9/11

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Background

Timeline

Investigations

9/11 Commission

Evidence for conspiracy

al-Qaeda and the CIA

Far from just a crazed anti-American jihadist group, there is extensive evidence that al-Qaeda has been an asset of the CIA since it was founded. The organization was formed out of the remnants of CIA-backed Islamist groups that fought as part of the mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan War, and it frequently showed up in other geopolitical contexts beneficial to the CIA throughout the 1990s. According to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, an operation involving the Pentagon and US intelligence (which she dubbed Operation Gladio B) maintained direct relationships with al-Qaeda leaders like Ayman al-Zawahiri and transported al-Qaeda fighters on NATO planes to join Pentagon-directed destabilization missions in Central Asia. This operation, according to Edmonds, went on from the 90s up through the 9/11 attacks themselves. Many of her revelations have been corroborated by Pentagon insiders.

[background of Osama bin Laden, whose family is well-connected to the elites of Saudi Arabia and the United States]

Key CIA funding conduits from the mujahideen support network resurfaced in the lead-up to 9/11. Pakistan's ISI, which served as an intermediary for the CIA to arm Islamist groups as part of Operation Cyclone, wired $100,000 to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta before the attacks. The transfer was ordered by ISI director general Mahmoud Ahmad, whose directorship reportedly required the unofficial blessing of the CIA director, and carried out by ISI agent Omar Saeed Sheikh, allegedly a direct CIA asset as well. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Mahmoud Ahmad was meeting with two likely US intelligence assets: Florida governor Bob Graham and his protege Florida congressman Porter Goss, a former CIA agent and future CIA director.

Another foreign intelligence front from Operation Cyclone which ended up providing the most important logistical support for the hijackers was Saudi Arabian intelligence. [...]

The al-Qaeda organization itself, though a longtime useful CIA asset, also has the capacity to be unpredictable, launching undesired attacks that would not be geopolitically useful to its ultimate benefactors. As such, it has required constant penetration by US and allied intelligence services to keep it under control:

  • ...
  • Felix Sater working for the CIA to buy back Stinger missiles (which came from the CIA to begin with) and obtain bin Laden's phone number
  • ...
  • The PROMIS software ending up in the hands of bin Laden after maneuvering by FBI mole Robert Hanssen and Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich, such that if he used it for operational planning, the CIA and Mossad would have a backdoor into al-Qaeda's activities
  • ...

Such a level of penetration indicates that al-Qaeda was controllable to a degree that US intelligence could allow or even create the attacks it wanted to happen and prevent others which it did not. As will be described below, the HUMINT assets which had penetrated al-Qaeda also included key members of the hijackers themselves.

Hijacker activities

The activities of many of the 9/11 hijackers point to their involvement in US intelligence operations. It is therefore almost certain that the highest levels of the terrorist plot were so thoroughly penetrated by US intelligence that they had knowledge if not operational control of the attacks.

Among the most striking examples is the activity of lead hijacker Mohammed Atta in Venice FL, where he and other hijackers received flight training from Huffman Aviation. Atta's time in Venice has been extensively documented by investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker. Huffman was run by Rudi Dekkers with the financial backing of well-connected businessman Wally Hilliard, two men who were both involved in drug trafficking through their aviation enterprises. Atta himself associated with a criminal element while in Venice, most notably German pilot Wolfgang Bohringer who claimed to work for the CIA and was the personal pilot for Russian mobster Viktor Kozeny. The narcotics trafficking in the Venice area was part of a longstanding pattern, tying back into drug trafficking operations involving intelligence-linked Arkansas businessman Jackson Stephens and CIA agent Porter Goss. Goss notably become a Florida congressman in the same district where Huffman Aviation was located, and (as mentioned above) shows up in other suspicious contexts on 9/11.

Yet another tie-in to drug trafficking arises from the presence of an Israeli spy ring with links to ecstasy traffickers that appeared to have kept tabs on the hijackers in Hollywood FL. [...]

For many hijackers, the evident intelligence connection went back farther. Shortly after the attacks, a number of press reports identified several of the hijackers (including Atta) as having trained at US military bases around the country. [...]

[Ziad Jarrah training under Bert Rodriguez]

[Zacarias Moussaoui receiving inexplicable protection]

[Nick Berg link to Zacarias Moussaoui and likely role in buying the Flight 93 ticket]

Foreknowledge

Despite claims by the Bush Administration that the September 11 attacks could not have been foreseen, there are extensive reports to the contrary, and the federal government has continually revised its story as these new reports have come out. [...]

Perhaps the most bizarre instance of foreknowledge was the account of Delmart Vreeland. [...]

Insider trading

Air defense failure

One of the most startling anomalies of the 9/11 attacks is how three hijacked airplanes were able to successfully hit their targets without any interference by the US military. This was despite well-established procedures for dealing with off-course aircraft that had been followed very successfully in the years leading up to 9/11. A careful analysis reveals that the air defense was deliberately paralyzed through a combination of military drills and false radar blips.

Researchers like Mike Ruppert have documented as many as many as 5 war games that occurred on September 11, 2001. Some were air training exercises near Alaska and Canada, which drew many fighters away from the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) and therefore left NEADS short-staffed to respond to the actual hijackings. Other war games involved simulations of hijacked planes, which confused air defense servicemen as to whether the actual 9/11 hijackings were real or "part of the exercise". Further confusion was sowed by the unexplained false radar blips that appeared on FAA radar screens, such as Flight 11 still being airborne after it hit the North Tower; at one point the presence of up to 11 hijackings were being contemplated. The combination of uncertainty over which planes were really hijacked, and a shortage of fighter jets leaving no resources to waste on hijackings that were not confirmed real, delayed the air defense enough to let the 9/11 attacks proceed.

A concerning fact about the FAA's computer systems was subsequently raised: its underlying architecture was handled by MITRE in partnership with Boston technology contractor Ptech. Ptech was funded through investments made by Yasin al-Qadi, a Saudi financier who supported al-Qaeda, and was identified by whistleblower Indira Singh as a CIA front that might have been using an evolution of the PROMIS software. Therefore Ptech represented a concerning potential backdoor into FAA systems that may have been used to introduce the false radar information. al-Qadi has boasted of meeting Dick Cheney in Jeddah (the same location of a CIA-dominated consulate issuing dubious visas to jihadist operatives) before he was vice president.

Physical evidence

There are certain analyses of physical evidence which are promoted as "smoking guns" that prove US government involvement in 9/11. Unfortunately, the real effect of these "smoking gun" claims has been to divide the 9/11 research community and offer ammunition to discredit the movement. Various factions in the 9/11 research community have spent years debating back and forth about these issues, distracted from looking at the bigger deep political picture. Meanwhile, the anti-conspiracy crowd has seized upon some of the more outlandish physical evidence claims, used them to represent the whole movement, and attacked these easy targets.

The inherent problem with physical evidence is that it introduces a massive amount of subjective interpretation and room for spin which can never be satisfactorily resolved. As occurs in court cases with a "battle of the experts", sufficiently-motivated "authorities" on a subject can make a convincing argument for any side of an issue regardless of whether or not it is actually true, and untrained observers (i.e. the jury) have a difficult time parsing out the truth. A more successful approach is to document 9/11 using clear-cut sources like news reports and government documents that do not require protracted analysis or special expertise. Ultimately, detailed examination of the physical evidence is not strictly necessary for demonstrating US government responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.

On the other hand, certain examinations of physical evidence can provide useful insight into the plot. For instance, if the WTC towers were taken down by controlled demolition, then investigation can be targeted towards the limited number of entities with the means, motive, and opportunity to plant explosives inside.

No-plane theories

Controlled demolition

[...]

There is evidence that a small crew of Arab immigrants, perhaps affiliated with Israeli intelligence and/or Russian organized crime, were involved in sabotaging the sprinkler systems at the World Trade Center. [Memphis DMV fraud story with Rocky Hammad having a WTC basement pass and Khaled Odtllah as the ringleader]

Perpetrators

Suspicious deaths

Aftermath

See also

References

External links

Books

Motives

  • Central Asia dominance
    • Peter Dale Scott, "9/11 in Historical Perspective: Flawed Assumptions", 2005/07/22 (further discussion on Rigorous Intuition forum) - overview of covert CIA operations involving Islamists to seize dominance over central Asia for drugs and oil
    • Afghanistan pipeline ambitions
    • Heroin trade in Pakistan and Afghanistan
      • ...
    • KBR / Halliburton involvement in drug trafficking
      • Center for Public Integrity, "Cheney led Halliburton to feast at federal trough", 2000/08/02
        • "Halliburton, which lobbied for the Ex-Im loan after the State Department initially asserted that the deal would run counter to the “national interest,” will receive $292 million of those funds to refurbish a massive Siberian oil field owned by the Russian company, the Tyumen Oil Co., which is controlled by a conglomerate called the Alfa Group."
        • "Under Cheney, Halliburton—largely through its Brown & Root subsidiary—has garnered $2.3 billion in U.S. government contracts. This is almost double the $1.2 billion it earned from the government in the five years before he arrived. Most of the contracts have been with the U.S. Army for engineering work in a variety of hot spots, including Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo and Haiti."
        • "That document and the FSB report claim that Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest and most profitable, as well as Alfa Eko, a trading company, had been deeply involved in the early 1990s in laundering of Russian and Colombian drug money and in trafficking drugs from the Far East to Europe.

          The former KGB major, who with the fall of communism in the late 1980s had himself been involved in the plan by the KGB and Communist Party to loot state enterprises, said that Alfa Bank was founded with party and KGB funds, and quickly attracted rogue agents who had served in anti-organized-crime units. “They (the rogue agents on the banks payroll) quickly determined that dealing in drugs would bring the highest profits with literally no risk in Russia,” according to the former KGB officer.

          He claimed that a “large channel of heroin transit was established from Burma through Laos, Vietnam, to the Far East [Siberia].” From there the drugs were camouflaged as flour and sugar shipments and forwarded on to Germany. The drug operation was controlled by a Chechen mob family, he said.

          The FSB report, too, claimed that the Alfa Groups top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, “allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia and into Europe.”"
        • "The FSB document claims that at the end of 1993, a top Alfa official met with Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the now-imprisoned financial mastermind of Colombia’s notorious Cali cartel, “to conclude an agreement about the transfer of money into Alfa Bank from offshore zones such as the Bahamas, Gibraltar and others. The plan was to insert it back into the Russian economy through the purchase of stock in Russian companies.”"
      • Mike Ruppert, "Halliburton Corporation's Brown and Root is one of the major components of THE BUSH-CHENEY DRUG EMPIRE", 2000/10/24
        • "A confidential source with intelligence experience in the region subsequently told me that the Kurds "got some payback against the folks that used to help them move their drugs." He openly acknowledged that Brown and Root and Vinnell both routinely provided NOC or non-official cover for CIA officers. But I already knew that."
        • "The heroin mentioned in the CPI story, originated in Laos where longtime Bush allies and covert warriors Richard Armitage and retired CIA ADDO (Associate Deputy Director of Operations) Ted Shackley have been repeatedly linked to the drug trade. It then made its way across Southeast Asia to Vietnam, probably the port of Haiphong. Then the heroin sailed to Russia's Pacific port of Valdivostok from whence it subsequently bounced across Siberia by rail and thence by truck or rail to Europe, passing through the hands of Russian Mafia leaders in Chechnya and Azerbaijan. Chechnya and Azerbaijan are hotbeds of both armed conflict and oil exploration and Brown and Root has operations all along this route.

          This long, expensive and tortured path was hastily established, as described by FTW in previous issues, after President George Bush's personal envoy Richard Armitage, holding the rank of Ambassador, had traveled to the former Soviet Union to assist it with its "economic development" in 1989. The obstacle then to a more direct, profitable and efficient route from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Turkey into Europe was a cohesive Yugoslavian/Serbian government controlling the Balkans and continuing instability in the Golden Crescent of Pakistan/Afghanistan. Also, there was no other way, using heroin from the Golden Triangle (Burma, Laos and Thailand), to deal with China and India but to go around them."
  • Iraqi oil ambitions
    • Alternet, "From Afghanistan to Iraq: Connecting the Dots with Oil", 2007/02/04
    • Lisa Pease, "It WAS all about Oil", 2007/04/24
    • TODO: look into the role of Ray Hunt, the son of H.L. Hunt and brother of Nelson Bunker Hunt and Caroline Hunt who inherited the Hunt Oil Company, in using his political influence to get an oil exploration deal with the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq
    • The Independent, "Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq", 2011/04/18: "Five months before the March 2003 invasion, Baroness Symons, then the Trade Minister, told BP that the Government believed British energy firms should be given a share of Iraq's enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Tony Blair's military commitment to US plans for regime change. The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP's behalf because the oil giant feared it was being "locked out" of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms. [...] Whereas BP was insisting in public that it had "no strategic interest" in Iraq, in private it told the Foreign Office that Iraq was "more important than anything we've seen for a long time"."
    • New York Times, "In Rebuilding Iraq’s Oil Industry, U.S. Subcontractors Hold Sway", 2011/06/17: "When Iraq auctioned rights to rebuild and expand its oil industry two years ago, the Russian company Lukoil won a hefty portion — a field holding about 10 percent of Iraq’s known oil reserves. [...] The auction’s outcome helped defuse criticism in the Arab world that the United States had invaded Iraq for its oil. [...] In fact, American drilling companies stand to make tens of billions of dollars from the new petroleum activity in Iraq long before any of the oil producers start seeing any returns on their investments. Lukoil and many of the other international oil companies that won fields in the auction are now subcontracting mostly with the four largely American oil services companies that are global leaders in their field: Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Weatherford International and Schlumberger. Those four have won the largest portion of the subcontracts to drill for oil, build wells and refurbish old equipment. [...] After the invasion, Lukoil sensed that its best chances lay in working with the Americans."
    • Al Jazeera, "Western oil firms remain as US exits Iraq", 2012/01/07: "Iraq's supergiant Rumaila oil field is already being developed by BP, and the other supergiant reserve, Majnoon oil field, is being developed by Royal Dutch Shell. Both fields are in southern Iraq. [...] "Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, US and other western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq's oil market," oil industry analyst Antonia Juhasz told Al Jazeera. "But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being forced out of the country in 1973." [...] Dr Zalloum added that he believes western oil companies have successfully acquired the lions' share of Iraq's oil, "but they gave a little piece of the cake for China and some of the other countries and companies to keep them silent"."
    • CNN, "Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil" by Antonia Juhasz, 2013/04/15
    • The Guardian, "Iraq invasion was about oil" by Nafeez Ahmed, 2014/03/20: "The real issue is candidly described in a 2001 report on "energy security" - commissioned by then US Vice-President Dick Cheney - published by the Council on Foreign Relations and the James Baker Institute for Public Policy. It warned of an impending global energy crisis that would increase "US and global vulnerability to disruption", and leave the US facing "unprecedented energy price volatility." The main source of disruption, the report observed, is "Middle East tension", in particular, the threat posed by Iraq. Critically, the documented illustrated that US officials had lost all faith in Saddam due his erratic and unpredictable energy export policies. In 2000, Iraq had "effectively become a swing producer, turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest to do so." There is a "possibility that Saddam Hussein may remove Iraqi oil from the market for an extended period of time" in order to damage prices:"
    • Leak of Nations, "15 years after the invasion of Iraq, and now largely out of the glare of the media, US and UK oil corporations start to flaunt the spoils of imperial conquest", 2018/01/10: "The British oil and gas company BP won the contract to operate the Rumaila Oil Field back in 2009, and now proudly boast of its new drilling capabilities on Twitter. [...] One of the board members of BP at present is Sir John Sawers, the former Chief of MI6 from 2009 to 2014 who acted as UK special representative to Iraq during the occupation. He cashed in a few favours and joined BP as an Independent Non-Executive Director in 2015, one year after he departed MI6 and two years after BP had been handed a licence to exploit one of the most valuable pools of liquid gold on the planet."
  • Role of Israel and its associated lobbying groups like AIPAC
    • Electronic Telegraph, "Netanyahu is pressed over American 'aliases'" by Anton La Guardia, 1996/07/04: "ISRAEL'S Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, came under mounting pressure from opposition MPs yesterday to clear up mysteries about his past, particularly allegations that he used a variety of names in the United States. Amid rumours that Mr Netanyahu may have worked secretly for the US government during his 11 years in America, the Speaker of the Israeli parliament yesterday agreed to allow the issue to be raised after MPs failed several times to table questions. He had earlier ruled that one motion, entitled "Who are Jerusalem you Benjamin Netanyahu?" and presented by the Labour MP Dalia Itzik, was insulting. "I have serious reason to suspect that the Prime Minister is concealing something," she said yesterday after tabling a watered-down version. The affair started last week when Kol Hair, a Left-wing weekly newspaper in Jerusalem, reported that Mr Netanyahu's social security file in the United States contained four different names - Benjamin Netanyahu, Benjamin Nitai, John J Sullivan and John J Sullivan Jr. Even murkier was the disclosure that the file had been marked "Secret". The paper said this can be done only by the CIA, the FBI or the Internal Revenue Service for specific categories of people - employees of the government and the three agencies; their undercover agents; witnesses under the witness protection programme; wanted criminals and terrorists. [...] Mr Netanyahu has previously admitted using the family name Nitai when he was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s, apparently because the shortened version was easier for Americans to pronounce."
    • Noam Chomsky, "The Israel Lobby?", 2006/03/28
    • John Spritzler, "Why U.S. Billionaires Could Destroy the Israel Lobby, But Don't", 2017/10/15 - refutes the notion of Israel as being the tail that wags the dog (i.e. the US)
  • Soviet Union privatization financial fraud - done with the Russian oligarchs and Russian Mafia
    • yogaesoteric, "TREASON: Who Did 9/11 And Why Did They Do It?", 2017 (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
      • "In that sense, an investigation of those accounts for any reason would have brought global visibility to a $240 billion “scam” in which the Russian mafia and George H.W. Bush, with support from major American financial houses, attempted to take over major segments of Russian industry during the privatization of the collapsing Soviet economy, a collapse largely facilitated by a Bush managed currency destabilization program. It sheds new light on the growing relations between the Russian mafia and the Bush family personal investments."
      • "The Riggs Valmet “consultants” helped the KGB and oligarchs create Bank Menatep, which later became a business partner with Riggs, in owning an undisputed money-laundering, tax evasion vehicle for its Russian and U.S. customers. It is speculated that the third world debt collateral was withheld long enough that the Soviet economy collapsed due to lack of capitalization, the goal of the destabilization program. The collateral funds – or part of the $300 billion plus that could have been generated in interest by the missing third world debt collateral – were then restored to Yelstin by George Bush Sr. Yeltsin then moved the collateral funds into Bank Menatep, that proceeded to use the funding with the Yeltsin oligarchs to “buy-up” Russian industry for pennies on the dollar.

        Through an array of financial actions, that wealth was then transferred through Nordex, Marc Rich, the Bank of New York, Riggs Valmet (and its shell companies) and several other banks identified collectively by Ambassador Leo Wanta and the Office of Naval Intelligence, to Swiss and German banks, while nominally held in off-shore banks."
      • "The WTC offices also held investigative information for the Bank of New money laundering scandal, which will later be shown to be intricately linked to covert oil operations in the aforementioned countries. From another perspective, three of the agencies involved in the Enron investigation were housed in the WTC: Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department, and the FBI. With a great deal of certainty this report concludes that Enron was a major money-laundering vehicle for the financial rape of Russia, buying and selling petrochemical contracts from the U.S. subsidiaries of the Russian oligarchs. Both Department of Defense and Department of Housing and Urban Development had contracts with Enron, and those agencies were reported by Rumsfeld (on September 10, 2001) to be unable to account for some $3.3 trillion in funding. The Internal Revenue Service, in Building 7, was looking at Barrick’s offshore hedge book."
    • E. P. Heidner, "Collateral Damage 911", 2010/09/01
      • "The 1991 coup against Gorbachev was engineered by KGB General Vladimir Kruchkov [121] who reported to General Victor Cherbrikov. Both of these men were business partners with Robert Maxwell, a British financial mogul, a documented Israeli secret service agent, and a representative of U.S. intelligence interests. Maxwell assisted Cherbrikov in selling military weaponry to Iran and the Nicaraguan Contras during the course of the Iran Contra deals, and made hundreds of millions of dollars available to Cherbrikov’s Russian banks. [122] Shortly before the attempted coup of 1991, Maxwell met with KGB General Vladimir Kruchkov on Maxwell’s private yacht. [123] A year earlier, it had been Maxwell that initiated the dialogue about a coup with Kruchkov. [124] In the same month as the coup, Maxwell was in Russia and received $780 million dollars from the CIA via the Israelis to pass on to General Kruchkov. [125] Maxwell’s chief U.S. connection was Senator John Tower, who was long time confidante of George H. W. Bush and participant in the October Surprise. [...]"
      • "In 1988, Riggs Bank, under the direction of Jonathon Bush and J Carter Beese, would purchase controlling interest in a Swiss company named Valmet. [...] In early 1989, the new subsidiary of Riggs called Riggs-Valmet would initiate contact with a group of KGB officers and their front-men to start setting up an international network for moving money out of the former Soviet block countries. [148] In 1989, Jonathon Bush as an ‘official’ representative of his brother, would tour Eastern Europe and the Ukraine. In November 1989 George H. W. Bush appears to have arranged for Alton G. Keel Jr, a former National Security Agency Director and a minor player in the Iran-Contra scandal, to go to work at Riggs Bank, where Jonathon Bush – George’s brother was an executive Vice President. Keel would head up the International Banking Group. [149] [...] The Riggs-Valmet operation, as it became known, would become the ‘consultants’ to the World Bank and to several KGB front operations run by future Russian oligarchs Khordokovsky, Konanykhine, Berezovsky and Abromovich. The Riggs-Valmet agents would advise the top four oligarchs in how to construct their vast money laundering schemes, and would provide guidance to western investors by touring Russian oil and gas operations to provide guidance on investing. [151] These soon to be Russian oligarchs had been set-up as front men by KGB Generals Aleksey (a.k.a. Alexei) Kondaurov; and Fillipp (a.k.a. Phillip) Bobkov, who would also sponsor Anton Surikov, also reported as an agent for Western Intelligence. [152] Both Kondaurov and Bobkov previously reported to Victor Cherbrikov, who worked with Robert Maxwell. Both Bobkov and Kruchkov (the August coup leader) were ideologically aligned [153], and worked together on structuring the Communist Parties economic activities starting in October 1990. [154] Kondaurov and Alexandre Konanykhine would bring a here-to-fore unknown politician and construction foreman named Boris Yeltsin from the hinterlands of Russia to the forefront of Russian politics through generous campaign financing, providing 50% of Yeltsin’s campaign funding."
    • The Atlantic, "The Wild East" by Seymour Hersh, 1994/06
      • "Those former colleagues who are willing to be quoted view the embassy's hands-off attitude toward Dasaro's murder as an attempt to hide the impact of organized crime on day-to-day life in Russia and the former Soviet republics. They say that many of AID's contract employees in Russia have been told not to discuss the murder with outsiders——and have also been instructed to buy steel doors for their apartments and to take more precautions when traveling alone at night."
      • "* Forty percent of private businesses and 60 percent of state-owned companies have been corrupted by organized crime."
      • "* The Russian mafia may own half the nation's commercial banks and 50 to 80 percent of the shops, hotels, warehouses, depots, and service industries in Moscow. A substantial portion of the commercial district in St. Petersburg is similarly in the control of criminal elements, with businessmen being forced to pay 15 percent of their income for protection."
    • The Nation, "The Harvard Boys Do Russia", 1998/05/14
      • "Through the late summer and fall of 1991, as the Soviet state fell apart, Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists participated in meetings at a dacha outside Moscow where young, pro-Yeltsin reformers planned Russia’s economic and political future. Sachs teamed up with Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s first architect of economic reform, to promote a plan of “shock therapy” to swiftly eliminate most of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned life for Soviet citizens for decades. Shock therapy produced more shock–not least, hyperinflation that hit 2,500 percent–than therapy. One result was the evaporation of much potential investment capital: the substantial savings of Russians. By November 1992, Gaidar was under attack for his failed policies and was soon pushed aside. When Gaidar came under seige, Sachs wrote a memo to one of Gaidar’s principal opponents, Ruslan Khasbulatov, Speaker of the Supreme Soviet, then the Russian parliament, offering advice and to help arrange Western aid and contacts in the U.S. Congress.

        Enter Anatoly Chubais, a smooth, 42-year-old English-speaking would-be capitalist who became Yeltsin’s economic czar. Chubais, committed to “radical reform,” vowed to construct a market economy and sweep away the vestiges of Communism. The U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.), without experience in the former Soviet Union, was readily persuaded to hand over the responsibility for reshaping the Russian economy to H.I.I.D., which was founded in 1974 to assist countries with social and economic reform.
      • "H.I.I.D. had supporters high in the Administration. One was Lawrence Summers, himself a former Harvard economics professor, whom Clinton named Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs in 1993. Summers, now Deputy Treasury Secretary, had longstanding ties to the principals of Harvard’s project in Russia and its later project in Ukraine."
      • "Another Harvard player was a former World Bank consultant named Jonathan Hay, a Rhodes scholar who had attended Moscow’s Pushkin Institute for Russian Language. In 1991, while still at Harvard Law School, he had become a senior legal adviser to the G.K.I., the Russian state’s new privatization committee; the following year he was made H.I.I.D.’s general director in Moscow. The youthful Hay assumed vast powers over contractors, policies and program specifics; he not only controlled access to the Chubais circle but served as its mouthpiece."
      • "Anne Williamson, a journalist who specializes in Soviet and Russian affairs, details these and other conflicts of interest between H.I.I.D.’s advisers and their supposed clients–the Russian people–in her forthcoming book, How America Built the New Russian Oligarchy. For example, in 1995, in Chubais-organized insider auctions of prime national properties, known as loans-for-shares, the Harvard Management Company (H.M.C.), which invests the university’s endowment, and billionaire speculator George Soros were the only foreign entities allowed to participate. H.M.C. and Soros became significant shareholders in Novolipetsk, Russia’s second-largest steel mill, and Sidanko Oil, whose reserves exceed those of Mobil. H.M.C. and Soros also invested in Russia’s high-yielding, I.M.F.-subsidized domestic bond market.

        Even more dubious, according to Williamson, was Soros’s July 1997 purchase of 24 percent of Sviazinvest, the telecommunications giant, in partnership with Uneximbank’s Vladimir Potanin. It was later learned that shortly before this purchase Soros had tided over Yeltsin’s government with a backdoor loan of hundreds of millions of dollars while the government was awaiting proceeds of a Eurobond issue; the loan now appears to have been used by Uneximbank to purchase Norilsk Nickel in August 1997. According to Williamson, the U.S. assistance program in Russia was rife with such conflicts of interest involving H.I.I.D. advisers and their U.S.A.I.D.-funded Chubais allies, H.M.C. managers, favored Russian bankers, Soros and insider expatriates working in Russia’s nascent markets."
      • "During the five years that the Chubais clique presided over Western economic aid and policy in Russia, they did enormous harm. By unconditionally backing Chubais and his associates, the Harvard operatives, their U.S. government patrons and Western donors may have reinforced the new post-Soviet oligarchical system. Shleifer acknowledged as much in Privatizing Russia, the book he wrote with Chubais crony Maxim Boycko, who with his patron would later be caught in another financial indiscretion involving taking a “veiled bribe” in the form of advances on a book on the history of Russian privatization. “Aid can change the political equilibrium,” they said, “by explicitly helping free-market reformers to defeat their opponents.”"
    • From p.265 of Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America by Robert I. Friedman (2000): "Astonishingly, both the Bush and the Clinton administrations have unwittingly helped foster the Russian mob and the untrammeled corruption of post-Soviet Union Russia. When the CIA was asked in 1992 by Kroll and Associates, working on behalf of the Russian government, to help locate $20 billion that was hidden offshore by the KGB and the mob, the Bush national security team declined to cooperate. The Bush group rationalized, according to Fritz Ermarth, a top CIA policy analyst writing in The National Interest, “that capital flight is capital flight. It doesn't matter who has the money or how it was acquired even if by theft; so long as it is private, it will return to do good things if there was a market.”"
    • From p.88 of Crossing the Rubicon: "Though the seeds had been planted by the outgoing first Bush administration, the US assistance program to facilitate Russia’s transition to capitalism took off under the new Clinton administration in 1993. A task force headed by Vice President Al Gore, Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot and involving exclusive US Treasury contracts with Goldman Sachs, the Harvard Institute for International Development, the IMF, and the World Bank worked in partnership with the government of Boris Yeltsin to remake the Russian economy. What happened was that Russia, in the words of Yeltsin himself, became a “mafiocracy” and was looted of more than $500 billion in assets; its economy was ruined, its currency destroyed, its population rendered desperate, and its ability to support a world-class military establishment smashed."
    • From p.89 of Crossing the Rubicon: "Once all the assets had been transferred to the oligarchs, who were becoming fabulously wealthy, it was a simple matter for them to liquidate those assets by selling them to the US and other Western countries, and then laundering their money through US financial institutions such as the Bank of New York. The money laundering and transfer of wealth made more than the Russian oligarchs rich. Billions of dollars accrued to Bank of New York executives and stockholders in 1999. And during the years of the Clinton administration, as Al Gore worked in exclusive partnership with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin, the Harvard Endowment’s value rose from 3 to 19-plus billion dollars."
    • Moscow Times, "Khodorkovsky's High Stakes Gamble", 2005/05/16: "According to Anton Surikov, an independent security expert who has known Khodorkovsky for more than 10 years, the drive to create a new class of private businessmen was partly a KGB operation from the start."
    • F. William Engdahl, "Chubais – The Next Neoliberal Head to Roll in Russia?", 2016/12/10: "The Bush Sr. Administration’s attack on post-communist Russia, dubbed “Operation Hammer,” had four distinct covert elements. The CIA would secretly finance the August 1991 Generals’ coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. [...] As the rogue ex-KGB generals and their hand-picked protégés looted the gold reserves of the now defunct Soviet Union, as well as the significant financial assets of the now-banned Communist Party, all with the blessing and complicity of Boris Yeltsin and his inner circle, the Bush CIA Old Boys were ready to launch the next phase, systematic takeover of strategic energy, raw materials and military state industries in the Soviet Union via IMF-dictated privatization operations that were run by Yeltsin’s Finance Minister, Yegor Gaidar, and his accomplice, Anatoly Chubais. [...] All actions of Yeltsin were guided by his CIA and rogue KGB handlers, notably KGB Generals Filipp Bobkov, Alexei Kondaurov and Yeltsin’s personal bodyguard, General Alexander Korzhakov–the cabal who, in coordination with George Bush Sr. and his CIA Old Boys described, staged the phony KGB “coup” attempt against Gorbachev that propelled Yeltsin, with support of mainstream Western media, as the “champion of democracy.” [...] Gaidar was instructed by the US Treasury from the new Clinton Administration that took office in January 1993. The key person at Treasury for the ensuing Gaidar-Chubais looting of Yeltsin’s Russia was a former Harvard economist named Lawrence Summers. [...] HIID was cleverly chosen by Summers as the key advisory agency to work with Gaidar and Chubais to organize the colossal looting known as Russian privatization. [...] Chubais as head of the state GKI state property agency issued 150 million “vouchers” to each and every citizen. [...] At the stated price for the vouchers, Chubais and his Harvard Boys had valued the entire Russian economy–which included the world’s largest nickel company, some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies including Sibneft and Gazprom, RUSAL, the world’s largest aluminum company–at a total that was less than the market value of the US General Electric company. [...] Because they had been allowed by the Bush CIA networks that controlled the financial side of the Yeltsin mafia to be the first Russians with big money, the select Yeltsin oligarchs were able to buy up hundreds of thousands of vouchers and redeem them for entire industries, which would later be stripped and sold. [...] This was how Bank Menatep’s Mikhail Khodorkovsky got a 78 percent share of ownership in Yukos, worth about $5 billion, for a mere $310 million. It was how Boris Berezovsky got Sibneft, another oil giant, worth $3 billion, for about $100 million."
    • Leo Wanta role in crashing the Russian ruble - note that he ended up being represented by Tom Henry, the same Colorado and Nebraska attorney who represented Delmart Vreeland and was involved in the Pat Sullivan pedophile network in Colorado
      • Thieves' World: The Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime by Claire Sterling (1994)
        • "Others present included Gibbins's predecessor in the negotiations, Leo Wanta of the "New Republic Financial Group"; two American confederates of Wanta's named Jack Tremonti and Martin Gulewicz; a Vladimir Rozenberg and an Igor Chernyafsky, described by a British paper as emanating "a whiff of brimstone"; and a mysterious Omar Khan." (p.182)
        • "Leo Emil Wanta, born in Appleton, Wisconsin, was a fifty-year-old, heavyset snake oil salesman, as Mr. X. described him. Starting out in the pinball machine business in Menomonee Falls, he had gone on to "work credit card and many, many other scams," said a senior FBI official.

          For the U.S. Secret Service, where the files on him are a yard long, he is a "flim-flam artist," convicted in Switzerland for money laundering involving the Charleston Bank in Panama, deported to the United States to stand trial for tax evasion and wanted in Austria for aggravated fraud arising out of events going back to September 1990, just as he was moving in on the Russian government." (p.186)
        • "Jack Tremonti came from Detroit, which has an American mafia, a Sicilian Mafia, and a Ukrainian mafia. Whether a made man, a mafioso wannabe, or simply someone who moved in the circles of the heavily Sicilian Biondo Family, he was "a macho mafia asshole—he's got the walk, he's got the talk," said Mr. X. Tremonti had been convicted in 1976 on three counts of theft and interstate shipment of stolen goods by a Federal court in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. (The FBI referred him to the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles for suspected money laundering late in 1991, but the charge was dropped.)

