Robert D. Hill, a participant in the operation as ambassador to Costa Rica.[15]

The Council itself also had extensive ties to United Fruit Company, with three Council members serving on the board of United Fruit, not to mention the Dulles brothers who were very close with the Council and United Fruit, while being in the key positions of CIA Director and Secretary of State.[16]

Propaganda as Policy

Another major facet of the significance of the U.S. operation to overthrow the democratic government of Guatemala was not simply that it was the first post-World War II U.S. coup in Latin America, but that it involved a monumental propaganda campaign aimed at shaping domestic American opinion, which would ultimately come to define much of the methods and substance of U.S. domestic propaganda throughout the Cold War. Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and the “Father of Public Relations” was pivotal in this program.

Bernays was hired as a public relations counsel for United Fruit Company in the early 1940s in order to help sell bananas during the winter. Bernays began finding new ways to sell bananas by marketing them not simply as a product to be consumed, but as a healthy life choice, and he further emphasized the need that United Fruit not simply educate North Americans about bananas, but about Latin America in general. Thus, Bernays established the Middle America Information Bureau, which was “in part an honest attempt to educate, providing scholars, journalists, and others with the latest information about a nearby place that most Americans knew almost nothing about.” However, Bernays wrote a memo to all employees of the Bureau that, “all material released by this office must be approved by responsible executives of the United Fruit Company.” The information that informed the articles produced by Bureau staff was provided directly by United Fruit.[17]

Bernays had early persuaded the United Fruit Company to begin framing the reformist democratic government of Arbenz as Communist, and had launched a campaign of planting stories in the media embracing this perspective. Articles began appearing in the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, the New York Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek, and even the left-leaning progressive magazine, The Nation, which “was especially satisfying to Bernays, who believed that winning the liberals over was essential to winning America over.”[18]

In January of 1952, Bernays took a group of journalists on a two-week tour of the region. The trip was “under the [United Fruit] Company’s careful guidance and, of course, company expense… The trips were ostensibly to gather information, but what the press would hear and see was carefully staged and regulated by the host.”[19] Bernays had control over media information on Guatemala up to and during the CIA coup. The government in Guatemala that came to power then ruled for decades with an iron fist “as it condemned hundreds of thousands of people (mostly members of the country’s impoverished Maya Indian majority) to dislocation, torture and death.”[20]

The achievement of scaring the American public with the threat of Communism proved to be incredibly successful in terms of creating public support for regime change in Guatemala. Thus, in 1954, when the exiled army officer in Honduras, Carlos Castillo Armas, had crossed the border into Guatemala with two hundred men who had been recruited and trained (and armed) by the CIA, Bernays framed this invasion in the American media as an “army of liberation.”[21] These tactics of media manipulation and the shaping of public opinion would come to define the Cold War propaganda strategy of the United States. For decades to come, every liberation struggle, every government, and every policy of foreign peoples and nations that threatened the dominance of U.S. hegemony and in particular, U.S. economic interests, would henceforth be framed as ‘Communist.’ As such, any force or process set against the ‘Communists’ in these regions would be seen as “liberators” and “democratic freedom fighters,” whether the strategy was that of fomenting rebellion, supporting death squads and terrorists, undertaking coups, “terror campaigns,” or outright war.

The underlying and far-reaching implications of this has been to create a historically unique situation in which the home population of the imperial nation (in this case, Americans) are subjected to a process of indoctrination so profound that they are in a state of ‘imperial denial.’ As such, Americans see their country and its role in the world as exceptional, in that they do not by and large accept or even contemplate the imperial nature of America and its policies, but rather are imbued with a type of ‘manifest destiny’ in which they believe that America is the “greatest nation” on earth, and thus have the ‘responsibility’ to ‘protect’ the world as a type of global policeman. This is unique in the history of empires, which until the dawn of the American empire, never denied their imperial nature as such (though they still justified it in various rhetorical ploys), nor were their populations entirely ignorant of their countries’ imperial status.

The Regional Politics of Global Dominance

As a result of the coup in Guatemala, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Henry F. Holland, stated that America “had paid a price in terms of prestige and good will” in the eyes of many Latin American nations and peoples.[22] It is telling to note the perspectives of several other Latin American nations and politicians in the lead-up to the Guatemala coup in late June of 1954. The United States learned an important lesson from their intervention in Guatemala, best examined with the case of internal politics in Chile, an important U.S. ally in the region, that the U.S. had to cultivate friendly perceptions and undertake propaganda efforts within Latin American countries, not simply within the United States itself.

Chile was an important source of resources for the United States, but in the early 1950s, its economy was in deep trouble, which then began to translate into political trouble for the United States. Chile elected a new president, Carlos Ibañez del Campo in 1952 (who had previously been a dictator in Chile from 1927-1931), with a priority to deal with Chile’s economic problems, though in ways that frustrated American interests. America appointed a new Ambassador to Chile, Willard L. Beaulac, who saw Chile’s economic problems as a threat to “solvency but also the stability of its political institutions.” As the Chilean public became increasingly dissatisfied with Ibañez’s handling of the economic situation, U.S. officials worried that he may try to do away with the democratic model and resort back to his dictatorial ways, modeling himself along the lines of Argentina’s Juan Peron, a populist dictatorship disliked by America. In the 1952 Chilean elections, Ibañez had framed himself as a “Peronist populist,” running as “the General of Hope.” Thus, the-then Ambassador to Chile declared, “The grave danger to Chile, and to us, is still Ibañez.” Further, a Socialist senator from northern Chile, Salvador Allende, increased in popularity, and declared: “If the President of the Republic does not consider himself capable of resolving [Chile’s] problems and fulfilling the promises he made, he would do well to take the democratic course of calling the country to resolve the problem through new elections.”[23]

Ibañez began courting the dictatorial path. His Undersecretary of Defense, Colonel Horacio Arce, approached U.S. Ambassador Beaulac “about how the United States would react to an Ibañez-led authoritarian regime,” to which Beaulac stated the American preference for a democratic regime. Ibañez had twice stated personally to the American Ambassador that he intended to impose an authoritarian regime. In Chile, American officials at the State Department did not view Communists as a real threat to the country, despite having one of the largest Communist organizations in Latin America (the others being in Brazil and Cuba). In 1948, the Chilean Congress had passed the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy, “which banned the Chilean Communist party and removed all Communists from the voter rolls.”[24] Thus, the ‘threat’ was generally contained.

With the Eisenhower administration’s focus on handling Guatemala and expanding U.S. actions against the Arbenz government, it then attempted to mobilize other Latin American countries to support its policies. The U.S. undertook a policy recommendation right out of the playbook – NSC paper 144 – which stated that the United States could achieve a “greater degree of hemisphere solidarity” if it utilized the Organization of American States (OAS) “as a means of achieving our objectives,” because this would “avoid the appearance of unilateral action and identify our interests with those of the other American states.”[25] Thus, for the OAS’s approaching Tenth Inter-American Conference, set in Caracas, Venezuela in March of 1954 (one year after the final draft of NSC-144 was published), U.S. officials proposed the addition of an “anti-Communist” resolution. This resolution stated:

That the domination or control of the political institutions of any American state by the international Communist movement… would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and political independence of the American states, endangering the peace of America, and would call for appropriate action in accordance with existing treaties.[26]

The treaty referred to specifically was the 1947 Rio Treaty, which stipulated that “if two thirds of member nations agreed, the OAS could take action against the nation that posed the threat.” One historian, Stephen Rabe, contended that the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles – with this resolution – essentially expanded “the Monroe Doctrine to include outlawing foreign ideologies in the American Republics.” The greatest opposition to this resolution at Caracas, interestingly, came from the Chilean delegation of Left and Center politicians and representatives, who openly opposed the Caracas Conference itself, as well as U.S. policy in Guatemala. One Chilean politician pointed out that the OAS should be concerned with the internal policies of the region’s dictatorships, not with Guatemala, and noted the irony of holding the conference in Venezuela, ruled by a “ruthless” dictator, General Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Eduardo Frei of Chile’s Falange party refused to attend the Chilean delegation to Caracas, stating:

I do not believe that the Department of State would be so bold as to suggest, least of all, an intervention into the internal affairs of [Guatemala] which is at liberty to determine freely its own destiny. If [the Department of State] did, all democratic forces of America would rise up to repudiate the aggression and to make common cause with Guatemala.[27]

Apparently, he underestimated the extent of America’s domestic propaganda system, which presented the “terror campaign” against a democratically elected and incredibly popular government as a victory for freedom and democracy. Orwellian artistry at its most malevolent.

Two weeks prior to the Caracas Conference, a group was organized within Chile’s Chamber of Deputies, led by the Chamber’s president, Baltasar Castro, as well as a number of Socialist party members and other radicals, calling themselves the “Friends of Guatemala,” who expressed their support for Arbenz in Guatemala, as well as their opposition to U.S. policy. Other “Friends of Guatemala” organizations appeared in El Salvador, Cuba, and Mexico, but Chile’s was the most influential and best mobilized, as they focused on the issues of “self-determination, Arbenz’s status as a democratically elected president, and the United States abusing its power to pressure smaller neighbors.” Baltasar Castro, as leader of the “Friends of Guatemala,” attracted negative attention from the U.S. embassy in Santiago, Chile. As their criticism intensified, other Latin American neighbours increasingly expressed reservations regarding the OAS meeting and specifically the anti-Communist resolution. Thus, they amended the resolution to stipulate that instead of taking “direct action,” they would “call for future consultations on additional measures,” and Chile, as well as several other nations, then voted in favour of the resolution, believing that it no longer stood for “unilateral or collective intervention” against Guatemala. A member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff who attended the meeting observed that Latin America had “more fear of U.S. interventionism than of Guatemalan communism.”[28]

Salvador Allende, an important Socialist party politician in Chile, had not yet reached the national political stage in Chile (as he would later), but was generally considered by U.S. officials in the region to be “a friend,” whom they thought could act as a significant counter-weight to Ibañez. However, Allende had been increasingly critical of poverty and malnutrition among the poor and lower classes of society. This was tolerated by American officials who felt Allende had “no use” for Communism. Thus, as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Edward G. Miller stated, Allende could “do substantial damage to Ibañez,” so he was tolerated. With the 1954 Caracas conference, Allende was provided “with a new political issue,” and began speaking out against U.S. policy in the region, stating that the anti-Communist resolution at the OAS conference was “nothing more than an instrument of the Cold War,” and it did “not reflect any of the fundamental concerns of the peoples of this part of the continent.” Further, Allende admonished Secretary of State John Foster Dulles for leaving the OAS conference “ten minutes after obtaining” the acceptance of the anti-Communist resolution, which exposed, according to Allende, how the conference was an instrument “for approving the anti-Communist resolution of Mr. Dulles.” As Allende presciently observed, American propaganda gave:

the impression that the mountains of [our] countries are infested with communists, that our coasts are full of communist ships, that the small country of Guatemala threatens the existence of the largest of the bourgeois countries. Like David and Goliath. But Guatemala does not have a sling. Its only sling is showing the road to follow for introducing progress and liberty into the nations of America.[29]

That was, however, certainly enough to make an enemy of America. After all, “introducing progress and liberty into the nations of America” is inimical to the interests of the United States, which sought to control and dominate the region and exploit its resources under the obedient command of local elites and with the ultimate pacification and submission of the “masses.”

Following the Caracas conference, as some State Department officials observed, “anti-U.S. sentiment runs quite high” in Chile, and that U.S. diplomats in the country were “striving to preserve such good-will as we still have.” U.S. officials, growing increasingly frustrated with the “anti-U.S. sentiment” in Chile, then began to hope that Ibañez would undertake an “anti-Communist campaign,” in order “to change the existing Chilean attitude that communism in Chile is a local phenomenon.” As U.S. Ambassador Beaulac noted, “The communists were Chileans… and it was difficult for the United States to compete with Chileans in Chile.” As the U.S. stepped up pressure against Guatemala in the lead-up to the coup, the “Friends of Guatemala” in Chile stepped up their own efforts against U.S. policy in the region, and proposed to hold a conference in Chile on the matter, focusing on three major agendas for deliberation:

(1) The self-determination of peoples, (2) the right of nations to dispose of their raw materials and autonomously to conduct their diplomatic and commercial relations, and (3) the internal democracy of countries, the full exercise of human rights, and the inviolability of individual guarantees.[30]

Naturally, this angered U.S. officials, who accused the Friends of Guatemala of attempting “to create pro-Guatemala propaganda,” and Assistant Secretary of State Holland stated: “I sincerely hope something will shock the Chileans out of their present posture of complete irresponsibility, political and economic.”[31] This goes again to the NSC-144 document which emphasized the need for America to “encourage” Latin American nations onto “responsible” modes of governance, politically and especially economically. Thus, supporting the “self-determination of peoples” is politically “irresponsible,” and worse yet, “the right of nations to dispose of their raw materials and autonomously to conduct their diplomatic and commercial relations,” is incredibly “irresponsible” for U.S. officials, who, as stated in NSC-144, were to “assist” Latin America in playing “a more vigorous and responsible role in economic development of the area.”[32] The Latin American countries were viewed by the United States as being akin to misbehaving children, and thus, they had to be properly disciplined and have their behaviour ‘corrected.’

The “shock” for Chile came with the coup in Guatemala, though not a ‘shock’ in the sense that U.S. officials had hoped. When the invasion of Guatemala began on June 17 with Colonel Castillo Armas and his CIA-backed army, mass protests erupted in Chile (and elsewhere in the continent), “often in front of the U.S. embassy,” and in Santiago’s city center, protesters burned a U.S. flag “amid the cheers of thousands of students.” A U.S. reporter took a photo of the flag burning which ended up in several U.S. newspapers, and the protests continued, even burning effigies of U.S. President Eisenhower. Ibañez’s Undersecretary of Defense told Ambassador Beaulac that Chilean students thought “that the United States is persecuting Guatemala.” Apparently, Chileans and other peoples in the region had no misunderstandings about who was responsible for the invasion and coup in Guatemala, as Chilean public opinion “continued to run high” in support of Guatemala and showed “accumulated pent up resentment against the United States,” as the American Embassy in Chile admitted.[33]

Chile’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate passed a resolution opposing U.S. policy and in support of Arbenz in Guatemala, and discussed the role of United Fruit in “supporting movements designed to overthrow a government which is not amenable to its interests.” Salvador Allende, Baltasar Castro, and others organized protests against the United States in cooperation with workers organizations, student groups, and radical political parties, of which American officials lamented that these men were “giving comfort to the communist cause.” As the U.S. Embassy in Chile cabled to Washington, the invasion of Guatemala “provided the communists with an issue – U.S. ‘aggression’ against the integrity of a duly constituted government, around which many in Latin America are quick to unite.”[34]

When the image of a U.S. flag being burned in Chilean protests showed up in American newspapers, the New York Times, in its usual animosity toward truth and justice, declared that Chilean Communism “comes the nearest to being a menace now,” while the New York Herald Tribune suddenly cited “recent reports of growing Communist strength in Chile.” Thus, the image of a U.S. flag being burned in protest against a violent action of state terror against an innocent country and its people who were only seeking liberty, autonomy, and justice, suddenly became represented in the American media as an act of “Communism” against American ‘democracy.’ The role of the aggressive superpower waging a brutal assault and “terror campaign” against an innocent country was removed from the dialogue, and it was presented as a “Democracy versus Communism” issue, with those who oppose U.S. terrorism being “Communists.” This negative image of Chile in the American media, however, urged several Chilean elites to quickly address the situation, and President Ibañez conducted an interview with NBC in which he stated that Communism was “a real menace in Latin America,” but Chileans would “defend inter-American principles,” and that, “Chilean public opinion is in no way represented by the provocations of certain uncontrolled groups.” In a meeting with Ambassador Beaulac, Ibañez declared, “I don’t know how much longer I am going [to] stand for this. I am going to do something but I don’t know yet what it is. You can be sure of one thing, however, and that is that Chile will not go Communist. I will cut off their heads when the time comes.” Thus, as Ibañez pursued constitutional “reforms” to give himself more power, American media and public officials responded negatively (fearing he was attempting to resort to his dictatorial origins), and they sought to discourage such moves. At the same time, the Friends of Guatemala were mobilizing their efforts, holding a conference in July of 1954 with delegates from Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Paraguay, at which, the U.S. Embassy later wrote, “oratory was uniformly and usually vehemently critical of the United States and the OAS.” U.S.-supported dictators in the region were also denounced, including Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Manuel Odria in Peru, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, and Tiburcio Carias in Honduras. More worrying, still, was that American corporations like Standard Oil, United Fruit, and Anaconda Copper were presented “as the present-day counterparts of the pirate marauders of yore.”[35]

The conference ended with the approval of five resolutions, the first of which rejected the Caracas anti-Communist resolution, “which give[s] the United States a presumed right of intervention in complicity with illegitimate Latin American governments [i.e., dictatorships] in the political and economic life of our peoples.” The second resolution was in recognizing “the inalienable right” of self-determination; third, they would fight against the pact which created the OAS; and fourth, to “fight against all forms of colonialism, especially on the American continent.” The fifth resolution was to express “sympathy for all underdeveloped nations” in the struggle for “self-determination and called on them ‘for common action in defense of this right’.”[36]

Frustrated with the “anti-U.S. sentiment” within Chile, Ambassador Beaulac increased his rhetorical assault on those who opposed U.S. policies, and speaking before the American Chamber of Commerce in Santiago, Beaulac lambasted those who are “quick to talk against the United States, as though the United States and not Russia… menaced freedom everywhere,” and divided these “anti-U.S.” elements into two groups: the “dupes,” who were “simple-minded people who know no better and who will never know any better,” and secondly, the “demagogues,” who were “ambitious men” seeking to advance “their own political fortunes.” The lesson of Guatemala, then, for Beaulac, was “for decent men [i.e., those who support U.S. policy] to work as hard to tell the truth [i.e., the American version of the truth].” As the Chilean press attacked Beaulac for “interference” in domestic affairs, the American media countered with suggesting that “responsible quarters” in Washington had been concerned that “Communists are gaining power in Chile.”[37]

As Chile was portrayed in a negative light by the American media, Chilean officials complained to U.S. State Department officials who replied that it was “normal for the American public, press, and Congressional opinion to interpret the many of these acts as indicative of a strong pro-Communist bias in Chile,” and that, “acts like burning of the American flag are bound to cause resentment in the American people,” and thus, “the public would draw its own conclusions.” The Eisenhower administration had grown increasingly frustrated with Chile, a country it had given the status of “a favored nation” to, and Ambassador Beaulac told a Chilean official that Chileans should not “try to make political capital at the expense of the United States,” as “Chile cannot gain the good will and cooperation [of] the Government of the United States by attacking it.”[38]

In surveys of Chilean public opinion conducted in 1955 and 1956, the United States Information Agency (USIA) discovered that Chileans had the least “favorable impression” of the United States, being “inclined to say that U.S. words do not agree with U.S. actions,” referring to the rhetoric of democracy versus the actions and support of tyranny.[39] Reports increasingly emerged within the United States that Chile was “the major source of anxiety for many weeks” in the U.S. State Department, with its Communist movement (relative to its population size), being “the largest and most alarming in Latin America.” In 1955, Ambassador Beaulac stated, following a visit to Washington, that “a number of highly placed people” in Washington felt that “communism in Chile constitutes a serious threat to the stability of the Chilean government.”[40]

Over the following years, Salvador Allende mobilized the Chilean left into a wide coalition of Socialists, workers, democratic parties, populists, and others, leading to Allende being the nomination for the presidential election of 1958. At a rally of more than sixty-five thousand supporters in 1958, Allende declared that, “The Department of State insists upon a policy that is odious and anti-popular… We demand the right to seek our own solutions and to follow the roads that best suit our habits and traditions.” His political rise coincided with that of Fidel Castro in Cuba, leading to intense frustrations and fears among State Department and other foreign policy officials in Washington. As one official stated, “our political interests will not permit us to stand by and watch Chile ‘go down the drain’.”[41]

Indeed, some years later, Salvador Allende rose to great political prominence in Chile, becoming the president in the early 1970s, and this set in motion one of Latin America’s most infamous American-led coups which established a dictatorship of infamous brutality. However, that story will be told later.

What the story of Guatemala in the 1950s underscored was the continuing relevance of the Monroe Doctrine, established by the United States in 1823, which declared Latin America to be the “backyard” of the United States, and thus, the U.S. would inevitably control the entire Western Hemisphere, which it would exploit for its own benefit and imperial expansion. Over 125 years after the Monroe Doctrine, the United States finally had the means to make it an established fact: America was the ultimate empire, and most especially, the only dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. Thus, no opposition – no matter how small or large – would or could be tolerated. This doctrine remained throughout the rest of the Cold War, and led to countless coups, dictatorships, “terror campaigns” and ruthless repression and mass murder on a monstrous scale. Perhaps more than anywhere else, the history of the United States in Latin America presents an image of America not as a “benevolent empire” as some American commentators have suggested, but as a truly brutal, dehumanizing, oppressive and transnational tyranny: a continental terror state. This, however, does not reinforce American perceptions of themselves or the role of their country in the world; thus, this history is – as George Orwell predicted it would be – thrown into the “memory hole.” In truth, it’s known little to those outside Latin America itself. The best way to gain a clear conception of the nature of a particular nation is to look at how it treats the most vulnerable. In the case of America, looking at Latin American history is a character study of the United States itself, from which one can only deduce that its ‘human’ characteristics more closely resemble a technocratic psychopath than a benevolent leader.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People’s Book Project.

NOTE: This is an excerpt from a chapter in a current book-in-progress being funded through The People’s Book Project. The chapter is on the American Empire’s early implementation of its “Grand Area” designs in Latin America, as defined by the Council on Foreign Relations during World War II. The Project is currently in dire need of funding, so please donate if possible to allow progress on this book to continue.

Notes

[1]            NSC 144, United States General Policy With Respect to Latin America, Foreign Relations, 1952-1954, Volume IV, page 1.

[2]            Ibid, page 6.

[3]            Ibid, page 7.

[4]            Ibid.

[5]            Ibid, page 8.

[6]            Ibid, page 9.

[7]            Ibid, page 10.

[8]            Dennis M. Rempe, “An American Trojan Horse? Eisenhower, Latin America, and the Development of US Internal Security Policy 1954-1960,” Small Wars & Insurgencies (Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 1999), pages 35-36.

[9]            Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (Authors Choice Press, New York: 2004), page 195.

[10]            Ibid, pages 195-196.

[11]            Ibid, page 196.

[12]            Kate Doyle and Peter Kornbluh, CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents. The National Security Archives: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

[13]            Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Random House, New York: 2008), pages 112-113.

[14]            Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (Authors Choice Press, New York: 2004), page 197.

[15]            Ibid, page 198.

[16]            Ibid, pages 198-199.

[17]            Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), pages 161-163.

[18]            Ibid, pages 167-168.

[19]            Ibid, page 170.

[20]            John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & The Birth of PR. PR Watch, Second Quarter 1999, Volume 6, No. 2: http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1999Q2/bernays.html

[21]            Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), page 176.

[22]            Mark T. Hove, “The Arbenz Factor: Salvador Allende, U.S.-Chilean Relations, and the 1954 U.S. Intervention in Guatemala,” Diplomatic History (Vol. 31, No. 4, September 2007), page 623.

[23]            Ibid, page 628.

[24]            Ibid, page 629.

[25]            NSC 144, United States General Policy With Respect to Latin America, Foreign Relations, 1952-1954, Volume IV, page 7.

[26]            Mark T. Hove, “The Arbenz Factor: Salvador Allende, U.S.-Chilean Relations, and the 1954 U.S. Intervention in Guatemala,” Diplomatic History (Vol. 31, No. 4, September 2007), pages 629-630.

[27]            Ibid, pages 630-631.

[28]            Ibid, pages 631-633.

[29]            Ibid, pages 633-634.

[30]            Ibid, pages 635-636.

[31]            Ibid, page 636.

[32]            NSC 144, United States General Policy With Respect to Latin America, Foreign Relations, 1952-1954, Volume IV, page 8.

[33]            Mark T. Hove, “The Arbenz Factor: Salvador Allende, U.S.-Chilean Relations, and the 1954 U.S. Intervention in Guatemala,” Diplomatic History (Vol. 31, No. 4, September 2007), pages 636-639.

[34]            Ibid.

[35]            Ibid, pages 639-642.

[36]            Ibid, pages 642-643.

[37]            Ibid, pages 643-646.

[38]            Ibid, pages 646-648.

[39]            Ibid, page 654.

[40]            Ibid, page 655.

[41]            Ibid, pages 658-661.

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The process of establishing an American Empire during and after World War II was not – as has been postulated (by those who even admit there is such a thing as an ‘American Empire’) – an ‘accident’ of history, something America seemingly stumbled into as a result of its unhindered economic growth and military-political position as arbiter of world peace and prosperity. A vast literature has developed in the academic realm and policy circles – particularly within Political Science and the think tank community, respectively – which postulates a notion of ‘American empire’ or ‘American hegemony’ as accidental, incidental, benevolent, reluctant, and desirable.

Robert Kagan is a prominent American neoconservative historian. He is a Senior Fellow at the prestigious think tank, the Brookings Institution, was a founder of the neoconservative think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), formerly worked at the State Department in the Reagan administration under Secretary of State, George Shultz, and served for over a decade as a Senior Associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and is, of course, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Kagan has written a great deal on the notion of American hegemony. As he wrote in the journal, Foreign Policy, in 1998, “the truth about America’s dominant role in the world is known to most clear-eyed international observers.” This truth, according to Kagan, “is that the benevolent hegemony exercised by the United States is good for a vast portion of the world’s population.” Samuel Huntington, another Council member and prominent American strategist, wrote that, “A world without U.S. primacy will be a world with more violence and disorder and less democracy and economic growth than a world where the United States continues to have more influence than any other country shaping global affairs.”[1] This “Benevolent Empire” – as Kagan titles his article – rests on such fundamental ideas as the notion “that American freedom depends on the survival and spread of freedom elsewhere,” and that, “American prosperity cannot occur in the absence of global prosperity.” For half a century, Kagan wrote, Americans “have been guided by the kind of enlightened self-interest that, in practice, comes dangerously close to resembling generosity.”[2]

Sebastian Mallaby, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, former Editorial Board Member and columnist at the Washington Post as well as correspondent and bureau chief for The Economist, wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs, that “empire’s are not always planned,” referring to America as “The Reluctant Imperialist.”[3] Lawrence Summers, another prominent economist, politician, and policy-maker for the Clinton and Obama administrations, referred to America as “history’s only nonimperialist superpower.”[4] Niall Ferguson, a prominent British liberal economic historian, has written extensively on the open acknowledgement of “American Empire,” but stipulates, as he did in his book Colossus, “that the United States is an empire and that this might not be wholly bad.” Referring to America as an “Unconscious Colossus,” Ferguson stressed that, “a self-conscious American imperialism might well be preferable to the available alternatives.”[5] Ferguson in fact stresses the need for Americans to “recognize the imperial characteristics of their own power today [writing in 2005] and, if possible, to learn from the achievements and failures of past empires.” This, Ferguson felt, would reduce the so-called “perils” of being an “empire in denial.”[6]

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., famed American liberal historian and adviser to President Kennedy, wrote that the United States enjoys “an informal empire – military bases, status-of-forces agreements, trade concessions, multinational corporations, cultural penetrations, and other favors,” yet, contends Schlesinger, “these are marginal to the subject of direct control,” and instead, “far from ruling an empire in the old sense,” America “has become the virtual prisoner of its client states.”[7] Some other commentators referred to America as a “virtual” or even “inadvertent” imperial power.[8]

The notion of America as a “reluctant imperialist” or a “benevolent empire” is not a new one. This has been the mainstay within the academic literature and policy-planning circles to both advocate for and justify the existence of American domination of the world. The concept of the reluctant, yet benevolent great power presents an image of a dutiful personage coming to the aid of those in need, following the responsibility which is derived from great power; that America’s rise to economic prominence – also seen as the product of free and democratic initiative and ideals (thus negating America’s long history of being a slave state and subsequently a brutal industrial society) – was the precursor to America being thrown the title of ‘global power,’ and with that title bestowed upon it – like a child-king still unsure of his own abilities to rule – took up the activities of a global power with a desire to bring the rest of the world the same altruistic truths and enlightened ideals which made America flourish so; that America’s gift to the world was to spread freedom and democracy, in the economic, political, and social spheres. This myth has been a constant foundation for the advocacy and justification of empire. Its importance rests most especially on the ideals and global public opinion which prevailed as the great European empires waned and ultimately collapsed through two World Wars.

The colonized peoples of the world had had enough of empire, had suffered so immeasurably and consistently under its tutelage, that the concept of empire was so discredited in the eyes of the world’s majority as to be incapable of justifying in the formal imperial-colonial sense. At home, America’s domestic political situation and public opinion had been largely isolationist, seeking to refrain from an expansive foreign policy, leading many American presidents and strategists to bemoan the struggle for empire beyond the continent on the reluctance of the American people and Congress to pursue aggressive expansionism (save for the expansion across the continent, wiping out Native American populations for American Lebensraum and the slow, increasing expression of trans-sovereign rights in Latin America, long considered “America’s backyard”).

World War II, then, presented a new opportunity, and a new challenge for America in the world. The opportunity was to become the worlds most powerful empire history had ever witnessed; the challenge, then, was to justify it in explicitly anti-imperial rhetoric. America, thus, was not a reluctant or accidental empire, nor, for that matter, a benevolent one. America was chosen to be an empire; it was strategised, discussed, debated, planned and implemented. The key architects of this empire were the bankers and corporations which arose out of America’s Industrial Revolution in the late 19^th century, the philanthropic foundations they established in the early 20^th century, the prominent think tanks created throughout the first half of the 20^th century, and the major academics, strategists and policy-makers who emerged from the foundation-funded universities, institutes, think tanks, and the business community, and who dominated the corridors of power in the planning circles that made policy.

No sooner had World War II begun than American strategists began calling for a new global American empire. Henry R. Luce, a Yale graduate and founder of Time Magazine, Life, and Fortune, was among America’s most influential publishers in the first half of the 20^th century. A strong supporter of the Republican Party and virulent anti-Communist, Luce was also a staunch advocate of fascism in Europe – notably Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany – as a means of preventing the spread of Communism. In 1941, Luce wrote a famous article in Life entitled, “The American Century,” in which he stated that, “the 20^th Century must be to a significant degree an American Century.” Luce wrote that America has “that indefinable, unmistakable sign of leadership: prestige.” As such, unlike past empires like Rome, Genghis Khan, or Imperial Britain, “American prestige throughout the world is faith in the good intentions as well as the ultimate intelligence and ultimate strength of the whole American people.”[9] Luce felt that the “abundant life” of America should be made available “for all mankind,” as soon as mankind embraces “America’s vision.” Luce wrote:

It must be a sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills. It must be an internationalism of the people, by the people and for the people… We must undertake now to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world.[10]

While Luce was perhaps the first theorist to posit the specific concept of “the American Century,” the actual work done to create this century (or at least the latter half of it) for America was chiefly initiated by the Council on Foreign Relations, and the prominent strategist Dean Acheson, among others. As Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Dean Acheson delivered a speech at Yale entitled, “An American Attitude Toward Foreign Affairs,” in which he articulated a vision of America in the near future, and as he later recalled, it was at the time of delivering this speech that Acheson began “work on a new postwar world system.” Acheson declared in his speech that, “Our vital interests… do not permit us to be indifferent to the outcome” of the wars erupting in Europe and Asia. The causes of the war, according to Acheson, were in “the failure of some mechanisms of the Nineteenth Century world economy,” which resulted in “this break-up of the world into exclusive areas for armed exploitation administered along oriental lines.” Recreating a world peace, posited Acheson, would require “a broader market for goods made under decent standards,” as well as “a stable international monetary system” and the removal of “exclusive preferential trade agreements.” Essentially, it was an advocacy for a global liberal economic order as the means to world peace, and without a hint of irony, Acheson then called for the immediate establishment of “a navy and air force adequate to secure us in both oceans simultaneously and with striking power sufficient to reach to the other side of each of them.”[11] Dean Acheson was also closely involved in the Council on Foreign Relations’ plans for the shaping of the post-War world order.

The Council on Foreign Relations and the ‘Grand Area’

Before America had even entered the war in late 1941, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was planning for America’s assumed entry into the war. The CFR effectively undertook a policy coup d’état over American foreign policy with the Second World War. When war broke out, the Council began a “strictly confidential” project called the War and Peace Studies, in which top CFR members collaborated with the US State Department in determining US policy, and the project was entirely financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.[12] The War and Peace Studies project had come up with a number of initiatives for the post-War world. One of the most important objectives it laid out was the identification of what areas of the world America would need to control in order to facilitate strong economic growth. This came to be known as the “Grand Area,” and it included:

Latin America, Europe, the colonies of the British Empire, and all of Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia was necessary as a source of raw materials for Great Britain and Japan and as a consumer of Japanese products. The American national interest was then defined in terms of the integration and defense of the Grand Area, which led to plans for the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank and eventually to the decision to defend Vietnam from a Communist takeover at all costs.[13]

In 1940, the Council on Foreign Relations also began a wide-ranging study of the war-time economic needs of the United States (prior to U.S. entry into the war), called the Financial and Economic Experts, which divided the world into four main blocs: continental Europe (which was dominated by Germany at the time), the U.S. –Western hemisphere, the United Kingdom and its colonial and commonwealth nations, and the Far-East-Pacific Area, including Japan, China, and the Dutch East Indies. The study compiled a list of each region’s main imports and exports. Upon completion of the study in the fall of 1940, the Council sent its conclusions and policy recommendations to President Roosevelt and the State Department. The conclusions stated that the United States needed larger export markets for its products, and specifically that the U.S. needed “living space” (or as the Nazi German state referred to it, Lebensraum) throughout the Western hemisphere and beyond, as well as trade and “economic integration” with the Far East and the British Empire/Commonwealth blocs. The report stated bluntly, “as a minimum, the American ‘national interests’ involved the free access to markets and raw materials in the British Empire, the Far East, and the entire Western hemisphere.”[14]

This was the foundation for the Grand Area designs of the Council in the post-War world. The Grand Area project emphasized that for America to manage the “Grand Areas” of the world, multilateral organizations would be needed to help facilitate “appropriate measures in the fields of trade, investment, and monetary arrangements.” The study further emphasized the need to maintain “military supremacy” in order to help facilitate control of these areas. As the Council’s 1940 report to the U.S. State Department stated: “The foremost requirement of the United States in a world in which it proposes to hold unquestioned power is the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete re-armament,” which would “involve increased military expenditures and other risks.”[15]

While the Grand Area project was made and designed for the United States during World War II, it included plans for the post-War world, and included continental Europe in its designs following the assumed defeat of Germany. Thus, as economist Ismael Hossein-Zadeh wrote, “making the Grand Area global.” The idea behind the “Grand Area” was “even more grandiose – one world economy dominated by the United States,” and the study itself suggested that the Grand Area “would then be an organized nucleus for building an integrated world economy after the war.”[16] As Shoup and Minter wrote in their study of the Council, Imperial Brain Trust, “the United States had to enter the war and organize a new world order satisfactory to the United States.”[17] Benevolent, indeed.

