Stage-Managing the War on Terror: Ensnaring Terrorists Demands Creativity / By Stephan Salisbury/ TRUTHOUT/TomDispatch

Stage-Managing the War on Terror: Ensnaring Terrorists Demands Creativity / By Stephan Salisbury/ TRUTHOUT/TomDispatch

http://www.truth-out.org/stage-managing-war-terror61099

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175270/tomgram%3A_stephan_salisbury%2C_p…

Stage-Managing the War on Terror
Ensnaring Terrorists Demands Creativity
By Stephan Salisbury

Informers have by now become our first line of defense in our battles with the evildoers, the go-to guys in the never-ending domestic war on terror. They regularly do the dirty work — suggesting and encouraging the plots, laboring as bag men to move the money, fashioning the bombs, and eliciting the flamboyant dialogue, even while following the scripts of their handlers to the letter. They have attended to all the little details that make for the successful and now familiar arrests, criminal complaints, trials, and (for the most part) convictions in the ever-distracting war against… what? Al-Qaeda? Terror? Muslims? The inept? The poor?

The Liberty City Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy, the Newburgh Four — each has had their fear-filled day in the sun. None of these plots ever came close to happening. How could they? All were bogus from the get-go: money to buy missiles or cell phones or shoes and fancy duds — provided by the authorities; plans for how to use the missiles and bombs and cell phones — provided by authorities; cars for transport and demolition — issued by the authorities; facilities for carrying out the transactions — leased by those same authorities. Played out on landscapes manufactured by federal imagineers, the climax of each drama was foreordained. The failure of the plots would then be touted as the success of the investigations and prosecutions.

A band of virtually homeless and penniless men in Florida, we were told, were planning to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. They just needed the right combat boots to pull it off, and a little free money.

A cell of New Jersey roofers, handymen, and cab drivers was scheming to use a laminated pizza delivery map to guide them through a devastating attack on Fort Dix, the enormous military base in Burlington County, south of Trenton.

Ex-cons in Detroit, mostly known for patronizing a weekly soup kitchen to stave off hunger, were also planning to set up their own country in Michigan under Islamic law.

And a band of Orange County New York parolees and former drug peddlers placed bombs at two Bronx synagogues and was preparing to launch missile attacks on military cargo planes at Stewart National Guard Air Base in Newburgh.

In the Liberty City Seven case, which revolved around two informants paid in excess of $130,000 for their services, the government tried the hapless defendants three times before finally wresting a conviction from a jury. One defendant was acquitted at the first trial, another in the third, and five were eventually convicted of at least some terrorism-related charges. In the Fort Dix case, jurors were shown horrific films said to be on a computer owned by one of the defendants, who claimed an FBI informant demanded more and more videos for viewing.

Another defendant actually called the Philadelphia police, mid-plot, and said he was being pressured to commit radical acts by what turned out to be an FBI informer. Prosecutors dismissed this as an obvious decoy maneuver. The key informer in that case — the FBI eventually paid two people to spy on the group — an Egyptian on probation, received $236,000 for his services.

Most recently, this duplicitous landscape of war-on-terror “success” has been illuminated yet again by the case of four alleged Newburgh, New York, conspirators — the Newburgh Four — and in the botched arrest and fatal shooting (a first for federal authorities) of an African American imam in Detroit, leader of the so-called Ummah Conspiracy. As the details have slowly emerged, these two cases offer vivid examples of how government-scripted many of the terror plots “uncovered” in the U.S. in recent years have turned out to be. Each case, in fact, offers a window onto a stark world in which nothing is what it seems to be.

The “Un-Terrorism Case”

In the years following 9/11, when I was reporting my book, Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland, many defense and immigration attorneys I interviewed insisted that the mere mention of “terrorism” has often been enough to knock down any and all defenses. In the Newburgh conspiracy, however, the federal judge, Colleen McMahon, has shown a more questioning attitude toward what, in a May 28, 2010, pre-trial hearing, she took to calling the “un-terrorism case.”

After their May 2009 arrests, the four Newburgh conspirators were portrayed as Jew-hating Muslim converts who intended to blow up synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes based at Stewart Airport in Newburgh. “It’s hard to envision a more chilling plot,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Snyder at the time, describing the defendants as “extremely violent.”

The men were indeed arrested only after placing bogus bombs (courtesy of the FBI) near two Bronx synagogues. New York Police Chief Raymond Kelly said the plotters believed “it would be alright” to kill Jews. The Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a statement noting that the uncovered plot cooked up by “the jihadist terrorists” showed “that the dangers from such fanaticism have not passed and that American Jews must maintain their vigilance.” New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg reiterated that vigilance remains a necessity for all concerned.