          Martin Gulewicz, an ex-football player closely associated with Tremonti in Detroit, was "pure rotten bad," in the view of Mr. X. A Federal court in Grosse Pointe had convicted him for drug trafficking in 1987." (p.187) - interesting that two Wanta associates were from Detroit and involved with crimes in Grosse Pointe (the birthplace of North Fox Island pedophile ring operator Francis Shelden), as this is where Delmart Vreeland also had his origin
      • J. Orlin Grabbe, "Who is Leo Wanta?", 1997/08/26: "Meet Leo Emil Wanta, a man accused of, or praised for, crashing the Russian ruble over 1990-1. There is no doubt that he was a currency trader, placing orders for 100 billion rubles at a time. [...] Wanta, an erstwhile travelling companion of Vernon Walters and supplier of machine guns to Bill Casey, was arrested by Swiss authorities on July 7, 1993, in Geneva, Switzerland. He was held for four months, then extradited to Wisconsin to stand trial for state taxes owed for the years 1982 and 1988. [...] Wanta was sentenced to 22 years in prison. [...] Afterward, on Sept. 21, 1996, Wanta wrote a mysterious letter to Hillary Rodham Clinton, referring to "U.S. President Bill Clinton's Short Term Notes and IMF Sale of Bullion." [...] Wanta's letter (or letters) got results. On Jan. 10, 1997, Wanta received a reply from Erskine Bowles at the White House. [...] On February 1, 1997, after Bowles had checked with W.H. Agency Relations, Leo Wanta was released on $90,000 bail. [...] Wanta presented his credentials in Moscow in October 1990. He was a member of Reagan's "President's Club" (meaning he had given $50,000 to the campaign). He also headed the "New Republic Financial Group" located in Appleton, WI, and registered in Vienna, Austria (New Republic/USA Financial Group, GES.m.b.H., Kartnerstrasse 28/15, Telefon: 513-4235, A-1010 Wien). New Republic had declared capital of about $17,000, according to Sterling. On this basis, Wanta wanted to swap $5 billion for 140 billion rubles, rising over five years to $50 billion for 300 billion rubles. [...] To Sterling's "Mr. X", who worked with Wanta, the objective was quite different: "I knew there would be a possibility of a Western privately orchestrated economic Jihad that could help crush the communist ruling powers by destroying their unstable ruble. Unilaterally and privately, I decided to play a catalytic role to crash the ruble." During the previous year Wanta's group bought sold and traded rubles. Many of the orders/offers appear to be bogus--calculated to cause a run on the ruble. [...] By December 1991 Wanta and his partner Kok Howe Kwong had set up a food for petroleum joint venture in Moscow. Accounts in dollars and rubles were opened at Status Credit Bank in Singapore by the two through Asian-Europa Development Pte Ltd. Asian-Europa proceeded to export Soviet petroleum and import Western goods at an exchange rate (oil for goods) very favorable to Asian-Europa. Asian-Europa appears to be a U.S. government/CIA proprietary company set up under USCA Title 18, Sec. 6., Line 11. And it appears to have had a relationship with Mochtar Riady's Lippo Group."
      • James F. Bennett, "The Strange Saga of Leo Wanta", 2006/12/01 - cites an Associated Press article from 1998/04/08 about Wanta's attempt to sell semi-automatic pistols to Manuel Noriega through his Appleton WI business AmeriChina Global Management Group Inc.; cites an Insight article from 1991/06/17 about Wanta's ruble scam through his New Republic/USA Financial Group, and his claimed connection to "the late Sen. Alexander Wiley, a Wisconsin Republican" and "various careers as a high-tech defense engineer, a deputy in the Waukesha County sheriff's office, a Milwaukee policeman, stints in the Nixon and Reagan campaigns, adviser to the Drug Enforcement Administration and as a perennial candidate for various Cabinet and sub-Cabinet posts"
      • Interesting to note that Wanta conducted his scams while based in Appleton WI, at the same time that CIA operative and future 9/11 flight school financier Wally Hilliard was residing in nearby Green Bay WI before his "retirement" to Venice FL
      • Wisconsin Tax Appeals Commission, no. 96-I-888: LEO E. WANTA vs. WISCONSIN DEPARTMENT OF REVENUE, ruling and order - notes that Wanta "is currently represented by Attorney Thomas E. Henry of Omaha, Nebraska, and Attorney Jan Morton Heger of Laguna Niguel, California"
      • Dossier (ISRAEL_PALESTINE_USA_vs_STATE_AGENT_PROVOCATEURS_23pgs_2016) of various documents related to Wanta's case - on p.6 is a 1993/11/03 letter from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to Leo Wanta thanking him for his support of the Palestine peace process; on p.22 is a 1984/03/28 letter from Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-IA) to "Mr. Leo E. Wanta" of "Leo E. Wanta & Associates" located at 2101 North Edgewood Avenue in Appleton WI, mentioning Grassley's efforts to help Wanta apply as Inspector General of the Department of Defense
      • Dossier (POTUS_202_YOUR_CRIMINAL_MATTER_THE_FAMOUS_PAYMENT_CHECK_1995) of various documents related to Wanta's case - on p.4 is a handwritten note that says "Senator Robert Kasten of Wisc. Elk's Club party sponsored by: Elk's officer Lee E Wanta"
      • Dossier (SIMPLE_QUESTIONS_PART_1_of_2___CIRCA_2020) of various documents related to Wanta's case - on p.6 is a 2002/08/15 letter from Thomas E. Henry to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asking for records of Wanta's involvement in the 1992 peace negotiations between then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat
      • Dossier (ACTING_PRESIDENT_GEORGE_BUSH_ORDERS_ARREST_OF_SECRET_AGENT_WANTA) of various documents related to Wanta's case - on p.14 is a 2001/10/17 telefax from Wanta to the Treasury Department with multiple individuals including Dick Cheney and Colin Powell cc'd
    • Bank of New York scandal - laundered money for the Russian mob under the direction of Semion Mogilevich
      • CNN, "BNY in $10B Russian scam", 1999/08/19: "The Bank of New York was used by members of a Russian organized-crime gang to launder as much as $10 billion since early last year, the bank confirmed Thursday. The bank suspended two high-ranking employees in its Eastern European division with pay this week in connection with the case. Both employees, identified as Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovsky and Lucy Edwards, are married to Russian businessmen. Bank officials maintain that thus far there have been no allegations of wrongdoing leveled against the $68 billion institution, the nation's 16th-largest commercial bank based on year-end 1998 statistics. The investigation, which is being run by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, apparently focuses on the use of the bank as a conduit for funds from Russia into other countries. The accounts under investigation are linked to Semyon Yukovich Mogilevich, who investigators say runs a veritable one-stop shopping center of crime, according to the New York Times, which first reported the story Thursday. Mogilevich is engaged in arms trafficking, extortion and prostitution, according to law enforcement and intelligence sources, the Times reported."
      • The Independent, "Russian mafia `laundered $10bn at Bank of New York'", 1999/08/20: "The investigation at the Bank of New York is believed to have begun a year ago on the basis of information supplied by the British authorities. They are said to have found references to a front company linked to Mr Mogilevich while sifting boxes of documents for an investigation into UK activities of the Russian mafia. Two senior employees of the bank, both dealing with Eastern Europe and Russia, have been suspended. One is a senior vice-president of the bank in New York, the other holds a similar rank in the bank's London branch. [...] The bank, which has more than $67bn in assets, was founded in 1784 and is known for getting foreign companies to list on US stock markets. Mr Mogilevich, who is believed to be living in Budapest, was named in a 1996 Senate hearing as the leader of an organised-crime group in the United States. A year earlier the National Criminal Intelligence Service in Britain said he was "one of the world's top criminals" with a "personal wealth of $100m"."
    • Riggs Bank money laundering
      • Washington Post, "RIGGS BANK BUYS MAJORITY HOLDING IN VALMET GROUP", 1989/04/03: "Riggs National Bank has purchased 51 percent of the Valmet Group, a Geneva-based investment management company, for an undisclosed amount, a spokesman for the bank said last week. The move is the latest in a series of efforts by Riggs, the largest bank that has its headquarters in the District, to move more forcefully into the international financial services arena. Riggs International Banking Corp. in Miami is the international branch of Riggs' banking services. [...] The 15-year-old Valmet Group, which will be called Riggs Valmet, has offices in Gibraltar and Lugano and Geneva, Switzerland. It will continue to do international portfolio management for individuals or institutions with accounts in excess of $500,000. [...] Riggs' private banking division now serves about 2,400 customers through its offices in Washington, Miami and Nassau. [...] The two principal shareholders of the Valmet Group, Christian Michel and Michel Saba, will remain with Riggs Valmet as the primary minority shareholders and will serve as chairman and vice chairman of the board of Riggs Valmet."
      • UPI, "Riggs drawn into bank probes", 1999/09/18: "Riggs Bank joined the list of financial institutions under investigation for involvement in a Russian money laundering scandal, the Washington Post reported Saturday. Federal investigators will probe Riggs because it had business ties to three other firms implicated in the scandal, Valmet Group, Menatep Bank of Moscow and the European Union Bank of Antigua. [...] Investigators suspect Valmet, Menatep and the now dissolved EUB of using Western banks to launder Russian money obtained illegally or improperly."
      • Forbes, "The Oligarch Who Came in from the Cold", 2002/03/18: "If your business gets some benefit from cheap energy, send a note of thanks to Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky [...] Keeping OPEC at bay may be one of the concessions that Vladimir Putin made to George W. Bush when he visited the American president in November. But the Russian government is also responding to pressure from its own oil magnates. This is where Mikhail Khodorkovsky comes in. His company, Yukos , accounts for 17% of Russia's oil production and has significant influence in the Kremlin. One former employee was, until recently, the minister of fuel and energy; another former Khodorkovsky sidekick is currently Vladimir Putin's deputy chief of staff. Among Russian oilmen, Khodorkovsky is the leading advocate of ignoring OPEC's demands and expanding production as rapidly as possible. [...] Russian executives have needed bodyguards ever since capitalism came to the country. [...] Flush with cash from his trading operations, Khodorkovsky and his partners established Bank Menatep. As one of Russia's first privately owned banks, Menatep expanded with dizzying speed, not only by financing Khodorkovsky's lucrative trading operations, but also by handling state money, such as the funds allocated for the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. [...] It was first a client, and later a shareholder, of a private bank in Geneva called Riggs Valmet. This was when Russian private banks were widely suspected of spiriting away billions of dollars belonging to the Communist Party into anonymous offshore accounts. [...] After communism fell and Boris Yeltsin came to power, Menatep's fortunes continued to rise. It was authorized to handle the funds of the Ministry of Finance, the State Taxation Service, the Moscow city government and the Russian arms export monopoly. Meanwhile, Khodorkovsky's trading operations had begun to take on international commodity shipments. There were deals with Marc Rich, the pardoned fugitive, and a big oil-for-sugar deal with Cuba."
      • CNN, "FBI probes possible Saudi, 9/11 money ties", 2002/11/23: "Law enforcement sources told Newsweek the FBI has uncovered financial records showing that the family of Omar Al Bayoumi, a student in San Diego, began receiving payments amounting to about $3,500 a month in early 2000. According to Newsweek's sources, the money came from an account at Riggs Bank in Washington in Princess Haifa Al-Faisal's name. She is the daughter of the late King Faisal. After Al Bayoumi left the United States in July 2001, similar payments were being made to another San Diego student, Osama Basnan, Newsweek reported. According to the magazine's report, Al Bayoumi and Basnan befriended two men who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon -- Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi."
      • Wall Street Journal, "'Bank of Presidents' Stumbles Amid Probe of Terrorism Funds", 2004/04/07: "The FBI and federal regulators are probing huge cash withdrawals by the Saudis and have accused Riggs of failing to alert regulators of suspicious transactions. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has classified Riggs as a "troubled institution" for failing to adequately tighten its money-laundering controls despite an order to do so. The office is considering a fine. [...] Even if the bank continues to go it alone, the problems are a sharp blow to Mr. Allbritton, the controlling shareholder of Riggs National Corp., the bank's parent, and a connoisseur of horseflesh and fine art whose friends include the queen of England. "He is a first-class guy, one of the best financial brains I know," said Riggs board member and Washington power broker Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America. [...] [Joe L.] Allbritton, who a spokesman said was unavailable to comment, has been mixing politics and banking since 1960, when he backed fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson's unsuccessful presidential bid. [...] After Mr. Allbritton won control of Riggs in 1981 following a legal battle with the bank's then-management, he quickly accelerated the push into foreign markets with millions of dollars in loans to governments in the developing world. [...] While his roots were in conservative Democratic circles of Texas, Mr. Allbritton was a friend of GOP Senator John Tower of Texas and found it easy to fit into the Republican Washington of the 1980s, befriending President Reagan and his wife, Nancy. [...] He is also a supporter of former president George H. W. Bush's library. Riggs now owns the brokerage firm J. Bush & Co. of New Haven, Conn., founded by President George W. Bush's uncle, Jonathan Bush. [...] "Riggs was perhaps uniquely vulnerable, because much of their business was in this area," said H. Rodgin Cohen, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, the bank's outside law firm."
      • New York Times, "A Washington Bank In a Global Mess", 2004/04/11: "EACH January, in honor of Gen. Robert E. Lee's birthday, a group of Washington's movers and shakers gather to rub elbows at the Alfalfa Club dinner. [...] Attendees have included luminaries like Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States; Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America; and others with surnames like Greenspan, Kissinger and Rehnquist. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made their first joint public appearance after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the Alfalfa gathering in 2002. [...] in a town long on political heavyweights and short on full-blown business tycoons, the 79-year-old host, Joe L. Allbritton, is a corporate titan. [...] Until late February, Riggs managed $360 million worth of Equatorial Guinean accounts that federal investigators say were controlled by that country's dictator. The accounts were largely funded by proceeds from deals with Exxon Mobil, the oil company. [...] the Saudis are among Riggs's biggest clients. Until the Sept. 11 attacks, Saudi officials often rolled into a Riggs branch on a Friday and withdrew millions of dollars for, say, a weekend splurge in London, according to individuals familiar with the transactions. [...] Riggs's Washington location and its international reach sometimes landed it in the middle of messes that most midsize banks elsewhere would never dream of encountering. The investigation of the C.I.A. spy Aldrich Ames in 1994 turned up Riggs accounts flush with funds from Mr. Ames's Russian handlers. The bank also bought and later sold a stake in a Channel Islands company called Valmet that helped move funds for the jailed Russian oil billionaire Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, transactions that became fodder in the sprawling money-laundering investigation of the Bank of New York in the late 1990's."
      • Washington Post, "Web Site Cites Bush-Riggs Link", 2004/05/15: "A political Web site written by a Democratic operative drew attention yesterday to the fact that President Bush's uncle, Jonathan J. Bush, is a top executive at Riggs Bank, which this week agreed to pay a record $25 million in civil fines for violations of law intended to thwart money laundering. Jonathan Bush, who is a major fundraiser for his nephew, was appointed in 2000 to run Riggs Investment Management Co. His association with Riggs began when he headed J. Bush & Co., a New Haven, Conn., company he created in 1970 and built to offer advice on money management. Riggs bought J. Bush & Co. in 1997 to help create a one-stop financial outlet offering a range of services, from insurance to securities trading and investment advice. News reports at the time said investment bankers estimated the purchase price, which was not disclosed, as $5.5 million."
      • Wall Street Journal, "U.S. Review of Riggs Oversight Will Study Bank's Political Ties", 2004/06/07: "The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an agency of the Treasury Department, conceded last week it failed to come down hard enough on Riggs for the bank's years-long failure to comply with reporting requirements and other regulations aimed at combating money laundering. [...] The probe's outlines were disclosed by the agency after the Washington Post reported Friday that agency examiner R. Ashley Lee went to work for Riggs in October 2002 immediately after retiring from the government. [...] The bank's former chairman, Joe L. Albritton, long has been influential in political circles. A senior executive at Riggs, Jonathan Bush, is President Bush's uncle. Also, Riggs has a close relationship with the Treasury Department, for which it runs a cash-management system."
      • New York Times, "At Riggs Bank, A Tangled Path Led to Scandal", 2004/07/19: "The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has concluded that Riggs executives and bank regulators, even after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, failed to monitor suspicious financial transactions involving hundreds of millions of dollars. [...] On Friday, the parent of Riggs announced that PNC Financial Services of Pittsburgh had agreed to buy it for $779 million. Still, Riggs, and those who ran it, face more regulatory, Congressional and law enforcement investigations. [...] The scrutiny of the bank involves accounts it held for Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, and for the Saudi Arabian Embassy. [...] At a meeting with regulators at the headquarters of Riggs Bank two years ago, Barbara B. Allbritton, a Riggs board member, was offended that the bank had to end its relationship with a valued client, General Pinochet, according to the report and testimony at the Senate hearing. [...] Bank regulators, who stumbled across the Pinochet funds during a Riggs review in early 2002, could have given Mrs. Allbritton compelling reasons for closing the accounts. Even at a time when the general was detained on charges of human rights abuses and his assets had been frozen by court orders, Riggs helped him disguise millions of dollars in suspect funds and wire the money worldwide, the Senate report says. [...] Raymond M. Lund, a former Riggs executive who opened General Pinochet's accounts at the bank in the mid-1990's, said in Senate testimony that Mr. Allbritton had a ''professional business relationship'' with the dictator. Carol Thompson, who oversaw Riggs's Latin American business, told Senate investigators that she occasionally briefed Mr. Allbritton directly on General Pinochet's finances. [...] When regulators asked Riggs in 2000 for a list of its accounts controlled by political figures, the roster provided by the bank did not include General Pinochet's name. Shortly after The Observer article was published, the bank -- in a move that it acknowledged last week was improper -- changed the name on accounts of the general and his wife from ''Augusto Pinochet Ugarte & Lucia Hiriart de Pinochet'' to ''L. Hiriart &/or A. Ugarte,'' ensuring that searches for Riggs accounts named ''Pinochet'' would draw a blank. [...] regulators never considered fining Riggs in 2002 or referring the Pinochet accounts to law enforcement officials, according to Senate records and testimony. The comptroller's lead Riggs examiner at the time, R. Ashley Lee, took an executive position at Riggs later that year. [...] What regulators expected to be a one-month examination lasted five months as regulators uncovered improprieties in some of 150 Saudi accounts at Riggs. [...] Many of these transactions involved Prince Bandar personally, these people said."
      • Washington Post, "Riggs Bank Suspends 2nd Senior Executive", 2004/09/11: "Robert C. Roane, who spent his entire 25-year career at Riggs and ran its sister bank in London from 1995 through 1999, is the second Riggs executive to be suspended in connection with the multiple ongoing federal investigations of the bank's relationship with Pinochet and other diplomatic clients. [...] Roane was suspended for possible violations of internal company policies, sources familiar with the matter said. A June report released by the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations raised questions about one transaction in particular that involved the London branch, detailing a March 1999 $1.6 million transfer of Pinochet funds between Riggs's London and D.C. banks that appeared designed to hide the owner of the funds. [...] Last month Riggs officials placed R. Ashley Lee, an executive vice president and Riggs Bank's former chief bank examiner, on paid leave until a Justice Department investigation into whether he violated government ethics rules is resolved. Lee, who retired as a bank examiner with the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in 2002, became a subject of intense scrutiny this summer by congressional investigators and the Treasury Department for his role in a decision not to include results of an OCC investigation of Riggs and Pinochet in the Riggs federal case file."
      • Washington Post, "Riggs Uncovers Deep Ties to Pinochet", 2004/11/20: "A Riggs Bank internal investigation has uncovered signs of money laundering by bank employees, including efforts in 2003 to help Argentine naval officers hide $3.8 million in cash to prevent seizure by investors after the Argentine government defaulted on bond payments. The investigation by a small team of former Secret Service agents hired by Riggs last year also discovered that efforts by former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to hide millions of dollars at Riggs go back to 1985, nearly 10 years earlier than previously known. Pinochet came to power in a 1973 coup and instituted several years of bloody repression. He resigned after a 1989 election, but he remained commander-in-chief of the armed forces until 1998. [...] Although the investigation turned up no evidence that Joe L. Allbritton, Riggs's largest stockholder and its chief executive until 2001, participated in any suspicious activity involving Pinochet accounts, numerous bank officials told investigators that they thought Pinochet was a favored client and a friend of Allbritton. [...] The investigation so far has resulted in the firing of at least three Riggs employees, including a lawyer in the bank's general counsel office, according to sources. [...] The Pinochet account was closely managed by Carol Thompson, who ran the Latin American embassy and international private client business for Riggs. [...] Thompson quit Riggs in 2003 and until recently was an employee of Wachovia Bank. [...] Among the investigation's other findings: • Riggs paid $5,000 into a Pinochet family foundation in 1997, shortly after senior bank executives visited Pinochet in Chile to solicit his business. • Some Riggs internal bank documents relating to Pinochet are missing from the bank's files. • Pinochet and his family had more accounts than previously disclosed, including 10 accounts at Riggs's Miami bank and several opened by Chilean military officers described by bank executives as "fronts" for the dictator."
      • Wall Street Journal, "Riggs Bank Had Longstanding Link To the CIA", 2004/12/31: "Riggs Bank, which is under investigation by the Justice Department for money laundering, has had a longstanding relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to people familiar with Riggs operations and U.S. government officials. That relationship, which included top current and former Riggs executives receiving U.S. government security clearances, could complicate any prosecution of the bank's officials, according to private lawyers and former prosecutors. [...] Prince Bandar's connections to the CIA have long been a significant, albeit little-discussed, aspect of the Riggs affair. During the initial phase of the controversy over Saudi accounts at Riggs in early 2003, Prince Bandar detailed his work for the CIA in a meeting with Treasury Secretary John Snow, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials who interpreted the disclosure as an explanation for the prince's large unexplained cash transactions at Riggs. [...] During the 1980s, Prince Bandar helped fund the anticommunist Nicaraguan Contra rebels at the request of the White House and CIA, and later helped support Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet Union. [...] The CIA has a longstanding but indirect relationship with Mr. Pinochet, a longtime Cold War ally of the U.S., through his former chief of secret police, Manuel Contreras, according to scholar John Dinges, author of a book on the Chilean dictatorship. Mr. Contreras banked at Riggs, according to a 1979 State Department cable obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive."
      • Chicago Tribune, "Bank fined $16 million for hiding accounts", 2005/01/28: "Riggs Bank agreed to pay a $16 million fine Thursday after pleading guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by hiding transfers of millions of dollars in accounts controlled by Chilean despot Augusto Pinochet and top officials of Equatorial Guinea. [...] Banking regulators and the Justice Department also continue to investigate the possible misuse of Riggs property by Joe L. Allbritton, a major Riggs shareholder and its former chief executive, and his family. [...] Ending the criminal case clears the path for a possible takeover by Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial Services Group Inc., which has an agreement to acquire Riggs for $779 million, pending approval by Riggs' shareholders. But it also could give PNC an opening to walk away. [...] To mask the source of funds, Riggs moved money from a Pinochet account into an internal Riggs account before sending it to a destination outside the bank, the documents show. When Pinochet was under house arrest in Chile, Riggs broke up $1.9 million on deposit in one account into $50,000 cashier's checks and had bank employees ferry them in person to the ex-dictator, Wainstein said. The bank also helped Pinochet set up shell corporations in the Bahamas in 1996 and 1998. [...] Riggs performed a similar service for Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Nguema in 1999, helping him open an entity called Otong S.A., which eventually held $11.5 million in U.S. currency, according to court papers."
      • The Guardian, "BAE accused of secretly paying £1bn to Saudi prince", 2007/06/07: "The arms company BAE secretly paid Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia more than £1bn in connection with Britain's biggest ever weapons contract, it is alleged today. [...] An inquiry by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into the transactions behind the £43bn Al-Yamamah arms deal, which was signed in 1985, is understood to have uncovered details of the payments to Prince Bandar. But the investigation was halted last December by the SFO after a review by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith. He said it was in Britain's national interest to halt the investigation, and that there was little prospect of achieving convictions. Tony Blair said he took "full responsibility" for the decision. However, according to those familiar with the discussions at the time, Lord Goldsmith had warned colleagues that British "government complicity" was in danger of being revealed unless the SFO's corruption inquiries were stopped. [...] The Saudi diplomat is known to have played a key role with Mrs Thatcher in setting up Britain's biggest ever series of weapons deals. [...] According to legal sources familiar with the records, BAE Systems made cash transfers to Prince Bandar every three months for 10 years or more. BAE drew the money from a confidential account held at the Bank of England that had been set up to facilitate the Al-Yamamah deal. Up to £2bn a year was deposited in the accounts as part of a complex arrangement allowing Saudi oil to be sold in return for shipments of Tornado aircraft and other arms. Both BAE and the government's arms sales department, the Defence Export Services Organisation (Deso), allegedly had drawing rights on the funds, which were held in a special Ministry of Defence account run by the government banker, the paymaster general. Those close to Deso say regular payments were drawn down by BAE and despatched to Prince Bandar's account at Riggs bank in Washington DC."
    • Azerbaijan oil industry
      • MEGA Oil - run by Iran-Contra conspirators such as Richard Secord
        • Chicago Tribune, "OIL FIRMS FIND NEW WILD WEST, IN AZERBAIJAN", 1992/06/21
          • "Then there`s tiny, unknown Mega-Oil USA, an American consortium operating out of Atlanta that somehow managed to dart into the confusion of Baku, the Azeri capital, and pluck the rights to reactivate old, broken and clogged wells. The company started work a month ago and is already pumping oil, to the astonishment of Western diplomats and competitors.

            How did Mega-Oil do it? The directors of the company-including a retired U.S. Air Force commander who loves to hint at his involvement in the Iran-contra scandal-are reluctant to say. And the head of the state-run Azerineft oil company, which controls all Azerbaijan`s oil, isn`t talking, either."
          • "''Look at all these big companies. They`ve been here for two years, and they haven`t done a thing,'' said Gary Best, president of Mega-Oil. ''We`re here a few months and we`re already doing something. You can`t argue with our success.''"
          • "The secrecy has raised eyebrows among diplomats and other oil-company representatives in Baku, who wonder privately whether payoffs might have been made."
          • "The arrangements for the medical shipment were handled by retired U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Harry C. Aderholt, now vice chairman of Mega-Oil. Aderholt used to run a supply operation in Honduras called the Air Commando Association, which was alleged to have helped supply the contras fighting to overthrow Nicaragua`s former Marxist government."
        • From p.272 of Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter's Adventures in an Oil-rich, War-torn, Post-Soviet Republic by Thomas Goltz (1998):

              “They say the represent a new company in town, but one no one in the industry has ever heard of it before.”
              “What's the name?”
              “MEGA Oil.”
              “So who are they if not oilmen?”
              “I don't know,” said Pond. “But the consortium seems to be made up of about five or six small companies with addresses in Georgia, Florida, and other Dixie states where Special Forces guys like to retire.”
              “What does that mean?”
              “I mean MEGA Oil is a front for something, and I don't know quite what. But it stinks, and as far as I can tell, all the little companies involved got their start during the glory days of Iran-Contra.”
              “Ollie North and all that?”
              “General Secord just checked out of the hotel last night.”
           
        • Gary Best background
          • Sun Sentinel, "ARROW AIR MAY BE TIED TO IRAN-CONTRA MYSTERY", 1989/11/12: "[Orlando businessman Bob] Fletcher suspects that his defunct Atlanta-area toy company somehow is connected to the "toyco" reference in Swiss bank account records detailing the diversion of funds from the Iranian arms sales to Nicaragua's Contra rebels. He said he sold his company in early 1985 to Gary Best, an import-export businessman who subsequently failed to make the promised payments. Instead of exporting toys, Fletcher said Best soon began using the toy company as a "front" to peruse arms deals to Iran and Central America and missions to Southeast Asia in search of soldiers missing in action from the Vietnam war."
      • See also Viktor Kozeny's fraudulent State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) privatization venture Oily Rock
      • Halliburton involvement
        • Village Voice, "Dick Cheney’s Pipe Dream", 2001/10/16: "Halliburton has continued to do just that. This spring, the company signed a major contract with the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan to develop a 6000-square-meter marine base to support offshore oil construction in the Caspian Sea, the Voice has learned. The base will be used to assist Halliburton’s catamaran crane vessel, the Qurban Abbasov, in upcoming offshore pipe laying and subsea activities, according to a statement the company released May 15."
        • Moscow Times, "Halliburton Man to Sub for Khodorkovsky", 2004/04/30: "Upon his arrest, Khodorkovsky’s secretive business arrangement with the Rothschild family was exposed, as Jacob Rothschild took over Khodorkovsky’s 26% control of Yukos. Khodorkovsky’s seat on the board of directors for Yukos went to former Halliburton executive Edgar Ortiz, a former Halliburton vice president during US Vice President Dick Cheney’s time as Halliburton CEO, and as President and CEO of Halliburton, took over the relationship with the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR)."
    • Russian oligarch Chalva Tchigirinski - named in Delmart Vreeland's warning note, and Vreeland claims he was assigned to break into Tchigirinski's apartment while on his fateful 2000 mission to Moscow
      • 2001/12/11 version of the Sibir Energy board of directors page: "Mr. Chalva P. Tchigirinski, Non-Executive Director
        Mr. Tchigirinski, age 51, is the representative of the largest shareholder in Sibir. In this capacity he is a Director of Yugraneft, a Director of both Evikhon and Salym Petroleum Development NV. He is also President of both Moscow Oil Company and Central Fuel Company (which controls the Moscow refinery) neither of which are in competition with Sibir. His interests in the sector include a key role in British Petroleum’s impressive fuel retail network in Moscow. Mr. Tchigirinski speaks fluent English."
      • 2001/12/11 version of the Sibir Energy corporate history page: "November 2000 Sibir announces that its had reached an agreement in principle with Sibneft, a major Russian integrated oil and gas company, for the establishment of a joint venture to develop the Yugraneft oil fields. Sibneft agreed to provide finance on commercial terms to fund the entire development of the Yugraneft fields as well as technical and operational resources on cost effective terms."
      • Alexander's Gas and Oil Connections, "Sibneft hooks up with Halliburton", 2002/02/08: "In a move to further boost efficiency, oil major Sibneft announced that it has signed a framework agreement for Halliburton to provide oil field services. Sibneft vice president Alexander Korsik said an almost "unlimited" sum of money can be spent on introducing Western technology to Siberian oil fields. [...] Halliburton only came into the Russian spotlight in 1999, when it was chosen as a contractor for Tyumen Oil's Samotlor field as part of a controversial US Export-Import Bank loan deal. But Halliburton has prospered in Russia and the Caspian region over the past 10 years with the backing of US Vice President Dick Cheney, who lobbied strongly for lucrative projects when he was Halliburton CEO from 1995 to 2000."
      • From p.191 of Crossing the Rubicon:

            The lower half of the note was filled with a variety of names that had little immediate significance. I did recognize the name “ulista petrovka” as being a street or place in downtown Moscow not far from Red Square. Upon returning to L.A., I checked a few of the names to see what I could find quickly. One in particular was Chalva Tchigirinsky, (Vreeland had misspelled it) who was connected somehow with money. It did not take long for me to confirm that Tchigirinski was a Russian oil executive who had business relationships with BP and Gazprom, the company that had been trying to build the trans-Afghan gas pipeline from Turkmenistan. Tchigirinski’s interests stretched into Central Asia and the Caspian. He was also president of the Moscow Oil Company.
            Later on a talented researcher named Nico Haupt was to forward me a detailed background on Tchigirinski, which elaborated further on his oil, real estate, and business ventures, including a deal signed in early 2002 with Halliburton. Tchigirinski was an oligarch.
         
      • Links about the Russian oil industry on Delmart Vreeland's website
    • Cantor Fitzgerald - a bond trading firm whose employees suffered the most casualties on September 11; alleged ties to the Russian mob
      • BBC, "Wall Street counts the cost", 2001/09/13: "Bond trader Cantor Fitzgerald - the largest dealer in US government bonds - appears to have suffered the heaviest losses for a single firm. The company occupied the top floors of the North Tower, the first to be hit, and 800 of its 1,000 staff were still missing by early Thursday."
      • Wall Street Journal, "At the Pentagon, Quirky PowerPoint Carries Big Punch", 2004/05/11: "In 1998, Thomas Barnett, an obscure Defense Department analyst, teamed up with senior executives at the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald LP to study how globalization was changing national security. [...] In the early days of the current Bush administration, senior Pentagon officials thought China, with its growing arsenal of ballistic missiles and increasingly sophisticated submarine fleet, might fill this role. Mr. Barnett's work with Cantor Fitzgerald, which stemmed from a long-standing relationship between the firm and the Naval War College, convinced him otherwise. China was buying U.S. debt, angling to join the World Trade Organization and growing increasingly dependent on foreign direct investment. "China isn't the problem, it's the prize," he told the officers."
      • Virginian-Pilot, "For couple who lived 9/11 horror, there are no words for the grief", 2006/09/11: "On a typical day, Bud Flanagan would be up at 6 and out of the house at 7:30. He would march two blocks west to Broadway and four north to Liberty Street. His eight-minute commute ended another block west, at the World Trade Center. [...] On a routine day, Flanagan would ride an elevator to a sky lobby on the 78th floor, where he'd board another elevator for the 105th. He usually was at his desk by 7:45 a.m. But that Tuesday, Bud Flanagan was running late. [...] Until today, retired Adm. William J. Flanagan Jr. hasn't talked about that morning. [...] Two phone calls and a brief conversation: If not for them, Bud Flanagan would have been in his corner office, high up in One World Trade Center that morning. [...] His commission as a four-star admiral was on display, along with a framed four-star flag and a statuette naming him one of the Jaycees' Ten Outstanding Young Men of America in 1979. At 58, Flanagan was senior managing director for Cantor Fitzgerald, a global financial services company. He shared his office with Philip Ginsberg, the company 's chief economist and leader of a Cantor bond-trading division. The pair's work was steady and intense: Markets were open someplace in the world 23 hours a day, and Cantor had customers in virtually every time zone. [...] As it happened, he left home an hour late that morning. [...] Phil Ginsberg was on his way to Toronto."
  • Military-industrial complex profits

al-Qaeda connections

  • Osama bin Laden background
  • J. Michael Springmann revelations
  • Operation Gladio B handling
    • Ceasefire Magazine, "Why was a Sunday Times report on US government ties to al-Qaeda chief spiked?", 2013/05/17: "In interviews with this author in early March, Edmonds claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, current head of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s deputy at the time, had innumerable, regular meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001, as part of an operation known as ‘Gladio B’. Al-Zawahiri, she charged, as well as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations."
  • Penetration by US intelligence
    • See the Hijackers section for evidence that certain hijackers like Mohammed Atta were US intelligence agents and the Foreknowledge section for evidence that US intelligence knew extensively about the 9/11 attacks before they happened
    • Ali Mohamed - double agent for the CIA / US Army and Egyptian Islamic Jihad
      • San Francisco Chronicle, "Bin Laden's man in Silicon Valley / "Mohamed the American' orchestrated terrorist acts while living a quiet suburban life in Santa Clara", 2001/09/21
        • "In remarks to a judge last year when he pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, Mohamed admitted a long list of such crimes: training guerrillas who attacked U.S. soldiers in Somalia in 1993; arranging a summit conference of anti-U.S. terrorist organizations in Sudan in 1994; plotting the suicide bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 200 people and injured thousands. Other suspected activities during his California days include raising money for the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, implicated in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and smuggling sleeper agents for bin Laden into the United States from Canada."
        • "But even while an American soldier, court records show, Mohamed worked on behalf of militant Islamic groups. In the late 1980s, he turned up in a Brooklyn, N.Y., refugee center for people displaced by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, according to evidence in the 1995 trial of El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian terrorist convicted of plotting to bomb the U.N. headquarters in New York. In Brooklyn, Mohamed gave combat training to Muslim recruits bound for Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invasion, said defense lawyer Roger Stavis. Nosair was among the guerrilla fighters Mohamed trained, he said."
        • "In 1994, while he was at the al Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Mohamed came under FBI suspicion in connection with a probe of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, a blind Islamic cleric arrested and ultimately convicted for masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six and injured 1,000."
      • San Francisco Chronicle, "Al Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI / Ex-Silicon Valley resident plotted embassy attacks", 2001/11/04
        • "In 1984, he quit the Egyptian Army to work as a counterterrorism security expert for EgyptAir. After that, he offered to become a CIA informant, said the U.S. government official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The agency tried him out, but because he told other possible terrorists or people possibly associated with terrorist groups that he was working for the CIA, clearly he was not suitable," the official said. The CIA cut off contact with Mohamed and put his name on a "watch list" aimed at blocking his entrance to the United States, according to the official. Nevertheless, Mohamed got a visa one year later. He ultimately became a U.S. citizen after marrying a Santa Clara woman. In 1986, he joined the U.S. Army as an enlisted man. He was posted to Fort Bragg, N.C., home of the elite Special Forces."
        • "Later that year, Anderson said, Mohamed announced that -- contrary to all Army regulations -- he intended to go on vacation to Afghanistan to join the Islamic guerrillas in their civil war against the Soviets. A month later, he returned, boasting that he had killed two Soviet soldiers and giving away as souvenirs what he claimed were their uniform belts. Anderson said he wrote detailed reports aimed at getting Army intelligence to investigate Mohamed -- and have him court-martialed and deported -- but the reports were ignored. "I think you or I would have a better chance of winning Powerball (a lottery), than an Egyptian major in the unit that assassinated Sadat would have getting a visa, getting to California . . . getting into the Army and getting assigned to a Special Forces unit," he said. "That just doesn't happen. " It was equally unthinkable that an ordinary American GI would go unpunished after fighting in a foreign war, he said. Anderson said all this convinced him that Mohamed was "sponsored" by a U.S. intelligence service. "I assumed the CIA," he said."
        • "In 1989, Mohamed left the Army and returned to Santa Clara, where he worked as a security guard and at a home computer business. Between then and his 1998 arrest, he said in court last year, Mohamed was deeply involved in bin Laden's al Qaeda. He spent months abroad, training bin Laden's fighters in camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. While in Africa, he scouted the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, target of the 1998 bombing. In this country, he helped al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's top aide, enter the country with a fake passport and tour U.S. mosques, raising money later funneled to al Qaeda."
        • "Later that year [in 1993], Mohamed -- again seemingly without concern for consequences -- told the FBI that he had trained bin Laden followers in intelligence and anti-hijacking techniques in Afghanistan, the affidavit says."
      • Globe and Mail, "Canada freed top al-Qaeda operative", 2001/11/22
      • PBS Frontline interview with FBI Special Agent Jack Cloonan: "I had been seconded to a special team that had been established as a result of President Clinton signing a presidential finding, an intelligence finding, in early January of 1996. And in that finding, he basically declared war on bin Laden, and he directed all U.S. intelligence assets, including the FBI, to go after bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Al Qaeda network. [...] Ultimately, we ended up talking to bin Laden's first trainer, Ali Mohammed, Ali Abdul Saud Mohammed, who is currently in jail. He taught bin Laden. In one of the first training classes that Ali Mohammed conducted was Sheikh bin Laden; Ayman al-Zawahiri; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who's chief of military operations at the time; Saif al-Adel, who's still one of the 22 most wanted fugitives, and others."
      • Peter Dale Scott, "9/11's Trainer in Terrorism Was an FBI Informant", 2006/10/27: "That Mohamed trained al Qaeda in hijacking planes and wrote most of the al Qaeda terrorist manual is confirmed in a new book, The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, who has seen US Government records.(8) [...] "Within days of 9/11 Cloonan ... interviewed Ali, whom the Feds had allowed to slip into witness protection, and demanded to know the details of the plot. At that point Ali wrote it all out - including details of how he'd counseled would-be hijackers on how to smuggle box cutters on board aircraft and where to sit, to effect the airline seizures."(9) [...] Peter Lance has charged that Fitzgerald had evidence before 1998 to implicate Mohamed in the Kenya Embassy bombing, yet did nothing and let the bombing happen.(11) In fact, the FBI was aware back in 1990 that Mohamed had engaged in terrorist training on Long Island; yet it acted to protect Mohamed from arrest, even after one of his trainees had moved beyond training to an actual assassination.(12) [...] at Nosair's house. They found much more: There were formulas for bomb making, 1,440 rounds of ammunition, and manuals [supplied by Ali Mohamed] from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg marked "Top Secret for Training," along with classified documents belonging to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The police found maps and drawings of New York City landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square -- and the World Trade Center."
      • Raw Story, "Author: Fitzgerald libel threat aimed at censoring key 9/11 tale", 2009/06/12: "Peter Lance should be thanking Patrick Fitzgerald right now, even as the attorney’s checks are being signed. If it were not for the U.S. Attorney who famously prosecuted I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former Vice President’s Chief of Staff, the re-release of Lance’s stunning tale of mishandled espionage leading up to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, might be overlooked. [...] “In 1996, Fitzgerald and other top officials discredited a treasure trove of al Qaeda-related evidence, including evidence of an active al Qaeda cell operating in NYC five years before 9/11 and of a bin Laden plot to hijack a plane to free Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman—intelligence considered so important that it was later cited in the infamous Presidential Daily Briefing given to George W. Bush just weeks before 9/11,” noted HarperCollins in a press release."
      • New York Times, "Convicted Militant Seeks Retrial in ’95 Case", 2011/06/13: "The witness Mr. Nosair’s lawyers wanted access to was Ali A. Mohamed, a naturalized American citizen from Egypt and one of the more intriguing figures to surface in the government’s investigations. [...] In 1989, while on active duty, Mr. Mohamed traveled to the New York area and provided military training to local Islamic militants. The United States government has said the militants included people who were later convicted of plotting terrorist attacks, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But a witness for Mr. Nosair testified that the men who received training, including Mr. Nosair, were preparing to fight the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Indeed, Mr. Nosair’s lawyers argued that their client was not involved in a conspiracy against the United States, but rather was part of a United States-supported covert operation to train and arm the mujahideen to fight in Afghanistan. [...] Prosecutors say that by the time of Mr. Nosair’s 1995 trial, Mr. Mohamed was already an active Qaeda member who had trained Bin Laden’s bodyguards and was reporting to senior Qaeda officials."
    • Felix Sater role
      • BuzzFeed News, "How A Player In The Trump-Russia Scandal Led A Double Life As An American Spy" by Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold, 2018/03/12: "Effectively, he has been a spy — but for the United States."
        • "Brokers, paid under the table, purchased stocks through offshore accounts controlled by Sater. Sater’s firm spun false stories about the companies to inflate their value, then dumped the overpriced stocks onto unwitting investors. Court documents show that the five main New York City mafia families were directly involved, mostly to provide muscle. “They were there for disputes,” Sater said."
        • "After working on what he called “the dark side of Wall Street” for 18 months, Sater said he left the business in 1995 because he “didn’t want to do dirty shit anymore.” The next year, he went to Russia to work on telecommunications deals with AT&T and others. One night, Sater was at dinner with a group of Russians in Moscow when he was introduced to an American defense contractor named Milton Blane. Sater said Blane, who died last year, followed him into the restroom that night and asked for his phone number to set up a meeting the following day. At an Irish pub, Blane explained that he worked for the DIA and that some of the people Sater had been dining with were high-level Russian intelligence agents. “‘You’re in with a group who could deliver,’” Sater recalls Blane telling him. Blane, Sater said, asked him to work as an asset, intelligence lingo for a confidential source, but warned, “‘I want you to understand: If you’re caught, the USA is going to disavow you and, at best, you get a bullet in the head.’”"
        • "One of Sater’s early operations involved the pursuit in 1998 of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The CIA had originally given the missiles to the mujahideen to oust the Soviets during their occupation of Afghanistan — but now the agency wanted to prevent them from falling into the hands of radicalized jihadists. Sater managed to find some, complete with their serial numbers."
        • "BuzzFeed News also confirmed another 1998 mission, in which Sater infiltrated the Afghan precious stone market to find dealers who were laundering money for al-Qaeda. Sater found his own dealer, from New York City’s 47th Street diamond district, and brought him to the Middle East to make the ruse seem more authentic. An FBI source said the Justice Department later confirmed this detail in court filings that remain under seal."
        • "As the FBI closed in, Sater continued to work his contacts overseas. He developed a close bond with an intelligence officer working for the Northern Alliance, the Afghan militia led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, the fierce and beloved fighter called the Lion of Panjshir. As the Northern Alliance fought Islamists, its intelligence officer fed information to Sater, according to Sater and a former FBI agent. Late in 1998, Sater was vacationing in Italy with his family when the Afghan intelligence officer called with five satellite phone numbers belonging to bin Laden."
        • "[...] soon, according to three former FBI agents, an intelligence official, and a Department of Justice official, Sater reported back to intelligence agencies on the results of coalition bombings, kills on the battlefield, the financial networks behind the 9/11 bombers and other al-Qaeda members worldwide, and even the identity of a New Mexico company believed to be laundering terror funds in the US. Sater’s Afghan intelligence source funneled to him copies of al-Qaeda passports, jihadi escape routes, the locations of fighters, and weapons caches."
      • Politico, "Judge confirms Trump associate gave feds Osama bin Laden’s number", 2019/05/16: "“He cooperated,” Glasser said. “And you know what he did over the 10, 11 years, because you told me that you know. He provided the telephone number of Osama bin Laden. He has done an awful lot of very interesting and dangerous things.”"
      • 5K1 letter sent 2009/08/27 confirming Sater's intelligence work (PDF copy)
      • Defense sentencing memo sent 2009/10/19 by Leslie Caldwell (PDF copy)
      • Note that Sater was managing director of the Bayrock Group, a real estate development firm most known for its partnerships with Donald Trump which was founded by Russian/Turkish businessman and alleged child trafficker Tevfik Arif
      • Note that Caldwell headed the DOJ's Enron Task Force
    • Randy Glass role - parallels that of Sater with an involvement in the diamond industry and tracing Stinger missiles
      • New York Times, "Former Rising Star on Wall Street Is Arrested in Arms Sale Inquiry", 2001/06/16: "On Tuesday, Kevin Ingram, who was named one of the top 25 African-American ''movers and shakers'' on Wall Street by Black Enterprise magazine in 1996, was arrested by federal agents in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., after agreeing to launder $2.2 million that had been described to him as proceeds from arms shipments, according to court papers filed in Federal District Court in Miami. [...] In 1999, according to the court documents, Mr. Ingram and one of the Jersey City men, Diaa Mohsen, laundered nearly $350,000 in two wire transactions by transferring the money from the United States to an account in London. Last week, after being approached by an undercover agent, Mr. Ingram arranged for a pilot, Walter Kapij, of Weathersfield, Conn., to take $2.2 million to Amsterdam on a chartered Lear jet. [...] Mr. Ingram ran the mortgage trading practice at Goldman Sachs from 1992 to 1996, when he joined Deutsche Bank as head of its mortgage-backed securities department, making deals involving hundreds of millions of dollars. [...] In January 1999, Mr. Ingram was forced to resign from Deutsche Bank under pressure after his division suffered costly losses. He then helped found TruMarkets Inc., an online bond trading venture that was able to attract some prominent Wall Street figures as board members, including Herbert Allison, a former president of Merrill Lynch. But the company sought bankruptcy protection in March."
      • Observer, "Ex-Goldman Trader Stung in Arms Plot, Shocks Colleagues", 2001/07/02: "Here was a guy who seemingly had it all. The academic degrees had led to a sparkling nine-year stint on Goldman Sachs’ government bond desk under such powerful patrons as Bob Rubin and Jon Corzine. [...] By all accounts, the highly sophisticated business of trading asset-backed securities came very easily to Mr. Ingram. After a brief stint at Lehman Brothers, he joined Goldman Sachs in 1988, and by 1992 he was promoted to run Goldman’s Collateralized Mortgage Obligations desk, overseeing all trading of mortgage and asset-backed securities. [...] Top Goldman executives like Mr. Rubin and Mr. Corzine were always on the lookout for minority stars, and they took a keen interest in fast-tracking Mr. Ingram. [...] But he was also a puzzle, with his leisurely ways and his claims that he was a sports agent on the side, representing baseball stars such as Baltimore Oriole Jeffrey Hammonds, and a partner with Evander Holyfield, backing a black musical group. His bosses and colleagues were always a little unsure of him. “There was always an edge to Kevin, a mysterious air,” says a Goldman associate. [...] As luck would have it, Paul Jacobson, a former boss of Mr. Ingram’s who had left Goldman Sachs in 1993, had just joined Deutsche Bank to head its fixed-income division. [...] In April 1996, Mr. Jacobson hired Mr. Ingram to run Deutsche’s mortgage-backed securities operation, giving him a blank check to build the bank’s business in all areas of asset-backed securities. [...] By the end of 1997, the desk–stocked with former Goldman colleagues–was generating more than $150 million in revenues. [...] while Mr. Ingram was collecting cars, he was living in a condo in Jersey City. [...] in August 1998, Mr. Ingram was promoted by Mr. Mitchell to head securitization globally for the bank, a position that based him in London and made him one of the senior investment bankers. [...] In early September, Mr. Mitchell asked for his resignation, together with a bunch of other top bankers on his desk. [...] At the time, Mr. Mitchell was in the midst of orchestrating Deutsche Bank’s high-profile, $10 billion merger with Banker’s Trust. [...] Mr. Mitchell died last December in a plane crash."
      • South Florida Sun-Sentinel, "Former Wall St. Bond Trader Cuts Plea Deal, Will Testify in Arms-trading Case", 2001/08/23: "While prosecutors haven't finalized a plea agreement for Kevin Ingram, they revealed at a Wednesday court hearing that he is set to testify against his co-defendants in the convoluted money-laundering case. The case came out of a 31-month investigation that led to the arrests of two New Jersey men who are accused of attempting to buy Stinger missiles and other sophisticated military weaponry for a foreign buyer. [...] Ingram, once a top trader with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, is accused of laundering $350,000 and then agreeing to launder an additional $2.2 million -- all money presented as the proceeds of illegal arms sales. Ingram, 42, of Jersey City, and Connecticut airplane broker Walter Kapij, 44, were arrested June 12 in a Fort Lauderdale hotel room after they agreed to launder the $2.2 million for a federal agent posing as a rogue arms dealer, according to federal authorities. That day, federal authorities also arrested Diaa Mohsen, 57, and Mohammed R. Malik, 52, after an undercover agent showed them an inactive Stinger missile inside a West Palm Beach warehouse, court documents indicate. Mohsen, of Jersey City, N.J., and Malik, of Watchung, N.J., had spent months talking with undercover agents about buying missiles, grenade launchers, night-vision goggles and possible components for a nuclear weapon, according to court records. The men allegedly said at one point that they were acting as middlemen for a former military official in a foreign country."
      • Palm Beach Post, "'The Individuals That Mr. Glass Has Dealt With Are Essentially Terrorists.': Taliban Showed Interest In Boca Snitch", 2001/09/29: "The probe led to the arrest of two New Jersey men - Egyptian national Diaa Badr Mohsen and Pakistani native Mohammed "Mike" Malik - in June at a West Palm Beach warehouse. Two others were arrested in Fort Lauderdale on related money-laundering charges. [...] When it finally came time to sentence Glass last year, prosecutors gushed over his work. [...] Glass, 49, was sentenced to 20 months in prison last year, but remained free while working for the government. After the arrests of the four men in June, Glass' sentence was cut again to seven months, which he is now serving in a prison at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle. [...] Glass' metamorphosis from con artist to informant started in 1998 when he was arrested for bilking $6 million from diamond and jewelry wholesalers worldwide. [...] He was accused of laundering $1 million in drug money and filing a $1 million false burglary claim from Palm Beach Jewelry Center on Okeechobee Boulevard in West Palm Beach and a false report that he was robbed of $250,000 in diamonds on a Chicago street corner by two black men in camouflage. [...] Glass, hit with 13 felony charges, started to cooperate with the government. By the time Glass pleaded guilty last year, the 13 felonies had been dropped and two counts of fraud had taken their place. When it came time for sentencing, the prosecutor - normally the defendant's adversary - appeared to be in awe of Glass. [...] Soon after he was charged in the fraud case, Glass told agents he knew of an arms dealer, a gambling buddy from New Jersey named Diaa Mohsen. Agents fitted Glass with a wire and tapped his phone, according to transcripts of court hearings. Mohsen, an Egyptian national, led Glass to a former Egyptian judge named Shireen Shawky, federal agents told Judge Ferguson in 1999. [...] The night before the July 1999 hearing, a phone conversation revealed the interest of the Taliban. "That group is presently seeking arms on behalf of themselves, and maybe for the benefit of bin Laden," ATF agent Barborini told the judge. [...] Mohsen asked about grenade launchers, machine guns, anti-tank missiles, a component for a nuclear weapon and Stinger missiles, according to a federal arrest report. In the 1980s, Afghan and Muslim rebels, including bin Laden, used U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles to bring down Soviet aircraft. Up to 100 unused Stingers remain in the hands of the Taliban or bin Laden, arms experts believe. [...] Agents also nabbed one-time Wall Street high-flyer Kevin Ingram and Connecticut airplane broker Walter Kapij in a related money laundering scheme. [...] In a 1999 contempt of court hearing for famed defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, who was accused of taking a client's money for legal fees when it should have been forfeited to the government, Glass took the stand and claimed Bailey tried to have Glass fence $1 million in jewelry. [...] Rodriguez and Eisenberg say their clients began looking for weapons because Glass fooled them into thinking they all were working for the government. Eisenberg said Malik brought in a Pakistani government official, Mohammed Abbas, and thought the arms deal was legitimate."
      • Washington Post, "U.S. Reopens Arms Case In Probe for Taliban Role", 2002/08/02: "The alleged weapons buyers repeatedly said in conversations taped by authorities that they represented the Pakistani government and were arranging the purchases for Pakistani intelligence, the then-Taliban government of Afghanistan or terrorists. [...] the U.S. government is convinced that the alleged buyers were, in some fashion, connected to militant groups affiliated with the Pakistani government. U.S. intelligence confirmed key parts of the buyers' statements concerning their affiliations, and a federal prosecutor attested to that in court hearings. [...] Wired for sound by agents, Glass listened as Mohsen said he knew people eager to buy U.S. weapons, including officials of a government and "terrorists" who would pay in heroin. [...] Mohsen, meanwhile, introduced the undercover agents to a friend, Mohammed "Mike" Malik, a Jersey City deli owner originally from Pakistan. Mohsen said Malik, in turn, could connect them to the ultimate buyers, who Mohsen identified as "the intelligence of Pakistan" and as people close to Afghanistan's Taliban regime and al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. [...] Pakistanis who said they represented the buyers in Islamabad flew to Florida several times to negotiate with Stoltz. At various points, Malik and these middlemen said that they represented Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). [...] Stoltz said in an interview that U.S. investigators concluded Malik and the middleman were "associates of Middle Eastern terrorists," and had "associations with militants and arms trafficking groups.""
      • Dateline NBC, "Trail of Terror: Never before broadcast tapes of how arms merchants who may have links to terrorism are buying arsenals of weapons, even components for nuclear bombs" by Chris Hansen and Ann Curry, 2002/08/02 - goes into the involvement of Jersey City NJ doctor Magdy el Amir, who financed Diaa Moshen to the tune of at least $5000, and his engineer brother Mohamed el Amir later living in Cairo, who was recorded arranging a weapons deal with Randy Glass
      • Dr. Magdy el-Amir background
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "Did Bush Homeland Chief hield Terrorist Ring in New Jersey?", 2005/01/12: "Michael Chertoff, appointed by President Bush to head the Homeland Security Department, may have shielded from criminal prosecution a former client suspected by law enforcement of having funneled millions of dollars directly to Osama Bin Laden while in charge of the U.S. Government’s 9.11 investigation. Egyptian-born Dr. Magdy el-Amir, a prominent New Jersey neurologist, was at the center of terrorist intrigue in Jersey City. El-Amir gave money to a conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. His brother in Cairo was caught on tape attempting to buy weapons from an American undercover agent for Islamic militant groups. Before being arrested in a terrorist deal involving oil and heroin for guns and training, arms smuggler Diaa Mohsen was paid at least $5,000 by one of Dr. el Amir's companies, NBC’s Dateline reported. And his HMO was suspected by law enforcement of being used to funnel money directly to Osama bin laden. [...] “Columbia/HCA, the health-care consortium… is the ninth-largest employer in the United States… As the lead attorney for Columbia, Chertoff negotiated a partial settlement of the case in May for about $ 745 million”…"
        • The Record (North Jersey Media Group), "Painkiller charges are Saddle River doctor's latest brush with law", 2011/01/16 (Patient Safety League copy): "The owner, Dr. Magdy Elamir, is not there. He's one of two physicians charged in a drug ring, accused of putting illicit prescription painkillers on the streets in Bergen, Hudson and other counties. [...] In the past two decades, the Egyptian immigrant, now 57, founded and plundered his own HMO, lost millions in Medicaid funds and ran several unlicensed MRI centers. He supported the Jersey City mosque where the "blind sheik" preached terrorism, and once hired Michael Chertoff to represent him in the HMO case before Chertoff's stint as Homeland Security czar. [...] How he managed to stay in business for so long is a mystery. Despite encounters with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, local law enforcement, fraud investigators at several insurance companies, and four state departments — Health, Banking and Insurance, Human Services, and the Attorney General's Office — Elamir continued to practice medicine and receive public and private insurance reimbursements until his arrest."
        • Jersey Journal, "Jersey City doctor's license revoked for acting as 'drug dealer'", 2014/11/26: "A Jersey City neurologist's medical license has been revoked by the state Board of Medical Examiners, which found he "acted solely as a drug dealer" in prescribing addictive drugs like Percocet and Xanax without performing medical evaluations of patients. Magdy Elamir, a Saddle River resident, is also ordered to pay $100,000 in civil penalties and $169,009.40 to reimburse the state's investigative and prosecuting costs."
  • Far West LLC handling
    • Peter Dale Scott, "The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11", 2005/10/29
      • "At global drug summits such as the one in Armenia in 1993, representatives of the Sicilian Mafia, the Brighton Beach Organizatsiya, and Colombian drug lords, have worked out a common modus operandi, with the laundering of dirty money entrusted chiefly to the lawless Russian banks."
      • "Thanks to extensive research in Russia, we now have initial evidence of a second and even more significant proposition: There exists on the global level a drug meta-group, able to manipulate the resources of the drug traffic for its own political and business ends, without being at risk for actual trafficking."
      • "One piece of evidence for this consists in a meeting which took place in July 1999 in southern France near Nice, at the villa in Beaulieu of Adnan Khashoggi, once called "the richest man in the world." Those at the meeting included a member of the Yeltsin cabal in the Kremlin and four representatives from the meta-group, with passports from Venezuela, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Germany. Between them they allegedly enjoyed excellent relations with: 1) Ayman al-Zawahiri, the acknowledged mastermind of 9/11 and senior mentor to Osama bin Laden. 2) Soviet military intelligence. 3) the FARC, the Colombian revolutionary group that has become increasingly involved in the drug traffic. 4) the Kosovo Liberation Army, a similarly involved group. 5) (according to a well-informed Russian source) the CIA."
      • "There is an undeniable western face to the dominant meta-group. One member of the meta-group at the 1999 meeting, Anton Surikov, had spent time at the London Centre for Defence Studies; and in addition Surikov had had contacts with at least one senior CIA representative.[9] (Another member of the meta-group, former Lithuanian Defense Minister Audrius Butkevicius, was with Surikov at the London Centre.) We shall see that a third member, Ruslan Saidov, is said to have been paid as a CIA contract agent."
      • "The group's business front, Far West, Ltd., is said to have CIA-approved contractual dealings with Halliburton for geopolitical purposes in the Caucasus, as well as dealings in Iraq with Diligence LLC, a group with connections to Joe Allbaugh (the FEMA chief in 2001) and to the President's younger brother Neil Bush. The head of Far West recently told a Russian outlet that "a well-known American corporation... is a co-founder of our agency.""
    • Peter Dale Scott, "The Real Grand Chessboard and the Profiteers of War", 2009/08/11-2010/01/10 (parts 1, 2)
      • "A hostile critic of Far West, “Yuri Yasenev” (a fictional name on the Internet), identified Far West’s U.S. partners as