Following Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the War, the Council concluded as early as 1941 that the defeat of the Axis powers was simply a matter of time. As such, they were advancing their plans for the post-War world, expanding the Grand Area to:

include the entire globe. A new world order with international political and economic institutions was projected, which would join and integrate all of the earth’s nations under the leadership of the United States. The Unification of the whole world was now the aim of the Council [on Foreign Relations] and government planners.[18]

As a part of this planning process, the U.S. Department of State formed the Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy in late December of 1941, of which the first document that was produced, “stressed the danger of another world depression and the need to provide confidence in world economic stability.” Thus, “the United States had to be involved with the internal affairs of the key industrial and raw materials-producing countries.” A key question in this was, as one postwar planner articulated, “how to create purchasing power outside of our country which would be converted into domestic purchasing power through exportation.” The idea was about “devising appropriate institutions” which would fulfill this role, ultimately resting with the formation of the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (later known as the World Bank). The postwar planners had to continually construct an idea of an international order, directed by the United States, which would not so easily resemble the formal colonial period or its methods of exerting hegemony.[19]

Recommendations of the Council suggested that such new international financial institutions were necessary in terms of “stabilizing currencies and facilitating programs of capital investment for constructive undertakings in backward and underdeveloped regions.” These plans included for the establishment of an International Reconstruction Finance Corporations and an “international investment agency which would stimulate world trade and prosperity by facilitating investment in development programs the world over.” These plans were drafted in recommendations and given to President Roosevelt and the Department of State.[20]

One Council member suggested that, “It might be wise to set up two financial institutions: one an international exchange stabilization board and one an international bank to handle short-term transactions not directly concerned with stabilization.” Thus, the Council drafted in 1941 and 1942 plans that would result in the formation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which formally emerged from the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, an event that is commonly acknowledged as the “birthplace” of the World Bank and IMF, thus ignoring their ideological origins at the Council on Foreign Relations two-to-three years prior. The internal department committees established in the Department of State and Treasury were well represented by Council members who drew up the final plans for the creation of these two major institutions.[21]

Whereas the League of Nations had been a major objective of the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Corporation-funded Council on Foreign Relations following World War I, so too was the United Nations near the end of World War II. A steering committee consisting of U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and five Council on Foreign Relations members was formed in 1943. One of the Council members, Isaiah Bowman,

suggested a way to solve the problem of maintaining effective control over weaker territories while avoiding overt imperial conquest. At a Council [on Foreign Relations] meeting in May 1942, he stated that the United States had to exercise the strength needed to assure “security,” and at the same time “avoid conventional forms of imperialism.” The way to do this, he argued, was to make the exercise of that power international in character through a United Nations body.[22]

The “secret steering committee,” later called the Informal Agenda Group, undertook a series of consultations and meetings with foreign governments which would be essential in creating the new institution, including the Soviet Union, Canada, and Britain, and the Charter of the United Nations was subsequently decided upon with the consent of President Roosevelt in June 1944.[23] The Informal Agenda Group was made up of six individuals, including Secretary of State Cordell Hull. All of them, with the exception of Hull, were Council members. President Roosevelt had referred to them as “my postwar advisers,” and aside from formal policy recommendations, they “served as advisers to the Secretary of State and the President on the final decisions.” By December 1943, a new member was added to the Group, Under Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., who was not only a Council member, but was also a former top executive at United States Steel and was the son of a partner in the J.P. Morgan Bank. After the Group had drafted the recommendations for a United Nations body, Secretary Hull had asked three lawyers to rule on its constitutionality. The three lawyers he chose were Charles Evan Hughes, John W. Davis, and Nathan L. Miller. Both Hughes and Davis were Council members, and John Davis was even a former President of the Council and remained as a Director.[24] John D. Rockefeller Jr. subsequently gifted the United Nations with $8.5 million in order to buy the land for its headquarters in New York City.[25]

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People’s Book Project.

NOTE: This was but a small sample from the chapter on the origins of the American Empire in the post-World War II world. The very same chapter includes the internal policy discussions relating to the formation of the Cold War, the establishment of the National Security State, and the advancement of policy programs aimed at securing the “Grand Areas” for American dominance around the world. The chapter also studies the emergence of the Marshall Plan, NATO, European integration, the Bilderberg Group, and a number of other institutions and ideas related to establishing and expanding a ‘New World Order.’

Endnotes

[1]            Robert Kagan, “The Benevolent Empire,” Foreign Policy (No. 111, Summer 1998), page 26.

[2]            Ibid, page 28.

[3]            Sebastian Mallaby, “The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire,” Foreign Affairs (Vol. 81, No. 2, March-April 2002), page 6.

[4]            Ibid, page 2.

[5]            Niall Ferguson, “The Unconscious Colossus: Limits of (& Alternatives to) American Empire,” Daedalus (Vol. 134, No. 2, On Imperialism, Spring 2005), page 21.

[6]            Ibid, pages 21-22.

[7]            Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The American Empire? Not so Fast,” World Policy Journal (Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 2005), page 45.

[8]            Michael Cox, “Empire by Denial: The Strange Case of the United States,” International Affairs (Vol. 81, No. 1, January 2005), page 18.

[9]            Geir Lundestad, “‘Empire by Invitation’ in the American Century,” Diplomatic History (Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring 1999), page 189.

[10]            Bruce Cumings, “The American Century and the Third World,” Diplomatic History (Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring 1999), page 356.

[11]            Ibid, pages 358-359.

[12]            CFR, War and Peace. CFR History: http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/war_peace.html

[13]            Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), page 74.

[14]            Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pages 43-45.

[15]            Ibid, page 45.

[16]            Ibid, page 46.

[17]            Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (Authors Choice Press, New York: 2004), page 118.

[18]            Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), page 48.

[19]            Ibid, pages 49-51.

[20]            Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (Authors Choice Press, New York: 2004), pages 166-167.

[21]            Ibid, pages 168-169.

[22]            Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), page 159.

[23]            Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), page 51.

[24]            Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (Authors Choice Press, New York: 2004), pages 169-171.

[25]            Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), page 160.

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Geostrategy on the New Silk Road

Part of the so-called “New Silk Road” countries facilitating trade between East Asia and Western Europe, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are assuming a new role in international relations as they become more important in trans-continental trade and as their energy resources are opened up to foreign business interests. Chief amongst these emerging lynchpin countries is Kazakhstan, a nation whose international star is rising as it adds its recent chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the world’s largest regional security pact, to its growing list of organizational affiliations, including its seat at the UN, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as well as its partnership action plan with NATO.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting Kazakhstan, its vast untapped oil, gas and mineral reserves resources, the fierce competition between the US, China and Russia for access to its resources and transportation corridors, the tug-of-war of sorts that is happening as the country positions itself in an emerging power struggle between the East and West, and the role of Islamic radicalism as a proxy strike force to be funded, armed, trained, and used by the West for terrorizing the country should they stray too far from Washington’s agenda.

Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here

*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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For the past few months on a daily basis we have been forced to read, watch and listen to the awful deeds of select dictators here and there, but not everywhere. Our war-drummer TV networks suddenly found an atrocious dictator in Libya, and at lightning speed lined up victim after victim of this long-ruling but suddenly popular dictator called Gaddafi. Remember this CNN episode? Yes I am sure you do. How could anyone erase these horrifying images from memory? Our public was far too horrified and disgusted to stop and wonder why now; why so suddenly. No. For years while our government and corporate partners supplied this dictator with an expansive array of deadly war and police tools, while they basked in the profit’s glow, no one in our media showed the slightest interest in or desire for widely and readily available atrocity documents, victims and witnesses. They waited until their government-corporate masters gave them the expedited green light for manic-continuous coverage. Oh how the majority longed for and anticipated our government’s regime change there…How they clamored for the barbaric ridding of this ruthless evil dictator. One down. A few more to go. Only here and there. Certainly not everywhere.

In recent months we have been presented daily, perhaps more accurately, hourly, with another dictator’s atrocious deeds. Every hour seems to be ‘the Syria Hour’ in our media. Oh, those poor freedom fighters falling one after another…The innocent people up against the heavily armed ferocious army…The daily massacres …all televised, intensely written about, loudly talked about; everywhere. That evil Bashar Assad and his regime. That evil dictator…

Granted on and off we’ve been hearing about the Assad regime’s evilness and its status on our decade-ago designated axis of evil list. But now, well now it is a different deal. Out of the blue, suddenly, this regime and its deeds have become the center of our focus, and it has been forced into our living rooms, newspaper baskets, and car radios; on an hourly basis. Oh how our people’s hearts are bleeding for those freedom-seeking revolutionary rebels…How we despise this stinky mean dictator … We can’t wait to see the bastard taken out and beheaded; preferably live on TV.

Now, here is what you won’t be hearing from our corporate-government-owned mainstream and corporate-foundation-owned pseudo alternative media. Up until very recently, as recent as two years ago, our government, our military and intelligence agencies worked hand-in-hand with this dictator and his regime. After 9/11 this dictator and his regime became one of our top choices for outsourcing our illegal torture and detention practices. In fact, our government always coordinated its bashing and name-calling of this dictator directly with him to help him boost his public standing and popularity in Syria. You see, there are ways to support dictator regimes, and then there are other ways. In ‘certain’ cases it is strategically beneficial to a dictator, or a military regime, or a kingdom, to be outwardly bashed and be cosmetically antagonized by ‘certain’ superpowers, or Israel. Those cosmetically issued bashing-threats go a long way towards improving a dictator’s popularity at home. You know what I’m talking about, right? Think the Saudi Kingdom and Israel. The Kingdom, while best friend and partner with Israel, prefers to be shown and known as Anti-Israel. It is a matter of survival … for ‘certain’ dictators. Now back to Syria.

During my work at the FBI after the September 11 Terrorist Attacks, I worked in a very large unit-room with more than 250 translators and analysts; with no individual rooms or even cubicles separating us. I worked with those from the Saudi Arabia desk, Iran Desk, Israel Desk, Turkey Desk …and of course the Syria Desk. And I can tell you with one hundred percent factual certainty that we, the United States Government and its Intelligence Agencies and its Pentagon and State Department, worked very ‘cozily’ with Syria’s military-intelligence regime. This same dictator we see exposed and bashed by our government and its tentacles- media, readily gave us everything we wanted, and more, and in return, we gave him ‘certain’ things he wanted from us; including outwardly expressed condemnation and evil name-calling.

I also want to remind you of our close partnership with the Syria regime in implementing illegal torture and detention practices. You see this same dictator’s torture practices that are being advertised as intolerable and war-worthy, were exactly the practices our government valued, appreciated, and cherished. Let me give you an example, a well-known documented example, that is [All Emphasis Mine]:

Maher Arar is a telecommunications engineer with dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship who resides in Canada. Arar’s story is frequently referred to as “extraordinary rendition” but the U.S. government insisted it was a case of deportation. Arar was detained during a layover at JFK in September 2002 on his way home to Canada. He was held without charges in solitary confinement in the US for nearly two weeks, questioned, and denied meaningful access to a lawyer.

The US government suspected him of being a member of Al Qaeda and deported him, not to Canada, his current home, but to his native Syria, even though its government is known to use torture. He was detained in Syria for almost a year, during which time he was tortured, according to the findings of a commission of inquiry ordered by the Canadian government, until his release to Canada. That commission publicly cleared Arar of any links to terrorism. The Syrian government now says that Arar is “completely innocent.”

…

Despite the recent public rhetoric, at the time of Arar’s deportation, Syria was working closely with the United States government in their “War on Terror“. In November 2003, Cofer Black, then counterterrorism coordinator at the US State Department and former director of counterterrorism at the CIA, was quoted as saying “The Syrian government has provided some very useful assistance on al Qaeda in the past.” In September 2002, George Bush opposed the enactment of the “Syria Accountability Act” citing effectiveness of current sanctions and the ongoing diplomacy in the region. In addition, the administration noted the cooperation and support by Syria in fighting al-Qaida as a reason for its opposition to the “Syria Accountability Act”.

…

The Syrian government shared the results of its investigation with the United States. Arar believes that his torturers were given a dossier of specific questions by United States interrogators, noting that he was asked identical questions both in the United States and in Syria.

Allow me to recap here: The Syrian regime was the regime of choice for the US government when it came to rendition and torture practices. Arar was not the only US detainee sent, handed-over to Syria; others did not have the benefit of second western citizenship privileges. This was not about looking the other way. It was the US government’s tacit approval of the Syrian regime’s dictatorial torture practices. The US and the Syria regime worked very closely and shared intelligence-police-military information with each other.

The US media has conveniently forgotten all about our government’s approval and support of the Assad regime’s dictatorial and torture practices, and its partnership with this same regime in its dark and illegal operations.  Our media seem to have gone into their highly characteristic amnesiac mode. They don’t want people to know about the past. In fact, they don’t want people to know about the present either. For instance, they have been hard at work trying to twist and falsify the US government’s position and role in the recent uprising in Syria. Based on the fictional concoction they’ve been pouring out, Americans are under the false impression that we began our support for these rebels after the uprising, and as a reaction to the Assad regime’s retaliation against these freedom seekers. When in fact we started our operation last April-May, and actually manufactured-created this highly-coordinated and managed uprising and violence.  You can read my internationally reported coverage on this here, and stay tuned for more detailed coverage on Syria here at Boiling Frogs Post.

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This is Part 5 of our interview series on the New World Order. You can listen to the previous interviews in this series here: Part I, Part II, Part III , and Part IV.

Richard Moore shares with us his unique perspective on the working of the political world at the highest levels, the matrix of a fabricated collective illusion, how this matrix of unreality is formed for us, and his proposals for escaping it. He discusses consensus reality, as generated by official rhetoric and amplified by mass media, and how this perspective on the political process, and on the roles of left and right, bears very little relationship to actual reality, and remain as a fabricated collective illusion. Mr. Moore further discusses the new post World War II paradigm which was designed and planned in a series of meetings, by a handful of people selected from the Council on Foreign Relations, to specifically serve the interests of central bankers. He talks about the recent rise in collective activism energy such as the Arab Spring uprisings, the Occupy Movement, and various protests in Europe, the left and right as illusions foisted on us to keep us divided, the importance of localism and inclusiveness in pursuit of real changes, and more!

Richard K Moore, an expatriate from Silicon Valley, retired and moved to Ireland in 1994 to begin his ‘real work’ – trying to understand how the world works, and how we can make it better. Many years of researching and writing culminated in his widely acclaimed book Escaping the Matrix: How We the People Can Change the World (The Cyberjournal Project, 2005). His Cyberjournal email list has been going since 1994 (cyberjournal.org). The book’s website is http://escapingthematrix.org, and his website is http://cyberjournal.org. He can be contacted via email at rkm@quaylargo.com.

Here is our guest Richard Moore unplugged!

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18 days ago, on November 21, here at Boiling Frogs Post, I reported on the ongoing joint US-NATO secret training camp in the US air force base in Incirlik, Turkey, which began operations in April- May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria. I had received the information for that story from multiple sources including highly credible insiders in Turkey and government insiders here in the US. You can read the story here.

My follow up piece on December 3 included the intentional blackout of this multiple-sourced and well-documented exposé. Here are a few excerpts from that story:

I immediately started checking our infamous US mainstream media sites- still nothing on this significant information. I then contacted one of my high-level sources and asked why he had come to me with his documented report instead of going directly to the big guys. With several credible insiders as his corroborators and a high-level official in Turkey, he would have no problem getting their attention. And his response? Well here it is minus a few expletives:

Who said we didn’t go to MSM first? We got them the info back in October. First they were interested and drooling. At least the reporters. Then, they disappeared. We sat and waited for a few weeks, and no one followed up. It is Turkey. It is NATO. It is our CIA guys. The media hot shots would not touch those cases without State Department sanction attached…

Now, 18 days later, there comes a decent coverage of this exposé. Guess where? Not in the US mainstream media. Not even the US alternative media…Well, here it is, Iran’s Press TV providing accurate and untwisted coverage, and doing so as part of its front page news:

A former employee with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has said that American and NATO forces are training Syrian rebels in southeastern Turkish city of Hakkari. Sibel Edmonds also said that she had received information from Turkish and US sources indicating that training Syrian opposition forces, led by defected Syrian colonel Riad al-Assad, had started in May, the Turkish daily Milliyet reported. Edmonds further added that the US is involved in smuggling arms into Syria from Incirlik military base in Turkey in addition to providing financial support for Syrian rebels…

…

Confessions by a number of Syrian rebels about foreign-sponsored plans to carry out armed operations and killing ordinary people as well as security forces prove that recent developments in the country are part of an attempt to incite a revolt in the strategic country neighboring the Israeli regime, aiming to overthrow the current government and replace it with a US-backed regime… Damascus blames the violence on foreign-sponsored terrorist groups, with the Syrian state TV broadcasting reports showing seized weapons caches and confessions by terrorists describing how they obtained arms from foreign sources.

…

So, let’s review. Turkish media, right from the involved region, and after checking with their own sources, have picked up my exposé based on several highly credible sources in Turkey-US. We are not talking blogs or alternatives in Turkey. We are talking mainstream media over there. And this, despite similar censorship pressures there due to the Turkish government’s intense desire to keep its partnership in this deal a ‘secret.’

After Turkish media and Iran’s Press TV, several other international news organizations are reporting on this very significant story; see a few examples here and here.

Now, what do we have here in the US? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Again we are not talking MSM only. Included in this are all those quasi alternatives supported by the corporate and corporate foundation sugar daddies. You see that the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times have no balls, no guts, to pursue a solid story brought to them by credible military sources here and abroad. Now, even after getting a deflector by the international media taking the lead, they are sitting, shivering, and continuing the blackout.

Since my story here at Boiling Frogs Post I have been contacted by additional credible sources, including a former high-level military official in Syria. I will have more, and will continue the coverage. And I will provide our readers with more specifics on the US media and reporters who’ve been sitting on this story for several months. Please stay tuned.

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A question asked by many shocked observers today both inside and outside of the United States is “what has become of the America I knew and loved?”

Beginning in the late 1930s as an overt propaganda campaign against fascist Germany and Imperial Japan, the world was treated to a Hollywood version of America as a democratic society that despite its flaws managed to maintain the egalitarian principles of its founding fathers and continued to press forward as a beacon of liberty, individualism and human rights.

As a romanticized ideal, the narrative of that America was of a “great melting pot” for all races where upward mobility, modernism and economic and religious freedom promised a better life for all those willing to make it work. And for millions it once did.

With a manufacturing and farm economy the envy of the world, a burgeoning middle-class and a huge military establishment garrisoning the world, the ideal was temporarily sustainable. But as the years wore on, the economy and political system constricted and the Pentagon grew to gargantuan proportions, the yawing schism between the real America and the illusory bygone America of Hollywood’s imagination began to take on a frightening dimension.

We have illustrated in our two multi-part series, 9/11, Psychological Warfare and the American Narrative and House of Mirrors that whatever America once appeared to be, at least since World War II and the beginning of the Cold War up to 9/11, it never was the country we thought it to be.  

Although still theoretically governed by rules, democratic laws and financial regulations, the real America of today has come to be controlled by the private and personal agendas of a handful of people and the vast majority of the American public disapproves of it. Over the years, organizations such as the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group and the Club of Rome are known to have exerted a decisive role over government policies and mass media. We have been warned of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Rothschilds and their desires for political control of the world through financial manipulation. Yet, despite their monopolistic and anti-democratic efforts their power and their money continue to fuel popular allure. We have written of secret intelligence organizations such as Le Cercle, the Safari Club and the 61 which at the behest of international business cartels both legal and illegal have secretly undermined democratic elections, overthrown governments and generally subverted the will of the people for the benefit of a chosen few.

But who are these few, and what are their plans for our country and the world? Where are we headed and most of all, what principles are guiding what increasingly resembles an international governmental, financial and geopolitical shipwreck brought on by years of Laissez-faire fiscal abuse, corporate greed and political delusion?

Our personal understanding of the present dilemma starts with another shipwreck, this one off the coast of Ireland in the year 1577. That was the year a notorious English pirate and slave trader named Martin Frobisher smashed a schooner filled with what was thought to be gold bullion onto the isolated, rocky, western coast of Ireland at a place known as Smerwick. According to one account, Frobisher’s mission was intended to find the fabled Northwest Passage to China as part of a “Protestant adventure that would rival the Catholic quest as well as enrich the queen’s [Elizabeth I] treasury.” The “gold”—which was soon revealed to be nothing more than iron pyrites (fools gold)—spilled from the broken ship’s hull, littering the base of the cliffs.

An Irish rebel-captain by the name of James Fitzmaurice raised a fort at the summit of the cliffs and named it Fort Del Oro, (Fort of Gold) to mock Queen Elizabeth’s greed and her vain quest to challenge Rome for wealth and power. Fitzmaurice’s family, the Fitzgeralds had been in conflict with London over land and authority since initiating the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century at the behest of their lord, Richard de Clare, otherwise known as Strongbow, the Earl of Pembroke.

Chafing under the rule of King Henry II of England, Strongbow pictured himself as the King of Ireland and his marriage to the daughter of Irish King Dermot MacMurrough was intended to seal the agreement. But fate and the driving ambitions of Henry II soon scuttled the plan and upon Strongbow’s death a short time later, the equally ambitious Fitzgeralds assumed his mission.  

Known for their loyalty to a Catholic Rome, their embrace of Ireland’s Celtic culture and their fierce desire to establish their control over Ireland, the next four hundred years found the family drawn deeply into English as well as European politics with numerous Geraldines (the family name) interned in the Tower of London. The coming of the Reformation to England in the 16^th century turned four hundred years of border disputes and jurisdictional feuding into holy war. And in 1580, the Holy See in Rome sent an army of Italians and Spaniards to help the Geraldines under the authority drafted by the “Just War Doctrine,”to help in the fight against Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant forces.

Dubbed by author Richard Berleth as the “Twilight Lords” for their role as the last doomed, feudal barons of Ireland, the Fitzgeralds and their struggle to fight off the Elizabethans and the Renaissance Neoplatonism of men such as Edmund Spencer and Walter Raleigh offers a glimpse into more than just another stale moment in history. It offers a revelation into a secret esoteric struggle between the spiritual forces of London, Rome, Moscow, Washington and Berlin that exploded openly into war numerous times during the 20^th century and whose ominous final confrontation looms over today’s geopolitical arena like a sword of Damocles.

Allegorized by the Elizabethans as evil and representative of the darkness in Spencer’s Faerie Queene, the Fitzgeralds came to embody the “Other” in the English propaganda of the day, while Elizabeth as both the Faerie Queene and Britomart and her knights embodied only the most chaste and blessed in the tradition of the Arthurian Round Table.

Far from being only a war over ecclesiastical principles, this “holy war” fought between the Catholic Geraldines and their Protestant others was also a war against economic domination and colonization from London. From London’s perspective, the war was a just war because it was a struggle to the death against the Papal forces of the Counter Reformation, which were encircling it militarily and economically and rolling back Protestant reforms. In the end, the war depopulated the Irish countryside, shifted the balance of power from local landowners to mercantilists in London and instilled a lasting fear and anger between Protestants and Catholics. As an experiment in colonization, Ireland set the standards of behavior that marked the beginnings of Britain’s empire that live on as much today in the neighborhoods of Kabul, Kandahar and Peshawar as they do in Derry and Belfast. But it also marked a turning point in the Holy Roman Empire’s ability to control events through military force and a shift from the ecclesiastically sanctioned violence of “just war” to the secular/state sanctioned violence of “just war.”

When in 1980 Colin Gray and Keith Payne attempted to stretch that concept of just war to justify nuclear war-fighting by transforming immorality into morality, it came as a cruel awakening to us that despite the gulf of four hundred years little had changed in the need to bend reality to justify war.

But in the thirty years since, the savage carnival of endless war with its attendant think tanks and lobbyists has only made the darkness blacker. In fact, the spiritual inspiration that propels today’s Washington/London/Berlin/Paris alliance and its so called humanitarian interventions could be considered nothing less than diabolic in which – as stated in the opening chapter to this series – America has turned from the light into its very opposite as it seeks to emulate “the dark matter… the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen.”

In battling the Elizabethans, the Fitzgeralds exhausted the very idea of Just War by plunging themselves and their hopeless cause into darkness. We can only hope as the U.S. continues to wander through the many facets of darkness contained within this House of Mirrors that someday soon, it will heed the lessons of history and find its way back to the clarity and sanity of the light.

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12 days ago, on November 21, here at Boiling Frogs Post, I reported on the ongoing joint US-NATO secret training camp in the US air force base in Incirlik, Turkey, which began operations in April- May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria. I had received the information for that story from multiple sources including highly credible insiders in Turkey and government insiders here in the US. Here are a few excerpts from that story:

You see, those alternative news and blog sites put down by the first cited article had it exactly right. Col. Riad al-Assad has been in Turkey, working with U.S. & NATO, right inside the US Incirlik Base in Turkey, to do exactly what he vehemently denies: smuggle US weapons into Syria, participate in US psychological and information warfare inside Syria as the middle-man whom Syrian protesters tend to trust, and help with funneling intelligence and military operators across the border and night-time drop offs by air.

The joint US-NATO secret training camp in the US air force base in Incirlik, Turkey, began operations in April- May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria. Since then, in addition to Col. Riad al-Assad, several other high-ranking Syrian military and intelligence officials have been added to operations’ headquarters in the US base. Weekly weapons smuggling operations have been carried out with full NATO-US participation since last May. The HQ also includes an information warfare division where US-NATO crafted communications are directed to dissidents in Syria via the core group of Syrian military and Intelligence defectors.

Yesterday the following report showed up on the Press TV Website:

‘Syrian saboteurs train in Turkey’

The head of Turkey’s main opposition group has accused the government of allowing the country’s soil to be used for training Syrian armed groups, Press TV reports. “Is it appropriate for Turkey to use its soil for training armed forces with the aim of creating unrest in another country?” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of Republican People’s Party (CHP), told reporters in Ankara on Thursday.

“While we have lots of problems ourselves, why do we meddle in the internal affairs of another country?” he added. His remarks came after Turkey’s Taraf daily reported that Ankara was establishing a ‘buffer zone’ in Syria to provide Syrian rebels with shelter.

“We say ‘Great Turkey’, ‘Powerful Turkey’. Can a great and powerful Turkey use its soil to support an armed force with the aim of meddling in another country? Is such an understanding possible?” Kilicdaroglu questioned…

…

The official also accused the Turkish government of having turned into a contractor for the ‘dominant powers.’

…

The story above only goes as far as ‘France’ and the French factor. It stops short of France and other NATO member nations led by the United States in NATO member country-Turkey.

I immediately started checking our infamous US mainstream media sites- still nothing on this significant information. I then contacted one of my high-level sources and asked why he had come to me with his documented report instead of going directly to the big guys. With several credible insiders as his corroborators and a high-level official in Turkey, he would have no problem getting their attention. And his response? Well here it is minus a few expletives:

Who said we didn’t go to MSM first? We got them the info back in October. First they were interested and drooling. At least the reporters. Then, they disappeared. We sat and waited for a few weeks, and no one followed up. It is Turkey. It is NATO. It is our CIA guys. The media hot shots would not touch those cases without State Department sanction attached…

So, okay. I was the last resort. But that’s not the moral of this post. This goes down as one more example of very many cases of intentional, willful censorship by the US mainstream media and their so-many- times-proven role as distorters of reality and gravediggers of the truth.

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Here is an exclusive interview I gave to James Corbett on my recent article, “US-NATO-Chechen Militia Joint Operations Base.” We discuss the American financing, funding and protection of Islamic terrorists in Central Asia, the history of Turkish links with the CIA, the heart of my whistleblower story and the State Secrets Privilege, and the real endgame for the competing world powers in the Caucasus.

You can listen to the interview here at Corbett Report.

As you know I am a big fan of my partner James Corbett and his brilliant work. If you are not familiar with him check out his website here for great podcast interviews, video reports and analyses. He now has an extensive collection of his interviews available on DVDs, and you can check them out and purchase them here.

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Authors and investigative journalists Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald join us to discuss their ground-breaking exclusive series ‘House of Mirrors’ on how America’s full blown surge into personal and private holy war caused the U.S. to slip into a crisis of identity. They explore the little-analyzed facts and mystical covert agendas that the United States continues to press on with into the 21st century, what those agendas may mean to America’s new role as the dark force that orders the universe, the prevailing motives that drive American national security policy today, and its de-evolution of rational defense policy and its immersion into the mystical. Gould-Fitzgerald talk about the top secret military operation known as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) which views itself as a ‘dark force,’ Mystical Imperialism traced to both Britain and Russia’s 19th century efforts to establish dominion through a mix of imperialism and Christian zeal, and more!

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice. Visit their website here.

Listen to the preview Here

Here are our guest Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald unplugged!

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More than one policy pundit has scratched their head at the strange, increasingly irrational nature of what guides American and European foreign policy. In November of 2010, commentator William Pfaff resorted to the term “medieval mysticism” to describe the “the cloud of unknowing” surrounding the run up to the all important NATO summit in Lisbon. He marveled that only by invoking the mystical past could one contemplate what was in store as the West pondered a dark future.

As odd as it may seem to modern audiences, medieval mysticism and its attendant priesthoods are not as far beneath the surface of present day policy as one might think. In fact following the crisis brought about by the failure of advanced technology to defeat Communism in Vietnam, America’s premier defense intellectuals were quick to fall back on the Middle Ages for answers to what seemed eternal and imponderable questions. 

One vivid example came from future Reagan administration officials Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne in the summer 1980 edition of Foreign Policy magazine who declared in an article titled “Victory is Possible” that: “Nuclear War is possible. But unlike Armageddon, the apocalyptic war prophesied to end history, nuclear war can have a wide range of options… If American nuclear power is to support U.S. foreign policy objectives, the United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally.”

Having come of age at a time when the U.S. enjoyed an overwhelming nuclear advantage and unquestioned technological superiority, America’s plunge into military defeat in Vietnam and a rough nuclear parity with the USSR was cause for a deep philosophical reassessment. The “new right” embodied in groups like Team B, the Committee on the Present Danger and the American Security Council needed to undo the debilitating effects caused by their own failures and discrediting the strategic doctrine implemented by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara known as Mutual Assured Destruction or (MAD) topped a long list.

These former government insiders and harsh critics of détente believed that the constraints on nuclear war fighting posed by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty (ABM) and the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks I and II (SALT), were predicated on a false assumption that nuclear weapons were too horrible to ever be used again. Neoconservative defense intellectuals viewed this restraint as a form of suicide and vowed to break free of it utilizing some pre-enlightenment thinking that challenged the very nature of modern reality.

The ideological cold war against Communism had never relied on facts. No one on the left or right could predict with any certainty where or when a nuclear war would stop if one ever broke out. Regardless of the kind or size of nuclear weapons used, with the enemy leadership decapitated and communications destroyed, there’d be no one left who could stop it. That’s what made nuclear war irrational. Anti-Communism was a matter of faith in which the political right and the political left shared the same goals but differed only in tactics. But the political right’s accommodation of the political left was never more than an elaborate game of deception played in a house of mirrors. In fact, according to the CIA’s own documents, “the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism” for the first twenty years of the Cold War relied completely on the manipulation and control of the so called progressive, liberal, non-Communist left.

Blamed by the neoconservative right for the failure in Vietnam and the relative decline in America’s nuclear posture, this faux left’s legitimacy as a valid political factor in American politics began to crumble. With the left’s policy of nuclear restraint now dismissed as irrational what possible justification could be found to wage a nuclear war in which tens of millions of innocent Russians and Americans as well as millions of others would be killed? 

By the late 1970s, those obscure strategic analysts who had formulated America’s nuclear policies had attained the status of religious figures. With their wisdom “worshipped as gospel truth,” and their insight raised to “an almost mystical level and accepted as dogma” the high priests of the new right stood ready to displace not only the left but traditional conservatives as well. By the summer of 1980 (6 months after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan)  two of those high priests were willing to take the dogma one step further by reinterpreting the Just War Doctrine of the Catholic Church to justify what reality, reason and common sense had forbad the U.S. from doing since the final days of World War II. 

“Ironically, it is commonplace to assert that war-survival theories affront the crucial test of political and moral acceptability” wrote Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne that summer. “Surely no one can be comfortable with the claim that a strategy that would kill tens of millions of U.S. citizens would be politically and morally acceptable. However it is worth recalling the six guidelines for the use of force provided by the “just war” doctrine of the Catholic Church…”

Carefully sidestepping the principle that war can only be “just” when used as a last resort and that targeting innocents is strictly forbidden, Gray and Payne would go on to claim that based on the most ancient rules of the game, not only did U.S. policy of nuclear deterrence toward the Soviet Union (MAD) fail to qualify for “just war,” but that in failing to plan to actually fight a nuclear war, “U.S. nuclear strategy is immoral.”

In other words, since neoconservative hawks could not use a rational scientific process to achieve victory through nuclear weapons or to find hard evidence to support their claims that the Soviets assumed they could achieve victory through theirs, they devised a new process that simply viewed the empirical evidence as a lie and whatever they could imagine as truth, based on precepts evolved by medieval monks.

The idea of justly killing one’s fellow humans had presented a moral dilemma since the origins of Christianity. St Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) originated the Just War theory which was later refined and expanded by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). But murdering in the name of Christ was tricky business and subject to self-serving and often conflicting interpretations. Far from the romantic notions of chivalry presented by today’s popular mythology, medieval knights were viewed by the Catholic Church at the time as lawless thugs engaged in an illicit business whose behavior was clearly “unjust.” The idea that a monk would engage in the plunder and murder of innocents, much less warfare that would bring about widespread death and destruction was anathema to church teaching.

The powerful Cistercian abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux weighed in with a different opinion in his famous twelfth-century treatise De Laude Novae Militiae (In Praise of the new Knighthood) by redefining the very nature of murder itself in support of his friend Hugues de Payens, Grand Master of the warrior monks known as the Knights Templar.

 “The soldier of Christ kills safely and dies the more safely… He is the instrument of God for the punishment of malefactors and for the defense of the just. Indeed, when he kills a malefactor this is not homicide but malicide, and he is accounted Christ’s legal executioner against evildoers.”

Like Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne’s “Victory is Possible,” Clairvaux’s treatise was propaganda intended to bend the rules for the uses of acceptable violence. It opened the floodgates of recruits for the Crusades, established the legal authority of powerful, wealthy Catholic military orders and put the power of the feudal machine under Church control, at least temporarily. 

Following the publication of Gray and Payne’s 1980 treatise we became drawn to the history of just war. After three years working as the host of a public affairs program for an affiliate of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network in Boston (remember the Fairness Doctrine?) we bore witness to an aggressive underground rightwing/Christian political movement merging into the American mainstream. Some basic assumptions about America’s secular democracy and defense policy were being challenged on the basis of faith, not facts. But the idea that some medieval religious precepts could or would be called upon to justify a nuclear war-fighting doctrine was staggering.

What we didn’t know at the time was that the Just War Doctrine of the Catholic Church had been invoked by the Papal Nuncio for the Fitzgerald family in Ireland during the 1570s. As a Fitzgerald I knew something of my family’s history. A terrible war, brought on the Fitzgeralds by the English had destroyed much of the family’s power and depopulated the Irish countryside.

Because of the Just War Doctrine, history had suddenly become personal and as it led us into the past we began to see behind the cover story into a hidden history of events ranging from the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy to the events of 9/11.

Join us as we explore the journey that took us from the emerging Christian Reconstructionism of the 1970s back in time to the 12^th century Norman invasion of Ireland and what it means to the upcoming Presidential elections of 2012 in our next installment titled The Twilight Lords. 

House of Mirrors Part I

House of Mirrors Part II

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story  ,  Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice. Visit their website here.

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The following is a sneak peak from a chapter in Andrew Gavin Marshall’s upcoming book funded through The People’s Book Project.

It is quite apparent in the history of America from the late 19^th century and into the 20^th century, that the Rockefeller family has wielded massive influence in shaping the socio-political economic landscape of society. However, up until the first half of the 20^th century came to a close, there were several other large dominant families with whom the Rockefellers shared power and purpose, notably among them, the Morgans. As the century progressed, their interests aligned further still, and following World War II, the Rockefellers became the dominant group in America, and arguably, the world. Of course, there was the well-established business links between the major families emerging out of the American Industrial Revolution going into the 20^th century, followed with the establishment of the major foundations designed to engage in social engineering. It was with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) that the changing dynamics of the Morgan-Rockefeller clan became most apparent.