With their anti-Semitic bona fides established and the men caught in the act, all that seemed left was a perfunctory trial, followed by life in prison for James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen. A decade earlier, Cromitie had been arrested for dealing drugs behind a school. Payen, a Haitian immigrant, is a crack addict and certified paranoid schizophrenic, often found living on the street; his earlier deportation had been on hold due to his mental instability. Onta and David Williams, not related, had pasts pocked by drug busts and spotty work at minimum wage jobs scrounged from Newburgh’s depressed economy. All four men were black.

Almost immediately, however, questions about the conspiracy began to arise. For one thing, the FBI informer who broke the case was a Pakistani named Shaheed Hussain, who arrived in Newburgh in the summer of 2008 driving a flashy Mercedes, showing lots of money, and promising jobs to down-and-out African American hangers-on at Masjid al-Ikhlas, Newburgh’s main mosque. Convicted in a fraudulent driver’s license scheme in 2002, he agreed to work undercover for the FBI shortly afterward to avoid deportation and turned out to have been an informer in a previous terrorism case in Albany in 2004.

The Albany case, in which an imam and a pizza shop owner were convicted of money laundering as part of a phantasmagorical scheme to kill a Pakistani diplomat with a missile, was bitterly contested by defense attorneys. They claimed that the elaborate plan had been concocted by Hussain himself. The jury didn’t buy it, convicting both imam and pizza shop owner.

The Newburgh case shares much with the Albany case, especially a fondness for baroque plotting, the flashing of great wads of money in front of needy people, and the aggressive use of an informant by the FBI in a house of worship, in this case Masjid al-Ikhlas. The intricate plotting and the use of an informer made it into the criminal complaint, but all that flashing money didn’t. There was no mention of the enticing job offers made by the seemingly well-to-do informer. Nothing about his offer of a $250,000 payment for carrying out the plot. Nothing about the BMW he pushed on Cromitie, who didn’t even have a driver’s license. Nothing about the $25,000 he was ready to pay anyone willing to act as a “lookout.”

Maybe Cromitie wasn’t the brightest hustler in town, but he was quite capable of grasping the significance of such sums of money in distressed Newburgh. He assured Hussain that dangling cash would lure participants, no matter what. “They will do it for the money,” he said. “They’re not even thinking about the cause.”

Nor did the complaint mention, as the defense now maintains, that even the anti-Semitic talk was triggered by the informant. He baited the defendants, telling them that Jews were responsible for the U.S. wars in the Middle East and for other acts of violence against Muslims. Cromitie had an unexpected reaction during one of these conversations, according to government transcripts. “I’m not gonna hurt anybody,” he said, after being badgered about possible attacks. “The plane thing… is out of the question.”

On the streets of Newburgh, relatives and neighbors say that they have never heard the four men even mention Jews or jihad, let alone link the two together in murderous rants. Lord McWilliams, the severely ill brother of David Williams, called such a characterization “crazy.” Hussain, he insisted, had promised his brother so much money that he would have been able to pay for the liver transplant that Lord desperately needed.

In fact, more substantial members of the mosque had pegged Shaheed Hussain as an informer almost the moment he arrived, but had no idea what to do about him. “Maybe the mistake we made was that we didn’t report him,” Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad, imam at Masjid al-Ikhlas, told congregants shortly after the May 2009 arrests. “But how are we going to report the government agent to the government?”

The Ummah and the Death of an Imam

Money also played a role in the deadly Detroit case involving 53-year-old Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, born Christopher Thomas, and gunned down during a sting operation run by the FBI in a Dearborn, Michigan, warehouse on October 28th of last year. For at least three years, FBI informants had filed copious reports on the conversations and activities of Abdullah, as he ministered to his largely indigent congregation at Masjid al-Haqq, a mosque so poor it could not even pay property taxes in disintegrating Detroit. Al-Haqq was evicted from its long-time home on Michigan Avenue early in 2009 and moved its operation — a soup kitchen and religious services regularly attended by several dozen largely African American families, ex-convicts, former addicts and alcoholics, and homeless men and women — into a house on Clairmount Street on Detroit’s west side.

It is from this pathetic building, surrounded by an increasingly vacant and collapsing neighborhood, that the FBI contends Abdullah was plotting rebellion, hiding weapons, and planning efforts to move stolen goods. A 43-page criminal complaint describes Abdullah as “a highly placed leader of a nationwide radical fundamentalist Sunni group consisting primarily of African Americans” whose “primary mission is to establish a separate, sovereign Islamic state (’The Ummah’) within the borders of the United States, governed by Shariah law.”

