The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy

The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy

 

By Prof Peter Dale Scott

URL of this article: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22908

Global Research, January 22, 2011

Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 4 No 2, January 24, 2011.

I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”– Senator Frank Church (1975)

In recent years I have become more and more concerned with the interactions between three important and alarming trends in recent American history. The first is America’s increasing militarization, and above all its inclination, even obsession, to involve itself in needless and pernicious wars. The second, closely related, is the progressive shrinking of public politics and the rule of law as they are subordinated, even domestically, to the requirements of covert U.S. operations abroad.

The third, also closely related, is the important and increasingly deleterious impact on American history and the global extension of American power, of what I have called deep events. These events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, are mysterious to begin with, are embedded in ongoing covert processes, have consequences that enlarge covert government, and are subsequently covered up by systematic falsifications in media and internal government records.

One factor linking Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11, has been the involvement in all three deep events of personnel involved in America’s highest-level emergency planning, known since the 1980s as Continuity of Government (COG) planning, or more colloquially as “the Doomsday Project.” The implementation of COG plans on 9/11, or what I call Doomsday Power, was the culmination of three decades of such planning, and has resulted in the permanent militarization of the domestic United States, and the imposition at home of institutions and processes designed for domination abroad.

Writing about these deep events as they occurred over the decades, I have been interested in the interrelations among them. It is now possible to show how each was related both to those preceding it, and those which followed.

I would like in this essay to go further and propose a framework to analyze the on-going forces underlying all of the most important deep events, and how they have contributed to the political ascendance of what used to be called the military-industrial complex.  I hope to describe certain impersonal governing laws that determine the socio-dynamics of all large-scale societies (often called empires) that deploy their surplus of power to expand beyond their own borders and force their will on other peoples.

This process of expansion generates predictable trends of behavior in the institutions of all such societies, and also in the individuals competing for advancement in those institutions. In America it has converted the military-industrial complex from a threat at the margins of the established civil order, to a pervasive force dominating that order.

President Eisenhower in his farewell address in 1961 warned that “We must guard against the unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex.”

With this framework I hope to persuade readers that in some respects our recent history is simpler than it appears on the surface and in the media. Our society, by its very economic successes and consequent expansion, has been breeding impersonal forces both outside and within itself that are changing it from a bottom-up elective democracy into a top-down empire. And among these forces are those that produce deep events.

I am far from alone in seeing this degradation of America’s policies and political processes. A similar pattern, reflecting the degradation of earlier empires, was described at length by the late Chalmers Johnson:

The evidence is building up that in the decade following the end of the Cold War, the United States largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation.

But my analysis goes beyond that of Johnson, Kevin Phillips, Andrew Bacevich, and other analysts, in proposing that three major deep events – Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11 – were not just part of this degradation of American democracy, but played a significant role in shaping it.

As author Michael Lind has observed, there have for a long time been two prevailing and different political cultures in America, underlying political differences in the American public, and even dividing different sectors of the American government.  One culture is predominantly egalitarian and democratic, working for the legal consolidation of human rights both at home and abroad. The other, less recognized but with deep historical roots, prioritizes and teaches the use of repressive violence against both domestic and Third World populations to maintain “order.”

To some extent these two mindsets are found in all societies. They correspond to two opposing modes of power and governance that were defined by Hannah Arendt as “persuasion through arguments” versus “coercion by force.” Arendt, following Thucydides, traced these to the common Greek way of handling domestic affairs, which was persuasion (πείθειν) as well as the common way of handling foreign affairs, which was force and violence (βία).”

Hannah Arendt

Writing amid the protests and riots of the 1960s, Arendt feared that traditional authority was at risk, threatened (in her eyes) by the contemporary “loss of tradition and of religion.” A half century later, I would argue that a far greater danger to social equilibrium comes now from those on the right who invoke authority in the name of tradition and religion. With America’s huge expansion into the enterprise of covertly dominating and exploiting the rest of the world, the open processes of persuasion, which have been America’s traditional ideal for handling domestic affairs, have increasingly tilted towards top-down violence.

This tilt towards violent or repressive power is defended rhetorically as a means to preserve social stability, but in fact it threatens it. As Kevin Phillips and others have demonstrated, empires built on violent or repressive power tend to rise and then fall, often with surprising rapidity.  Underlying the discussion in this essay is the thesis that repressive power is unstable, creating dialectical forces both within and outside its system. Externally, repressive power helps create its own enemies, as happened with Britain (in India), France (in Indochina) and the Netherlands (in Indonesia).