As discussed earlier in this book, the Council on Foreign Relations is the ultimate networking and socializing institution among the American elite. The influence of the CFR is unparalleled among other think tanks. One study revealed that between 1945 and 1972, roughly 45% of the top foreign policy officials who served in the United States government were also members of the Council, leading one prominent member to once state that membership in the Council is essentially a “rite of passage” for being a member of the foreign policy establishment. One Council member, Theodore White, explained that the Council’s “roster of members has for a generation, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, been the chief recruiting ground for Cabinet-level officials in Washington.”[1]

The CIA, as previously examined, is also no stranger to this network, since more often than not in the first several decades of the existence of the Agency, its leaders were drawn from Council membership, such as Allen Dulles, John A. McCone, Richard Helms, William Colby, and George H.W. Bush. As some researchers have examined:

The influential but private Council, composed of several hundred of the country’s top political, military, business, and academic leaders has long been the CIA’s principal “constituency” in the American public. When the agency has needed prominent citizens to front for its proprietary (cover) companies or for other special assistance, it has often turned to Council members.[2]

Roughly 42% of the top foreign policy positions in the Truman administration were filled by Council members, with 40% in the Eisenhower administration, 51% of the Kennedy administration, and 57% of the Johnson administration, many of whom were holdovers from the Kennedy administration.[3] The Council has had and continues to have enormous influence in the mainstream media, through which it is able to propagate its ideology, advance its agendas, and conceal its influence. In 1972, three out of ten directors and five out of nine executives of the New York Times were Council members. In the same year, one out of four editorial executives and four of nine directors of the Washington Post were also Council members, including its President, Katharine Graham, as well as the Vice-President Osborn Elliott, who was also editor-in-chief of Newsweek. Of both Time Magazine and Newsweek, almost half of their directors in 1972 were also Council members.[4]

The Council also has extensive ties to the other major American think tanks, most especially the Brookings Institution, as well as the RAND Corporation, the Hudson Institute, the Foreign Policy Association, and of course, the special-purpose foundations such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, of which fifteen of its twenty-one trustees (as of 1971) were also Council members, and its president from 1950 to 1971, Joseph E. Johnson, was also a director of the Council during the same time period.[5]

The Council and the major philanthropic foundations have had extensive ties not only to each other, but in working together in constructing research and programs of study in foreign affairs. The State Department undertook a study of 191 university-connected centers for foreign affairs research, which revealed that the largest sources of funding came from the Ford Foundation (which funded 107 of the 191 centers), the federal government (which funded 67 centers), the Rockefeller Foundation (18 centers), and the Carnegie Corporation (17 centers), and that, “for eleven of the top twelve universities with institutes of international studies, Ford is the principal source of funding.”[6] These foundations, aside from being major sources of funding for the Council throughout the years from its origins, also share extensive leadership ties with the Council. At the top of the list is the Rockefeller Foundation, which in 1971 had fourteen out of nineteen of its directors also being members of the Council; the Carnegie Corporation followed with ten out of seventeen; then came the Ford Foundation with seven out of sixteen; and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund with six out of eleven board members also being members of the Council. It should also be noted that the Carnegie network extended beyond the Carnegie Corporation, and also included the Carnegie Endowment, the Carnegie Institute of Washington, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. From its founding until 1972, one-fourth of all the Council’s directors had served as trustees or directors of at least one of the several Carnegie foundations. John J. McCloy had served as chairman of both the Council and the Ford Foundation at the same time, from the 1950s until the late 60s.[7]

Of all the networks associated with the Council, the most highly represented is the New York financial oligarchy. This broadly refers to the capitalist class, and more specifically the elite financial and banking groups. In a 1969 survey it was found that seven percent of the total membership of the Council are drawn from the propertied rich, with 33% more being top executives and directors of major corporations. Roughly 11% of Council members had relatives who were also members, and the most common occupation for members of the Council, at 40%, was in business. When adding in media corporations, the number reaches nearly 50%, with less than 1% representing labour or working class organizations.[8]

When it comes to Council leadership, the officers are almost exclusively drawn from membership of the ruling capitalist class, with 22% of Council directors having relatives who were also Council members. Financing for the Council has also been largely drawn from this group, primarily from foundations and corporations, as well as various investments and subscriptions to Foreign Affairs. When the Council got its own building in 1929, a Council director, Paul Warburg, contributed a significant portion, and John D. Rockefeller II contributed even more. When the Council moved into a larger building in 1945, the house was donated by Mrs. Harold Pratt, whose husband had made his fortune from the Rockefeller’s Standard Oil enterprise, and John D. Rockefeller II contributed $150,000 for upkeep of the house. Between 1936 and 1946, funding from the major foundations averaged roughly $90,000 per year, mostly from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, who continued their funding into the 1950s, 60s and 70s. In 1953, the Ford Foundation made its first major contribution to the Council at $100,000 for a study of US-Soviet relations which was chaired by John J. McCloy. In that same year, McCloy became Chairman of the Council, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller-owned Chase Bank.[9]

Among the top corporations and banks represented in the Council (as of 1969/70) were: U.S. Steel (founded by J.P. Morgan in 1901 after acquiring Andrew Carnegie’s steel companies for a hefty sum), Mobil Oil (now merged with Exxon), Standard Oil of New Jersey (later to be Exxon Mobil), IBM, ITT, General Electric, Du Pont, Chase Manhattan Bank, J.P. Morgan and Co. (now merged with Chase into J.P. Morgan Chase), First National City Bank, Chemical Bank, Brown Brothers Harriman, Bank of New York, Morgan Stanley, Kuhn Loeb, Lehman Brothers, and several others.[10]

The New York financial oligarchy could previously be divided into separate groups, notably among them, the Rockefeller group, Morgan group, Harriman group, the Lehman-Goldman, Sachs group, and a few select others. The Rockefeller group included: Chase Manhattan Bank, Chemical Bank, Bank of New York, Equitable Life, Metropolitan Life, Mobil Oil, Kuhn, Loeb, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy (law firm), and Standard Oil. The Morgan group included: J.P. Morgan and Co., Morgan Stanley, New York Life, Mutual of New York, Davis, Polk (law firm), U.S. Steel, General Electric, and IBM. As Laurence Shoup and William Minter examined in their book on the Council:

At the Council’s origin and until the early 1950s, the most prominent place within the Council was held by men tied to Morgan interests. Since the 1950s the Rockefeller interests have taken the major role in directing Council affairs.[11]

The Council, while always representative of Rockefeller interests, had seemed to officially pass from Morgan hands into those of the Rockefeller family in 1953. Three of John D. Rockefeller II’s sons, John D. III, Nelson, and David joined the Council in the late 30s and early 40s, and David became a director in 1949. From 1953 until 1971, George S. Franklin became executive director of the Council. Franklin was a college roommate of David Rockefeller’s, and they were related by marriage, and he had worked at the law firm of Davis, Polk (within the Morgan group), before becoming an assistant to Nelson Rockefeller. In 1950, David Rockefeller became a vice-president, and John J. McCloy, a long-time representative of the Rockefeller group, became chairman of the Council in 1953, as well as chairman of the Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. It could also be said that the Rockefeller group overtook the Ford group around this time, as indicative of McCloy taking position as chairman of the Ford Foundation in the same year (while also being a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation). In the following years, several leadership positions in the Council were drawn from organizations within the Rockefeller group. John W. Davis, Robert Roosa, and Bill Moyers were all Council leaders who were connected with the Rockefeller Foundation.[12]

As the years and decades passed, the Rockefeller group became even more powerful and dominant within the American establishment and indeed around the world, firmly establishing itself alongside the Rothschild family as the principle dynastic rulers of the globalized world. Of course, there were and still are several connections between these dynastic ruling families, perhaps so much so that it may be difficult to entirely differentiate between them. Both were involved in the founding and remain involved in the leadership of the Bilderberg Group. In the 1970s, however, it became apparent that the Rockefellers had certainly become the most influential dynasty in America, if not the world (as America was and remains the imperial hegemon of the world). More specifically, David Rockefeller arose as perhaps the most influential man in America, if not the world.

David Rockefeller graduated from Harvard in 1936, and then went to school at the London School of Economics, where he first met John F. Kennedy, and had even dated JKF’s sister, Kathleen.[13] During World War II, David Rockefeller served in North Africa and France, working for military intelligence.[14] In 1947, he became a member of the board of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a major international think tank, a job that was offered to him by the Carnegie’s President, Alger Hiss. Other members of the board included John Foster Dulles, who in 1953 would become Secretary of State; Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in 1953 would become President; and Thomas J. Watson, the CEO of IBM.[15] Thomas J. Watson had previously overseen IBM’s deep business relationship with Hitler in providing the technological machinery for organizing the Holocaust.[16] In 1949, David joined the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1946, he had joined Chase Bank, and through the years rose up to becoming President in 1960, and became Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan in 1969.

David Rockefeller had long family ties to the Dulles brothers, whom he knew personally since his college years.[17] Allen Dulles had been the CIA Director and John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. David was also associated with Richard Helms, former top CIA official, as well as Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., a former CIA agent who worked with Chase Manhattan, and whose brother, Kermit Roosevelt was another CIA agent who had been responsible for organizing the 1953 coup in Iran.[18] David Rockefeller also developed close ties with a former CIA agent, William Bundy, who was close to CIA Director Allen Dulles, and who later served in both the Defense Department and the State Department in the JFK and Lyndon Johnson administrations, where he was a pivotal adviser on matters related to the Vietnam War. In 1971, one year following David Rockefeller becoming Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, Bundy was invited by David to become the editor of Foreign Affairs, the influential journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, which he then ran for 11 years.[19] David had also been extensively briefed on covert intelligence operations by various CIA division chiefs at the direction of Director Allen Dulles, David’s “friend and confidante.”[20]

Thus, in the early 1970s, David Rockefeller has risen to a position of great influence as Chairman of the Council and Chase Manhattan, placing him at the centre of the network which defines, designs, and profits from America’s imperial interests. Thus, the international situation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, of a general feeling of American imperial decline, competition increasing and cooperation decreasing between the major industrialized nations, and the general independence and liberations struggles throughout the ‘Third World’ and at home had created a general sense of oligarchic uncertainty. Of particular interest, and much more so to a banker, was the international functions of the debt market, specifically for the ‘Third World’ nations. As examined in Holly Sklar’s book, Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management:

West European and Japanese firms invaded the U.S. market and competed for the growing Third World market. Moreover, European nations began to give aid and loans to Third World nations, becoming an alternative source of aid and strengthening economic ties to their former colonies. Third World nations began to use U.S. aid to repay debts to Western Europe or relied on U.S. aid to offset chronic balance-of-payments shortages incurred, in part, through buying European products. In effect, the U.S. saw itself as paying for Third World importation of European and Japanese goods… In short, the problem from the perspective of the U.S. was that the situation then unfolding gave Third World borrowing nations too much freedom to manipulate the system, to the partial advantage of Western Europe and the Third World and to the definite disadvantage of the U.S. … In particular, the U.S. was concerned with extending its economic (and political) hegemony over the emerging Third World politically-independent nations without creating undue tensions with Western Europe and Japan.[21]

Naturally, these concerns raised the importance and the increasing potential behind institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, themselves products of the Council on Foreign Relations. Various proposals began to emerge in ‘reforming’ these institutions to meet the changing international circumstances. One proposal was to increase the practice of what was referred to as ‘tied’ aid: “aid to a country under the conditions that it be used by the country to buy U.S. goods and services.” Another proposal favoured cooperation among the major industrial nations, a “consortium approach to aid, which involved increased coordination among donor nations about scheduling payments due them by recipient nations.” Further, “each donor nation would refuse to grant aid except on terms identical to those of other donor nations in the consortium.” A third proposal, gaining in popularity, was referred to as “program aid,” which was “aid given with definite stipulations, often within the context of an overall program of economic planning, to which a recipient nation had to agree in order to obtain the aid or loans.”[22] George Ball, a long-time Council member and Bilderberg participant, was Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, said in 1967 that, “the political boundaries of nation-states are too narrow and constricted to define the scope and activities of modern business.”[23]

This was the context in which Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg group, had written his book, Between Two Ages, in which he called for the creation of a ‘Community of Developed Nations.’ David Rockefeller had taken note of Brzezinski’s writings, and was “getting worried about the deteriorating relations between the U.S., Europe, and Japan,” as a result of Nixon’s economic shocks. In 1972, David Rockefeller and Brzezinski “presented the idea of a trilateral grouping at the annual Bilderberg meeting,” which was rejected on the idea of not wanting to admit the Japanese into the Bilderberg group. Many Europeans did not want to include the Japanese at the high table. In July of 1972, seventeen powerful people met at David Rockefeller’s estate in New York to plan for the creation of the Commission. At the meeting were Brzezinski, McGeorge Bundy, the President of the Ford Foundation, (brother of William Bundy, editor of Foreign Affairs) and Bayless Manning, President of the Council on Foreign Relations.[24] So, in 1973, the Trilateral Commission was formed to address these issues. Initial funding to set up the Commission came from David Rockefeller and the Ford Foundation.[25] For the first several years, most of the Commission’s funding came from foundations, with increasing support from major corporations, which contributed roughly 12% of its funding in 1973-76, to roughly 50% in 1984.[26] Thus, in the 1970s David Rockefeller rose to an even more prominent international position, simultaneously holding a leadership position within the Bilderberg Group, and being Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.

Zbigniew Brzezinski was the Executive Director of the Trilateral Commission, and at the same time served as a director of the Council on Foreign Relations. The Trilateral Commission acted as an organization through which ‘hegemony of consent’ could be organized, particularly that of socializing elites from the ‘trilateral’ nations to one another, integrating their views, ideologies, objectives, and methods just as think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations have done within the United States. As the CFR acts domestically, the Trilateral Commission acts internationally (at least with the leading industrial nations of the North). The first European Chairman of the Commission, Max Kohnstamm, emphasized the role of ‘intellectuals’ in the construction of hegemony within the Commission:

This, which must be done by absolutely first-rate intellectuals will tend to become irrelevant unless it is done in constant checking with those who are in power or who have a considerable influence on those in power. It seems to me that the linkage between the kind of people we must get for our Trilateral Commission and the intellectuals doing the indispensable work of thinking about the elements for a new system is of the greatest importance. A Trilateral Commission without the intellectuals will become very soon a second-class negotiating forum. The intellectuals not being forced to test their ideas constantly with the establishment of our world will tend to become abstract and therefore useless… [It must be] the joint effort of our very best minds and a group of really influential citizens in our respective countries.[27]

In a 1972 speech at the Bilderberg meeting at which David Rockefeller proposed (alongside Zbigniew Brzezinski) the establishment of the Trilateral Commission, he stated that the Commission would be “bringing the best brains in the world to bear on the problems of the future… to collect and synthesize the knowledge that would enable a new generation to rebuild the conceptual framework of foreign and domestic policies.”[28]

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People’s Book Project.

Pipeline politics have entered the North American consciousness over the last several months, with the proposed Keystone Pipeline connecting the Alberta Oil Sands to the United States becoming a contentious political issue sparking a storm of protest from a concerned population.

Much less in the North American consciousness, however, are a series of pipeline projects both proposed and under construction that are set to change the face of Central Asia, and to rewire the political relations of Eurasia as a whole. The political implications of these project are enormous, if underappreciated, and the potential economic rewards for the players involved are enormous, a fact certainly not lost on the players involved.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, joined by our distinguished guests Pepe Escobar and William Engdahl, presenting the West’s scramble to secure pipeline concessions in the highly strategic Caspian basin region, the likely destabilization game in these key states in a campaign of terror that will be blamed on Islamic fundamentalists or other shadowy terror groups, and how this destabilization would benefit the very NATO countries with an interest in gaining control in the region.

Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here:

*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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As the U.S. becomes more and more the kind of country it has traditionally opposed, the answer to where we are headed may lie more in the arcane traditions of a dim past than in a bright future.

On the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, numerous commentators from across a broad spectrum of opinion focused their alarm not so much on the horror of events in lower Manhattan ten years before, but on what America has become in the aftermath of that horror. Ten years on, the United States desperately expands what appears to be an increasingly irrational, corrosive and ultimately self-destructive national security mandate around the globe and here at home.

In the darkening gloom of  the upcoming 2012 Presidential elections as the U.S. builds up its forces in the Middle East and returns its attention to Asia’s Pacific rim, the CIA’s focus is no longer on analyzing intelligence on terrorists, but simply killing those perceived as a threat to its existence or perhaps more cynically, its livelihood. In the hardened fortresses of endless war, American soldiers walled off from human society claim their own lives in record numbers while in beltway foreign policy circles “Peace” has become a dirty word. In the darkening gloom, robot Predator drones target those thought to be “terrorists” or those suspected of being terrorists. Those unfortunate enough to be standing nearby are targeted as well and will one day be the target of drones piloted by computer software and facial recognition, making the machine-killing completely autonomous.

In this house of mirrors where endless war has made guilt and innocence or even facts irrelevant, the U.S. has left the realm of science and empiricism and entered a realm more mystical than real. It is a realm where ideology dictates plans and programs and not logic and empirical evidence.  It is a realm where ideology dictates who dies and who lives and is populated by men and women who can neither be understood nor reasoned with outside the confines of their own internal and hermetically sealed logic. 

From its inception during World War II, America’s military/intelligence apparatus has acted more as a subculture of America’s ruling elite than a bureaucracy dedicated to the nation’s security. It was said of America’s first spy agency the OSS that its initials stood for Oh-So-Social because of its abundant staffing with New York’s high society blue bloods. Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks even titled their 1974 book on their life in the CIA and Foreign Service as The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. 

But over the last forty years and especially since the events of 9/11, that “Cult,” and its sister organizations in the military/intelligence community have emerged from behind the curtain to become a ubiquitous and forbidding presence.

In effect, 1974’s American “Cult” of intelligence has grown to become in 2011 the dominant American “Cult-ure.” But what that culture really is and where it’s leading us remains a frightening proposition that each and every American needs to understand.

Openly and unashamedly, “national security” now pervades all aspects of American life from the grocery store to academia to hotel check-ins to manufacturing to religion. This militarization of American society has helped to polarize the political process, dwarf diplomacy as a tool of American interests overseas and slowly and inexorably change the way Americans think about their country and behave towards each other.

Its hypnotic pull on the young (and not so young) through online electronic video games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare whose most recent release pulled in a staggering $400 million on the first day of British and American sales, continues to astonish even professional observers. This celebration of modern warfare as a “game” after ten years of budget-busting real war and only two days before the November 11, Veterans Day commemoration was a cruel reminder of the Orwellian illogic of life on the other side of the mirror. But the deeper and more troubling problem now surfacing is that real war and the imagined war played out on the video screens of America now appear to have merged into one stark unreality.

Apart from the moral implications, the future of society and the very nature of who we are as human beings have been fundamentally altered by such technology. Recent studies indicate that heavy gaming may structurally alter the brain in ways comparable to a behavioral addiction.

The altered states of awareness traditionally offered by drugs and mysticism, religion and meditation have been replaced by technology of all kinds and through technology real war and fantasy war have exchanged places. But as this narcotic enticement spreads into the public sphere of politics and business, this new altered state of mind threatens to permanently upend the very nature of reality.

The tyranny of illogical thinking evidenced by the U.S. in its War on Terror can be traced most recently to the Cold War where it became necessary to throw out the burden of proof and invert the rules of logic in order to defeat Communism.

We were personally subjected to this illogic in 1982. In response to our PBS documentary on Afghanistan, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds we were informed by Karen McKay, a former U.S. army officer and spokesperson for the right-wing Washington-based propaganda outfit Committee for a Free Afghanistan,  that the Soviet’s use of poison gas in that war didn’t require proof because “we know they’re guilty.”

Such faith-based assumptions were more the realm of medieval theologians than rational analysts and the late Senator J. William Fulbright said so in his 1972 New Yorker article titled, Reflections: In Thrall To Fear.

“The truly remarkable thing about this Cold War psychology,” he wrote, “is the totally illogical transfer of the burden of proof from those who make charges to those who question them… The Cold Warriors, instead of having to say how they knew that Vietnam was part of a plan for the Communization of the world, so manipulated the terms of public discussion as to be able to demand that the skeptics prove that it was not.”

Fulbright realized that “Rational men could not deal with each other on this basis,” and arrive at anything resembling “truth.” But this understanding quickly evaporated as the Vietnam era ended and the U.S. drifted into a realm governed by irrational men unable to accept that God might not forever be on America’s side. Powered by an ideology freed from logic as well as the reality that Vietnam had overwhelmingly disproved their theories of war and their rationales for using them, America’s defense intellectuals lapsed deeper into a distorted mirror of illogic.

Guided by old ideologues who’d helped to create the Cold War like Paul Nitze, Leo Cherne, William Casey and General Danny Graham and leading neoconservatives like Richard Perle, Harvard professor Richard Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz, their group known as Team B guided the restructuring of American military policy towards the Soviet Union not on the basis of fact or proof, but only on what their minds could imagine in their wildest fantasies.

In fact, Team B accused the CIA’s analysts of “Mirror imaging,” their own intentions once again as President Kennedy’s science advisor Jerome Wiesner had claimed back in the 1960s. Only this time (in a further twist of logic) they claimed the mirror image was of American weakness and not strength reflected in the mirror of the Soviets’ steely eyes.

The idea that the Soviet Union could or should be judged solely based on an ideological perspective was rejected by Washington’s more rational elite. “I would say that all of it was fantasy,” said Anne Hessing Cahn who worked on the staff of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1982 to 1988. “They looked at radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said ‘this is a laser beam weapon’ when in fact it was nothing of the sort… And if you go through most of Team B’s specific allegations about weapons systems and you examine them one by one, they were all wrong… I don’t believe anything in Team B was really true.”

So what is true about the prevailing motives that drive American national security policy today?  In the summer of 1980 we got a major clue to the thinking behind the neoconservative’ s aggressive plotting to overturn the U.S. government’s rational policy regarding nuclear weapons (Mutual Assured Destruction) by replacing it with a faith-based policy that would justify fighting nuclear wars.

Join us next as we unravel the de-evolution of rational defense policy and its immersion into the mystical as we explore the radical 1980 re-interpretation of  the 4^th century Just War Doctrine of the Catholic Church and it perennial advocates.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story  ,  Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice.  Visit their website here.

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As the U.S. becomes more and more the kind of country it has traditionally opposed, the answer to where we are headed may lie more in the arcane traditions of a dim past than in a bright future.

“‘We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,’ a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on condition of anonymity, said in describing his unit.”

If anyone (correctly) thought that the war on terror and Washington’s response to it had taken on a fantastical otherworldly quality, this recent quote on the front page of the Washington Post seemed to confirm it.

Following 9/11the elected government of the United States of America delivered the country to a whole department (of Homeland Security) dedicated to expanding the government’s fear of darkness into everybody’s life (remember the 2003 duct tape and plastic sheeting craze?) Now we also have a top secret military operation known as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that thinks it is the dark.

Begun as a modest hostage rescue team, JSOC has morphed into a veritable heart of darkness, with the power to murder at will and with immunity from American legal jurisdiction (which apparently still maintains that such assassinations are illegal).

Even within the military, JSOC operates as a “Stovepipe,” operation, meaning that it operates completely in the black, reports to no one and continues to employ rogue ex-CIA professionals such as indicted Iran Contra operative Dewey Clarridge.  The Navy Seal Team that took out Osama bin Laden operated under JSOC. Retired military personnel refer to JSOC as “Murder, Incorporated” and the “most dangerous people on the face of the earth.”  

But if JSOC’s reputation for secrecy, vengeance and death from above can’t be explained from within the context of traditional U.S. military operations or U.S. law, then what set of rules is it operating from? Or is it simply that the traditions of rationalism and law that most Americans took for granted about the United States are subject to deeper, religious, or perhaps even mystical rules, whose anachronistic logic has found a renewed acceptance in an irrational world of  personal, private and holy war?

No one less than the legendary Cold Warrior, Time Magazine’s Henry Luce understood that his passion for defeating Communism constituted “a declaration of private war,” which, in citing the example of  the privateer Sir Francis Drake made it not only “unlawful,” but “probably mad.”  As the child of American missionaries, Luce was committed to the militant spread of Christian Capitalism while viewing its ultimate triumph over the world as an inevitable consequence of God’s will.

Known to its 19^th century advocates as mystical imperialism, the term can be traced to both Britain and Russia’s 19^th century efforts to establish dominion through a mix of imperialism and Christian zeal. The competition came to a dead stop in Afghanistan with the end of the Great Game in 1907. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 complicated matters by infusing a heavy dose of socialist realism. But with the advent of the Cold War and the mysterious and intoxicating god-like qualities inherent in nuclear weapons, a new iteration of mystical imperialism came into being.

America’s mystical Cold War warriors were far removed technologically from their 19^th century counterparts whose Christian elite believed they were bringing rational western thinking to the “darker regions of the earth.”  

The sole purpose of America’s mid 20^th century defense intellectuals was to rationalize nuclear war scientifically. Their failure over time ultimately dragged an entire stratum of American scientific and political thought back into the irrational realm of medieval mysticism. A 1960s London Times Literary Supplement marveled at the new priesthood who moved as freely through the corridors of the Pentagon and the State Department as the Jesuits once had through the courts of Madrid and Vienna, centuries before. Tasked with defeating Communism they invented their own reality, accelerated the nuclear arms race, created the domino theory of Communist expansion and then escalated the war in Vietnam to counter it. 

President Kennedy’s science advisor Jerome Wiesner eventually came to realize that the so called “missile gap” and the massive buildup of America’s nuclear arsenal in response to it was only a “mirror image” of  America’s own intentions towards the Soviet Union and not the other way around. Yet instead of addressing the error, the U.S. slipped deeper into the Cold War mirror until its own identity began to take on the image of its “Other.”

By 1973 these thermonuclear Jesuits and their CIA counterparts were using the U.S., NATO, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia to shake the Soviet Union’s domination over Central Asia through a Christian/Islamic holy war in Afghanistan. In a rational world it might be assumed that this war was supposed to stop with the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism. But instead of ending, America’s full blown splurge into personal and private holy war had caused the U.S. to slip into a crisis of identity.

Forced after seventy five years of anti-communism to finally define itself based on what it stood for and not what it stood against, the United States entered a house of mirrors in which it continues to wander. Stricken by the results of decades of economic and military excess, it finds its mission confused and its underlying philosophical grounding threatened.

What is America on the eve of 2012? Who are these Americans who revel in their dark powers? What have we become and how did we get that way?

Join us as we explore the little-analyzed facts and mystical covert agendas that the United States continues to press on with into the 21^st century and what those agendas may mean to America’s new role as the dark force that orders the universe in the run up to the 2012 presidential elections.

“Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice . Visit their website here.

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 In his recent book The Black Banners, former FBI agent Ali Soufan portrays a key 9/11 Commission staff member, Doug MacEachin, as believing the CIA deliberately withheld information from the FBI in January 2001. This is in contrast with the Commission’s final report, which states that the CIA failed to pass on intelligence to the FBI on multiple occasions, but puts it down to honest failings.

MacEachin was one of the best-known of the Commission’s staffers before its formation. He was a career CIA officer and even served as Deputy Director for Intelligence between 1993 and 1996.

According to Soufan, MacEachin believed that the CIA purposefully withheld information placing al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash at the Malaysia summit, a gathering of top al-Qaeda figures in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000 that was monitored by the CIA. This intelligence was especially significant because it linked bin Attash, then known to be a mastermind of the October 2000 USS Cole bombing, to future Flight 77 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi.

Had the FBI learned what the CIA knew of the Malaysia summit at this time, its Cole investigators would have focused on Almihdhar and Alhazmi eight months before 9/11, giving them plenty of opportunity to stop the plot.

In his book, Soufan describes a meeting between himself and some Commission staffers, evidently Soufan’s second interview with the Commission on September 15, 2003.

Soufan says he started the interview by discussing a source inside al-Qaeda that he and his partner Steve Bongardt had helped recruit some time before the Cole bombing. In late 2000, the source had been shown a passport photo provided by the Yemeni authorities of a person the FBI thought to be bin Attash, and had identified him as such to a CIA officer known only as “Chris” and FBI agent Michael Dorris. This was another plank in the case being built against bin Attash for the Cole bombing.

Shortly after, in murky circumstances Soufan does not discuss, the CIA sent pictures of Almihdhar and Alhazmi taken at the Malaysia summit for the source to try to identify. While Dorris was out of the room, Chris showed the pictures to the source, who said he did not know Almihdhar, but identified the photo of Alhazmi as bin Attash; the two men had similar facial features.

Although the photo was not actually of bin Attash, it simply caused the CIA to believe something that was, in fact, true. Bin Attash had been at the Malaysia meeting, the agency had photos of him there; it simply omitted to show them to the source.

Whereas Chris had had the previous identification, of bin Attash in the Yemeni-provided photograph, repeated for Dorris’ benefit, this second identification of bin Attash was not repeated. In fact, Chris kept completely silent about it.

Soufan quotes himself as telling the Commission:

After 9/11 we learned that the CIA went behind our backs and showed the pictures of the Malaysia summit meeting—the pictures they wouldn’t share with us—to the source. They didn’t tell us that they had shown him the pictures, nor did they share with us what he told them about the pictures. He didn’t know that the CIA wasn’t sharing information with the FBI; nor was he told why these pictures were important. …

… This shows that the CIA knew the significance of Malaysia, Khallad, and Mihdhar but actively went out of their way to withhold the information from us. It’s not a case of just not passing on information. This is information the FBI representative working with the source should have been told about. It was a legal requirement. Instead we were deliberately kept out of the loop.

A Commission staffer then interjected that the CIA claimed it had shared the information, and Soufan responded by asking whether the Commission had checked the “regular cables,” meaning general reporting of the debriefing of the source, including information that would be shared with the FBI and the wider intelligence community. The staffer replied that they had. As later reported, the regular cables contained no mention of the key fact that that the mastermind of the Cole bombing had attended a summit of al-Qaeda leaders in Malaysia. Soufan then asked whether the Commission had checked the “operational traffic,” where mention of the source’s identification of bin Attash was later found. At this point MacEachin exclaimed, “That must be it,” although Soufan judged that the other Commission staffers in the room had not understood his point.

Soufan explains what MacEachin had grasped:

Operational traffic refers to cables sent during an operation. The officer will list procedures, leaving a record in case something goes wrong or something needs to be referred to. Because these cables are strictly procedural and not related to intelligence, they would not be sent to the FBI. If someone wanted to hide something from the FBI, that’s where he would put it. Because Doug had worked for the CIA, he knew what operational cables were, while other members of the team might not have.

This clearly indicates MacEachin had come round to Soufan’s way of thinking, at least on this point. However, the Commission’s final report did not find that this information about bin Attash—or indeed any information—was deliberately withheld by the CIA. In fact, the final report calls this incident “an example of how day-to-day gaps in information sharing can emerge even when there is mutual goodwill.”

Chris subsequently met with the source again, in the presence of Dorris and other FBI agents, and they repeated the first identification of the Yemeni-provided photograph of bin Attash for formal use in legal proceedings. However, Chris did not mention that bin Attash had attended the Malaysia summit. Chris also reported the identification of bin Attash to the CIA station in Yemen, which failed to pass it on to the FBI Cole investigators there. Finally, Chris also asked the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center to bring the FBI up to speed with what was going on, but they also failed to tell their colleagues bin Attash had been identified in a Malaysia photograph.

Soufan later refers to MacEachin as a “supporter of mine,” indicating that there was some disagreement inside the Commission. As we can see from the final report, the opinion that the failure to pass on information was not deliberate prevailed.

Nevertheless, there are still questions. In the recently released audio documentary Who Is Rich Blee? 9/11 Commission chairman Tom Kean disagreed with his own report’s conclusions, stating of the CIA’s failure to pass on information: “[I]t wasn’t careless oversight. It was purposeful. No question about that in mind. It was purposeful.” Does MacEachin, agreeing with his former boss, still believe that information about bin Attash was deliberately withheld from the FBI? Also, what other information does he think was withheld—the interview of the source in Islamabad was only one piece of a larger mosaic? Finally, what happened in the discussions of this issue within the Commission—if MacEachin was a “supporter” of Soufan, who were his opponents?

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations

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The office of the Director of National Intelligence announced last month that America’s civilian intelligence agencies appropriated a combined 54.6 billion dollars for classified operations this year, but he explicitly refused to provide any details of how the figure was divided up between America’s 16 non-uniformed intelligence agencies or what the money was appropriated for.

Intentionally and daringly withheld from the public is the amount of funds that the CIA has to use for its so-called “black operations,” or covert actions. What is the size of the CIA’s budget, and where is this money parked?

The question is even more difficult to answer than it first appears. Not only is there the issue of the funds that they receive in secret from Congress, and not only is there the ever-present question of how black operations use illegal methods to finance further illegal covert operations, there is also the question of the CIA literally setting up businesses, front companies, and shells, that function, from the outside, like any other business. Behind the scenes, however, these businesses are merely a place for the CIA to nest its covert operatives, and, potentially, to make and funnel money for their own purposes.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting well known and exposed facts, questions, and intrigues on the CIA’s front companies and its connections to the murky world of money laundering and shady financial institutions, to secretly and illegally fund their immoral black operations around the world.

Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here:

*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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‘Two’:I am reading the new sensational headlines on Honduras’ now internationally recognized status as the Western Hemisphere’s major Cocaine Hub:

Long an impoverished backwater in Central America, Honduras has become a main transit route for South American cocaine.”Honduras is the number one offload point for traffickers to take cocaine through Mexico to the U.S.,” said a U.S. law enforcement official who could not be quoted by name for security reasons. A U.S. State Department report released in March called Honduras “one of the primary landing points for South American cocaine.”

Almost half of the cocaine that reaches the United States is now offloaded somewhere along the country’s coast and heavily forested interior — a total of 20 to 25 tons each month, according to U.S. and Honduran estimates.

Here is a brief video clip for a general idea of Honduras’ now recognized Narco State Status:

 
‘Another Two’: Remember the illegal military coup in June 2009? I am talking about the one our President vehemently and actively supported while recognizing it as illegitimate and unconstitutional? Our president not only continued financial aid and support to the illegitimate new government of Honduras, but actually increased it, and continues to increase it. This, despite of a whole host of human rights violations, such the killing of more than 3000 people including journalists, lawyers and activists by the US supported illegitimate government.

‘Next Two’: Have you read the Nation magazine’s recently uncovered close relationship between the corporate drug lords and private paramilitaries and the Obama administration?  Wealthy landowners with ties to the cocaine trade, like Miguel Facussé, who actively supported the 2009 military coup, and who has met with the State Department numerous times, and met with Obama in Washington DC in the first week of October. How about that, huh? And the results?

Obama has allocated $45 million in new funds for military construction, including expansion and improvement of the jointly operated Soto Cano Air Force Base at Palmerola (supplied now with US drones) and has opened three new military bases, Police and military funding, almost $10 million for 2011, rose dramatically in June with $40 million more under the new $200 million Central American Regional Security Initiative, supposedly to combat drug trafficking in Central America.

“More Two’s”: With Honduras’ ascending status in the drug trade and associated violence and corruption, why has the Obama administration been vehemently supporting the illegitimate and criminal Honduran regime and its top-tier drug lords? Huh, doesn’t this sound very familiar? Think about Afghanistan’s drug lords and operators. I’m talking about the pawn government we have planted there. You know, the Karzai Heroin Clan?

You may also throw in the following ‘two’ provided to you by Boiling Frogs EyeOpener Video Report with James Corbett: Morbid Addiction: CIA & the Drug Trade

Okay. Now, shall we go ahead and add the two and two and two and two …What does it add up to? You tell me.

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What if this Halloween was exported to other parts of the world where horror and atrocities are woven into the people’s lives? What if this ritual was adopted by the children of the war-torn nations? What if these children who’ve been seeing, hearing and experiencing daily horrors and fear were to concoct their own Halloween characters? Would they solely rely on imaginary and made-up monsters and boogiemen, or would they designate real-life boogiemen as their Halloween characters and symbols?

