LA TIMES: "Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit"
(CHECK THE DATE - JULY, 2001)
"Plot: Officials there took seriously a report that terrorists would try to crash a plane to kill Bush and other leaders. "

From a Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON -- U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July that Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialized nations, officials said Wednesday.

Italian officials took the reports seriously enough to prompt extraordinary precautions during the July summit of the Group of 8 nations, including closing the airspace over Genoa and stationing antiaircraft guns at the city's airport.
9-27-01
 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092701genoa.story


"Ashcroft Flying High"
CBS News, WASHINGTON, July 26, 2001
 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/07/26/national/main303601.shtml

In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.

"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.

+++

Q Had there been any warnings that the President knew of?

MR. FLEISCHER: No warnings.

Office of the Press Secretary, September 11, 2001,
Press Briefing to the Pool By Ari Fleischer, Aboard Air Force One,
 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-6.html

+++

Evidence of high-level government complicity in the events of 9-11
 http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/911page.htm

+++

Exposing NORAD's Wag The 911 Window Dressing Tale Using NORAD’s Own Press Release And Fifth Grade Math
 http://standdown.net/

+++

A TIMELINE SURROUNDING SEPTEMBER 11TH
IF CIA AND THE GOVERNMENT WEREN'T INVOLVED IN THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS WHAT WERE THEY DOING?
 http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/02_11_02_lucy.html

+++

An Interesting Day: President Bush's Movements and Actions on 9/11
 http://cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essayaninterestingday.html

+++

A 68-page paper by the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) was released on September 10th, 2001, one day before "9-11."

"Of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, the SAMS officers say: 'Wildcard.  Ruthless and cunning.  Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.'"

The Washington Times September 10, 2001
 http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020405-13268800.htm

+++

HAARETZ (an Israeli Newspaper) Sept. 17, 2001
"5 Israelis detained for `puzzling behavior' after WTC tragedy"

By Yossi Melman

Five Israelis who had worked for a moving company based in New Jersey are being held in U.S. prisons for what the Federal Bureau of Investigation has described as "puzzling behavior" following the terror attack on the World Trade Center in New York last Tuesday. The five are expected to be deported sometime soon.

The families of the five, who asked that their names not be released, said that their sons had been questioned by the FBI for hours on end, had been kept in solitary confinement for three days, and had been humiliated, stripped of their clothes and blindfolded.

The mother of one of the young men explained the chain of events as she understands it to Ha'aretz:

She said that the five had worked for the company, which is owned by an Israeli, for between two months and two years. They had been arrested some four hours after the attack on the Twin Towers while filming the smoking skyline from the roof of their company's building, she said. It appears that they were spotted by one of the neighbors who called the police and the FBI.

The mother said that the families and friends of the five in Israel had known nothing of the men's whereabouts for a number of days.

"When they finally let my son make a phone call for the first time to a friend in the United States two days ago, he told him that he had been tortured by the FBI in a basement," the mother said. "He was stripped to his underwear; he was blindfolded and questioned for 14 hours. They thought that because he has citizenship of a European country as well as of Israel that he was working for the Mossad [Israel's secret service]."

Seven FBI agents later stormed the apartment of one of the Israelis, searched it and questioned his roommate. The Israeli owner of the company, who has U.S. citizenship, was also questioned. Both men were subsequently released.

The families here complained that the Israeli consulate in New York and the situation room set up by the Foreign Ministry there to locate missing Israelis had done nothing to help their sons. The Foreign Ministry told the families that the FBI had denied holding the five and that the consulate had chosen to believe the FBI, the mother said.

The five were transferred out of the FBI's facility on Saturday morning and are now being held in two prisons in New Jersey by the Immigration and Naturalization Services. They are charged with illegally residing in the United States and working there without permits.