The complaint opens with page after page of over-the-top political trash talk, provided by three informants listening to (and sometimes recording) Abdullah’s sermons and conversations, tying the imam to H. Rap Brown, a 1960s radical and a former leader in the Black Panther Party now serving life in prison for the shooting deaths of two Georgia state troopers. According to the complaint, Abdullah was rarely without a gun or knife. He daydreamed about cop killing, engaged in elaborate revolutionary plotting, and enthusiastically told anecdotes about past violent encounters, largely with police. In effect, the complaint conjures up an old-time boogeyman: the angry, gun-toting Black Panther given over to “anti-government and anti-law enforcement rhetoric” — now dressed up with sympathy for Osama bin Laden.

But in its efforts to be all-inclusive, the complaint also features an extraordinary section that describes an FBI informant offering Abdullah $5,000 “to pay to have someone ‘do something’ during the 2006 Super Bowl in Detroit.” The imam rejected the offer. “Abdullah said he would not be involved in injuring innocent people for no reason,” the complaint blandly states. So much for entrapment on the political front.

Despite page after page of braggadocio from Abdullah, following the rebuff over Super Bowl violence, no further effort was apparently mounted to entice him into a terrorist “plot.” The complaint outlines no grounds for charges of treason, none for terrorism, and nothing even for a charge of material support for terrorism (that reliable catch-all used to ensnare dozens of American Muslims and institutions and even human-rights groups). Despite the heavy emphasis on descriptions of violent radicalism, the criminal complaint ultimately accuses Abdullah and several congregants of the pettiest of fencing operations — 54 powertools, 46 TVs, and the like — involving small amounts of money ($100, $200, $500).

FBI agents worked out a simple but comprehensive sting. Undercover operatives rented a warehouse and offered the imam and his congregants money for help in moving batches of furs and small electronic items. Money, goods, trucks, warehouse, and plans were all supplied by covert federal agents, and all activities were reported, virtually in real time, by informers close to Abdullah and inside the mosque.

Then, as the sting unfolded on October 28th, Abdullah was gunned down by FBI agents as they sought to round up the purported members of the fencing operation. No one else was harmed. The FBI claimed Abdullah fired first, killing a police dog, which was taken by helicopter to a veterinary hospital. After he was shot, the imam was handcuffed behind the back and dragged from the warehouse into a trailer full of TVs and other “stolen” goods. Presumably, at this point he was dead, though no information has been released describing his condition or the circumstances of his removal from the warehouse. Abdullah’s body was photographed in the trailer and picked up by the Wayne County medical examiner, who then declined to release autopsy findings. The head of the local FBI office claimed that he was “comfortable with what our agents did” to protect themselves.

This whole murky incident with a still unfolding aftermath has caused deep anxiety and not a little anger in Detroit’s African American and Muslim communities. Why was the imam shot in the back? Why was the dog given emergency medical treatment and the imam handcuffed and dragged around? Was he dead when the shooting ended? Did he even have a gun?

Was Abdullah’s death an instance of score settling for his unrepentant association with Rap Brown, known as Jamil Abdullah al-Amin since the 1970s? In a conversation I had recently with a black leader in Philadelphia, he said that rumors are spreading on the street of nationwide interrogations of African American Muslims who, in the past, associated with al-Amin. (In Philadelphia, a mosque founded by civic-minded entrepreneur Kenny Gamble, well known for his efforts to assist the black community, has been attacked by anti-Islamic groups for its purported association with “The Ummah.”)

Members of Abdullah’s congregation and prominent Muslims in Detroit told me that Abdullah was indeed incensed by the poverty and racism he saw all around him and could indeed deliver harsh attacks on the government — but that hardly distinguished him in a city as ravaged and beaten down as Detroit. Moreover, those who knew Abdullah insist that they never heard him promote any violent separatist effort on behalf of any organization.

National Islamic organizations, such as the Muslim Alliance in North America, insist as well that “The Ummah” is nothing more than an association of largely African American mosques. (“Ummah” is an Arabic term that refers to the Muslim community.) The alliance calls the FBI description of the Ummah “an offensive mischaracterization.” (Abdullah El-Amin, an imam at the largest African American Detroit mosque, told the New York Times that he had heard Abdullah discuss a separatism that would be “sort of like the Pennsylvania Dutch have their own communities and stuff.” There are similar comments from Abdullah in the criminal complaint.)

In any event, the indictment that followed Abdullah’s death, naming 11 of his congregants and associates, makes no mention of radical politics or the shadowy “Ummah” or “offensive jihad” — all highlighted in the earlier criminal complaint. The 11 were indicted as petty criminals, charged with selling and receiving stolen goods, tampering with vehicle identification numbers, and weapons offenses.