I think the children of war-torn countries with mighty oil, or the kids in the nations on the mighty oil path, would not have to resort to a concocted, fictional and generic boogieman. You see, they have known, seen or heard of a real one. Their boogieman would have a name and a face. He’d be known for his ritualistic map combing, where he’d bend over a map, run his fingers over the page while humming:

 Eeny, meeny, mighty oil

Get that country by sheer force

If it fights back, fry by drone

Eeny, meeny, mighty oil

He’d keep humming until his finger, remotely controlled by the shadowy powers behind him, would come to a halt, on top of a nation- the chosen one for his coming round. If you happen to be one of the children in that nation …well, then may God help you; because no one else can.

The Boogieman with a name and a face would be coming after you with his man-less extension.

He’d be frying babies and mothers without having to hear the sound of their sizzling skin.

His man-less driven bombs would be hitting unknowing children at dinner tables or in bed.

Why man-less? Well, because it would take a certain type of man, a rare kind, to do it in person, to be able to stand the sound of those sizzling skins or the screams of the frying mother and her child, and keep doing it. But man-less is how it is done when a boogieman and a ruthless coward become one. And this kind of a coward boogieman with a face and a name is far scarier than any boogieman that can be concocted by any fiction. Just ask the children of the chosen Eeny- meeny- mighty oil nations. They’d tell you.

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Has it ever occurred to you that there seems to be no positive actions or accomplishments associated with this rogue-criminal agency? Really, think of one positive accomplishment or contribution by this well-funded and legitimized terrorist entity? We all know of the need and longing for praise and gloating when it comes to government agencies and bureaucrats. You would think that for every awful and scandalous incident that is leaked there would be several glorified and flowery ones. No? Come on; it’s human nature, and even more so, an inherently present government bureaucracy pattern.

I kept thinking, and thinking more, and tried hard to come up with one positive attribute of this rogue agency called the CIA. And I found one. Kind of. I think it is more appropriate to consider it an ‘unintended positive externality’ rather than a plain and straight forward positive. Well, here it is:

Let me start with a general concept as a framework. Are you familiar with the general concept of Penal Colonies? If not, here is a very general, macro definition: A penal colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general populace by placing them in a remote location, often an island or distant colonial territory. I am going to use penal colonies just as a general concept since these colonies were designed and implemented for a wide range of purposes targeting an even wider range of people or groups as the colonies inhabitants, the prisoners.

Next, I want to briefly talk about the list of ‘desired qualifications’ for the CIA operative selection process. A few years ago one of my former CIA operative sources made the following comment:

“I truly owe it to the military and the CIA. Considering my background, a severely abusive childhood environment and later juvenile delinquencies, I was on my way to turn into a hard-core criminal. I stood before this fork: one led me to the extreme criminal path, and the other one turned me into a great soldier and even greater operative. Military re-channeled my criminal tendencies and rage, and later the CIA put those to noble and great uses through black operations overseas. When I kidnapped, killed, tortured…well, I did them all for my country and for the good of my own people. I owe them both.”

Now, the man above was one of several I have extensively interviewed on the top qualifications sought by the Agency in order to be accepted as operatives. The general list includes the following qualifications:

• Highly deceptive and manipulative
• Above Average Intelligence
• Pathological Liar
• Psychopathic tendencies
• Sociopathic tendencies
• Sadistic Tendencies
• Absence or low degree of conscience 
• Rage and Anger issues
• Abusive Childhood
• Moral Ambiguity

Well, you get the general picture, and I don’t have to bore you with the longer list of highly sought qualifications.

Back to the operative I quoted above. What went unsaid was this: I got to put all those criminal tendencies into action overseas, victimize people in other countries, and was told it was all for the good of my country. Oh, I was also given honor and a couple of medals for that.

Another way to say it, crudely that is: don’t sh.. where you eat. It is okay and actually honorable to commit those crimes elsewhere and victimize ‘others.’ But the same actions over here, at home, would land you in jail at best, and most likely in the electric chair.

Or say it this way: I came to this fork. One was to become a domestic criminal, the other was to become an international one sanctioned and legitimized by my government. I chose the latter and even got a medal or two for it.

How does all this tie into the semi positive externality and penal colonies concept?

The CIA has thousands of these operatives with ‘those’ sought after qualifications around the globe. Without the CIA these highly qualified sadistic, psychopathic, murdering and torturing criminals would have been here at home; right in our own backyard.

I am all with Ron Paul when it comes to dissolving this rogue criminal and terrorist agency. I also keep my realism hat on and accept the consequences of such a move. The moment the agency is dissolved, when the operatives come back home, we will see a phenomenal rise in our domestic hard and cruel crime rate: a astronomical jump in the number of serial murder victims, a huge increase in serial rape and torture cases, a vast increase in white collar crime involving con artists and charlatans … Basically, the penal colonies inhabitants would be coming ‘home.’

Still, despite all these negative consequences I would rather free our nation and the world of this dangerous rogue criminal terrorist agency. It is past time to stop treating the rest of the world as our penal colonies for our hard-core criminals.

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This is part I of our interview series based on the recently released book -The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State, edited by Dr. Philip Zwerling.

Professor Philip Zwerling joins us to discuss his recently released book on how years after covertly funding the National Students Association, spying on suspect faculty, and dosing unsuspecting students with psychedelic drugs, the CIA is back, funding conferences on ‘intelligence ethics’, subsidizing courses for academic credit, and recruiting operatives among some the of the poorest students in the nation under the guise of protecting the homeland and combating terrorism. He describes various incentives that drive the faculty and administrators at campuses nationwide to cooperate with this new CIA-campus targeting operation. Dr. Zwerling talks about the “pilot program” authorized under the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act to establish the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), and how the PRISP students’ identities are secret as are the classes they attend, how the CIA’s funding provided to universities may explain an absence of articles critical of CIA activities in academic journals, and more!

Philip Zwerling is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Texas Pan American in Edinburg, Texas. He is the author of more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles and two books, Nicaragua: A New Kind of Revolution, and After School Theatre Programs for At Risk Teenagers, and is the editor of The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State

Here is our guest Dr. Philip Zwerling unplugged!

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The AQ Khan nuclear network was first introduced to the public in early 2004, with Abdul Qadeer Khan’s dramatic televised confession to the Pakistani public that he had participated in selling nuclear technology, including bomb-making designs and equipment, to countries including Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Right from the beginning, the sensational nature of the network and its eventual discovery, a tale of international intrigue and shadowy spy craft, seemed tailor-made for headline-grabbing reports, or sensationalistic BBC docudramas.

As is typical with these events, a popular understanding has emerged around the early reporting on the subject, one that suggests that Dr. Khan was working essentially off the radar and out of sight of the intelligence agencies whose very existence is predicated on identifying such threats long before they develop.

Inevitably, however, as happens every time that an intelligence operation leads to some catastrophic result, the “incompetence theory” is trotted out as a way to explain what happened. In the Khan case, it is argued that the CIA, despite infesting every layer of this plot, somehow remained completely oblivious to Khan’s efforts to proliferate these weapons to North Korea, Iran, and Libya until it was already too late.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting the documented but under-reported facts and intrigues on AQ Khan’s nuclear network, the CIA’s knowledge and surveillance of the network from its very inception, and the collaborative efforts by the CIA and certain US politicians to fund, protect and further the network’s nuclear black-market activities and expansion.

*Beginning next week our EyeOpener Video Report will be available only to our subscribers.

**The Transcript for this video is now available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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Taliban Did Not Kill Afghan President’s Brother: NATO

The man who killed the influential half brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai three months ago carried out the attack for personal reasons and was not a Taliban fighter, a senior NATO official said Saturday.

“It was a murder, not an assassination,” the NATO official said of Karzai’s killing, in a briefing to unveil NATO statistics showing a fall in Taliban attacks. “It wasn’t politically motivated and it wasn’t an insurgent masterstroke.”

…

Well, we at Boiling Frogs Post did not need a half-baked NATO report, still far from being factual, to arrive at that conclusion. Three months ago I wrote the following commentary report on Ahmed Wali Karzai’s assassination:

The Assassination of Afghan Kingpin Karzai: A Case of CIA Liabilities Exceeding Its Asset? 

There is no point in wasting too many words and space rehashing what every media outlet has been reporting and recounting on the assassination of Afghan Heroin Kingpin Ahmed Wali Karzai. The US media began reporting on the Kingpin, his heroin network and operations, his shady deals and even shadier connections over two years ago. This is how it always goes when the relationship between Kingpins like Karzai starts souring with their masters in Langley…

Then, right after that commentary, no longer able to stand the mainstream and pseudo alternative media’s nonstop spreading of that fantastical script made-up by Langley, I wrote my next analysis of the likely story:

Gimme a Break: The CIA Asset Turned Taliban Bodyguard Assassin?!

The entire scenario of a Taliban-Turned confidante bodyguard didn’t sit well with me; way too Langley. When you get a chance read a bit about the assassination of Vietnam’s Diem Brothers, and then you’ll understand what I mean when I say ‘Too Langley.’

Anyhow, this morning I read the following headline: Bodyguard Who Killed Karzai’s Brother Was Trusted CIA Contact :

The bodyguard who assassinated President Hamid Karzai’s brother had been working closely with US Special Forces and the CIA …

Everything made sense up to this point, but then came the following sentences:

…before he was recruited by the Taliban, raising fears over the Islamist movement’s increasingly sophisticated intelligence apparatus which has managed to threaten the inner circles of power in Afghanistan.

…

Utter nonsense; that is, if you start adding 2 and 2 and another 2, and then check the result against the one presented to you by the media. Let’s add up a few twos here:

-We know that Ahmed Wali Karzai was a CIA operative and trusted asset for years.

-We know that the CIA relationship- aka working arrangement soured with Ahmed Wali Karzai around 2008, so he was outed by Langley.

-We know that Ahmed Wali Karzai had a pretty good relationship with a certain group of Taliban figure-heads and was pro dialogue with the Taliban.

-We know that Ahmed Karzai’s bodyguard, Sardar Mohammad, spent years as a CIA trusted asset and US ally.

-We know that Karzai’s Bodyguard was a well-know Taliban Foe and played an important role as a snitch reporting on the Taliban and helping with their arrests.

Here is what the above twos add up to: The known Taliban Foe CIA Asset assassinates former CIA Asset-Operative whose relationship with the CIA had soured, and who had relationships and dialogue with certain Taliban figureheads.

And here is the add up by the media: The bodyguard turned out of the blue into a Taliban and assassinated former US operative who turned out to be a drug kingpin, Ahmed Wali Karzai.

…

So, do you think the MSM and their quasi siblings will go back and retract their previous fantasy-bologna; the one given to them by their Langley bosses? Right! Maybe a few years from now there will be another back-page story giving out other bits and pieces of the real deal, but no way-no chance for the publication of the entire ‘real story.’

By the way, do you remember our ‘Breaking News’ last month, on September 21, which exposed the identities of the CIA analysts at the heart of a notorious failure in the run-up to the September 11th tragedy? You know the one that was not touched by the MSM and pseudo lurkers? Well, finally, about a month later, one finally picked up the story. Pretty much it is the carbon copy of our reports on the case, nonetheless we are glad to see ‘some’ coverage, even though about a month late

We intend to remain fast and furiously truthful when it comes to reporting, analyzing and discussing the issues that remain blacked-out by the MSM-Pseudo misinformation market. And we hope you are resolved and determined to support our one-of-a-kind website with your contributions through your subscription to Boiling Frogs Post.

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Just as the British Empire was in part financed by their control of the opium trade through the British East India Company, so too has the CIA been found time after time to be at the heart of the modern international drug trade. From its very inception, the CIA has been embroiled in the murky underworld of drug trafficking.

There are billions of dollars per year to be made in keeping the drug trade going, and it has long been established that Wall Street and the major American banks rely on drug money as a ready source of liquid capital. With those kinds of funds at stake, it is unsurprising to see a media-government-banking nexus develop around the status quo of a never-ending war on drugs – aided, abetted and facilitated by the modern-day British East India Company, the CIA.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett presenting the history, documented facts, and cases on the CIA’s involvement and operations in the underworld of drug trafficking, from the Corsican Mafia in the 1940s through the 1980s Contras to the recent Zambada Niebla Case today.

*The Transcript for this video is now available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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Leading scholars and human rights groups from a range of fields – including psychology, medicine, law, military, and intelligence – have joined together in spearheading a broad-based effort to annul and delegitimize the American Psychological Association’s deeply flawed 2005 Report of the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (the PENS Report). In a joint declaration the coalition states:

Despite evidence that psychologists were involved in abusive interrogations, the PENS Task Force concluded that psychologists play a critical role in keeping interrogations “safe, legal, ethical and effective.” With this stance, the APA, the largest association of psychologists worldwide, became the sole major professional healthcare organization to support practices contrary to the international human rights standards that ought to be the benchmark against which professional codes of ethics are judged- the “do no Harm” standard.

Further, the coalition points out the inherent bias in the Presidential Task Force membership, where six of the nine voting members were on the payroll of the U.S. military and/or intelligence agencies, and five having served in chains of command accused of prisoner abuses. The group cites other significant conflicts of interest by the Task Force’s unacknowledged participants, such as the spouse of a Guantánamo intelligence psychologist and several high-level lobbyists for the Department of Defense, and direct funding for psychologists by the CIA.

Professor Stephen Soldz, clinical psychologist and one of the coalition’s active leaders, had the following statement in an exclusive interview with Boiling Frogs Post:

“We now know that psychologists played a central role in design and implementation of the US torture program and the PENS Report was the crucial document that protected this involvement. Without the involvement of psychologists the torture program as we know it could not have gone forward. The PENS Report was a black mark for the profession of psychology and a devastating blow against human rights worldwide. We are calling on people from around the world – psychologists, other professionals, and ordinary citizens concerned with human rights – to join us in calling for the Report to be annulled as a step to ending torture everywhere.”

Professor Soldz is also one of the contributing authors in the recently released book -The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State, edited by Dr. Philip Zwerling.

The Coalition has launched a petition calling for the annulment of the APA’s PENS Report as part of their joint effort to remove psychologists from torture and abusive interrogations. So far the list of prominent signatories includes more than 300 scholars, intelligence experts and activists. Here are a few names from the petition’s signatory list:

Philip Zimbardo, President, American Psychological Association (2002); Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, Stanford University

Leonard Rubenstein, Senior Scholar, Center for Public Health and Human Rights, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor (ret.), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Michael Wessells, PhD, APA PENS Task Force Member, Professor of Clinical Population and Family Health, Columbia University

Steven Reisner, PhD, Candidate for APA President; Clinical Assistant Professor, NYU Medical School; Faculty and Supervisor, International Trauma Studies Program, New York City

David DeBatto, former US Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and Iraq war veteran

Michael Ratner, President Emeritus, Center for Constitutional Rights

Manfred Nowak, Professor for International Law and Human Rights, University of Vienna; Director, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights

David Remes, Appeal for Justice; Guantánamo habeas attorney since 2004

Nora Sveaass, UN Committee Against Torture; Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Norway

Sibel Edmonds, Founder & Director, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition

Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis FBI Legal Counsel

The petition is now open to the public. People are encouraged to visit the coalition’s website for more information and background, and sign the petition here.

*We just recorded an in depth interview with Professor Soldz. The interview will be published in two weeks as part of our new series on ‘CIA on Campus,’ based on a recently released book -The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State, edited by Dr. Philip Zwerling. Here is a brief preview of our interview:

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Former FBI-CIA Agent Nada Prouty joins us in an exclusive interview to discuss her journey from Lebanon to the United States, her sham marriage to obtain US citizenship, what motivated her to join the FBI counterterrorism unit, and why she left the FBI to join the CIA. She provides us with details of being investigated and eventually prosecuted by the Justice Department, and the reasons she pled guilty to two felonies and a misdemeanor to the sham marriage and unauthorized use of a FBI computer. Ms. Prouty shares with us her assessment of the FBI and the CIA, the differences between the two agencies in approaching counter-terror related operations, her take on the Agency’s scandals, from lying on Iraq WMD to documented cases of assassination-rendition- torture, and more!

Nada Prouty is a former CIA case officer of Lebanese origin who was recruited in 2003 into the CIA from the FBI. In 2005 she was investigated for passing information to Hezbollah because her brother-in-law was suspected of having ties to Hezbollah. U.S. officials said that there was no evidence that Prouty had passed secrets to Hezbollah or to other groups the United States considers terrorist. However, the investigation uncovered that Prouty had committed immigration fraud in 1989 by paying a man to marry her so she could obtain United States citizenship. In 2007 she pled guilty to two felonies related to the sham marriage and to one misdemeanor count of unauthorized use of a FBI computer. Ms. Prouty pled guilty to the computer charge to end the case due to the costs of a legal defense, and was given no jail time in exchange for her plea. Her memoire Uncompromised: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of an Arab American Patriot in the CIA is scheduled to be released this November. For more information on Ms. Prouty and her book you can visit her website.

Here is our guest Nada Prouty unplugged!

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In the first two parts of this series we saw how a group of officers at Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, concealed information about al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit from their FBI colleagues in January 2000. In particular they hid information about a US visa in the possession of Flight 77 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar. We also saw how this protection of Almihdhar, his partner Nawaf Alhazmi and al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash continued even after the involvement of Almihdhar and bin Attash in the October 2000 USS Cole bombing became known to the US intelligence community. Concealing information about terrorists involved in seventeen homicides was bad enough, but things were about to get much worse.

Shortly after the CIA had failed to respond truthfully to a second formal request for information about the Cole bombing from FBI agent Ali Soufan in April 2001, the cables the CIA drafted about the Malaysia summit were reviewed at Alec Station. The review was conducted by Tom Wilshire, the station’s deputy chief and one of the key figures in the withholding of the information, and a female CIA officer whose name is not known. The two of them re-read cables from the previous year that said Almihdhar had a US visa and that Alhazmi had flown to Los Angeles with a companion, but neither of them took the appropriate action—watchlisting the Malaysia attendees and alerting the FBI.

After this review, Wilshire ordered another review of the same information. The review was to be carried out by Margaret Gillespie, a CIA detailee to Alec Station whose alleged memory loss regarding the events of January 2000 makes one suspicious of her motives. Wilshire believed, correctly as it turns out, that the cables contained the key to preventing the next major al-Qaeda attack—had they been handled properly, 9/11 would never have happened.

Three weeks before the attacks, Gillespie allegedly discovered a key cable, and this led her to tell the FBI about Almihdhar and Alhazmi. As you know, the FBI hunt for Almihdhar and Alhazmi was unsuccessful and this, as you probably don’t know, was largely due to Wilshire. Nevertheless, Wilshire received substantial praise from the post-attack investigations for getting Gillespie to do the review. Plenty of his other actions cast suspicion on him, but this review seemed to put him in the clear—if he really was trying to hide the information, why start a review?

If we look at how Wilshire started the review, two things stand out. First, Wilshire told Gillespie that the review was not urgent and that she should do it in her free time. There were obviously other things to do at the time, but figuring out the location of the next major al-Qaeda attack should have been fairly high on the Counterterrorist Center’s to-do list. Second, the reason it allegedly took Gillespie three months to review a handful of relatively short documents is reportedly that she could not find them in the CIA’s database. However, Wilshire had the cables when the review started, but simply failed to give them to Gillespie. Had he done so, the review would have lasted closer to a couple of hours than three months. As we will see, Gillespie says she discovered the key cable that led her to alert the Bureau shortly after the 9/11 hijackers finalised the date of the attack.

After the above facts are taken into consideration, we can come up with a theory about why Wilshire started the second review: after the first review by Wilshire and the unnamed CIA officer, it was obvious that action should be taken; specifically, the FBI and INS should be contacted and told what Alec Station knew, which would have prevented Almihdhar re-entering the US late in the year, or enabled the FBI to follow him when he did. In order to prevent the unknown officer from doing this, Wilshire suggested a second review, which he may have represented as being, for example, more complete, thorough, wide-ranging, etc. Initiating such a review was the only way he could come up with to stop this officer from doing what she knew she should do.

Shortly after this, Wilshire moved to the FBI, where he became deputy chief of the International Terrorism Operations Section. He also initiated a series of events that led to the FBI’s Cole investigators being shown photos of Almihdhar and Alhazmi, although all information about the two men continued to be withheld.

First, Wilshire initiated a discussion with a CIA analyst named Clark Shannon in which a group of three surveillance photos taken at al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit were mentioned. In this discussion, Wilshire committed a slip, suggesting that the photo of Alhazmi that, based on the January 4 meeting with “Omar” discussed in part two of this series, the CIA believed showed bin Attash did not actually show bin Attash at all. “Someone saw something that wasn’t there,” he wrote to Shannon. Given that Wilshire claims he had not even read the cable reporting on the January 4 identification of bin Attash, this is surprising to say the least. Wilshire was, in fact, correct and the photo showed Alhazmi, not bin Attash, but Wilshire appeared to know al-Qaeda operatives better than one of the US’s top sources inside the organization. The explanation for this seems clear: Wilshire knew well who Alhazmi was, and he knew bin Attash too.

After e-mailing with Wilshire, Shannon mentioned the photos to Dina Corsi, an FBI headquarters analyst who worked closely with Wilshire and will go on to play a key role in the story. Wilshire then printed the photos off for Corsi, who was to show them to the Cole agents. Naturally, Wilshire forgot to mention that bin Attash, the mastermind of the attack they were all investigating, had been in Malaysia with Almihdhar in January 2000. Corsi also obtained information from the NSA about the Malaysia meeting.

On June 11, 2001, Shannon, Corsi and Gillespie went to meet with the Cole agents, in particular Steve Bongardt and Russell Fincher, at the FBI’s New York office. After a presentation by the Bureau about the state of the investigation, Shannon told Corsi to take the photos out and show them to her FBI colleagues. Bongardt was immediately curious and asked some basic questions about the photos, such as who was in them and what was going on. The “Wilshire” side of the table mostly refused to answer them. There was an argument, a “shouting match,” which continued between Bongardt and Corsi when the meeting broke up.

It is hard to sustain a good-faith explanation for this meeting, which represents another opportunity to interdict Almihdhar, Alhazmi and the whole 9/11 plot. The claimed reason for showing the photos was that the CIA wanted to know if any of them showed Fahad al-Quso, one of the Cole plotters who was in Yemeni custody and had been interviewed by the FBI. However, one of the photos showed Almihdhar. Wilshire identified him as such when he gave Corsi the photos and she even wrote Almihdhar’s name on the back of the photo. How was the FBI supposed to identify al-Quso in a photo of Khalid Almihdhar? Another photo showed Alhazmi, who looked nothing like al-Quso. Also, Shannon provided conflicting accounts of the meeting afterwards, and his claim that he went to an information-sharing meeting without any information to share is both bizarre and contradicted by Corsi’s notes, which show he did disclose that Almihdhar was travelling on a Saudi passport in January 2000.

Corsi’s refusal to provide the Cole investigators with the NSA information is also incredible. She claimed she could not do so because of an offshoot of the “wall” regulations, which primarily governed the sharing of information between FBI intelligence agents and criminal prosecutors. However, the regulations did not apply to one of the New York agents at the meeting, who was a designated intelligence agent. In addition, it would have taken Corsi one day to get permission to pass the information to the other agents, who were on the criminal side, from the NSA’s general counsel.

When the events of the meetings and what preceded it are weighed up, the following conclusion seems inescapable: the meeting was not a good faith attempt to share information, but a ruse—orchestrated by Wilshire—to learn whether the Cole agents recognised Alhazmi and Almihdhar.

When this meeting is compared to the January 4, 2001 meeting with “Omar” referenced in part two of this series, there is a striking similarity: photos of Almihdhar and Alhazmi are passed under the pretext that they show other people, and information just happens not to be shared. Meanwhile, the group around Wilshire learns whether the people recognise Almihdhar and Alhazmi or not.

Another significance of the June 11 meeting is that it shows us that whatever the CIA was doing with Almihdhar and Alhazmi was still very much ongoing. The two men had not been forgotten, they were at the front of the minds of Wilshire and his now-former boss, Richard Blee. As we will see in part 4 of the series, both men were highly aware of the drumbeat of threat reporting in the summer of 2001 and Wilshire even linked Almihdhar to the forthcoming major al-Qaeda attack in a highly incriminating e-mail.

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

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In-Q-Tel was formed by the CIA in 1999 as a private, not-for-profit venture capital firm with the specific task of delivering technology to America’s intelligence community. Publicly, In-Q-Tel markets itself as an innovative way to leverage the power of the private sector by identifying key emerging technologies and providing companies with the funding to bring those technologies to market. In reality, however, what In-Q-Tel represents is a dangerous blurring of the lines between the public and private sectors in a way that makes it difficult to tell where the American intelligence community ends and the IT sector begins.

In-Q-Tel has generated a number of stories since its inception based on what can only be described as the “creepiness” factor of its investments in overtly Orwellian technologies.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett presenting documented facts and cases on the CIA’s privately owned venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, in which well-connected board members drawn from the private sector profit from the investments made with CIA funds that come from the taxpayer.

*The Transcript for this video is now available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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Zambada Niebla, son of one of the leaders of the Sinaloa “Cartel,” arguably the most powerful international narco-trafficking organization on the planet, argues in his criminal case, now pending in federal court in Chicago, that he and the leadership of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug-trafficking organization, were, in effect, working for the U.S. government for years by providing US agents with intelligence about rival drug organizations.

In exchange for that cooperation, Zambada Niebla contends, the US government granted the leadership of the Sinaloa “Cartel” immunity from prosecution for their criminal activities — including the narco-trafficking charges he now faces in Chicago.

The government, in court pleadings filed last month, denies that claim but at the same time has filed a motion in the case seeking to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), a measure designed to assure national security information does not become public during court proceedings.

CIPA, enacted 30 years ago, is designed to keep a lid on public disclosure in criminal cases of classified materials, such as details associated with clandestine FBI or CIA operations. In this case, however, the invocation appears to be for the purpose of covering up a scandalous and shady quid pro quo deal between the US government and a drug cartel. Not only that, the Niebla case also threatens to further expose another US government scandal:

It is important to note again that most of the weapons allowed to cross from the US unimpeded into Mexico by ATF’s Fast and Furious were going to the Sinaloa “Cartel,” according to a report issued in July by Issa and Grassley.

So, given Zambada Niebla’s claim ithat “some of the [Fast and Furious] weapons were deliberately allowed by the FBI and other government representatives to end up in the hands of the Sinaloa “Cartel,” it seems his attorneys may want to pose some serious questions to witnesses suspected of having knowledge of that alleged act, including DEA’s Roberts, as well as the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Mexico operations, Carol K.O. Lee and the U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, Kenneth J. Gonzales.

Such a prospect can’t be very uplifting for the prosecution in Zambada Niebla’s case and might explain, in part, why there is an effort afoot by the US law-enforcement and intelligence officials to cloak the revelations, the evidence, that might surface in the case under the seal of national security.

Prosecutors on Monday, Oct. 3, filed a motion in federal court in Chicago rebutting the accused Mexican narco-trafficker’s argument that he has been denied access to critical evidence in preparing his defense:

In their pleadings, prosecutors again affirm the government’s position that there was no immunity deal offered to the accused narco-trafficker or to the leadership of the Sinaloa drug-trafficking organization. The pleadings filed by the prosecution do not address directly why the government is seeking to invoke national-security procedures for Zambada Niebla’s case
…

Monday’s filing by prosecutors confirms that Zambada Niebla’s case does raise national security issues that require, according to those prosecutors, that special procedures be established by the court — under a 30-year-old law known as the Classified Information Procedures Act — to assure that classified materials do not become public during the court proceedings.

There seems to be another equally troubling and scandalous angle to this story: the US media’s synchronized and orchestrated black out of this massive scandal, most likely at the behest of the US government:

To date, the US mainstream media has been completely silent on the US government’s effort to invoke CIPA in the Zambada Niebla case; so, kind readers, Narco News is the only authentic news publication providing you with the scoop.

…

Conroy’s final sentence succinctly sums up the reality in the US government’s so-called War on Drugs:

The future of the for-profit prohibition industry and the drug-war pretense that props it up could well depend on assuring that the public remains in the dark…

I am going to add my own little sentence to Conroy’s: …and the US media has been playing its role exceptionally well in this “assurance” project.

I am going to ask our readers to treat this Boiling Frogs Post update as a Code Red Alert for US Media Cover Up, and take the following actions:

1-    Visit Narcosphere and read my solid journalist friend Bill Conroy’s article here.

2-    If you have a website, FB, twitter or similar accounts, post the notice for Conroy’s article, and ask others to do the same.

3-    E-mail this notice and article links to your friends-groups and ask them to do the same.

4-    Go to ‘comments’ section of mainstream media websites, post comments with the link to this story, and put them to shame-although we know they know no shame.

5-    And finally, thank you all for your vigilance.

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Peter B Collins: Our guest today is Paul Thompson, he is the author of the Terror Timeline, he is an alumnus, a graduate of Stanford university, and he has been researching 9/11 and related issues for many years. Paul Thompson, welcome to the Boiling Frogs.

Paul Thomspon: Hey, thanks for having me.

PC: I just wanted to mention as we delve into the complex issues of the events of September 11, 2001, that there were 2 key bits that prompted me to become skeptical or curious, and follow your lead in many respects to question the official story and seek the truth about 9/11. The first was when a friend who was a medical doctor and a private pilot came to me and talked to me about the disconnect between the Federal Aviation Agency and NORAD on 9/11. We may get into those details but, suffice to say, it was a sad comedy of errors and it piqued my interest. But it wasn’t until I saw the timelines that were developed by people like you, and there was some others who did similar work, that really showed the glaring inconsistencies in the official narrative and led to ask questions about the role of some of the individuals in the Bush administration, and the level of honesty, or of lack of it that we have had to encounter, including the way 9/11 Commission was used to “firm up”, the myth that had been launched right after the 9/11 attacks. Now, Paul Thompson, in recent weeks Richard Clarke, who was a key counterterrorism advisor to George W. Bush in the Bush White House, was the subject of an interview that was actually conducted a couple of years ago, but was broadcast on a public television station in Colorado. And it includes some very interesting new allegations from Clarke, essentially that he was kept in the dark on one specific piece of information regarding two of the individuals who were later alleged to have been hijackers on 9/11. Why don’t you recap for our listeners what Clarke said, and why it makes news about these issues.

PT: Well, I recommend people go check out the interview with Clarke for themselves. It’s at secrecykills.com, and it’s about 12 minutes long, so it’s not too much information to take in, and I think the whole thing was very interesting. But in short, he was the ‘counterterrorism czar’ at the time of 9/11 and for a few years before that, and that means he was the highest counterterrorism official in the United States. So he really was the top dog, and all information, all important information, was supposed to come through him, to get to his desk. And, so in this interview he says, ‘you know, there were these two hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almidhar, and it looks now in retrospect, that for a long time, people in the CIA knew a lot about those guys, those two hijackers, and that information did not come across my desk.’ He says he was in contact with Tenet, talking to him on the phone, three, four times a day, any time there was any little bit of information, he would get a phone call from Tenet. He was receiving over 100 CIA reports a day and looking them over. There was a steady flow of information and it’s hard to think before 9/11, what would be a bigger red flag than having 2 known al-Qaeda operatives actually inside the United States? And for all of this time, nobody told him that, he claims. And so he’s quite shocked about this and quite dismayed, and he ends up coming up with a theory to explain why that happened.

PC: And his theory essentially is that the CIA was trying to work with these two Saudis, and convert them to CIA assets. And in order to ‘flip’ them, they kept this very tightly held. The other theory that surfaces for me though, Paul, is that as you mentioned Richard Clarke had served in the Clinton administration and was a holdover into the Bush White House, one of the few.

PT: Mm-hmm.

PC: And my sense is that he was not entrusted with the darkest secrets of the Republican inner circle that arrived determined to attack Iraq and Afghanistan.

PT: Well, I think to some extent that’s true, he was certainly kind of demoted, allowed to keep his job but sort of not in the inner circle. He wasn’t meeting with the principals anymore, meaning cabinet-level people like he had been in the Clinton administration. But you have to remember also that George Tenet was a holdover from the Clinton administration and he

PC: Yep.

PT: he was the head of the CIA all the way back to 1997, and this is really a lot about Tenet and the CIA hiding this information. So, you’ve got two Clinton holdovers really, who are at the center of this.

PC: Mm-hmm.

PT: And to some extent he was privy to some of this stuff that the Bush administration was doing. I had heard this interview with Richard Clarke and I was driving down the road, and I practically drove off the road I was so shocked, this was a few years ago, where he mentioned in an interview with NPR radio that around, I think it was around April, May 2001…basically, top Bush people were sitting around a table and discussing ways to have some kind of provocation to go to war with Iraq. And they were kind of brainstorming different ideas on ways to have a casus belli

PC: Mm-hmm.

PT: you know, some sort of excuse for the war. They talked about things like flying an airplane over Iraq and making sure it got shot down by the Iraqi forces, so they could use that as an excuse. So that’s some pretty wild stuff that most of the American public has never heard about and people

PC: That particular idea that was floated by, apparently, George W. Bush was in a conversation with Tony Blair. And it was British, I believe, Sir David Manning, the British Ambassador to Washington who ultimately revealed that.

PT: Mm-hmm.

PC: And it does show that they were looking for a pretext and possibly it wasn’t the first one that they had thought about or activated.

PT: Right.

PC: So Paul, as we heard this interview with Richard Clarke, many other questions come up because he does make a very precise allegation, which is, on September 4th of 2001, there was a principals meeting in the White House, and, he was not told, the principals were not told, that the CIA had informed the FBI about the presence in the united states of Alhazmi and Almidhar. And he says, ‘if they had told us, we would have found those assholes’, and he talks about what they would have done first to launching an investigation into malfeasance by the CIA for not sharing this information and secondly, that he said, ‘we would have put it out on the Associated Press and found those guys.’

PT: Mm-hmm. Well, I’d kind of like to go the whole way back to the beginning and talk about the whole story of these two guys. I think their story has not really been understood or appreciated by the American people as the importance that it really needs to have. But to just kind of mention just a little bit about what you were saying…that very day that that meeting happened, which was September 4th, one week before the 9/11 attacks; There’s a very strange mystery because there was, in the couple weeks right before 9/11 there was some information about these 2 hijackers that was finally given to the FBI after they had, the CIA, had known about these guys for 2 years.
And there was this very inexperienced FBI agent by the name of Robert Fuller, who was given the job of finding these two hijackers. The hijackers, these 2 guys, were not living under cover, using aliases, using all kinds of clever spy tactics…they were living completely openly in the United States. One of them even had his name in the San Diego phone book for crying out loud. They had bank accounts, they had credit cards, they had car registrations, they had traffic tickets…all down the line, everything in their own name. So, at that time, the United States had developed over the years a lot of databases. For instance, you can look up police database that would have anybody’s traffic tickets or arrests in there, and Alhazmi had actually been arrested a couple times for minor things. You can look up credit checks, you can look up the motor vehicle index, they have all these great, sort of private companies collecting incredible amounts of information about people, like Choicepoint was one of these. They had the hijackers’ names and addresses in that. So, he had all of these databases to look at, something like ten different databases, and he supposedly he didn’t find the names of these 2 hijackers in any of the databases which just doesn’t make any sense at all.

Immediately after 9/11, other people did checks and they found these names in pretty much all of these databases. And interestingly enough, we have a mention that says that he asked permission from someone else, from a higher up, to search the credit card database for the names of these 2 people and he was told that was not advisable, ‘not prudent, to do so at this time.’ So, you can see, there’s something very strange going on there, why on earth would they not want to be looking at databases to see if these people are in the United States. What would be the possible excuse to be telling this agent not to do that? So I would like to go all the way back to the beginning and kind of tell the whole story about these 2 hijackers.
PC: Well, go right ahead, we are all ears. So how far back would you like to go?