The Foreign Ministry said in response that it had been informed by the consulate in New York that the FBI had arrested the five for "puzzling behavior."  They are said to have had been caught videotaping the disaster and shouting in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery.

 http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=75266&sw=mockery#top

+++

"False Flag Operations"

The Lavon Affair:

During July, 1954, several bombs went off in Cairo and Alexandria, including two which set fire to the U.S. Information Service offices in both those cities and one which went off in a Metro-Goldwyn Mayer theater. Members of what the Egyptian authorities described as a ring of "Israeli spies" and who were, in fact, Jewish-were tracked down and put on trial. Two of them were executed and the rest jailed. The Egyptian action raised a furor among Israelis, who accused Egypt's president,Gamal Abdul Nasser, of "trumping up" charges against Jews. A few months later, however, a political scandal erupted in Israel-later known as the "Lavon affair"-and forced out the admission from Israeli government officials that the members of the Cairo spy ring were indeed Israeli spies highly trained members of Israel's military intelligence service. A primary purpose of the bombing operation, it turned out, was to try to put a halt to what the Israeli government saw as an alarming trend towards better Egypt-U.S. relations-by creating the impression through the bombings that Egypt was basically unstable and anti-American.

Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs
Israel and "State Terrorism"
 http://www.wrmea.com/Washington-Report_org/www/backissues/043084/840430002.html

+++++

"In March 2001, the federal National Counterintelligence Executive issued a warning urging employees to report all contact with people describing themselves as Israeli art students. It said some had gone to the private residences of senior U.S. officials under the guise of selling art."These individuals have been described as aggressive," the warning said. "They attempt to engage employees in conversation rather than giving a sales pitch.  "However, the warning added that there may be two groups involved, one with an "apparently legitimate money-making goal while the second, perhaps a non-Israeli group, may have ties to a Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalist group."
 http://www.forward.com/issues/2002/02.03.15/news8.html

+++++

Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth
Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage

"The five Israelis worked for a moving company with few discernable assets that closed up shop immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel."

"FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front."

"Moreover, one man carried two passports and another had fresh pictures of the men standing with the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center in the background."

"Other allegations involved Israelis claiming to be art students who had backgrounds in signal interception and ordnance."  (EXPLOSIVES!)
 http://www.forward.com/issues/2002/02.03.15/news2.html

###

Police Seize Rental Truck With TNT Traces
FoxNews, Carl Cameron, May 13, 2002

"A Budget truck was pulled over in Oak Harbor, Wash., last Tuesday near the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station and found to have traces of TNT on the gearshift and traces of RDX plastic explosive on the steering wheel, Fox News has learned.  Traces of explosives were also found on one of the truck's two occupants."   

"Documents read to Fox News indicate that both driver and passenger were Israeli nationals. Investigators say a roadside check of the national database of immigration records indicated that one of the men had not entered the country legally, and the other was in violation of his visa. Both men were taken into custody for immigration violations."
 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,52681,00.html

++++

And what about these explosives and explosives experts?


"SEISMIC ‘SPIKES’

Seismographs at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded strange seismic activity on Sept. 11 that has still not been explained.

While the aircraft crashes caused minimal earth shaking, significant earthquakes with unusual spikes occurred at the beginning of each collapse.

The Palisades seismic data recorded a 2.1 magnitude earthquake during the 10-second collapse of the South Tower at 9:59:04 and a 2.3 quake during the 8-second collapse of the North Tower at 10:28:31.

However, the Palisades seismic record shows that—as the collapses began—a huge seismic “spike” marked the moment the greatest energy went into the ground. The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of the collapses, well before the falling debris struck the Earth.

These unexplained “spikes” in the seismic data lend credence to the theory that massive explosions at the base of the towers caused the collapses.

A “sharp spike of short duration” is how seismologist Thorne Lay of University of California at Santa Cruz told AFP an underground nuclear explosion appears on a seismograph.

The two unexplained spikes are more than 20 times the amplitude of the other seismic waves associated with the collapses and occurred in the East-West seismic recording as the buildings began to fall.

Experts cannot explain why the seismic waves peaked before the towers actually hit the ground.

Asked about these spikes, seismologist Arthur Lerner-Lam, director of Columbia University’s Center for Hazards and Risk Research told AFP, “This is an element of current research and discussion. It is still being investigated.”

Lerner-Lam told AFP that a 10-fold increase in wave amplitude indicates a 100-fold increase in energy released. These “short-period surface waves,” reflect “the interaction between the ground and the building foundation,” according to a report from Columbia Earth Institute.