The Socio-dynamics of Repressive Power in Large-scale Societies

But more dangerous and destabilizing has been the conversion of those empires themselves, into hubristic mechanisms of war. The fall of Periclean Athens, which inspired Thucydides’ reflections, is a case in point. Thucydides described how Athens was undone by the overreaching greed (pleonexia) of its unnecessary Sicilian expedition, a folly presaging America’s follies in Vietnam and Iraq. Thucydides attributed the rise of this folly in the rapid change in Athens after the death of Pericles, and in particular to the rise of a rapacious oligarchy.  Paul Kennedy, Kevin Phillips, and Chalmers Johnson have described the recreation of this process in the Roman, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and British empires.  Its recurrence again in recent American history corroborates that there is a self-propelling dynamic of power that becomes repressive.

It is useful to be reminded of the historical division between two cultures in America, which both underlay and predated the Civil War. But these two cultures have evolved and been reinforced by many factors. For example urbanization in America’s South and West worked for most of the 20th century to meld the two cultures, but after about 1980 the increasing disparity of wealth in America tended to separate them to an extent recalling the Gilded Age of the 19th century.

More importantly, postwar U.S. history has seen the institutions of domestic self-government steadily displaced by an array of new institutions, like the CIA and Pentagon, adapted first to the repressive dominance and control of foreign populations abroad, and now increasingly dominant domestically. The manipulative ethos of this repressive bureaucracy promotes and corrupts those who, in order to be promoted, internalize the culture of repressive dominance into a mindset.

The egalitarian mindset is widely shared among Americans. But Washington today is securely in the hands of the global repressive dominance mindset, and a deepening of the military-industrial complex into what in my most recent book I call the American war machine. This transformation of America represents a major change in our society. When Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex in 1961 it was still a minority element in our political economy. Today it finances and dominates both parties, and indeed is now also financing threats to both parties from the right, as well as dominating our international policy. As a result, liberal Republicans are as scarce in the Republican Party today as Goldwater Republicans were scarce in that party back in 1960.

That change has been achieved partly by money, but partly as a result of deep events like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, and 9/11. As a rule, each of these deep events is attributed by our government and media to marginal outsiders, like Lee Harvey Oswald, or the nineteen alleged plane hijackers.

I have long been skeptical of these “lone nut” explanations, but recently my skepticism has advanced to another level. My research over four decades points to the conclusion that each of these deep events

1) was carried out, at least in part, by individuals in and out of government who shared and sought to promote this repressive mindset;

2) enhanced the power of the repressive mindset within the U.S. government;

3) formed another stage in a continuous narrative whose result has been a transformation of America, into a social system dominated from above, rather than governed from below.

Please note that I am talking about the result of this continuous narrative, not about its purpose. In saying that these deep events have contributed collectively to a major change in American society, I am not attributing them all to a single manipulative “secret team.” Rather I see them as flowing from the workings of repressive power itself, which (as history has shown many times) transforms both societies with surplus power and also the individuals exercising that surplus power.

We are conditioned to think that the open institutions of American governance could not possibly provide a milieu for plots like 9/11 against public order. But since World War Two covert U.S. agencies like the CIA have helped create an alternative world where power is exercised with minimal oversight, often at odds with public agencies’ proclaimed policy objectives of law and order, and often in conjunction with lawless and even criminal foreign and domestic elements.

The expansion of this covert world has occurred principally in Asia. There covert U.S. decisions were made to build up drug-financed armies in Burma, Thailand, and Laos, in a series of aggressive actions that by the 1960s involved America in a hot Indochina War. This war, like the related wars that ensued later in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, was initiated by America for a mix of geostrategic and economic reasons, above all the desire to establish a dominant U.S. presence an important region of petroleum reserves.

Air America at Sam Thong, Laos, 1961

The country most deeply affected by the succession of Asian Wars has been America itself. Its expansive forces, backed by powerful interest groups, are now out of control, as our managers, like other empire managers before them, have “come to believe that there is nowhere within their domain – in our case, nowhere on earth – in which their presence is not crucial.”7

To illustrate this, loss of control, let us look for a moment at a milieu which I believe to have been an important factor in all of America’s major domestic deep events: the CIA’s ongoing interactions with the global drug connection.