        > – «Kellogg, Brown &Root» (KBR Halliburton) – in Colombia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Georgia, and Iraq.
        >
        > – «Diligence Iraq LLC» (controlled by the Kuwaiti Mohammed as-Sagar) – in Iraq.”[4]"
      • "According to Dunlop the meeting was actually brokered by a retired GRU officer called Anton Surikov, who we know from other sources to have been an officer of Far West Ltd. In Dunlop’s words,

        > On the day following the initial incursion of rebel forces into the Dagestani highlands in early August of 1999, the investigative weekly Versiya published a path-breaking report claiming that the head of the Russian Presidential Administration, Aleksandr Voloshin, had met secretly with the most wanted man in Russia, Shamil’ Basaev, through the good offices of a retired officer in the GRU, Anton Surikov, at a villa belonging to international arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi located [in Beaulieu] between Nice and Monaco.[9]"
      • "[...] He neglected to mention that Anton Surikov had spent time at the London Centre for Defence Studies; and in addition had admittedly had contacts with former CIA officer Fritz Ermarth.[10]" - note that Ermarth was a part-time senior analyst for the Strategies Group at SAIC
    • Pravda.info, "Vladimir Filin: We were not left without intrusive attention for a minute", 2005/09/02: "Who are our partners is a trade secret. I can say that these are four private firms from three countries - Turkey, Russia and the USA, which are involved in freight transportation, among other things. One of these firms is a division of a well-known American corporation. This company is a co-founder of our agency."
    • left.ru, "Orange Revolution Is in Store for Russia: It is being prepared by International Terrorists, Criminal Organizations and Agents of Foreign Secret Services" by Yuri Yasenev, 2005
      • "In December 1996 Ayman Zawahiri was arrested in Dagestan for illegal entry. He carried a false Sudanese passport. When he was arrested Saidov went to Makhachkala [the capital of Dagestan]. There he organized a petition to the authorities in support of Zawahiri. It was signed by twenty-six Muslim clergymen and the Russian State Duma deputy, Nadirshakh Khachilaev. Saidov managed to obtain a court decision, condemning Zawahiri to a six-month prison term, which had actually expired by that time."
      • "Since the middle of the nineties, Saidov formed stable relations with the Saudi businessman Adnan Hashoggi, Prince Turki al-Faisal (then head of the Saudi intelligence and at present, Saudi Ambassador to Great Britain) and Prince Naif. At the time of the terrorist act in the Moscow theater in Dubrovka in October 2002, Saidov and Prince Turki were in Moscow together. [...]"
      • "On December 8, 2004 Saidov addressed Muslim youth in Moscow. In his words, "following Ukraine, the Orange Revolution is coming to Russia." "Our liberals say that in 2008 the situation in Moscow will be like the one in Kiev. " However, everything will be different, and not in 2008, but earlier." "Amirs and mudjahideen will soon make the Kremlin shudder with horror." In 2005, "they will throw into hell the servant of Satan," i.e., President Putin, who is allegedly "wanted by the International Tribunal at The Hague.""
    • left.ru, "Consulting" Agency Far West, LLC Paid $3 Million Bribe to Ukrainian Official For Illegal Arms Deals with Syria and Iran", 2006/02/18: "The centerpiece of Demidov's article is the facsimile of the internal letter (dated 04.18.05) by the deputy director of Ukrspetsexport Valery Lysenko to the Head of Security Service of Ukraine Alexander Turchinov. Lysenko wrote this letter in response to Turchinov's inquiry (dated 04.12.05) concerning Far West, Ltd. The letter names Likhvintsev as a founder and Kosyakov as the general director of Far West, Ltd. which “consults the sales of light arms and military supplies to the countries of Africa and Latin America.” Lysenko also lists businesspartners of FWL: private military companies KBR Halliburton (US), Diligence Iraq, LLC (Kuwait), and Meteoric Tactical Solutions (South Africa)."
    • left.ru, "Obama and the Intelligence Cabal" by Natasha Barch and Vadim Stolz, 2009/10: "Our monitoring of the public statements made in recent months by FarWest LLC vice-presidents Generals Vladimir Filin, Ruslan Saidov and the board member Rt. Colonel Anton Surikov--principal liaison of the group with right-wing circles in Washington—betray more that the aggressive Obamophobia of this group. In particular, Surikov/'s recent anti-Obama statements give reasons for concern. Here are some quotes.

      * “There are some serious people in the new Administration: the Vice-President Biden and the defense minister Gates. Presently they are not in the limelight but, I think, in two years or so they will come out of the shadow into the forefront and Biden will become the President.”

      * “In this world crisis situation, Obama was meant to take the responsibility for some kind of extraordinary stint on a global scale... Following this he will be removed as an expendable intelligence asset.”"
    • Fritz Ermarth background
      • National Interest, "Colin Powell's Briefing to the Security Council: Brief Comments from an Ex-Intelligence Officer" by Fritz W. Ermarth, 2003/02/05: "To me, this means that Saddam Hussein is done for unless he executes immediately and massively a complete change of course, which seems highly improbable. The question remains whether, in the face of this case, the UN Security Council and our key allies rise to the occasion or not. There is a substantial element in the international community, especially in Europe, whose top priority is to contain, not Saddam Hussein, but the United States. They wish the Bush Administration to fail. They do not care about the evidence or the threat from Iraq. The question is whether they can be outvoted. If not, they will be ignored. [...] These revelations are evidence beyond reasonable doubt. [...] I am slightly surprised and somewhat disappointed that Powell did not make more of the spotty but credible evidence of Iraqi involvement in terrorist attacks in and on the United States going back to the early 1990s. This includes the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and other attempted attacks in New York. There is some evidence that it includes the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. [...] Perhaps recounting of this history would have been too awkward for the man sitting directly behind him, or perhaps Powell himself has not found the strength of this evidence sufficiently compelling to match its explosive implication, i.e., that Iraq did have a hand in 9/11. I believe it did and that, sooner or later, we shall find that smoking gun."
      • Acknowledgments of Curing Analytic Pathologies by Jeffrey R. Cooper (2007): "Frank Jenkins, General Manager of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) Strategies Group, deserves special praise for allowing Fritz Ermarth and me to follow our instincts and start to investigate these issues before the failures became so very public."
      • Italian Institute for Strategic Studies (a.k.a. Machiavelli's Institute) bio for Fritz W. Ermarth
  • Russian mafia affiliations
    • From p.233 of Crossing the Rubicon: "As noted by Peter Dale Scott in Drugs, Oil and War (Rowman & Littlefield) bin Laden had for years established close working relationships with the Russian Mafias. This has been acknowledged by US government officials. Part of this relationship centered on Afghani heroin."
    • PROMIS software ending up in bin Laden's hands thanks to Semion Mogilevich
      • From p.346 of Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon (2003):

            In October 2001, a month after the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York and the attack on the Pentagon in Washington by al-Qaeda suicide bombers, it emerged that the man who controlled them, Osama bin Laden, had acquired a copy of the still highly secret Promis software.
            The version of Promis provided to bin Laden came from a former FBI agent, Robert Hanssen. For years he had been a Russian spy inside the FBI. He had passed over the latest version of Promis to his handlers in Moscow. They had sold on a copy to Simeon Mogilevich for the reputed sum of $3 million. He had sold it on to bin Laden for an undisclosed price.
         
    • Arms deal involving Monzer al-Kassar and Semion Mogilevich
      • Monitor Vol. 7 Issue 174, "ZHIRINOVSKY BLAMES U.S. OIL COMPANIES, CIA FOR SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS", 2001/09/24: "Meanwhile, Kommersant, which is controlled by Berezovsky, reported today that the Spanish special services were looking into reports that associates of bin Laden had met with Semyon Mogilevich, the reputed Russian mafia boss, at the Spanish resort of Marbella. The paper, citing the French and British special services, reported that Mogilevich had sold radioactive materials to a company belonging to bin Laden. According to Kommersant, members of bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network were arrested in Paris this past August and found to be carrying U-235, a radioactive material used in nuclear weapons, in a suitcase. The paper claimed that Mogilevich, in addition to being the target of an international manhunt for allegedly selling radioactive materials and laundering money made from sales of stolen art, is wanted by the FBI for laundering US$10 billion made from the sales of narcotics produced in Afghanistan (Kommersant, September 24)."
      • Margie Burns, "Monzer al Kassar followup . . . is Mogilevich in Virginia?", 2007/08/09: "As a highly successful and opulently wealthy international arms dealer, Mr. Al Kassar has reportedly cultivated a global network of interesting contacts. One contact was the alleged Russian mafia boss Semion Mogilevich, and at least one locus for contact was Marbella, Spain. By coincidence, a little less than two weeks before September 11, 2001, a plane crashed at Spain’s Malaga airport carrying a passenger from Morocco on his way to meet with both Mr. Al Kassar and Mr. Mogilevich. According to the London Sunday Express, the passenger was believed by Israeli intelligence to be a “bag man” for Osama bin Laden." [...] The prospect of a terror network between the Russian mafia and bin Laden “has put all Western intelligence services on red alert,” according to the Express article published on September 2, 2001. [...] In the years lapsed since 2001, Mr. Mogilevich himself seems to have turned up in northern Virginia – safe haven for U.S. government contractors, the military-security-surveillance complex, gun sellers, and the lawyers and lobbyists who protect them."
      • Background of Monzer al-Kassar
        • The Observer, "Meet the 'Prince of Marbella' - is he really supporting Iraq's insurgency?", 2006/10/01: "The official US Iran Contra report says he sold weapons to the 'Enterprise' arming the Contras."
        • New Yorker, "The Trafficker", 2010/02/08: "Kassar was sufficiently flexible, in fact, that during the Iran-Contra affair he supplied covert weapons to the United States. Tom Clines, a weapons specialist formerly with the C.I.A., visited Marbella and negotiated the deal. Between 1985 and 1986, Kassar was paid a million and a half dollars through a Swiss bank account controlled by Oliver North and his co-conspirators, and in return he obtained more than a hundred tons of assault rifles and ammunition from Cenzin, in Poland."
  • Penetration by Russian intelligence
    • John Schindler, "Exploring Al-Qa’ida’s Russian Connection", 2014/06/10 (Business Insider copy)
      • "That Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s right-hand man and the leader of the global jihad movement since bin Laden’s death in May 2011, spent almost a half-year in the mid-1990s in the custody of Russian intelligence is admitted by both sides and is a matter of public record."
      • "The FSB had ample reason to doubt the Arabs’ cover story. Among the items confiscated from the trio included details about bank accounts in Hong Kong, mainland China, Malaysia, and the U.S. (specifically St. Louis), plus substantial cash in seven currencies. Their laptop computer was seized and subjected to forensic analysis by the FSB."
      • "[...] Rejecting the prosecution’s request for a three-year sentence, the judge gave them six months each; almost immediately they were released, time served. The FSB returned the men their possessions, including the cash, communications gear, and the laptop. After their release, Zawahiri spent ten days clandestinely meeting with Islamists in Dagestan, which presumably had been the original purpose of his trip to the region. Shortly thereafter, he headed for Afghanistan to establish his fateful alliance with bin Laden, which was cemented in the mid-February 1998 announcement of a new partnership between the men and their organizations in a Global Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders. [...]"
      • "Hard evidence about what Zawahiri was doing in Russian custody has not been forthcoming. Dissident FSB Colonel Aleksandr Litvinenko made explosive claims. In a 2005 interview, Litvinenko asserted that Zawahiri actually underwent training by the FSB in Dagestan during his half-year in Russian custody, and that Russian intelligence then dispatched him to Afghanistan to become bin Laden’s right-hand man. “I worked in the same division [of the FSB],” he stated, “I have grounds to assert that al-Zawahiri is not the only link between the FSB and al-Qa’ida.”"
      • "Just as important, it is known that Russian intelligence had ties to Islamist extremists in Chechnya long before Zawahiri entered the region. From the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian intelligence formed discreet ties with radical Islamists in the Caucasus, including men who would later become leading mujahidin."
  • Yasin al-Qadi role in the terror financing network
  • Al Taqwa Bank / Bank Al Taqwa financing
    • Nelson Bunker Hunt connection
      • Jason Jonathan Vaught, "AL TAQWA BANK | A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of San Diego State University | In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science in Homeland Security", 2011 summer: "Earlier, in the 1980s, Mussalim was investigated by U.S. authorities for his role in the attempt by Nelson Bunker Hunt and Herbert Hunt to corner the world’s silver market. The Hunts, members of the right-wing John Birch Society, sought to make a fortune by restricting others’ access to silver (used primarily at that time in the photograph development industry), and approached both the Shah of Iran and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to determine if they were interested in participating in the scheme.67 Ultimately, the Hunt brothers set up the “International Metals Investment Company,” with headquarters in Bermuda, with four principals: Nelson Hunt, Herbert Hunt, Mohammed Aboud al-Amoudi, and Ali bin Mussalim. The four—along with Mahmoud Fustock, a businessman and the brother-in-law of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia—were found liable by a Federal jury in August 1988 on racketeering charges brought against them by an investment company that had lost millions in the scheme.68

        At one point, fearing a government confiscation of their silver holdings, the Hunts “chartered three 707 jets from Texas to Chicago and New York—in the dead of night—and loaded them with forty million ounces of silver to be whisked away to Switzerland for safe keeping.”69 The U.S. Treasury’s deputy general counsel, George Wolfe, sent a letter to Swiss authorities in January 2002 asking for their help in investigating Mussalim. According to that letter, Mussalim “has been providing indirect investment services for al-Qaeda, investing funds for bin Laden, and making cash deliveries on request to the al-Qaeda organization,” and the letter went on to link Mussalim to Youssef Nada and the Al Taqwa Bank."
    • Ahmed Huber - a Swiss neo-Nazi
      • San Francisco Chronicle, "Swiss probe anti-U.S. neo-Nazi: Suspected financial ties to al Qaeda", 2002/03/12: "At the behest of President Bush, Swiss law authorities are investigating an alliance between Islamic militants and European neo-Nazis who have allegedly been providing financial support to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Experts say Islamic militants and far-right movements -- a coalition they call the Third Position -- share common hatreds: the United States and Jews. [...] The central figure in the probe is Ahmed Huber, a 74-year-old Swiss convert to Islam who says the "Zionist Israel lobby controls the U.S. government and mass media and shapes U.S. policy." Nada Management, the Bern company Huber helps direct, has been singled out publicly by President Bush. Huber, a gregarious and outspoken former journalist who spent three decades covering the Swiss Parliament for a socialist newspaper, is a strong supporter of Germany's neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) and such extreme-right politicians as France's Jean-Marie Le Pen. Huber serves on the board of directors of Nada Management. Founded by a Swiss Nazi and formerly known as al Taqwa Bank, the consulting and management firm is part of the international al Taqwa group, which the United States believes has long acted as a financial adviser to al Qaeda. [...] Buhrer also assailed Huber for denying the scope of the Nazi Holocaust and for being a faithful disciple of Francois Genoud, a Swiss lawyer who funded Hitler and served as a German agent during World War II. [...] Authorities believe Genoud founded al Taqwa Bank and allocated its resources to support international terrorists such as Vladimir Ilich Ramirez, alias Carlos the Jackal, and bin Laden."
      • Washington Post, "Unlikely Allies Bound by a Common Hatred", 2002/04/29: "A portrait of Adolf Hitler has long adorned the study of Ahmed Huber, a 74-year-old Swiss convert to Islam who lives outside this small capital city. After Sept. 11, he twinned the picture with one of Osama bin Laden. [...] For years, Huber has been barnstorming the far-right circuit, speaking to a European congress of neo-Nazi youth organizations and Germany's far-right National Democratic Party. He has taken the same message to Aryan youth meetings in the United States. And then there's his other identity. Huber works frequently with militant Islamic groups. He is a director of Nada Management, a Swiss company described by the U.S. Treasury Department as a financial adviser to bin Laden's terrorist network. He acknowledges having met al Qaeda operatives, but denies any financial role in the organization. In an interview here, Huber said his role is to build a bridge between radical Muslims and what he calls the New Right in Europe and the United States."
  • Wall Street criminals involved with the terrorists - links to the American mob and Russian mob
    • Ch.8 ("Al Qaeda, Iran, and Some Mafia-tied Agents of Economic Sabotage") of The Miscreants’ Global Bust-Out by Mark Mitchell (2011) (full book)
      • "Patrick concluded his presentation by saying that he believed that abusive short selling posed a risk to the stability of the financial system. And he said that he was filing a lawsuit against one miscreant short seller, a guy named David Rocker, who then ran a hedge fund called Rocker Partners, later renamed Copper River.

        Rocker was one of Michael Milken’s close associates. He previously worked for the Belzberg brothers – Sam and Hymie. The Belzbergs, who are also among Milken’s closest associates, had been key participants in the junk bond merry-go-round and bust out scams that Milken masterminded in the 1980s." - note that Michael Milken was a "disgraced financier" who attended a Mar-a-Lago event in February 2000 also attended by Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Jeffrey Epstein
      • "Of course, when the Belzberg’s ties to the Mafia were exposed, they expressed surprise that the people they had been dealing with for years were Mobsters. They had even dealt with Meyer Lansky, who was one of the most famous Mobsters in the world, without (according to the Belzbergs) knowing who Meyer Lansky was."
      • "Whatever the truth, Rocker subsequently went to work as a top trader for Michael Steinhardt’s hedge fund. Steinhardt has since admitted that his father was in the Mafia and that the Manhattan District Attorney called his father “the biggest Mafia fence in America.” But the Belzbergs must have been surprised to learn that, too." - note that Michael Steinhardt was a devoted Zionist who was a leader in the Mega Group (along with others like Jeffrey Epstein benefactor Les Wexner, Charles Bronfman, and Edgar Bronfman Sr.), a former chairman of the pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a friend of Marc Rich who lobbied Bill Clinton for his pardon, a partner with Conrad Black and others in the neoconservative New York Sun, and a board member of the strategic advisory board of Genie Energy
      • "This former spy announced that he had spent many years investigating Michael Milken and his friends, and he said that one key to understanding this network was a guy named Gene Phillips, who was deeply tied to the Mafia. He also said that Milken and his associates were holding secret meetings in Costa Rica, where they were planning the destruction of some big companies."
      • "In addition, the former spy said that he had confirmed that Kevin Ingram, the guy mentioned by Patrick Byrne – the guy tied to the Stinger missile deal — was working for the Milken network, and had mysterious ties to the Pakistani intelligence services."
      • "There was also something about a guy in Costa Rica. It seemed this guy in Costa Rica was hosting the secret Milken meetings, and there was a lot that was strange about this guy — he had ties to the Mafia, and jihadis, and he worked out of the same building as the Israeli embassy, and…"
      • "Kevin Ingram, the guy linked to the attempted Stinger missile deal, was at some of those meetings in Costa Rica. And he wasn’t just working for the Milken network, he was playing a key role in devising some of the schemes that the network would perpetrate against big companies and the mortgage markets."
      • "These people say that Ingram also helped devise the self-destruct CDO scam that I described at the outset of this story. As you will recall, “synthetic” CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) were designed by short sellers who made sure they contained the mortgages most likely to default. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has blamed these instruments for the 2007 collapse of the mortgage markets."
      • "As for those meetings in Costa Rica – well, there is much more I have to say about them, beginning with the fact that they were hosted by a man named Jonathan Curshen.

        Back in 2006, Curshen was one of Costa Rica’s more prominent residents, known for the large-scale money laundering and brokerage operation he ran out of a company called Red Sea Management. He was also known for the raucous parties that he held with other Costa Rica residents, including a man named Steve Cohen."
      • "Jonathan Curshen, the host of the meetings in Costa Rica, had a colorful cast of clients that included a number of shady characters from the Middle East, and people like James Arion, owner of a string of Canadian brothels, including Lady Godiva Escorts, Dangerous Curves, Cupid Escorts, and Sweet Dreams." - note that Curshen was also affiliated with Andy Badolato, a financial crook who was a partner of sorts to Steve Bannon
      • "Arion also ran a money laundering operation through the All Saints Greek Orthodox Church in Toronto while engaged in some kind of business with Jonathan Idema, an American mercenary who was convicted in 2004 for running a secret, private prison in Afghanistan and torturing Afghan citizens."
      • "So Idema is a bit of a mystery. But one thing is certain: Johnathan Curshen has ties to jihadis and the Russian Mafia. He famously led a group of investors that was going to buy an outfit called YBM Magnex right at the time in 1998 when government investigators in the United States and Canada had determined that YBM Magnex was controlled by Semion Mogilevich, the Russian Mafia boss who also stands accused of trying to sell highly enriched uranium to Al Qaeda."
      • "In addition to Mogilevich, Russsian Mobster Grigori Loutchansky (suspected of trafficking in nuclear weapons materials) was also tied to the Bank of New York scandal. Recall that others tied to the Bank of New York scandal included a number of Michael Milken’s closest associates, including Randolph Pace and Judah Wernick.

        In fact, Milken himself was tied to that scandal. And it was not just a Mafia money laundering scandal; it was one of the biggest market manipulation schemes in history, perpetrated with the full cooperation of the Russian government, in league with people — such as Marc Rich, Edmund Safra, and Abbas Gokal (the Pakistani intelligence agent) — who had close ties to the regime in Iran."
      • "In a subsequent meeting at a luxury hotel in a different Central American location, Curshen hinted to the Deep Capture man that he had also laundered money for Colombian drug cartels.

        This was unsurprising, because in 2006, at the time when Curshen was hosting the Milken meetings, counter-narcotics officers searched a DC-9 airplane at a remote Mexican airport and found that it was loaded with more than 5 tons of cocaine. And the plane was tied either to Curshen or Curshen’s clients, or both."
      • "Later, the plane was registered in the name of Genesis Aviation, which was incorporated by Curshen’s Red Sea client Ramy El Batrawi.

        At the same time, El Batrawi was running a company called GenesisIntermedia that was controlled by another Curshen associate, the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khasshogi, who was a key figure in various BCCI scandals, including Capcom, the Saudi intelligence operation that traded through Michael Milken’s Drexel Burnham in the 1980s." - note that at Drexel Burnham Lambert, Milken's right-hand man was Leon Black (a noted Jeffrey Epstein associate) who founded Apollo Global Management
      • "On September 10, 2001, a famous short seller named Anthony Elgindy, also known as Amr Ibrahim Elgindy, liquidated some accounts that he held at Salomon Smith Barney. In explaining to his broker why he was liquidating these accounts, Elgindy said that a major event was going to occur on the next day that would cause the Dow Jones market average to fall to 3,000 (it was then trading at 9,600)."
      • "The FBI proceeded to investigate, and key to its investigation was evidence that had been compiled by the man who would later go undercover to befriend Jonathan Curshen in Costa Rica. This man knew that Curshen and Elgindy were close associates and had often joined together to perpetrate manipulative short selling attacks on public companies."
      • "As evidence, the prosecutors noted that Elgindy had delivered large sums of money to Mercy International, a “charity” that appeared to be an Al Qaeda front. Elgindy’s defense council argued that Elgindy had not given money to Mercy International, but rather to Mercy USA, which was somehow different."
      • "And as Elgindy probably knew, Mercy USA’s director, Mohammad Mabrook, was, among other distinctions, the president of Global Chemical, the bomb-making factory set up by hedge fund manager Yasin al-Qadi, who was later labeled by the U.S. government as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” because of his ties to so many other Al Qaeda fronts."
      • "As of 2001, Elgindy and a small pack of affiliated market manipulators were trading through just a few remarkable and eminently criminal brokerages. One of these brokerages was called Global Securities."
      • "Then there was Global Securities client Mansur Ijaz, who has close ties to Iran and is a paid lobbyist for the Pakistani government. Ijaz has publicly claimed to have had direct contact with Osama bin Laden.

        Shortly before the September 11 attacks, Ijaz founded Crescent Investment Management with James Abrahamson, who was a board member of an anti-terrorism and security company called Stratesec.

        The FBI investigated a Stratesec director who was suspected of having advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks because he was tied to Mansur Ijaz, and he purchased a large number of Stratesec shares shortly before the attacks occurred. However, no charges were filed."
      • "Felix Sater’s market manipulation network was, as we shall see, tied in with the larger Bank of New York scandal. Meanwhile, Felix was among a closely affiliated pack of market manipulators who were, back in 2001, trading through Global Securities."
      • "Felix Sater’s other Bayrock partner is Leon Black’s Apollo fund. Maybe it’s also worth recalling at this point Leon Black’s importance to Credit Suisse, the investment bank that was caught financing Iran’s nuclear program while helping Libya, Sudan (and also the above-mentioned Iranian espionage outfit, the Assa Corporation, according to initial findings by a former staffer of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office) conduct securities transactions — probably manipulative trading — through a network of other brokerages." - note that Leon Black was close to Jeffrey Epstein
      • "After Abbas Gokal (who, we know, was an agent for the Pakistani ISI) served his prison sentence for his role in the BCCI affair, he moved to Tehran, where he is now once again serving as financial advisor to the Iranian regime."
  • Khalid Sheikh Mohammed background
    • Peter Dale Scott, "9/11's Trainer in Terrorism Was an FBI Informant", 2006/10/27: "Last month Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, told an Australian newspaper that ''In 1996, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [the al-Qaeda mastermind of the 9/11 plot] was in Doha [the capital of Qatar], the CIA found out about it, and wanted to arrest him and people in Washington stopped them. That has never been answered in the 9/11 commission report, why that arrest was stopped."(26)"
    • TIME, "Why KSM's Confession Rings False", 2007/03/15: "KSM has also not offered evidence of state support to al-Qaeda, though there is good evidence there was, even at a low level. KSM himself was harbored by a member of Qatar's royal family after he was indicted in the U.S. for the Bojinka plot — a plan to bomb twelve American airplanes over the Pacific. KSM and al-Qaeda also received aid from supporters in Pakistan, quite possibly from sympathizers in the Pakistani intelligence service. KSM provides no details that would suggest we are getting the full story from him."
  • 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirators
    • Tom Secker, "The 1993 World Trade Center Bombing: Decoys, Aliases and NeoConspiracy Theories", 2013/02/25
      • "The CIA has remained tight-lipped about their involvement in Al-Kifah but given the timing of its development, its location and the fact that their agents posing as consular officials arranged the visas that allowed the Blind Sheikh to enter the US, it is obvious that they were at the least happy about Rahman’s growing influence there. In April and May 1989 US officials secretly met with followers of the Blind Sheikh in Egypt, including a lawyer representing the group. The cables recording these meetings were signed by Frank Wisner — the US ambassador to Egypt and the son of the veteran of CIA black ops. A year later the Blind Sheikh moved to New York permanently" - note that Frank Wisner was the AIG contact for Viktor Kozeny
      • "In reality, Salem was fired by the FBI in bizarre circumstances in the summer of 1992. He didn’t build the bomb – terrorists do not build a bomb and then wait around for six months before using it. Exactly why Salem was fired is not clear, but when his original handler Nancy Floyd started asking questions the FBI leaked stories to the press that she was sleeping with Salem and ultimately subjected her to a career-damaging internal affairs investigation. As a result, six months before the bombing the FBI lost their eyes and ears inside the Blind Sheikh’s group."
      • "According to the official story, and his own extended confession, and much of the evidence, the real bomb-maker was Ramzi Yousef, born Abdul Basit but also known as Dr Paul Vijay, Dr Adel Sabah, Muhammud Azan, Rashid Rashid, Kamal Ibraham among many other pseudonyms. Ramzi arrived in New York in September 1992, following six months training in Afghanistan in explosives. He conveniently turned up just after Emad Salem had been removed from watching the Al-Kifah. Trained in Britain in electrical engineering, Yousef was smart and capable and found in the Al-Kifah a willing reception committee for his plan to blow up something in New York."
      • "For another, who was Ramzi Yousef? This international man of mystery was certainly not particularly religious, and enjoyed B-girls and brothels on his travels around the world. He may well have been trained by Ali Mohamed, who according to multiple testimonies from trainees was in the same area of Afghanistan as Yousef for much of 1992. When Yousef left New York on the evening of the WTC bombing he spent the next two years on the run from the FBI, travelling all over Asia carrying out various acts of terrorism before being brought to ground in February 1995. How did he manage this?

        It appears he had help from the ISI. Simon Reeve’s remarkably prescient and accurate book The New Jackals, based on an extraordinary degree of access to the security services around the case only a year or two after Yousef had been convicted, records several instances of this. When Yousef landed in Pakistan in May 1992 his fake Iraqi passport had the wrong seal on the visa, and yet he was waived through. Similarly, when he and Ahmed Ajaj first entered the US on badly faked passports, Ajaj was arrested but Yousef was not, despite it being clear they were travelling together. When Yousef’s Pakistani immigration records were checked as part of the WTC investigation, much of the paperwork had disappeared. The implication is that someone was clearing a path for him."
    • Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman background - was financed by Dr. Magdy el-Amir who was part of the ISI-linked weapons deals that Randy Glass spied on, as described above
      • Village Voice, "THE CIA AND THE SHEIK" by Robert I. Friedman, 1993/03/30
        • "The FBI operative, Mamdouh Zaki Zakhary, monitored the radical activities at the El Salaam Mosque in Jersey City, which was the headquarters of the terrorist cell that allegedly planned and carried our the of the World Trade Center on February 26. [...] During this time, he watched the first two men arrested in connection with the bombing. Mohammed Salameh and Ibraham Elgabrowny, as well as the spiritual leader who may have inspired them, the fiery blind fundamentalist cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is infamous throughout the Arab world for his alleged role in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat."
        • "Shortly after police arrested [core El Salaam Mosque member El Sayyid] Nosair they found startling evidence that the [Rabbi Meir] Kahane killing was just the first in a planned spree. Scrawled on a bank calendar in Nosair's home was a "hit list" that included the names of a U.S. representative, two federal judges, and a former assistant U.S. Attorney. Local police searching Nosair's Cliffside Park, New Jersey, home discovered a trove of terrorist paraphernalia: bombmaking manuals, AK-47 cartridges, a stolen New York State license plate, and a bullet-riddled target board. There were also a number of passports and driver's licenses under various names, as well as articles about the assassination of Anwar Sadat.

          But despite Zakhary's reports, Nosair's hit list, and the suspicious cache at his home, the authorities seemed to be downplaying all signs of a terrorist conspiracy. Within 12 hours of the shooting, New York City chief of detectives Joseph Borrelli declared the Kahane assassination was the work of a "lone gunman." Borrelli added, '"There was nothing found [at Nosair's house] that would stir your imagination.""
        • ""Why aren't we going after the sheikh [Abdel Rahman]?" demanded the undercover man.

          "It's hands-off," answered the agent.

          "Why?" asked the operative.

          "It was no accident that the sheikh got a visa and that he's still in the country," replied the agent, visibly upset. "He's here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA [National Security Agency], and the CIA." The agent pointed out that the sheikh had been granted a tourist visa, and later a green card, despite the fact that he was on a State Department terrorist watch-list that should have barred him from the country. He's an untouchable, concluded the agent. "I haven't seen the lone-gunman theory advocated [so forcefully] since John F. Kennedy.""
        • "Sheikh Abdel Rahman left Egypt in 1990, in the wake of a series of bloody clashes between his militant fundamentalist group, Al Gamaat al Islamia, and the secular Egyptian government. The sheikh traveled to Pakistan, where he met with representatives of the Afghan mujahedeen, who were providing training for his underground terrorist group in Egypt, the very same mujahedeen who were receiving financial aid and training from the CIA in the war to rid Afghanistan of the Soviet Army. Even after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in February 1989, the U.S. and the Saudis continued to aid the mujahedeen through Pakistan until December 1990, in an attempt to topple the Afghan government.

          According to a very high-ranking Egyptian official, when the sheikh moved to Brooklyn in May 1990, he worked closely with the CIA, helping to channel a steady flow of money, men, and guns to mujahedeen bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The camps became a mecca for disaffected youth from across the Muslim world."
        • "After brief stays in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, the sheikh slipped into Pakistan, where he forged operational links with mujahedeen strongman Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the head of a radical Afghan Islamic fundamentalist army that was being covertly backed by the CIA. According to Stephen Van Evera, an affiliate of Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs, Hekmatyar "strongly chastised the United States and its 'immoral' society, even while Washington lavished him with aid." In Hekmatyar's guerrilla training camps, American advisers taught everything from using explosives to shooting down enemy planes with shoulder-held Stinger missiles."
        • "In 1991, a year and a half after he began to work for the FBI, Zakhary reported to his handler that he had overheard a plot to assassinate the two U.S. senators from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alfonse D'Amato. When incredulous FBI agents hooked him up to a lie detector, Zakhary failed the test. He blames the result on prescription medication he was taking at the time because of an automobile accident. The FBI did not believe him and terminated his employment."
        • "The authorities are just now reopening the Kahane investigation. It is possible that Nosair will be tried in federal court for violating Kahane's civil rights, much as the police in the Rodney King case are now being tried. A new investigation may find that the bombers of the World Trade Center were also Kahane's killers. The connections seem strong. Both Elgabrowny and Salameh visited Nosair in Attica. And federal agents found forged Nicaraguan passports made out to Nosair and his family in Elgabrowny's Brooklyn brownstone. Attica officials are currently investigating whether an escape was being planned.

          Another suspect in the case, Mahmud Abouhalima, a New York City taxi driver and an associate of both Nosair and Salameh, fled the U.S., reportedly for Egypt. Investigators believe he may now be in Pakistan, where he had trained with the mujahedeen and later fought in the Afghan war. [...]"
      • Chicago Tribune, "SLAIN MUSLIM HAD LINK TO RADICAL CLERIC", 1993/07/11: "Death, Mustafa Shalabi believed, was close at hand. He slept with a knife and pistol. He grew quiet, protective, obsessed with his dawa, the internal call to devote himself to Islam. He had sold his household goods and in March 1991 was three days away from leaving for Afghanistan-where Muslims were fighting to establish an Islamic state-when he was brutally murdered in his Brooklyn home. [...] Shalabi's work for the last few years before his death also raises questions about the U.S. government's relationship with fundamentalist Muslims like Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the fiery cleric who entered the U.S. in July 1990 although his name was on a government watch list of suspected terrorists. A successful electrical contractor who had become an increasingly devout Muslim, Shalabi sponsored the sheik when he arrived in the U.S. from Sudan. [...] Shalabi took the blind sheik into his house, gave him a part-time driver and helped set him up in a Brooklyn apartment. He also made him a part of his effort to support the mujahedeen, or holy warriors, in Afghanistan. [...] Soon after arriving, the sheik allegedly wanted to take over the jihad office and channel the funds it raised to his supporters in Egypt. "Mustafa refused," recalled Kallash, who said he tried to negotiate an agreement with the sheik. [...] Nefissa Ayad, an Egyptian lawyer who was divorced from Shalabi several years earlier, told Sawt al-Salam she was surprised that her former husband was killed in a galabiya, a casual robe. He rarely welcomed strangers to his house, she said, and never wearing a galabiya."
    • Ramzi Yousef background - was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
    • Mohammed Salameh background
      • Jerusalem Post, "'Sharon was Kahane killer's target'", 2010/08/15: "[Nosair] added that on the night he shot Kahane dead, he was accompanied by two co-conspirators to the Marriot Hotel in Manhattan where Kahane was speaking – one of whom was also carrying a gun. The men, Bilal al-Kaisi of Jordan and Mohammed Salameh, a Palestinian illegal alien later involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, have never been charged for their part in the slaying."
    • Mahmud Abouhalima background
      • New York Times, "U.S. Sees Brooklyn Link to World Terror Network", 1998/10/22: "The accused bomber told prosecutors that he had twice turned to a Texas acquaintance named Wadih el Hage to buy weapons for his Brooklyn associates. [...] Alkifah Center, in those years, was a neighborhood hub. It started out as a desk in Al Farooq Mosque around 1986 [...] The center was set up by Mustafa Shalabi, an Egyptian immigrant. [...] One of those who answered the call to fight in Afghanistan was Mahmud Abouhalima, who was active in militant Islamic movements in his native Egypt before moving to West Germany in 1981 and to New York four years later. Mr. Abouhalima would later become a well-known figure in New York as one of the men accused in the World Trade Center bombing. [...] In his 1993 statement to investigators, Mr. Abouhalima made no mention of Mr. bin Laden, although Mr. bin Laden is known to have worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the war years distributing official Saudi aid money for the mujahedeen. [...] With the arrival in Brooklyn in 1990 of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who was later convicted of conspiring to blow up New York landmarks, Mr. Abouhalima said, the regulars at Alkifah began to quarrel over money, political direction and leadership. It was around that time that Mr. Abouhalima said he had first met Mr. el Hage, a Lebanese-born naturalized American citizen, at an Islamic conference in Oklahoma City. [...] Mr. Abouhalima, who told investigators that he had been in charge of protecting Sheik Abdel Rahman during the cleric's stay in the United States, told investigators that he had gone at least twice to Mr. el Hage to buy guns. [...] Prosecutors say that by 1994, Mr. el Hage moved his wife and children to Sudan, where neighbors said they knew him as the director of Africa Help, a private aid organization. But the Government said he was the private secretary to Mr. bin Laden, who by then had relocated from Afghanistan to Sudan."
      • Tablet Magazine, "First Blood" by Peter Lance, 2010/09/01: "On four successive weekends in July 1989 (according to trial testimony), agents from the FBI’s Special Operations Group followed a group of “ME’s”—FBI-speak for “Middle Eastern Men”—from the al Farooq Mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to the Calverton shooting range, a large outdoor sand pit located at the end of Long Island.

        Firing a series of weapons, including AK-47s and hand guns, the “ME’s” at the Calverton range included Nosair, then a 34-year-old janitor from Port Said, Egypt, who reportedly popped Prozac and worked in the basement of the Civil Courthouse on Centre Street in Manhattan; Mahmoud Abouhalima, aka “The Red,” a 6-foot-2-inch Egyptian cab and limo driver; Mohammed Salameh, a diminutive Palestinian; and Nidal Ayyad, a Kuwaiti who had graduated from Rutgers University. According to interviews with former FBI agent Jack Cloonan, each of them had been instructed by Ali Aboelseoud Mohamed, an ex-Egyptian Army commando from the unit that assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981."
    • FBI informant Emad Salem - was inexplicably provided real bombs by his handlers
  • 1995 Oklahoma City bombing conspirators - possibly involved or possibly set up as patsies, but either way, almost certainly part of US intelligence's choreography of the OKC bombing
    • LA Weekly, "The Terrorist Motel" by Jim Crogan, 2002/07/24: "What happened at the nondescript roadside motel outside Oklahoma City was just a fleeting encounter during the twisted cross-country odyssey of the terrorists who would carry out the September 11 attacks. Mohamed Atta, alleged leader of the plot, and two companions wanted to rent a room, but couldn’t get the deal they wanted, so they left. It was an incident of no particular importance, except for one thing. The owner of the motel remembers Atta being in the company of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called ”20th hijacker,“ who was arrested prior to September 11 [...] After the attacks, said the motel owner, he recognized his visitors in photos from television reports. ”I was really stunned,“ he said. Then he decided to call the FBI hot line. [...] In the interim, he also spoke to a former law-enforcement officer who was investigating reported sightings of Mujahid Abdulquaadir Menepta at the same motel during the mid-1990s. Menepta, reportedly a friend of Moussaoui’s, was arrested 30 years ago in Colorado for aggravated robbery and served more than three years in prison. [...] A former desk clerk at the motel — a different clerk from the one who purportedly dealt with Atta and Moussaoui — told the Weekly that he remembered Menepta because in 1994 and 1995 — prior to the Oklahoma City attack — Menepta frequently visited the motel office. There, he bought coffee and talked for hours to this clerk. [...] One reason for the FBI‘s apparent lack of interest might be this motel’s alleged connection to Timothy McVeigh and a group of Iraqis who worked in Oklahoma City. According to the motel owner and other witnesses and investigators interviewed by the Weekly, McVeigh and several of these Iraqis were motel guests in the months preceding the 1995 bombing. Witnesses also claimed they saw several of the Iraqis moving barrels of material around on the bed of a truck. [...] Former Oklahoma City TV reporter Jayna Davis also interviewed motel staff and former guests. In the process, she collected signed affidavits about their contacts with McVeigh and the Iraqis. She tried twice to give the Bureau this information, but the FBI refused to accept her materials."
    • LA Weekly, "An Oklahoma Mystery" by Jim Crogan, 2002/07/24: "[JAYNA] DAVIS, THE FORMER TV REPORTER FOR KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City, began investigating the bombing the day after the attack. In seven years, she's accumulated 26 affidavits and more than 100 hours of taped interviews. In particular, she zeroed in on a group of Iraqis who worked for Samir Khalil, a Palestinian-born businessman and owner of a property-management company in Oklahoma City. Davis also did pieces on John Doe No. 2, the mysterious figure identified in initial police bulletins as having been seen fleeing the federal building after the bombing. The FBI later announced that John Doe No. 2 never existed. One of the Iraqis, Hussain Alhussaini, later came forward and identified himself as the person being fingered in Davis' television reports as John Doe No. 2. He sued the reporter for defamation. A federal judge dismissed the suit; Alhussaini has appealed. [...] Davis also turned up material that appeared to connect Nichols to Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad. Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, is now serving a life sentence in federal prison. He also had hatched unrealized plans to blow up 12 airliners and to assassinate Pope John Paul II. Murad, a confederate of Yousef, is also in federal custody. He told Philippine police about a plot to hijack an airliner and crash it into CIA headquarters. Murad also claimed in 1996 that a large number of Middle Eastern men were being trained at U.S. flight schools in connection with these plots. This information was passed on to the FBI. [...] An analysis of raw news footage and reports in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, Okla., shows local television reporters stating repeatedly that two additional, sophisticated, undetonated explosive devices were found by investigators on the scene."
    • Patrick Briley, "Did HW Bush, Clinton Officials Orchestrate OKC Bombing?", 2005/09/30: "Melvin Lattimore was with McVeigh’s car and two other FBI provocateurs, James Rosencrans and Sean Kenny, at the OKC Travelers Aid adjacent to the bombed Murrah federal building one day before the OKC bombing. 6 FBI agents spent 9 months browbeating 4 witnesses at the Travelers Aid trying to make them change their story about seeing Lattimore at the Travelers Aid. Lattimore was also seen in OKC with the provocateur Al Hussain Hussaini. Retired Air Force General Benton K. Partin informed AG Ashcroft in August 2001 of the Travelers Aid story in writing and in person. Yet intentionally nothing was done by Ashcroft about Lattimore. Lattimore was the roommate of the 20th 9/11 hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui while he attended the Airman flight school in Norman Oklahoma in 2000 and 2001."
  • Radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki
    • CBS, "Qaeda-Linked Imam Dined at Pentagon after 9/11", 2010/10/21: "Anwar al-Awlaki - the radical spiritual leader linked to several 9/11 attackers, the Fort Hood shooting, and the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an airliner - was a guest at the Pentagon in the months after 9/11, a Pentagon official confirmed to CBS News. Awlaki was invited as "...part of an informal outreach program" in which officials sought contact "...with leading members of the Muslim community," the official said. At that time, Awlaki was widely viewed as a "moderate" imam at a mosque in Northern Virginia."
    • New York Times, "Inside Al Qaeda’s Plot to Blow Up an American Airliner", 2017/02/22 - note that the 2009 "Underwear Bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was, according to witness Kurt Haskell, supervised and let through security by a US intelligence officer, and according to Cliff Arnebeck, this intelligence officer was likely the CIA agent who dated Beverly Campbell and worked for Karl Rove's election fraud operation
      • "Mr. Awlaki, an American-born cleric who had become a leading propagandist for Al Qaeda, told the man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, that “the attack should occur on board a U.S. airliner,” according to the account Mr. Abdulmutallab gave the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
      • "Mr. Awlaki, whom everyone at the Qaeda training camp called “sheikh” out of respect for him as a religious leader, spoke at length with the Nigerian, then 23 and the son of a wealthy banker, about what he saw as the religious obligation of jihad. He put the younger man up at his house in the province of Shabwah, where Al Qaeda had a large presence, and introduced him to other Qaeda trainers and bomb makers, Mr. Abdulmutallab told the F.B.I."
      • "He advised Mr. Abdulmutallab to blur his trail by traveling from Yemen to an African country before booking the flight on which he intended to detonate his bomb. The choices of exact destination and timing were left up to Mr. Abdulmutallab, who said Detroit and Dec. 25 were random decisions dictated by ticket prices and flight schedules.