PT: I want to go all the way back. I think another really great, untold story, in which I have to sort of give the highlights of, is how much the United States intelligence community knew about al Quaeda before 9/11. I just want to mention something that I found, it was from a report, about 6 months after 9/11 that shows just how jaw dropping this was. And this was from a Washington Post article that talked about the capture of Abu Zubayda who supposedly is an al Quaeda big wig and he was arrested early in 2002. And I’ll quote from the article, “‘When agents found Zubaydas laptop computer’, a senior law enforcement source said, ‘They discovered that the vast majority of people he had been communicating with were being monitored under Visa warrants or international spying efforts.’ ‘Finally we got some comfort that surveillance efforts are working’, said a government official familiar with Zubaydas arrest.” So this is quite remarkable because there’s been a lot of controversy about Zubayda; was he really some important al Quaeda guy or not?

Some people think he was mentally ill. But there’s no doubt that he was sort of like a travel agent and he was in communication with a vast number of people. One of the people who said he was kind of crazy and not as important as people say, an FBI agent by the name of Dan Coleman, he said that even though he was crazy, he was constantly on the telephone talking to people all around the world. He was kind of being used, perhaps as someone who is expendable if they got caught, because he did have these mental issues. So, all around the world, all these al Quaeda operatives, we find that the vast majority of them were actually under surveillance at this time, just a short time after 9/11. So, to me, that’s a story that’s never been told, how is that al Quaeda has been able to operate as successfully as they were when they were being monitored so closely?
PC: Well, that’s a lingering question that we are going to have to deal with. So, take us back to Alhazmi and Almidhar first became evident, or, we first became aware of them as we look back forensically.

PT: Right, well, I think we have to go even further back than that. If you go all the way back to the early 1990′s, you have Osama bin Laden living in Sudan rather openly. And we know that way back then, the US intelligence community already started monitoring his satellite phone. In fact, according to one report, even way back then, they developed a technology that they got enough of his vocal recognition, so that if he called on any telephone, they would be able to go through their incredible NSA database and match that phone call with his voice. So he didn’t even have to be using his phone, any voice they’d be able to figure out that was an Osama bin Laden call.

So anyway, so he’s living there and around 2006 (1996?), this other al Quaeda operative, who’s a long time close personal friend of Osama bin Laden, starts this hub in Yemen, and this is going to play a very important role in the story of Alhazmi and Almidhar. And what was happening was that a lot of the countries where al Quaeda was operating like Afghanistan, Egypt, Somalia, different countries, the governments there, they were trying to prevent phone calls being made by militants from one country to another. So for instance, Egypt didn’t allow anybody in Egypt to call Afghanistan. They would block all those calls that they could. There was a lot of these blockages, so what a lot of the al Quaeda operatives around the world did was they used this Yemen hub as basically an al Quaeda switchboard.
They would call that hub and say, ‘I’m looking for so-and-so somewhere, and my friend’s over in Europe’, and connect me with that person. So this was just of incredible importance, this hub. Osama bin Laden himself called the hub many, many times. And what happened was the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, they all realized the great importance of this hub. So much so, that they not only monitored phone calls from the hub, but they actually physically planted bugs inside the building, and they even had a satellite in the sky that was dedicated to the hub, that would take satellite photos of anybody coming and going from the building.
This goes way back to the 1990s when they were doing this. What they also did was they had a big map of the world that they put on the wall somewhere, some FBI agents, and every time there would be a call from that hub to somewhere in the world, they would put a pin in the location to where that call was going. And so over time, they were able to map al Quaedas operations all around the world.
So you can start to see why, from this Washington Post article, they were able to say that they had the vast majority of all al Quaeda operatives around the world under surveillance. It was mostly because of this hub.

So now lets get to the Alhazmi-Almidhar part of this. It turns out that the person who owned this building and ran that hub, was actually the father in law of Khalid Almidhar, one of the hijackers. And so, Khalid Almidhar lived in the hub, his wife lived in the hub. Of course he would be off doing various operations, but he would come back from time to time, visit his wife and his extended family which was all pretty much living in that hub. And everyone in that family was pretty much al Quaeda. One report says that practically half of all of the really dangerous operatives in Yemen were all related to this one family. So, this was just like a laser being shone on this hub, on these phone calls and people in the hub, it just couldn’t be any more important. And then, at the end of, well actually all through 1999, Khalid Almidhar was coming and going, NSA was recording phone calls, the fact that he was living there. They got his name, they got the name of his good friend Nawaf Alhazmi, and then it reached a climax at the end of 2009 (1999?) when there was a series of phone calls, basically another high ranking al Quaeda leader named Khalad bin Attash, called up at the hub, called Khalid Almidhar there, and said ‘there’s an important meeting coming up in Malaysia, we want you to attend’. And he said ‘OK’. And there was also a call to Nawaf Alhazmi saying the same thing, ‘Come to the meeting in Malaysia’, and there was a call also to Salem Alhazmi, Nawafs’ brother who’s another 9/11 hijacker. He was also told to come to the meeting. All of these calls are all being recorded by the NSA. And so, they realized with the other US intelligence agencies ‘something really important is happening in Malaysia. Let’s track these guys to the meeting, record the meeting, find out what’s going on there. And that’s exactly what they do. On the way to the meeting Khalid Almidhar stops by in Dubai in the middle east and his passport, his photograph, secretly, might have been by some local people there, might have been some people breaking into this hotel room and photographing it, but for whatever reason they got his passport and it revealed that he had a Visa to come to the United States; and this is huge. Can’t get any more important information than that, because they’ve never really had any solid link of al Quaeda doing something, planning some kind of attack in the United States. This was the first really big break. So, this brings us all the way up to the Malaysia Summit.
PC: And before we go there, Paul, can I just ask you a couple of things about this hub in Yemen? Because Michael Scheuer, who was heading the Alec station, that was the al Quaeda desk, and it was named for his son Alec. He told me, and I believe he also told James Bamford that he tried to get the NSA to share transcripts of these intercepted satellite phone calls that were coming into the hub in Sanaa, in Yemen

PT: Mm-hmm.

PC: and that the NSA refused. And apparently CIA was able to get one portion of the call. Let’s just say that it’s the part originating from Yemen going up to the bird. And he even made a transcript of the one side of the call that CIA was able to intercept, sent it over to NSA and said, ‘well now will you please give us the rest of it?’, and they declined. So some of this in fighting between intelligence agencies on the US side is of interest to me, because it once again suggests, as Richard Clarke has, that the top CIA officials were keeping some information about key al Quaeda operatives very, very tightly held.

PT: Right. Well, I’d say that, sort of the main explanation that people give when they talk about this kind of thing, is they talk about the infighting between these various agencies and, ‘isn’t a shame that there was so much infighting, and that’s really what prevented US intelligence from stopping the 9/11 attacks’, and certainly there was a tremendous amount of infighting that was going on. And what Richard Clarke said is that the infighting excuse is not enough; it wasn’t simply that FBI and CIA couldn’t play ball together and so forth, that there is such an egregious amount of hiding of information about these 2 hijackers that that alone doesn’t explain it. And I think that’s what I’m going to try to argue here, as we go along, is that yes there was this infighting but that alone does not explain what’s going on here. And certainly with the Yemen hub there’s a tremendous amount of hoarding of information. The NSA hardly shared anything that they were getting about this.

So, what’s interesting is that all 3 of those agencies, NSA, CIA, FBI, they realized how important this hub was, and they pretty much independently created their own ways of getting information about the hub so they wouldn’t have to rely on the other agencies. I think the CIA actually went so far as to build their own satellite antenna in the Indian ocean so that they could get the information from this hub. So, we follow that about not sharing of information, but we have to be mindful that in a way that doesn’t really apply to things, because they were gathering their own information independently of each other.
PC: Mm-hmm. And I think I may have misstated his name, it was Scheuer, Michael Scheuer. Ok, so with that said, continue your narrative and let’s go to Malaysia.

PT: I’d also like to point out that Scheuer, he left the CIA bin Laden Unit in the middle of 1999, so he is not really privy to what happens afterwards.

PC: Mm-hmm.

PT: Which is, we’re getting at the very end of ’99. So they’ve tracked these 2 people, Alhazmi and Almidhar, to the Malaysia summit. It’s not really clear if Salem Alhazmi ever attended or not, although he did go on to participate in the 9/11 attacks. Malaysia was a great place to meet because the Malaysian government, wanting to be friendly with middle eastern governments, didn’t even require a Visa from most countries to come to that country, so people could just drift in very easily. And what seems to have happened was it was kind of like an ‘al Quaeda all-star team’ arrived at this summit, and there’s some dispute over exactly who attended, and I think there’s been a deliberate obfuscation all the way until today about just who was at that meeting, but I believe that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the “9/11 mastermind” was at that summit.

For instance, there’s a lot of newspaper reports to that effect, and recently I came across some Wikileaks documents that came out that indicated that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lived for a whole week with Alhazmi and Almidhar in Malaysia at that time, which would seem to confirm that he was there. Then you’ve got Hambali, who’s sort of al Quaedas biggest man in Southeast Asia. He worked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the Bojinka plot in 1995 which was kind of an early version of the 9/11 attacks which could have killed up to 4,000 people. Very major terrorist; he was known to be a major terrorist by the time of the summit. Then you’ve got Ramzi bin Alshibh; now he’s a very interesting case because he was a member of the Hamburg cell with Mohammed Atta, and some of the other 9/11 pilots who seem to have come to this summit. German intelligence says they have credit cards of him being in Malaysia at the time, there were photographs of him taken at the summit. So that’s a big ‘what if?’. How is it that he goes to the summit and that doesn’t somehow lead to the Hamburg cell in Germany being wrapped up? Because the summit is being very heavily monitored by intelligence agencies. We’ll get back to that. But anyways, so then you’ve got him, you’ve got Alhazmi and Almidhar, the host of the summit is a person named Yazid Sufaat, who’s seemingly head of al Quaedas biological weapons program; it’s being held in his apartment. You’ve got Khalad bin Attash who’s a major operational planner, you’ve got another guy al-Nashiri, major operational planner, about a dozen guys in all. Very, very important, I don’t think there was probably ever a time before 9/11 where there was such a collection of individuals outside of Afghanistan. It was just an unparalleled intelligence opportunity.

So all these guys are gathering at this apartment of Yazid Sufaat, and what the CIA did apparently was instead of monitoring these summit attendees themselves, they had the Malaysian Special Branch, their intelligence agency in Malaysia, do the monitoring. And so the Malaysian Special Branch took photographs, the first day they actually recorded a lot of video footage, but the story is they never got into the apartment where the summit was held. They never had any audio recordings, they were only taking pictures of these people as they wandered around town, they were staying at hotels, they were going to restaurants visiting internet cafes, so on and so on. But they never actually knew what going on in the summit. Now, I don’t know if I believe that, but be that as it may, they’ve got this recording of all this going on, and at the time it was considered so important that people at the cabinet-level in the United States were being updated on a daily basis. The head of the FBI, George Tenet, head of the CIA, the National Security Advisor; it doesn’t seem it actually got all the way up to the level of president Clinton, but certainly very top level people were being told on a daily basis as this summit went on. It was a 4 day meeting. Every day they would be getting updates on what was happening at that summit. And another very important point is that this is at the very time where fear about al Quaeda was hitting a peak, because this summit just happened a few days after January 1 2000, and there was a great fear that there would be millennium attacks, to be timed at the start of the new millennium. There had been an al Quaeda operative captured as he tried to enter the US in Seattle just a couple weeks before. And so there was this great fear that al Quaeda might be planning some attacks to happen very soon in the United States. So you have this incredible worry and focus and you have all these al Quaeda big wigs all meeting right there in Yemen (Malaysia?) So, you would think that after all that, 2 of the 9/11 hijackers attending, the 9/11 mastermind attending…how is it possible that they don’t just wrap up the whole 9/11 plot based on the surveillance of the summit? That’s one of the big mysteries that’s never been explained.
PC: And so, without asking you to form some hardened conclusion, as you recite these things, is it your suspicion that the Bush administration allowed it to happen, or was some way involved in orchestrating it with these characters that they certainly had under surveillance?

PT: Well, you know, I don’t like to speculate along those lines, I don’t even think speculation is necessary, because I think as we go into more details of this Malaysia summit and these hijackers and so forth, you can put forward 3 theories: you can say there was some sort of incompetence; people dropped the ball, that there was an al Quaeda operation going forward and the Bush administration let it happen, or that they actually helped make it happen. But I think the least worst of those would be the incompetence, obviously. When you really look at this, it would have to be such a level of incompetence where you just have this right in your face over and over and over again, that that would have to be criminal incompetence, which should lead to jail terms in my opinion.

So you’re kind of, those different theories, it’s almost a moot point where you’re kind of arguing just how long do these people go to jail, you know? I kind of put it, I like to think of it in terms of a bank robbery.

Where you can think, OK, you can have a person standing there as a security guard, and the bank robber runs down the street runs into the bank; so what is the security guards role? He could be working to help the person rob the bank, it could be part of the team, or, he could be just letting it happen because he wants to see that bank robbed. Or, he could be totally incompetent and do nothing while massive amount of time goes by, and the bank gets robbed. And that’s just as bad as the other two pretty much! I mean, wouldn’t that security guard be locked up for a long time if he just waited an hour knowing that the bank is being robbed and he didn’t do anything about it? Didn’t tell anybody about it? To me, it’s just as bad, really.
PC: Mm-hmm.

PT: So, I see it as kind of– you can’t really know, you can’t really go inside these people’s heads, we don’t have enough data to really know everything, but we know enough that I think if there were to be, to this to actually come to the US courts, that people would go to jail for something. Because there’s no good excuse for why these various attacks were allowed to go forward.

Sibel Edmonds: Well, actually it even gets more confusing and complex than that, and that’s the fact that both the CIA and the State Department, because a lot of these operatives at the CIA, they worked under State Department titles. And a study from 1995, 1996, these same actors were working with, back then they were not called al Quaeda, at least not by the FBIs’ definition or the wiretaps collected at the scene, –foreign targets of the State Department. But, the same actors that we are talking about, our government people within the State Department and the CIA, this is during the Clinton years, were working with these people in Chechnya, in the Balkans, in the central Asian Caucasus. And I’m talking about working together.

PT: Right, well

SE: OK, and so the question that comes up is, they are our partners, they were our partners, in the Balkans, you know, with the conflict in Bosnia, and also in Kosovo. They were our partners with what we did with Chechnya, with Russia. They were our partners with some of the assassinations and the plots they were carrying out in places like Azerbaijan. The same people, bin Laden, Zawahiri, even some of the actors involved in this
PT: Mm-hmm.

SE: And yet, we were also monitoring them as terrorists while we were actually working with them. That’s

PT: Yeah, it’s sort of crazy when you think about it. I mean, I think that if you really start looking at the Machiavellian workings of what the US government and other governments were doing, they kind of saw things in terms of “good terrorists” and “bad terrorists”. Where you have terrorists who for whatever reason, these people are somehow doing our bidding, they are helping us out, they’re helping us achieve our goals, either wittingly or unwittingly.
A good example would be Chechnya, where, for a long time the US had a great quagmire in Viet Nam, and they liked to sort of think of Chechnya as Russia’s’ Viet Nam, and this is a big quagmire for them. They’ve got to be dealing with these Islamist militants and fighting there constantly, year after year, sapping their economy.
SE: Exactly.

PT: They’re a traditional enemy of the United States, so the more Chechnya can sap them, the more the American foreign policy experts and officials are saying, ‘hey this is a really good thing, so why would we want to stop any potential Islamist militant from going to Chechnya and fight there? Hey, instead of stopping them, let’s pretty much give them the plane tickets, have them go there, because that’s helping us out, right?’

SE: Exactly. Right.

PT: And so that’s not just with Chechnya, but that happened in a lot of other places around the world. So, you have this idea where one man’s terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, right? It’s all these labels you throw on these people, these very loaded words, I try not to use words like ‘terrorists’ if I can, because you never know exactly who really these people are, who they’re working for, really what’s going on there? It often turns out there’s double agents and all kinds of intrigue going on, like some sort of exciting spy novel. But anyways, you’ve got these good terrorists, you’ve got these bad terrorists, and it’s clear to me that there were a lot of people before 9/11 who were ‘good terrorists’ in the eyes of the United States because they were doing something that the United States thought was helpful.

In fact there’s a famous quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski, if I can get his name right, who’s the National Security Advisor way back under Carter, and he was asked in 1998 about starting the whole war in Afghanistan way back in the 1970s, because really, it looks now that the CIA kind of goaded the Soviets into attacking by putting some operatives in there, and kind of stirring people up and creating a lot of chaos. So he said, let’s see if I can find his quote here, what he said…I can’t find his exact quote offhand, but it was something to the effect of ‘what’s more important, defeating the Soviet Union or a few stirred up Muslims?’ So the idea is that in a very Machiavellian way, thinking that ‘I’m using these people to get at the Soviets and to achieve our foreign policy goals, so we certainly don’t want to stop these people, we actually want to help them, fund them, train them in some cases…
SE: Exactly.

PT: And we could go way back and look at a long history of US covert support for Islamist militants around the world.

SE: Right! And let’s say just in the 1990s, starting from the mid-1990s to 2000, and we are talking about during the Clinton administration, and we are talking about the 2 guys who are left over from that administration. We are talking about Tenet, and we are talking about Clarke. And Tenet and Clarke were also aware, not only aware, they were involved, both through the diplomatic; working through State Department, but also through these ‘black ops’ and operations in Central Asia and the Balkans. So we have those 2 guys involved in that.

PT: Mm-hmm, yea. These two people particular people, Alhazmi and Almidhar, they have a very long history of working with al Quaeda, and it goes all the way back to the Bosnian conflict in the early 1990s,

SE: Exactly.

PT: it appears that they were involved n that. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also appears to have fought in Bosnia in the early 1990′s, and then it appears that later on that they made attempts at least and probably went to fight in Chechnya as well, these two: Alhazmi and Almidhar.

SE: Mm-hmm.

PT: So it could be that they might have had linkages you know, there’s a whole other story about US support working with al Qaeda

SE: They were not even called al Qaeda, at least not in the FBI. This is one of the things I kept emphasizing during my testimony with the 9/11 Commission. The Arabic unit that worked, and that includes the bombing in Nairobi, because some of the translators, with FBI agents actually went in there, I’m not going to get too deep into the details of those, but they did not even emphasize a title, the name al Qaeda.

PT: Mm-hmm.

SE: So this is the interesting from the FBI side: you mean al Qaeda did not, even though we have this stuff, yea, al Quaeda came up again in 1997, FBI didn’t even have an al Quaeda unit. And these cases, the filings for these cases were not even under ‘al Quaeda.’

PT: Mm-hmm.

SE: The al Quaeda became popular after 9/11.

PT: Right.

SE: Became a brand, it was not even being used as a title for this group, or these groups. And that’s another interesting point, at least for the FBI.

PT: Well, I don’t think the title is so important. Obviously bin Laden, he didn’t really like al Quaeda, he came up with some other long winded names for his group that he wanted to use, and eventually he kind of got, just had to acknowledge that the media was using around the world ‘al Quaeda’ so much,

SE: Exactly, US media made it like (inaudible)

PT: he said, ‘OK, we’re al Quaeda’, but that was pretty much after 9/11. It’s not really so much important what these people are called, is what they were doing and who they’re working with, in my opinion. And you can see these 2 hijackers in particular, have a long history going way back to the 1990s. I don’t want to get too much into the Bosnian conflict, but there’s good evidence the US was working hand in hand with Osama bin Laden and his supporters in Bosnia at that time. So these guys may well have had some sort of contacts with that, going way back. So when Richard Clarke in his interview says, ‘maybe they were trying to turn them’, maybe they thought that they’d already turned them, or maybe they thought that, ‘well these guys, we know them, we know all about them, these are great candidates to turn.’ I don’t know, we can just kind of speculate. (laughs) So anyways, to kind of get back to the thread of what happened at the Malaysia summit and so forth…So what’s really interesting is that, sort of the bombshell out of this, all of the summit stuff, was the fact that Khalid Almidhar had a Visa to come to the United States. And actually, Nawaf Alhazmi did too, but apparently they didn’t know about that right at that point in time. Even as the summit was going on, there were efforts to prevent the FBI from knowing about that.

SE: Before you go further, one question, because I don’t have that information. Do you know where the Visa was obtained, which embassy, where?

PT: I’m pretty sure it was in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, if I remember.

SE: OK, thank you.

PT: Which is kind of a whole other story, because that, at least historically had been used in the Afghan war to have the Mujahedeen who were fighting in Afghanistan, to get Visas for them to come to the Unites States to be secretly trained and supported over there. So, it’s, (laughs) the more you dig into this stuff, the more interesting it gets.

SE: Right, because I have a State Department whistleblower, he hasn’t been really that public and vocal, but he worked, he was actually in charge of the Visa office in Jeddah.

PT: Mm-hmm.

SE: Until, I believe 2000-2001, and he also went to the Commission and he spoke a little bit about this stuff. He still hasn’t gotten into the names, but he actually filed complaints about people who actually they knew were confirmed terrorists, candidates, lists. Because many of these CIA operatives worked through the embassy there in Jeddah. Every time they brought it up, they would be overridden by the CIA guys in the embassy of there in Jeddah.

PT: Right.

SE: That was why I was asking.

PT: Right, so anyway you get these hijackers at the summit, then the summit starts to break up, and these people start to be scattered to the four winds. At that time, it would make sense that, normally, the CIA would normally say, ‘OK, FBI, you’re interested in what’s going on in the United States. We have information that one of these people at the summit, Khalid Almidhar, he has a Visa to come to the United States. He’s almost certainly going to use it and probably be involved in some sort of attack there.’ They knew for instance, he was involved in the embassy bombings and some other big attacks already.

That does not happen. In fact, there is somebody who drafts a cable to be sent to the FBI saying just that, that he has this Visa. His superior over rid him and basically said, ‘you can’t send that cable, you’re not allowed to send it.’ He tried later, another week or two later again and told, ‘you’re not allowed to send it.’ That same superior who told him not to send the cable turned around and sent a cable within the CIA telling everybody that the FBI had been told. You can see right there, you really see some duplicity. It goes even further than just the FBI and the CIA not getting along. We have evidence, for instance, of the CIA branch in Thailand, because these guys Alhazmi and Almidhar, they went from the Malaysian meeting, they went to Thailand. The CIA branch in Malaysia kind of asked the Thai branch, ‘what’s going on with these guys? Do you know what happened to them there in Thailand?’ And the Thai branch said, ‘we’ll have to get back to you, we don’t know what’s going on.’ Where at that point we know that the Thai was aware about this US Visa. So even within the United States, within the CIA, one branch is lying to the other branch about what they knew about these 2 particular hijackers. It’s not just a FBI/CIA turf battle kind of thing that’s going on here.

So anyway, so after about a week after the summit, these 2 hijackers, they’re from Thailand, they get on a plane, and they fly to the United States, and they immediately start living in San Diego. And Nawaf Alhazmi at least, he spends the next 2 years, basically he never leaves the United States from that point on. He just lives openly in San Diego, he’s got his number in the phone book and everything. It would be so easy to find him. Khalid Almidhar after a while, he leaves, and he actually –because as I’ve said, his father-in-law was a person who runs that Yemen hub, he actually goes back to the Yemen hub where his wife is, and he lives there for at least a month. Now remember that that hub is so monitored, anybody coming and going their picture is taken, there’s bugs inside the house, there’s so much that has not been revealed. How is it possible for Khalid Almidhar to back to that hub and live there for an entire month? He thinks that he’s with fellow al Quaeda people that he can trust. Would he not be talking about his time in the United States and what he is doing there, and the whole 9/11 plot that he’s a part of, in this very building that is a focus point of US intelligence collection efforts? How is it possible that this 9/11 plot isn’t discovered? And then you’ve got the fact that Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, when they’re living in San Diego, they’re making calls back and forth to this hub all the time. And they’re making other calls around, but you know, at least those calls are being monitored and recorded by the NSA. Again, how is it possible that some people don’t say, ‘hey, these 2 people are living in the United States, and probably up to no good there.’
PC: And Paul, what was the source of the funding that paid for their housing, paid for their expenses, while they were living in San Diego?

PT: (laughs) Yea, again there are just so many threads to this. I think what happens is that it’s such a complicated story that people kind of lose the thread after a while, because there’s so many tangents and things. But, it turns out that while those 2 hijackers were living in San Diego, there seems to have been a lot of money coming through the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C. into sort of the wife of a friend, and it seems to have increased right when the hijackers got there. A lot of people believe that that money was actually helping to pay their living expenses, and there’s a tremendous amount of other information about these hijackers having ties with the Saudis while they were there, and by Saudis I don’t just mean Saudi citizens, I mean Saudi intelligence agents. They went to the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles, you know, hooked up with people there, some of whom were very radical, militant minded themselves, who were working at that consulate.

There was one particular guy named Omar al-Bayoumi, who’s a very important figure, because he was living in San Diego, and he really seems to have been some sort of Saudi intelligence agent. He had no visible means of support, yet he had some ghost job with some Saudi government kind of related company, and he was being paid a tremendous amount of money for doing no work. And he had this habit of wandering around the mosques and places where Saudis were living in the United States congregate. You have the video camera and a microphone on the camera, and he’d just be recording people willy nilly, and talking into the microphone making his observations about all the things that he was recording. Everybody in town who was in that Saudi community had basically knew that he was a Saudi government agent, and his job pretty much –you would think that the Saudi government has always been very worried about radical Islamics who come along who want to overthrow the Saudi government.

People like Osama bin Laden, who’s said all kinds of things about how they want to overthrow the Saudi royalty. So, in sort of most towns, they would have somebody like Omar al-Bayoumi, who was keeping an eye to make sure that there weren’t anti-Saudi government insurrections going on amongst Saudi students who were scattered all over the world. So, this guy, and when you go back to the Richard Clarke interview, he puts forth the theory, and he says, ‘well maybe when Alhazmi and Almidhar were living in the United States, maybe the CIA kind of handed off surveillance of these 2 people to the Saudis, and so somebody like Omar al-Bayoumi running around with his video camera would be a likely person to be keeping close eyes on these guys.
He did have all kinds of ties with these 2 people, they even lived at his place for a couple weeks when they first got there. I’ve found that there’s good evidence that Alhazmi knew that al-Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence agent and he disliked him and tried to stay away from him, and sort of was very wise to what this al-Bayoumi guy was doing. If the CIA was trusting monitoring these 2 incredibly important al Quaeda operatives to some guy who’s just wandering around openly known as a Saudi intelligence agent, walking around with a video camera all the time, I mean that just doesn’t seem to make any sense. Why would you do that? How could you learn any secrets about these people when you’re so openly advertising yourself as a Saudi intelligence agent?
PC: Well, and Paul, it begs the question about the role of Saudi Arabia and the royal family in funding al Quaeda, supporting their efforts. We know that the bulk of the alleged hijackers were Saudi citizens, and yet, the Bush administration gave Saudi Arabia a virtual complete pass

PT: Right.

PC: in any investigation into these events. We went into Afghanistan to distract people from Saudi Arabia.

PT: You know, there’s so many different threads in this story, and one thing that I’ve always been interested in is not only the possible whatever role the United States government and other western governments had in linkages with al Quaeda and so forth, but also, there were a lot of supporters of groups like al Quaeda in the Muslim world. People, even higher ups, billionaires in Saudi Arabia and other countries were very kind of ideological, same thinking as Osama bin Laden, and so they would be supporting these groups with a lot of money and other kinds of support. You see all along that Osama bin Laden would never have been able to keep up, even though he had some money from his inheritance from his big, rich family. It was estimated that al Quaeda cost about 30 million dollars to run every year. Not so much all these operatives running around, but sort of the training camps and there’s a whole sort of network you have to have, before you can even have any operative taking part in everything. You have to be recruiting people and so forth. So you sort of have this big operation that costs 30 million dollars a year, he would have run out of money pretty quickly. He had all these rich Sheiks living in the Middle East who were giving him a lot of money. So the question is, may have some of these Saudi contacts been aware of the 9/11 plot? May have they actually been funding some of the 9/11 hijackers? That’s a very interesting story, but I think it’s kind of a tangential story to the other story we’re talking about today, which is why doesn’t the CIA do something about these guys. What do they know about these guys and why don’t they do something about them?

One of the things about the Saudis is that the CIA knew way back that the Saudi intelligence agency had been very compromised by their support for al Quaeda. There was some people from another intelligence agency, I think the Jordanian intelligence agency one day went into the headquarters of the Saudi intelligence agency and looked around, and they saw on the computers a lot of the people actually had pictures of bin Laden as their screensavers on their computers because they were big supporters of bin Laden.
SE: Now here is another contradiction Paul, because all this time we keep hearing from the both from the media, but also from various supposed speeches by bin Laden, that he was actually a threat to the Saudi establishment, that he was absolutely feared and hated by the Saudis, and basically his number one goal was to basically get rid of the US bases from Saudi Arabia, and also the kingdom. So how do they work together? I mean you’re looking at two now almost contradictory concepts here in terms of the relationship between bin Laden and the Saudis.

PT: Well it’s so complicated, and it’s a very parallel situation in Pakistan, where you see tremendous support from Pakistan, even from the Pakistani intelligence agency to al Quaeda and related groups. And at the same time, these groups are often attacking Pakistani government buildings, and killing lots of people in Pakistan. In Saudi Arabia, it seems even royal members, high ranking members of the royal family are supporting bin Laden and al Quaeda, and Osama bin Laden’s saying, ‘down with the royal family.’ So I think a lot of this kind of ends up being intrigues and politics, where for instance you might have one faction of the Saudi royal family who thinks, ‘I would like to be king one day, and if I can use the fact that there are a huge number of people in Saudi Arabia who are supportive of bin Laden and bin Laden-type extremists, Wahabist religious beliefs, and ally with that whole faction, then that could help me get to power.’
And the same kind of thing happening in Pakistan, where you have various playing off against each other and using these militant groups as a way to get an edge. In fact, in Pakistan there are times where one faction would actually hire people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef, his nephew for instance, to kill –there was an attempt where those guys tried to kill Benazir Bhutto back in the 1990s. So they’re very much involved in the intrigues and the politics of these countries which get very complicated, and people working sometimes at cross purposes, or trying to kill each other and so forth.
SE: That makes a lot of sense, especially with what you said with the divided kingdom, as far as Saudi Arabia is concerned. And I think one of the dividers there is the attitude or the stand when it comes to Israel, because where you have the old timers, you have the top layer, that actually behind the scenes, they do have good relationship with Israel. Then you have the segment there within the Saudi kingdom who are absolutely against Zionism and what’s happening in Israel. So that itself is just one other example of how divided they are within their own kingdom.

PT: Right. So to kind of keep trying make sure we stay on the focus of these Alhazmi and Almidhar characters…Richard Clarke, he’s saying that these guys may have been monitored by Saudi Arabia, but to get back to the point that I made a minute ago, that the CIA was so leery of the support that a lot of people in the Saudi intelligence agency had for al Quaeda, that they had put out a notice a couple years prior to all these events saying basically, ‘don’t trust the Saudi intelligence agency about anything having to do with bin Laden.’ So how could they then turn around and say, ‘oh, let’s just leave these 2, the first 2 al Quaeda people we ever really knew who were living in the United States, we’ll just trust the Saudi intelligence agency to keep an eye on them. I mean, that just doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t buy Richard Clarkes’ theory there. So, if you don’t buy that theory, then that leaves a gaping hole. Well, who’s looking after these 2 people when they’re living for 2 years in the United States? Did they just drop the ball so badly that they just said, ‘oh, I wonder whatever happened to those guys.’ (laughs) No one checked on them for 2 years. I don’t buy that.

SE: Neither do I.

PC: Well, at this point, I’m going to pause here and conclude part 1 of our conversation with Paul Thompson, and this’ll make it easier for our listeners to listen to and absorb, and we will continue in part 2, which will be released in short order after part 1, so that you can get all this information and listen to them at your convenience.

Warrick’s book, The Triple Agent, focuses on Jennifer Matthews, the CIA station chief at forward base Chapman who was among those killed by a Jordanian suicide bomber.  In discussing the role of Matthews in the CIA’s withholding of critical pre-9/11 intelligence from the FBI and counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, Collins asked if Jennifer Matthews had connections to Alfreda Frances Bikowsky—the CIA officer recently identified here at Boiling Frogs Post. Warrick responded:

“There is a group of very, shall we say, strong personalities within the counterterrorism division, you’ve named 2 of them, they were good friends, they worked together on these cases, and the list of people the IG has identified as potentially deserving of disciplinary review for their actions before 9/11 never been published, but we know from multiple counts that Jennifer Matthews had been on that list…”

In this response, Warrick directly confirms the role of Bikowsky in the pre-9/11 intelligence debacle, as well as her presence at the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydeh, which was being directed by Matthews.  And without explicitly naming Bikowsky, he confirms that she was a friend and colleague of Matthews and that they worked together on counterterrorism at CIA. 

Warrick also asserts that he knows of the Inspector General’s list of some 60 CIA employees proposed for investigation over the pre-9/11 intelligence suppression, and that he has been able to get multiple confirmations that Matthews was on that list. But it appears that The Post has acquiesced to the CIA, and its editors believe that the public is not interested in learning the truth and seeking accountability on these matters.

“We’d still love to get that list. And we tried at the time to get the names of the individuals. It was decided at a high level, this was back during the Bush administration, when Porter Goss was CIA Director that these names would never be published, as far as the CIA was concerned, and there is not much of a process to force the CIA to retreat from that decision….and no one in either the Bush or Obama administration has pushed for further disclosure, they’d like for this thing pretty much to be put to rest and forgotten about.

There is nothing that makes officials here want to change the subject more quickly than those kinds of questions; politicians and certainly the intelligence people would just rather see it go away…and there just doesn’t seem to be much public interest, either, that we’ve detected….there are certainly pockets of it, but in terms of getting people excited and interested in this again, it’s been a real struggle.”

These comments raise serious questions about the integrity and independence of The Washington Post, as Warrick says his newspaper has had this information for years but appears to take editorial direction from the CIA and the White House.  The failure of The Post and the 9/11 Commission to fully investigate the CIA for its actions prior to 9/11 and explore the Malaysia summit and visas issued to al-Hazmi and al-Midhar are part of an obvious cover-up, and suggest widespread obstruction of justice. 

In addition, the Washington Post and more recently the Associated Press  refrained from reporting the complete story and Bikowsky’s involvement in the German citizen el-Masri’s rendition and torture, in compliance with the CIA pressure. The well-known New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer also complied with CIA’s unofficial request and withheld certain facts and the identities of the CIA employees and contractors involved in rendition and barbaric cases in her book The Dark Side.

Boiling Frogs Post broke the story and identified Alfreda Frances Bikowsky for the first time a week ago on September 21, 2011. Although the CIA had threatened producers Nowosielski and Duffy, and had prevented them from identifying the two CIA officers Bikowsky and Michael Anne Casey, the agency did not threaten or request redaction when asked for confirmation by the alternative news site Gawker. Despite Boiling Frogs Post’s exposé as the first alternative news site to publish the story, complete coverage by Cryptome, the video report by independent investigative journalist James Corbett at Corbett Report, and the subsequent coverage and analyses by Gawker, the mainstream media and the so-called independent outlets have so far readily complied with the establishment’s no-no rule and have abstained from covering this significant report involving obstruction of justice, cover up, lying to Congress, rendition and torture.

Here is the relevant portion of the audio interview of Joby Warrick by Peter B Collins:

To listen to the entire show visit Peter B Collins’ website: here.

We have so far identified and confirmed three CIA officers, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, Jennifer Matthews and  Michael Anne Casey, who were involved in the intentional cover up of significant pre 9/11 intelligence, subsequent cover up during the quasi 9/11 investigations, and the CIA’s rendition and torture cases. As we can see, the partnership between the government, mainstream media, pseudo alternative media, and Congress makes sure the facts pertaining to these crimes and criminals remain untouched and buried.