Many officials and organizations, including Congressman John Conyers, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, the local chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil-rights and advocacy organization, the ACLU, and the NAACP, have called for an investigation of the killing — calls unanswered so far by the Obama administration. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is reviewing the case. The state attorney general named a prosecutor to look into the matter after the FBI refused to hand over documents to the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office because, the bureau said, the documents were “classified.”

In early June, Cyril Wecht, a well-known forensic pathologist asked by CAIR to review the autopsy findings (they were finally released in February), said Abdullah’s face was pierced by wounds and lacerations consistent with a dog attack. His jaw was fractured. Wecht also said there were two gunshot wounds in Abdullah’s back, not one. This prompted Wayne County Medical Examiner Carl Schmidt to defend his findings and accuse Wecht of emotionalism, according to a Detroit Free Press report. “We don’t always say what others would like us to say,” Schmidt commented. “We can only describe what we see.”

As the wait for reviews and investigations and answers drags on, the immediate area served by Abdullah’s mosque — blighted, black, and destitute — frays further, and is in danger of losing a small but critical social and economic resource. Abdullah ran a well-attended soup kitchen for years, worked to rid the neighborhood of gang violence, and sought to provide support for the poor, the homeless, and ex-convicts. His family and his depleted mosque are now struggling to keep the house of worship and soup kitchen going. Mosque attendance has plummeted and contributions, never robust, have evaporated; law-enforcement investigators continue to fan out through the community.

“People are still scared,” said Omar Regan, one of Abdullah’s 13 children, who makes his living as an actor, comedian, and motivational speaker based in Los Angeles. “They are still interrogating people. The more people push about injustice, the more they harass Muslims in that area [of Detroit]. My father took care of all these people. They leaned on him. He was a reason a lot of them didn’t commit suicide. They came for food. For shelter.”

Regan is incensed that the FBI provided the money to acquire stolen goods, the actual goods as well, and even the warehouses to store them in, while working out plans for moving the goods through informants and undercover employees clustered around Luqman Abdullah and the Masjid al-Haqq mosque. And now Omar Regan’s father is dead.

“It’s the FBI setting the whole thing up,” he lamented. “How can that be legal?”

It’s a question more and more people are asking as the war on terror grinds on, now directed by the Obama administration. If nothing else, the cases of the Newburgh Four and the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy show that street-smart accused conspirator James Cromitie knew what he was talking about when he said that chronically poor people will “do it for the money” and “don’t care about the cause.”

This simple fact underlies both the Detroit and Newburgh cases. The FBI contends that the Detroit sting was not about terror, but about mundane criminal activity. If that’s the case, why was the criminal complaint larded with characterizations of Luqman Abdullah’s supposed violent political views? What relevance does H. Rap Brown, now in prison, have to moving stolen goods in Dearborn?

Beyond that, what justification do federal authorities have for characterizing “the Ummah” as a threatening separatist movement? Many Muslim leaders argue that such a characterization is a fantasy akin to tales spun by the FBI’s most imaginative informers. Both Newburgh and Detroit are, indeed, instances of “unterrorism,” as the Newburgh judge said of the “plot” before her. Yet both are starkly framed by the on-going war on terror, both involve elaborate set-ups arranged by federal informers and covert agents, and both ensnared inept, virtually destitute black people scrambling to get by in post-racial America.

It remains to be asked: How expansive will the stage become for creative informers and their government directors now working the theater of the Great Recession?

Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His most recent book is Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland (Nation Books). Catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Salisbury discusses how terror cases are created via entrapment and informers by clicking here, or to download to your iPod, click here.

[Note on sources: The criminal complaint for the Detroit Ummah conspiracy can be found in pdf file format by clicking here.]

Increasing Threats To the 9/11 Truth Movement

Increasing Threats To the 9/11 Truth Movement

June 16, 2010

Increasing Threats To The 9/11 Truth Movement

By Bill Willers

website:  http://www.opednews.com/articles/Increasing-Threats-To-The-by-Bill-Willers-100610-885.html

SEC: Government Destroyed Documents Regarding Pre-9/11 Put Options

SEC: Government Destroyed Documents Regarding Pre-9/11 Put Options

<!–break–>

 

***

At least one Wall Street firm reported their suspicions about this activity to the SEC shortly after the attack.

The same thing happened with United Airlines on the Chicago Board Options Exchange four days before the attack. An extremely unbalanced number of trades betting United’s stock price would fall — also transformed into huge profits when it did after the hijackings.

"We can directly work backwards from a trade on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. The trader is linked to a brokerage firm. The brokerage firm received the order to buy that ‘put’ option from either someone within a brokerage firm speculating, or from one of the customers," said Randall Dodd of the Economic Strategy Institute.