Unaccountable Power: The CIA and the Return of the Global Drug Connection

Since World War Two the CIA has made systematic use of drug trafficking forces to increase its covert influence — first in Thailand and Burma, then in Laos and Vietnam, and most recently in Afghanistan.8 With America’s expansion overseas, we have seen more and more covert programs and agencies, all using drug traffickers to different and opposing ends.

In 2004 Time and USA Today ran major stories about two of the chief Afghan drug traffickers, Haji Juma Khan and Haji Bashir Noorzai, alleging that each was supporting al-Qaeda, and that Khan in particular “has helped al-Qaeda establish a smuggling network that is peddling Afghan heroin to buyers across the Middle East, Asia and Europe.”9 Later it was revealed that both traffickers were simultaneously CIA assets, and that Khan in particular was “paid a large amount of cash by the United States,” even while he was reportedly helping al-Qaeda to establish smuggling networks.10

There is no longer anything surprising in the news that large U.S. payments were made to a drug trafficker who was himself funding the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The arrangement is no more bizarre than the CIA’s performance during the U.S. “war on drugs” in Venezuela in the 1990s, when the CIA first set up an anti-drug unit in Venezuela, and then helped its chief, Gen. Ramon Guillén Davila, smuggle at least one ton of pure cocaine into Miami International Airport.11

It would be easy to conclude from these reports that the CIA and Pentagon intentionally use drugs to help finance the enemy networks that justify their overseas operations. Yet I doubt that such a cynical Machiavellian objective is ever consciously voiced by those responsible in Washington.

More likely, it is an inevitable consequence of the U.S. repressive style of conducting covert operations. Great emphasis is put on recruiting covert assets; and in unstable areas with weak governance, drug traffickers with their own ample funds and repressive networks are the most obvious candidates for recruitment by the CIA. The traffickers in turn are happy to become U.S. assets, because this status affords them at least a temporary immunity from U.S. prosecution.12

In a nutshell: I am describing a development that is not so much intentional, as a consequence of repressive dynamics. A related example would be the CIA’s recurring use of double agents, again for the reason just suggested. In the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, the chief planner was a double agent, Ali Mohammed, who surveyed the Embassy and reported to Osama bin Laden in 1993, just months after the FBI had ordered the Canadian RCMP to release him from detention.13 In the Mumbai terrorist attack of 2008, the scene was initially surveyed for the attackers by a DEA double agent, David Headley (alias Daood Sayed Gilani) whom “U.S. authorities sent… to work for them in Pakistan… despite a warning that he sympathized with radical Islamic groups.”14

David Headley in court

The central point is that expansion beyond a nation’s borders engenders a pattern of repressive power with predictable results — results that transcend the conscious intentions of anyone within that repressive power system. Newly formed and ill-supervised agencies spawn contradictory policies abroad, the net effect of which is usually both expansive and deleterious – not just to the targeted nation but also to America.

This is especially true of covert agencies, whose practice of secrecy means that controversial policies proliferate without either coordination or review. Asia in particular has been since 1945 the chief area where the CIA has ignored or overridden the policy directives of the State Department. As I document in American War Machine, CIA interventions in Asia, especially those that escalated into the Laotian, Vietnam, and Afghan wars, fostered an ongoing global CIA drug connection, or what I have called elsewhere a dark quadrant of unaccountable power.

This drug connection, richly endowed with huge resources and its own resources of illegal violence, has a major stake in both American interventions and above all unwinnable wars to aggravate the conditions of regional lawlessness that are needed for drug trafficking. Thus it makes perfect sense that the global drug connection has, as I believe, been an ongoing factor in the creation of an overseas American empire that most U.S. citizens never asked for. More specifically, the dark quadrant has contributed to all the major deep events – including Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11, that have helped militarize America and overshadow its public institutions.

Doomsday Power and the Military Occupation of America

I have said that, underlying the surface of America’s major deep events, there has been a pattern of conflict between two mindsets – that of openness and that of repressive dominance – dating back to the Civil War and the Indian wars of the mid-nineteenth century (and before that to the American Revolution).15 But it would be wrong to conclude from this on-going pattern of conflict that there is nothing new in our current situation. On the contrary, America is in the midst of a new crisis arising from this very old antagonism.