*For additional more background check out the following links:

BFP Breaking News: Confirmed Identity of the CIA Official behind 9/11, Rendition & Torture Cases is Revealed 

Boiling Frogs Breaking News: CIA Goes After Producers Nowosielski & Duffy

The Still Developing Story of the Recently Issued CIA Threats to Producers Nowosielski & Duffy

Podcast: The Boiling Frogs Presents Ray Nowosielski & John Duffy

As you can see we are doing our share as one of the very few true alternatives. Please do your share and help us continue our operation by subscribing to Boiling Frogs Post. Thank you.

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Author and researcher Kevin Fenton joins us to discuss the recent case involving the CIA’s withholding of the release of audio documentary “Who is Richard Blee?” and the extensive research and findings which have resulted in the unmasking of three former top CIA officials and their role in withholding intelligence on two key 9/11 hijackers and subsequent cover-ups. He details the findings on the two key CIA analysts who were instrumental in this cover up – who were recently identified and exposed as Alfreda Frances Bikowsky and Michael Anne Casey. Mr. Fenton discusses the CIA’s Alec Station, and questions the notion of incompetence versus intentional when it comes to the events leading to and making the terrorist attacks possible on 9/11.

Kevin Fenton is an independent researcher and the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

Here is our guest Kevin Fenton unplugged!

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The producers Nowosielski and Duffy have now made both names available [link removed] at their website. They also identify the second CIA culprit as M. A. C. We have not been able to obtain confirmation by other sources on this person yet, but we are still working on it.

Alfreda Frances Bikowsky is the person described in New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side as having flown in to watch the waterboarding of terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammad without being assigned to do so. “Its not supposed to be entertainment,” superiors were said to have told her.  She was also at the center of “the el-Masri incident,” in which an innocent German citizen was kidnapped by the CIA in 2003 and held under terrible conditions without charges for five months in a secret Afghan prison. The AP characterized it as “one of the biggest diplomatic embarrassments of the U.S. war on terrorism.”

Both the previous and current administrations appear to have deemed Alfreda Frances Bikowsky’s direct involvement in intentional obstruction of justice, intentional cover up, lying to Congress, and overseeing rendition-kidnapping-torture practices as qualifying factors to have kept promoting her. She now leads the CIA’s Global Jihad Unit and is a close advisor to the President.

*For more background check out the following links:

Boiling Frogs Breaking News: CIA Goes After Producers Nowosielski & Duffy

The Still Developing Story of the Recently Issued CIA Threats to Producers Nowosielski & Duffy

Podcast: The Boiling Frogs Presents Ray Nowosielski & John Duffy

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September 11^th Advocates:

Patty Casazza

Monica Gabrielle

Mindy Kleinberg

Lorie Van Aucken

*For more background check out the following links:

Boiling Frogs Breaking News: CIA Goes After Producers Nowosielski & Duffy 

The Still Developing Story of the Recently Issued CIA Threats to Producers Nowosielski & Duffy

Podcast: The Boiling Frogs Presents Ray Nowosielski & John Duffy

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by subscribing .

This is Part 3 of our three-part one-of-a-kind interview series with author and researcher Paul Thompson. For additional background information please visit the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project at HistoryCommons.Org.

Paul Thompson joins us to discuss one of the most blacked-out and censored aspects of Al-Qaeda-CIA connections: The partnership and alliance between the CIA and Al Qaeda and their joint operations in Central Asia, Balkans and Caucasus throughout the 1990’s. Mr. Thompson talks about Al-Qaeda’s Balkans operations, running training camps, money-laundering, and drug running networks in the region, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and his residence in Bulgaria in order to help manage the Al Qaeda effort in nearby Bosnia, the Al Qaeda cells in Chechnya and Azerbaijan, BCCI and more!

Paul Thompson is the author of the Terror Timeline, a compilation of over 5,000 reports and articles concerning the September 11, 2001 attacks. His research in the field has garnered over 100 radio and TV interviews. Mr. Thompson holds a psychology degree from Stanford University obtained in 1990. For the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project visit HistoryCommons.Org

Here is our guest Paul Thompson unplugged!

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I asked Mr. Nowosielski how the CIA was informed about the schedule and the content of their upcoming segment, and he provided us with the following details:

We emailed CIA Public Affairs on Thursday morning telling them of our intention to name two current agents in our journalism piece and explained the context of their use — the things they were accused of. We also explained that their names had been deduced through open-source materials and that our sources had told us they were working from headquarters.

As for the CIA’s reaction and response Mr. Nowosielski recounted the following:

Their media spokesperson called back almost immediately. After a brief discussion, we emailed him the script for official reply. We also requested an interview with the two to ensure that we were telling the full story accurately. The reply email began “This is off the record:” and then informed us that we may be violating federal law by including those two names. When we asked him to cite the law, we were told it was the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. This and follow up calls occurred on Thurs, Fri, and Sat, until we explained that we were not recognizing “off the record” in our official interactions with the Agency. We have heard nothing further since.

My own immediate response to the way in which CIA responded to the producers can be summed up in three questions:

1- Is this one of those fairly common cases where the government agency tries its ‘bluffing tactic’ to see whether that suffices to intimidate and stop the whistleblower or reporter in question?

Because the threat is issued by e-mail, and ludicrously, it starts off by stating ‘off the record.’ When confident and on solid ground the agencies come after the targets armed with official- legal letters or even court orders. In my days, in my own case as a government whistleblower, and later as the director of NSWBC dealing with many intelligence agencies whistleblowers and  also reporters, I have experienced the government agency ‘Bluffing Tactic’ more than a few times. For example, the FBI tried to stop my interview with CBS-60 Minutes and later attempted to stop the airing of the segment, but when challenged and invited to go ahead and take legal action, they changed their mind; they went away.

2- Is this an attempt by the CIA to buy needed time to take further action against the producers through the Department of Justice?

One thing I know is that government bureaucracy takes time. It takes time to get ‘things done’ when it comes to the government. In this case, the CIA would have to bring and make the case to the Justice Department. The DOJ then would have  to go through its own bureaucracy and reviews to decide whether it could turn this into a legal action via the courts. Thus, this could possibly be a case of the CIA trying to buy more time to translate its ludicrous ‘off the record’ threat issued by a casual e-mail into a real threat with some teeth. If so, wouldn’t that mean a window of opportunity for the producers to release the information? Or not?

3- What are the real legal liabilities facing the Producers, since the names of the two culprit CIA analysts are already out in public records? Further, with other sources in addition to the public records ‘outing’ the names of the analysts who happen to be involved in possible criminal actions, what level of threat are the producers faced with?

Again, based on my own experience and the experiences of many government intelligence agencies whistleblowers, the CIA would have to first classify the already public information-documents out there revealing the identities of the two CIA analysts; classification after the fact. Next, they would have to legally pursue the other involved sources who have either confirmed or released those names. The CIA hasn’t done that. At least not yet. And what does this mean? Does it mean the producers still have the burden of abiding by the casually issued ‘off the record’ e-mail by the CIA? Or not?

We are still waiting for further analysis by our legal experts and other intelligence sources. Meanwhile I asked our media advisor Kristina Borjesson to give us her take and expert analysis on this case. Internationally acclaimed for her work, Ms. Borjesson has produced for major American and European television networks and published two groundbreaking books on problems of the U.S. press: Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press and Feet to the Fire: the Media After 9/11, Top Journalists Speak out. Her awards include an Emmy and Murrow Award in TV, the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse award for Media Criticism, and two Independent Publishers Awards for her books.

Here is the analysis of this case by Ms. Borjesson for Boiling Frogs Post:

The Pitfalls of Due Diligence for Deep Journalism

When independent filmmakers Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy interviewed Richard Clarke in 2009, the former counterterrorism czar dropped a bomb on camera.  Clarke accused former CIA head George Tenet and two other CIA officials, Cofer Black and Richard Blee of withholding critical intelligence from the FBI, DOD, White House and Immigration on the presence in the US of two alleged 9/11 hijackers well before 9/11.  In their film, “Who is Richard Blee?” Nowosielski and Duffy also identify two CIA analysts who participated in the cover-up.

After interviewing Clarke, the filmmakers tried for more than a year to interest media outlets in their bombshell information. “We pitched everywhere and were told no,” says Nowosielski, “We always held out hope to get funding for it to be a real documentary, which we thought [the subject] deserved.” Finally, the filmmakers settled on putting the film out as a podcast.

The CIA is now holding up the release of the recording as a result of the filmmakers doing due diligence as reporters.  It is a standard practice of good journalism to get in touch with subjects that other subjects in a print or TV news piece are talking about if the talked-about subjects are being accused of malfeasance or illegal or unethical behavior.  It is only fair to allow accused subjects to answer and/or defend themselves. It is also then incumbent upon the reporter to get to the bottom of who exactly is telling the truth—the accuser or the accused.

In this case, the filmmakers contacted CIA public affairs to give the two CIA analysts a chance to defend themselves. They followed proper procedure in contacting the CIA public affairs people, because public affairs (not the analysts) are authorized to decide whether to speak on behalf of the analysts or to allow the analysts to speak for themselves.  

Nowosielski and Duffy went one step further in their due diligence.  They sent their entire script to CIA public affairs. “We sent the full piece because we wanted them to know these people were going to be outed. So if they’d been sent in some deep cover thing, we wanted to give them time to pull those people out of those positions.  We thought maybe they would be compelled to defend themselves, because people from the 9/11 commission, the FBI…even Tony Shaffer from Able danger [were] piling on, so we thought maybe we’re misinterpreting this story or they need to defend themselves.”

No doubt the producers did all their digging and proof-gathering into what the CIA analysts allegedly did before calling CIA public affairs. You call public affairs AFTER you have the goods on their employees, not before getting the goods or to get the goods. It’s an ethical protocol, but usually one that is done after it’s too late for public affairs to shut down sources or otherwise interfere in the reporting process.  In this case, contacting CIA public affairs kept the producers on the straight and narrow journalistically, which is a good place to be at all times when reporting on highly sensitive issues.

CIA public affairs responded with an emailed threat. “Off the record,” the CIA’s spokesperson wrote, Nowosielski and Duffy might be violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by outing their analysts. The penalty for outing CIA agents without using classified sources includes fines and/or prison time. The spokesperson’s use of the “off the record” line is a ploy.   When journalists go off the record, it is usually a mutually agreed upon pre-arrangement.  The CIA’s public affairs person’s attempt to silence Nowosielski and Duffy didn’t work but it has given them pause.

The filmmakers are withholding the release of “Who is Richard Blee?” so the threat, even though it has no legal force, has for now had the desired effect. But the story probably won’t end there. Nowosielski and Duffy are currently in assessment mode.  The question they are asking themselves, says Nowosielski, is “Are we in a position that we want to face the heat involved in that? We’re in no rush; we want to make a good decision.”  Meanwhile, they’re getting advice from a number of friendly legal quarters. 

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In the first part of this series we saw how, in January 2000, the CIA learned that Flight 77 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar had a US visa, but kept this secret from the FBI. At the time, concealing a terrorist or two from the FBI may have been wrong, but it was nothing to get that excited about. However, the withholding of the information took on a new meaning on October 12, 2000, when al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen.

Although there is no stone-cold proof of Almihdhar’s involvement in the bombing, there is a small hill of circumstantial evidence linking him to it. For example, he was in Yemen at the time, reportedly with one of the masterminds of the attack, Khallad bin Attash, and the bombers called his phone number in Sana’a, Yemen, although this was an al-Qaeda communications hub and they could have been talking to somebody else there. In addition, one day after al-Qaeda’s previous ship-bombing attempt in Yemen, he had left the country and gone to meet with other people suspected of involvement in the operation. Also, he worked on another al-Qaeda ship-bombing plot, to be carried out in Singapore.

The team that went to Yemen to investigate the bombings was mostly from the FBI, although there were also Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents, and the CIA station in Yemen was supposed to co-operate. The team was led by FBI managers John O’Neill, who died on 9/11, and Ali Soufan, who later became famous due to his opposition to torture by the CIA and US military.

They quickly found evidence linking the bombing to al-Qaeda. This was both through the calls to the communications hub where Almihdhar lived and through evidence linking the attack to bin Attash and another al-Qaeda leader, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Both bin Attash and al-Nashiri were known to the US intelligence community. Indeed, the number of core bin Laden operatives was so small that both had also played a part in the 1998 East African embassy bombings, something already known to US authorities in 2000.

Investigating bin Attash, Soufan picked up hints of an al-Qaeda meeting somewhere in Southeast Asia around January 2000. Thinking this might be significant; in November 2000 he sent a formal request to the CIA asking whether the Agency knew anything about such meeting. The reply that came back was that it knew nothing. This was not true, as the CIA was highly aware of the meeting, having followed the participants around Kuala Lumpur for several days.

It is hard to comprehend how the CIA could simply have forgotten it knew about Malaysia. It is even harder when one learns that Soufan sent not one such request, but three, the latter two coming in the spring and summer of 2001. Each request was more specific than the last. In the end, Soufan even linked the Cole operation to a pay phone used by the militants outside the condominium in Kuala Lumpur where al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit was held and asked the CIA about this pay phone. The Agency had watched the attendees coming out of the building, walking round the block and then making calls from the pay phone, but they were determined not to tell Soufan any of this before 9/11.

Soufan’s requests were first made public in a New York Times piece by James Risen in April 2004, a few months before the 9/11 Commission and Justice Department inspector general, which investigated the FBI’s pre-9/11 performance, reported. Yet, there is not a single mention of these three requests in either of these two reports. Neither is there any mention of them in what remained unredacted of the 2002 Congressional Inquiry report or the executive summary of the CIA inspector general’s report into that agency’s failings. Soufan was interviewed three times by the 9/11 Commission, which also looked at documentation from the Cole bombing enquiry. There was a plan to have Soufan testify publicly at a 9/11 Commission hearing, but it never came to fruition.

Working the bin Attash angle, Soufan received a photo of a person thought to be bin Attash from the Yemeni authorities on November 22. He sent it to the US embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, via the CIA, to check that it was the same Khallad a joint FBI-CIA source inside al-Qaeda who was handled out of Islamabad had previously reported on. On December 16, an FBI agent known as “Michael D.” and a CIA officer known as “Chris” took the photo to the source, who we will call “Omar.” Chris showed the photo to Omar while Michael D., who could not speak any of the source’s languages, was out of the room. When Michael D. came back, Chris showed the photo again, and Omar identified it again as bin Attash in front of Michael D. The news that Omar said the photo showed the Khallad bin Attash he knew was passed along. This might seem less glamorous than assassinating someone with a missile, but it is real police work.

Shortly after this, an unknown CIA official drafted a cable containing some information about bin Attash and some information not about bin Attash. The cable instructed officers to share the information not about bin Attash with the Bureau, but contained no such order regarding the information about bin Attash. Again, this seems to be part of a plan to withhold evidence about certain terrorists from the FBI, although it is unclear whether the center of attention is bin Attash, Almihdhar or someone else.

The CIA alleges that it then somehow convinced itself that Almihdhar may in fact be bin Attash. This despite the fact that it had photos of the two men and they have remarkably different facial features. The idea led the agency to send one of the Malaysia photos showing Almihdhar to Islamabad for Chris and Michael D. to show Omar. However, when the photo arrived in Islamabad it was accompanied by another one; it showed Alhazmi and was also taken in Kuala Lumpur.

Chris and Michel D. went to meet Omar on January 4, 2001. While Michael D. was out of the room, Chris showed Omar the photos of Alhazmi and Almihdhar. Omar did not recognize Almihdhar, but said that the photo of Alhazmi actually showed bin Attash. Although this might sound odd, the two men actually have similar facial features. Unlike on the previous occasion, when Michael D. came back into the room Chris did not have the identification repeated for his benefit. In fact, he never mentioned it to Michael D. at all. He then drafted three cables about the meeting. Two of them, crucially including one disseminated to the wider intelligence community, made no mention of the identification of bin Attash. The one that mentioned his identification was sent only to the CIA.

However, this was very significant information for the Agency, as it now officially believed a senior al-Qaeda operative, one who had just masterminded an operation that cost 17 American lives, had been at the Malaysia summit. The CIA claims it did not know this before—even though it is hard to credit these protestations of ignorance.

Chris sent the information that the photo showed bin Attash and that he had therefore been at the Malaysia summit to the CIA station in Sana’s, Yemen. That station was supposed to be working closely with the FBI on the Cole investigation. The day Sana’a station received the news bin Attash had been at the Malaysia summit, it failed to tell the FBI. It also failed to do so the next day, and the next, and so on, right up until 9/11. The 9/11 Commission knew the information had been sent to the CIA station in Sana’a, but omitted this from its report. It is hard to imagine what good-faith explanation could be advanced for such error.

The same as the station in Sana’a, Alec Station also failed to pass on the information to its FBI colleagues, this despite the fact that in mid-January 2001 Chris asked his Alec Station counterparts to contact FBI headquarters and tell it about recent developments.

Two of the Cole agents, apparently including Soufan, then flew out to Islamabad to have Omar formally identify the first bin Attash photograph for possible use in a criminal proceeding against bin Attash. When they met with Omar, on February 1, 2001, Chris was present. He made no mention of the fact that just four weeks previously Omar had seen bin Attash in a Malaysia meeting photograph. In fact, like all other CIA agents, he made no reference to the Malaysia summit at all.

This is perhaps the most confusing episode of the pre-9/11 intelligence failures, so some explanations are in order. When one views the facts as set out above, something seems to be missing, the whole episode is a series of loose ends and unanswered questions. Why would the CIA think Almihdhar and bin Attash were the same person? Why send the additional photo, showing Alhazmi, to Islamabad? And what happened between the meeting when Omar identified bin Attash in the Yemeni photograph, when everything went swimmingly, and the subsequent one, when Chris had evidently gone over to the dark side?

The explanation that best fits the facts is this: nobody involved in the withholding of the Malaysia information from the FBI realized any danger when Soufan sent the first photo to Islamabad, so Chris did his job the way the taxpayers pay him to do it. However, one of the coterie of officials who was withholding information from the FBI subsequently realized that, as Omar had identified bin Attash and bin Attash was an associate of Almihdhar and Alhazmi, then Omar might also identify these two men as well, if shown photos from the FBI. Therefore, it was necessary to ascertain to what extent this danger was real. The speculation that Almihdhar and bin Attash were the same person was then simply a ruse under which a photo could quickly be transmitted to Islamabad to be shown to Omar. The reason the Alhazmi photo arrived unannounced was that there was concern Omar might identify Alhazmi to the FBI as well. The reason neither Chris nor anyone else mentioned the apparent identification of bin Attash to the Bureau is that, well, this was information the CIA had been working hard to keep from the Bureau for a year, why tell it to them now?

It has become a truism that intelligence operations that go on for a long time get screwed up, often for the strangest reasons, and this is a perfect example of that. Nobody could have anticipated that Omar would look at the photo of Alhazmi and say it was bin Attash, but it had happened. Now Alec Station was forced to withhold crucial information about the USS Cole bombing mastermind and tied itself up in knots about how it had failed to pass this information along after 9/11. The tale of incompetence in withholding the information about Almihdhar, Alhazmi and bin Attash had been stretched well beyond breaking point, but much more, and much worse, was to come in the late spring and summer of 2001. These events will be the subject of part 3 of this series.

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations

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Nowosielski and Duffy are working with legal advisors and we will have more on this soon. Meanwhile you can listen to our recent exclusive interview with the producers and their discovery here at Boiling Frogs Post:

Podcast Show #55: The Boiling Frogs Presents Ray Nowosielski & John Duffy 

Also, here are related interviews with Paul Thompson based on the exposé by the two producers: Part 1 & Part 2.

The producers’ website was taken down yesterday. We are in touch with them, and we will keep you informed. Please disseminate this stunning new development, the CIA’s panic, and the content of their interview. Thank You.

Sibel Edmonds

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Filmmakers Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy join us to discuss their extensive research, interviews and findings which have resulted in the unmasking of three former top CIA officials- George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee- and their role in withholding intelligence on two key 9/11 hijackers and subsequent cover-ups. Duffy and Nowosielski provide us with a detailed account of their new interview with former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and his allegations against the CIA officials- Tenet, Black and Blee – accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence from the White House, the FBI, Immigration and the State and Defense Departments. They discuss two key CIA analysts who were instrumental in this cover up, a joint statement issued by the three accused CIA officials in response to Clarke’s allegations, and more!

Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy produced the film “Press for Truth,” which documented the journey of four 9/11 widows as they lobbied the Bush White House to convene an independent commission to probe the attacks. They recently launched a new transparency web site SecrecyKills.com.

Here are our guests Ray Nowosielski & John Duffy unplugged!

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Although the story of the CIA’s actions in the run-up to 9/11 is complicated, at a fairly early point in any examination of them it becomes clear the agency committed multiple failures, and that these failures enabled the attacks to go forward. The key issue that remains in dispute ten years on is whether these “failures” were deliberate or simply the product of overwork and incompetence. Making an informed judgment means taking the time to look at all the failures, put them in order, and analyze what it all means.

Perhaps the most comprehensible problem is the scope of the CIA’s failings. There was not one error by some lowly neophyte, but a massive string of failures. As Tom Wilshire, one of the key CIA officials involved in the withholding of the information commented to the Congressional Inquiry, “[E]very place that something could have gone wrong in this over a year and a half, it went wrong. All the processes that had been put in place, all the safeguards, everything else, they failed at every possible opportunity. Nothing went right.”

In addition, some of the failures were extremely serious. For example, the alleged failure by Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, to inform CIA Director George Tenet that Flight 77 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar was in the country in August 2001 is simply beyond comprehension. Added to this, the failures were committed by a small group of intelligence officers, centered on Wilshire and his boss Richard Blee, and focused on a few al-Qaeda operatives, in particular Almihdhar and his partner Nawaf Alhazmi. Finally, one of the officers who withheld information has admitted this publicly, and a second reportedly in private, and some surviving documents contradict the “incompetence excuse.”

The story of the CIA’s pre-9/11 failings starts in late December 1999, when the NSA intercepted an al-Qaeda communication, apparently between Almihdhar and bin Laden associate Khallad bin Attash, who is currently in Gitmo. One end of the call was at al-Qaeda’s operations hub in Yemen, which the NSA had been monitoring for some time. The communication showed that a group of al-Qaeda operatives would soon be travelling to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The NSA told the CIA and FBI.

The CIA tracked Almihdhar from Yemen to a stopover in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where a photocopy of his passport was made. US officials discovered he had a US visa, issued several months earlier and due to expire in April 2000. This information was reported to the various CIA stations involved in the tracking operation and to Alec Station at CIA headquarters on January 5, 2000.

An FBI detailee named Doug Miller read the relevant cables from the field and drafted a message to the FBI to telling them Almihdhar had a US visa. The FBI is a domestically focused organization, so without the US visa Almihdhar was just a foreign terrorist abroad, and not of much concern to it. It was the US visa that would have made Almihdhar significant to the Bureau. A female CIA officer who we will call “Michael” then told Miller not to send the cable yet, saying Wilshire wanted to hold off on it—no one below Wilshire had authority to release such information to the FBI.

A few hours after she blocked Miller’s cable to the FBI, Michael sent out a cable stating that the FBI had been informed of Almihdhar’s visa information. This was not true, and Michael must have known this at the time.

You will not find this episode in the main text of the 9/11 Commission report. Despite its obvious importance, the commission relegated it to a small-type endnote, number 44 to chapter 6.

Miller turned to a fellow FBI detailee, Mark Rossini, who went to Michael to ask what was happening. According to Rossini, Michael said that the FBI was not going to get the information until the CIA wanted it to and that the next al-Qaeda attack was going to be in Southeast Asia.

In addition, according to several CIA officers interviewed by the Agency’s inspector general, it was standard practice to confirm the Bureau had received such information. This was not done.

Around a week later, Miller sent an e-mail to Wilshire asking whether he could send the message to the FBI now. He received no reply.

After 9/11, investigators were unable to find Miller’s draft cable for nearly two and a half years and the people involved allegedly forgot all about it. It was discovered in early 2004, necessitating they relevant officials be interviewed again. However, they still claimed to have no recollection.

Rossini began to talk more freely about what happened to Lawrence Wright for his 2006 book The Looming Tower, which has an unnamed CIA official tell Miller “This is not a matter for the FBI.” However, Rossini then left the Bureau in disgrace and gave a full account of what happened to author James Bamford and journalist Jeff Stein in 2008. According to Rossini, there was nothing wrong with his memory when interviewed by investigators; he simply chose to lie under pressure from the CIA. Rossini also says there was a minder in the room during the interview, a depressingly typical occurrence for the post-9/11 investigations.

On the same day Miller’s cable was blocked, a CIA officer on loan to the FBI who we will call “Robert” briefed two FBI colleagues on what the CIA knew about the Malaysia meeting. Robert told the two FBI agents pretty much everything the CIA knew except the one key thing the Bureau needed to make it sit up and take notice—that Almihdhar had a US visa. Robert then told another CIA officer on loan to the Bureau there was no need to brief the FBI about Malaysia because he had already done so, ensuring this officer would not let slip the Almihdhar visa information.

Meanwhile in Malaysia, the CIA and a local Malaysian intelligence service were following Almihdhar, Alhazmi and their contacts around. Numerous photos were taken, the attendees at the meeting were videoed on the first day, the operatives went out to use computers at an internet cafe, and intelligence officials then examined the computers. However, an attempt to bug the meeting allegedly failed.

The full list of the attendees is not known. However, in addition to Almihdhar and Alhazmi, we do know that two leading radicals, bin Attash and Hambali, a leader of the al-Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah, were present, along with several other lower-level militants. According to counterterrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna and a Pentagon document about Hambali, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohamed was also there. If true, this would make the CIA’s failure to exploit the meeting all the more bizarre—the Agency was actively looking to rendition him to New York for trial at this time due to his involvement in the 1995 Bojinka plot to blow up multiple airliners.

On January 8, Almihdhar, Alhazmi and bin Attash left Kuala Lumpur for Bangkok, Thailand. The CIA claims it lost them at this point, failing to get men to the airport in time to follow them. This claim needs to be taken with a pinch of salt—bin Attash was monitored in Malaysia making a call to the Washington Hotel in Bangkok, where the three men ended up staying, so it would not be too hard to find them there.

Something strange happened at Alec Station on January 12 and 14. Four days after the three men had left Kuala Lumpur, Wilshire’s boss Blee briefed his superiors, presumably including Counterterrorist Center chief Cofer Black and CIA Director George Tenet, about what was happening. He falsely claimed the surveillance in Malaysia was ongoing. Two days later, he gave another false briefing, saying that the meeting had broken up and, again falsely, that the attendees were still being tracked.

This is a puzzle. It is hard to believe that Blee, who managed only a couple of dozen officers, could be so ignorant of the various cables sent and received about the travel to Bangkok. So why did he misinform his superiors? Was he genuinely misleading them? Or had they told him they wanted no paper trail linking them to what was happening?

On January 15, Alec Station dropped the matter entirely, even allegedly failing to write up a full report on the matter. However, in February a foreign intelligence service made an offer to help with Almihdhar, an offer mentioned in the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry Report, but not the 9/11 Commission Report. The reply that came stated that no help was needed because the CIA was in the middle of an investigation “to determine what the subject is up to.” This is a key document, as it contradicts the claim Alec Station had forgotten all about the two men at the time.

Also in February, a CIA station (almost certainly the one in Kuala Lumpur) prodded Bangkok station about Almihdhar. What had happened to him? Bangkok was silent for some time, then replied they did not know, and would have difficulty finding out. As Thailand had watchlisted Almihdhar and Alhazmi at the CIA’s request in mid-January, it almost certainly did know, or could get the information with a simple phone call. A couple of weeks later, Bangkok got round to replying in a cable also sent to Alec Station: it said Alhazmi had taken a flight to Los Angeles on January 15 with a companion, who was not named but who was in fact Almihdhar. The non-naming of the companion was totally bizarre, the March 5 cable was drafted in response to a query about Almihdhar and Bangkok must have known his name, so why omit it?

Alec Station did nothing with this cable, which was yet another opportunity to watchlist the two men and inform the FBI. This was not the last time such failures were committed.

How the two main inquiries, by the two Congressional intelligence committees and the 9/11 Commission handled the March 5 cable is instructive. The 9/11 Commission report just glosses over it in a couple of lines. The Congressional Inquiry, however, realized just how important it was and zeroed in. Tenet was asked about this publicly under oath by Senator Carl Levin and Tenet… well, he was less than a hundred per cent truthful. In response to the questioning he claimed, “I know that nobody read that cable,” and then repeated the assertion twice. In actual fact, as the public learned five years later, at least 50 people at the CIA had read the cable. It is hard to believe that Tenet, who must have prepared thoroughly for such an important appearance before Congress, thought what he was saying was accurate. So the simple question is: what was he trying to cover up?

Part two of this series will focus on the bombing of the USS Cole and the CIA’s continuing failure to share information with the FBI.

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

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A Few Foreign Nation Clients

Saudi Arabia
Pakistan
Turkey
Sudan

A Few Clients from the Banking & Fed Megas Pool

Bank of America
Morgan Stanley
Standard Charter Bank

Oil Industry

Exxon Mobile
BP
Chevron Texaco

Military Industrial Complex

Boeing
General Electric

International-Imperialistic- Parasitic Organizations

World Bank
IMF
United Nations

You see, there exists no conflict of interest among these Fein clients. When it comes to imperialistic and exploitative operations, the target puppet nations, the greedy oil and military industrial complex players, and the corrupt-criminal mega banking industry work hand-in-hand. Are you with me so far?

On the other hand, last time I checked Ron Paul challenged the Fed & the corrupt mega bankers. Last time I heard, Ron Paul unequivocally was voicing his disdain for US led international and imperialistic institutions such as the World Bank and IMF. Last time I looked, Ron Paul was on the ‘no-no list’ for the Military Industrial Complex lobby.

Now Ron Paul is Bruce Fein’s client. The above predators are also Bruce Fein’s clients. So what are we talking about here?

A Gigantic Conflict of Interest?

Compatible Interests?

If you think it is neither, which one of these clients’ interest comes first? Let me give it a bit of perspective with one example:

The Turkish clients paid Bruce Fein $500,000 in less than two years for him to represent their interests. How much is the Ron Paul campaign willing to pay Bruce Fein in order to surpass Turkey’s  client value to Fein? How much must th Paul campaign pay Bruce Fein for its interests to be put before those of Saudi Arabia, all those mega banks, MIC…?

These questions are yours to answer, and you may want to ask Bruce Fein directly. On September 12, Monday, at 12:30, Bruce Fein will be at Busboys & Poets (2021 14^th Street NW, Washington, DC 20009).  Please let me know what answers you find.

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Last month the former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke made headlines in the alternative press when he revealed that the CIA’s failure to pass on information it knew about two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers living in the United States for over a year before the attacks did not merely involve a few lowly CIA analysts who did not understand the importance of the information, but instead extended all the way to former CIA director George Tenet.

The claim that the Director of Central Intelligence knowingly and purposely blocked the White House Counter-Terrorism Czar and high-level FBI officials from learning about known Al Qaeda agents living in the United States is profound in its implications. Given that any interpretation of this assertion would necessarily mean that Tenet and the other CIA officials who blocked this information actually aided the alleged 9/11 attackers and have now participated in a decade-long cover-up of their role, the question necessarily becomes: Why did they do this?

This is our EyeOpener Video Report by James Corbett on 9/11, the CIA & the Art of the Hangout: for boilingfrogspost.com.

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From ten years on, everything about 9/11 feels otherworldly and irrational, the reasons for it, the apparent helplessness in the face of it, the curious identities of the people involved and the American government’s response to it. It defied logic then and it still does. The World Trade Towers were proud symbols of who we were as early 21^st century Americans, at least who we thought we were. After all, wasn’t the spiritual motto of the original 1939 Flushing, NY World’s Fair “World trade center” pavilion dedicated to “world peace through trade?”  

There would be no peace after 9/11. The destruction loosed a demon that had been struggling for America’s soul since the creation of the Cold War in 1947. The U.S. would now be freed to pursue “evil” wherever it could be found and there would be no turning back. The creation of the World Trade Towers by Rockefeller brothers Nelson and David had been steeped in psychological symbolism from their start in the early 1960s. As the most well known scions of American business, the Rockefeller family brought more than just money to their endeavors, they brought a vision for the future of the planet and a philosophy to guide it.

Begun as a massive undertaking to revitalize lower Manhattan, Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David and New York Governor Nelson pushed hard for the project and each tower stood as a symbol of their respective power. As metaphor, the towers were more than just two of the tallest buildings in the world. It might be said they were as important as the two pillars Joachim and Boaz which stood at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple; mystical gates to a Cathedral of wisdom in which all could worship under one religion; the religion of business, Capitalism.

The Rockefellers were no strangers to the power of psychological warfare and its impact on American opinion. During World War II Nelson had headed the U.S. government’s intelligence agency for Latin America, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA). CIAA’s film division guided the 1942 production of Walt Disney’s Saludos Amigos to promote pro-American sentiment in South America. In 1954 Nelson was appointed as President Eisenhower’s White House special assistant on Cold War tactics and psychological warfare. Nelson Rockefeller played a central role in formulating domestic propaganda programs throughout the 1950s as chairman of the Planning Coordination Group which, in addition to its propaganda work, oversaw all CIA covert operations. His 1956 Special Studies Project directed by Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger produced many of the domestic policy recommendations that came to be known as President Kennedy’s New Frontier. His family’s philanthropic support of the arts had been carefully coordinated with the CIA and was both overtly and covertly propagandistic.

As a committed Anglophile, Rockefeller had aided British intelligence during World War II when he rented space in New York’s Rockefeller Center at a steep discount to a number of British propaganda agencies including their secret intelligence service for the Americas, the British Security Coordination (BSC). The BSC’s chief, Sir William Stephenson (Intrepid) set up shop in New York City with the help of some of New York’s wealthiest families with one main objective in mind: Get the United States into the war in Europe on Britain’s behalf.

One key agent in the psychological war for American public opinion was young RAF pilot Roald Dahl who along with James Bond creator Ian Fleming, playwright Noel Coward and Gallup pollster David Ogilvy were given free rein to commit sabotage, political subversion and propagandize “the natives” (Americans) through whatever means possible.

Dahl’s creative fiction earned him praise from the New York Times and publishing contracts from Random House as well as entrée to Hollywood where he would collaborate with Walt and Roy Disney in their studio’s transformation into an arsenal of animation while inspiring numerous imitators.  Dahl would go on to marry a movie star and become a Hollywood icon with perennial successes, most notably “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” The cult of intelligence would ultimately become so seamlessly blended into every aspect of publishing, television and film, the CIA would jokingly be referred to as “the Chocolate Factory.” Along with Fleming, Ogilvy and Coward, Dahl would help to get the United States into the war with Germany and craft an enduring Anglo-centric cultural narrative in the public’s mind whose main objective was the promotion of a British agenda for the United States. That agenda would quickly shift from anti-fascist to aggressive Cold War anti-communist (read anti-Russian) as World War II ended, with Britain playing a seminal role in the creation of America’s national security state.

President Harry Truman’s March 12, 1947 proclamation laying out the rationale for the Cold War (Truman Doctrine), fundamentally altered America’s identity by embedding a permanent psychology of fear. But a hidden aspect of this conflict was the slow, grinding corruption that its unreality fostered in America’s leadership. That unreality was finally revealed in the catastrophe of Vietnam.

In a remarkably self-effacing (especially by today’s standards) January 8, 1972 New Yorker article tracing the origins of the devastation caused by Vietnam titled “Reflections: In Thrall To Fear,” Senator J. William Fulbright bemoaned the mental corruption caused by the Truman Doctrine during the 1940s, 50s and 60s, whereby “Our leaders became liberated from the normal rules of evidence and inference when it came to dealing with Communism… The effect of the anti-Communist ideology was to spare us the task of taking cognizance of the specific facts of specific situations. Our ‘faith’ liberated us, like the believers of old, from the requirements of empirical thinking… Like medieval theologians, we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion.”