        Mr. Awlaki offered a final reminder: “Wait until you are in the U.S., then bring the plane down.”"
      • "When the agents asked whether, in retrospect, Mr. Awlaki’s documented patronage of prostitutes disturbed him, he demurred. It might be false slander, he said. If not, then Mr. Awlaki “could repent for those sins and his commitment to jihad would outweigh such transgressions,” Mr. Abdulmutallab said."
  • Grover Norquist involvement with Islamist groups
    • New Republic, "Fevered Pitch", 2001/11/12: "As president of Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist is best known for his tireless crusades against big government. But one of Norquist’s lesser-known projects over the last few years has been bringing American Muslims into the Republican Party. [...] NORQUIST HAS NOT undertaken this crusade alone. In the mid-1990s, he enlisted a partner, Khaled Saffuri, then working as a lobbyist and deputy director for the American Muslim Council (AMC). [...] In 1998 he left the AMC to help Norquist found the Islamic Institute, an advocacy organization dedicated to promoting a conservative agenda that would appeal to Muslims. Saffuri served as executive director and Norquist as chairman of the board. The Institute operated out of the headquarters of Americans for Tax Reform, from which it borrowed not just a fax machine and conference room, but an agenda. Soon the Institute was shilling for all of Norquist’s pet issues—a moratorium on Internet taxation, fast-track trade negotiation authority, and personal savings accounts. [...] Through the Islamic Institute, Norquist appears to have developed close relationships with a number of Muslim leaders. [...] Last year at its annual dinner, the AMC presented Norquist with an award for his service."
  • Murder of Yale University student Suzanne Jovin - was doing a senior thesis on Osama bin-Laden in 1998
    • Vanity Fair, "A Murder at Yale", 1998/08
      • "Van de Velde majored in political science at Yale. He sang in the university’s well-known Russian chorus his freshman year and twice traveled to Asia on internships. He was a serious student who graduated with honors. After Yale, Van de Velde went to Boston to Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, from which, in 1987, he received his Ph.D. in international-security studies. In 1988 he was selected for a prestigious Presidential Management Internship and was assigned to work at the Pentagon and at the State Department, where he stayed for four years, working on U.S.-Soviet disarmament issues.

        In 1988, Van de Velde also joined the U.S. Naval Intelligence Reserves, in which he still holds the rank of lieutenant commander, with a “Top Secret” clearance. Trained in intelligence work, he was assigned to Singapore, Brussels, and Panama, where he analyzed the drug trade out of Latin America. In 1993, after Bill Clinton defeated George Bush, Van de Velde, who was a political appointee and a Republican, left the State Department. That fall he was back at Yale as the dean of Saybrook College."
      • "“He had this aura about him because we’d heard that he worked for the C.I.A.,” another woman recalls. “He said he’d studied handwriting analysis, and he would do it for us in the dining hall,” says another. Michael Ranis, who went to high school and to Yale with Van de Velde, says that his friend really enjoyed being a dean. “He liked the students a lot, the idea of being there for them,” Ranis says. “He was shy and awkward socially, but he really tried. He wanted to do everything right,” says one woman."
      • "Van de Velde took a leave of absence from the dean’s job, early in 1997, to go to Italy on assignment for naval intelligence. He came back that April to complete the semester, and then left Yale to go to Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center as its executive director. In May 1998, nine months into a five-year contract, he resigned and returned to New Haven. Van de Velde, a friend says, had been miserable in California. “There were older professors who came [to work] in shorts. Jim wears suits and ties every day,” she says. “It did not click with anyone. He didn’t have a social life. He wasn’t happy.”"
      • "Jovin, friends say, began the semester like many students, enthralled with Van de Velde. Indeed, she was impressed enough that she decided to do her senior essay with him as her adviser—actually, she had taken the unusual step of writing two senior essays, the other in international studies. She chose a subject in Van de Velde’s area of expertise: the international terrorist Osama bin Laden, who is believed to have masterminded the bombing of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Van de Velde appeared equally taken with Jovin. “I think he liked Suzanne’s enthusiasm. It was flattering that a student would be so deeply involved in his topic,” says a student who was in the class."
      • "The initial speculation by the police was that Van de Velde and Jovin were having an affair that went horribly wrong. Although they pursued that theory aggressively in the first weeks after the murder, they seem to have found no evidence of a romantic relationship. Jovin was happy with Roman Caudillo, her friends and parents say, insisting that she never so much as hinted to anyone that she was involved with Van de Velde. For his part, Van de Velde seemed to be in search of a relationship, not in the throes of one. “He really wanted to meet someone,” says a friend."
      • "If the police found no evidence of a romance, they did, however, learn something else. By November, it appears, the professional relationship between Van de Velde and Jovin had broken down almost completely. Although Van de Velde had written her a glowing recommendation for graduate school in late October, Jovin began to feel that he had no time for her. According to a friend of Jovin’s, she had tried repeatedly to meet with Van de Velde about her senior essay and had felt that she was rebuffed. In the weeks before she died, says this friend, “she complained bitterly about a bunch of things in that class, and especially his lack of support for her project. He had shown no interest in her work.” For a college-thesis adviser basically to check out on a student trying to get feedback on her senior essay would be unusual in any case. But for Van de Velde—a devoted teacher noted for his availability, who would take his students to lunch to help them with their work, and who answered their E-mails within minutes—it would have been downright bizarre."
      • "Sometime on the afternoon of December 4—Van de Velde believes it was either between 4 and 4:30, or around 1—Jovin stopped by Van de Velde’s office on Prospect Street to drop off a new draft. She attached a cordial, handwritten note outlining her changes and thanking him. “Feel free to e-mail me over the weekend if you have questions or run into any major problems,” she wrote, and signed it “Suzanne.”"
      • "But what the police do know is that one person who watched the news that night phoned them, stunned at what she saw. The woman who had seen Jovin walking on College Street at around 9:25 on the night of the stabbing saw Van de Velde on television and started shaking. “I got chills,” she says. “I didn’t know Van de Velde. I go home and turn on the news and I see him. This guy, talking to reporters, he was blond, with glasses. I could not believe what I saw. I went back to my notes and saw the description I wrote, that I saw a blond man with glasses.” The man she claims she saw walking behind Jovin near Phelps Gate the night of the murder so closely resembled Van de Velde’s image on television that she believes it was he."
    • Killtown, "Yale student's '98 murder linked to 9/11?", 2007/01/16: "What had Suzanne written on her thesis? She handed her new thesis draft about Osama bin Laden to her Navy Intelligence thesis advisor with very high top security Pentagon clearance and an expert on drug trafficking and Bin Laden and less than seven hours later, she winds up being stabbed 17 times by someone the police said she knew and drove her to the scene four days before her thesis was due and after she had been complaining about Van de Velde’s lack of support with her thesis, yet he had written her a glowing recommendation for graduate school in late October."
    • American Spectator, "A Yale Murder", 2006/06/19: "He was one of few faculty members we talked about in any depth, because here was a guy with a Mysterious Past who did who knows what for The Government in exotic places like Panama. We speculated on whether he was the CIA’s talent scout, the guy who could put you in touch with Langley if that appealed to you."
    • Possible inspiration for Jovin's paper: MSNBC, "Bin Laden comes home to roost", 1998/08/24: "As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow’s invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war. What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation."

Hijackers

  • Saudi Arabian backing
    • CBC documentary by Bob McKeown about the Saudi relationship with the Bush family and the hijackers - includes material on Jim Bath and Arbusto Energy
    • Russ Baker, "Saudi Royal Ties to 9/11 Hijackers Via Florida Saudi Family?", 2011/09/22
    • Kevin Ryan, "Saudi Ties to 9/11 Mean U.S. Ties to 9/11", 2015/09/27
    • Kevin Ryan, "Five Revelations From the 9/11 Joint Inquiry’s 28 Pages", 2016/07/16 - implicates SAIC
    • Larisa Alexandrovna, "The “28 Pages” Explained", 2016/07/19 - explanation of the "28 pages", revealing high-level Saudi support for the hijackers
    • Omar al-Bayoumi - a likely Saudi intelligence agent who handled the two San Diego hijackers that later moved in with FBI informant Abdussattar Shaikh
      • Newsweek, "Bin Laden's Invisible Network", 2001/10/28: "He is a shadowy figure, lurking on the edges of the Sept. 11 attack. Federal investigators know that Omar al-Bayoumi helped pay the rent for two of the American Airlines Flight 77 hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, on their apartment in San Diego. The Feds also know that al-Bayoumi is well educated and ambitious. In completing an application for admission to a doctoral program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, al-Bayoumi listed himself as "assistant to the director of finance" at Dallah AVCO, an aviation-services company based in Saudi Arabia. The FBI is investigating possible ties between Dallah AVCO and Al Qaeda terror network. Asked about these ties by NEWSWEEK, Dallah AVCO's owner, Saudi billionaire Saleh Abdullah Kamel, responded, "This is not true at all." [...] (Arrested but released by Scotland Yard, al-Bayoumi is now living in England, where he remains under investigation by U.S. and British authorities.)"
      • CBS, "Saudi Spy Link To Al Qaeda Or 911?", 2003/08/03: "The report also notes al-Bayoumi worked with a Saudi government aviation official whose son's picture was found on a computer disk along with pictures of many of the 19 hijackers, most of whom came from Saudi Arabia. FBI officials questioned the son last year. Congressional officials question in the report the nature of the work al-Bayoumi did for his Saudi pay and why money to him spiked when he was befriending the hijackers, according to officials who have seen it. [...] Another connection for U.S. authorities is a Saudi businessman named Saleh Abdullah Kamel, who heads Dallah al-Baraka Group (DBG). Al-Jubeir said al-Bayoumi once worked for Dallah Avco, a DBG company involved with the Saudi government's aviation department. That department is overseen by Prince Sultan, the father of the princess in Washington and another member of the royal family."
      • San Diego Magazine, "Terror Two Years After", 2003/09 (pages 1, 2, 3): "Al-Bayoumi visited the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles. Law enforcement officials believe he had a closed-door meeting with Fahad al Thumairy, a member of the consulate’s Islamic & Culture Affairs Section who later was barred from entry to the United States because of alleged links to terrorism. After meeting with al Thumairy, Al-Bayoumi met the hijackers in Los Angeles, then brought them to San Diego, arranged for them to live at the Parkwood Apartments in Clairemont (near the Islamic Center of San Diego) and reportedly paid $1,550 for the first two months’ rent. Al-Bayoumi—who, with others here, helped Alhazmi and Almihdhar open a bank account, obtain car insurance, get Social Security cards and call flight schools in Florida—also threw a welcoming party for the hijackers, during which he introduced them to the local Muslim community. Rarely appearing at the Kurd mosque where Al-Habeeb had positioned him, Al-Bayoumi was widely suspected by Muslims here to be a Saudi government agent —long before 9/11. “He was always checking on the young Saudi students,” says Henry Bagadan, a Pakistani businessman who worships at the Islamic Center. “I always thought he was a Saudi spy.”"
      • Talking Points Memo, "Jack and Saleh" by Kate Cambor, 2005/08/16: "You might remember that Omar al-Bayoumi, who befriended and provided money to two of the 9/11 hijackers, was once an assistant to the Director of Finance for Dallah Avco, a DBG company that works with the Saudi aviation authority."
      • Saleh Abdullah Kamel - owned the company from which al-Bayoumi received payments; was a client of Jack Abramoff
        • CBS, "Saudi Spy Link To Al Qaeda Or 911?", 2003/08/03: "[Saleh Abdullah] Kamel has been sued by families of some of the Sept. 11 victims who allege Saudi support for terrorism. The families allege his name appeared in a late 1980s document recovered in Bosnia identifying potential financial support for bin Laden's mujahadeen fighters when bin Laden was still a U.S. ally fighting Soviet occupation of Afghanistan."
        • Talking Points Memo, "Jack and Saleh" by Kate Cambor, 2005/08/16: "As the Washington Post reported on Friday, in the first nine months of 2002, Abramoff collected $12.2 million in fees from Indian tribes and additional sums from the General Council for Islamic Banks and other clients while working for Greenberg Traurig. [...] Abramoff's job was to spread the word about Islamic banking practices and to refute claims that Islamic banks sheltered money used for terrorist networks. And if anyone needed a good PR man, it was the chairman of the General Council for Islamic Banks, a Saudi businessman named Saleh Abdullah Kamel estimated to be worth in the neighborhood of $ 2.6 billion, who was quickly the subject of intense government scrutiny over his possible ties to terrorist activity."
    • Abu Zubaydah - there is controversy over how many of his claims were extracted through torture
      • TIME, "Confessions of a Terrorist", 2003/08/31: "By March 2002, the terrorist called Abu Zubaydah was one of the most wanted men on earth. A leading member of Osama bin Laden's brain trust, he is thought to have been in operational control of al-Qaeda's millennium bomb plots as well as the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. [...] Seventeen months ago, the U.S. finally grabbed� Zubaydah in Pakistan and has kept him locked up in a secret location ever since. [...] [Why America Slept,] A new book by Gerald Posner says Zubaydah has made startling revelations about secret connections linking Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and bin Laden. [...] When questioning stalled, according to Posner, cia men flew Zubaydah to an Afghan complex fitted out as a fake Saudi jail chamber, where "two Arab-Americans, now with Special Forces," pretending to be Saudi inquisitors, used drugs and threats to scare him into more confessions. Yet when Zubaydah was confronted by the false Saudis, writes Posner, "his reaction was not fear, but utter relief." Happy to see them, he reeled off telephone numbers for a senior member of the royal family who would, said Zubaydah, "tell you what to do." The man at the other end would be Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a Westernized nephew of King Fahd's and a publisher better known as a racehorse� owner. [...] To the amazement of the U.S., the numbers proved valid. [...] Zubaydah, writes Posner, said the Saudi connection ran through Prince Turki al-Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, the kingdom's longtime intelligence chief. [...] Those three Saudi princes all perished within days of one another. On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed was felled by a heart attack at age 43. One day later Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, 41, was killed in what was called a high-speed car accident. The last member of the trio, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, officially "died of thirst" while traveling east of Riyadh one week later."
      • USA Today, "Declassified 9/11 pages show ties to former Saudi ambassador", 2016/07/15: "A telephone number found in the phone book of al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002, was for an Aspen, Colo., corporation that managed the "affairs of the Colorado residence of the Saudi Ambassador Bandar," the documents show."
      • CNN, "Prince and the '28 pages': Indirect 9/11 link to Saudi royal revealed", 2016/08/05: "The connection to Bandar was made through Zubaydah's phone book, retrieved during the Pakistani raid in which he was taken. In it, the FBI found numbers linked to the United States, including an unlisted number for a company that managed Bandar's estate in Aspen, Colorado. An unlisted number was also found for a bodyguard who worked at the Saudi Embassy in Washington. "Both of those numbers were unpublished, so they had to have gotten into Zubaydah's phone book through a personal contact who knew what those numbers were and what they represented," said former Sen. Bob Graham, co-chair of the congressional commission that compiled the 28 pages."
    • Homaidan al-Turki - was a Colorado resident in contact with the Hamburg cell
      • KDVR, "Declassified documents show possible link between man in Colorado and 9/11", 2016/05/24: "In 2006, an Arapahoe County jury convicted Homaidan al-Turki, a Saudi citizen living in Denver, of keeping his maid as a sex slave. Seven years later, he was in the news again. He was on the verge of being transferred back to Saudi Arabia to serve his sentence there. But the FBI intervened and Department of Corrections Chief Tom Clements said no to the transfer. A week later, Clements was killed. The case is unsolved, but there have been suspicions that al-Turki might have played a role. [...] But the National Archives recently released staff notes and al-Turki’s name comes up repeatedly as someone to look into. The staff lists the names of possible Saudi government connections to the 9/11 attacks, saying they are “some of the most important individuals with whom the hijackers may have had contact.” Al-Turki is on the list and described as a Saudi student living in Colorado with ties to the Saudi royal family and government. [...] The report says the FBI claims al-Turki was in contact with a German cellphone linked to one of the 9/1 hijackers. The hijackers and other key players in the 9/11 plot were part of a radical Islam cell in Germany. The investigation staff wanted to know whose phone was al-Turki contacting, what was his relationship to that person and was there any information tying him to others involved in the attack or other terrorist groups?"
      • Denver Post, "Saudis need a mirror to see injustice" by David Harsanyi, 2006/11/22: "Like our attorney general [John Suthers] was asked to do when he was shuttled over to Saudi Arabia by the feds to “explain” why a Colorado resident named Homaidan Al-Turki was sentenced to 20 years to life. [...] Even his high-priced lawyers – likely paid for, as was his $400,000 bail, by the Saudi government – couldn’t save Al-Turki from richly deserved jail time. [...] So why was our newly elected attorney general mollifying some of the world’s biggest gangsters? Having spoken to Suthers, I have a better understanding of why he believes it was a good idea. Gov. Bill Owens, Suthers says, had called him on behalf of some higher-ups at the U.S. State Department. Al-Turki, you see, comes from a powerful Saudi family."
        • Deseret News, "Will Bush replace Cheney?", 2004/02/18: "Bush strongly backs the former Wyoming congressman, who served as his father's defense secretary and President Gerald Ford's chief of staff. But some Republicans are quietly asking whether Cheney will help or hinder the ticket among voters this November. That has raised speculation about possible Cheney replacements. Among those mentioned: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee; Rep. Rob Portman of Ohio; Colorado Gov. Bill Owens; former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, now Bush's homeland security secretary; and two New Yorkers: former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki."
      • Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle, "Norm Of Arabia", 2017/04: "Saudi Arabian wealth has many surrogates in the state of Colorado. The powerful shadow and overreach of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia into the offices of power and influence in Colorado grows daily. Its tentacles reach into former Governor Bill Owens, Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers, Governor John Hickenlooper, attorney Hal Haddon, attorney Jack Finlaw, former United States Attorney General for the District of Colorado Henry Solano and perhaps most shocking, super lawyer and lobbyist Norman Brownstein who is beginning to be called in some circles “Norm of Arabia.”"
      • Tom Clements murder - page here
    • Judicial Watch, "As FBI Director Mueller Helped Cover Up Fla. 9/11 Probe, Court Docs Show", 2018/01/23
    • Newsweek, "CIA and Saudi Arabia Conspired To Keep 9/11 Details Secret, New Book Says", 2018/08/28
    • Richard Roy Blake, "THE STORY THAT COLORADO MEDIA REFUSES TO REPORT: COLORADO LINKS TO 9/11 PAST AND PRESENT", 2019/03/22
      • "After 14 years of pressure, the Obama Administration finally declassified a heavily redacted version of the 28 missing pages of the 9/11 report. The redacted version did not mention names such as Anwar al-Awlaki, that had been mentioned as being in the 28 pages by a 60 Minutes report on the subject. Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico, the son of New Mexico State University professor who had been born in Yemen. Awlaki attended Colorado State University in Fort Collins, where he was President of the Muslim Student Association. He later served as Imam (Islamic minister) at the Denver Islamic Society on Birch Street just south of Evans Avenue.

        In the months prior to 9/11 Awlaki left Denver and became the spiritual advisor to two of the 9/11 hijackers that had summered in San Diego and met with three others who were in Fall Church, Virginia and attended the notorious Saudi financed mosque there. It was also reported that Awlaki was in constant contact with the Saudi embassy in the months immediately prior to 9/11. An FBI agent had said that he felt that Awlaki was “at the heart of the 9/11 story.”"
      • "[...] [Homaidan] Al Turki also founded a company called “Al Bashir Publications and Translations” that featured the speeches and sermons of Anwar al Awlaki urging Muslims to violence against non-Muslims and especially the US and the West. It is difficult to overestimate the effect of Awlaki’s speeches and sermons had, and even after his death, continues to have in terms of inspiring terrorism."
      • "In addition to al Turki and al Awlaki, other Denver residents suspected of involvement with al Qaeda prior to 9/11 include Khalid al Fawwaz who will later be indicted for his involvement in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Africa. Another is Ziyad Khaleel, vice president of the Denver Islamic Society until 1994. Together with al Fawwaz, Khaleel is suspected of purchasing a satellite phone for Osama bin Laden."
    • Background of Bob Graham
      • Note that the plane of drug smuggler Joseph Valverde was seized and subsequently used by Governor Graham, similar to what happened with Texas Governor George W. Bush and Barry Seal's plane
      • Note that one of his financial benefactors shortly after 9/11 was Hank Asher
      • Kevin Ryan, "The 9/11 Joint Congressional Inquiry and 28 Missing Pages", 2014/03/16: "The leaders of the 9/11 Joint Congressional Inquiry were Congressman Porter Goss and Senator Bob Graham, who headed-up the House and Senate intelligence committees at the time. Due to Goss and Graham’s activities before 9/11 and on that day, as well as their representation of the state of Florida, their leadership of the Inquiry presented a remarkable number of questions. For example, Goss and Graham were meeting with Pakistani ISI General Mahmud Ahmed just as the first plane struck the World Trade Center. [...] Porter Goss joined the CIA in 1961 when he was a student at Yale. [...] Goss later acknowledged that he had recruited and run foreign agents [...] After leaving the CIA (assuming that is possible) Goss began his political career thanks to a favor granted by the man who would later help him lead the 9/11 Joint Inquiry. Goss was appointed by then-Florida Governor Bob Graham, to fill a Democrat vacancy as commissioner of Lee County. Why Graham appointed Goss, a Republican, for the normally partisan post is unclear. [...] In the months following 9/11, both Goss and Graham rejected calls for an investigation. The Senate voted for one anyway, however, and that led both Bush and Cheney to attempt to stop it or limit its scope. Apparently the best they could do was to make sure that Goss and Graham were put in charge."
      • Kevin Ryan, "Bob Graham and the Missing 9/11 Report Pages", 2015/05/12: "Little discussed facts about Graham might shed light on the answer to this dilemma. For example, few people seem to remember that Bob Graham was against an investigation from the start. In November 2001, two months after 9/11, Graham was leading the effort to delay any inquiry into the crimes. [...] While Graham was trying to stop an investigation, the Senate voted for one anyway. The compromise was that Graham and his CIA operative protégé, Porter Goss, would run it and that it would have a very limited focus on intelligence agency shortcomings. [...] Another unnoticed fact is that Graham’s calls for release of the 28 pages have matched up, chronologically, with changes in Saudi government leadership. [...] This suggests that Graham is simply using the redacted section of his report as a control mechanism to bring new Saudi leadership in line with continued U.S. interests."
  • Pakistani ISI backing
  • Israeli Mossad handling
    • Art student spy ring against the DEA
      • National Counterintelligence Executive, "Suspicious Visitors to Federal Facilities", 2001/03: "In the past six weeks, employees in federal office buildings located throughout the United States have reported suspicious activities connected with individuals representing themselves as foreign students selling or delivering artwork. Employees have observed both males and females attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings. If challenged, the individuals state that they are delivering artwork from a studio in Miami, Florida, called Universal Art, Inc, or that they are art students and are looking for opinions regarding their work. These individuals have been described as aggressive. They attempt to engage employees in conversation rather than giving a sales pitch. Federal police officers have arrested two of these individuals for trespassing and discovered that the suspects possessed counterfeit work visas and green cards. These individuals have also gone to the private residences of senior federal officials under the guise of selling art. Other reporting indicates that there may be two groups involved, and they refer to themselves as "Israeli art students." One group has an apparently legitimate money- making goal while the second, perhaps a non-Israeli group, may have ties to a Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalist group."
      • Drug Enforcement Agency, "Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities", 2001/06
      • Fox News, "Carl Cameron Reports: What did the Mossad know in advance about September 11 (and not pass on to USA allies?)", 2001/12 (parts 1, 2, 3, 4): "There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are "tie-ins." But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, "evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information.""
      • FORWARD, "Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth", 2002/03/15
      • Salon, "The Israeli "art student" mystery", 2002/05/07
        • "The two French journals came to conclusions that the memo itself clearly did not. And yet they had unearthed some intriguing material. Six of the "students" were apparently carrying cell phones purchased by a former Israeli vice consul to the United States. According to Le Monde, two of the "students" had traveled from Hamburg to Miami to visit an FBI agent in his home, then boarded a flight to Chicago and visited the home of a Justice Dept. agent, then hopped a direct flight to Toronto -- all in one day. According to Intelligence Online, more than one-third of the students, who were spread out in 42 cities, lived in Florida, several in Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. -- one-time home to at least 10 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers. In at least one case, the students lived just a stone's throw from homes and apartments where the Sept. 11 terrorists resided: In Hollywood, several students lived at 4220 Sheridan St., just down the block from the 3389 Sheridan St. apartment where terrorist mastermind Mohammed Atta holed up with three other Sept. 11 plotters. Many of the students, the DEA report noted, had backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence and/or electronics surveillance; one was the son of a two-star Israeli general, and another had served as a bodyguard to the head of the Israeli army."
      • "Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers and FBI Suspects in the September 11 Attacks and Their Failure to Give Us Adequate Warning: The Need for a Public Inquiry", 2004/09/15
      • Ecstasy trafficking link
        • From the DEA report: "DEA Orlando has developed the first drug nexus to this group. Telephone numbers obtained from an Israel Art Student encountered at the Orlando D.O. have been linked to several ongoing DEA MDMA (Ecstasy) investigations in Florida, California, Texas, and New York. The Orlando D.O. has opened an investigation that is being coordinated with DEA HQs."
        • From the Salon article: "Miami was cited as one of the main entry points of Ecstasy into the United States and was specified as one of the central "headquarters for the criminal organizations that smuggle Ecstasy"; Houston was also cited for large Ecstasy seizures -- an interesting nexus, given the large number of "art students" who congregated both in the Miami and Ft. Lauderdale area and in Houston. "Israeli nationals in the Ecstasy trade have been very sophisticated in their operations," says a U.S. Customs officer who has investigated the groups. "Some of these individuals have been skilled at counterintelligence and in concealing their communications and movements from law enforcement.""
        • USA Today, "Feds Crack Down on Ecstasy", 2000/04/19: "The international crime agency Interpol, the U.S. Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration have tracked Israeli crime groups and Russian mobsters trading in Ecstasy. Last month, federal authorities arrested Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, a former mafia hitman, for allegedly running an Ecstasy ring in Arizona that distributed 25,000 pills a week, worth half a million dollars on the street. [...] About 90% of Ecstasy comes from northern Europe, primarily the Netherlands and Belgium, where labs can produce a pill for less than a dime, the DEA says. Israeli crime groups, which mark up the wholesale price to about $4 a tablet, dominate distribution, the agents say. Last year, Dutch and Israel authorities seized more than 1 million tablets and arrested 49 people in the Netherlands, Israel and elsewhere."
        • UPI, "Feds: Ecstasy Ring Linked To Mob, Kosovo", 2001/10/25: "The San Diego Union-Tribune said a federal prosecutor outlined the potential links between the Gambino family and an unnamed Kosovo rebel general during a bail hearing Wednesday for defendants in a case involving an alleged Ecstasy lab located in northern San Diego County. [...] Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, the former high-ranking Gambino mobster who testified against his former boss, John Gotti, was indicted last year in Arizona on charges he was involved in an Ecstasy ring operating in the Phoenix area. Nine New Jersey men were indicted in March for allegedly trafficking Ecstasy on behalf of Philadelphia mobsters. According to the DEA, a large percentage of the Ecstasy sold in the United States is produced in Europe and controlled by organized crime figures in Western Europe, Russia and Israel."
        • Note that the possibility of the art student spy ring being involved in both ecstasy trafficking and monitoring the hijackers is very interesting. Israeli and Russian organized crime elements were said to dominate the ecstasy trade, and some of the hijackers in the places surveilled by the "art students" -- particularly Mohammed Atta -- were directly tied to drug trafficking operations, including ones with Russian mafia involvement. There is a very real possibility that these Israeli operatives were keeping tabs on or even handling narcotics smuggling that the hijackers were involved in. Hollywood FL, a location where 10 of the 19 hijackers stayed and a large number of "art students" operated, is particularly interesting due to its organized crime history with the Adam Walsh kidnapping, John Walsh's boss John Monahan who was involved in Colorado drug trafficking, and Hank Asher.
    • Urban Moving Systems in Weehawken NJ
    • New York Times, "Lebanese in Shock Over Arrest of an Accused Spy", 2009/02/18: "For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school. To Israel, he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983. [...] One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well."
  • Huffman Aviation in Venice FL - run by Rudi Dekkers with the backing of Wally Hilliard
    • 9/11 Encyclopedia article on Huffman Aviation
    • Welcome to TerrorLand: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up in Florida by Daniel Hopsicker (2004)
      • Chapter 1
      • Appendix: parts ..., 6, ...
      • Altruistic World Online Library full copy of the text (parts 1, 2, 3, 4)
    • Daniel Hopsicker, "Mohammed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus", 2004
    • Confirmation of Atta training at the school
      • Associated Press, "Feds investigatie links in Florida", 2001/09/12 (NewsMine.org archive): "Charlie Voss, a former employee at Huffman Aviation in Venice, said FBI agents told him the two were involved in Tuesday's airplane attack of the World Trade Center. [...] Voss said one of men was named Mohamed Atta. Azzan Ali, a student at Huffman Aviation, identified the second man as Marwan Alshehhi. [...] Voss said the men said they had just arrived from Germany and wanted flight instruction at Huffman, which offers training in light, single-engine aircraft but not commercial jetliners. Rudy Dekkers, Huffman's president and owner, said the two attended the school for about five months beginning in July 2000, then left to train elsewhere."
      • Charlotte Sun Herald, "Search and Rescue", 2001/09/14 (Daniel Hopsicker copy): "Atta and Alshehhi are suspected of helping crash airliners into the World Trade Center on Tuesday. The two men may have been planning the bloody terrorist attack when they enrolled at Huffman Aviation in Venice from July 6 to Dec. 21, 2000, said the school's owner, Rudi Dekkers. Authorities first recognized Atta's name on one of the flight's passenger manifests. They then found a car abandoned at Logan Airport in Boston which connected Atta's name to a South Venice address of Charles and Drucilla Voss. The two men stayed with the Vosses for a short time in July 2000 until they were asked to leave for being disrespectful and rude, the Vosses said."
    • Mohammed Atta activities in Venice - including potential impersonation and his alleged girlfriend Amanda Keller
      • Charlotte Sun Herald, "Hunt for terrorists reaches North Port", 2001/09/14 (Daniel Hopsicker copy): "Mohamed was associated with a local woman believed to be Amanda Keller, a local restaurant manager, LaConca said. The FBI is looking for Keller for additional questioning, but she might be missing. LaConca told the agent that Keller had "dishwater blonde hair, was about 21 years old, big boned with freckles" and seemed to be enamored of Mohamed. [...] Keller, who allegedly met Mohamed while working at Papa John's Pizza in Venice, told the couple she would translate because Mohamed spoke limited English. She said he was French/Canadian. She told the LaConcas that he was not a U.S. citizen. [...] While talking to Keller and Mohamed, the couple learned he had a pilot's license to charter small planes of four to six people and was going to school at Huffman Aviation in Venice to train for a commercial pilot's license. [...] The couple learned more about Mohamed from a then-employee of Vonnie's cleaning company. After meeting Mohamed and Keller on Feb. 21, the former employee joined the couple on an adventure to Key West the following day. [...] LaConca said Mohamed footed the entire bill for the weekend including buying Keller and the unnamed employee new clothes, alcohol, drugs and hotel stay. However, the couple said, Mohamed did not have a job. "The two girls were introduced to two men from Germany that they said were Mohamed's friends," Tony LaConca continued. "I thought it was strange, because Mohamed didn't appear to be French-Canadian or German." [...] At the end of his week-long stay at Agress Avenue, Mohamed returned to the LaConcas' home to pick up his $75 security check. This time, the couple noticed he spoke "good English." He arrived in a rental car with a friend that he claimed he had just picked up from the airport. Mohamed requested that the check be made out to his unidentified friend."
      • Sarasota Herald-Tribune, "Fourth terrorist suspect may have ties to Venice", 2001/09/22 (pages 1a, 6a) (Daniel Hopsicker copy): "However, Atta may have been in Venice as recently as April. Charles Grapentine, the manager of Sandpiper Apartments on Airport Avenue in Venice, said he remembers seeing Atta at the complex for about three weeks in April. He said Atta was living in the apartment of Amanda Keller. In a telephone interview late Friday, Keller said she met Atta through a friend and let him stay in the apartment with her and her then-boyfriend, Garrett Metts, because she felt sorry for him. She said authorities told her not to say anything at all about Atta. "I can't really discuss anything," she said. "I'm afraid I'll get in trouble." Keller's mother, Susan Payne of Lady Lake, remembered Atta. "I didn't like him; he just seemed strange," she said. Payne said Atta dressed in a casual yuppie fashion and her daughter told her he mostly kept to himself. Payne said Keller took Atta in because he had nowhere to stay."
      • CNN, "Sources: Suspected terrorist leader was wired funds through Pakistan", 2001/10/01: "In Punta Gorda, Florida, the owner of The Shipping Post told CNN that Atta and one unidentified associate came into her store several times between mid-July and mid-August and purchased money orders on at least two occasions. "He was very cold," said Jeanne Waldorf. "Most people are friendly and cordial, and he certainly was not." [...] Atta attended an aviation school in Venice, Florida, which is just north of Punta Gorda."
      • 20 minute excerpt from a Daniel Hopsicker interview of Amanda Keller - mentions the two German or Austrian friends of Atta as being named Peter and Stefan / Stephan
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "Mohamed Atta & the Saudi Royal Family", 2003/03/08: "Suspicion is growing in Hamburg, Germany that Atta maintained ties with Western intelligence agencies while in Technical School, says one former German intelligence official, pointing to Atta's participation in an elite program sponsored by the German equivalent of the Agency for International Development, an arm of the government which often harbors intelligence operatives in the U.S. [...] The MadCowMorningNews has learned exclusively that an eyewitness who has never been contacted by the FBI spotted Atta, Marwan and Siad Al-Jarrah together in Venice barely a week before the terrorist attack, long after authorities say they had moved on from this tiny retirement community on Florida’s Gulf Coast. All three terrorist pilots ordered subs from her in the deli at the local Publix supermarket, states Brenda Covey. She had served them all before on numerous occasions, she continued, a statement confirmed by news accounts, and so she has no doubt at all about who the three were. [...] Englishwoman Anne Greaves met Mohamed Atta while pursuing her lifelong dream of learning to fly. As fate would have it she ended up taking flying lessons with Mohamed Atta at Huffman Aviation in Venice Florida. "I certainly found it strange to find two Arabs in such a quiet location," she told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.’s investigative program 4Corners. "When I checked with my instructor on one occasion about their (strange) habits, I was informed that the men we now know as Mohamed Atta and al-Shehhi actually had royal connections with a Saudi House and al-Shehhi was his bodyguard." [...] "That is what I was given to understand so in a way it made sense to me that there were always two because I never saw al-Shehhi take the controls of the aircraft. It was always Mohamed Atta but nevertheless al-Shehhi always accompanied him on his flying lessons.""
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "Flight School Owner Changes Story… Again", 2003/03/15: "Moreover, the chief flight instructor at neighboring Jones Aviation in Sarasota, where Atta and Marwan trained for six weeks, insisted in an exclusive interview with the MadCowMorningNews that Dekkers was flat out wrong when he told reporters that Mohamed Atta already had a private pilot's license when he entered the U.S."
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "The ‘Second Mohamed’ in Venice", 2005/05/03
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "Mohamed Atta’s DAD in U.S, Two Weeks Before 9.11", 2005/08/23: "Moreover, the FBI knew about the U.S. visit of Cairo attorney Mohammed El-Amir almost immediately after the attack, when, after seeing him on television denying that his son had anything to do with the terrorist hijackings, a number of credible witnesses called the Sarasota office of the FBI to report they had seen Atta’s father in Venice with his son ten days to two weeks before the attack. [...] We first learned of Atta Senior’s presence in Venice in a casual conversation with a Venice pharmacist who has been known to us for over 25 years, since my parents bought a retirement home here after my father suffered a series of heart attacks. Accompanied by Mohamed Atta and his bodyguard Marwan Al-Shehhi, the pharmacist stated that Mohamed Atta Senior had been in his pharmacy several weeks before the attack, to send a fax. “We have just about the only public fax in town,” the pharmacist stated. “The fax went to a number in New Jersey.” [...] After recognizing Atta’s father on television, the pharmacist called the FBI… [...] “We gave them the videotape from our closed circuit surveillance cameras, and that was it.” The videotape was returned two weeks later. And it sat on a shelf in the pharmacy until we requested to watch it. After screening the (six weeks worth) of videotape, we discovered that the tape had been altered before being returned to the pharmacist. [...] Mohamed Atta Senior’s visit to his soon-to-be-dead son bespeaks foreknowledge of the 9.11 attack. It also would seem to confirm the persistent rumors of his involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood, outlawed in Egypt" - interesting to note that Mohammed el-Amir is the name of an Egyptian who was in fact based in New Jersey and involved in the aforementioned arms deals that Randy Glass exposed (Joseph Cannon, "Did Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff represent Atta's uncle?", 2005/09/28)
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "Was Pentagon Tracking Atta Days Before 9.11 Attack?", 2005/09/19: "On August 6, 2001, the same day Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi returned to Venice after renting a car at Warrick's RentaCar in Pompano Beach, FL, and picking up Siad Al-Jarrah at the airport in Miami, the MadCowMorningNews has learned that a self-described former NAVY SEAL named Joe Gesell applied for and was hired as the night driver (they only need one) at Venice Yellow Cab. Gesell squired Atta around Venice and Sarasota in his cab on a number of occasions. What raises suspicions that he may have been working for more than just tips is this: after starting his new job on the day of Atta’s return, Gesell quit a month later, just one day after Atta left town for the last time. [...] If Gessell is shown to have taken part in unacknowledged U.S. military surveillance of Atta continuing until just before the attack, it would not be uncharacteristic… [...] The Able Danger unit, for example, was by no means the first military intelligence investigation into the activities of the Hamburg cadre. According to one Army C.I.D. officer there at the time, military investigators were being detailed to Hamburg, Germany, tracking “Al Qaeda heroin flows” from Afghanistan to the West as far back as 1991 [...] Documents being destroyed by the Pentagon probably include at least a terabyte on Atta & company’s activities in Venice, Florida. [...] For example, according to Bob Simpson and other Venice Yellow Cab employees interviewed by the FBI, Atta took numerous cab rides to and from Huffman Aviation as well as several other locations in Venice during August 2001. On at least two of these occasions Atta was traveling with Rudi Dekkers, a man who testified under oath before Congress that his relationship with the terrorist ringleader ended almost nine months earlier."
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "MOUSSAOUI TRIAL DOCUMENTS SHOW FBI WITHELD EVIDENCE IN 9/11 COVER-UP", 2006/10/06 (911Blogger copy) (alleged list of calls on Atta's Nokomis FL (Venice-area) cell phone; Verizon basic subscriber info on the cell phone; fax sent by Atta to Eagle Jet International of Miami on 2001/03/11 from Nokomis FL)
      • Bar incident in Hollywood FL a couple days before the attacks
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "9/11 REVISIONIST HISTORY EXPOSED", 2011/05/18
        • Associated Press, "Feds investigatie links in Florida", 2001/09/12 (NewsMine.org archive): "Agents showed employees at a Hollywood restaurant, Shuckums, photos of two men Tuesday night. Manager Tony Amos said he identified a man in a photo bearing the name Mohamed. Amos said that man and two others had each consumed several drinks Friday night and Mohamed told Amos he was a pilot. "The guy Mohamed was drunk, his voice was slurred and he had a thick accent," Amos said Wednesday. Bartender Patricia Idrissi said the men argued over the bill, and when she asked if there was a problem, "Mohamed said he worked for American Airlines and he could pay his bill.""
        • Newsweek, "Bush: 'We're At War'", 2001/09/23: "Last week Atta and two of his buddies seem to have gone out for a farewell bender at a seafood bar called Shuckums. Atta drank five Stoli-and-fruit-juices, while one of the others drank rum and Coke. For once, Atta and his friends became agitated, shouting curse words in Arabic, reportedly including a particularly blasphemous one that roughly translates as "F--k God." There was a squabble when the waitress tried to collect the $48 bill (her shift was ending and she wanted her tip)."
        • Palm Beach Post, "9/11 mastermind may be gone, but troubled memories linger in South Florida", 2011/05/06: "On Sept. 7, 2001, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi pounded down drinks at Shuckums Oyster Bar on Young Circle in Hollywood. They played video games, then argued with a waitress and a manager over a $48 tab. Four days later, Atta and al-Shehhi flew passenger jets into the World Trade Center, killing 2,752 people, and forever changing life for some in South Florida who unknowingly entered their orbit. Like Tony Amos, the night manager who backed up waitress Patricia Idrissi at Shuckums, 1814 Harrison St. (replaced in 2003 by Harpoon Harry’s Raw Bar and Grill, it’s now the Sauer Apple Saloon martini lounge). Amos owns El Sloppy Taco in Brunswick, Md., and says that his brush with 9-11 infamy played into his decision, in 2007, “just to get away.″"
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "Truth, Lies & the Sarasota Herald-Tribune", 2011/05/24
      • Elias Davidsson, "The Atta Mystery: Double agent or multiple Attas?", 2011/10/05
    • Atta associate Wolfgang Bohringer - self-proclaimed CIA operative and personal pilot for Russian mobster Viktor Kozeny
      • Resume of Wolfgang Bohringer posted by Daniel Hopsicker - from 1995 to 1997 he was part of the Flying Club of Munich in Naples FL where he "Conducted flight instruction for German clientele" and "Managed all school operations in the USA"; from 1998 to October 1999 he was a "Pilot, Flight Instructor King Air 90 Jaguar" for Harvard Capital Investment in Nassau Bahamas
      • Search People Free info on Wolfgang Bohringer - places of residence include Atlanta GA, Arlington VA, Naples FL, Doraville GA, St. Thomas VI, Dunwoody GA, Augustine FL, Chamblee GA, Arden NC, Cambridge MD, Norwood MA, Titusville FL (October 1995), and Brighton MA (May 1995)
      • Florida corporate records for BOHRINGER CORPORATION - designated as a Foreign Profit Corporation; filed 07/31/1996 and REVOKED FOR ANNUAL REPORT on 09/26/1997; principal and mailing address is 7231 RADIO RD #102 NAPLES, FL 33942; registered agent is CORPORATION SERVICE COMPANY 1201 HAYS STREET TALLAHASSEE, FL 32301-0000; officers are BOHRINGER, WOLFGANG 5132 LOCHWOOD CT NAPLES, FL and BOHRINGER, SUJATA 5132 LOCHWOOD CT NAPLES, FL
      • Florida corporate records for WOLF AERO INC. - designated as a Florida Profit Corporation; filed 01/02/1997 and ADMIN DISSOLUTION FOR ANNUAL REPORT on 10/16/1998; principal and mailing address is 6255 18TH AVE SW NAPLES, FL 34112; registered agent is BOHRINGER, WOLFGANG 6255 18TH AVE SW NAPLES, FL 34112
      • Blue Water Yachts Inc. company
        • Florida corporate records for BLUE WATER YACHTS INC. - designated as a Florida Profit Corporation; filed 08/23/1999 and ADMIN DISSOLUTION FOR ANNUAL REPORT on 09/22/2000; principal and mailing address is 2630 ST. AUGUSTINE BLVD. ST. AUGUSTINE, FL 32086; registered agent is VAN DER MEYDEN, DIRK 380 S.E. MIZNER, #1760 BOCA RATON, FL 33432; officers are VAN DER MEYDEN, DIRK 380 S.E. MIZNER, #1760 BOCA RATON, FL 33432 and BOHRINGER, WOLFGANG 6255 18TH AVE., S.W. NAPLES, FL 34114
        • Reddit post in 2018 about Wolfgang Bohringer and Blue Water Yachts: "He started a company called Blue Water Yachts with Dirk Van Der Meyden, August 23 1999. People using that company address in the same year, according to an online database, had US military addresses, one in Japan and I think they were also stationed at Mayport Naval Base, Jacksonville. Also, Dirk had spent years in the US Air Force and did work for the Saudi government's Kingdom Holdings."
        • FedEx Company bio of Dirk Van Der Meyden - in the US Air Force from 1984 to 1992; worked at the Kingdom Holding Company from 1996 to 1998; worked at Aerospace Concepts from 2002 to 2003; worked at Vulcan Aviation from 2006 to 2010; worked at Fedex Express Corporate Aviation from 2000 to present; said to reside in the Greater Memphis Area
        • LinkedIn page of Dirk Van Der Meyden
      • Work for Viktor Kozeny
        • From p.92 of Slingshot to the Juggernaut by Sander Hicks (2011): "Lois's sources reported Bohringer said about Kozeny, “I was his double. I smuggled planeloads of cash for Viktor, from the Bahamas into the U.S. . . . If you like arms, I can get you any kinds of arms.”"
        • Note that in his resume, Bohringer claimed to be a pilot for Harvard Capital Investment in the Bahamas, which is most likely a Kozeny front company (fleet sheet's final word, "Remember Stratton Investments?", 2003/03/04: "Stratton Investments took the CR by storm in Oct. 1995, when it declared that it was buying shares in several Czech companies from the Harvard funds and was going to send in managers to turn them around. Stratton made a lot of noise and gave Harvard some much-needed legitimacy that allowed it to soak even more money out of shareholders. Jan Sýkora of Wood & Co. said in July 1996 that basically nothing of Stratton's grand turnaround plans actually materialized. The people behind Union banka seem to remember Stratton well. Invesmart, UB's investor, hasn't put up any of its own money and, like Stratton, can pull out and disappear at any time. Invesmart, too, seems to be a front for Czech investors who, like Harvard Capital Investment Holding, are mainly interested in cheap assets. Running a business or bank was apparently never a priority for any of these "turnaround experts."")
      • Relationship with German pilot Stephan Verhaaren - might be the Stephan who was with Mohammed Atta, Amanda Keller, and another German named Peter (who may be his brother Peter Verhaaren) in Key West FL
        • Sarasota Herald-Tribune, "Venice author questions 9/11 findings in controversial book", 2005/07/11: "In January, a man named Stephan Verhaaren filed a defamation lawsuit against Hopsicker and his company, Madcow Productions, claiming that Hopsicker lied about Verhaaren in his book and linked him to the Sept. 11 attacks and Atta. “He’s constantly reporting that my client somehow has had something to do with terrorists, which is a total lie,” said Neil Chonin, a Miami lawyer representing Verhaaren. Hopsicker also writes about Verhaaren on his Web site, www.madcowprod.com. Verhaaren, a European pilot who flies for businesses overseas, is not the only person suing Hopsicker for libel."
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "The Mystery Of Fanning Island: Was Mohamed Atta close associate in Florida a CIA pilot?", 2006/12/11: "Wolfgang was instrumental in bringing another German pilot to Naples named Stephan Verhaaren, who was on parole in Germany for smuggling when he came to the U.S. Verhaaren took over Bohringer’s flight school in Naples in 1999. While regular German flight students struggle to obtain the necessary visas, Wolfgang and Stephan had inside connections which smoothed their progress, said a flight instructor in Naples. “Sometimes it makes me mad that a criminal gets preference," stated the instructor with some bitterness. "Wolfgang signed off on Stephan’s books, and Stephan also got in on a fraudulent business investor’s visa." In a recent deposition in a lawsuit he filed against us, Verhaaren stated that he first came to Florida with his then-girlfriend, named Mahfouz, whose family owned a home in Florida. While it is speculation, the notorious Saudi intelligence chief and BCCI honcho Khaled bin Mahfouz "lived in Florida" part of the year. Verhaaren was associated with “The Flying Club of Munich,” which now looms as an increasingly suspicious entity, because he appears to have lied to protect it. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, including Bohringer’s own online resume, which Bohringer attempted to delete (but which we had already cached), Verhaaren denied under oath that Bohringer had anything to do with “The Flying Club of Munich.” Unlike Bohringer, who freely admitted to island residents his association with Atta, Verhaaren claims to have never met Mohamed Atta."
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "Dallas to 9/11 to Iraq: War on the Truth", 2007/09/11: "The Miami lawyer representing the German pilot indignantly told the Sarasota Herald Tribune at the time, "He's constantly reporting that my client somehow has had something to do with terrorists, which is a total lie.” The pilot who sued us—who we’d admitted we’d been in error in identifying as an associate of Atta’s—is a convicted smuggler, who was living, at the time he sued, in the Naples, Florida home of a Hungarian Mobster convicted of money laundering in 1991 while serving as the manager of the Indian Casino on the reservation of the Morongo Indian Tribe in Cabazon, CA. [...] This same German pilot—who, again, wasn’t an associate of Mohamed Atta’s—bought a business in Naples, Florida, from another German pilot, a man named Wolfgang Bohringer."
          • Los Angeles Times, "Managers of Casino at Reservation Indicted", 1994/05/12 (pages 1, 12): "The managers of the casino on the Morongo Indian Reservation near Palm Springs were indicted Wednesday for allegedly operating illegal slot machines and skimming millions of dollars from the Morongo tribe in the process. [...] Although Wednesday's indictment does not spell out how much the tribe received, it alleges that the outside management firm, E.C. Investments Inc., fraudulently set up an intermediary firm to lease the machines to the Indians and in effect paid itself an extra $3.3 million over the last 15 months. [...] Indicted along with E.C. Investments, also known as Great Western Casinos Inc., were its president, Ira Englander, 66, of Los Angeles, who manages the casino along Interstate 10, and three others: Gyorgy Hargitai, 46, of Budapest, Hungary, the owner of ECI; William C. Armstrong, 43, of Pompano Beach, Fla., described as. a consultant to the firm, and Roger Keesee, 56, of Atlanta, also a consultant. [...] The indictment alleges that ECI brought in "illegal gambling devices" namely video keno, poker and "Pot-O-Gold" machines after taking over management of what was then merely a card room and bingo hall on the Morongo reservation in March, 1992. Even before that, other California tribes had quietly installed similar machines, prompting state Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren to call for a crackdown on the use of slots on Indian land in 1991. But after sheriffs departments in several areas, including San Diego County, followed his advice and staged raids, a judge ruled that only federal authorities have jurisdiction over Indian gambling."
        • George Webb interview of Daniel Hopsicker on 2020/01/15 - at 36:11 Hopsicker discusses the lawsuits he faced over his books, one of which was from a pilot who had been convicted of cigarette smuggling in Germany, was accused by Hopsicker of being an Atta associate (though Hopsicker now believes it was the man's brother), and was at the time of the lawsuit living in a Naples FL mansion owned by a Hungarian mobster who had been the head of casino on the Cabazon reservation
      • 2005 attempt to open a flight school on Fanning Island
      • Aqua Marine Dive Center in St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands (possibly connected to Jeffrey Epstein's private island)
        • Boat Database entry for the AQUA MARINE - USCG ID is 1227494; port is ST THOMAS VI; owner is WOLFGANG BOHRINGER; registration was issued on 2010-06-14 04:00:00
        • Lighthouse Yachting buyer testimonials: "Anamarija Urh & Wolfgang Bohringer New Owners - Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 49 “Very impressed with the service and honest way of doing business. We will definitely recommend them to anybody interested in buying or selling a boat.”"
        • 2016 forum post by sliky9100: "I know of a man going by the same name in St. Thomas, and he is running a dive shop in the USVI. Wolfgang Bohringer runs Aqua Marine Dive Center and Atta appears to be a part of the action. I have no idea who these people are. I just happened upon them after having a negative encounter with their employee Igor Viatcheslav Labzhinskiy, who is Ukranian and is a boat captain for their operation in the USVI.