Since World War Two, secrecy has been used to accumulate new covert bureaucratic powers under the guise of emergency planning for disasters, planning known inside and outside the government as the “Doomsday Project.” Known more recently (and misleadingly) as “Continuity of Government” (COG) planning, the Doomsday Project, under the guiding hands in the 1980s of Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others, became the vehicle on 9/11 for a significant change of government. This package of extreme repressive power accumulated under the guise of the Doomsday Project can be referred to as Doomsday Power. In concrete terms, the repressive power developed to control the rest of the world is now, to an unprecedented extent, treating America itself as an occupied territory.

What I mean by “doomsday power” is the package of repressive mechanisms (which I have discussed elsewhere under their official name of “continuity of government” or COG plans), that was prepared over two decades by the elite COG planning group, and then implemented beginning on 9/11. The package includes 1) warrantless surveillance, 2) warrantless detention, (including unprecedented abridgments of the right to habeas corpus), and 3) unprecedented steps towards the militarization of domestic security enforcement and shrinking of the posse comitatus acts.

One recent development of Doomsday power, for example, has been the deployment since 2008 of a U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team to be stationed permanently in the United States. A major part of its dedicated assignment is to be “called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control.”16 Many people seem to be unaware that Americans, together with this Brigade, have lived since 2002 under a U.S. Army Command called NORTHCOM.17 Yet if nothing is done to change the present course of events, historians may come some day to compare the stationing of this brigade in 2008 CE to the date, in 49 BCE, when Caesar, along with his legion, crossed the Rubicon.

And I believe that the forces that have worked for decades to create Doomsday power have, like the global drug connection, been involved in every one of the deep events, from Dallas to 9/11, that have helped bring us here.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. Peter Dale Scott is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.

Death From Above The Video Game Real War From Afar

Documents Expose Predator Drones Spying Extensively in U.S.

Predator drones used by multiple agencies in domestic airspace could be armed.

Kit Daniels
Infowars.com
July 4, 2013

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is now lending Predator drones to a wide range of federal, state, and local agencies for domestic surveillance and possible “non-lethal” strikes, according to federal documents released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Credit: Pat Dennis via Flickr

The FBI, the U.S. Marshals and even the Texas Department of Public Safetyhave used CBP Predator drones in U.S. airspace.  In 2010, CBP reported that future drone payloads could include“non-lethal weapons designed to immobilize targets of interest.”

Last month, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that the FBI has used drones domestically.

The new documents expose the wide extent of domestic drone use.  The EFF released the documents after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

CBP drone use by other agencies has increased over eight times from 2010 to 2012.

By 2016, CBP wants airborne drones in domestic airspace 24 hours a day, seven days a week to ensure a “layered security strategy.”

Predator drone mission data can be fused into an information sharing center for federal, state, and local agencies across the country.

This drone data center would operate like current Homeland Security fusion centers which have violated Americans’ civil liberties and privacy according to a two-year Senate investigation.

The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator drone, perhaps the most well-known unmanned aerial vehicle, is extensively used overseas by the U.S. Air Force and the CIA for armed drone strikes.

According to Policymic, in a four-year period drone strikes killed at least 800 innocent people in addition to 22 “suspected terrorists,” a civilian kill ratio of at least 36 to 1. Pakistani sources have claimed an even higher civilian kill ratio of 50 to 1.

In June, Brandon Bryant revealed his former career as an Air Force drone operator.

Bryant saw drone strikes kill people through a computer screen half-way across the world.

This method of killing is no doubt dehumanizing. Men, women, and children are reduced to pixelated targets for drone operators who grew up in arcades.

Near the end of his career, Bryant received a past mission “score card” showing over 1,600 deaths.

Bryant said he can still see the blood and gore when he closes his eyes.  Doctors have diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Only time will tell when Predator drones will be used to kill Americans on U.S. soil, unless they have done so already.

Source Documents:

2010 “Concept of Operations” Report to Congress

2012 CPB UAS Mission Prioritization Process Presentation

2010 Daily Flight Logs

2011 Daily Flight Logs – Part 1

2011 Daily Flight Logs – Part 2

2012 Daily Flight Logs – Part 1

2012 Daily Flight Logs – Part 2

2012 Daily Flight Logs – Part 3

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Former drone operator says he’s haunted by his part in more than 1,600 deaths

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Former drone operator Brandon Bryant tells NBC’s Richard Engel that he felt like he became a "heartless" "sociopath" under the drone program.

By Richard Engel, Chief Foreign Correspondent, NBC News

A former Air Force drone operator who says he participated in missions that killed more than 1,600 people remembers watching one of the first victims bleed to death.