What Fulbright’s brilliant but tragic reflections fail to include is that America’s assumptions about the Cold War were never empirical. In fact the assumptions weren’t even necessarily American but had been crafted by America’s Anglo-centric intelligence bureaucracy and rooted in messianic 19^th century British designs for control of the Eurasian landmass. A recent release of classified documents reveals that Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill was so obsessed with Eurasian conquest, he’d envisioned rearming Germany and attacking the Soviet Union right up to the end of World War II in a plan named Operation Unthinkable. Faced with the absurdity of confronting an overwhelmingly superior Soviet force and starting World War III, Churchill’s operation was shelved, but his famous Iron Curtain speech of 1946 would animate the idea while establishing the ideological narrative by which all future U.S./Soviet relations would be defined.   

The inspiration for Churchill’s speech and its warning of the growing Communist threat to “Christian civilization” was the American child of British immigrants, James Burnham. As the godfather of neoconservatism, Burnham would work his way from Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky in the 1930s, to authoring a book that would forge the foundations of a new kind of planned, centralized society, to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. His much critiqued landmark 1940 The Managerial Revolution would be read and admired by Hitler’s general staff and viewed as the blueprint for George Orwell’s 1984 in which a new class of business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers would destroy the old capitalist order, crush the working class and seize all of society’s wealth for themselves.

In a 1945 Partisan Review article titled “Lenin’s Heir” Burnham, while still at the OSS, infused his apocalyptic political views with mystical allusions to the Eurasian heartland as “the magnetic core” of Soviet power, comparing it to the mystical “reality of the One of Neo-Platonism,” whose inexorable and unstoppable “emanative progression… descends through the stages of Mind, Soul, and Matter” towards its ultimate destination beyond the Eurasian boundaries and through “Appeasement and Infiltration (England, the United States).”  Burnham was a keen advocate of dirty tricks. He would play an important role in the overthrow of Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddeq and the installation of the Shah. His book The Machiavellians would become a handbook for CIA planners. 

As an “anti-Communist ideology” Burnham’s apocalyptic warnings about the inevitability of Soviet expansion from Eurasia’s magnetic core ring like a medieval theologian’s incantation throughout Churchill’s  “Iron Curtain” speech. George Orwell even makes clear in his 1946 “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” that Burnham’s words read like a mystical invocation and were most likely intended to hypnotize.  

Twenty six years later, Senator Fulbright would realize that only because of the disastrous outcome of Vietnam was there any willingness at all to reexamine the basic assumptions of American postwar policy toward the Soviet Union and what had brought the United States to such a sorry state. The 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks SALT would spring from this realization, as would the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty ABM and eventually SALT II, until in January of 1980 President Jimmy Carter would ask the Senate to delay consideration of the Treaty on the Senate floor because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. That treaty would never be passed.

Our involvement in the Afghanistan story began in the summer of 1979 when we began production of a documentary titled Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance. During the next months numerous experts including economist John Kenneth Galbraith lent their experience to our understanding of the unseen damage that a massive new diversion of tax dollars and investment capital would represent to the civilian economy. Galbraith insisted that accelerated defense spending and renewing the Cold War – as the neoconservative right was demanding at that critical moment – would ultimately destroy the civilian economy. He was convinced that the Cold War had already made America more and more like the Soviet Union, ruled by a military-industrial-academic establishment suspended from reality.

But by the time our program aired that winter, the argument was no longer whether our government should call a halt to the nuclear arms race and reinvest in the civilian economy. The December 27, 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had rolled back the narrative to 1947, the Truman Doctrine, to Churchill and Burnham’s mystical, medieval enchantment and the psychological warfare campaign necessary to bring it back to life was about to begin.

J. William Fulbright’s 1972 “Reflections: In Thrall To Fear” represented an awakening from the deep hypnotic trance imposed upon Americans by Cold War ideology. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought about its re-emersion, but this time to a deeper and totally detached level of unreality.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1980, the United States not only rejected Fulbright’s concerns for the intellectual dishonesty represented by the continuation of the Cold War, but willfully embraced the fraud, the lie and the illusion as its own and was willing to take it one step further.   

The U.S. had silently, almost imperceptibly crossed through a mirror in 1947 with the creation of a second and covert national-security-government. But few in Washington understood at the time, the Faustian bargain they were signing onto. Now that secret government would take the U.S. on a fairytale journey into a mirrored image of itself from the 1940s, interweaving its own delusion with a remanufactured, two dimensional Hollywood invention named Ronald Reagan as the host. America would never be the same.

As an actor, Reagan had been implanted into America’s subconscious as a hero during the 1940s and his militaristic campaign of Peace through Strength  was sold to Americans as the Reagan revolution. It was in fact a counter-revolution engineered by a reactionary gang of consummate insiders headed by former Research Industry of America employee, OSS veteran and Wall Street lawyer William J. Casey with the intention of restoring America’s militarist Cold War thinking.

As Reagan’s intelligence chief, Casey had key access to the concentric circles of international power necessary to carry off the tectonic shift of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street that would transfer power to an already wealthy globalist elite. As one of OSS chief Wild Bill Donovan’s Knights Templar during World War II, Casey took his “Crusade for Freedom” and a one world religion of Capitalism as creed, and as Director of Central Intelligence was perfectly positioned to put James Burnham’s dirty tricks and Machiavellian philosophy to work in the heartland of Eurasia.

Casey’s passion for the Afghan jihad was messianic. An ultra-conservative Catholic, Casey saw little difference in the antimodernist beliefs of the Wahhabist House of Saud and the anti-enlightenment views of the newly installed Polish Pope, John Paul II. Disguised as a war to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet aggression, Casey’s campaign was intended to infiltrate covert teams beyond Afghanistan into the Soviet Union’s Muslim provinces and provoke an insurrection. Backed by neoconservatives, the Saudis and secretive organizations like the Safari Club, Le Cercle, the Bilderberg Group and the 6I, it would play out in propaganda from Rambo to Charlie Wilson’s War as the greatest American victory of the Cold War.

In reality, Casey’s team would so tear down the wall between fact and fiction, legal and illegal, truth and the lie, it would make 9/11 inevitable.

But if anyone deserves the prize for the culture of triumphalist self-deception which lives on today in the endless war on terror and the Homeland Security State-culture-of-fear, it is James Burnham.  On February 23, 1983 James Burnham was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan culminating his fifty years of service as one of the “guiding lights in mankind’s quest for truth.” Burnham’s 1940 prediction that Nazi Germany would win the war had actually been wrong as was his prediction that the Soviet Union would lose. His subsequent revised prediction that the Soviets would win and expand beyond the Eurasian heartland followed only after a Soviet victory appeared obvious in 1944.

In George Orwell’s 1946, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” Orwell clinically diagnosed Burnham’s convenient powers of revisionist prophecy as the product of a “mental disease” whose “roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.”

Ten years after the events of September 11, 2001, thirty two years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and sixty four years after the creation of the Cold War, James Burnham lives on as an icon to a deeply corrupted Homeland Security-culture “In Thrall to Fear.” We have no one to blame but ourselves for allowing that culture’s acolytes, their lies and their fabrications to continue to hypnotize us.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire Visit their website here.

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This is Part II of our three-part one-of-a-kind interview series with author and researcher Paul Thompson. For additional background information please visit the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project at HistoryCommons.Org and Richard Clarke’s interview by John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski at SecrecyKills.Com.

Paul Thompson joins us to discuss the latest revelations by former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and his explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials – George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee – accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence about two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks. He provides us with the most comprehensive history and context to date on Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 with three other terrorists and flew the jetliner directly into the Pentagon killing 189 people. Mr. Thompson takes us through a mind-boggling journey through the Yemen Hub, the highly critical Malaysia Summit, Thailand, USS Cole bombing, CIA’s Alec Station, NSA, FBI and beyond!

Paul Thompson is the author of the Terror Timeline, a compilation of over 5,000 reports and articles concerning the September 11, 2001 attacks. His research in the field has garnered over 100 radio and TV interviews. Mr. Thompson holds a psychology degree from Stanford University obtained in 1990. For the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project visit HistoryCommons.Org

Here is our guest Paul Thompson unplugged!

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Today is Day 7 on the campaign to raise awareness and alert re Bruce Fein, the greatest threat to the Ron Paul Camp to date. It may be my last one depending on the public response and feedback we receive from the already active and vigilant ‘true’ Paul supporters. I am going to start with one last response to Bruce-Mattie Fein agents who have hijacked several websites to deflect attention from the facts and the real issues. If you go and read the propaganda written by the Feins’ agents you’ll see why I refer to them as ‘agents.’ Either due to certain omega fatty acid deficiencies or natural genetic misfortune, these guys slip and make clear their close associations with both Bruce and Mattie Fein. Now, allow me to provide you with a concrete rebuttal to some of this misinformation that is being spread and planted by Feins’ agents:

“So what if he is representing foreign agents, foreign governments or foreign groups. He is an attorney after all, and it is his job to represent these people?”

Last time I checked attorneys represented their clients in courts. Last time I checked legal cases were not brought by attorneys before the CIA. Last time I checked lawyers did not argue their clients’ cases before State Department operatives. And last time I checked legal representation did not extend to going to Congress, wining and dining representatives, and funneling money into their pockets. Did I miss something when I checked all this last time?! Because this is what Bruce Fein writes and markets about the services he provides for foreign agenda clients, and if you read you hardly, if ever, come across any mention of legal-attorney representation:

“The Lichfield Group features unrivalled government, media, and business experience. Exemplary is the Group’s high level connections with the Department of Justice, the Department of State, and the Central Intelligence Agency, on the one hand, to The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, and nationwide broadcast or cable networks on the other.

Whether a client is a giant corporation handcuffed by ill-conceived United States government policies or a foreign government anxious to influence the decisions of Congress, the President, agencies, the judiciary, or State governments, The Lichfield Group is armed with the skills and contacts indispensable for success.”

Just to show my generosity and kindness towards the IQ-challenged Fein agents I am going to recap: Bruce Fein is a foreign agent-lobbyist and that has nothing to do with ‘legal representation.’ He represents foreign agendas before the CIA, the State Department, the Congress, and the White House… Courts ain’t got nothing to do with this in-name-only ‘attorney.’ Where did you guys ever hear of cases being brought before the despicable Central Intelligence Agency-CIA?! What exactly are this Bruce Fein’s ties and close connections to the CIA and State Department he keeps bragging about?!

“Bruce Fein is a fine attorney. Regardless of his shady foreign ties and businesses, as the Chief Legal Advisor to Ron Paul Campaign he is bringing his highly regarded attorney expertise and services!”

As I am writing this piece, as has been the case since the ruling issued by the Congressional Ethics Committee, there is a fine group of legal experts who are working on getting the Bar Association to investigate and hopefully suspend Mr. Fein’s attorney license. This is a gigantic public scandal, not an allegation, people:

“In a statement released on August 5, the House Ethics Committee ruled that Rep Jean Schmidt has received multiple improper gifts totaling $500,000 from the Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) between 2008 and 2010. The Committee ruled that Schmidt must pay the money back, However, she will not face sanctions by the House as she was able to pin the blame for her behavior on her attorneys Bruce Fein and David Saltzman.”

After investigating the case, the Ethics Committee says it was Bruce Fein who intentionally misled his client Rep. Schmidt and funneled half a million dollars of foreign lobby money to the Congresswoman. As I stated before, there are only two possible scenarios here:

His two possible explanations for this case would be: 1- I did not tell my client that my legal representation of her case was part of foreign lobby money funneling to her; 2- My client was fully aware of the foreign lobby bribery nature of my legal representation and services, but to protect her and my foreign bosses I took the blame. Under either explanation one glaring point remains clear, and that is the lack of ethics on behalf of the involved attorney-Bruce Fein.

Feins’ agents are out there trying to persuade the Paul Camp to ‘forget Fein’s foreign lobbyist status and businesses’;  that ‘you’ve got a darn good attorney as your chief legal advisor.’ It is not any of my ‘allegations’ they are countering here; it is the official findings by the House Ethics Committee. How is it going to look for Ron Paul and his supporters if and when it is announced that Bruce Fein is being barred from legal practice due to unethical practices as an attorney?! Who is going to defend Ron Paul for picking this kind of an attorney for this kind of high-official position?! What will the public say? The presidential candidate who picked a crusty foreign lobbyist and a barred attorney as his chief legal advisor?!

I did not have to invent Bruce Fein’s Foreign Lobbyist status. It is in Mr. Fein’s resume and his past and present practices, showcased by him right here. Mr. Fein’s intimate associations with the CIA, the State Department and the White House are not based on any allegations; it is in his resume as written by him. Mr. Fein’s position and membership in the Neocon Nest AEI is a fact that is highlighted and used by him when needed. The ruling on Mr. Fein’s foreign lobby money funneling scheme is not some rumor; it is in an official congressional report.

And finally, it is very hard for me to believe that the propaganda, misinformation and personal attacks on me recently could possibly be coming from any ‘true’ Ron Paul supporter. We are talking about libertarians, and libertarian-leaning people who refuse to stop the critical thinking process and readily summit to any authority. Take a look at the following propaganda example from the Daily Paul website, and tell me if this jibes with the Paul Camp motto:

“I’m all for questioning things, but in the context of a presidential campaign, our leader is Ron Paul. His decision is to keep Fein. Back him up, despite your opinions.”- Road Runner on Wed, 08/31/2011 – 13:40.

Since when do Ron Paul people advocate for a monarchy-kingdom where followers must follow their king/leader blindly without question? This is disgusting. A disgrace to any libertarian minded person! Here is another one:

“An adviser may not be central in the campaign, and could be there to simply “bolster the appearance of the management team”, just like they do with company investment portfolios. It even might be for the purpose of gaining some acceptance from neocons by having the AEI adviser, even though RP is not neocon oriented and might not even take any advice from him. In the end, I have to consider RP to be capable of making these decisions. He is experienced and may have some reasons and knowledge that we do not see.” - Big T Wed, 08/31/2011 – 12:25.

What are these people saying? It is totally okay if Ron Paul hired this guy in order to expand his base to include neocons?!

Okay, I am not going to waste my time with mind-boggling quotes attacking me personally, advocating a dictatorship style following, planting misinformation, and most importantly attributing all that to Ron Paul supporters. Instead, here is my message to all in the ‘true’ Paul Grassroots network:

It is okay to think highly of Bruce Fein’s speeches-writings on State Secrets Privilege and some First Amendment related topics. I’ve read some of those, and I happen to like the content. Fein has been in and around the Paul Camp, giving speeches and interviews since 2008. I had no problem with that. Have the man, pay the man, to write and publish articles. That’s fine. But do NOT let this man inside as a strategically positioned insider. Do not let this man become Ron Paul’s Chief Legal Advisor. A crusty foreign lobbyist, an unethical attorney involved in money-laundering-funneling for foreign agents, a CIA-State Department Insider, a known AEI Neocon, a covert Israel supporter, a man who has been playing all sides-from the ACLU to AEI to Turkey to Pakistan to Israel to Ron Paul…Well, that kind of man has NO place in the Ron Paul campaign as an insider, and has no place with Ron Paul.

I believe I have said and done my part for now. I have been in this particular fight for way too long. Causes to fight for have not decreased but increased. I believed this to be one of those causes worth fighting for, including taking vicious attacks and insults from Paul imposters. However, the decision is now yours to make and the next step is yours to take. In the end, it all boils down to sincerity and principle. Please let me know, and until then.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by subscribing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

We are going to have a busy and highly interesting week starting on Monday, September 5. Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald will present you with their Grand Finale, Part 4 of their 9/11, Psychological Warfare & the American Narrative series:

“Willie Wonka & the National Security State as the U.S. resumes a holy war begun in the 19^th century through a syncretistic cult-like British foreign policy known as Mystical Imperialism” 

Read the first three parts if you haven’t been following their extraordinary insight into US psychological Warfare operations:

Part I. A Campaign Where the Lie Became the Truth and the Truth Became the Enemy of the State

Part II. Building the Afghan Narrative with Black Propaganda, the People, the Process & the Product

Part III. A Clockwork Afghanistan

Also coming up: Boiling Frogs Podcast interview with Paul Thompson Part II

Here is the link to our interview Part I: Click here.

We’ll also have Kevin Fenton’s 9/11 series on the CIA, and other highly interesting articles, interviews and  updates for our 9/11 countdown series.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

The internal discussions over the recent ‘Fein’ selection continue inside the Paul camp. Loyal and vigilant Paul supporters have been doing their part. And a few Fein publicists and friends have been hard at work planting misinformation, propaganda and false accusations on the net right and left. I guess this is a positive indicator – we have Fein and his publicists nervous. When false fronts get nervous they tend to expose themselves even further. And that’s good.

Fein publicists and propaganda planters have been  mainly targeting Ron Paul related sites and forums, and attacking everyone who even dares to question Bruce Fein’s highly questionable businesses and associations. For example: they claim Fein worked for AEI in 1981, and then left. Fein’s bio contradicts this. AEI contradicts this. Even Fein’s business advertisement geared towards his foreign governments contradicts this!

Here is what AEI says about their dear Fein, ‘Mr. Fein has been an adjunct scholar at AEI,’ and says this as of today, September 2, 2011.

When you look at Bruce Fein’s biographical information listed and promoted by him at his ‘very recently erased’ company website, you see this: “Mr. Fein has been an adjunct scholar with the American Enterprise Institute.”

Another interesting development: the Feins have been trying very hard to delete-erase their various companies’ websites and past information. Nervous Bruce and Mattie Fein quickly ran and got rid of their business website for ‘the Lichfield Group’, trying very hard to erase information on their actual businesses. However, as many of you know, nowadays it is very hard to get rid of past online information, and here is what we retrieved on Fein’s relationships and ongoing work as advertised at his company website and brochures seeking additional lobbying positions:

The Lichfield Group features unrivalled government, media, and business experience. Exemplary is the Group’s high level connections with the Department of Justice, the Department of State, and the Central Intelligence Agency, on the one hand, to The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, and nationwide broadcast or cable networks on the other.

Whether a client is a giant corporation handcuffed by ill-conceived United States government policies or a foreign government anxious to influence the decisions of Congress, the President, agencies, the judiciary, or State governments, The Lichfield Group is armed with the skills and contacts indispensable for success.

As you can see the Fein couple is not selling good ole boring attorney appeal here. They say they are close to the CIA and State Department and Congress, and willing to influence them for foreign entities if the right dollar amount is paid.

Also, it is very interesting to see how twisting and misrepresenting facts in a not very ethical manner, apparently a ‘Fein’  trademark, shows itself in his representation of his marital status! The Fein publicists, since my article exposing the couple’s ‘Israel Lobby’ agenda,  have begun advertising the Feins as divorced, and concluding that ‘so Mattie Fein’s activities and associations do not in any way apply to Bruce; they are divorced!’ I did check my facts, and I did talk with credible sources: They did file for divorce a few years back, but with all sorts of business partnerships and strategic benefits in politics at stake they changed their mind, and nullified their filings. They are legally married. They are business partners. They have businesses together, and Fein has been his wife’s supporter in every single meaning of the word ‘support.’

I am not going to waste my time, and your time, countering every single bit of false information, accusation and propaganda that is going to be planted by Fein’s publicists. I believe those with a positive agenda who want to see this great threat to the Paul Camp gone are informed and vigilant enough to counter these recent false information planting operations on their own. As you can see, Fein is very nervously busy trying to erase his past; so are his publicists. Instead, I want to remind you that today is Day 4 of our countdown to remove Mr. Fein, the greatest ‘insider’ threat to the Paul campaign to date, and we are counting down.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

This is Part I of our three-part one-of-a-kind interview series with author and researcher Paul Thompson. For additional background information please visit the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project at HistoryCommons.Org and Richard Clarke’s interview by John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski at SecrecyKills.Com.

Paul Thompson joins us to discuss the latest revelations by former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and his explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials – George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee – accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence about two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks. He provides us with the most comprehensive history and context to date on Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 with three other terrorists and flew the jetliner directly into the Pentagon killing 189 people. Mr. Thompson takes us through a mind-boggling journey through the Yemen Hub, the highly critical Malaysia Summit, Thailand, USS Cole bombing, CIA’s Alec Station, NSA, FBI and beyond!

Paul Thompson is the author of the Terror Timeline, a compilation of over 5,000 reports and articles concerning the September 11, 2001 attacks. His research in the field has garnered over 100 radio and TV interviews. Mr. Thompson holds a psychology degree from Stanford University obtained in 1990. For the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project visit HistoryCommons.Org

Here is our guest Paul Thompson unplugged!

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

The idea that the drug trade in Afghanistan is enabled and protected by western interests for their own benefit is by no means a new or controversial idea. After all, we are talking about the third most lucrative commodity in the world behind oil and the arms trade. However, the media coverage of this issue involving hundreds of billions of dollars is another story. James Corbett brings to you questions and points not dared to be raised by the media and pseudo alternatives alike.

This is our EyeOpener Video Report by James Corbett on Afghanistan’s White Gold for boilingfrogspost.com

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

The root cause of what the United States suffers from today, both politically and economically stems from the psychological warfare campaign triggered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  At that time, Americans responded dutifully if not robotically to the threat as a barrage of propaganda poured from a hoard of foreign policy “experts” claiming vindication for Vietnam while bemoaning America’s military weakness. Zbigniew Brzezinski himself claimed that the Soviet invasion was a vindication of his prediction that the Soviets would be emboldened by a lack of U.S. resolve elsewhere. The shaken president, Jimmy Carter announced a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the creation of a rapid deployment force to the Middle East and a new get tough posture toward the Soviet Union.

On January 2, 1980 the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour presented former U.S. Ambassador Theodore Eliot and Harvard Professor Richard Pipes to speculate on the implications of the invasion. As an unabashed neoconservative ideologue, Pipes should have been considered a controversial choice sitting alongside the thoroughly Eastern establishment Eliot. But on this evening Pipes had been carefully chosen to play the very special role of delegitimizing détente with the Soviet Union while moving the discussion permanently and irretrievably to the neoconservative right.  Paired with Eliot, the dean of American diplomacy and soon to be Secretary General for the United States of a gathering of international elites calling itself, the Bilderberg group, the two were there to send the signal that the ideology of neoconservatism, globalism and the institutions of the American government were now one and the same.

It was a moment that would change the United States in ways that few Americans would immediately understand and many continue to find baffling. Years earlier, Pipes had been chosen to chair a highly controversial operation known as the Team B experiment in competitive analysis.

The decade of the 1970s had presented a series of strategic shocks to the United States. The Watergate scandal and the Arab oil embargo, campus protests, combined with the American military failure in Vietnam had shaken Washington’s own belief in the American narrative. Vietnam had removed the veil from America’s Cold War defense-intellectual elite, revealing their elaborate plans and complex mathematical formulas to be useless as a guide to action. But even before the end of that war in 1975, pressure had been building from a powerful collection of right-wing ideologues to ignore their own complete intellectual failure, wind back the clock and return to an openly militarized Cold War approach to the Soviet Union.

Backed by Gerald Ford’s CIA director George W. Bush, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) vice chairman, Leo Cherne, and the father of Cold War thinking, Paul Nitze, Team B’s goal was to turn the CIA’s thinking about the Soviet Union on its head.

“The intensity and scope of the current Soviet military effort in peacetime is without parallel in twentieth century history,” they claimed in their top secret 1976 report. The Soviets were preparing for a “third world war” and were comparable only to “Nazi remilitarization of the 1930s.” Given military superiority and the will to use it, they reasoned, at some point in the near future the Soviets would make a strategic move that the United States would be militarily unable to stop.

But it was in their claim that the Soviets would first “intimidate smaller powers . . . adjacent to the USSR . . . where pro-Soviet forces have an opportunity to seize power but are unable to do so without military help,” that the Team B assessment attained a level of prophecy.

If anything could be described as a psychological warfare operation come unhinged, it was the Team B experiment. Team B effectively exposed the government’s own process of rational analysis to an irrational exercise in personalized, politicized, ethnic and faith-based psychological warfare. And it succeeded.

By 1979, the Team B and its acolytes Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad had so managed to overlay their alternate reality onto the mind of government that when the invasion of Afghanistan took place in 1979 their fantasy appeared to be as real and foreordained as it was intended to be.

Richard Pipes made clear in that January 2, 1980 broadcast that Afghanistan was “a superb springboard from which to launch offensives both into the Indian subcontinent and into Iran and the Iranian Gulf….” And then invoked the magic of World War II by stating that never before had the Soviets “felt bold enough… to engage in a direct blitzkrieg. So if they get away with it in Afghanistan, there’ll not only be great danger for our whole Middle eastern position but we will have encouraged them to engage in actions of this sort in other parts of the world, including, for example, Southeastern Europe or possibly even Western Europe.”

A “direct blitzkrieg” aimed at the Middle East, India, Southeastern and even Western Europe? Just like the phantom threat posed by Saddam Hussein in 2003 and brought forward by the very same people, the idea that the Soviets might cut off a vital oil supply was all that was needed to capture public opinion. That spring CBS News anchor Dan Rather followed up with a coast to coast broadcast reinforcing the company line: the American people were asleep to Soviet designs and had better start supporting the Mujahideen “freedom fighters” before it was too late. 

The major media had been priming the pump for months prior to the invasion citing Brzezinski and the importance of the “arc of crisis,” and predicting that the Soviet Union would be driven toward the Persian Gulf within the decade due to intelligence reports that it was “running short of the oil it needs to fuel an expanding economy.” Never mind that the Soviet economy was actually contracting at that point and the CIA’s secret 14-page memo titled “The Impending Soviet Oil Crisis,” was pure hokum.

Brzezinski and his Team B allies wanted the Soviets in Afghanistan as part of a long standing plan for the conquest of Eurasia and the psychological warfare campaign to convince Americans of the Soviets’ malevolent desires for world domination was already gearing up to make it reality.

International Rescue Committee Chairman Leo Cherne was well practiced in the arts of such deception. As of 1978, the year of the Marxist coup in Afghanistan the IRC was already at work stating in their Annual Report that they were actively engaged in bringing Afghan refugees to Europe and the United States following “The takeover of Afghanistan by dictatorial forces sympathetic to the Soviet Union…” The IRC’s Annual Report that year featured a photograph of Cherne’s old protégé at the Research Institute of America, board member William J. Casey while conducting a tour of Southeast Asia. Casey would serve as Chairman of the Executive Committee the next year before running Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election campaign and shortly thereafter becoming his CIA director.

The IRC in cooperation with the CIA had virtually created the elaborate psychological warfare mechanism that sold the U.S. military buildup in Vietnam to the American public. By 1975 their campaign of black lies had been exposed as a dangerous fraud. But in faraway Afghanistan, those mistakes would be forgotten with the help of the Europeans and a covert globalist agenda. 

It was obvious to us in 1980 that the Soviet invasion was not what it seemed and even more obvious that the Western response to it was not what it should have been. 1979 was a critical moment in American history. Vietnam had created huge problems for the post World War II infrastructure and economy. Huge debt and a military resurgence was the last thing the U.S. needed. But when Theodore Eliot showed up at a preview of our first-person 1981 Afghan documentary on life behind Soviet lines and demanded to know who in the U.S. government had “authorized” our project, we realized we had penetrated a psychological warfare campaign that was steeped in the irrational.  

Like clockwork, the 1979 Soviet invasion would open a back door for a small band of globalists to bleed, loot and ultimately disassemble the Soviet Union, just the way the very same people would use 9/11 to go through the front door to bleed, loot and disassemble the United States.

Join us next for Willie Wonka and the National Security State as the U.S. resumes a holy war begun in the 19^th century through a syncretistic cult-like British foreign policy known as Mystical Imperialism.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire Visit their website here.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-Terrorism Richard Clarke suggests that former CIA Director George Tenet blocked the sharing of information within the government on two members of al Qaeda in the United States, information that Clarke believes could have prevented 911. The CIA admits it knew about the two future hijackers but claims the Director was not informed.

“In early 2000, a number of more junior personnel (including FBI agents on detail to CIA) did see travel information on individuals who later became hijackers but the significance of the data was not adequately recognized at the time.“

Clark claims to have been very close to Tenet and to find this impossible to believe. Clarke maintains that the Director must have been informed and must have made the decision not to share the information with Clarke and others. Clarke speculates that the presence of these two al Qaeda members was kept secret because the CIA had tried to recruit, or “flip,” those al Qaeda members and failed. Yet he has no evidence of such attempts.

But why not report that you tried to recruit someone and failed? What is the reason not to report that?

It seems more likely to me that Clarke is going easy on Tenet. “The September 11th attacks could have been prevented” has an “Obama could have fought for progressive principles” ring to it; it builds in the assumption that those involved WANTED the attacks to be prevented. Whatever this other new report ends up meaning, the history of Able Danger, and of White House inaction, and of Clarke’s earlier revelations begins to suggest a pattern.

I hate to underestimate incompetence and petty infighting as explanations for things, but I also hate to accept as the only possible explanation Clarke’s theory — of which he himself does not seem at all convinced — as to why Tenet apparently withheld information. I asked FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds what she thought, and her reply suggested a level of contempt for both Clarke and Tenet:

“I think sometimes it takes one evil fighting another evil to get to the truth. In this case, the clash of two guilty egos has helped unearth some truth on 9/11. Hope to have more clashes.“

I turned to Pentagon whistleblower Karen Kwiatkowski. She ought to have a sense of how accurate Clarke’s description is of standard practice versus inexplicable deviation from it. She seemed to think this new angle fit an existing pattern:

“[This] is just one more unanswered question regarding our own government’s involvement and possible complicity in the events. There are more gaping questions that lend credence to the theory that the U.S. government or parts of it were supportive and facilitated the 9/11 events (and the subsequent Amerithrax case). One, why was there no investigation of and no discussion of WTC 7 in the 9/11 commission report? And why has the case of the Israeli ‘art students’ (actually agents) who were tracking and had detailed operational intelligence on a significant number of the purported hijackers in this country in the months leading up to 9/11 never dealt with in a big way by any commission or any government agency? The after-the-fact lack of interest in these events kind of confirms the before-the-fact activities of those who were in a position to stop the attacks.“

Note that Karen does not here suggest, and neither do I have much use for theories to explain away what we know, theories that suggest there were no airplanes, no hijackers, etc., etc., some of which theories are extremely valuable but purely as entertainment. Rather, Karen is asking questions about things we don’t know, and things our government has gone to considerable lengths to avoid making known. When it comes to such matters, it’s hard to do better than turning to retired CIA officer Ray McGovern. I’ve just done so, and he hasn’t disappointed. Here’s a comment of McGovernian length and perception that he’s sent me:

“Withholding critical intelligence from the makers and implementers of security policy can be worse than lying. Of lying, we have plenty of evidence that former CIA director George Tenet is a serial offender — as is his long-time spokesman, Bill Harlow.

“But withholding intelligence on two of the 9/11 hijackers would have been unconscionable — the epitome of malfeasance, not just misfeasance. That’s why Richard Clarke’s conclusion that he should have received information from CIA about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, ‘unless somebody intervened to stop the normal automatic distribution’ is a most serious charge, given the role of the two in hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77 on 9/11.

“Tenet has denied that the information on the two hijackers was ‘intentionally withheld’ from Clarke, and has enlisted former CIA operatives Cofer Black (more recently a senior official of Blackwater) and Richard Blee (a more shadowy figure) to concur in saying, Not us; we didn’t withhold.

“Whom to believe? It is a no-brainer. One would have to have been born yesterday to regard the ‘George is right’ testimony from Black and Blee as collaborative.

“Tenet is the same fellow who provided the ‘slam dunk’ on the existence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, as well as the ‘artist renderings’ of equally non-existent mobile laboratories for developing biological warfare agents, based on unconfirmed information from the imposter code-named (appropriately) ‘Curveball.’ Tenet is the fellow who, under orders from Bush and Cheney, ordered up and disseminated a fraudulent National Intelligence Estimate on WMD in Iraq to deceive our elected representatives out of their Constitutional prerogative to authorize a war of aggression. Not small infractions.

“After a five-year investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Chairman Jay Rockefeller described the intelligence adduced under Tenet to ‘justify’ attacking Iraq as ‘uncorroborated, contradicted, and non-existent.’ Good enough to win Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom, though. It worked just fine for the purposes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, thank you very much.

“It is a matter of record that Tenet lies a lot — on occasion, demonstrating a sort of chutzpah on steroids. Recall, for example, Tenet telling Scott Pelley on ’60 Minutes,’ five times, in five consecutive sentences, ‘We do not torture people.’

“Tenet has lied about 9/11 too. The joint statement from Tenet, Black, and Blee, provided by Bill Harlow, concludes: ‘We testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn’t know. We stand by that testimony.’ Almost made me laugh….almost.

“In his sworn testimony to the 9/11 Commission on April 14, 2004, Tenet told the Commission under the prime-time klieg lights that he had not spoken to Bush — even on the telephone — during the entire month of August 2001.

“But Tenet did visit fly to see the President in Crawford — not once, but twice during August 2001, and briefed Bush again in Washington on the 31st. After the TV cameras at the 9/11 Commission hearing were shut off, Bill Harlow phoned the commission staff to say, Oops, sorry, Tenet misspoke. Even then, Harlow admitted to only Tenet’s August 17 visit to Crawford (and to the briefing on the 31st).

“How do we know Tenet was again in Crawford on August 24? From a White House press release quoting President George W. Bush to that effect — information somehow completely missed by our vigilant Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).

“Funny how Tenet could have forgotten his first visit to Crawford. In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet waxes eloquent about the ‘president graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and me trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna.’ But the visit was not limited to small talk.

“In his book Tenet writes: ‘A few weeks after the August 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the president stayed current on events.’ The Aug. 6, 2001 President’s Daily Brief contained the article ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US.’ According to Ron Suskind’s ‘The One-Percent Doctrine’, the president reacted by telling the CIA briefer, ‘All right, you’ve covered your ass now.’

“If, as Tenet says in his memoir, it was the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB that prompted his visit on Aug. 17, what might have brought him back on Aug. 24? I believe the answer can be found in court documents released at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the fledgling pilot in Minnesota interested in learning to steer a plane but indifferent as to how to land it.

“Those documents show that on Aug. 23, 2001, Tenet was given an alarming briefing, focusing on Moussaoui, titled ‘Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.’ Tenet was told that Moussaoui was training to fly a 747 and, among other suspicion-arousing data, had paid for the training in cash.

“It is an open question — if a key one — whether Tenet told Bush about the two hijackers, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, while keeping that key information from the person who most needed it — White House counter-terrorist czar Richard Clarke. Clarke finds the only plausible explanation in his conclusion that Tenet was personally responsible. Clarke says:

“‘For me to this day, it is inexplicable, when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism, that the director didn’t tell me, that the director of the counterterrorism center didn’t tell me, that the other 48 people inside CIA that knew about it never mentioned it to me or anyone in my staff in a period of over 12 months.’

“But Tenet’s aide-de-camp Bill Harlow has branded Clarke’s statements ‘absurd and patently false.’ The statement Harlow shepherded for Tenet, Black, and Blee adds ‘reckless and profoundly wrong…baseless…belied by the record…unworthy of serious consideration.’

“And Harlow never lies. Right. I’m reminded of Harlow’s reaction to Newsweek’s publication on February 24, 2003 of the remarks of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, who had been in charge of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs for almost a decade before he defected to Jordan in 1995. Kamel did provide some information on residual, closed-down sites relating to WMD, and that information proved correct.

“Kamel ALSO said that after the first Gulf War in 1991:

“‘I ordered the destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons — biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.’

“This was not at all what Bush, Cheney, and — by extension — Tenet wanted Newsweek readers, or the rest of us, to learn just three weeks before the U.S./U.K. attack on Iraq, ostensibly to find and destroy those threatening, non-existent weapons.

“So Bill Harlow rose to the occasion, telling the FCM that the Newsweek story was, ‘incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue.’ And the FCM said, Gosh, thanks for telling us.