          This is a mug shot of Labzhinskiy that I found online;

          [mugshot photo]

          For all that I know these people could be model citizens. However the transaction that I had with Labzhinskiy was not good. Just be aware.

          Igor is a part time resident in Pensacola Florida, which is where is mug shot is from."
        • Reddit post in 2016 associating Bohringer with Epstein's island: "Having located Epsteins registered USVI address at 6100 Red Hook https://www.advancedbackgroundchecks.com/address/6100/red+hook+qtrs/st+thomas/vi I was concerned to find somehow associated with it companies like Pervert Inc. and Nauti Nymph Powerboat Rentals The major Miami developer who started Pervert Inc, Todd Glaser, is at 2121 Ponce de Leon Nauti Nymphs is at 6501 Red Hook By the way, Wolfgang Bohringer hangs out around Red Hook as he kept his yacht at Saphire Bay Marina. In fact Wolfgang led diving at the reef off little St James, Epsteins Pedo island"
          • New York Times, "On Epstein’s ‘Little St. Jeff’s’ Island, a Hideaway Where Money Bought Influence", 2019/08/28: "The islands became a haven for Mr. Epstein. His private plane would fly him to St. Thomas’s international airport, where he would board a helicopter that whisked him to his Little St. James and Great St. James islands. [...] Mr. Epstein used St. Thomas to register a number of his businesses. Little remains known about their purposes. In public documents, many listed their addresses as Mr. Epstein’s office at the American Yacht Harbor complex in the Red Hook quarter of St. Thomas. [...] People around St. Thomas are reluctant to talk about Mr. Epstein — even after his death, locals say, there are fears about violating nondisclosure agreements or angering his close associates on the island."
    • Russian mobster Viktor Kozeny
      • Early life and background
        • Fortune, "The Incredible Half-Billion-Dollar Azerbaijani Oil Swindle", 2000/03/06
          • "In Kozeny these gifts were evident early on. As an 18-year-old living in Germany--his family had arrived from Czechoslovakia two years earlier--Viktor attended a lecture in Munich given by an eminent American physics professor named Marlan Scully. Explaining that he was a physics prodigy who had fled communism, Kozeny waved around a notebook that contained his scribbled "theories." The professor was so moved by Viktor's story that he invited Kozeny to study with him at the University of New Mexico. Days after Scully returned to Albuquerque, Kozeny appeared on his doorstep, asking for a place to stay and a $100 loan."
          • "Next stop: Cambridge, Mass., where Kozeny enrolled in summer classes at the Harvard Extension School. His soon-to-be first wife bankrolled his expenses, which, as she describes it now, were extravagant even then. (They were divorced two years later.) Kozeny eventually talked his way into the real Harvard--where he wound up, by his own account, on "triple probation": "The trials and errors of a young man," he explains now. Yet when he finally graduated after six years, with a degree in economics, he walked away with a handful of glowing recommendations, including one from Harvard law professor (and future Supreme Court Justice) Stephen Breyer."
            • Jefferson Morley, "JFK: What the CIA Hides", 2019/11/22: "Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who served as a fact checker for the Commission in 1964, defends the lone gunman conclusion, saying, “You have to look at the new evidence and when you do, I come to the same conclusion.”"
        • Interesting to note that he was educated at Harvard in the late 1980s before going on to attempt several privatization schemes in the former Soviet Union, since the official Clinton Administration architects of post-Soviet privatization also hailed from Harvard
        • Association with figures from the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) a.k.a. Star Wars program
          • American Institute of Physics, oral history interviews of Marlan Scully, 2004/07/15-16: "Scully: That’s for sure. I hope it doesn’t turn out to be as long-term serious as it could. (Interruption). We were doing Kirtland airborne laser lab work in the seventies, long before SDI came into being. We were doing this Star Wars research with Pete Avizonis at Kirkland all through the seventies. And then in the eighties, Reagan and his administration began pushing it very hard. We were still involved — by that time that I had taken joint appointment in Munich and New Mexico — we were still involved, but then everybody jumped on the bandwagon. At some level, the picnic ground was overcrowded. There weren’t really that many problems to go around. And I, if anything, was less actively working with the Air Force at that point."
          • Dave Emory, "FTR #574 Interview with Daniel Hopsicker – Victor Kozeny’s Last Stan", 2006/11/14: "During the discussion, Daniel related that a physics professor who was one of Kozeny’s first contacts in the U.S. was associated with Reagan’s Star Wars program. In addition, another of the people who traveled in Kozeny’s circle at this time was a key Air Force officer in charge of procurement for the Star Wars program."
      • Czech voucher privatization - involved George H.W. Bush Chief of Staff, election fraud suspect, and Council for National Policy member John H. Sununu
        • Newsweek, "A Wizard On The Run", 1995/07/02: "Kozeny, as it turned out, kept his promise--the vouchers were worth exactly what Kozeny said they'd be valued at after the first year. But the speculation about how Kozeny had pulled it off intensified. Kozeny, it was rumored, was a tool of the CIA, which got a big Czech bank to back him. A leading opposition politician in Prague recently told NEWSWEEK that Kozeny was laundering drug money--fronting for "the Colombian narco-mafia." The wild charges have never been substantiated. However, Kozeny had become a lightning rod."
        • CNN, "THE PIRATES OF PRAGUE AN EXILED FUND PRODIGY AND HIS BRASH WALL STREET MENTOR PROMISED TO TEACH CZECH INDUSTRY WESTERN MANAGEMENT METHODS. INSTEAD, INVESTORS LEARNED A PAINFUL LESSON ABOUT THE PERILS OF EMERGING MARKETS", 1996/12/23: "That cleared the decks for Kozeny and Dingman's final maneuver last July. First, all the Harvard funds, which by then had been transformed into holding companies, were merged into a single entity called Harvard Industrial Holding. Then Harvard was merged with Sklo Union Teplice, a holding company that Dingman and Kozeny controlled. That company was then merged with portions of Dingman's investment vehicle, Stratton, to form yet another holding company, called Daventree Ltd., whose board's roster, in addition to Dingman and Kozeny, includes such luminaries as former White House chief of staff John Sununu and former U.S. astronaut Thomas P. Stafford. The investors in Kozeny's funds now became indirect holders of paper in this Cyprus-based company, which is beyond the scrutiny of Czech authorities and shareholders, and has not published any accounts. Daventree shares aren't publicly traded, although Kozeny has promised to seek a listing for them in London or New York."
      • Azerbaijan oil privatization fraud - involved the American International Group (AIG) with managing director David Pinkerton, former Maine Senator and Clinton Administration diplomat George Mitchell (implicated as a Jeffrey Epstein associate to whom Epstein provided underage girls), and businessman Frederic Bourke (named in Jeffrey Epstein's black book)
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "The Senator, the Billionaire Pedophile, & the Fugitive Oligarch", 2019/08/30
        • Wall Street Journal, "Viktor Rides Again: The Controversial 'Pirate of Prague' Bets Big on Voucher in the Caucasus", 1998/10/26: "Whatever his reputation might be, the 35-year-old whom Fortune magazine puts among the world's 1000 richest people is again out to make his name in the post-Soviet world. A year ago, Mr. Kozeny quietly planted stakes in the windswept and sandy streets of Baku. And now he's the biggest investor in oil-drenched Azerbaijan, bar the large energy multinationals, after personally putting down some $100 million and opening a financial outfit called the Minaret Group.

          As in the Czech Republic, the draw in Azerbaijan is privatization. Out of Minaret's headquarters in Baku, Mr. Kozeny and his foreign partners have placed a bet that holding Azerbaijani vouchers and options on upcoming privatizations will someday give them access to the country's crown jewels, perhaps even the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (Socar). The ongoing emerging markets crisis recently forced Mr. Kozeny to scale back his plans, but he sounds undeterred."
        • Fortune, "The Incredible Half-Billion-Dollar Azerbaijani Oil Swindle", 2000/03/06
          • "On Dec. 20, 1997--just as he was starting to round up investors for his venture in Azerbaijan--Viktor Kozeny and his resplendent third wife, Ludka, threw a party in Aspen. Not just any party, mind you, but the sort that even local jetsetters would still remember two years later.

            The setting was the Kozenys' $19.7 million mountaintop chalet--a property he'd bought barely six months earlier. The guests were 150 of Aspen's rich and famous--Ivana Trump among them--many of whom the Kozenys had never met. Bowls of caviar greeted the guests. Expensive champagnes and fine wines flowed freely all night. Natalie Cole provided the entertainment. As the guests left, they received gifts from Asprey & Garrard, the exclusive London jewelry store. "I wanted to meet some neighbors," says Kozeny nonchalantly of his $1 million shindig."
          • "Bourke was in, of course. He and some friends put up $8 million. Others followed, including Aaron Fleck, a 77-year-old Florida money manager, who added $4 million, and Richard Friedman, the Boston developer who loans his Martha's Vineyard vacation home to the Clintons, who came in for $1 million. Bourke had introduced Kozeny to George Mitchell, the former Senate Majority Leader and respected special government envoy to the peace talks in Northern Ireland. After dining with Kozeny at a Florida resort, Mitchell decided he, too, wanted in. The former Senator invested $200,000. He also agreed to serve as vice chairman (Kozeny was chairman) on the board of the venture, which Kozeny had named Oily Rock Group Ltd."
          • "Aliyev's support was crucial if the scheme was going to work. Any decision about when--or whether--to privatize SOCAR rested with Aliyev alone. That's the way things worked in Azerbaijan. "When the President made a decision, it was a decision," says a former ambassador. [...] Mitchell gained an audience with Aliyev--and reported back that privatization would proceed. Kozeny, for his part, was not subtle about the reason. "We're in bed with the President," a former aide recalls him saying."
          • "In late April, Kozeny presided over the official opening of Minaret's headquarters. Mitchell flew on Kozeny's jet with his young wife and infant son, who were dropped off in Monaco--where they stayed on Kozeny's yacht. Afterward, Kozeny flew Mitchell to Dublin, where he gave a speech on the talks in Northern Ireland. (Says Kozeny with a smile: "It was my little contribution to the peace process.")"
        • Eesti Päevaleht, "EE: Praha piraadi hiilgus ja viletsus", 2001/08/23: "In addition to spending 325,000 kroons on three people's lunch at the Mayfair restaurant Le Gavroche, he spent 312.5 million kroons on buying Lloyd Webber's London house and almost the same amount on a chalet in Aspen, Colorado. While traveling around the world on a private jet, he hosted so many celebrations that the stars of Hollywood were stunned, and for nearly five years, he slammed almost everyone he encountered with gifts bearing the names of famous designers. One beast he organized in Aspen Alpine House in December 1997 was described as a "party party". "There was an incredible amount of wine, food and gifts," said one local who attended the party. "Goldie Hawn was invited to visit, and like every season, Kozeny left everyone a credit card at a local ski store.""
        • Sunday Times, "Bouncing Czech bounces back", 2002/12/08: "Guests, who included Goldie Hawn, were serenaded by Natalie Cole as they dined on Pacific lobster and Texan beef accompanied by a choice Montrachet."
        • paper unknown, "BAD DEAL SNARES IRISH PEACE HERO", date unknown: "Kozeny threw a lavish bash for prospective investors, including Mitchell, in December of 1997 at his $20 million home in Aspen, where Goldie Hawn was among the invitees and Natalie Cole performed live. Joining Mitchell in the venture were realty magnate and Bill Clinton chum Richard Friedman, and hedge-fund guru Leon Cooperman."
        • Note: Considering their shared membership in Aspen's elite social circles (including interactions with some of the same Hollywood figures like Goldie Hawn), involvement in oil ventures, Colorado pedophile ring connections, and apparent US intelligence links, it is worth asking if Kozeny was acquainted with Fleet White Sr.
        • Bahamas Business, "Castaway In The Bahamas?", 2003/10/27: "Another marriage? No such plans, despite his dreams to run a political campaign in the Czech republic one day, as a candidate of a new style, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. "Czech society is fairly tolerant in these things; that is not America," Kozeny says, though two years ago he claimed his political program would be conservative and similar to that of George Bush."
        • MarketWatch, "AIG managing director indicted", 2005/10/06: "David Pinkerton, a managing director at an American International Group investment unit, and two other men were indicted on Thursday for their part in an alleged bribery scheme in Azerbaijan. Pinkerton, Viktor Kozeny and Frederic Bourke were allegedly involved in a "massive" scheme to bribe Azerbaijan government officials to ensure that the country's state-owned oil company was privatized and that they got to share in the profits, according to a statement by the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York."
        • Log of FOIA requests to the CIA in 2008 - includes "MEETING PLANNED OR SOUGHT ON OR ABOUT OCTOBER 1998 INVOLVING VIKTOR KOZENY & NATAN SHARANSKY" and "COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN VIKTOR KOZENY, NADIR NASIBOV, BARAT NURIYEV, FRED BOYUR, GEORGE MITCHELL (EACH) & JAMES D. WOLFENSOHN 1997-2000"
        • FCPA Blog, "Kozeny Wins In Privy Council", 2012/03/29: "The U.K. Privy Council ruled yesterday that Viktor Kozeny, the accused mastermind in a huge 1990's bribery scheme in Azerbaijan, can't be extradited from the Bahamas to the United States to face FCPA charges. [...] He was arrested in the Bahamas at the request of the U.S. government in October 2005 and held in prison until granted bail in April 2007. [...] The Privy Council's unanimous ruling said Kozeny's alleged bribery didn't break any laws in the Bahamas. Therefore the courts there had no jurisdiction to order his extradition."
        • Bloomberg, "Swiss Lawyer Sentenced to Time Served in Bribery Case", 2013/03/07: "A Swiss lawyer who was the U.S. government’s star witness in a bribery case over an oil deal in Azerbaijan, was sentenced to time already served in prison and ordered to pay a $500,000 fine for his role in the scheme. Hans Bodmer, sentenced yesterday in Manhattan federal court a decade after his arrest in the international bribery scheme, was also ordered to forfeit $131,906. At a 2009 trial against Frederic Bourke, co-founder of handbag maker Dooney & Bourke Inc., Bodmer said he helped a Czech expatriate, Viktor Kozeny, orchestrate a plot in Azerbaijan in which Bourke invested. [...] Bodmer was arrested in 2003 in South Korea. He spent five months in prison there before returning to the U.S., pleading guilty and agreeing to cooperate. [...] At Bourke’s trial, Bodmer testified that he helped Kozeny, promoter of an ultimately unsuccessful deal to take control of the Azeri national oil company, create secret Swiss accounts and offshore companies that would pay Azerbaijan’s leaders."
          • New York Southern District Court, IPOC INTERNATIONAL GROWTH FUND, LTD. v. LEONID ROZHETSKIN, MIKHAIL FRIDMAN, PYOTR AVEN, ALFA GROUP CONSORTIUM, ALFA CAPITAL MARKETS, INC., ALFA TELECOM (n/k/a ALTIMO) and HANS BODMER, complaint, 2006/06/08
            • "19. The Alfa Group conducts such significant and varied business in the United States that it has actually found it to be in its interest to spend millions of dollars courting the American political elite through Washington D.C. based lobbying firm of Barbour Griffiths and Rogers, LLC which lobbies Congress and others in Washington on its behalf. In addition to using his lobbying firm, Alfa Group has retained Edward Rogers' Washington D.C . based "investigative" firm, Diligence, Inc.-which has criminally misappropriated IPOC information as described further below, and an army of American P.R. (Hill & Knowlton), and other media "experts" to further its varied interests in this country. Having chosen to spend millions of dollars to influence the United States Congress and others, and having received millions of dollars from the American government and private citizens, it should not fairly be heard to complain of being called to task now in an American courtroom." - note that Hill & Knowlton is the PR firm of Robert Keith Gray that also represented Marc Rich
            • "21. Defendant Pyotr Aven also has been a major participant in the scheme and worked directly with Rozhetskin and Fridman in the misappropriation and theft of IPOC monies. Aven is a director of Golden Telecom, a NASDAQ company, which regularly files with the United States Securities Exchange Commission . He is a controversial figure: As observed by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, a Russian "corruption task force informed [the government] that Aven was engaged in various misdeeds, including drug trafficking.""
            • "23. Defendant Hans Bodmer, as described further below, is a former principal of von Meiss Blum and Partners ("vMPB") a Zurich, Switzerland law firm which served as escrow agent . Bodmer assisted Rozhetskin and Fridman with the Sonic Duo/Mega on theft scheme . As discussed below, Bodmer worked with his coconspirators to send instructions to 1POC to wire money through banks in New York for the benefit of Defendants. Bodmer is no stranger to criminal prosecution in the United States, having recently pled guilty to the criminal conspiracy to launder money and conspiracy to violate the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with the scheme to bribe foreign leaders (along with Victor Kozeny, who is currently being extradited to New York from the Bahamas). Case No: 1 : OS-CR-00518-RCC-ALL (S.D.N.Y.)."
        • Twitter thread in 2019 about Frederic Bourke's connection to Jeffrey Epstein - a cited DOJ press release calls Bourke "a friend and neighbor of Kozeny's in Aspen, Colo."; it is noted that David Pinkerton ended up at Falcon Bank, which is allegedly linked to JP Morgan and Blackstone Real Estate Partners Asia; notes that Kozeny's lawyer was Benjamin Brafman a.k.a. Ben Brafman, who employed NXIVM leader Keith Raniere's defense attorney Teny Rose Geragos and was on Harvey Weinstein's defense team
      • From "The September 11 Commission Report: Final Report of the Investigation into the Murders of Nicholas Berg, Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley": "The Atta-Bohringer connection provides an interesting linkage back to George HW Bush’s secret war against the Soviet Union in 1991. Bohringer’s extensive relationship to Viktor Kozeny is actually one of several connections to US Intelligence, the first being his claim to his arresting officers that he was a CIA operative, apparently a substantiated claim in that Bohringer was released within hours after his arrest. The other linkages are through his nominal employer, Viktor Kozeny, who appears as a front man for Western Intelligence in the early 1990s no more or less than Leo Wanta.

        * Kozeny received funding for his Azerbaijan bribery and money laundering efforts to purchase SOCAR, the Azerbaijan State Oil Company, from AIG. AIG has been, since WWII, a major CIA intelligence operation. History records that the OSS learned that in the 1940’s that the Nazis owned 45% of the world’s insurance companies, and used the background files from these companies to plan their espionage and bombing raids. With this lesson, when William ‘Wild Bill’ Dovovan created the CIA, part of his legacy was an extensive partnership with AIG. [see "The Secret (Insurance) Agent Men," Mark Fritz. The Los Angeles Times 2000 September 22, 200]

        * Kozeny’s contact at AIG was Frank Gardiner Wisner [see Capturing the Pirate of Prague, Rob Urban and David Glovin, International Eurasian Institute for Economic and Political Research, Bloomberg Markets, February 23, 2006] Frank G Wisner was head of Office of Strategic Services operations in southeastern Europe at the end of World War II, and the head of the Directorate of Plans of the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s.] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wisner]

        * One of Kozeny’s key promoters was Senator George Mitchell. Mitchell had served in the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps from 1954 until 1956, and later served on the Iran-Contra Senate Hearings and while challenging some of Oliver North’s assumptions about patriotism, inevitably supported the conclusions of the committee.

        * When Kozeny and his investment ‘partners’ were brought to US court for money laundering and bribery, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin dismissed most of the charges. [see Federal Prosecutors Hope To Revive Oil Bribery Case, Free Internet Press, 2007-08-23]. Scheindlin is the same judge that dismissed charges against Osama Awadallah, who was an associate of the two San Diego based September 11 terrorists. Her ruling prevented the FBI from collecting information on the two terrorists.

        * Kozeny was initially funded by loans from Alpha Bank, which is represented in the US by ex-Bush administrators Lanny Griffith and Ed Rogers of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers [Seller of Privatization Securities Is Indicted in the U.S., Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times, October 3, 2003]. Kozeny used his scam proceeds to repay Alpha Bank. It is of related note that Alpha Bank funds a fellowship for Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft, which also funded Mohammed Atta’s entrance to Germany. [For The Record#573, Alfa Males—One Helluva Conspiracy Theory, Part II, Recorded on 10/15/2006.]"
    • Early history of Huffman
    • Wally Hilliard charter flight companies
      • July 2000 heroin bust of a company Lear jet
        • Orlando Sentinel, "Record-setting heroin seizure nets 30 pounds", 2000/08/02 (pages 1, 5): "The DEA investigation was launched on July 14, when Nassar Darwich, 30, a Colombian national, was arrested in Orlando after 1.3 kilograms was found in the soles of shoes he was carrying, Eaton said. After Darwich's arrest, DEA agents were waiting when the Learjet landed at the airport on July 25, Eaton said. Passengers Edgar Javier Valles Diaz, 51, and Neyra Aracely Rivas Casanova, 48, both of Caracas, Venezuela, were arrested after 13 kilograms of heroin were found hidden in the soles of tennis shoes stashed in their luggage, Eaton said. The pilot was not arrested because of a lack of evidence. Five kilograms were destined for Orlando and eight were scheduled to continue to New York, officials said."
        • See the Welcome to TerrorLand appendix for official government documents on this case - a DEA agent's affidavit names the pilot as Diego Levine-Texar; Florida corporation records for Hilliard's company American Jet Charters include the pilot
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "Flight School Owner’s Plane Seized for Heroin Trafficking", 2003/10/24: "Apparently the DEA was “very disturbed” enough to look more closely at Hilliard’s jet charter operation. The result was their firm opposition to returning the plane to Hilliard. And although no one from Plane 1 Leasing was charged with any crime, there appears to be abundant evidence pointing to the conclusion that––at the very least––the company had to have known what was going on. “It was just blatant,” said one aviation observer. “That same plane flew that same run thirty or forty times, ferrying the same people. And they always paid cash for the rental.” [...] The plane’s frequent roundtrips to South America were confirmed by an official at Executive Jet Service, the facility which serviced the jet at Orlando Executive Airport, who stated the plane made weekly down-and-back runs to Venezuela."
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "Able Danger Intel Exposed "Protected" Heroin Trafficking", 2005/08/17 (old version): "As far back as 1991, military investigators had been detailed to Hamburg Germany, tracking what one military investigator who was there told us were “Al Qaeda heroin flows” from Afghanistan to the West. [...] When Hilliard sued to get the DEA to return the Lear jet inn forfeiture hearings, attempting to show himself to have been an “innocent owner,” his motion was opposed by the Government and roundly rejected in court. The U.S. Attorney’s office opposed the plane’s return. Their motion said, “because the property was used or acquired as a result of a violation of the Controlled Substances Act.” [...] The court concluded Hilliard’s company knew what was going on. Affidavits later filed by the machine-gun toting DEA agents who had surrounded the Lear jet indicated Hilliard’s company’s involvement went much deeper than anyone was willing to acknowledge publicly."
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "Russian Mobster Tied to 9/11 Conspiracy in Plot", 2006/11/29 - implicates Russian mobster Igor Borisovich Rabaev a.k.a. Boris Rabaev a.k.a. Felix Rabaev as the New Jersey contact for the drug flights: "During much of the year 2000, Russian Mobster Igor Borisovich “Felix” Rabaev, late of the Russian enclave of Brighton Beach in New York City, current whereabouts unknown, met imprisoned Venezuelan drug trafficker Edgar Valles-Diaz on his arrival on over thirty weekly flights, each of which began in Venezuela with a stop-over in Fort Lauderdale before landing at a general aviation airport just outside New York City in Teeterboro, New Jersey. [...] Rabaev, a member of one of the three largest Russian Mob families in the U.S., flitted in and out of Central Asia at will, eyewitnesses told the MadCowMorningNews, using the Uzbek capital of Tashkent as a transshipment point for heroin from Afghanistan wending its way to Russia and the West."
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "Source: Rudi Dekkers drug case “will never go to trial”", 2013/03/06: "With a guilty plea, hopes that Dekkers’ trial for drug trafficking will become an opportunity to illuminate the criminality of some of shadowy financier Wally Hilliard’s key lieutenants will be dashed. [...] Drug pilot #1 was Diego Texar Levine, a Venezuelan native and Hilliard’s partner in a jet charter service, piloted a Hilliard-owned Lear jet that was surrounded by DEA Agents on a runway of Orlando Executive Airport in July 2000, less than three weeks after Mohamed Atta began attending his flight school. [...] Drug pilot #2: Michael Francis Brassington, a native of Guyana, was the co-pilot on that flight. [...] Yet co-pilot Brassington was conspicuously unnamed in the DEA’s affidavit filed in court documents in the case. Perhaps this was due, a Naples Airport insider told me, to his second career… working for the DEA. “He is DEA, assigned to Guyana,” asserted this source. [...] Drug Pilot#3: Kevin Frater, a Hilliard pilot-employee in 2000-2001, went on the lam when his business partner was arrested with more than a 100 lbs. of heroin."
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "Did Magic Dutch Boy’s Boss Slip Saudis out of Raytheon?", 2001/12/26 (Tampa Tribune, "Phantom Flight From Florida", 2001/10/05 (copy of article)): "Let’s begin with a story in the Tampa Tribune of a twin-engine Lear jet, which took off two days after the Sept 11 attack, at a time when every other private plane in the nation was grounded due to safety concerns. [...] It carried a Saudi Arabian prince, the son of that nation’s defense minister, as well as the son of a Saudi army commander, and it flew from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky, where Saudi princes had been purchasing racehorses in Bluegrass Country. From there, they flew a private 747 out of the country. [...] Since the plane took off from a private hanger at Raytheon Airport Services in Tampa, we went there first… Raytheon is a major defense-intelligence industry player which spent the past decade expanding, purchasing notorious E-Systems and culminating with Raytheon’s merger with Hughes Electronics’ defense operations (Hughes Aircraft). [...] Today—no thanks to Raytheon— the MadCowMorningNews has learned from a knowledgeable aviation source that the Lear jet in question very likely came from a Naples, Florida charter service. [...] “Wally Hilliard owns the only charter Lear service in Southwest Florida,” said this source. “If a Lear was flying that day, it would have been his.”"
      • Endorsements by Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris
        • Discover Air website from 2002/10/08 showing "The Discover Air "family" with Governor Bush"
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "9/11: The American Connection", 2003/05/27: "In the blink of an eye, bright futures turned bleak, as 20-yr-old students were suddenly left with $100,000 student loans to pay off and nothing to show for it. Individual losses were so large because the Airline Training Academy, owned and run by the family of retired Delta pilot Jim Williams, followed the unusual practice of forcing students to pre-pay, in full, for training. [...] Attempting to protect any remaining assets, the students went to court, and sued. [...] Suspicion focused on a transaction the previous year in which the William’s family sold a charter air carrier, Discover Air, to Sunrise Airlines, an aviation holding company controlled by Wally Hilliard. "At least three million got siphoned out of ATA and into Discover Air," an attorney for the students told us. "The money flowed out of the country to the Bahamas." Conveniently, Wally Hilliard owns an aviation facility in Nassau called Executive Air, run by Alfonso Bowe, a South African native, where the busy Mr. Hilliard also owns a winery. [...] The general manager at Discover Air, Tommy Barraza, said ATA and Discover Air were "definitely not connected;" they ‘just happened’ to share the same officers, members of the family of "Captain Jim" Williams, head honcho of the flight school, and his son Scott, Discover Air's CEO. [...] But look at the Discover Air website, the students countered, which identified the flight school as "the parent company of Discover Air." [...] And at the same time ATA and Discover Air were going bust, corporate filings relating to Wally Hilliard and his operations had begun to go missing at the Secretary of State’s office in Tallahassee—Katherine Harris’s office. [...] Harris, we recalled, was one of two Florida officials—the other being Gov. Jeb Bush—who somehow found it necessary to publicly praise Wally Hilliard’s airline—then flying as “Florida Air”— even though it too had been going bankrupt at the time, six months before the 9/11 attack. [...] One of these documents, we discovered, contains crucial evidence in the Orlando flight school’s bankruptcy, proving that two years before the Williams’ family say they ‘sold’ Discover Air to Wally Hilliard, Discover Air CEO Scott Williams filed incorporation papers with the Florida Secretary of State’s office… The company he was incorporating, oddly enough, was Wally Hilliard’s Sunrise Airlines, the same company which supposedly purchased his company two years later."
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "Terror Flight School Owner’s Lear Flew Saudis on Unsupervised Flights", 2004/05/04 (old version) - describes an attempted takeover of Rum Cay in the Bahamas, by a group including Leslie Greyling (a fraudster linked to Adnan Khashoggi, Donald Trump, and the investigation of Mafia influence on Wall Street that tied to Michael K. Graye of Premier Election Solutions) and F. Lee Bailey which used a Lear jet N35NK from Plane 1 Leasing
      • Business ventures with Alphonso Bowe (who has roots in South Africa just like the aforementioned Leslie Greyling)
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "9/11: The American Connection", 2003/05/27: "Conveniently, Wally Hilliard owns an aviation facility in Nassau called Executive Air, run by Alfonso Bowe, a South African native, where the busy Mr. Hilliard also owns a winery" - note that Nassau is where Viktor Kozeny fled to and has resided since the US government sought his arrest for the Azerbaijan oil privatization fraud
        • WineNet (PTY) Ltd, "Bowe Jouberts debut Wines", 2001/11/03: "A new era for the farm began in October 2000 when owner-brothers Jannie and Lukas Joubert entered into a joint venture with Bahamian businessman Alphonso Bowe, and Andrew Hilliard from Green Bay, Wisconsin, the third partner. The new company took the name of the major players to become known as the Bowe Joubert Vineyards and Winery."
        • WineNet (PTY) Ltd, "New roots in Cape", 2001/11/03: "Backtrack to 1995: Alphonso Bowe, a young dynamic and very successful Bahamian entrepreneur, lands at Schipol airport in Holland on a business trip. he encounters a distinguished man in the cloakroom, who reveals he is to meet the Dutch Royal family, and who accepts an offer of a splash of cologne. The distinguished man is President Nelson Mandela, who proceeds to invite Bowe to visit South Africa. Reciprocally, the President accepts Bowes open invitation to visit Nassau in the Bahamas. Bowe, whose interests extend beyond aviation and shipping to include a sound knowledge of wine, visited Cape Town a year later, and fell in love with the winelands. [...] Last year, he met the Jouberts of La Provence, a beautifully situated wine farm on the Polkadraai Road near Stellenbosch. Enjoying stupendous views of the Helderberg and Hottentots Holland mountains and False Bay, the property has been farmed since 1695, and wine has been made there for over 200 years. The time was ripe for development. Jannie and Lukas Joubert entered into a joint venture with Bowe, while a Wisconsin businessman, Andrew Hilliard, became a third party in the re-named Bowe Joubert Vineyards and Winery."
        • University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, "Ron Weyers to receive UW-Green Bay Chancellor's Award", 2004/12/15: "Weyers began a career in insurance in 1962. Seven years later, he and partner Wally Hilliard began their own insurance agency. [...] He also serves on the boards of Promotion Management Inc. (PMI) of Green Bay, M&I Bank of Northeastern Wisconsin, Secura Insurance Companies, Raven Mfg. LLC, Foth & Van Dyke Inc., Executive Flight Support, and Junior Achievement of Green Bay."
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "Charter Crash Exposed Criminal Organization", 2009/02/25: ""Brassington flew in while I was working at the General Aviation Facility in Ft. Lauderdale,” former Customs Agent James Sanders told us. “The charter company Brassington was flying for is controlled by a family suspected of running an organized drug ring.” “And without a doubt he had some kind of financial relationship with Wally Hilliard. I was given a manifest for his flight labeled “Executive Flight Support,” which was owned by Wally Hilliard, and managed by Alfonso Bowe. “According to the terminology used in our Customs computer systems, Bowe heads up a criminal organization the computer labeled “The Alfonso Bowe Smuggling Group.”"
          • Boondocks forum post on 2009/03/02 citing a Broden & Mickelsen document about a Bowe family member being involved in drug trafficking: "[...] This is what I found on Alphonso Bowe. http://www.brodenmickelsen.com/documents/Bowe.pdf. I just found that this website for Broden & Mickelsen is down. I found a Google cache for this document. I will copy this document as an OpenOfficeWriter file, so that I won't lose it, if the cache expires or if this brodenmickelsen.com never returns. Alphonso's brother, CHARLES ALEXANDER BOWE, was convicted of "conspiring to import cocaine, "importing cocaine," "conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute cocaine," and "possession with the intent to distribute cocaine." Alphonso Bowe and other family members testified for the defense. Alphonso and his sister "attempted to establish that Mr. Bowe was a fifteen percent owner in a very profitable family business and would not likely be involved in a drug deal for a $4,000 return on a $56,000 investment." The Bowe family hired "Edward Garland and his firm and paid Mr. Garland�s firm approximately $150,000" to defend Charles. They paid a total of $275,000 for his defense, and Alphonso himself was very involved with preparing the case for the defense. Note this :

            Page 12: "Damian Coverley was arrested on December 3, 2004 after he arrived at the Savannah Airport to pick up approximately 8 kgs. of cocaine that had been flown to Savannah from Nassau, Bahamas by government informant Robert Nylund".

            Page 15-16: "Meanwhile Robert Nylund testified at trial that, in fact, he flew Kevin Frater from Nassau, Bahamas to Cuba on December 12, 2002 at the direction of Mr. Bowe�s brother, Franz Bowe. Id. at 361. Nevertheless, Nylund made clear that, in the entire time he worked for Mr. Bowe as a pilot, he never knew Mr. Bowe to be involved in flying drugs."

            Page 35: "Theresa Laramore, a customer service representative in the Bahamas for Executive Flight Services, could have established that there was no prearranged plot on the part of the Bowes to fly Frater to Cuba as claimed by Coverley. In fact, Frater showed up unexpected one day at Executive Flight Support in the Bahamas asking to charter a plane to Jamaica.""
          • Death of Anna Nicole Smith
        • Nassau Guardian, "Executive Flight Supports to become Jet Aviation Bahamas", 2015/01/26: "Executive Flight Support (EFS) has announced a new fixed base operator management agreement with international aviation maintenance company Jet Aviation, and according to the tourism minister, it is a move that celebrates “brand Bahamas”. The Lynden Pindling International Airport-based EFS will be a new addition to Jet Aviation’s worldwide FBO network and will be rebranded as Jet Aviation Bahamas. Managed by Jet Aviation as of January 2015, EFS – in business since 1990 – touts itself as “the premier full-service FBO in the Caribbean”, situated at the largest airport and the main international gateway into the country. [...] EFS owner and Managing Director Alphonso Bowe seemed satisfied with the deal."
        • Jet Aviation (subsidiary of General Dynamics) contact page for Alphonso Bowe - calls him the Director of FBO Services
      • Wisconsin Court of Appeals, no. 2008AP124: HERBERT J. CUENE, JR., PLAINTIFF-RESPONDENT, V. WALLACE J. HILLIARD, DEFENDANT-APPELLANT, appeal decision, 2008/05/06: "Hilliard formed Florida Air Holdings, Inc., in March 2001, envisioning it as primarily a commuter airline operating in Florida. To operate as a commuter airline, the company needed a “Part 121” operating certificate from the United States Department of Transportation. To obtain the Part 121 certificate, Florida Air purchased the bankrupt Sunrise Airlines, Inc., to operate as a Florida Air subsidiary. [...] Hilliard also owned a company called Plane 1 Leasing Co., Inc., which owned and leased planes to other airlines. [...] Plane 1 and Huffman Aviation—another of Hilliard’s companies—also had loans from M&I totaling $4 million."
      • Don Whittington and Bill Whittington connection
    • Hilliard background and connections
      • Democratic Underground post digging into the business ventures and associates of Wallace J. Hilliard
      • University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, "Ron Weyers to receive UW-Green Bay Chancellor's Award", 2004/12/15: "Weyers began a career in insurance in 1962. Seven years later, he and partner Wally Hilliard began their own insurance agency. In 1977, they purchased an insurance company charter and grew the company to what became Employers Health Insurance Company, one of the largest health insurance companies in the United States. Employers later became known as Humana Inc. The pair left the firm in 1988 and started American Medical Security Inc. When they sold AMS in 1996, it had revenues in excess of $1 billion.