U.S. investigators want to know whether Osama bin Laden was the ultimate "inside trader" — profiting from a tragedy he’s suspected of masterminding to finance his operation. Authorities are also investigating possibly suspicious trading in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Japan.

 

 

On September 29, 2001, the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out:

"Usually, if someone has a windfall like that, you take the money and run," said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Whoever did this thought the exchange would not be closed for four days.

"This smells real bad."

***

There was an unusually large jump in purchases of put options on the stocks of UAL Corp. and AMR Corp. in the three business days before the attack on major options exchanges in the United States. On one day, UAL put option purchases were 25 times greater than the year-to-date average. In the month before the attacks, short sales jumped by 40 percent for UAL and 20 percent for American.

 

***

Spokesmen for British securities regulators and the AXA Group also confirmed yesterday that investigations are continuing.

The source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown, the American investment banking arm of German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of the options.

***

Last weekend, German central bank president Ernst Welteke said a study pointed to "terrorism insider trading" in those stocks.

On October 19, 2001, the Chronicle wrote:

On Oct. 2, Canadian securities officials confirmed that the SEC privately had asked North American investment firms to review their records for evidence of trading activity in the shares of 38 companies, suggesting that some buyers and sellers might have had advance knowledge of the attacks.

***

FMR Corp. spokeswoman Anne Crowley, said her firm — which owns the giant Fidelity family of mutual funds in Boston — has already provided "account and transaction" information to investigators, and had no objection to the new procedures announced yesterday. Crowley declined to describe the nature of the information previously shared with the government.

So the effort to track down the source of the puts was certainly quite substantial.

What were the results and details of the investigation?

Apparently, we’ll never know.

Specifically, David Callahan - executive editor of SmartCEO - submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the SEC regarding the pre-9/11 put options.

The SEC responded:

This letter is in response to your request seeking access to and copies of the documentary evidence referred to in footnote 130 of Chapter 5 of the September 11 (9/11) Commission Report.

***

We have been advised that the potentially responsive records have been destroyed.

If the SEC had responded by producing documents showing that the pre-9/11 put options had an innocent explanation (such as a hedge made by a smaller airline), that would be understandable.

If the SEC had responded by saying that the documents were classified as somehow protecting proprietary financial information, I wouldn’t like it, but I would at least understand the argument.

But destroyed? Why? (See Afterword for additional details.)

Not the First Time

This is not the first destruction of documentary evidence related to 9/11.

I wrote in March:

As I pointed out in 2007:

The 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on a third-hand account of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees.

The official 9/11 Commission Report states:

Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al Qaeda members. A number of these "detainees" have firsthand knowledge of the 9/11 plot. Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses-sworn enemies of the United States-is challenging. Our access to them has been limited to the review of intelligence reports based on communications received from the locations where the actual interrogations take place. We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting.

In other words, the 9/11 Commissioners were not allowed to speak with the detainees, or even their interrogators. Instead, they got their information third-hand.

The Commission didn’t really trust the interrogation testimony. For example, one of the primary architects of the 9/11 Commission Report, Ernest May, said in May 2005:

We never had full confidence in the interrogation reports as historical sources.

As I noted last May:

Newsweek is running an essay by [New York Times investigative reporter] Philip Shenon saying [that the 9/11 Commission Report was unreliable because most of the information was based on the statements of tortured detainees]:

The commission appears to have ignored obvious clues throughout 2003 and 2004 that its account of the 9/11 plot and Al Qaeda’s history relied heavily on information obtained from detainees who had been subjected to torture, or something not far from it.

The panel raised no public protest over the CIA’s interrogation methods, even though news reports at the time suggested how brutal those methods were. In fact, the commission demanded that the CIA carry out new rounds of interrogations in 2004 to get answers to its questions.

That has troubling implications for the credibility of the commission’s final report. In intelligence circles, testimony obtained through torture is typically discredited; research shows that people will say anything under threat of intense physical pain.

And yet it is a distinct possibility that Al Qaeda suspects who were the exclusive source of information for long passages of the commission’s report may have been subjected to "enhanced" interrogation techniques, or at least threatened with them, because of the 9/11 Commission….

Information from CIA interrogations of two of the three—KSM and Abu Zubaydah—is cited throughout two key chapters of the panel’s report focusing on the planning and execution of the attacks and on the history of Al Qaeda.

Footnotes in the panel’s report indicate when information was obtained from detainees interrogated by the CIA. An analysis by NBC News found that more than a quarter of the report’s footnotes—441 of some 1,700—referred to detainees who were subjected to the CIA’s "enhanced" interrogation program, including the trio who were waterboarded.