“By all indications, Harlow is still able to work his fraudulent magic on the FCM, which has virtually ignored this major story since it broke several days ago. If Harlow says it’s not true…and throws in still more pejorative adjectives to dismiss what Clarke says, it is surely Richard Clarke who is not telling the truth. No matter Clarke’s well deserved reputation for honesty and professionalism.

“And so it goes.”

Yes, it is as likely as that the sky is blue that Tenet knew and that Tenet is lying about what he knew. But I’m interested in why. Did he try to convert two members of al Qaeda to his team and fail, and then choose to keep quiet about it, despite his established habit of trying to “cover his ass”? Wouldn’t his ass have been better covered by sharing the information? And wouldn’t we all then be better off, in particular the million Iraqis and thousands of Americans and Afghans who’ve paid for this malfeasance with their lives?

But what if, just as Obama’s actions make sense when we stop fantasizing about him being a liberal, Tenet’s actions make sense when we stop assuming his top priority was protecting the people of this country?

David Swanson is the author of “War Is A Lie” http://warisalie.org This article was originally published here.

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On the other hand, by this very same definition, a criminal ‘hot case’ that has not gone through a proper investigation by real investigators remains a ‘hot case.’ Whether that hot case is shoved into a cold case file or not does not make it technically a ‘cold case.’ The never-investigated mass murder on September 11, 2001, a case never assigned to real and independent investigators, with many witnesses never-interviewed, with many suspects never-pursued, with many questions left unanswered, and with many leads never-followed, remains a ‘hot case.’ The self-serving classifications and redactions, the many cover ups, and the burial of the case and related files in government-created massive igloos, do not make 9/11 a cold case.

Let’s take a few minutes and by comparison examine a smaller scale murder investigation involving a murdered wealthy middle-aged man in an office building that was set on fire. While the forensic teams go over the body and through the charred building and debris to search for clues and evidence, the trained detectives begin interviewing witnesses, checking out the victim’s history, following any leads and forming their list of suspects.

In creating their list of suspects, the investigators look at all persons with direct or indirect motive(s): A young trophy wife with a multi-million dollar life insurance policy; a business adversary with much to gain from the elimination of the murder victim; former business partners and associates with grudges; a man who had actually threatened the murder victim; another who had shared his intense desire to see the victim dead; the owner of the handsomely insured burned down office building who had been unsuccessfully trying to sell the building and liquidate his assets …so on and so forth.

Whether through accounts of eye-witnesses or relatives, coworkers and friends, whether through documented evidence such as letters or e-mails, the investigators fill the list with possible suspects with motive(s) to see the victim dead, and maybe some with the established intent to kill him. Once the investigators create their list of suspects, and once the forensic and other evidence and witness statements have been gathered and analyzed, then they set about winnowing down the list. Using exhaustive interrogation techniques, investigative channels, and forensic evidence, the investigators begin eliminating unlikely suspects from the initial list one-by-one.

Sometimes the list is simultaneously narrowed down and expanded. While some initial suspects can be eliminated, others related to the initial suspects may be added as accessories to the crime. For example, the murder victim’s business adversary hired a professional hit organization that turned around and contracted the killing to three of its contract hit men. Or the victim’s wife’s lover plotted with her and engaged two hit men to execute the plot.

In the end, the investigators turn over their final suspect-accessory list and all the evidence that they believe will stand up in court to a prosecutor who then decides (on the evidence)  whether to bring charges against one or more suspects, and then argues the case in court. The suspect(s), motive, means and opportunity, all supported by evidence and witnesses, are presented in court for the jury to judge the case and decide guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

Of course we then have those cases that never make it to court. The lack of sufficient evidence, witnesses, or even a lack of possible suspects, moves the case from the investigation phase directly into the cold case file cabinet.

Then, we have cases that never make it even to the real investigation phase. Period. Without going through the usual investigative process- evidence-gathering, witness interviews, seeking motives and means, looking for intent, establishing a list of suspects …Without turning over any suspect with ‘all’ associated evidence and witnesses to any prosecutor…These case are evasively declared closed or a cold case.

The investigation of the 9/11 mass murder was first assigned to a highly-influenced and dependent Congress. We are not talking seasoned detectives and investigative agents here. Then, it was given to a group of sleazy pocketed politicians called a commission. Again, we are not talking about experienced detectives and savvy and independent prosecutors. No; just a handful of masterful and deceitful politicians and their puppet administrative staff.

There never was a thorough initial list of suspects. A few hours after the mass murder a bearded man in some dark cave in Afghanistan was announced as the mastermind and less than a couple dozen dead hit-men were declared the executioners of that mass murder. As for motive and intent, there was a round or two of circular discussions in the media, but absent any real investigation and thus any need for real prosecution, establishing motive and intent were deemed irrelevant and unnecessary. Same for any accessory suspects; a few hundred were rounded up around the globe and were taken into black holes, black sites, and black prisons. Some were later released, some were tortured and killed, and some still remain in those holes. We don’t know, and it looks like we’ll never know.

In a real-life mass murder investigation by real investigators a document like this, explicitly stating the desire for a mass murder like this would immediately make its way into the evidence bag, and signatories such as these people with a real motive and unlimited means would be automatically added to the top of the investigators’ initial list of suspects. They would remain there until further investigated, eliminated, or possibly prosecuted. Of course this was not a real investigation, and with no real investigators, and there never was a real list of suspects.

In a real-life investigation highly suspicious suspects like this would not easily disappear into thin air just like that.

In a real-life investigation any suspect accessory like this would be investigated, interrogated, and accordingly cleared or apprehended. And other highly suspicious persons or possible witnesses like this would be questioned and examined very thoroughly, rather than being directly assisted in fleeing the country.

In a real-life investigation key witnesses and investigative experts like these would be held with the highest regard, and their knowledge, first-hand information, and documented evidence would be considered of great value. They certainly wouldn’t be censored, classified and officially gagged.

In a real-life investigation if the highest-level criminal investigative body declares the capriciously designated perpetrator only a ‘suspect’ with no real hard evidence ever linking him to the crime in question, the case would be categorized as ‘never-solved & so very much open.’

And the list goes on and on. When we get down to it, I mean really get down to it, what do we really have in the investigation of the biggest mass murder in the history of our nation? I’ll tell you what we have. We have a still ‘Hot Case’ that has been shoved inside a massive establishment-built igloo; so far, successfully.

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Recent allegations made by former counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke against former CIA Director George Tenet and two other former CIA managers, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, have thrown one of the key unanswered questions of 9/11 into sharp relief. What happened at Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, after an officer there discovered that two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, had entered the US?

The officer, Margaret Gillespie, says she made the discovery on August 21 and the record indicates she began to notify the FBI and other government agencies on this day. However, while a substantial amount of information has been made public about how the news circulated around the FBI, almost nothing is known of how Alec Station dealt with it.

In an interview recently broadcast as a trailer for the forthcoming audio documentary “Who Is Rich Blee?” Clarke alleged that the CIA had deliberately withheld from him information about Almihdhar and Alhazmi—in particular the news that Almihdhar had a US visa—for over twenty months before 9/11. Clarke also highlighted the importance of the information, saying it was more important than, for example, any of the key pieces of intelligence discussed at a controversial meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001.

According to a statement recently released by Tenet, Black and Blee, neither Tenet nor any other senior CIA official was told of the visa or of travel to the US by Alhazmi and Almihdhar before 9/11. This was also the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion, although this conclusion was hedged. If this is true, then one appropriate question would be: why not?

After the attacks, it emerged that the FBI had arrested one of the possible hijackers, Zacarias Moussaoui. However, it blew the case, failing to obtain a warrant to search Moussaoui’s belongings and even failing to inform its own director of what was happening. This later failure became a badge for the FBI’s general uselessness. And Thomas Pickard, the acting director whom the information did not reach, made matters worse when he suggested Tenet, who had been informed of the case, should have stepped in and done the job Pickard’s staff failed to do.

In his 2007 book At the Center of the Storm Tenet piled on the agony for Pickard (emphasis in original):

During the 9/11 Commission hearings, I was stunned to hear Tom Pickard, who was acting FBI director in August 2001, suggest that I had somehow failed to notify him about Moussaoui. Failed to tell him? Hell, it was the FBI’s case, their arrest. I had no idea that the Bureau wasn’t aware what its own people were doing.

However, the CIA’s failure to inform Tenet of the Almihdhar and Almihdhar information must be regarded as more serious than the FBI’s failure to inform Pickard of Moussaoui. While the local Bureau agents who arrested Moussaoui thought he may well be a terrorist, they did not even realise he was a bin Laden operative, let alone connected to a suspected forthcoming al-Qaeda attack. On the contrary, the CIA knew Almihdhar was linked to the next attack.

In a July 23, 2001 e-mail published following Moussaoui’s trial in 2006, one of Blee’s former deputies, Tom Wilshire, warned CIA Counterterrorism Center (CTC) managers of Almihdhar’s link to the next attack: “When the next big op is carried out by UBL hardcore cadre, Khalad will be at or near the top of the command food chain—and probably nowhere near either the attack site or Afghanistan. That makes people who are available and who have direct access to him of very high interest. Khalid Mihdar should be very high interest anyway, given his connection to the (redacted).”

Khalad (usually spelt Khallad) was a known al-Qaeda leader, currently in Guantanamo. The redaction is probably a reference to al-Qaeda’s global operations hub in Yemen, to which Wilshire knew Almihdhar was linked. The e-mail appears in none of the relevant reports published by the Congressional Inquiry, 9/11 Commission and Justice Department inspector general. It was a follow up to one sent ten days earlier that Blee is known to have read. Wilshire, who was on loan to the FBI at this point, is one of the officials who failed to pass on notification of the Moussaoui case towards Pickard.

The scenario that Tenet, Black and Blee are selling is this: Gillespie found that Almihdhar and Alhazmi had entered the US and notified multiple other agencies. Four weeks previously, Wilshire had informed his former CTC colleagues that Almihdhar was “very high interest.” Yet, nobody at the CTC was able to put this together. Indeed, the significance of the two militants’ presence in the US would usually necessitate prompt notification to Tenet, even without Wilshire’s e-mail. Yet this was not done.

Here, then, is a very simple question: If Tenet did not know that Alhzami and Almihdhar had entered the US after August 21, who failed to tell him?

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Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

 I am not going to get into the ‘some’ reasons for this post; although, I have plenty to say on the subject. Instead, for the purpose of this piece, and for those audiences, I am going to answer the ‘whys.’ Why ‘some’ still question and seek answer(s) and accountability on 9/11.

Why 9/11? Because ‘they’ claim that’s what gives them the right to override our Constitution and all other laws guaranteeing our liberties and privacy.

Why 9/11? Because that’s what ‘they’ claim as justification for every one of our many wars.

Why 9/11? Because that’s what ‘they’ say is the reason for us having to be violated, humiliated, groped and fondled for the ‘privilege’ of travel.

Why 9/11? Because that’s when ‘they’ began the illegal eavesdropping of all our communications.

Why 9/11? Because that’s how ‘they’ legitimize excessive secrecy.

Why 9/11? Because that’s the excuse ‘they’ use to implement torture and severe human right violations and escape all liabilities.

Why 9/11? Because that’s the rationalization ‘they’ use to expand ‘their’ size and power.

Why 9/11? Because ‘they’ have successfully made it a means to justify many unjustifiable ends.

Why 9/11? Because that holds answers to many questions ‘they’ don’t want you to ask.

Why 9/11? Because that’s the question ‘they’ don’t want ever answered.

Why 9/11? Because maybe that is what ‘they’ really wanted.

Why 9/11? Because ‘they’ should not get away with it.

With all due respect to those who are still not satisfied with my answers to their ‘why’ question, we’ll be publishing articles, podcast interviews and investigative videos on 9/11 and related topics for the next few weeks…or maybe longer.  We hope to have those friends as an open-minded and critical thinking audience during our 9/11 coverage here at Boiling Frogs Post.

Sibel Edmonds

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 Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the numerous “20th hijackers,” was arrested ten years ago next Tuesday, outside the Residence Inn in Eagan, Minnesota. The arrest was one of the first events in a case that gave the FBI a chance to blow open the 9/11 plot, but resulted in abject humiliation for the bureau when its headquarters’ string of errors was exposed in the press.

The Moussaoui case is a poster boy for the state of our knowledge about the attacks: we have some of the details, but know some are missing. Also, two key questions remain unanswered. This despite the wealth of information that came out at the trial and the fact that Moussaoui, although largely ignored by the 9/11 Commission’s final report—partly due to the forthcoming trial—was a major topic of the Justice Department inspector general’s report into the FBI’s pre-attack failings.

These are the bare bones of the case: Moussaoui had been a known extremist for years prior to his arrest. Before the bureau first heard his name on August 15, he had been under surveillance by French and British intelligence and the CIA, although the agency would claim it only knew him under an alias. He was sent to the US for flight training by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, possibly to participate in 9/11, possibly to participate in a follow-up operation. However, he was a poor student and dropped out of basic flight school before obtaining a licence and went to learn about flying a Boeing 747, which aroused suspicion.

When the FBI was brought in, the Minneapolis agents realized he was dangerous and arrested him on an immigration violation—despite being told not to do so by headquarters. This was the first of many times the Minneapolis field office and FBI headquarters clashed over the case. Essentially, even though they did not know he was linked to al-Qaeda, the local agents understood the risk Moussaoui posed—one even speculated he would fly a large airliner into the World Trade Center—and they wanted a warrant to search his belongings to get information that would lead to his accomplices. On the other hand, headquarters seemed to think they were alarmist and there was nothing to the case. They kept throwing up roadblocks.

Although it is uncertain whether Moussaoui would have participated in the 9/11 attacks if he had remained free, or whether he ever met any of the nineteen hijackers, he certainly had very visible links to some of their key associates, such as Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ahmed al-Hawsawi and Yazid Sufaat. These links would have led to eleven of the nineteen. Some of the connections between what Moussaoui had in his possession and the hijackers would have been easy to make. For example, the CIA knew that Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi had stayed at Sufaat’s apartment during al-Qaeda’s January 2000 summit in Kuala Lumpur.

There were four key figures who dealt with the case at FBI headquarters: Rita Flack, an intelligence operations specialist at the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU); Michael Maltbie, a supervisory special agent with the RFU; their unit chief Dave Frasca; and Tom Wilshire, a CIA officer on loan to FBI headquarters. Wilshire was either a consultant to Michael Rolince, head of the FBI’s International Terrorism Operations Section, or his deputy. Wilshire was also the key figure in the CIA’s withholding of information about Almihdhar and Alhazmi from the bureau.

These four people somehow managed to convince themselves that the Moussaoui case was a minor matter that deserved little attention and that the Minneapolis agents were, in Flack’s words, “maniacs.” Although very little is known about Wilshire’s involvement in the case, an e-mail used as evidence at the trial shows he shared this attitude; on August 24 he e-mailed his three colleagues asking for the latest on the “Minneapolis Airplane IV crowd,” although it is unclear whether this was a reference to Moussaoui and an associate or the Minneapolis field office.

This is one of the two key questions outstanding: where did this attitude come from? With hindsight, what the Minneapolis agents foresaw was not half as bad as what happened. It was not one airliner that flew into the WTC, but two, with another at the Pentagon and a fourth also aimed for Washington. Given the circumstances of the case, Minneapolis’ fears were reasonable and were shared both by a CIA detailee to the FBI, who predicted Moussaoui may crash a 747 into the White House, and at least one officer in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. Given that we still lack information about the interactions between the four participants, we cannot say with whom this bad attitude originated. However, we can say that Wilshire shared and supported it.

It would take too long to summarise all the obstacles thrown up, but here are two examples: when French intelligence reported that, yes, they knew Moussaoui and, yes, he was an Islamist militant, Maltbie objected that maybe they were talking about some other guy with the same name. Therefore, Maltbie argued, the FBI should search all the telephone directories in France to see how many people called Zacarias Moussaoui actually lived there.

The second example involves a comment made by Moussaoui’s imam on a phone monitored by the FBI to the presumed accomplice arrested with him. “I heard you guys wanted to go on jihad,” said the imam. “Don’t talk about that now,” was the reply. Frasca’s response upon learning this? “The jihad comment doesn’t concern me by itself in that this word can mean many things in various [M]uslim cultures and is frequently taken out of context.”

Other roadblocks included Frasca’s ban on Minneapolis applying for a criminal warrant itself, Maltbie blocking a referral to the Justice Department’s criminal division, Flack’s inability to provide the Phoenix memo to anyone else after she read it, the withholding of the relevant documentation from attorneys asked to assess the case, the deletion of key passages from an application for an intelligence warrant, etc., etc.

When the case became public knowledge after the attacks the bureau was a laughing stock—they arrested one of the hijackers (actually more of an associate) over three weeks before the attacks but were unable to even file a warrant application to search his luggage. What’s worse, the bureau was so completely clueless that it even failed to inform its own acting director, Thomas Pickard, of the case. How much more incompetent could it get? This dynamic was made even worse when one of the Minneapolis office employees, Coleen Rowley, went public with her criticism of FBI headquarters, becoming one of Time’s people of the year for 2002.

Logically, if the information came into FBI headquarters, but didn’t get to the acting director, it must have stopped with someone. So who was that someone? The most senior official to be told about the case was Rolince, but he received scant information on it for nearly two weeks. The two people below him were his consultant/deputy Tom Wilshire and RFU chief Dave Frasca and the blame needs to be shared between them. Exactly how it should be apportioned out we don’t know—the relevant reports, by the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry, 9/11 Commission, and Justice Department inspector general, are silent on who should carry the can—and the inspector general omits even to mention that not informing the bureau’s director was a failure. This is symptomatic of the reports’ approach—nobody who performed badly was held accountable.

Wilshire’s role in the deliberate withholding of information from the FBI about Pentagon hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi makes his presence in the Moussaoui case alarming. However, although Wilshire certainly had a malign influence on the case, there is no smoking-gun proof of wilful malfeasance on his part. What we do know, however, is that this case was a significant stimulus for the reform of the US intelligence community. Without knowing what actually happened here and why, we have no way of judging whether those reforms were warranted and appropriate. Perhaps it would have been better to fire those who performed badly, instead of promoting them.

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Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Go East Young Man, The Early Years: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas; (Random House, 1974)

The Court Years, 1939-1975: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas; (Random House, 1980)

William O. Douglas holds a few records for his U.S. Supreme Court Justice career, including the longest continuous service (36 years) ever.  Douglas was a passionate defender of the First Amendment and free speech.  That dedication coupled over time with growing concern for the abuse of government authority, as well as support for individuals facing arbitrary and capricious government behavior.

When it came to freedom of the press, well, Douglas walked the talk.  His prolific Supreme Court opinion writing coincided with a career that included 30 books and hundreds of articles.  It isn’t all that surprising that Douglas wrote not one, but two, autobiographies. 

Go East, Young Man, The Early Years (Random House, 1974) covers Douglas’ childhood roots, education, and his experience as a law professor at Columbia and Yale.  Douglas’ analysis of securities law and regulation on the heels of the Crash of 1929 and with the onset of the Great Depression prompted Joseph Kennedy to recruit him to the SEC staff.  Douglas was appointed a Commissioner of the SEC when Kennedy left the SEC in 1936, and Douglas was named the Chairman of the SEC in 1937.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt then nominated him to serve on the Supreme Court in 1939, where he sat until his retirement in 1975.

Douglas’ early enthusiasm for applying law and regulation to cure the markets’ ills grew tempered by experience, an evolution reflected in reflections in Go East, Young Man as well as the second autobiographical volume, The Court Years, 1939-1975.  Douglas watched and documented how idealistic regulatory goals were hijacked by special interest groups, muting his expectations for the value of an active government.  And this First Amendment champion was no innocent, spoon-fed consumer of newspapers, either.  Douglas’ accumulated experience left him likewise concerned about the Fourth Estate.

A recent re-reading of Douglas’ observations about the media in The Court Years sparked this review.  Many Boiling Frogs readers share concerns about the depth and honesty of mainstream journalism on important matters.  Sibel’s experience makes for one example, but there are certainly others.  In Chapter Eleven (“The Press”) of The Court Years, Douglas provides some remarkable observations that will likely resonate with many in the audience here.

Douglas introduced the chapter with a brief description of his basic philosophy, but the second paragraph left little doubt his respect was for the freedom of the press, not the press itself:

In time I wrote many opinions sustaining and defending the press. I, along with Hugo Black, was a strict constructionist who thought the First Amendment meant what it said when it commanded that Congress shall make ‘”no law … abridging” freedom of the press. …

My defense of the press did not stem from my personal opinion of its quality. It was, I thought, as depraved as it had been in Jefferson’s time. My feelings, however, were like Jefferson’s – that craven and abusive and self-seeking as the press is, a much worse press would result from governmental surveillance.

Speaking of surveillance, it is interesting to consider that last observation in light of the recent News Corporation news in the UK.  We may have more to learn about practices like that in the US.  And what if government outsources some of its surveillance as it partners with large media interests?  Some food for thought, perhaps. 

Douglas didn’t paint with an overly broad brush; he had significant respect for some of his contemporaries in journalism, and named and discussed them in the chapter.  Bernstein, Woodward and Graham gather high praise from Douglas for their work in Watergate, for example.  But Douglas’ overall appraisal was pretty bleak, and his concerns are shared by many in the Boiling Frogs community in light of media practices over the last decade or so:

…There were not many real reporters in Washington. A real reporter, as I use the term, is someone who searches out the facts on his or her own. In the capital there were a few solid muckrakers, notably I.F. Stone and Drew Pearson. But most reporters followed the course of least effort and lived on government handouts or curried favor with high officials like J. Edgar Hoover for tip-offs or leads. Presidents, Cabinet officers or agency heads handed out tidbits to favored reporters. Much classified, even top secret, material was leaked in this way. Government’s purpose was served and the reporter who reported faithfully, stressing precisely the right angle, could expect to be rewarded again.

The victim was the public, which did not know who the “undisclosed but reliable source” was. Full disclosure would have revealed the strategy being employed. Much of the disastrous build-up of public support for our activities in Vietnam was the product of these discreet “leaks” to the press.

New York Times, are you listening?  How well have you apologized for your reporting leading into the war with Iraq?  Have you reformed the kind of practices at work in that and other episodes?  Could a loss of public confidence be playing a more important role than the challenge from the Internet in explaining the 80% decline in your stock price since 2004?

Douglas’ observations on the implications of government/media collaboration and the implication for public policy in the Vietnam war years ring bells that are loud, clear, and timely in light of our national security and foreign policy in the last decade:

The official line that was pushed by the government as respects Vietnam was often half-truths or distorted facts or plain lies, as the Pentagon Papers later were to show. The lie was often believed on the inside as well, leading men whose personal opinions differed from the official line to drop out of government or accustom themselves to working in a system that produces cynicism and self-deceit. The fact that a Lyndon Johnson could have his way and mold the American mind as he did is as alarming as were Goebbels’ techniques under Hitler.

In The Court Years, Douglas criticized not just intent but also a tendency toward laziness.  There are exceptions today, to be sure, but in light of our major media’s treatment of issues like the events of September 11, the lead-up to the war with Iraq, and other matters, Douglas observations from 1980 still hold at least a grain of truth today:

… The American press, as I have suggested, is by and large a mimic, not an original research group. It prints handouts from government and from industry and expresses its opinions on those items. But the basic facts are seldom mined; the press does not have the initiative or the zeal to ferret out the original from the false or pretended.

It wasn’t just laziness.  Incentives against independent hard work were frequently part of the system:

… most of the “facts” disclosed in the Pentagon Papers were so well known in Vietnam that only a newsman’s decision (or his paper’s decision) to look the other way and parrot what the military told him, kept the American public from knowing full well what was going on there, at least during the sixties.

The key role in those years was played by the CIA. Yet there were no news stories out of Vietnam even by the New York Times to reveal a) which members of the Saigon government were on the CIA payroll, b) what the CIA rates of pay were, c) how the CIA organized riots, d) how much they paid those who shouted, those who carried banners, those who only marched. … In later years Americans were entitled to know these same facts about CIA activities in Laos and Cambodia. But few, very few, such facts filtered through until much later. The press was greatly remiss in our “war” in Southeast Asia.

Between 1959 and 1963 the New York Times had outstanding reporters in Vietnam. …. Yet few of the vital facts ever found their way into print. Why this great, this enormous default? It is hard to believe, but I think it is true that in those years our press in Vietnam was as much under the thumb of the armed services as Russia’s press is under the thumb of the politburo.

See also the following compilation of the Supreme Court opinions in the Pentagon Papers case in particular, Justice Douglas’ dissenting opinion in a 5-4 decision suggesting Beacon Press might be prosecuted for publishing the Pentagon Papers despite Sen. Mike Gravel had already read them into the Congressional Record. 

“The story of the Pentagon Papers is a chronicle of suppression of vital decisions to protect the reputations and political hides of men who worked an amazingly successful scheme of deception on the American people. They were successful not because they were astute but because the press had become a frightened, regimented, submissive instrument, fattening on favors from those in power and forgetting the great tradition of reporting.”

Douglas’ discussion in The Court Years amplified how his heightened concern for regulatory agency behavior joined at the hip with his concern for media quality:

…The press is very sensitive to its own First Amendment rights, but it has done very little to promote First Amendment values. … The role of the press is not to defend any institution or any party but to search for the truth involved in important public issues. Many of the “facts” lie buried in the files of the federal bureaus in Washington. The Freedom of Information Act of 1966 … was designed to make those agencies open their files. They did not fully do so in my time. While sporadic efforts have been made and some court contests ensued, the press at no time waged an all-out campaign to get at the truth. It was easier to “cover” the institutions, take their press releases, and accept the “official” version as the gospel. The result was that, in my time, the people knew less and less what forces were behind the decisions of the agencies. If the press had done its job, the pitiless spotlight of publicity would have exposed the cancerous condition of our government and disclosed the powerful and evil lobbies that more and more dictate policies.

The idealistic public servant that entered the SEC back in the early 1930s had grown sharply critical of the motivations and effect behind government’s role in the economy.  Douglas’ New Deal enthusiasm has drawn criticism from some quarters, but we would do well to learn from the lessons he learned over time. And since he wrote the book in the 1970s, the fact that his observations seem to ring so true today suggest we have yet to take those lessons to heart.  Douglas didn’t expect us to, either:

Yet looking ahead, the days seem dark to me. Great wealth controls most of our news outlets. The conservative influence of the press will continue; a Society of the Dialogue, as espoused by the First Amendment, will be increasingly difficult to stimulate.

…

Provocative and frequently controversial, Douglas has drawn heat as well as admiration.  His inspirational call for the press to serve the public by actively seeking the truth might be cheapened by critics who have challenged some elements of Douglas’ own memoirs.  But Douglas still serves as a valuable lighthouse, and his critique and challenge to the media matters today, 30 years after The Court Years. 

Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it, the saying goes.  The manufactured myth that shrouded the truth of the events of September 11, 2001 and helped shape our foreign policy over the last decade should be viewed in this light.  Again, there are exceptions in the media, and a recent article in Vanity Fair titled “The Kingdom and the Towers” indicates some stalwarts are still out there.  But in a democracy dependent on majority rule, where a majority of people were shown by survey to have believed that Saddam Hussein played a key role in the events of 9/11, the willingness of many elements of the media to serve or otherwise enable dishonest leaders shaping public perception calls out for a rebirth in journalism.  Douglas’s autobiographies can provide guidance on that quest.

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For almost 10 years we have been engaged in a massive and many-fronted war advertised as a war on terror-war on Al Qaeda. Recent reports put the total cost to America of this war on terror at around $3 trillion. This is not counting un-countable covert operations with secret budgets, and it does not include the war in Libya or covert wars elsewhere.

For the last 10 years of the Cold War, the period of our heightened expenditures against a war marketed as a war against communism, we reportedly spent slightly under $3 trillion.

For a moment let’s forget about the exaggerated and sometimes dubious Soviet threats that were being sold to our nation during the Cold-War, and assume all of them legitimate and warranted. Okay?

We had the Soviet military with over 5 million men. We were dealing with Long-Range Ballistic Missile capabilities.  We had an empire with a declared arsenal of 39,967 tons of chemical weapons. We were faced with massive nuclear arsenals and warheads, sophisticated fighter aircraft, tanks… All that, and of course the added fear propaganda and jazzed up other threats to go with it. My point here is not how scary an adversary the USSR was to the United States. Here is what I want you to do:

Take into perspective and compare the size, budget, militaristic and technological capabilities, and the vast power of our former adversary, the USSR, to the current alleged terrorist adversary, Al Qaeda, whom we have supposedly been fighting for ten years.

Let’s first begin by engaging in a rational process of elimination, and take out the wars and targets that are not related to the 9/11 terrorists, the supposed Al-Qaeda. That will take out Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and also Libya and Gaddafi.

Next, we should take out Afghanistan as a terrorist nation state. Afghanistan has been under our occupation for almost ten years, and we have our puppet government installed there, and when it comes down to it, the Taliban does not equate to Al-Qaeda, it never did. The Taliban did not exercise terrorism in the United States or its Global territories.

We must also remove Pakistan as a terrorist country, thus a nation state target. If you remember, neither the quasi 9/11 Congressional Inquiry nor the quasi 9/11 Commission Report ever declared the Pakistani government/nation as terrorists or an Al-Qaeda member. Let us go with their official judgment. After all, haven’t we been giving Pakistan billions of dollars in US aid since 9/11 and continuing to date? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to on one hand categorize our drone war there as war against Pakistan as a member of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, and on the other hand support and finance them? Exactly; that eliminates Pakistan as an Al-Qaeda nation-government. Are you with me so far? What does this leave us with?

Our war on Al-Qaeda terror does not include a single nation state or organized state military. No military infrastructure or headquarters. No trained army-navy-air force. No tanks, warplanes, nuclear warheads, drones. No intelligence institutions or landmarks. No communication satellites. No technology. No borders. No GDP…

The supposed Al Qaeda’s top leadership was declared by our government to be Osama Bin Laden, aka Al Qaeda Commander in Chief; a sickly old man who was hooked to a dialysis machine; who supposedly lived and hid in caves, and later, in a mud house located in a remote third world village with chickens and goats. A man who sustained himself and his family by periodically selling his wives jewelry or bartering milk from his goats for occasional lamb chops. All this according to our own government; coming out in bits and pieces, and of course, sometimes in a totally contradictory fashion.

The supposed Al-Qaeda network’s communication and intelligence sharing infrastructure, according to our government, was kept very simple to evade our trillion-dollar intelligence institutions. The Al-Qaeda commander-in-Chief wrote down notes and instructions. He then waited for the courier to come and pick it up. The old man courier would hop on a donkey and travel from a bigger town to the Commander-in-Chief’s mud house in a third world village. This sometimes took several days. He’d take the note, then hop on his donkey, and go back to the town where he’d meet another intermediary courier. The intermediary courier would take the note to a nondescript little house, climb up to the roof where he kept trained courier pigeons and hawks, and based on the importance of the communication given to him, he’d either choose a hawk or pigeon to send the intelligence to the next courier. The next one used couriers who traveled to the remote deserts by camels, and so on and so forth.

How about the sophistication of weapons-methods used by our target terrorists, the ominous Al Qaeda? We are talking about a dozen or so pocket knives priced at approximately $4 a piece (probably made in China), and of course if bought in bulk, for a total under $40. That for the supposed execution of the massive terror plot over here, in the world’s super power nation. As for other worldwide terror incidents that have been placed under the  ‘Al Qaeda Track Record,’  we are talking about rudimentary bomb-making ability paired up with ultra simple bombs created by ingredients such as fertilizer; we are talking a few loads of cow dung here; literally, that is.

What about the size of the manpower these terrorists, Al-Qaeda, possess? Interestingly no one in our government has ever touched upon any scientific or even commonsensical estimate as to the number of active-combative Al-Qaeda terrorists. Instead, our government, through their stenographers in the media and their marketing arm in the Hollywood filmmaking industry, has succeeded in forming this public perception of a massive number of boogieman-Al Qaeda-terrorists out there who are actively and constantly planning and executing terror plots against the West.  Thus, to get a certain level of rational perception we must look at some factual indicators:

We have had this $3 trillion ‘War on Al Qaeda Terror’ for the last 10 years with nearly a quarter million military members, thousands and thousands of intelligence operatives and analysts, highly sophisticated and gigantic intelligence gathering tools (Think NSA, satellite technologies, wiretaps, spooks and snitches), mega rewards for turning in Al-Qaeda members …You’d think in ten years of these constant war and intelligence gathering operations we’d have tens of thousands of captured Al-Qaeda terrorists in our jails here and abroad. No?

Interestingly ‘No.’ Let’s take a look at the mother of all our captive top Al Qaeda terrorists detention center; Guantanamo Bay:

Since October 7, 2001, when began the war in Afghanistan, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo. Of these, most have been released without charge or transferred to facilities in their home countries. The Department of Defense often referred to these prisoners as the “worst of the worst”, but a 2003 memo by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, “We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants … GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan.”

Currently we have less than 200 detainees at Guantanamo most of whom have not been proven guilty of being ‘Al Qaeda terrorists.’ Let’s be even more generous and count in those detained in other US military prisons like Bagram. Again, we are looking at 500 or so prisoners none of whom having ever been charged; none of whom legally found to be an Al Qaeda terrorist.

Now please put all these facts in perspective: Ten long years of continuous wars, trillions of dollars, 250,000 military personnel, trillions of dollars worth of intelligence gathering institutions and capabilities, millions of dollars set in rewards for Al Qaeda terrorists, and a supposed network with supposed  Al Qaeda active terrorist members in very large numbers. Yet we have less than 1000 detained who have been accused of being Al Qaeda terrorists, and none ever proven to be an active Al Qaeda terrorist member.

Does this make sense to you? Does it make sense as far as the trillions of dollars you have been made to pay for this? What are we talking about here? A massive never-ending war against a fantastical network of technologically and militaristically dwarfed terrorists whose proven guilty members we haven’t been able to catch or kill.

Everyone is busy arguing whether we should cut or add a few billion dollars to the several trillion dollars war on Al Qaeda. People keep talking about which country we should be getting out of, or, how many more countries we should get into to fight against terrorist Al Qaeda. No one is asking what Al Qaeda is or who really these supposed Al Qaeda terrorists are. The question that never seems to come up is exactly how big is this Al Qaeda we are spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting against. I mean no one.

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BFP Nightly Quote

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Two of the terrorist hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, communicated while they were in the United States to other members of al Qaeda who were overseas. But we didn’t know they were here, until it was too late.

The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September the 11th helped address that problem in a way that is fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities. The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time.

-President Bush, December 17, 2005

In the aftermath of 9/11, reams of newsprint were given over to discussing the CIA and FBI failures before the attacks; the agency had some of the hijackers under surveillance and allegedly lost them, the bureau was unable even to inform its own acting director of the Zacarias Moussaoui case. However, the USA’s largest and most powerful intelligence agency, the National Security Agency, got a free ride. There was no outcry over its failings, no embarrassing Congressional hearings for its director. Yet, as we will see, the NSA’s performance before 9/11 was shocking.

It is unclear when the NSA first intercepted a call by one of the nineteen hijackers. Reporting indicates it began listening in on telephone calls to the home of Pentagon hijacker Khalid Almihdhar’s wife some time around late 1996. However, although Almihdhar certainly did stay there later, it is unclear whether he lived there at that time. The house, in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a, was a key target for the US intelligence community as it was Osama bin Laden’s communication hub, run by Almihdhar’s father-in-law Ahmed al-Hada.

The NSA kept the Yemen communications hub secret from the rest of the US intelligence community. However, Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, found out about it through an agency officer loaned to the NSA. Even after the discovery, the NSA refused to provide transcripts of the calls, meaning Alec Station could not crack the simple code the al-Qaeda operatives used. This was one reason the 1998 East African embassy bombings—assisted by al-Hada—were successful despite the bombers being known to numerous intelligence agencies.