“The seismic effects of the collapses are comparable to the explosions at a gasoline tank farm near Newark on Jan. 7, 1983,” the Palisades Seismology Group reported on Sept. 14, 2001.

One of the seismologists, Won-Young Kim, told AFP that the Palisades seismographs register daily underground explosions from a quarry 20 miles away.

These blasts are caused by 80,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and cause local earthquakes between Magnitude 1 and 2. Kim said the 1993 truck-bomb at the WTC did not register on the seismographs because it was “not coupled” to the ground.

“Only a small fraction of the energy from the collapsing towers was converted into ground motion,” Lerner-Lam said. “The ground shaking that resulted from the collapse of the towers was extremely small.”

Last November, Lerner-Lam said: “During the collapse, most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and the neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage—but not causing significant ground shaking.”

Evidently, the energy source that shook the ground beneath the towers was many times more powerful than the total potential energy released by the falling mass of the towers. The question is: What was that energy source?

While steel is often tested for evidence of explosions, despite numerous eyewitness reports of explosions in the towers, the engineers involved in the FEMA-sponsored building assessment did no such tests."

NEW SEISMIC DATA REFUTES OFFICIAL EXPLANATION
 http://www.americanfreepress.net/09_03_02/NEW_SEISMIC_/new_seismic_.html

+++

9/11 – WHAT WAS ISRAEL'S ROLE? Fox News revelations point to an ominous conclusion
 http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j121701.html

All traces of the Fox (Carl Cameron) four part broadcast on Israeli spying in America have mysteriously disappeared from the Fox website. 

Archived:

"What did the Mossad know in advance about September 11 (and not pass on to USA allies?)"
 http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/01/12/Israelis/spies1.html

"An Enigma: Vast Israeli Spy Network Dismantled in the US"
"The Americans "would have apprehended or expelled close to 120 Israeli nationals.""
 http://www.antiwar.com/rep/lemonde1.html


"Update: The spies who came in from the art sale
Creative Loafing has obtained a report detailing alleged Israeli spy activity in the United States. "

"Perhaps most intriguing, the Israelis' military and intelligence specialties are listed: "special forces," "intelligence officer," "demolition/explosive ordnance specialist," "bodyguard to head of Israeli army," "electronic intercept operator" -- even "son of a two-star (Israeli) army general."
 http://www.atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2002-03-20/fishwrapper.html


Mossad is probably the best secret intelligence service in the world.  Their motto is: "By Way of Deception"

"Hijack 'suspects' alive and well"
"FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt."
Yet, the media keeps repeating the lie.
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559151.stm

"On the morning of September 11, Pakistan's Chief Spy General Mahmoud Ahmad, the alleged "money-man" behind the 9-11 hijackers, was at a breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill hosted by Senator Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss, the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence committees."

Political Deception: The Missing Link behind 9-11
 http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO206A.html

If the Bush Administration and the Israeli Mossad had conspired -- along with Pakistan's ISI -- to crash planes into prominent symbols of America (the "new Pearl Harbor", Project for the New American Century) on "911" (even the date chosen indicates Western decision making), to blame it on "19 Arabs" (many of whom are still ALIVE AND WELL, UK Telegraph, September 2001), -- well -- then something like this could be expected:

The Secrets of September 11
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek 

 http://www.msnbc.com/news/907379.asp?0cv=CB10

Wednesday 30 April 2003

The White House is battling to keep a report on the terror attacks secret.

Even as White House political aides plot a 2004 campaign plan designed to capitalize on the emotions and issues raised by the September 11 terror attacks, administration officials are waging a behind-the-scenes battle to restrict public disclosure of key events relating to the attacks.

At the center of the dispute is a more-than-800-page secret report prepared by a joint congressional inquiry detailing the intelligence and law-enforcement failures that preceded the attacks-including provocative, if unheeded warnings, given President Bush and his top advisers during the summer of 2001.