        Weyers has received many business awards, including the Free Enterprise Award from the Rotary Club of Green Bay, the Excellence in Business Award from the Green Bay Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Wisconsin Entrepreneur of the Year award from Ernst & Young, Inc. magazine and Merrill Lynch.

        In addition to his support of UW-Green Bay, Weyers has served the community as a founding member and member of the board of the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation. He also serves on the boards of Promotion Management Inc. (PMI) of Green Bay, M&I Bank of Northeastern Wisconsin, Secura Insurance Companies, Raven Mfg. LLC, Foth & Van Dyke Inc., Executive Flight Support, and Junior Achievement of Green Bay."
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "The Man Who Paid the Men Who Stare at Goats", 2009/10/15: "Wally Hilliard’s links to American intelligence go back (at least) to November of 1981, when his insurance company, Wisconsin Employer’s Group, was bought out by Myron Du Bain, a World War II OSS/CIA operative and the Chairman of Fireman's Fund of San Francisco. [...] DuBain became chairman of SRI International in 1985, at a crucial time when the U.S. Defense Dept. was growing increasingly concerned with advances in psychic research behind what was then called the “Iron Curtain.” A January 10, 1984 headline in the New York Times read “PENTAGON IS SAID TO FOCUS ON ESP FOR WARTIME USE.” [...] Du Bain’s first stint running SRI was also tumultuous. As President of SRI during the late 60’s, he faced regular protests over the institute's controversial military contracts, including studies on chemical warfare and LSD. The Stanford campus was up in arms over SRI’s involvement in LSD experiments being conducted at the Veterans Hospital in Redwood City (where author Ken Kesey first took LSD) resulting in Stanford University issuing a statement in 1970 cutting it’s ties to the institute which bore its name. [...] With oilman Gordon Getty and Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz, DuBain founded an exclusive private San Francisco supper club. He was also influential at the Pacific Institute, which kept former Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from starving while Clinton was President in the 90’s. [...] Another example is Farhad Azima, who leased his plane to Ollie North so he could go to Iran, was implicated in the S & L scandal ( specifically Indian Springs S & L out of Kansas City), named in the Lincoln Bedroom scandal, and has run CIA affiliated airlines going all the way back to the 70's with Egyptian-American Air Transport. He and Hilliard are partners in a venture called Spatialight."
        • Green Bay News-Chronicle, "Wisconsin Employers Group merger official", 1982/11/10: "A super-merger combining $26 billion in mutual assets was officially enacted Tuesday when American Express-Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. of San Francisco acquired the Wisconsin Employers Insurance Group of De Pere. [...] A number of high ranking officials, including former Green Bay Packer Willie Davis, were on hand to sign the agreement. Davis, now a Fireman's Fund board member, flew in from San Francisco Monday along with American Express Vice Chairman Myron Du Bain and other executives of the Fireman's Fund, one of 25 American Express subsidiaries. [...] According to W.J. Hilliard, WEG president and co-founder, the employment expansion will start next winter, when about 5 or 10 new employees will be added."
        • SFGate, "Myron Du Bain -- Fireman's Fund ex-CEO", 2002/07/26: "A memorial service will be held Monday for Myron Du Bain, who rose from file clerk to become chairman and chief executive officer of the venerable Fireman's Fund insurance company in San Francisco. [...] Mr. Du Bain got into the insurance business shortly after World War II, when his wife, Alice, suggested to the newly discharged Navy lieutenant that he give it a try. "Why don't you go down to Fireman's Fund, that seems like a nice company to work for," she told her husband. [...] In 1974, he was named president and chief executive officer of the $3 billion-a-year insurance colossus. The following year, he was elected chairman of the board. [...] Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Mr. Du Bain's longtime friend, called him a man of "boundless optimism, tremendous buoyancy and patriotism." [...] Fireman's Fund, a subsidiary of American Express, operated for decades out of its historic headquarters on California Street in Laurel Heights. The company, founded in San Francisco in 1863 to benefit firefighters, moved to Novato and San Rafael in the 1980s and was acquired in 1991 by Allianz, a big German conglomerate. Mr. Du Bain was a native of Cleveland and a graduate of UC Berkeley. During World War II, he commanded a rescue boat in the South Pacific. He also served during the Korean War. He was a member of more than a dozen corporate boards, including American Express, Wells Fargo, Transamerica, Pacific Gas and Electric and Chronicle Publishing Co., former owner of The Chronicle. In 1983, he retired from Fireman's Fund to become chairman of Amfac, the hotel chain, and later of SRI International, the former Stanford Research Institute. [...] He was a member of the Bohemian Club, the California Tennis Club and the Pacific Union Club, of which he was currently serving as president."
        • Leader's Edge Magazine, "Game Changers", 2014/12/02: "Heeding the call of his generation, Myron Du Bain joined the Navy when the United States entered WWII. He commanded a rescue boat in the South Pacific and later served in the Korean War. What’s not commonly known is his important role in intelligence work as a member of the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the CIA."
        • SEC filing on Spatialight Inc. - mentions FARHAD AZIMA in an unclear context; involves ARGYLE CAPITAL MANAGEMENT CORPORATION; some of the biggest lenders are Hilliard Limited Partnership, Dan Hilliard, and Wallace J. Hilliard Flint Trust; other lenders include Ronald A. Weyers, Jeffrey J. Weyers, and Robert J. Weyers
      • Oryx LLC company
        • Florida corporation records on ORYX, LLC - filed on 2001/04/12 and ADMIN DISSOLUTION FOR ANNUAL REPORT on 2005/09/16; principal address and mailing address are 100 AVIATION DRIVE SOUTH SUITE 202 NAPLES, FL 34104; only authorized person with title MGRM is HILLARD, WALLACE J 100 AVIATION DRIVE SOUTH NAPLES, FL 34104
        • Possible connection to Oryx Investments Ltd. run by Saudi businessmen
          • Foreign and Commonwealth Office, "Economic relations between Gulf states and UK", 1974, p.23 (PDF copy): "I am very happy about the quality of Oryx's Arab partners: in Saudi Arabia we have H.E. Kamla Adham, Abdulaziz Sulaiman and Adnan Khashoggi (through his company, Triad); in Abu Dhabi we have the Hamoodah family; in Dubai we have Mohamed Almulla; in Kuwait we have the Kuwait International Investment Company; in Bahrain we have the Alireza family; and in Qatar we have Ahmed Mannai. Our initial Chief Executive is Alan Wren, who has had many years banking experience in the Middle East."
          • Companies House information on ORYX INVESTMENTS LIMITED - company number is 01178167; officers are HOMSY, Nicolas Georges (of England), AL-SULAIMAN, Saud (of Saudi Arabia), and JEANBART, Paul (of Lebanon with Swiss nationality)
        • Possible connection to Oryx Natural Resources (owned by the Oryx Group of Oman with ventures in Africa), a diamond mining company accused of financing al-Qaeda in a since-retracted BBC report
          • The Guardian, "'How did this happen?'", 2001/12/09: "Back on October 31, it all seemed so different. In an edit suite in the corner of Television Centre that is home to the Ten O'Clock News, reporter David Shukman was putting the final touches to his report, laying down a dramatic commentary over a document that would show the connections between diamonds and terror. The document listed Kamal Kal Fhan as a shareholder in a Congolese mine owned by Oryx, a complex group of compannies that is based in the Gulf state of Oman. Leaning forward into the microphone, Shukman stated that Mohamed Khalfan had been jailed two weeks earlier for his involvement in the 1998 attacks. Then, in his best conspiratorial tone, he intoned invitingly: "Look at the list of shareholders in the diamond company and you see someone with a very similar name. Were they the same men?"

            Clearly, that wasn't enough. Simply sharing a name was no evidence of a link. So Shukman then played in the commentary of intelligence expert Brian Johnson-Thomas. Shulman said: "We turned to someone who's investigated the diamond trade for the UN security council. Brian Johnson-Thomas obtained proof that the bomber and the shareholder are one and the same.""
          • Global Witness, "Global Witness questions 9/11 commission regarding diamonds", 2004/06/17: "A draft report by the 9/11 Commission stating that Al Qaeda did not “fund itself through trafficking in diamonds from African states engaged in civil wars” is wrong and will damage international efforts to ensure that rough diamonds are not used to fund terrorism. Global Witness fears that unscrupulous elements of the diamond trade will use the draft report to undermine genuine and serious efforts being made by groups such as the US Department of Treasury’s FinCEN and diamond financing banks such as ABN Amro to ensure that money laundering and terrorist financing are taken more seriously by the diamond industry.

            Following the revelations by the Washington Post in 2001, Global Witness conducted a yearlong investigation into Al Qaeda’s involvement in the diamond trade. In March 2003 Global Witness released an investigative report detailing how Al Qaeda cells had strategically used diamonds for profit and to launder targeted funds. Evidence contained in Global Witness’ report came from the US government and FBI itself. Notebooks and business cards taken by the FBI from Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary, Wadih El Hage, show a deep involvement in the diamond and precious gem trade. Similarly court transcripts of trials in the USA and Germany in 2000 and 2001 show that Al Qaeda members in East Africa were involved in the diamond and gem trade."
      • Jerry Falwell involvement
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "THE SECRET HISTORY OF JERRY FALWELL", 2007/05/18: "We first learned of terror flight school owner Hilliard’s loan to Falwell from Stuart Burchill, Hilliard’s former accountant. At one time Hilliard had assigned him the task, Burchill stated, of dunning deadbeat Falwell, the founder of Liberty University and Pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, to repay the million bucks Falwell owed his boss. In the course of trying to get Falwell to address the unpaid debt Burchill learned details of the Reverend’s accounting practices upon which the Almighty Himself would presumably frown. “The Falwell note was an outstanding receivable I was assigned to collect,” Burchill explained. “I talked to Falwell’s accountant, who was very apologetic. He said there was plenty of money to pay off the loan, except that any time there was money left in the account at the end of the month, Jerry always stripped it out.” [...] Why did Wally Hilliard loan Falwell a cool million bucks? When we briefly interviewed Wally Hilliard several years ago we brought the subject up. “You loaned money to Jerry Falwell. How much?” we asked. “More than I want to tell you about,” Hilliard replied. “Did Falwell pay you back?” “He paid some of it back.” [...] Then, too, there is Falwell’s association with leading televangelist, Pat Robertson, who eulogized him, saying, “Jerry’s courage and strength of convictions will be sadly missed in this time of increasing moral relativism.” [...] One of the flight trainers who trained Atta in Venice moonlighted flying missionary flights for televangelist Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing. During the 1980s Falwell— at the same time Robertson was involved a bizarre sideline for a preacher, diamond mining in West Africa— had been an outspoken supporter of apartheid in South Africa. And a Caribe Air C130 had been shot down over Angola with the loss of everyone aboard, including a US Congressman’s nephew. The plane was on a mission for the Angolan government, it was discovered, laden with a cargo of swag, including whiskey and cigarettes. More recently, terror flight school owner Wally Hilliard incorporated a “charity” called the “West African Children’s Lifeline, Inc.” [...] Recently we learned that Wally Hilliard’s former accountant, Stuart Burchill, is today the CEO of a company called Industrial Nanotech, a company working closely with Sandia National Laboratories."
        • Daniel Hopsicker, "Jerry Falwell, Wally Hilliard, & Transnational Organized Crime", 2019/10/13: "Flores was writing, he said, because an unknown company, Britannia Aviation, had been awarded a five-year contract to run a large regional maintenance facility at the Lynchburg Virginia Regional Airport, over a much better-qualified local firm, Virginia Aviation. [...] “Right away, Virginia Aviation’s VP Jim Lampmann started questioning this company’s credentials, to the point where I’d be setting the paper up for liability if I printed it,” he wrote. [...] “And he was right. They didn’t have the FAA license. Paul Marten, the Brit who is VP of the company, said he didn’t have the license because they were just working out of a small hangar on planes for Huffman Aviation under Huffman’s license,” Flores wrote. [...] In September of 2003, the year after the company moved in, the Lynchburg City Council approved the assignment of the Britannia Aviation lease to Aviation Technical Services [same ownership]. The next year the City Council approved the assignment of the lease to Falwell Aviation, which soon changed its name to Freedom Aviation. [...] The University’s assets have grown from $259 million in 2007 to over $3 BILLION today. [...] A contributing factor was that Liberty University owned what used to be called Brittania Aviation. After being ‘folded’ into Falwell Aviation, which then changed its name to Freedom Aviation, it became the largest aviation company at Lynchburg Airport. [...] To reassure those in attendance that his company was real and solvent, Marten said that while housed at Huffman Aviation’s hangar at the Venice Airport, they had for some time been successfully providing aviation maintenance services for a Caribbean air carrier called Caribe Air. [...] Caribe Air’s history as a notorious CIA proprietary air carrier was extraordinarily well-documented. Aircraft owned by the company had seized by federal officials at the infamous Mena Arkansas airport, involving accusations by government prosecutors that the company maintained as many as 20 planes to ship drugs worth billions of dollars into the U.S. Caribe Air was run by German national and longtime CIA asset Dietrich Reinhardt, who had a partner at the Charlotte County Florida Airport who was suspected of stealing as many as 23 helicopters… from the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Dept. [...] An aviation executive in Venice confirmed the report. “The KGB was around Hilliard’s operation. I don’t know why they were there, but I know that Hilliard knew they were there. And not just the KGB, there were individuals who flew for the Israeli military who were there at the Venice airport.”"
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "Venice FL ‘Terror’ Flight School Owner Arrested", 2009/03/05: "The owner of the flight school in Venice FL where the two hijackers who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center took flight lessons, was arrested last May after assaulting his 17-yr old step-daughter outside a sports bar in Naples, Florida. [...] The daughter involved in the altercation with Hilliard has since relocated to Utah. In the wake of Hilliard's arrest several Naples residents who socialize with Hilliard contacted us to express outrage about his behavior. "In public, and at church, they are the epitome of a good family," wrote one disapproving neighbor. "Behind closed doors, not so much." From their comments it was possible to piece together an account of the turbulent private life of the 78-year old Hilliard. His wife, Patricia, is at 46 thirty-two years his junior. She has five children from a previous marriage. After the two wed, Hilliard adopted her children. He also adopted his new bride's Mormon faith. [...] After retiring to Naples in 1996, Hilliard hobnobbed with an assortment of international 'players" who are decidedly uncharacteristic of circles a retired-to Florida insurance executives might normally travel in. [...] Aviation mechanic Dave Montgomery, known as “Jet Dave” at the Naples Airport, thinks that may have been the point. Montgomery witnessed a secretive meeting between Hilliard and the founder of Waste Management, garbage king Wayne Huizenga, conducted entirely inside a helicopter on the tarmac at Naples airport. Huizenga, who at that time was also the owner of the Miami Dolphins, flew in on a chopper with a Dolphins helmet emblazoned on the side, Montgomery said. Hilliard went out to meet it, and got in. Then the two men then sat inside the helicopter for almost an hour. [...] Naples flight manager Danielle Clarke told us Hilliard didn't act like someone who had retired. [...] "The man quickly purchased—and in very short order—a fleet of fifteen jets. He spent between $30 and $40 million on planes. He still (in 2003) has 20 very expensive airplanes left, including Lear 35s, and Gulfstreams.” Clarke, a British aviatrix who came to Florida after her British pilot husband died, snorts at Hilliard's attempt at portraying a “pious man." “Wally came in quite a bit, seemed very compassionate, made a lot of references to God,” she said. “You’d be talking about business; then all of a sudden he’d mention the Good Lord." She waved a hand dismissively. "It got to be a bit much.”" - note that Wayne Huizenga, a GOP donor, also ran a company called Republic Services Inc. which was a lobbying client of Tom Feeney in Orange County FL
    • Dekkers involvement with the hijackers
      • p.1 of an FBI interview with Nicole Antini on 2001/09/13: "RUDI DEKKERS offered ATTA and ALSHEHHI a job with his new airline Flair, as co-pilots. ATTA and ALSHEHHI would have to pay DEKKERS for the job because they would be able to gain experience to further their flight license."
      • Sarasota Weekly Planet, "Not So Media Savvy" by Rochelle Renford, 2001/09/27: "On Wednesday, he told some reporters, including me, that his interaction with the two suspects came from a couple of brief conversations when he passed them in the halls. His employees had dealt with their enrollment. By Sunday's reports, Dekkers served up anecdotes about the two men, telling a reporter, "He sat right there last year when he came to talk to me about taking lessons here." [...] Whereas on Wednesday he'd blasted a reporter for asking about a German connection, on Thursday he told me an anecdote about one of the suspects saying he was German. Dekkers wasn't just remembering new details; he was learning how to tell a story."
    • Yeslam bin Laden (a.k.a. Yeslam bin Ladin / Yeslam Binladin) connection
      • New Yorker, "The House of bin Laden" by Jane Mayer, 2001/11/04: "Yeslam Binladin, meanwhile, has issued a statement denouncing his half brother Osama; he has told reporters that his real passions are tennis and flying. He has nonetheless attracted the scrutiny of Swiss and American investigators because of a financial stake he has in a Swiss aviation firm. By a seeming coincidence, he paid for flight instruction for an acquaintance at Huffman Aviation, the training school in Venice, Florida, that many of the suicide hijackers attended. When I asked Yeslam about this, he replied in a fax from Geneva that while he had subsidized the flying lessons, he was not involved in picking the flight school. He said that he has had no contact with his half brother for more than twenty years, has never supported him either politically or financially, and has not been back to Saudi Arabia for thirteen years."
      • New York Post, "OSAMA BRO SUED – 9/11 KIN SAY HE PAID FOR ATTACKS", 2005/04/11: "Yeslam Binladin, Osama bin Laden’s brother and one of 54 siblings from their father’s many wives, has publicly claimed to have had no contact with Osama for decades. But French authorities are currently investigating Yeslam, whose daughter, Wafah, is trying to become a pop star in New York, for ties to Osama and terrorism. And in documents filed in Manhattan federal court, families of 9/11 victims specifically brand Yeslam a terrorist who knowingly helped his brother and his terrorist organization launch the deadliest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor."
    • Other controversy surrounding Huffman
    • Life of Dekkers after the 9/11 controversy
    • History of covert operations in and around Venice FL
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "Jackson Stephens ‘Active’ in Venice, Florida", 2002/10/31: "A block away from the Venice Florida airport stands an opulent three-story red brick building that is a monument to the rivers of money flowing through the Stephens financial empire. Looking eerily-reminiscent of the plush digs of the law firm in the Tom Cruise movie "The Firm," or a particularly-ostentatious Southern Governors’ mansion, the building seems out of place alongside the weed-strewn airport perimeter. This was the national headquarters of Jackson Stephen's Beverly Enterprises. It is a stone’s throw from the Venice Airport. Gleaming like a movie set and basking in Florida's Indian summer, the building still houses Stephens former law firm, local political powerhouse Boone Boone & Boone, a firm which worked so closely with client Stephens that at least one of his executives was permanently housed there. "I don’t think you could safely say that they (Boone & Boone) runs everything in town," said one local observer. "But you could safely say they run almost everything. They exert a strong influence here, including out at the airport." [...] Interestingly enough, the Venice Airport also surfaced briefly in the questioning of Oliver North during the Iran Contra hearings, when a man with a local aviation business named Joe Duncan was alleged to have run guns to the Contras from the airport."
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "Big Safari, the Kennedy Assassination, & the war for control of the Venice Airport", 2009/09/08 (FBI report from NARA 124-10370-10031 that mentions the arrest of Stephen Ruth from the Venice FL area; Hopsicker copy): "Operations at the Venice Airport have involved individuals whose names figure prominently in the Kennedy Assassination, for example Texas oilman General D. H. (Harry) Byrd, owner of a defense contractor which in the late 50's and early 60's built and launched Regulus II cruise missiles from the beach directly in front of the Venice Airport in a program run out of at Eglin AFB in Florida’s panhandle. [...] Amazingly—especially for a tiny airport located in an out-of-the-way retirement community—according to a recently-uncovered police report there is a second man active at the Venice Airport with relevance to the Kennedy assassination as well. According to this recently-unearthed police report, that man, a suspected CIA Agent, flew to Cuba in 1969 on a mission to assassinate one of “four or five” of the men then still alive who had been part of the Kennedy assassination “hit team.”"
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "“Venice was a quiet Mena,” says former drug pilot", 2010/04/16: "Led by a mysterious Cuban exile, who used the alias “Frank Guzman,” The Company’s contingent at the Venice Airport numbered as many as a dozen pilots and associates. The Company began receiving national attention in the early 1980’s. [...] At the Venice Airport, in addition to Frank Guzman their number included: Stephen Ruth, who we reported on earlier in Confessions of a Drug Smuggling CIA Hit Man," Lee Crowell, Joseph Brea, Richard Curry, George Quarles, and several others, including a local attorney, who have been missing in action for more than 20 years. [...] We received further confirmation after we tracked down a former drug pilot for The Company who spoke with us on condition of anonymity. [...] “Venice was a kind of quiet Mena (Arkansas)," said our pilot informant. "Jackson Stephens had built this huge headquarters next to the airport. And he was in charge. But I do remember seeing Porter Goss around the airport a lot.”"
  • New York Times, "Hard Times Are Plaguing Flight Schools in Florida", 2003/09/14: "Arne Kruithof, who owns Florida Flight Training Center in Venice, where one 9/11 hijacker learned to fly, said he had only a handful of students a year ago and his business was then barely surviving. [...] Mr. Kruithof's school trained Ziad al-Jarrah, one of the men who hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. A neighboring flight school, Huffman Aviation, trained Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, identified as leaders of the hijackings."
  • Ziad Jarrah training at a gym in South Florida operated by Bert Rodriguez
    • CNN, "FBI returns to suspected hijacker's gym", 2001/09/19: "Two FBI agents returned Wednesday to a gymnasium near Hollywood, Florida, where one of the suspected hijackers worked out and learned street-fighting techniques from a personal trainer who used rubber knives and taught mental harmony. US-1 Gym owner Bert Rodriguez told CNN the FBI was asking questions about Ziad Samir Jarrah. [...] The gym owner said Jarrah worked out there and hired him as a personal trainer. Rodriguez said Jarrah paid about $1,000 to learn street-fighting and self-defense techniques during private lessons and paid another $200 to $300 to use the gym between May and August. [...] Jarrah lived in an apartment in Hollywood not far from the gym. [...] Rodriguez said Jarrah told him he was German and that he was in the United States studying business and flying. [...] Rodriguez said he also taught Jarrah about Buddhism. "I taught him mental harmony. He spent hours on that," he said."
    • From p.82-83 of The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson (2004):

          At one point during my conversation with Stuart I happened to ask him if he knew anyone who was the living embodiment of the First Earth Battalion. Stuart instantly replied, “Bert Rodriguez.”
          “Bert Rodriguez?” I said.
          “He's a martial arts guy down in Florida,” Stuart said. “My younger brother is one of his students. I've never met anybody like Bert. His gym is always full of ex-military guys, ex-Special Forces. Spooks. And in the middle there's my skinny little brother.”
          I typed Bert Rodriguez's name into a search engine and my screen filled with a picture of an intense-looking shaved-headed Cuban with a black mustache, frozen in the act of slamming a huge and sweaty man into the wall of his gym—the US 1 Fitness Center in Dania Beach, Florida.
          “Bert once got my brother to lie on the floor,” Stuart said, “and he put a cucumber on his chest, and he blindfolded himself and wham! He sliced the cucumber in half with a samurai sword. Didn't cut my brother at all. Blindfolded!”
          “Bloody hell,” I said.
          “Bert's one of the most spiritual guys I've ever met,” said Stuart. “No. Spiritual is the wrong word. He's occultic. He's like a walking embodiment of death. He can stop you at a distance. He can influence physical events just with his mind. If he catches your attention he can stop you without touching you.”
          Stuart paused.
          “But he doesn't talk like this. He's the most First Earth Battalion guy I know but he's incapable of verbalizing it. He's a street fighter from Cuba. With Bert it's just instinctive. But everyone can see it. That's why people come and train under him.”
          In April 2001, Bert Rodriguez took on a new student. His name was Ziad Jarrah. Ziad just turned up at the US 1 Fitness Center one day and said he had heard that Bert was good. Why Ziad chose Bert, of all the martial arts instructors scattered around the Florida shoreline, is a matter of speculation. Maybe Bert's uniquely occultic reputation preceded him, or perhaps it was Bert's military connections. Plus, Bert had once taught the head of security for a Saudi prince. Maybe that was it.
       
    • WJHG, "Destin Man Unknowingly Trained 9/11 Mastermind", 2011/09/08: "Unbeknownst to him, Bert Rodriguez trained the mastermind behind the September 11th Terror Attacks, Ziad Jarrah. Jarrah signed a gym contract ten years ago asking Rodriguez to train him in police enforcement and street tactics. During their conversations, Jarrah said he travels a lot and was studying for an engineering degree in Germany. Jarrah was said to be friendly and very religious. It was not until after the September 11 attacks, and a visit from the FBI that Rodriguez realized the connection Jarrah had with the tragedy. Rodriguez said he had no idea Jarrah was plotting. He went onto say, it saddens him to think Jarrah used the tactics he taught him against innocent Americans."
    • PRWeb, "To Attain Success, You Must First Face Your Fears; Bert Rodriguez Tells His Story in New Book", 2014/02/25: "Just as Dr. Cutler says, "Face Fear Create Courage" is a book that will change lives. The author chronicles his youthful drug addiction and trafficking, jail time, and street encounters with death, including attacks by gang members, being stabbed and shot, living on the streets, and kicking heroin addiction cold turkey. After overcoming his fears, he has become a successful entrepreneur, having trained members of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Metro Dade Police Academy, Broward County Sheriff’s Office, and others in the armed forces.

      Bert Rodriguez has an extensive background as a counselor and speaker in the fields of positive attitude, self-hypnosis, and personal motivation. His reputation in both amateur and professional boxing and kickboxing has elevated him to become a highly respected trainer of world champions. He established Power Punch Promotions in South Florida, which opened and owned top fitness centers in West Palm Beach, North Miami, and Dania, Fla. He now owns and operates Crossfit Destin with his wife, Kathy Rivers, in Destin, Fla."
    • Note that Destin FL, where Bert Rodriguez resided, is where alleged CIA operative and Dixie Mafia member Bowen Ballard has done business
  • Lantana Airport flight schools in Palm Beach County FL
    • Palm Beach Flight Training
    • Kemper Aviation
      • History Commons profile of Kemper Aviation: "9/11 hijacker Marwan Alshehhi pays for a few hours of ground and flying time at Kemper Aviation in Lantana, Florida. According to a document used as evidence at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial, on the first day, “Alshehhi could not answer basic questions on the written aviation test, which he needed an instructor’s assistance to complete.” Alshehhi returns on July 30 and August 8, when he rents a plane for approximately one hour. [US DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF VIRGINIA, ALEXANDRIA DIVISION, 7/31/2006, PP. 66 pdf file] Alshehhi is accompanied by an unknown man on August 8. [FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, 10/2001 pdf file] The FBI will visit the school on September 12, seizing all records of pilots from Saudi Arabia. Over a year later, the FBI will renew its interest in a Saudi, Turki al-Masri, who attended the school around the same time as Alshehhi, but the reason for the renewed interest is not known. [ABC NEWS, 1/23/2003]"
      • ABC, "FBI Hunts Hijacker Connection in Fla. Home", 2003/01/23: "The son, Turki Almasri, was a student at Kemper Aviation located nearby at the Palm Beach County Park Airport, where in August 2001 alleged 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta rented single engine planes. Joe Kemper, President of Kemper Aviation, told ABCNEWS that several teams of FBI agents visited the school on Sept. 12, 2001, and seized the records of all students of Saudi Arabian origin, including Almasri."
      • Los Angeles Times, "FBI Scours Florida Home Saudis Left Before 9/11", 2003/01/23: "According to property records, the single-family home in the gated community of Fairway Isles is owned by Mohammed and Afaf Almasri. The records show Mohammed Almasri bought the house on June 30, 2000. He told people he was an engineer. Some neighbors said that on Sept. 9, 2001, two days before terrorists hijacked four airliners, a white minivan pulled into the driveway, and the family loaded it with suitcases and quickly departed. [...] A supervisor at Kemper Aviation said Turki Almasri had been enrolled at the school, located at the airport in Lantana. [...] According to neighbors, the Almasris divided their time between Saudi Arabia and Florida, and would usually inform other residents when they were leaving. The last time, they apparently told no one."
      • Former chief flight instructor Jean-François Buslik - a likely member of the Operation Gladio fascist underground in Belgium (which is itself connected to the Dutroux affair)
        • Sun Sentinel, "MARSHALS GET FUGITIVE ON LAM 17 YEARS", 1999/04/17: "Anative of Belgium who has eluded authorities since 1982 was arrested on Thursday at his home in North Palm Beach. Jean Francois Buslik, 46, who authorities said also goes by the aliases Jean Francois and Jean Somerville, was in the Palm Beach County Jail late Friday. He was being held for authorities in Belgium. Buslik was charged with murder, theft and possession of explosives. Agents from the U.S. Marshal Service and North Palm Beach police arrested Buslik. They said he had been living a lavish lifestyle. [...] Officials seized a rifle, a semiautomatic .9mm handgun, two revolvers and a large quantity of ammunition from his home. He also had military issue .30-caliber machine-gun bullets, officials said. [...] In the early 1980s, Buslik terrorized residents in Brussels when he helped to make a bomb and placed it in a police car, according to the release. It is not known whether the bomb was detonated. Also while in Brussels, Buslik allegedly robbed and killed the driver of a truck that was hauling a load of gold and other precious metals, Vega said."
        • New Times Broward-Palm Beach, "Secrets and Crimes", 1999/04/22: "An intensely private and enigmatic figure, he had been lurking around the airport since the late '80s, teaching hundreds how to fly and shuttling cargo and wealthy weekenders to and from the Bahamas. [...] In the case of Jean-Francois Buslik, even the country's own Ministry of Justice is unable to explain his years of freedom. "It's very strange, but the attorney general of Brussels never issued an arrest warrant," said Eric Verbert of the extradition division of the Belgian Ministry of Justice weeks before a provisional request for extradition reached that office. [...] Despite his informal 1988 not-guilty plea from afar, the evidence against Buslik was enough to convince prosecutors to charge him with murder, which in 1995, 13 years after the airport robbery, led a panel of judges to find him guilty and sentence him to death. [...] Robert Beijer and Madani Bouhouche, two former police officers implicated with Buslik in the crime, were in the country to face trial; they received lesser sentences of 14 and 20 years respectively. [...] Although a considerable fortune was snatched at the Brussels airport in 1982, the robbery is not the reason that Buslik and his coconspirators received such public notoriety in Belgium. Their media status, at one time on the level of O.J. Simpson or Timothy McVeigh, resulted from their suspected connection to 28 unsolved murders that took place around Brussels in the mid-'80s. [The "Crazy Brabant Killers"] [...] Before retiring in scandal in 1983, Bouhouche, whose father was North African, was well known on the police force for his extreme-right, neo-Nazi sympathies and for his affiliation with the Belgian neo-Nazi organizations Westland Newpost (WNP) and the Youth Front. [...] During the 1988 interrogation in Miami, Buslik blamed his legal trouble in Belgium on his affiliation with Bouhouche. [...] Bouhouche seemed to accord him absolute trust. Buslik was one of only three people who had a key to Bouhouche's house, and he was godfather to Bouhouche's son David. Buslik, in return, pledged his loyalty to Bouhouche, a man he clearly admired. [...] [Buslik] has often been described as a DEA informant and has been closely linked in the press to a DEA agent named Frank Eaton, the top-ranking American drug agent in Brussels in the late '70s. Eaton helped set up the federal antidrug squad in Belgium, a law-enforcement organization that fell into considerable disrepute when its chief, Leon François, and most of his officers were charged with drug trafficking in 1982. Eaton, who was also charged, had already left the country and was protected under diplomatic immunity" - note that Bouhouche was accused by Regina Louf of participating in the Dutroux pedophile ring
    • Nadia Marcinkova a.k.a. Nadia Marcinko training at Lantana Airport - an Eastern European sex slave of Jeffrey Epstein who was accused of being his pilot and child trafficking accomplice
      • Plane & Pilot, "Learning To Fly: All About Priorities", 2013/01/22: "Marcinko called a friend who she knew was a pilot, and asked him if he could recommend a place to take her introductory flight. He took her to a small FBO at Lantana Airport in Florida (officially called the Palm Beach County Airport). Her introductory flight there was a freeing experience. "That was it!" says Marcinko, "I fell in love with flying right there, and dove right into lessons." Flying three or four times a week and financing lessons with money she earned modeling, Marcinko quickly earned her private certificate. Her friend—who was also a corporate chief pilot—became her mentor and supporter, and helped her quickly climb the ratings ladder. "Florida was too flat," laughs Marcinko, "so I went to Santa Fe, N.M., to do my instrument ratings in the mountains." She had her eye on corporate flying, though she would still take the occasional modeling gig."
  • Training at US military bases
    • Newsweek, "Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained At U.S. Bases", 2001/09/14: "Three of the alleged hijackers listed their address on drivers licenses and car registrations as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla.-known as the "Cradle of U.S. Navy Aviation," according to a high-ranking U.S. Navy source. Another of the alleged hijackers may have been trained in strategy and tactics at the Air War College in Montgomery, Ala., said another high-ranking Pentagon official. The fifth man may have received language instruction at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Tex. Both were former Saudi Air Force pilots who had come to the United States, according to the Pentagon source. [...] The three foreign nationals training in Pensacola appear to be Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmad Alnami, who were among the four men who allegedly commandeered United Airlines Flight 93. [...] The third man who may have trained in Pensacola, Ahmed Alghamdi, allegedly helped highjack United Airlines Flight 75, which hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. Military records show that the three used as their address 10 Radford Boulevard, a base roadway on which residences for foreign-military flight trainees are located. In March 1997, Saeed Alghamdi listed the address to register a 1998 Oldsmobile; five months later he used it again to register a second vehicle, a late model Buick. Drivers licenses thought to have been issued to the other two suspects in 1996 and 1998 list the barracks as their residences."
    • New York Times, "Shared Names for Hijackers", 2001/09/15: "Three of the men identified as the hijackers in the attacks on Tuesday have the same names as alumni of American military schools, the authorities said today. The men were identified as Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari and Saeed al-Ghamdi. The Defense Department said Mr. Atta had gone to the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama; Mr. al-Omari to the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas; and Mr. al-Ghamdi to the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio in Monterey, Calif."
    • Washington Post, "Reconstructing the hijackers' last days", 2001/09/16: "As the investigation gathered strength Saturday, unusual leads began to surface, among them the possibility that some of the hijackers may have received training at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida or other U.S. military facilities. Two of 19 suspects named by the FBI, Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmed Alghamdi, have the same names as men listed at a housing facility for foreign military trainees at Pensacola. Two others, Hamza Alghamdi and Ahmed Alnami, have names similar to individuals listed in public records as using the same address inside the base. In addition, a man named Saeed Alghamdi graduated from the Defense Language Institute at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, while men with the same names as two other hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari, appear as graduates of the U.S. International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., and the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, respectively."
    • World Socialist Web Site, "Air Force officer disciplined for saying Bush allowed September 11 attacks", 2002/06/21
    • Role of Doss Aviation (run by Mark Fuller) in conducting flight training at Maxwell AFB in Alabama
      • Wayne Madsen, "Federal judge's firm trained lead 9/11 hijacker", 2012/08/03
      • Roger Shuler, "Judge in Siegelman Case Owned a Company That Helped Train 9/11 Terrorist Mohamed Atta", 2012/08/07
        • "WMR reports that Fuller's company assisted in Atta's flight training. From WMR, in a piece dated August 3-5, 2012: (WMR is a subscription site, and a link is not available to the content; we have received permission to run excerpts from the piece.)

          > U.S. Judge for the the Middle District of Alabama Mark Fuller, scheduled to re-sentence former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman on August 3 in Montgomery, was the previous owner of a firm that trained accused 9/11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta. The information on Fuller's links to the 9/11 attack were uncovered by a former Republican Party campaign aid in Alabama who spoke to WMR on background."
        • "Does Fuller have reason to be fascinated with the date September 11? Madsden suggests the answer is yes:

          > WMR previously reported on Fuller's financial dealings with Doss Aviation, which, among other government business, had the contract to re-fuel Air Force One. Having had trained Atta, as well as Saudi, Iranian, and other Egyptian pilots to fly aircraft, the Colorado Springs, Colorado-based Doss Aviation was in a position to help carry out threats against Air Force One that were received by the presidential airplane's pilot on 9/11, specifically "Angel is next." Angel was the classified code word used at the time to denote Air Force One.

          > Ironically, as we reported earlier: "It is also noteworthy that the Doss Aviation active contract web page has a photo of the World Trade Center shaded in the colors of the U.S. flag. Fuller's firm has seen a growth in contracts and profits since the 9/11 attacks and U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan.""
        • "According to Wayne Madsen Report, the Mohamed Atta in Alabama was, in fact, the man who became a 9/11 terrorist--and he received training from Doss Aviation:

          > WMR can now report that one of the pilots Doss trained was Atta. The Egyptian-born pilot and accused Al Qaeda terrorist cell leader was often seen at the officer's club at Maxwell Air Force Base, where he was known as "Lieutenant Colonel" or merely "Colonel" Mohamed Atta of the Egyptian Air Force."
      • Roger Shuler, "Siegelman Prosecution Has Ties to 9/11 and Ugly Activities at an Alabama Air Force Base", 2012/08/08
        • "A source tells Legal Schnauzer that the Alabama flight training came at the direction of Bandar bin Sultan, who was Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005. He is so close to the Bush family that he goes by the nickname "Bandar Bush."

          Our source says Maj. Gen. A. Bowen Ballard, who was assistant to the commander of the Air University at Maxwell, assisted in the training of Saudi pilots. As a civilian, Ballard has worked in real estate and banking, and his ties to the Bush family reportedly date to at least 1972."
        • "Fuller is embroiled in an ongoing divorce case that includes allegations of adultery, driving under the influence, domestic abuse, and addiction to prescription painkillers. That case, WMR reports, has caused problems both for the judge and perhaps others connected to 9/11's Alabama roots:

          > It was only after Fuller's wife, Lisa Boyd Fuller, became aware of an ongoing affair between Fuller and one of his deputy clerks, Kelli Gregg, that the judge's links to Doss became a problem. Some five months before Mrs. Fuller filed divorce papers against Fuller on May 10, 2012, Doss Aviation was sold to J.F. Lehman & Company, which is owned by former Navy Secretary and 9/11 Commission member John Lehman. The law firm that worked out the details of the sale was Jones Day, a firm with close ties to the Republican Party and the Central Intelligence Agency. By divesting himself of Doss's assets, Fuller could escape his wife's claims on Doss profits as shared marriage assets. The sale of Doss to Lehman would also protect the U.S. government's foreknowledge of the events of 9/11."
      • Wayne Madsen, "Bush crime family murders, assassinations now being fully exposed", 2012/09/05: "[Former Secretary of the Navy John] Lehman is a former member of the now totally discredited 9/11 commission. A Doss subsidiary, Professional Aviation Training Service LLC, was, as previously reported by WMR, involved in the training of Saudi, Iranian, and Egyptian pilots, including one Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who would later be accused of flying American Airlines flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Fuller, in ordering Siegelman to report back to prison on September 11, 2012, is fully aware of the importance of that date and Fuller's subliminal message serves as a stark warning to anyone who may think about pursuing criminal investigations of what was called "The Enterprise" by Oliver North."
      • Air University involvement in training foreign pilots
      • From p.301 of The Almost Classified Guide to CIA Front Companies, Proprietaries & Contractors by Wayne Madsen (2016): "Professional Aviation Training Service, LLC [CIA contractor]. Based in Enterprise, Alabama, provided aircraft training and instructional services to a host of clients, including Saudi, Egyptian, and Iranian pilots. The firm was founded on October 5, 2000, and dissolved on July 3, 2006."
        • Alabama corporation records for Professional Aviation Training Services, L.L.C. - entity ID is 672 - 060; principal address is 203 E LEE STREET ENTERPRISE, AL 36330; formed 2000/10/05 and dissolved 2006/07/03; registered agent is Mark Fuller; nature of business is AIRCRAFT TRAINING/INSTRUCTION SERVICES; members include COBRO CORPORATION and DOSS AVIATION INC; on 2000/10/18 the registered agent was changed from FULLER, MARK at PO BOX DRAWER 310910 ENTERPRISE, AL 36330
          • Incorporation and dissolution documents - on p.1-5 are the Articles of Organization; purpose is specified as engaging in the "development, operation, simulation, and maintenance of an aircraft flight training and instruction services"; initial registered office is Cassady, Fuller & Marsh, L.L.P., P.O. Drawer 310910, Enterprise, AL 36330 with registered agent Mark Fuller; initial members are COBRO Corporation (A Westar Company) with CEO Joe I. Durant at 6808 Academy Parkway East, NE, Building C, Suite 3, Albuquerque, NM 87109-4464 and Doss Aviation, Inc. with CEO Mark E. Fuller at 3320 W. Carefree Cir., Colorado Spring, CO 80917-2805; management are Charlie Mingus of 804 Donnell Blvd., Daleville, AL 36322, Frank Hunter of the aforementioned Colorado Springs address, and Joe Durant of the aforementioned Albuquerque address; articles executed on 2000/09/20; on p.6-14 are the Articles of Dissolution; EVP and CEO Doug Childress signed off the dissolution on 2006/05/12, citing a "unanimous vote of all members" and naming "Westar Aerospace+Defense Group, Inc., as successor in interest to COBRO Corporation"; contains a 2003/12/31 filing with Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller renaming COBRO Corporation (of Maryland) to Westar Aerospace and Defense Group, Inc. (of Nevada), designating the forwarding contact as Jeff Lantz of Westar Aerospace and Defense Group, Inc. at the St. Louis Engineering Center, 4 Research Park Drive, St. Charles, Missouri 63304-5685; on p.15 is the Change of Registered Agent/Registered Office document
        • Cobro Corporation background - said to be based in Maryland
          • OpenCorporates page on the Colorado branch - corporation number is 19981145383; incorporated 1998/08/10 and dissolved 2004/03/29; is a Foreign Corporation; registered agent is The Corporation Company at 7700 E Arapahoe Rd Ste 220, Centennial, CO, 80112-1268, US
          • OpenCorporates page on the Alabama branch - corporation number is 904-358; incorporated 1995/08/16 and still active; registered agent is C T CORPORATION SYSTEM at 2 NORTH JACKSON ST., SUITE 605 MONTGOMERY, AL 36104
          • Avion Solutions page on leadership team: "Gary Donald has over thirty-six years of program management and engineering experience. He served in the Army until 1972 before transitioning into the Army Aviation Systems Command from 1972-1982. During that time he was involved in the development and testing of the Blackhawk and Apache helicopters and separated as a GM-13. He then worked for Cobro Corporation until 1992 holding the positions of Program Manager, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Engineer. In 1992, Mr. Donald, along with two partners, used their experience to form Avion, Inc., where he served as President until his recent retirement in January of 2014, when his son stepped into the role. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Iowa State University in 1970. Mr. Donald is a Rotarian."
    • Naval Air Station Pensacola background
      • Washington Post, "Florida triple murder tied to ‘witchcraft’ and blue moon, police say", 2015/08/05: "The murders of a Florida woman and her two adult sons are being investigated as a “ritualistic killing” connected to the recent blue moon. Voncile Smith, 77; John William Smith, 49; and Richard Thomas Smith, 47, were found dead near Pensacola, Fla., on July 31, three days after police said they were slain. Police checked the home after a co-worker of Richard Thomas Smith at the Department of Homeland Security reported him missing. Richard Thomas Smith was shot in the head; all three victims were beaten with a claw hammer and had their throats slit. “The elements of this case are odd, at best,” Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan said at a news conference, as Reuters reported. [...] Though authorities did not go into much detail, they described the killings as related to witchcraft, and are investigating a person of interest “with ties to witchcraft.” “It appears that this might be connected to some type of Wiccan ritual killing and possibly tied to the blue moon,” Escambia County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Andrew Hobbes told NBC News. [...] “Initial research has led us to believe it was a ritualistic killing,” Morgan also said, as the Pensacola News Journal reported. [...] Morgan also said that the murders were unrelated to “national security elements,” despite Richard Thomas Smith’s employment at Naval Air Station Pensacola."
      • Pensacola News Journal, "Arrest in 'ritualistic' triple murder", 2015/10/27: "The Escambia County Sheriff's Office has arrested a Pensacola man who allegedly killed his mother and two adult siblings in a "ritualistic" murder. Donald Wayne Hartung Sr., 58, was taken into custody Tuesday morning and charged with three counts of first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of his mother, 77-year-old Voncile Smith, and his two half-brothers, John William Smith, 49, and Richard Thomas Smith, 47. State Attorney Bill Eddins announced at a press conference Tuesday that his office will seek the death penalty. [...] A few days after the murders, Sheriff David Morgan told the media that the killings may have been motivated by "witchcraft" and the appearance of a blue moon. At the press conference Tuesday, the sheriff said that conclusion was based on statements from Hartung and evidence found in his home. Morgan said that theory was still "in play," but that his office had also investigated financial gain and Richard Smith's connection to the Department of Homeland Security as possible motives. [...] Morgan confirmed that Hartung was the person of interest that the ECSO identified in the initial days of the investigation."
      • The Guardian, "Pensacola: suspect watched mass shooting videos at dinner party, official says", 2019/12/07: "The Saudi student suspected of killing three people at a US navy base in Florida hosted a dinner party earlier in the week where he and three others watched videos of mass shootings, a US official told the Associated Press on Saturday. One of the three students who attended the party videotaped outside the building while the shooting was taking place at Naval Air Station Pensacola on Friday morning, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity after being briefed by federal authorities. Two other Saudi students watched from a car, the official said, adding that 10 Saudi students were being held on the base on Saturday while several others were unaccounted for. [...] Authorities confirmed the suspect was a member of the Royal Saudi air force who was on the base as part of a US navy training program designed to foster links with foreign allies. In an emailed statement on Saturday, the FBI named him as second lieutenant Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, 21."
      • CNN, "First on CNN: More than a dozen Saudi servicemen to be expelled from US after review of December shooting at Naval Air Station", 2020/01/11: "More than a dozen Saudi servicemen training at US military installations will be expelled from the United States after a review that followed the deadly shooting last month at a Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, multiple sources told CNN. The Saudis are not accused of aiding the 21-year-old Saudi Air Force second lieutenant who killed three American sailors in the December shooting, two sources said, but some are said to have connections to extremist movements, according to a person familiar with the situation. A number are also accused of possessing child pornography, according to a defense official and the person familiar with the situation."
    • Saudi military connections to Tyndall Air Force Base near Panama City FL
      • Daniel Hopsicker, "Venice Airport Used for Covert Ops": "We had already heard a curious story about Raytheon and Tyndall AFB, after a former resident of the Florida Panhandle alerted us to a curious visit that took place there in April of 1999, when Raytheon sponsored a delegation of seven Saudi defense officials, led by Saudi Prince Turki bin Bandar, to Tyndall AFB. “The Prince told me they were at Tyndall to get a helicopter repaired that President Roosevelt had given his father, who had been the Saudi king during World War II,” stated hotel proprietor Peggy Wood. “When the delegation first arrived, they asked to speak to whoever was in charge, and they wouldn’t believe me when I told them that I was,” Wood recalls. “‘Women don’t run businesses,’ they told me.” A Saudi delegation led by a Saudi Prince had indeed spent several weeks at Tyndall AFB, we confirmed with the owner of the Driftwood Inn in nearby Mexico Beach, where they stayed. And one of the members of the delegation staying at her beachside inn, Peggy Wood told us, was a Major Mohammed Al-Ghamdi. Shortly after the 9/11 attack a man with that same name was taken into custody in Miami by the FBI."
  • Oklahoma activities of the hijackers (especially Zacarias Moussaoui) - apparent links to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing
    • New York Times, "A NATION CHALLENGED: THE DETAINEES; No Bail for Friend of Man Suspected of Preparing for Sept. 11 Hijackings", 2001/11/10: "An Oklahoma friend of Zacarias Moussaoui, the man the authorities suspect was meant to be the 20th suicide hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks, has been ordered held without bail on weapons charges by a federal magistrate in Oklahoma City. The Oklahoma man, Mujahid Abdulqaadir Menepta, 51, who was arrested on Oct. 11 and taken to New York as a material witness in the World Trade Center investigation, is dangerous and poses a flight risk, Jeffrey Whitney, an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, testified at a hearing on Wednesday. [...] Without offering many details, Mr. Whitney told the court that some telephone numbers connected with cellphones seized in a search of Mr. Menepta's home in Norman were associated with continuing criminal investigations in Oklahoma City, St. Louis, Detroit, El Paso and Kansas City, Mo. These involve organized crime, drugs and money laundering, he said. Mr. Whitney told the court that Mr. Menepta, who was born Melvin Lattimore in St. Louis, and changed his name in 1989 after converting to Islam, came to the attention of the authorities the day after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. He testified that an informer told federal agents that Mr. Menepta had belonged to an Islamic group in Norman and St. Louis, whose leaders advocated terrorist acts and killing law enforcement agents. Mr. Whitney also told the court that Mr. Menepta had said the Secret Service told him that one of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 had used his visa number. [...] After the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Menepta, who lives in Norman, gave several interviews in which he defended Mr. Moussaoui, 33, whom he knew through a mosque."
    • LA Weekly, "The Terrorist Motel" by Jim Crogan, 2002/07/24: "What happened at the nondescript roadside motel outside Oklahoma City was just a fleeting encounter during the twisted cross-country odyssey of the terrorists who would carry out the September 11 attacks. Mohamed Atta, alleged leader of the plot, and two companions wanted to rent a room, but couldn’t get the deal they wanted, so they left. It was an incident of no particular importance, except for one thing. The owner of the motel remembers Atta being in the company of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called ”20th hijacker,“ who was arrested prior to September 11 and now faces conspiracy charges in connection with the terror assaults. [...] The motel co-owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the incident occurred around August 1, 2001, just six weeks before 911. [...] The motel owner said that Moussaoui and a man who appeared to be Marwan al-Shehhi — who helped crash a jetliner into the south tower of the World Trade Center — were friendly and said a few things, but Atta was clearly the leader. ”He did most of the talking and seemed very serious,“ said the owner, adding, ”I was standing face to face, about two feet away from Atta, and talked to the three of them for about 10 minutes. Atta asked if he could rent one of the other rooms at a weekly rate, and I told him no. “I asked him what they were doing here in the area. And Atta told me they were going to flight school. I thought he meant [Federal Aviation Administration] training in Oklahoma City. But Atta told me no, they were taking flight training in Norman. [...] After the attacks, said the motel owner, he recognized his visitors in photos from television reports. ”I was really stunned,“ he said. Then he decided to call the FBI hot line. The motel owner said he didn‘t hear right back from the FBI. In the interim, he also spoke to a former law-enforcement officer who was investigating reported sightings of Mujahid Abdulquaadir Menepta at the same motel during the mid-1990s. [...] A former desk clerk at the motel — a different clerk from the one who purportedly dealt with Atta and Moussaoui — told the Weekly that he remembered Menepta because in 1994 and 1995 — prior to the Oklahoma City attack — Menepta frequently visited the motel office."
    • Holland Van den Nieuwenhof, "Key to the Truth in Oklahoma", 2008/04/18 (911Truth.Org copy): "Independent investigations of the OKC bombing and 9/11 have found themselves stumbling over one another as the same cast of characters and places crop up time and time again."
      • "One of the roads to 9/11 starts in Oklahoma in 1993 when, according to the 9/11 Congressional report, Osama bin Laden’s personal pilot came to Norman to train at Airman Flight School. Five years later this had become a trend, as the local office of the FBI warned of the large number of Middle Eastern men training in Oklahoma Fight schools in a memo titled, “Weapons of Mass Destruction” issued on May 15, 1998. The next year 9/11 hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, or men using those names, visited Airman Flight School once again to inquire about lessons."
      • "In February of 2001 the supposed 20th hijacker, Zacharias Mossaoui, trained at Airman in Norman and lived in a University of Oklahoma Dormitory. [ Oklahoma Gazette ] He later moved off campus into a house he shared with Melvin Lattimore, a man with links to the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the OKC bombing. In April of that year, the FBI documents that hijacker Salem al-Hamzi was seen visiting this house. That same month another hijacker, Nawaf al-Hamzi, was issued a speeding ticket in Oklahoma so he very well may have visited this 0ff-campus terrorist party pad also. [...] [ Daily Oklahoman ]"
      • "during the trial of Timothy McVeigh, a BATF agent testified on the stand that an FBI informant had named Lattimore as suspect. What was not revealed on the stand, because the FBI never filed the eyewitness reports, is that Lattimore and another associate of McVeigh who went by the name of Tim Rosencranz had been ejected from the Traveler’s Aid Society in OKC shortly before the bombing after becoming belligerent when asked to show identification. When Lattimore and Rosencranz drove away from the Traveler’s Aid Society, the employees noted their descriptions and the description of the car. It was a yellow Mercury Marquis without a license plate which, if you recall, matches exactly the description of the vehicle Tim McVeigh was driving when he was arrested following the bombing. [New American]"
      • "The man in the truck with McVeigh has been identified as Hussain al-Hussaini and was seen at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in the truck by six witnesses to the scene. [...] In The Third Terrorist, Jayna Davis documents that al-Hussaini later went on to work at Boston’s Logan Airport as a baggage handler, and was there the day of the 9/11 attacks. Lead Hijacker Mohammed Atta’s flight took off from Logan Airport that morning while his baggage later went on a different flight, to be captured by the FBI with its incriminating “last will and testament” inside."
      • "On the day of 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet was having a leisurely breakfast with his mentor, University of Oklahoma President David Boren. When aides rushed in to tell the Director of the attacks, Tenet was witnessed by reporters as turning to David Boren as saying, “I wonder if this has anything to do with the guy who trained for a pilot’s license.” [Washington Post] [...] George Tenet owed a lot to David Boren. Prior to his appointment as CIA Director, Tenet had absolutely no intelligence experience or training. In fact, his only qualification seems to have been that he was on David Boren’s congressional staff, back when he was Senator Boren. [...] David Boren is a political institution in Oklahoma. In the seventies he was in the House of Representatives, then he served as Governor. He later ran for Senate and served the longest tenure until that time as Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. During that time Boren propped up Robert Gates’ nomination for CIA Director, despite Gates’ controversial record as a CIA analyst of inflating the Soviet threat to the benefit of defense contractors."
      • "As President of the University of Oklahoma, in the Summer of 2001 he appointed to OU CIA officer David Edger, described as a CIA officer-in-residence on the OU website. Edger had a strange career, even for a CIA agent. Edger was serving in Chile on September 11, 1973, when the CIA overthrew the elected leader of that country, Salvador Allende. Following Allende’s death thousands of Chileans were tortured and murdered to secure the puppet government. Edger was later Aldrich Ames’ supervisor when that agent was arrested for spying for the Soviets. Edger went on to become Deputy Director for Intelligence for the Directorate of Operations, the covert action arm of the CIA. [...] Then in an apparent demotion, David Edger went to Hamburg, Germany to be in charge of a CIA team monitoring the apartment of Mohammed Atta, soon to be named as the lead hijacker in the 9/11 attacks. During this time the apartment was visited by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had a 2 million-dollar bounty on his head by the U.S. Government for his role in African embassy bombings. Mohammed remained unmolested [...] Then in the Summer of 2001, Edger was appointed to a teaching position at OU, just down the road from where Mohammed Atta and Zacharias Mossaoui had their meeting at the Sands Motel that August. Edger freely admits to monitoring Atta in Germany his class at OU, but says he heard nothing of interest."
      • "In the fateful Summer of 2001, Nick Berg’s laptop computer was used to email Zacharias Mossaoui. Berg was later questioned by the FBI and said that he had lent his computer and password to a stranger on the bus, and that stranger must have been the one who emailed Mossaoui. This story apparently flew with the FBI, despite the fact that OU busses at that time did not have wireless email capabilities, and still don’t, nor did many laptops. [Michael P. Wright] In August of 2001, following Atta’s and Mossaoui’s meeting in OKC, a plane ticket that was used in the 9/11 attacks was purchased at an OU library computer. According to the research of Michael P. Wright, the library assistant who witnessed this transaction said a white American male purchased the ticket."
    • 911Blogger.com, "Major 9/11 Exclusive on Deadline Live w/ Jack Blood - Friday - 7/18/08", 2008/07/19: "According to eyewitnesses (none of whom knew each other) Atta and the boys were in OKC just 3 days before 911. ONE OF THEM, TWO WEEKS AFTER 911! My sources (who will remain nameless until today's radio broadcast) also have credit card receipts from an Atta and crew drinking session at a local OKC bar, where they nearly got in a brawl with 2 other patrons. The CC numbers used by Atta seem to show that the Cards were GOVERNMENT AUTHORIZED!"
    • Jack Blood, "THE LAST NAIL IN THE COFFIN OF THE 911 MYTH: MOHAMED ATTA IN OKLAHOMA CITY SEPTEMBER 2001", 2008/07/20: "The 911 hijackers seen by witnesses with Atta have been revealed as: Abdulaziz Alomari, Saeed Algamdi, Ahmed Alnami, and Hamza Algamdi. [...] On Friday, September 7th 2001 (evening) Atta and crew turn up again at an OKC bar. ( To be named at a later date, but known to be frequented by police and spooks ) The group returned to the same bar the next night. The five were drinking beer and hard liquor, dancing, and eventually picking a fight with two local patrons. [...] Chris Emery and team were able to obtain the Credit Card receipts from that night, and have spent most of the last 18 months attempting to trace the card numbers, and the authorization of the cards themselves. [...] What was discovered in the end, was that the sequence of numbers on Atta's credit card revealed a unique application only found on U.S. Government Credit cards. [...] One card number used by Atta and crew had been EXPIRED a full six months before the September 7th and 8th dates the card was used and approved at this local Oklahoma City establishment. [...] This transaction was approved without delay. [...] On Saturday - 9/15/01 (FOUR DAYS AFTER 911!) a mutual friend of Atta (who shook Atta's hand and said something very briefly in Atta's ear about an hour after Atta picks the fight with two club patron's on Friday 9/7/01) comes back to the club with yet ANOTHER alleged hijacker identified in the photo line up as being Marwan Al Shehhi. [...] One witness notices this mutual friend of Atta and this new 'guy' are sad and somewhat depressed. [...] Saturday 9/15/01 this mutual friend brings in Mr. Al-Shehhi and says "they had friends that were killed..." and within seconds of answering this witness, Mr. Al Shehhi jumps over the bar and grabs this witness by the shirt collar and wants to fight with him."
    • Kevin Ryan, "Two Oklahoma Airports: David Boren, KuwAm, and 9/11", 2012/10/28: "Between February and August of 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui lived in Norman, Oklahoma and attended Airman Flight School at Max Westheimer Airport, which is owned and operated by the University of Oklahoma. Moussaoui even lived in a university dormitory. [...] A squadron of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), a federally supported, non-profit corporation that serves as the official civilian auxiliary of the U. S. Air Force, still gathers at Westheimer every week. [...] Coincidentally, several of the alleged 9/11 hijackers rented apartments in Delray Beach, Florida from a woman whose husband was a member of CAP. One of the apartments was said to be “a meeting ground for terrorists.” The CAP member, [Sun editor] Mike Irish, turned out to be connected to the October 2001 anthrax attacks. [...] According to FBI summary documents, Mohamed Atta was also spotted at nearby Wiley Post Airport in Bethany, Oklahoma within six months of the 9/11 attacks. [...] Hangar 8 of Wiley Post Airport was, until 2005, the home of Aviation General, the aircraft company owned by Kuwaiti-American Corporation (KuwAm) and run by Wirt Dexter Walker III. [...] Although Aviation General and its subsidiaries all went bankrupt or were sold off in the few years after 9/11, Hangar 8 still houses three businesses. These include Jim Clark & Associates, Valair Aviation, and Oklahoma Aviation. [...] At first glance, the most interesting of these new Hangar 8 companies is the flight school called Oklahoma Aviation. This is due to an incredible coincidence regarding the young man who now runs the company, Shohaib Nazir Kassam. [...] Kassam was, in March 2006, a government witness against Zacarias Moussaoui. He was actually Moussaoui’s flight instructor."
    • Nick Berg and the purchase of the Flight 93 ticket
      • FD-302 reports on Nicholas Evan Berg from 2004 in Iraq (315E-HQ-1404383) and 2002 in the United States
        • "Berg was interviewed in January 2002 by FBI Special Agent [REDACTED] of the FBI Newtown Square Resident Agency. His computer network ID was used in Norman, Oklahoma by some unknown subject (UNSUB) in communication with [REDACTED]. Berg's Electronic Mail was never used by the UNSUB, and Berg never saw any E-Mails from this UNSUB. Berg was providing this information because he knew the FBI would check their records and discover this." (p.1)
        • "Berg is president of Prometheus Towers. Prometheus Towers is incorporated out of Virginia because incorporation is inexpensive in Virginia and because [REDACTED] for the corporation. [REDACTED] Prometheus Towers is actually based out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania where the equipment is kept. When doing business overseas, Prometheus Towers is known as Shirkat Abroj Babil. Prometheus Towers has [REDACTED] employees other than Berg [REDACTED] Most of the company's customers are radio stations while it does have some" (p.1)
        • "Berg was in Iraq December 2003. At that time he spoke with Beth Payne of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad. [...] He returned to Iraq one and one half weeks prior to this interview. [on 2004/03/25]" (p.3)
        • "Berg was carrying with him a book written in Arabic entitled the Protocols of Zion. It as a well known vehemently anti-Semitic book. Berg is reading it out of curious." (p.4)
        • "While working at the University of Oklahoma, an unknown subject (UNSUB) stole Berg's computer log-on and password. The UNSUB did not use Berg's Electronic Mail (E-Mail). If the UNSUB had used Berg's E-Mail he would have known about it. Berg has no idea who stole his log-on and password. Someone could have watched Berg's fingers as he logged on at the student Union. Berg does not remember his log-on, but his password was the first four letters of his last name and the last four digits of his Social Security Number. Someone working for the University of Oklahoma could have accessed his information and stolen his password. Also, many times people forget to log off the computer, and then other people sit down at the same computer terminal and continue using the computer without logging on themselves. These are all possible explanations for what happened with regard to Berg's computer log-on and password." (p.6)
        • "[confrontation of Berg "with the statement he had made to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on 01/03/2002 (265A-NY-280350)"] Berg gave his network ID and password to a passenger on the bus he would take to the YMCA. Berg never gave interviewing agents on 01/03/2002 a specific Latin American name of the UNSUB to whom he gave his computer information. He did not know if it were an Hispanic or Arab male. Berg did in fact see the E-Mail which was received by the UNSUB. Berg opened only one E-Mail. It contained Hispanic sounding names. He did not open other E-Mails because he did not want to jeopardize his friendship with the UNSUB. He saw two or three E-Mails to the UNSUB on his E-Mail server." (p.6-7)
        • "Berg's primary reason for coming to Iraq previously was to perform tower inspections for SAIC. SAIC was the predecessor in Iraq to Harris Communications." (p.7)
        • "Berg made pipe bombs with friends when he was in high school. They would make these devices in Chester County, Pennsylvania." (p.9)
        • "Berg stated that he had given information during 2002 interview with the FBI because he wanted to be a part of the investigation of the acts against the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He stated that he did not know to whom he had given his log-on and password and that he did not know the nationality. Berg then admitted that he had in fact given his log-on and password to an Arab male, but he did not know him except for sitting next to him on the bus four or five times. Despite Berg's previous assertions that he did not want to read the E-Mails because he did not want to jeopardize his friendship with the UNSUB, Berg was not friends with the UNSUB and does not know his identity." (p.10)
        • "Berg then displayed a Jewish prayer shawl which he wears underneath his clothing with the tassels tucked into his pockets." (p.10)
        • "On October 25, 2001, interviewing Agent telephonically contacted Oklahoma University (OU) [REDACTED] secretary, [REDACTED] at work telephone number [REDACTED] Interviewing Agent requested that [REDACTED] who has provided information to interviewing Agent in the past, provide any information related to student NICK E. BERG, having the last four of his social security number as 6273." (p.15)
        • "[summary of the story of Berg giving his credentials to someone on a bus and seeing their emails show up in his inbox]" (p.18-19)
        • "BERG stated that his computer account should have been closed and does not know why it was not closed. He was not taking classes, but he was still getting class information and student information in his e-mail. BERG stated that he still has his OU ID. BERG stated that the conversation with the Latino guy would have occurred right after he obtained his Oklahoma driver's license. His driver's license is the same number as his social security number, 242-29-6273. BERG explained that the network ID, BERG6273, was assigned to him by OU and consists of the first four letters of his last name and the last four numbers of his social security number. BERG stated that each student then made up their own password." (p.19)
        • "Berg stated that he is being treated well at the One West Iraqi Police Station. The Iraqi Police and the US Military Police are great to him. He is like some sort of celebrity." (p.20)
        • "While in Oklahoma, several of the individuals with whom he rode the bus to the YMCA were flight students. One flight student was 5'10, 160 lbs, spoke English, had kempt hair, was Middle Eastern, and was some sort of class leader. Berg would talk with him on the bus. Berg gave his University of Oklahoma computer log-on and password to another bus passenger who knew this first Middle Eastern male. The second individual was Middle Eastern, shorter and heavier than the first individual, spoke some English, and had a darker skin pigment. Berg first stated that he might be able to pick out the name of the person to whom he gave his password, but then Berg stated that he does not know the names of either individual." (p.25)
      • St. Petersburg Times, "Mystery shrouds hostage's Iraq trip", 2004/05/13: "Mystery surrounded not only Nicholas Berg's disappearance but also why he had been held by Iraqi police for about two weeks and questioned by FBI agents three times. Berg's family disputed U.S. officials' claims that Berg was never in U.S. custody. "The Iraqi police do not tell the FBI what to do, the FBI tells the Iraqi police what to do. Who do they think they're kidding?" Berg's father, Michael, told the Associated Press from his home in West Chester, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb. Berg was last in contact with U.S. officials in Baghdad on April 10, and his body was found Saturday in Baghdad. Staff members at the $30-a-night Fanar Hotel in Baghdad told the AP that Berg stayed there for several days until April 10. [...] The FBI warned Berg shortly before his disappearance that Iraq was too volatile a place for unprotected American civilians but he turned down a State Department offer to fly him home, U.S. officials said Wednesday. [...] According to the State Department, Berg told an American diplomat in Baghdad that he preferred to travel on his own to Kuwait. [...] Knight Ridder Newspapers reported that Berg told friends in Iraq that Iraqi police arrested him because he had a Jewish-sounding last name and an Israeli stamp in his passport. "They thought he was a spy," said Hugo Infante, a Chilean who works for the United Press International news service and lives at the Fanar Hotel. [...] "He wasn't mad. It was adventure for him," Infante said, a view echoed by another friend, Andrew Duke, who said Berg shook off his detention. "Basically his attitude was it was all sort of fun, inconvenient," recalled Duke, 43, of Boulder, Colo. Duke, who drank beer with Berg the night before he left, said Berg told him he had made a lot of money and was thinking about going sailing in Turkey. He said he thought Berg was planning to leave the country by land. [...] in a Jan. 18 e-mail, Berg said his company had been announced as an approved subcontractor for a broadcast consortium awarded a contract for the U.S.-controlled Iraqi Media Network. "Practically, this means we should be involved with quite a bit of tower work as part of the reconstruction, repair and new construction of the Iraqi Media Network," he wrote, referring to the network, operated by the Harris Corp. of Melbourne, as "something like NPR in the U.S.""
      • CNN, "Berg's encounter with 'terrorist' revealed", 2004/05/14: "When Nicholas Berg took an Oklahoma bus to a remote college campus a few years ago, the American recently beheaded by terrorists allowed a man with terrorist connections to use his laptop computer, according to his father. Michael Berg said the FBI investigated the matter more than a year ago. He stressed that his son was in no way connected to the terrorists who captured and killed him. Government sources told CNN that the encounter involved an acquaintance of Zacarias Moussaoui -- the only person publicly charged in the United States in connection with the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. According to Berg, his son was taking a course a few years ago at a remote campus of the University of Oklahoma near an airport. He described how on one particular day, his son met "some terrorist people -- who no one knew were terrorists at the time." At one point during the bus ride, Berg said, the man sitting next to his son asked if he could use Nick's laptop computer. "It turned out this guy was a terrorist and that he, you know, used my son's e-mail, amongst many other people's e-mail who he did the same thing to," Berg said. Government sources said Berg gave the man his password, which was later used by Moussaoui, the sources said. The sources said the man who used Berg's e-mail knew Moussaoui, now awaiting trial on federal charges that could bring a death sentence."
      • Philadelphia Daily News, "BERG MET WITH SHADY IRAQI", 2004/05/17: "Berg teamed up in Baghdad with an ex-Philadelphia man who led a controversial group of Iraqi expatriates encouraged by the U.S. government - even as he faced deportation for his role in Russian-emigre crime ring selling millions of vials used for crack. Aziz Kadoory Aziz, also known as Aziz al-Taee, hooked up earlier this year with the 26-year-old West Chester man to start a small company called Shirikat Abraj Babil, or Babylon Towers Co., that would install, inspect and repair telecommunications and utility towers. [...] Aziz said that on April 10 Berg "surprised me by calling me at 9 or 10, to say that he found some friend to travel with to Jordan." [...] Here in America, Aziz was the highly visible spokesman for a group he'd founded called the Iraqi American Council and appeared frequently on major media outlets like Fox News Channel calling for the military ouster of Saddam Hussein. Aziz' outfront role also included speaking at pre-war, pro-troop rallies. [...] Aziz told the Associated Press that Berg had contacted him by e-mail sometime after attending a two-day conference in Virginia on business opportunities in Iraq last December. Aziz agreed to give him some space in an office he had in Baghdad to form a partnership seeking communications work. [...] In 1993, about a decade after fleeing Saddam's Iraq for America, Aziz was in the electronics business when he was one of 25 people charged with distributing some 100 million crack vials on the East Coat. Prosecutors said that Aziz, who lived in Northeast Philadelphia, was tied to a network run by a Soviet immigrant named Valery Sigal. Most in the ring were immigrants from Russia or the former Eastern Bloc. Aziz claimed he didn't know the vials were going to drug dealers. but he pled guilty. [...] He was arrested again in May 2001, on charges that the chain of electronics stores he owns in Philadelphia was selling counterfeited compact discs. [...] The Inquirer also reported he received probation in a 1997 case for selling stolen computers to undercover cops. [...] Sometimes called "Joe Aziz," [...] In December 2002, another key member of the Iraqi American Council - a California engineer named Bassam Ridha Al-Hulsaini - was reportedly one of 15 Iraqis flown to Washington by the State Department for two days of "media training" under a project known as Future of Iraq."
        • GOPUSA News, "Saddam's History of Torture: The Other Case For Regime Change in Iraq" by Jeff Gannon, 2003/03/10: "Aziz al-Taee, chairman of the Iraqi-American Council, relates some of the atrocities he has seen. He tells of how his cousin was tortured and murdered by Iraqi officials after which his mutilated body was returned to his mother with a bill for the bullets used to kill him. She was threatened with execution if she held a funeral service for her son."
        • Philadelphia Inquirer, "An Arab Voice is Challenged" by Gaiutra Bahadur, 2003/04/08: "“Today, we say no more time for Saddam’s crimes. . . . Free Iraq now. Free Iraq now.” Al-Taee (al-tie-EE) has sounded the same drumbeat in countless interviews since the war began – on CNN; almost daily with Fox News’ conservative diva, Greta Van Susteren; on Al-Jazeera, the Arab television station; on PBS and in The Inquirer. The man in the pinstripe suits, a cell phone always on his hip or in hand, speaks in sound bites. [...] “He’s misleading the people of the United States into thinking Iraqis believe in this war,” said Raad Saleh, a Philadelphia businessman who in the 1980s stood shoulder to shoulder with al-Taee in equal hatred of Hussein, then a U.S. favorite, in demonstrations outside the Iraqi Embassy in Washington. Not only do Saleh and others dislike al-Taee’s message, but they also say the messenger is self-appointed and might have other motives for his support of U.S. military action in Iraq. [...] Al-Taee, whose legal name is Aziz K. Aziz, is not a U.S. citizen but a permanent resident. Despite being ineligible, he registered to vote as a Democrat in 1998."
        • Joseph Cannon, "Berg: It gets even stranger", 2004/05/19: "The Daily Kos commentary notes that a Google search on Aziz brings up the noteworthy fact that he corresponded with to two "former" CIA officials, Vince Cannistraro and Graham Fuller, as well as neo-con propagandist Laurie Mylroie."
      • Newsmax, "Jayna Davis Dissects Berg-Moussaoui Links", 2004/05/18: "On Sunday Davis explained why to WABC Radio's Monica Crowley: "You're sitting on a bus. It's a five- to ten-minute ride [from campus to the Airman Flight School, where Moussaoui was taking flight lessons]. How in the world would a stranger sitting next to you say, 'Hey, can I borrow your laptop computer because I want to log on to your e-mail?'" For the question to make sense, Davis argued, "You would have to have a cell phone, a modem and be online for it to be a logical request in the first place." The investigative journalist noted also that the FBI's version of the password incident differs considerably from that given by Berg's own family. Berg told the FBI that "he was with an unidentified man who turned out to be a terrorist who passed this information about his confidential e-mail account to Zacarias Moussaoui," said Davis. Meanwhile, Berg's family insists that it was Moussaoui himself who met Berg on the bus that day. "One theory the FBI was looking into was that it wasn't just this hapless encounter with an unidentified terrorist on a bus," Davis told Crowley, explaining that Berg "may have known" Moussaoui's two OU roomates. "One of these men is known as Hussein al-Attas," she noted. Like Berg, al-Attas was an engineering student."
      • Michael P. Wright, "Nick Berg Was Arrested Twice At OU During Spring 2000", 2004/05/18 (Wright's website, audio recording of KOCO reporter Terri Watkins and KOCO employee Melissa; copy of article, WMA copy of recording): "Friday, I ascertained that Berg had been an OU employee during academic year 2000-2001. The OU personnel directory for that year listed him as a facilities attendant at the Lloyd Noble arena. The thought crosses one's mind that Berg might have been the one who bought the 9/11 hijacker's airline ticket from the OU library computer terminal. [...] If Berg was the one who bought the ticket, then appearing to be a vagrant would have been a way to gain the trust of Al Qaeda, for infiltration purposes. They would be likely to trust someone who appeared to be a misfit and alienated from mainstream American society. Also, it has been reported that Berg had been in possession of anti-Semitic literature. That would be another tactic for gaining the trust of Al Qaeda. How does a one who was a vagrant in spring 2000 make the transition to independent businessman in Iraq, doing telecommunications work, in 2004? Maybe with the help of funds paid by the CIA to its operatives? [...] Three different people have told me of watching a Channel 5 TV news broadcast reporting the event of the hijacker's ticket purchase from the OU library. During an October 2003 phone conversation, a Channel 5 employee at the news desk confirmed this, but reporter Terri Watkins later denied it."
      • Michael P. Wright, "Anyone Shopping for a Bridge in Brooklyn? If You Believe Nick Berg's Story to the FBI I'll Sell You One", 2004/05/28 (filing against Moussaoui detailing his Internet accounts): "The FBI searched Zacarias Moussaoui's computer after the 9/11 attack and found Nick Berg's email account and password on it. When interviewed by them, Berg reportedly explained that when he was a student at the University of Oklahoma in the fall of 1999, he allowed a stranger on a bus ride to use his email. The stranger turned out to be an associate of Moussaoui, we are told, and gave him Berg's password and email account name. [...] There are several big reasons to be extremely skeptical about this story and to wonder what kind of fools the FBI agents were who bought it. One glaring fact is that, according to his indictment, Moussaoui did not show up in the United States until February of 2001. Conceivably the stranger on the bus was already an associate of Moussaoui in the fall of 1999, but isn't that kind of a reach? [...] He didn't start to get interested in Norman until he contacted the Airman Flight School in September 2000. He didn't use Nick Berg's email account for that. He used one he set up that month with an internet service provider in Malaysia. [...] From the FBI document we see that Moussaoui, like anyone else, was able to obtain free anonymous Hotmail accounts. Why would he need to snatch Nick Berg's password for purposes of sending email?"
      • Michael P. Wright, "KOCO-TV Suppresses an Explosive 9/11 News Report", 2005/07/31 (FBI FOIA response): "In the fall of 2001, a librarian at the University of Oklahoma in Norman (OU) told me that she was present when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted an interview about the fact that an airline ticket for a 9/11 hijacker was purchased from a computer terminal at that school’s library. She said it was for United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. This is very important. The purchaser was not a hijacker. He was a white American male and a temporary library employee. Apparently the FBI already knew the IP address of the terminal, and with that evidence librarians were able to locate it in the facility. The librarian speculated that he was a neo-Nazi who shared Al-Qaeda’s hatred for Israel."
      • Michael P. Wright, "More Evidence of the FBI’s Lie About Nick Berg", 2005/08/23 (document from PENTTBOMB investigation: "Al-Attas and Moussaoui used University of Oklahoma (OU) computer lab with Berg6273 corrupted student ID to access computers"): "There is more evidence about the agency’s deep interest in Berg. When the laptop computer of Zacarias Moussaoui was searched on 9/11, the FBI recovered the University of Oklahoma computer identification record, Berg6273, which belonged to Nick Berg. In 2001 he was a temporary OU employee. He had been a student there only for the fall of 1999. [...] The material presented in these scans came from the one dated November 16, 2001."
      • Twitter thread from 2019/09/11 on the murder of Nick Berg - points out that he was "Sitting in a room identical to those found Abu Ghraib. In a chair identical to the type in Abu Ghraib. In Abu Ghraib prison uniform"; describes the alleged killers on the video as "Fat "Iraqis" in 2004, with lighter ashkenazi skin tones. One is holding an Israeli rifle. One has a gold ring which is forbidden in Islam"; cites another source saying that a likely member of the group that killed Berg was Steven Stephanowicz a.k.a. Steven Stefanowicz who was a contract interrogator at Abu Ghraib working for Titan Corporation (later acquired by L-3 Communications which in 2019 merged with Harris Corporation to form L3Harris Technologies) under subcontract to California Analysis Center Inc. (CACI)
  • FlightSafety Academy / Flight Safety Academy in Vero Beach FL
    • Associated Press, "Feds investigatie links in Florida", 2001/09/12 (NewsMine.org archive): "In Vero Beach, about 70 miles north of West Palm Beach, FBI agents searched four homes in three neighborhoods. [...] In another neighborhood, agents searched two houses next door to each other, leaving with several garbage bags of evidence and towing away two cars. [...] Landlord Paul Stimelind identified the tenant in the other home as Adnan Bukhari, who said he worked for Saudi Airlines and was training at Flight Safety Academy. Bukhari arrived with family in June 2000 and planned to move out in mid-August, Stimelind said."
  • San Diego hijackers staying with FBI informant Abdussattar Shaikh
    • Newsweek, "Exclusive: The Informant Who Lived With The Hijackers", 2002/09/15: "The two hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, were hardly unknown to the intelligence community. The CIA was first alerted to them in January 2000, when the two Saudi nationals showed up at a Qaeda "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. FBI officials have argued internally for months that if the CIA had more quickly passed along everything it knew about the two men, the bureau could have hunted them down more aggressively. But both agencies can share in the blame. Upon leaving Malaysia, Almihdhar and Alhazmi went to San Diego, where they took flight-school lessons. In September 2000, the two moved into the home of a Muslim man who had befriended them at the local Islamic Center. The landlord regularly prayed with them and even helped one open a bank account. He was also, sources tell NEWSWEEK, a "tested" undercover "asset" who had been working closely with the FBI office in San Diego on terrorism cases related to Hamas. A senior law-enforcement official told NEWSWEEK the informant never provided the bureau with the names of his two houseguests from Saudi Arabia. [...] But the FBI concedes that a San Diego case agent appears to have been at least aware that Saudi visitors were renting rooms in the informant's house."
    • The Telegraph, "September 11 pair 'helped by Saudi agent'", 2003/07/22
    • New York Times, "Senator Accuses Bush of Cover-Up", 2004/09/08: "The accusation stems from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's refusal to allow investigators for a Congressional inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers. In his book "Intelligence Matters," Mr. Graham, the co-chairman of the Congressional inquiry with Representative Porter J. Goss, Republican of Florida, said an F.B.I. official wrote them in November 2002 and said "the administration would not sanction a staff interview with the source." On Tuesday, Mr. Graham called the letter "a smoking gun" and said, "The reason for this cover-up goes right to the White House.""
  • Visits to casinos
  • Possible Zacarias Moussauoi connection to Blackwater (the company run by Erik Prince)
    • Moussauoi trial exhibit of a scan of his notebook - p.10 has the phone number of the Blackwater Training Center
    • A known instance of Blackwater training Islamic terrorists: IBTimes India, "Who is Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov; Former Blackwater Special Ops Commander is now Isis Recruiter", 2015/05/31: "The news that Tajikistan's special forces chief Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov has joined the Islamic State (Isis) militants has shook up governments world over. Gulmurod Khalimov, a distinguished officer, had gone missing sometime in April. He resurfaced the last Thursday, when he appeared on an Isis propaganda video. [...] Colonel Khalimov, as the commander of the elite OMON division of the Tajik national police, has been to the United States twice. In the video, he claims he visited the US several times to train with Special Operations Forces and Blackwater. He also claimed that he was trained by the Russians as well."

Logistics of hijacking

  • Airport security subversion
    • TIME, "TIME Exclusive: An Inside Job?", 2001/09/22: "US officials are compiling what one called "growing" evidence that other hijackings may have been planned for September 11. Officials from both the government and the airline industry tell TIME Magazine that a knife-like weapon was found on each of two separate Delta Airlines aircraft later that day, although neither plane took off due to the nationwide grounding after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on hijacked United and American airlines planes.

      Government sources would not describe in detail the nature of the weapons found on the Delta flights last week, but one official disclosed that another weapon was discovered on at least on other aircraft, owned by a fourth airline. The government official refused to name that carrier.

      Investigators are not yet certain how these weapons came to be on board the aircraft. But they increasingly believe that the weapons may have been prepositioned by accomplices for use by others. As one US official told TIME, "These look like inside jobs."

      The new evidence is causing officials to broaden their investigative and security efforts to encompass not only the carry-on bag screening system but the entire aviation security apparatus at US airports. The new evidence raises the worrisome possibility that the hijackers may have had accomplices deep within the 'secure' areas of airports — that may include the shops and restaurants in the terminal behind the metal detectors, or amongst the thousands of people who work in catering, fueling or cleaning aircraft; or anyone who might have access to the airplane before takeoff."

Foreknowledge

  • Washington Post, "FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools", 2001/09/23
  • New York Times, "A NATION CHALLENGED: THE SUSPECT; Flight School Warned F.B.I. Of Suspicions" by Philip Shenon, 2001/12/22: "An instructor at a Minnesota flight school warned the F.B.I. in August of his suspicion that a student who was later identified as a part of Osama bin Laden's terror network might be planning to use a commercial plane loaded with fuel as a weapon, a member of Congress and other officials said today. The officials, who were briefed by the school, said the instructor warned the Federal Bureau of Investigation in urgent tones about the terrorist threat posed by the student, Zacarias Moussaoui. Mr. Moussaoui, a French citizen of Morrocan descent, was indicted last week on charges of conspiring in the Sept. 11 terror attacks."
  • Los Angeles Times, "FBI Brass Accused of Apathy", 2002/05/25: "FBI agents attempting to investigate terrorism were hamstrung for years by top officials here despite abundant evidence of Middle Eastern extremists, according to a letter sent to FBI headquarters late last year by a longtime special agent. The letter, written five months before the now-famous flight school warning memo by Phoenix agent Kenneth Williams became public, portrayed counter-terrorism as “the lowest investigative priority in the Phoenix Division.” [...] One of the men tracked by FBI surveillance was an associate of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Muslim cleric imprisoned for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, according to a law enforcement source familiar with that investigation."
  • ...
  • Delmart Vreeland
    • From the Wilderness stories
    • Canadian court documents from the Vreeland case
    • Sander Hicks, "WILDCARD: Down the rabbit hole with the man who says he tried to warn the world about 9/11", 2002/09/26 (TODO: get supplements from Sander Hicks website)
    • Sander Hicks, "Wildcard: Down the Rabbit Hole with the Man Who Predicted 9/11", 2005 (Ch.5 from his book The Big Wedding)
      • "Delmart Vreeland was born March 20, 1966, near Grosse Pointe, Michigan, outside Detroit. He and his half-brother Terry Weems counted Steve Tocco among their close family friends (Tocco is related to Jake Tocco, the famous Detroit mafia leader.) Vreeland was not close to his father, Delmart Sr., a chef who was in prison briefly for embezzlement from the Big Boy restaurants he managed. Delmart’s stepfather, Bob Woodbury, was a Detroit cop who got the thirteen-year-old Delmart part-time work for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, busting “party stores” along Whittier Ave. that sold liquor to kids. The only problem with this arrangement is that the ATF required the arrests go on Delmart’s juvenile record." - note that Vreeland grew up in the same place and timeframe where the North Fox Island pedophile ring (involving Francis Shelden and his partners along with Detroit pedophiles like Chris Busch) was operating; the Mafia leader Jack Tocco was said to be a "gangland chum of Jerry J. Moore", a Houston real estate developer accused of being part of a pedophile ring that intersected with the JonBenet Ramsey murder through Fleet White Jr.
    • Supporting evidence from Hicks's website
    • Other planned terrorist attacks ("let one happen, stop the rest")
      • TIME, "TIME Exclusive: An Inside Job?", 2001/09/22: "US officials are compiling what one called "growing" evidence that other hijackings may have been planned for September 11. Officials from both the government and the airline industry tell TIME Magazine that a knife-like weapon was found on each of two separate Delta Airlines aircraft later that day, although neither plane took off due to the nationwide grounding after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on hijacked United and American airlines planes.