Commission members note that they repeatedly pressed the Bush White House and CIA for direct access to the detainees, but the administration refused. So the commission forwarded questions to the CIA, whose interrogators posed them on the panel’s behalf.

The commission’s report gave no hint that harsh interrogation methods were used in gathering information, stating that the panel had "no control" over how the CIA did its job; the authors also said they had attempted to corroborate the information "with documents and statements of others."

But how could the commission corroborate information known only to a handful of people in a shadowy terrorist network, most of whom were either dead or still at large?

Former senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat on the commission, told me last year he had long feared that the investigation depended too heavily on the accounts of Al Qaeda detainees who were physically coerced into talking ….

Kerrey said it might take "a permanent 9/11 commission" to end the remaining mysteries of September 11.

Abu Zubaida was well-known to the FBI as being literally crazy. The Washington Post quotes "FBI officials, including agents who questioned [alleged Al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaida] after his capture or reviewed documents seized from his home" as concluding that he was:

[L]argely a loudmouthed and mentally troubled hotelier whose credibility dropped as the CIA subjected him to a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding and to other "enhanced interrogation" measures.

For example:

Retired FBI agent Daniel Coleman, who led an examination of documents after Abu Zubaida’s capture in early 2002 and worked on the case, said the CIA’s harsh tactics cast doubt on the credibility of Abu Zubaida’s information.

"I don’t have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted," Coleman said, referring to the harsh measures. "He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn’t believe him. The problem is they didn’t realize he didn’t know all that much."

***

"They said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ " said Coleman, recalling accounts from FBI employees who were there. " ‘This guy’s a Muslim. That’s not going to win his confidence. Are you trying to get information out of him or just belittle him?‘" Coleman helped lead the bureau’s efforts against Osama bin Laden for a decade, ending in 2004.

 

Coleman goes on to say:

Abu Zubaida … was a "safehouse keeper" with mental problems who claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did.

***

Looking at other evidence, including a serious head injury that Abu Zubaida had suffered years earlier, Coleman and others at the FBI believed that he had severe mental problems that called his credibility into question. "They all knew he was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone," Coleman said, referring to al-Qaeda operatives. "You think they’re going to tell him anything?"

ACLU, FireDogLake’s Marcy Wheeler and RawStory broke the story yesterday that (quoting RawStory):

 

Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according to a document recently obtained by the ACLU.

The notification came in a letter dated January 6, 2004, addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet. The ACLU described it as a fax sent by David Addington, then-counsel to former vice president Dick Cheney.

In the message, the officials denied the bipartisan commission’s request to question terrorist detainees, informing its two senior-most members that doing so would "cross" a "line" and obstruct the administration’s ability to protect the nation.

"In response to the Commission’s expansive requests for access to secrets, the executive branch has provided such access in full cooperation," the letter read. "There is, however, a line that the Commission should not cross — the line separating the Commission’s proper inquiry into the September 11, 2001 attacks from interference with the Government’s ability to safeguard the national security, including protection of Americans from future terrorist attacks."

***

"The Commission staff’s proposed participation in questioning of detainees would cross that line," the letter continued. "As the officers of the United States responsible for the law enforcement, defense and intelligence functions of the Government, we urge your Commission not to further pursue the proposed request to participate in the questioning of detainees."

Destruction of Evidence

The interrogators made videotapes of the interrogations. The 9/11 Commission asked for all tapes, but the CIA lied and said there weren’t any.

The CIA then destroyed the tapes.

Specifically, the New York Times confirms that the government swore that it had turned over all of the relevant material regarding the statements of the people being interrogated:

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission ….

“No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings,” he said.

But is the destruction of the tapes — and hiding from the 9/11 Commission the fact that the tapes existed — a big deal? Yes, actually. As the Times goes on to state:

Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Al Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.

If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations.

Indeed, 9/11 Commission co-chairs Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton wrote:

Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.

The CIA also is refusing to release any transcripts from the interrogation sessions. As I wrote a year ago:

What does the fact that the CIA destroyed numerous videotapes of Guantanamo interrogations, but has 3,000 pages of transcripts from those tapes really mean?

Initially, it means that CIA’s claim that it destroyed the video tapes to protect the interrogators’ identity is false. Why? Well, the transcripts contain the identity of the interrogator. And the CIA is refusing to produce the transcripts.

Obviously, the CIA could have "blurred" the face of the interrogator and shifted his voice (like you’ve seen on investigative tv shows like 60 Minutes) to protect the interrogator’s identity. And since the CIA is not releasing the transcripts, it similarly could have refused to release the videos.

The fact that the CIA instead destroyed the videos shows that it has something to hide.

Trying to Create a False Linkage?

I have repeatedly pointed out that the top interrogation experts say that torture doesn’t work.