The report was completed last December; only a bare-bones list of “findings” with virtually no details was made public. But nearly six months later, a “working group” of Bush administration intelligence officials assigned to review the document has taken a hard line against further public disclosure. By refusing to declassify many of its most significant conclusions, the administration has essentially thwarted congressional plans to release the report by the end of this month, congressional and administration sources tell NEWSWEEK. In some cases, these sources say, the administration has even sought to “reclassify” some material that was already discussed in public testimony-a move one Senate staffer described as “ludicrous.” The administration’s stand has infuriated the two members of Congress who oversaw the report-Democratic Sen. Bob Graham and Republican Rep. Porter Goss. The two are now preparing a letter of complaint to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Graham is “increasingly frustrated” by the administration’s “unwillingness to release what he regards as important information the public should have about 9-11,” a spokesman said. In Graham’s view, the Bush administration isn’t protecting legitimate issues of national security but information that could be a political “embarrassment,” the aide said. Graham, who last year served as Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, recently told NEWSWEEK: “There has been a cover-up of this.”

Graham’s stand may not be terribly surprising, given that the Florida Democrat is running for president and is seeking to use the issue himself politically. But he has found a strong ally in House Intelligence Committee Chairman Goss, a staunch Republican (and former CIA officer) who in the past has consistently defended the administration’s handling of 9-11 issues and is considered especially close to Cheney.

“I find this process horrendously frustrating,” Goss said in an interview. He was particularly piqued that the administration was refusing to declassify material that top intelligence officials had already testified about. “Senior intelligence officials said things in public hearings that they [administration officials] don’t want us to put in the report,” said Goss. “That’s not something I can rationally accept without further public explanation.”

Unlike Graham, Goss insists there are no political “gotchas” in the report, only a large volume of important information about the performance and shortcomings of U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies prior to September 11.

And even congressional staffers close to the process say it is unclear whether the administration’s resistance to public disclosure reflects fear of political damage or simply an ingrained “culture of secrecy” that permeates the intelligence community-and has strong proponents at the highest levels of the White House.

The mammoth report reflects nearly 10 months of investigative work by a special staff hired jointly by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and overseen by Eleanor Hill, a former federal prosecutor and Pentagon inspector general. Hill’s team got access to hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents from the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and other executive-branch agencies. The staff also conducted scores of interviews with senior officials, field agents and intelligence officers. (They were not, however, given access to some top White House aides, such as national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice or other principals like Secretary of State Colin Powell or Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.) The team’s report was approved by the two intelligence committees last Dec. 10. But because the document relied so heavily on secret material, the administration “working group,” overseen by CIA director George Tenet, had to first “scrub” the document and determine which portions could be declassified.

More than two months later, the working group came back with its decisions-and some members were flabbergasted. Entire portions remained classified. Some of the report-including some dealing with matters that had been extensively aired in public, such as the now famous FBI “Phoenix memo” of July 2001 reporting that Middle Eastern nationals might be enrolling in U.S. flight schools-were “reclassified.” Hill has since submitted proposed changes to the working group, pointing out the illogic of trying to pull back material that was already in the public domain. But officials have indicated the “review” process is likely to drag on for months-with no guarantees that the “working group” will be any more amenable to public disclosure.

A U.S. intelligence official cited international distractions as at least one reason for the delays. “In case you hadn’t noticed, there have been two wars going on,” the official said. The official added: “We’re working this [report] to try to get it out without putting lives at risk and without endangering sources and methods.” Asked why the working group was refusing to permit disclosure of material that had already been made public, the official said: “Just because something had been inadvertently released, doesn’t make it unclassified.”

The administration’s tough stand, some sources say, doesn’t augur well for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks-which is conducting its own investigation into the events of 9-11. Already, flaps have developed on that front, as well. When one commissioner, former congressman Tim Roemer, last week sought to review transcripts of some of the joint inquiry’s closed-door hearings, he was denied access-because the commission staff had agreed to a White House request to allow its lawyers to first review the material to determine if the president wants to invoke executive privilege to keep the material out of the panel’s hands.

“I think it’s outrageous,” says Roemer, who plans to raise the matter at a commission hearing this week. But a commission staffer says he expected the White House review to be finished by the end of the week, and it was unclear whether the president’s lawyers would try to invoke executive privilege-a stand that would almost certainly provoke a major legal battle with the panel.