        Government sources would not describe in detail the nature of the weapons found on the Delta flights last week, but one official disclosed that another weapon was discovered on at least on other aircraft, owned by a fourth airline. The government official refused to name that carrier."
      • American Airlines Flight 43
        • Chicago Tribune, "FBI probes 5th flight for hijackers", 2001/09/18: "The FBI is investigating the possibility that suicide hijackers were on board a fifth transcontinental airline flight last Tuesday, one that was cancelled just minutes before its scheduled 8:10 a.m. departure from Boston due to a mechanical problem, according to sources familiar with the investigation. Federal agents are searching for an undetermined number of passengers who were on board American Airlines Flight 43, according to one source familiar with the passenger manifest. The flight was to have departed Boston 25 minutes after American Flight 11, which struck New York's World Trade Center, this source said."
        • The Guardian, "FBI believes plotters planned to seize six airliners for attack", 2001/09/19: "As the largest investigation in criminal history entered its second week, the bureau said it was considering whether a fifth suicide hijacking was foiled by the cancellation of a flight from Boston to Los Angeles. American Airlines flight 43 was cancelled at the last minute last Tuesday because of technical problems."
      • Unidentified San Antonio TX flight
        • The Guardian, "FBI believes plotters planned to seize six airliners for attack", 2001/09/19: "There is also growing evidence that a sixth attack was planned, and that a cell of terrorists was intending to hijack a flight due to leave San Antonio last weekend. Investigators in the city yesterday seized a doctor, Albader Alhazmi, 34, a Saudi-born national, who worked at the University of Texas health science centre. He did not turn up for work last Tuesday and is on a 180-name FBI watchlist of people suspected of having links with the 19 hijackers. [...] Dr Alhazmi's name also appeared on a passenger list for a United Airlines flight due to leave San Antonio for San Diego via Denver on Saturday. Investigators believe he may have been due to meet two men who were seized in Fort Worth, Texas, last Wednesday on an Amtrak train that was bound for San Antonio. Ayub Ali Khan, 51, and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, 47, were arrested in a routine drug search and are being held as material witnesses. They were found with box-cutters, hair dye and $20,000 in cash. Two of the hijackers who died last week in the crash in Pennsylvania have been traced to addresses in San Antonio."
      • Pair of possible hijackers in Toronto
        • History Commons sources on the event
        • CBS, "No New Arrests", 2001/09/14: "Authorities at Pearson International Airport in Toronto reportedly have detained a man carrying a bizarre photo of himself in a flight crew uniform against a fake backdrop of the World Trade Center. According to The Globe and Mail, the man was refused admission to Canada and is being questioned. Sources say the man, who said he is an aircraft maintenance engineer in Gaza, was supposed to have arrived at a U.S. destination just days before Tuesday's terrorist attacks, but was delayed for some unidentified reason."
      • Air Canada Flight 704
        • Globe and Mail, "Box cutters on Sept. 11 Air Canada N.Y. flight", 2001/10/13: "The RCMP are investigating the discovery of box cutters on an Air Canada plane that was to fly from Toronto to New York on Sept. 11, The Globe and Mail has learned. Flight 704, which was scheduled to leave at 9 a.m., never took off from Pearson International Airport. It was grounded minutes after two hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center in New York. [...] The knives were found by a passenger as Flight 792, from Toronto to Calgary, was boarding. That aircraft was the same one that was to have been used for Flight 704 to New York on Sept. 11, The Globe and Mail has learned."
        • CNN, "Knives on Canadian airliner investigated", 2001/10/15: "The knives, described as box cutters, were discovered on September 14 aboard Flight 792, an Air Canada Airbus A320 scheduled to fly that day between Toronto, Ontario, and Calgary, Alberta. That plane had also been slated to fly to New York on the morning of September 11 before it was grounded following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."
      • United Airlines Flight 23
        • Globe and Mail, "General Suspects Sept. 11 Plot Was Wider", 2002/06/13: "A Canadian general who is deputy commander of NORAD has revived the spectre of more than just four commercial airliners targeted for hijacking on Sept. 11. "We suspect there might have been more than just the four aircraft involved," Lieutenant-General Ken Pennie, the Canadian second-in-command of the North American Aerospace Defence Command, said yesterday. He said the information stemmed from the fact that suspicious passengers left a grounded plane on Sept. 11, somewhere in North America. [...] Gen. Pennie apparently was alluding to a Los Angeles-bound flight grounded at New York's John F. Kennedy airport on Sept. 11, on which three Middle-Eastern passengers angrily demanded that the flight proceed and then were kicked off the plane, vanishing before police showed up. United Airlines Flight 23 was bound for the West Coast and full of fuel."
        • Nor Cal Truth, "The Curious Case of United Airlines Flight 23 on 9/11", 2011/11/21
      • New York Times, "Original Plan for 9/11 Attacks Involved 10 Planes, Panel Says", 2004/06/16: "Some of the 9/11 terrorist plans, the commission staff said, called for the hijacked jets to be crashed into the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, various nuclear power plants, and skyscrapers in California and Washington State, a captured leader of Al Qaeda, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has told interrogators. [...] Today's interim report on the outline of the 9/11 plot offers new details and far more context than has previously been known. It says, for instance, that Zacarias Moussaoui, who has often been dubbed "the 20th hijacker" out of speculation that he was to have joined the 19 actual hijackers, was instead meant to participate in a "second wave" of attacks, an idea thwarted when he was arrested in August 2001 after his behavior at a Minnesota flying school aroused suspicion. [...] Mr. Mohammed has told his questioners that he initially wanted to have 25 or 26 hijackers in place in the United States. Some candidates for the suicide missions withdrew under pressure from their families, while others could not get visas to enter the United States or encountered other obstacles, the report said. [...] Mr. Atta said he thought the White House would be too difficult a target, though it was not clear why."
      • Airliners.net thread on "9/11 Flights That Did Not Take Off"
    • Dr. Haider identity
    • Attorney Tom Henry - also the attorney for Leo Wanta; possibly a handler of both Wanta and Vreeland
      • Christopher Story, "DEVIOUS FINANCIAL CROOK EXPOSED BY THE MAN WHO BOUGHT HIS FREEDOM", 2009/09/20 - has correspondence from "Thomas E. Henry" identifying themselves as "Colo. Atty. #4504" and "NE Atty. #11819"; his full name is given as "Thomas Eugene Henry"
      • Colorado attorney information for #4504 - name is "HENRY, THOMAS EUGENE"; status is "Disability Inactive"; firm name is "Thomas E. Henry, Attorney at Law"; business address is "9836 Ontario Street Omaha, NE 68124"; was admitted to the bar on 10/3/1973; has suspensions in 2008, 2010, and 2015
      • Nebraska attorney information for #11819 - name is "HENRY, THOMAS E."; status is "Regular Active"; license was received on 11/15/2002; address is 9836 Ontario Street; has a reprimand in 2008
      • Avvo lawyer profile of Thomas Henry - says that he practiced in Colorado since 1973 and Nebraska since 2002; places his office at 9836 Ontario St in Omaha NE; lists a Nebraska reprimand in 2008 and Colorado suspensions in 2008, 2010, and 2015
      • Avvo reviews of Thomas Henry
      • Family and early life (including work as an Assistant US Attorney in Denver)
        • Omaha World-Herald, advertisement for Omaha city council candidate John Ritums, 1973/05/14 - lists endorsements from Cynthia M. Henry and Thomas E. Henry
        • Omaha World-Herald, list of Creighton University School of Law graduates, 1973/05/20 - among the 24 Omaha natives on the list, there is Thomas E. Henry as well as Gerald E. Moran
        • Lincoln Journal Star, "156 Pass State Bar Exam", 1973/08/10 - includes "Thomas E Henry, Omaha" and "Gerald E Moran, Omaha"
        • Omaha World-Herald, "His Name Is John", 1974/08/12: "John Schuyler is the name chosen for their first child by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Henry, ex-Omahans now of Perry Park, Colo. The baby is the first grandchild of Mr. and Mrs. John W. Madden Jr. of Denver and Perry Park, and the first great-grandchild of Mr. and Mrs. John W. Madden Sr. of Englewood, Colo. All are ex-Omahans. Paternal grandparents are Dr. and Mrs. E. Dexter Henry, and other great-grandmothers are Mrs. J. Leslie Putt and Mrs. Frank J. Pros, all of Omaha."
        • Omaha World-Herald, "Dr. Henry Rite To Be Tuesday", 1975/04/14: "The funeral will be 11 a.m. Tuesday at the Trinity Cathedral for Dr. E. Dexter Henry, 67, of 9836 Ontario Street, former chairman of the Omaha-Douglas County Health Board. Dr. Henry, who retired from practice as a dentist after suffering a heart attack last November, died Sunday at a local hospital of heart disease. Survivors include his wife, Rose; daughter, Mrs. Denmar (Barbara) Canova, Des Moines; son, Thomas, Denver, Colo., and four grandchildren. Burial will be in Hillcrest Memorial Park."
        • Omaha World-Herald, obituary for E. Dexter Henry, 1975/04/15: "Funeral services will be at 11 a.m. today at the Trinity Cathedral for Dr. E. Dexter Henry, 69, of 9836 Ontario Street, retired dentist who died Sunday of heart disease. Dr. Henry was a former chairman of the Omaha-Douglas County Health Board, was president of the Omaha District Dental Society, and served as chairman of the Mayor’s Citizens Advisory Board for Community Improvement from 1966 through 1969. He also was active in the Omaha Figure Skating Club and was responsible for bringing the U.S. Figure Skating Association’s national competition here during the 1960s."
        • United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, no. 74-1810: United States v. Gurule, opinion, 1975/09/12 - argued on 1975/08/20; attorneys for the plaintiff-appellee are "Arthur Bosworth, Asst. U.S. Atty., Denver, Colo. (James L. Treece, U.S. Atty. and Thomas E. Henry, Asst. U.S. Atty., Denver, Colo., on the brief)"
        • United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, no. 527 F.2d 696: United States of America, Plaintiff-appellee, v. John Alexander Beathune and Rudy Rhodes, Defendants-appellants, appeal decision, 1975/12/31 (rehearing denied 1976/02/09) - argued on 1975/08/19; attorneys for the plaintiff-appellee are "Theodore S. Halaby, Sp. Asst. U.S. Atty. (James L. Treece, U.S. Atty., and Thomas E. Henry, Asst. U.S. Atty., on the brief)"
        • Omaha World-Herald, "Around and About: Big Reunion", 1976/05/14: "Linked with upcoming commencement exercises at the University of Nebraska at Omaha is a Madden family reunion. John W. Madden Jr., a former Omahan now of Larkspur, Colo., is one of three UNO alumni who will receive achievement awards at the Saturday morning graduation ceremonies. He and Mrs. Madden arrived this week and are houseguests of Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Hanson of Ginger Cove, Valley, Neb. Their daughter, Mrs. Thomas Henry of Perry Park, Colo., and her son, Schuyler, are also Omaha visitors. They’ve been at the home of Mrs. Henry’s grandmother, Mrs. J. Leslie Putt, and Thursday upon the arrival of Mr. Henry, moved to the home of Schuyler’s paternal grandmother, Mrs. E. Dexter Henry. Another Madden daughter, Mrs. Robert Lankford, with Mr. Lankford and the couple’s daughter, Polly, are visitors from Littleton, Colo. Mr. Madden’s parents, ex-Omahans Mr. and Mrs. John W. Madden Sr. of Englewood, Colo., are guests of their son-in-law and daughter, the LeRoy Crosbys. Other relatives, the Arthur Pinkertons and the W. T. Burgesses, will swell attendance at the grand reunion of the clan Saturday at a dinner at the Crosby home."
        • Omaha World-Herald, "Daughter Named", 1977/01/19: "Former Omahans Mr. and Mrs. Thomas E. Henry of Perry Park, Colo., are parents of a daughter, Marjorie Blair, born Dec. 31. The couple has a son, Schuyler, 2½. Grandparents are Mr. and Mrs. John W. Madden Jr. of Perry Park and Mrs. Dexter Henry of Omaha."
        • Omaha World-Herald, "Around and About: King to Be Honored on Ice", 1977/12/05: "With pomp and circumstance, Dr. Harold Gifford last October was crowned King Ak-Sar-Ben LXXXIII in a glittering pageant at the Coliseum. On Thursday, he'll again be honored at Ak-Sar-Ben — but with less formality and in more familiar territory. The Omaha Figure Skating Club will salute King Hal and his wife, both charter members of some 40 years standing, at a supper following the regular 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. skating session at Ak-Sar-Ben rink. Party-planners, headed by Mrs. Frederick C. Hill, include the club president Mrs. E. Dexter Henry; Mrs. Rex Clemons, Mrs. Edward T. Foster, Mrs. Norvald Nielsen, Kathryn Tukey and Joan Lubischer."
        • Dignity Memorial obituary for Rose Kathryn Pros Henry: "Rose Henry, 100, of Ankeny, passed away on Saturday, October 4, 2014 at her home in Ankeny. Memorial services will be held Thursday October 9th, at 7:00 pm at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church (2110 W. First St., Ankeny, IA 50023) with a time for fellowship following the service. Burial of cremated remains will take place at West Lawn-Hillcrest Cemetery in Omaha, NE. on Saturday October 11th, at 1:00 pm. Rose Kathryn Henry was born March 6, 1914 to Frank and Rose (Svojtek) Pros in Omaha. On June 7th 1936, Rose was united in marriage to E. Dexter Henry at the Trinity Cathedral in Omaha. The couple made their home in Omaha, and were blessed with two children Barb Canova, and Thomas Henry. Rose enjoyed spending her time doing needle work, painting ceramics, and playing bridge. She loved to take care of her family, and she expressed this through her joy of cooking and baking. Rose is survived by her two children, Barb Canova of Ankeny, IA., and Thomas (Aileen) Henry of Omaha, NE; grandson, David (Tammy) Canova and their children Melissa Canova, Jennifer and her daughter Liliana Dooley, Lindsay (Nick) Galvin and their daughter McKenna; granddaughter, Sara (Chris) Wiese and their children Taylor, Sydney, and Rylie; grandson, Dan (Dawn) Canova and their children Connor, Taitlyn and Paige. She was preceded in death by her husband, E. Dexter Henry; brother, Frank Pros; and son-in-law D.B “Spook” Canova."
      • 21st century record
        • Dossier (ACTING_PRESIDENT_GEORGE_BUSH_ORDERS_ARREST_OF_SECRET_AGENT_WANTA) of various documents related to Wanta's case - on p.14 is a 2001/10/17 telefax from Wanta to the Treasury Department that asks for his intended recipients to contact the law office of "Jan Morton Heger, Esquire" and address it to the attention of "Thomas Henry, Legal Assistant"
        • Dossier (SIMPLE_QUESTIONS_PART_1_of_2___CIRCA_2020) of various documents related to Wanta's case - on p.6 is a 2002/08/15 letter from Thomas E. Henry to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (regarding the Leo Wanta case), in which Henry's address is given as 1125 South 79th Street in Omaha NE and his email is aileenkj@cox.net
        • 2008 Colorado Supreme Court suspension of Thomas Eugene Henry: "Respondent hired a doctor to perform two independent psychological evaluations and then failed to pay the doctor for either expert evaluation as of the date of the order approving the Conditional Admission of Misconduct. His misconduct constituted grounds for the imposition of discipline pursuant to C.R.C.P. 251.5 and violated Colo. RPC 8.4(d)."
        • 2010 Colorado Supreme Court suspension of Thomas Eugene Henry - case number 09PDJ081; on p.8, Henry's practice address is given as 1125 South 79th Street in Omaha NE
        • Bizapedia entry for FEDERAL FUGITIVE TASK FORCE LLC in Colorado - file number 20101180963; incorporated 2010/03/26; registered agent is Thomas E Henry of 1303 Delaware St Denver, CO 80204; principal address is 1303 Delaware St Denver, CO 80204
        • Avvo page for Denver CO lawyer Huntington Comstock Brown - anonymous 1-star review titled "Covered up crimes by other lawyers" says: "In late 2004 early 2005 Mr. Brown represented me regarding a landlord situation and personal property damage and landlord failing to fix plumbing issues on a house I rented in the tech center. In late 2010/early 2011 Mr. Brown conspired with Carol Chambers, James Colgan, and Diane King to forge and fabricate criminal charges against me. Covering up crimes committed in my home starting in April of 2010 by Dorian Henry, Bruce Cunningham, and Frank Calve. Chambers conspired to use an individual named Thomas Henry to pretend he was Huntington Brown and as if I had just moved to Arapahoe County from Denver as I did in 2004. Stealing copies of old mortgage files of my sister for the employer I worked at in 2004/2005 when Huntington Brown. Covering up crimes with my computers and using and access mortgage files and editing forging mortgage files and committing identity theft of my parents, sister, myself. They all forged every kind of documentation including my rental history in Arapahoe County from August 2004-August 2005. Even committing fraud I had a boyfriend and was married to give them access to anything they wanted and commit endless fraud. I've been diligent at gathering evidence knowing the sick crimes committed to cover up personal friends of Carol Chambers including influencing and committing crimes with police to cover up the crimes I began reporting. Diane King is still trying to cover up Thomas E Henry and the crimes against my home, family, and him impersonating Hunt Brown. She is still committing fraud with the Denver Police as she did at the beginning of 2011."
        • 2015 Colorado Supreme Court suspension of Thomas Eugene Henry
        • The Committee to Expose Dishonest and Incompetent Judges, Attorneys and Public Officials, "Attorney Thomas Henry of Omaha; ethical dwarf", 2015/07 - interesting to note that Henry graduated from Creighton University School of Law in 1973, the same graduating class as Gerald Moran (prosecutor in State v. Owen)
    • Life prior to his 2000 arrest in Canada
      • Tampa Tribune, "Cops seek man who took ride in yacht", 1997/03/25: "Pinellas County Sheriffs detectives are searching for a man who they say apparently took a luxury yacht for a joy ride Monday night. Sheriffs spokesman Sgt. Greg Tita said a man who identified himself as Delmart Edward Vreeland, 30, of Orlando, started negotiating for the purchase of a 32-foot Chris-Craft Daycruiser docked at Tierra Verde Marina at 110 Pinellas Bayway in St. Petersburg Monday afternoon. Vreeland gave the marina a personal check in excess of $127,000 for the vessel as backup for a bank wire transfer and convinced the marina to let him take it for a test cruise, Tita said. When he didn't return, the marina found that no bank account existed and deputies were called. At 8:30 p.m., the vessel was found at Duke's Marina and Fish Camp in Tarpon Springs, Tita said. Deputies found two juveniles on board, Tita said. Charges against the juveniles are pending, Tita said, but Vreeland faces grand theft charges when found."
    • Fate after the 9/11 controversy
      • Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) records check on Delmart Vreeland born 1966/05/20 (archive)
      • Purported Michigan death certificate for Vreeland on 2002/08/13 - SSN is 377-80-2556; DOB is 1966/05/20; location is said to be in Oakland County MI (Troy MI or Rochester Hills MI); cause of death is said to be OCCIPITAL ENTRY PENETRATING TRAUMA
      • Douglas County Sheriff's Office, case no. 2004-10708, 2004/10/12 - see accompanying tweets here and here that highlight notable pages of the report, including: 171 (mention of Vreeland having a drug dealer named Mario Brito, which is the same name as a leading drug smuggler from a CIA family involved with the Gulf Cartel); 187 (in Colorado circa 2004, Vreeland made money by prostituting out one of the kids who he was abusing); 209 (Vreeland's half-brother states that Vreeland inexplicably "got government credit cards" and somehow always manages to get charges against himself dropped; Oakland County MI investigators caught Vreeland for child porn back in the late 90s, yet the FBI never analyzed his hard drive and subsequently destroyed it); 220 (Vreeland professed to run a child pornography ring that sent material to Germany); 302-303 (Vreeland's claim to know what happened to Centre County DA Ray Gricar, who had failed to prosecute Jerry Sandusky back in 1998 and mysteriously vanished just before retirement in 2005); 887 (the US military itself reported that Vreeland had the Lt. rank, corroborating Exhibit O above and refuting the notion that he was kicked out of the Navy after only 6 months)
      • WDIV, "Man Who Says He Predicted Sept. 11 Attacks Arrested: Michigan Native Wanted On Child Prostitution, Fraud Charges", 2004/10/22: "A Michigan native who claims to have predicted the events of Sept. 11, 2001, was arrested by authorities in Iowa on Wednesday. Delmart Vreeland, 38, of Rochester Hills, was wanted by eight Michigan jurisdictions, including Oakland County, for crimes like fraud and burglary, according to a report in The Daily Oakland Press. Vreeland was captured by sheriff's deputies in Iowa's Franklin County after he stopped to refuel at a gas station. Vreeland used a credit card at the station that had an alert placed on it by authorities in Colorado -- where he is wanted on child prostitution charges, according to the paper."
      • The Courier (Waterloo IA), "Man wanted in eight states arrested in Iowa", 2004/10/22: "Clayton Steeves, 42, of Castle Rock, Colo., also known as Delmart Vreeland, was arrested Wednesday about 7:20 p.m., said Chief Deputy Ken Lubkeman of the Franklin County sheriff's department. Steeves was driving from Denver to Minneapolis on Interstate 35 when he stopped for gas, Lubkeman said. A credit card Steeves used alerted authorities of his whereabouts. Steeves gave several false names when his van was pulled over by authorities two miles north of the station, Lubkeman said."
      • Des Moines Register, "Alleged con artist arrested in Iowa", 2004/10/26: "Vreeland gave officials several false names. Then he started talking. "He told us he had information about 911, he said he worked with Naval intelligence, and he said he had information pertaining to terrorist cells in the United States," Lubkeman said. Sheriff's officials checked his claims with intelligence agencies, but "we honestly can't say whether any of it is true," Lubkeman said. "There's just too much there." [...] Lubkeman said Vreeland was convincing and very believable. But other agencies warned that he's a phony. "He is an excellent con artist, one of the best I've ever seen," said Detective Bruce Lidgard of the sheriff's office in Oakland County, Mich."
      • The Detroit News, "Police capture fraud suspect", 2004/10/??: "Deputies cautiously approached the driver of the Colorado van on an Iowa interstate. The driver calmly identified himself as Mark Osmon, but a passenger in the same car said he had known the driver for three years as Clayton Steeves. [...] When he was caught, Vreeland was sought by police in nine Metro Detroit suburbs and five other states for a variety of offenses. In his possession were 22 ID cards, seven dates of birth, several Social Security cards and a stolen Canadian passport. Colorado authorities tipped off Iowa enforcement officials. According to Franklin County (Iowa) Sheriff's Department Deputy Chief Ken Lubkerman, Colorado authorities want to charge him with child prostitution in their state, where Vreeland claims to have lived for two months. [...] In 1998, he turned star witness for the prosecution when he testified against a stepbrother-in-law, Bobby Moore, who was charged with burning down a St. Clair Shores steak house bearing his name. Vreeland said Moore paid him to set the fire, but District Judge William Crouchman called Vreeland "the least credible witness I've ever seen." Judy Horigan, a former salesperson for the now-defunct Scott Shuptrine furniture store in Troy, said Vreeland fraudulently obtained thousands of dollars in furniture. "He is the smoothest con artist," said Horigan, who now lives in Virginia. [...] "One day in June 2001 he supposedly called the warden and wrote a one-page note that he told him not to open until Sept. 13," Horigan said. "In it, he told of the September 11 tragedies. I think he just befriended a terrorist along the way somewhere, that's all. But he used it to impress the Canadians." [...] [He further claimed that he] had a hand in the design of the Star Wars defense system, a U.S. space-based missile defense program of former President Reagan. Vreeland also somehow set up a voice mail on a phone number at the Pentagon with a recording identifying "Delmart Vreeland's office," further duping Canadian authorities and journalists who spent months trying to make sense out of his stories from jail."
      • Democratic Underground thread from October 2004 discussing an alleged planned terror attack in Minneapolis that Vreeland claimed to be trying to warn about
      • Jeff Wells post in 2005 giving his interpretation of Vreeland's arrest for child prostitution charges: "Andy Stephenson was a confidant of Vreeland, and before these charges surfaced he told me Vreeland alluded to a history of covert abuse very much like the Franklin Cover-Up."
      • ABC7 (Denver), "International Criminal Gets Prison For Child Sex Crimes", 2008 (original link, now 404s): "Delmart Edward Vreeland, 42, of the Cottonwood subdivision in Douglas County, was convicted in 2006 of 13 felony charges, including inducement of child prostitution, sexual assault, sexual exploitation of children, and distribution of cocaine. Earlier this year, he was convicted of six habitual criminal counts. Vreeland was arrested in October 2004 for numerous charges including child prostitution. Witnesses reported that Vreeland provided drugs and alcohol to two teenage boys, and then induced them to perform sex acts and make child pornography for the promise of thousands of dollars and a drum set. The victims reported Vreeland to the Douglas County Sheriff's Office."
      • United States District Court for the District of Colorado, Delmart E. J. M. Vreeland v. Zupan, judgment, 2016/12/20
        • "THE COURT: Who is your new lawyer?
          MR. VREELAND: Shawn [sic] Young and Tom Henry."
        • "MR. YOUNG: Actually, I'm not. I'd like to see the document that entered our appearance on this in the first place, because he originally had Harvey Steinberg on this case, and I don't know how our law firm got on the case. We had him for a bond issue on a separate issue, and somehow our name got on the record for this case, which is a criminal case, and obviously there's some sort of entry, because now today Mr. Thomas Henry --- I'm entering appearance for Mr. Henry and appearing for him today. He's recently been licensed in the State of Colorado, and entering appearance for him and trying to withdraw ourselves, because we never entered our appearance on this specific case."
        • "On September 21, 2005, Thomas E. Henry made an entry of appearance as counsel for Applicant. Case No. 04CR706 Court File at 000263. Mr. Henry, thereafter, filed several motions for the presiding judge to recuse, a motion for continuance, a motion to evaluate Applicant's competency, a motion for an independent evaluation, discovery motions, request that author of laboratory report testify, a motion to dismiss for violation of speedy trial rights, motion to allow independent examination, motion to dismiss for violation of attorney/client privilege, a motion for dismissal of habitual criminal counts, and a motion to specify Rule 404 evidence."
        • "On February 8, 2006, the trial court addressed the request of Applicant's third attorney (Mr. Henry) for permission to withdraw as counsel for Mr. Vreeland. Feb. 8, 2006 Hr'g Tr. at 3. At issue in Mr. Henry's request to withdraw was a criminal report prepared by the sheriff's office, reflecting Applicant's assertion that Mr. Henry had tried to blackmail Applicant for the money that allegedly had been stolen by another of Mr. Henry's clients. [...]"
        • "MR. VAHLE: And, Judge, if I may make just a little more record. I've talked to Lieutenant McMahon, and my understanding is about mid-December Mr. Vreeland approached him and wanted to level a complaint against Mr. Henry. He did tell Lieutenant McMahon that Mr. Henry was trying to blackmail him. He provided him some documentation, including some sort of power of attorney documents that were -- have Mr.
          Henry's name and address on them allegedly prepared for the transfer of some moneys.
          There was this statement, as Mr. Henry discussed, that Mr. Vreeland and Mr. Wanta, Leo Wanta, had been involved in some crime, had some access to a bank account, and how somehow Mr. Henry and Mr. Wanta were attempting to blackmail Mr. Vreeland. He requested that Lieutenant McMahon have the FBI look into that."
        • "[...] A letter from Applicant to the prosecution also was docketed on February 9 regarding Mr. Henry's alleged dishonesty and his failure to inform Applicant about the prosecution's willingness to enter into plea negotiations. [...]"
    • Jonathan Elinoff found that Vreeland was connected to a pedophilic blackmail ring in Colorado
      • "To elaborate a bit - Scott participated in Elinoff's abandoned documentary, as did Daniel Hopsicker and other researchers. Elinoff passed on extra details of his work to me earlier this year, and I've gone back and forth several times with the notion of posting some of it online here - not least because he warned me of mentioning a particular name on the internet. I'll simply note that eventually Elinoff received a death threat/warning from a figure who is also based in Colorado, who is mentioned in Ruppert's CROSSING THE RUBICON, and who is linked to Mike 'Delmart' Vreeland." - the figure is Tom Henry
      • "The Pat Sullivan scandal - mentioned in the very long CORE OF CORRUPTION thread I started on the 9/11 board - was the tip of an ongoing Franklin Scandal-type blackmail campaign in Colorado using victims of human trafficking as bait to entrap politicians and other people of authority. Some of the people involved in the human trafficking were working for Viktor Kozeny and other folks tied to the Russian Bratva mafia. Kozeny's personal pilot - Wolfgang Bohringer - was Atta's buddy in Florida in the months leading up to the attacks, and Amanda Keller said Atta and Kozeny were 'inseparable'. Elinoff had also tracked down and interviewed Keller, and - with a hidden camera in tow - had located and filmed Bohringer himself. Elinoff had followed leads provided by Hopsicker and had dug up a bunch of new stuff. It was at this time that the death threats started - and the threats, to an extent, weren't anonymous ones."
      • "I've seen evidence that the death threats to Elinoff were CIA-based, and also that the human trafficking ring in Colorado was/is a massive one that involved a tremendous amount of Colorado police personnel involved in the cover-up and the actual entrapment of children. COG is at the root of a lot of this - with Saudi money also involved in financing various events - but I'd love to know exactly what the CIA wanted from COG."
  • Washington Post, "Report Says FAA Got 52 Warnings Before 9/11", 2005/02/11

Air defense

Insider trading

  • Lars Schall, "9/11 Terror Trading: Beware of a Limited Hangout", 2017/03/23-25 (parts 1, 2 3)
  • Alex. Brown & Sons (acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1999) connection
    • Newsletter suggesting the put options on American Airlines
      • From p.?? of Black 9/11: Money, Motive and Technology by Mark Gaffney: "The newsletter was Steve Sarnoff's Options Hotline, published by a Baltimore-based company known as Agora Financial, itself a subsidiary of a holding company also named Agora, one of whose founders, the late Gregory Barnhill, was a protege and close associate of Buzzy Krongard. (Barnhill reportedly committed suicide in 2012.) The bank A.B. Brown is also based in Baltimore."
    • A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard background
      • Marcy Wheeler, "Was Alex Brown a CIA Front When It Was “Innocuously” Shorting 9/11?", 2014/11/05: "Prominent Baltimore banker Ed Hale has come forward to reveal he was a CIA NOC while Chair of the Bank of Baltimore from sometime around 1991 until 2001. [...] That’s all very nice. But it suggests that Buzzy Krongard was at the CIA, recruiting other banksters, years before he was known to be (he is known to have started in 1998). There are other versions of this, with slightly different dates and a different relationship with the CIA for Buzzy, which may be key. Still, they all show Buzzy recruiting a top banker to join the CIA in the early 1990s."
        • Baltimore Magazine, "Cameo: Ed Hale", 2014/10/31: "In your new memoir, Hale Storm, you disclose that you worked for the CIA for about a decade. How and when were you recruited? I was recruited in 1992 by Buzzy Krongard who was the chairman of [investment bank] Alex. Brown at the time. I was chairman of the board of Bank of Baltimore and we happened to be in the same building."
        • CBS Baltimore, "Baltimore Banker Reveals His Double Life As A CIA Agent", 2014/11/01: "In a life that reads like a spy thriller, Hale says he was recruited into the CIA by former Alex Brown chairman Buzzy Krongard, who was with the agency. “He came to my officer one day and said ‘Let’s go for a walk,’” Hale said. [...] As an operative, Hale found himself in the early hunt for the world’s most notorious terrorist, Osama Bin Laden. “Getting people into places where they could figure out the traces and the pathways of Osama Bin Laden back in the 90s,” Hale said. [...] During his time with the CIA, from 1991 to 2001, Hale never told anyone."
        • Wall Street Journal, "Former Maryland Banker Reveals He Used to Work for CIA", 2015/02/01: "“I am disappointed and upset that Ed would violate his agreement and understanding with the agency,” said A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard in a phone interview. [...] Mr. Hale and Mr. Krongard were friends who worked in the same office building. Mr. Krongard declined to comment on whether he worked for the CIA in the early 1990s."

Controlled demolition

  • WTC tenants with motive, means, and opportunity
  • Memphis DMV fraud gang having WTC plumbing access
    • New York Post, "9/11 LINK EYED IN FIERY DEATH OF ‘CROOKED’ DMV WORKER", 2002/02/13
    • CNN, "FBI probes death of driver's license examiner", 2002/02/15: "One of the men, Sakhera Hammad, had a visitor's pass for the World Trade Center dated September 5, 2001. He told authorities he and his cousin, Abdelmuhsen Mahmid Hammad, also charged with trying to obtain a fake license, worked on the tower's sprinkler systems -- a claim authorities have not been able to corroborate. Investigators say they are also intrigued by the fact that another man implicated in the scam, Khaled Odtllah, drove from New York City to Memphis on September 11."
    • Memphis Commercial Appeal, "License suspect had WTC repair pass, but Port Authority did its own work", 2002/02/16: "A photo ID pass for Sept. 5 found on one of the men charged with fraudulently obtaining a Tennessee driver's license from a Memphis woman gave him access to the six underground levels of the One World Center building. But which tenant hired Sakher 'Rocky' Hammad, 24, to work on its sprinklers is lost, said Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spokesman Alan Hicks on Friday. [...] It appears that Khaled Odtllah of Cordova shared the same 2840 Morning Lake Drive address at different times over the past year with Rocky Hammad, according to an online people finder database. Odtllah and Hammad also spent time in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn in 2000 and lived about 22 blocks apart near New York Harbor."
    • St. Petersburg Times, "Fiery death raises fears of terror link", 2002/02/17: "On the morning of Feb. 5, authorities say, a gray Dodge Durango and a white Toyota Avalon arrived in Memphis from New York and parked outside the motor vehicles office. Inside the cars sat six Middle Eastern men. [...] Shortly after Smith showed up for work, a man from the Toyota, Khaled Odtllah, a native of Jerusalem, joined the morning rush into the building. According to an FBI affidavit, he was clutching four signed driver's license applications. [...] According to records, Odtllah's last address was the Grove, a gated community in the Memphis suburb of Cordova, with swimming pools, tennis courts and spas. Police say Odtllah came to the United States about 13 years ago from Jerusalem and had been in Tennessee for about 2 1/2 years. [...] Agents in New York had received a tip that the men would be traveling to Memphis that day, and the bureau's agents in Tennessee had staked out Smith's home and the motor vehicle office. When Odtllah and the others pulled out of the parking lot, agents flashed blue lights and pulled them over. With Odtllah, police found Mostafa Said Abou-Shahin, Mohammed Fares and Sakher Hammad and his cousin Abdelmuhsen Mahmid Hammad. An unnamed juvenile also was arrested. [...] A business card in Sakher Hammad's wallet was for a Magic Plumbing & Heating in Brooklyn. It advertises "custom kitchens, bathrooms, water heaters, boilers, repiping" -- generally residential in nature. [...] Hammad's wallet also held courtesy cards from the New York City Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and the Detectives' Endowment Association of New York."
    • New York Times, "A NATION CHALLENGED: A SUSPICIOUS DEATH; Memphis Fraud Case Is Long on Clues but Short on Answers", 2002/02/18: "Then the agents searched a fifth man, Sakhera Hammad of New York, whom the men identified as their second contact, and found an alarming piece of paper. Mr. Hammad had a worker's pass to the World Trade Center dated Sept. 5. Suddenly, the case became a possible terrorist plot. In a telephone interview on Saturday, Mr. Hammad's father, Peter Hansen, said his son was a plumber, and he provided a letter he said he had obtained from his son's employer attesting to his work at the trade center. In the letter, dated Feb. 13, Sergei Denko, president of Denko Mechanical, said Mr. Hammad had been working for his company in the basement garage area of 1 World Trade Center. ''He was there for a couple of days,'' Mr. Denko said in an interview."
    • Memphis Commercial Appeal, "Suspect in ID fraud goes free on bond", 2002/03/29: "One of five suspects in a drivers license fraud ring was released Thursday after his father agreed to put up property, including his Staten Island home, as bond. Federal prosecutor Tim DiScenza dropped opposition to Sakher A. Hammad's release after his father, Peter Hansen, a civil engineer employed by New York City government, signed the $250,000 bond. But DiScenza fought a bid for bail by co-defendant Khaled Odtllah. U.S. Dist. Judge Bernice Donald is scheduled to rule Monday on that matter. DiScenza also told Donald that the government wants separate trials in rapid succession for the five defendants, with Odtllah, the alleged ringleader, being the last tried. [...] Hammad, like his four co-defendants, had been in federal custody since they were arrested Feb. 5 with Tennessee license examiner Katherine Smith. A criminal complaint the next day charged all six with being part of a scam in which Smith would issue driver's licenses for a fee to New Yorkers brought to Shelby County by Odtllah. [...] during Thursday's hearing, Nash revealed that FBI agents had found licenses and other identification from California and Utah - all in Odtllah's name - in an envelope marked "do not open." The envelope was found two weeks ago in a locked file cabinet when FBI agents searched a Memphis office where Odtllah's girlfriend, Sandra DaSilva, worked. DaSilva said she put the envelope in the file cabinet at Odtllah's instructions. [...] Nash also testified that Odtllah fled Utah for Florida after he was charged in 1997 with sodomizing the 12-year-old sister of his girlfriend."
    • New York Times, "A Nation Challenged: The Trade Center; Towers Fell as Intense Fire Beat Defenses, Report Says", 2002/03/29: "Fireproofing, sprinkler systems and the water supply for hoses were all disabled in the twin towers on Sept. 11 in the face of a blaze so intense that it drove temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees and generated heat equivalent to the energy output of a nuclear power plant, a federal report on how the towers fell has concluded. The fire, combined with these failures, brought down the towers even after they had shown surprising and lifesaving resiliency to massive structural damage caused by the impact of two hijacked airliners, the report says."
    • Sergei Denko / Sergei Davidenko background
      • 9/11 Encyclopedia article on Denko Mechanical: "The Port Authority of New York claimed no knowledge of hiring a Denko Mechanical and said Denko must have been hired by a tenant. Denko Mechanical Ltd's address and phone is the residential Manhattan apartment and phone of Mr. Sergei Davidenko. Mr. Davidenko obtained a business license in Feb, 2000. Denko is not listed in any yellow pages or in any type of NY contractor list. Denko simply could not be the sprinkler system contractor for the WTC. Not only would the Port Authority have had records, but companies that install and maintain sprinkler systems for large buildings are heavily regulated major operations with civil engineers, inspectors, warehouses full of delicate equipment and highly trained specialty crews. A Feb 8, 2000, business entity license issued for a Denko Mechanical Ltd, 232 E 26th St. in Manhattan (ph 212-481-8226) which, on reverse trace, is the Manhattan residence and phone of Mr. Sergei Davidenko; it's an apartment building. As noted above, the letter verifying Hammad's WTC employment was signed by a Sergei Denko. [...] The letter exonerating Mr. Hammad's employment was from a company Denko Mechanical signed by its owner Sergei Denko -- does not exist in NY except as a 2 y.o. business license registered to a Mr. Sergei Davidenko of 232 E 26th St., Manhattan. Another residential apartment (again using Skipease reverse trace)."
      • New York Sun, "Men Arrested for Faking Plumbing Qualifications", 2007/12/21 (press release by the Manhattan District Attorney on 2007/12/20): "Dozens of buildings are being reinspected for safety after two plumbers were arrested yesterday of faking their qualifications to install fire sprinkler systems. The two men, Sergei Denko and David Connell, are being charged with offering a false instrument for filing and forgery, and could face jail time if convicted."
      • 2014 list of sprinkler contractors for Nassau County NY - includes "DENKO MECHANICAL, INC. (6484044)"
      • Buzzfile info on Denko Mechanical - chairman is Sergei Denko; address is 3544 9th St Astoria, NY 11106; company was founded in 2000
      • LinkedIn page for Sergei Denko - lists him as president of Denko Mechanical Inc. from Feb 2000 to present
      • ClustrMaps info on 35-44 9th St in Queens - residents include Laura Denko, Sergei Denko, Ivan Dobra, and Mohamed Rudwan; one corporation using that address is Independent Mechanical Inc.
    • Attack on the Shelby County coroner
      • Memphis Commercial Appeal, "'No hoax -- bomb found outside county morgue", 2002/03/14: "A bomb and two smaller explosive-type devices were found Wednesday morning in the stairwell outside of the Shelby County Regional Forensic Center on Madison, which houses the morgue and the Medical Examiner's Office. "This was no hoax," said Gene Marquez, resident agent in charge of the Memphis federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms office."
      • Memphis Commercial Appeal, "Smith worked high-profile cases", 2002/06/03: "Dr. O. C. Smith, who was attacked Saturday by an unknown assailant, was chosen to serve as Shelby County's medical examiner two years ago. His job includes working with police on criminal investigations as well as testifying sometimes as a key witness in a case. In March, a bomb and two smaller explosive-type devices were found outside of the Shelby County Regional Forensic Center. At that time, Smith acknowledged that his office had worked on a number of highly publicized cases. "We have done several high-profile cases from (miss ing Harvard researcher) Dr. (Don) Wiley to Katherine Smith but there has been no indication that we offended anyone," Smith said."
    • Possible connection to the ID fraud by Herbert Villalobos
  • Cleanup of the ruins
    • Role of Paul Manafort's family construction company in cleaning up the WTC complex
      • Company history of Manafort Brothers Inc.: "An established reputation has led to us being called upon for unique and first of their kind projects. One occasion that stands out occurred shortly after 9/11 when our involvement was requested at Ground Zero in New York City in 2001 to assist in the demolition and removal of the World Trade Center buildings."
      • ABC, "School Shooter Adam Lanza's Newtown House Is Demolished", 2015/03/24: "The 3,100 square-foot yellow house on a leafy street in Newtown, Connecticut, where Adam Lanza lived with his mother was demolished today. It was the same house where Lanza began his December 2012 rampage by killing his mother before driving to Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 children and six adults before shooting himself. Manafort Brothers of Plainville, Connecticut, volunteered to carry out the demolition. Contractors arrived on site Monday “and had the house down within two hours,” Newtown First Selectman Pat Llodra told ABC News."

Other matters

  • Other lesser-mentioned suspects
    • Omaha businessman Warren Buffett
      • Coyote Bruce, "Damning Evidence of Buffett Role in 9/11", 2014/02/23 - notes that Buffett owned NetJets (ed. note: formerly Executive Jet Aviation), one of whose private jets was tracking Flight 93; points out that Buffett had a financial stake in MITRE, which allegedly had its hand in remote piloting and was partnered with the Saudi-owned software firm Ptech; mentions him entertaining a CEO whose office was in the WTC2 impact zone at USSTRATCOM (headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base) on the morning of September 11
      • Twitter thread by Tim McInerny on 2017/11/18 detailing "Warren Buffett's disturbing ties to 9/11" - mentions Buffett holding his Classic Charity event at Offutt Air Force Base on September 11; says that one of the guests was Admiral Richard Mies, the Commander in Chief of the United States Strategic Command who would have been in charge of the Global Guardian war game running that day; notes that another guest was Fiduciary Trust International CEO Anne Tatlock, and that her company occupied floors 94-97 of WTC2 which is right above where Flight 175 hit; identifies Tatlock as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and trustee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (as was James Baker); points out that Berkshire Hathaway owned FlightSafety International, whose subsidiary trained hijackers to fly, and major shares in SunTrust Bank, which was heavily used by the hijackers
    • FBI director Louis Freeh
    • Covert operations Naval officer and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage
      • Kevin Ryan, "9/11 as Sequel to Iran-Contra: Armitage, Carlucci and Friends", 2012/04/08: "Armitage was one of the signatories of a 1998 letter to President Clinton from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), calling for military intervention against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 2001, Armitage was the Deputy Secretary of State reporting to Colin Powell. He was involved in the secure video teleconference run by Richard Clarke that failed to respond to the hijacked airliners. The week of 9/11, in Washington, Armitage met with General Mahmud Ahmed, the head of Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) who ordered $100,000 to be wired to the alleged hijackers. Moreover, Armitage was a director at Choicepoint, which provided DNA testing on 9/11 victims through its subsidiary, Bode Technology."
  • Remote controlled planes
  • No-plane at Pentagon
  • Cell phones
  • TruthMove forum post critiquing David Ray Griffin: pages 1, 2, 3
  • "CRITIQUE OF CHRISTOPHER BOLLYN AND HIS INFLUENCE UPON THE TRUTH MOVEMENT", 2017/09/22
  • Pedophile ring connections (TODO: expand this list)
    • Delmart Vreeland, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) agent who wrote a note predicting 9/11 while in a Canadian prison, was arrested on child prostitution charges in Castle Rock CO (part of the Denver metropolitan area) in 2004. According to Jeff Wells, he had confided in Andy Stephenson prior to his arrest about a personal history of child abuse much like the victims of the Franklin scandal endured. In that sense it is noteworthy that Vreeland grew up in the Detroit area during the 60s and 70s, matching the place and time that the North Fox Island pedophile ring and associated rings linked to the Oakland County Child Killer (OCCK) murders were operating.
    • Jonathan Elinoff discovered a Colorado pedophile ring overseen by former Arapahoe County sheriff Pat Sullivan that he concluded was used to compromise public officials to facilitate 9/11. He was pulled into this discovery while investigating Vreeland, which was suggestive of a connection, especially since his Vreeland investigation brought him to the same Colorado milieu as that of the pedophile ring (nightclubs, drug distribution networks, etc.), Vreeland went down on similar charges to Sullivan, and a crooked attorney Tom Henry who played a role in the pedophile network was also Vreeland's attorney for some time. Some of the human traffickers in the network were said to be Russian mobsters working for Viktor Kozeny, the employer of Mohammed Atta's best friend Wolfgang Bohringer. Also tied to this network were white supremacist groups like the 211 crew, which in 2013 were behind a murder of Colorado Department of Corrections chief Tom Clements that is suspected of being at the behest of Hamburg cell contact Homaidan al-Turki.
    • Warren Buffett, who hosted a charity event at Offutt Air Force Base (which was George W. Bush's place of refuge later that day) on the morning of September 11 attended by a CEO who would have otherwise been in the WTC impact zone and owned multiple aviation businesses (FlightSafety International and NetJets) that were tied to the attacks as well as a stake in Ptech partner MITRE, was an Omaha billionaire who played a background role in the Franklin scandal
    • Khaled Odtllah, the ringleader of a group of Arabs involved in identity theft -- one of whom, Rocky Hammad, worked for Sergei Davidenko on some unspecified maintenance in the World Trade Center basement days before the attacks -- had formerly lived in Utah before fleeing a 1997 charge of raping his girlfriend's 12-year-old sister. He was from Jerusalem and lived in a wealthy suburb of Memphis, suggesting he might have been an Israeli intelligence operative.
    • 2007 Rigorous Intuition comment by 11:11: "I have a friend who is monarch cult abused multiple. She was totured at SRI where she was trained in remote viewing and used by the JASONS. She was also used in special access programs in the middle east - UAE. She was taken to Egypt, where she met Atta. She won't say a lot about it, because she's afraid that someone innocent (an Egyptian) could get killed over it. She was in Egypt as a slave for Mossad handlers, and she said Attah was both Muslim Brotherhood and working with the Mossad" - note that Myron Du Bain, the first intelligence contact of Wally Hilliard who owned the Venice FL flight school that trained Atta, ran SRI International during the period in which it was doing mind control research centered around remote viewing
      • Rigorous Intuition comment on 2007/03/14 by alleged Monarch survivor Onesmartrat: "I know, I grew up getting to know these fuckers real well ...not by choice mind you. (See my thread/post here for more details;http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?t=11129) Also, Mohammed Atta worked for the CIA/Mossad as a double agent. (I know this because he was one of the people I met when I was working for them (Mossad) in Egypt. I immediately recognized his photo on 911. I highly doubt he was even on that plane. He certainly was no Islamic fundy as he was a Gay man, and in Egypt being a Gay man is a hangable offense, which is why he spied on Egypt for Israel. In the US, he spied on the Mossad for the CIA."
    • 2008 comment by MaryH on the Vreeland story: "After 9-11 George Tenet said the only way to fix the CIA was to "blow it up" - he was figuratively speaking, of course. How did he fix it? He made it bigger by heavily recruiting private contractors from places like Lockheed Martin. They'd sign four year contracts and get paid a lot of money to conduct compromise campaigns - which sometimes (allegedly) utilize children as prostitutes while the "new recruits" film and record the event. A contractor from Colorado Springs allegedly signed such a contract. He was with LM at that time, but then moved on to Northrupp Grumman. He had a sexual assault charge buried by the US government in 2005. His FBI liaison from Minneapolis was seen with him in the hallway of the Colorado Springs courthouse. The El Paso County SD cannot release US gov't "sealed" portions of the file to the victim, who he tied up for the occasion. He is known to have taped/filmed other "events" and so it is assumed that he also taped this one."
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