As I wrote last May:

The fact that people were tortured in order to justify the Iraq war by making a false linkage between Iraq and 9/11 is gaining attention.

Many people are starting to understand that top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.

Indeed, the Senate Armed Services Committee found that the U.S. used torture techniques specifically aimed at extracting false confessions (and see this).

And as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

[A]ccording to NBC news:

• Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured

• At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being "tortured."

• One of the Commission’s main sources of information was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ

• The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves

In fact, the self-confessed "mastermind" of 9/11 also confessed to crimes which he could not have committed. He later said that he gave the interrogators a lot of false information - telling them what he thought they wanted to hear - in an attempt to stop the torture. We also know that he was heavily tortured specifically for the purpose of trying to obtain false information about 9/11 - specifically, that Iraq had something to do with it.

***

Remember, as discussed above, the torture techniques used by the Bush administration to try to link Iraq and 9/11 were specifically geared towards creating false confessions (they were techniques created by the communists to be used in show trials).

***

The above-linked NBC news report quotes a couple of legal experts to this effect:

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says he is "shocked" that the Commission never asked about extreme interrogation measures.

"If you’re sitting at the 9/11 Commission, with all the high-powered lawyers on the Commission and on the staff, first you ask what happened rather than guess," said Ratner, whose center represents detainees at Guantanamo. "Most people look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a trusted historical document. If their conclusions were supported by information gained from torture, therefore their conclusions are suspect."…

Karen Greenberg, director of the Center for Law and Security at New York University’s School of Law, put it this way: "[I]t should have relied on sources not tainted. It calls into question how we were willing to use these interrogations to construct the narrative."

The interrogations were "used" to "construct the narrative" which the 9/11 Commission decided to use.

Remember (as explored in the book The Commission by respected journalist Philip Shenon), that the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission was an administration insider whose area of expertise is the creation and maintenance of "public myths" thought to be true, even if not actually true. He wrote an outline of what he wanted the report to say very early in the process, controlled what the Commission did and did not analyze, then limited the scope of the Commission’s inquiry so that the overwhelming majority of questions about 9/11 remained unasked (see this article and this article).

***

As constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley stated:

[The 9/11 Commission] was a commission that was really made for Washington - a commission composed of political appointees of both parties that ran interference for those parties - a commission that insisted at the beginning it would not impose blame on individuals.

Other Obstructions of Justice

[Other examples of obstructions of justice include the following:]

• The chairs of both the 9/11 Commission and the Joint Inquiry of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees into 9/11 said that government "minders" obstructed the investigation into 9/11 by intimidating witnesses

• The 9/11 Commissioners concluded that officials from the Pentagon lied to the Commission, and considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements

• The tape of interviews of air traffic controllers on-duty on 9/11 was intentionally destroyed by crushing the cassette by hand, cutting the tape into little pieces, and then dropping the pieces in different trash cans around the building as shown by this NY Times article (summary version is free; full version is pay-per-view) and by this article from the Chicago Sun-Times

• Investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House. As the New York Times notes:
  
  

  Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence . . .

  * * *

  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."

We don’t need to even discuss conspiracy theories about what happened on 9/11 to be incredibly disturbed about what happened after: the government’s obstructions of justice.

Indeed, the 9/11 Commissioners themselves are disturbed:

• The Commission’s co-chairs said that the CIA (and likely the White House) "obstructed our investigation"

 

• 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that "There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn’t have access . . . ."
  

• 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said "We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting"
  

• 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: "It is a national scandal"; "This investigation is now compromised"; and "One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up"
  

• The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) - who led the 9/11 staff’s inquiry - said "At some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened". He also said "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true."

Afterword: Footnote 130 to chapter 5 of the official 9/11 Commission Report states:

Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 

9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options- investments that pay off only when a stock drops in price-surged in the parent companies of United Airlines on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10-highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. These examples typify the evidence examined by the investigation. The SEC and the FBI, aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous. Joseph Cella interview (Sept. 16, 2003; May 7, 2004; May 10-11, 2004); FBI briefing (Aug. 15, 2003); SEC memo, Division of Enforcement to SEC Chair and Commissioners, "Pre-September 11, 2001 Trading Review," May 15, 2002; Ken Breen interview (Apr. 23, 2004); Ed G. interview (Feb. 3, 2004).

Did the Commission have full access to information regarding put options? Was the Commission misled, as it was on other issues? Was evidence destroyed or fabricated? We will never know, as the underlying documents have - according to the SEC - been destroyed.