The tensions over the release of 9-11 related material seems especially relevant-if not ironic-in light of recent reports that the president’s political advisers have devised an unusual re-election strategy that essentially uses the story of September 11 as the liftoff for his campaign. The White House is delaying the Republican nominating convention, scheduled for New York City, until the first week in September 2004-the latest in the party’s history. That would allow Bush’s acceptance speech, now slated for Sept. 2, to meld seamlessly into 9-11 commemoration events due to take place in the city the next week.

Some sources who have read the still-secret congressional report say some sections would not play quite so neatly into White House plans. One portion deals extensively with the stream of U.S. intelligence-agency reports in the summer of 2001 suggesting that Al Qaeda was planning an upcoming attack against the United States-and implicitly raises questions about how Bush and his top aides responded. One such CIA briefing, in July 2001, was particularly chilling and prophetic. It predicted that Osama bin Laden was about to launch a terrorist strike “in the coming weeks,” the congressional investigators found. The intelligence briefing went on to say: “The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.”

The substance of that intelligence report was first disclosed at a public hearing last September by staff director Hill. But at the last minute, Hill was blocked from saying precisely who within the Bush White House got the briefing when CIA director Tenet classified the names of the recipients. (One source says the recipients of the briefing included Bush himself.) As a result, Hill was only able to say the briefing was given to “senior government officials.”

That issue is now being refought in the context over the full report. The report names names, gives dates and provides a body of new information about the handling of many other crucial intelligence briefings-including one in early August 2001 given to national-security adviser Rice that discussed Al Qaeda operations within the United States and the possibility that the group’s members might seek to hijack airplanes. The administration “working group” is still refusing to declassify information about the briefings, sources said, and has even expressed regret that some of the material was ever provided to congressional investigators in the first place.

A NEW HAND IN HOMELAND SECURITY

The White House is once again shuffling the deck in the staffing of top terrorism jobs, NEWSWEEK has learned. Gen. John A. Gordon-who has wielded broad if largely unseen powers as deputy national-security advisor in charge of combating terrorism-is moving up to become White House homeland-security adviser, a post formerly held by Tom Ridge. The new job is expected to give the brusque and secretive Gordon even more power as a “principal” with direct access to Bush. (Ridge is now secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.) Sources say Gordon beat out ex-FBI official James Kallstrom-an old ally of former FBI director Louis Freeh-for the key post.

The elevation of Gordon is the latest sign of the increasing prominence of intelligence-community veterans throughout the upper reaches of the government under Bush. (FBI director Robert Mueller, for example, recently reached outside the ranks of his law-enforcement agents to select Maureen A. Baginski, a former National Security Agency deputy director, to oversee FBI intelligence efforts.) For his part, Gordon was a former deputy CIA director with a reputation as a “a results-oriented guy” who has little patience for bureaucratic procedures, according to one former government official who has worked with him.

Gordon’s departure, however, leaves vacancies at the two top White House counterterrorism jobs: Gordon’s old post and that of his former deputy, Rand Beers, who resigned the week the war in Iraq began. On the surface, the vacancies seem conspicuous in an administration that has made combating terrorism the centerpiece of its policies. But sources say a vigorous search has been underway and replacements are likely to be named shortly.



Go to Original

9/11 Panel, Blocked
By Kristen Breitweiser
New York Times | Letter to the Editor

Wednesday 1 May 2003

To the Editor:

As a 9/11 widow who fought very hard for the creation of the independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks, I am particularly upset by your news article discussing the Justice Department's attempts to review and delay the release of certain documents to the commission ("Justice Dept. Seeks Sept. 11 Transcripts," April 26).

This delay is nothing more than a stalling tactic by the White House to prepare its spin on whatever information is eventually revealed by the transcripts.

The 9/11 families and the country have waited long enough for answers. Each day of delay is another day that this country remains vulnerable and perilously at risk to another terrorist attack.

KRISTEN BREITWEISER
Atlantic Highlands, N.J.
April 26, 2003