Full Article:  http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/06/sec-government-destroyed-documents.html

Richmond, New Hampshire Passes Resolution For New 9/11 Investigation

Richmond, New Hampshire Passes Resolution For New 9/11 Investigation

On March 9, 2010 voters in the town of Richmond, New Hampshire became the second town in the United States to pass a resolution calling upon Congress to open a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001. The first resolution of this kind was passed by the voters of Lincoln, Vermont in 2007.

The Vote For Answers resolution instructing New Hampshire’s congressional delegation “to pursue a new and independent investigation to address thoroughly all of the evidence and unanswered questions related to the event of September 11, 2001” passed 48 to 45 in Richmond (52% in favor).

To our disappointment seven other towns voted down the resolutions, though the overall percentage of votes in favor (in towns where exact results were recorded) was 23%. In referendums on social issues that depend more on values than awareness of the facts, 77% to 23% might be a landslide. However, because of the painful implications of 9/11 not being what we were told, and the media blackout on critical examination of the official 9/11 account, about 1 in 4 voters calling for a new 9/11 investigation is an accomplishment we can be proud of – it shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that questioning 9/11 is anything but fringe.

Among the four towns that have yet to vote, Barnstead will vote on Saturday, March 13, and Peterborough, Stoddard and Hanover will vote on May 11.

In addition to passing the resolution in Richmond and getting nearly 1 in 4 voters to vote in favor, Vote For Answers New Hampshire has garnered unprecedented local media coverage. The Keene Sentinel, Union Leader, Valley News, Brattleboro Reformer and Concord Monitor all published entire articles on the campaign prior to the campaign – with more coverage sure to emerge following the results. It has also been mentioned in countless other articles and letters to the editor throughout the region, including these articles in the Concord Monitor and Now! Hampshire.

Moving Forward

While devoting intense effort to getting the remaining resolutions passed in Barnstead, Peterborough, Stoddard and Hanover, the dedicated activists in the Monadnock 9/11 Truth Alliance and other parts of New Hampshire will use the foundation they have built to begin pursuing three new endeavors: 1) working with the Keene City Council and other City Councils to pass similar resolutions, 2) working with State Representatives to introduce a similar resolution in the State House of Representatives that would be voted on in early 2011, and 3) organizing to expand Vote For Answers New Hampshire to several dozen towns in 2011.

On the national front, NYC CAN will push forward with ballot initiatives in other states where voters can petition for non-binding resolutions to be on the ballot. In states where laws prevent voters from petitioning for non-binding resolutions, we will work with supportive elected officials to place resolutions on local ballots directly, without petitioning, or for city councils to pass resolutions on their own.

NYC CAN’s top ballot initiative priority is Boston, where a feasible sum of 3,600 signatures will allow for non-binding “public policy questions” to be placed on ballots in all 18 Massachusetts House of Representatives Districts located in Boston (200 signatures are needed per district). There are also opportunities to petition for resolutions in Detroit and in cities throughout Wisconsin, and a number of cities across the country present opportunities for city councils to place resolutions directly on the ballot.

If you are interested in doing a ballot initiative where you live, or if you have friends on local boards and city councils who would be able to place a resolution on the ballot – or better yet, pass a resolution on their own – please contact us about getting a campaign started.

To everyone who contributed to the campaign, NYC CAN and the Monadnock 9/11 Truth Alliance thank you for helping us bring our message to countless thousands of New Hampshire residents.

Election Results

Town	Passed/Not Passed	Percentage	Count
Chesterfield	No	Not Recorded	Not Recorded
Exeter	No	22% - 78%	381-1377
Harrisville	No	37% - 63%	35-60
Hollis	No	23% - 77%	33-109
Marlborough	No	Not Recorded	Not Recorded
Nelson	No	Pass Over	-
Richmond	YES	YES	48-45
Swanzey	No	29% - 71%	270-945

1) http://www.americanbuddhist.net/node/4868

2) http://voteforanswersnh.com/sentinelarticle.html

3) http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=NH+group+cites+need+for+new+9%2F11+probe&articleId=c2822a9b-f0c3-4f03-b8c3-09c3e0765b2f

4) http://www.vnews.com/02202010/6401650.htm

5) http://www.reformer.com/localnews/ci_14481447?source=rss

6) http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100219/FRONTPAGE/2190302/1004/COMMUNITY

7) http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100207/OPINION/2070330&template=page3

http://www.nowhampshire.com/2010/02/21/van-jones-911-%E2%80%98truther%E2%80%99-to-visit-school-tied-to-dem-state-senator/

Death Of 9/11 Firefighter Hero Jim Ryan Overshadowed By “Flashier” Flight 253 Terrorism Story

Death Of 9/11 Firefighter Hero Jim Ryan Overshadowed By “Flashier” Flight 253 Terrorism Story

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