Brandon Bryant says he was sitting in a chair at a Nevada Air Force base operating the camera when his team fired two missiles from their drone at three men walking down a road halfway around the world in Afghanistan. The missiles hit all three targets, and Bryant says he could see the aftermath on his computer screen – including thermal images of a growing puddle of hot blood.

“The guy that was running forward, he’s missing his right leg,” he recalled. “And I watch this guy bleed out and, I mean, the blood is hot.” As the man died his body grew cold, said Bryant, and his thermal image changed until he became the same color as the ground.

“I can see every little pixel,” said Bryant, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, “if I just close my eyes.”

Bryant, now 27, served as a drone sensor operator from 2006 to 2011, at bases in Nevada, New Mexico and in Iraq, guiding unmanned drones over Iraq and Afghanistan. Though he didn’t fire missiles himself he took part in missions that he was told led to the deaths of an estimated 1,626 individuals.

In an interview with NBC News, he provided a rare first-person glimpse into what it’s like to control the controversial machines that have become central to the U.S. effort to kill terrorists.

He says that as an operator he was troubled by the physical disconnect between his daily routine and the violence and power of the faraway drones. “You don’t feel the aircraft turn,” he said. “You don’t feel the hum of the engine. You hear the hum of the computers, but that’s definitely not the same thing.”

At the same time, the images coming back from the drones were very real and very graphic.

“People say that drone strikes are like mortar attacks,” Bryant said. “Well, artillery doesn’t see this. Artillery doesn’t see the results of their actions. It’s really more intimate for us, because we see everything.”

A self-described “naïve” kid from a small Montana town, Bryant joined the Air Force in 2005 at age 19. After he scored well on tests, he said a recruiter told him that as a drone operator he would be like the smart guys in the control room in a James Bond movie, the ones who feed the agent the information he needs to complete his mission.

He trained for three and a half months before participating in his first drone mission. Bryant operated the drone’s cameras from his perch at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada as the drone rose into the air just north of Baghdad.

Bryant and the rest of his team were supposed to use their drone to provide support and protection to patrolling U.S. troops. But he recalls watching helplessly as insurgents buried an IED in a road and a U.S. Humvee drove over it.

“We had no way to warn the troops,” he said. He later learned that three soldiers died.

And once he had taken part in a kill, any remaining illusions about James Bond disappeared. “Like, this isn’t a videogame,” he said. “This isn’t some sort of fantasy. This is war. People die.”

Courtesy Brandon Bryant

Brandon Bryant stands with a Predator drone in Nevada. He says that as an operator he was troubled by the physical disconnect between his daily routine and the violence and power of the faraway drones.

Bryant said that most of the time he was an operator, he and his team and his commanding officers made a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties.

But he began to wonder who the enemy targets on the ground were, and whether they really posed a threat. He’s still not certain whether the three men in Afghanistan were really Taliban insurgents or just men with guns in a country where many people carry guns. The men were five miles from American forces arguing with each other when the first missile hit them.

“They (didn’t) seem to be in a hurry,” he recalled. “They (were) just doing their thing. … They were probably carrying rifles, but I wasn’t convinced that they were bad guys.“ But as a 21-year-old airman, said Bryant, he didn’t think he had the standing to ask questions.

He also remembers being convinced that he had seen a child scurry onto his screen during one mission just before a missile struck, despite assurances from others that the figure he’d seen was really a dog.

After participating in hundreds of missions over the years, Bryant said he “lost respect for life” and began to feel like a sociopath. He remembers coming into work in 2010, seeing pictures of targeted individuals on the wall – Anwar al-Awlaki and other al Qaeda and Taliban leaders — and musing, “Which one of these f_____s is going to die today?”

In 2011, as Bryant’s career as a drone operator neared its end, he said his commander presented him with what amounted to a scorecard. It showed that he had participated in missions that contributed to the deaths of 1,626 people.

“I would’ve been happy if they never even showed me the piece of paper,” he said. “I’ve seen American soldiers die, innocent people die, and insurgents die. And it’s not pretty. It’s not something that I want to have — this diploma.”

Now that he’s out of the Air Force and back home in Montana, Bryant said he doesn’t want to think about how many people on that list might’ve been innocent: “It’s too heartbreaking.”

The Veterans Administration diagnosed him with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, for which he has undergone counseling. He says his PTSD has manifested itself as anger, sleeplessness and blackout drinking.

“I don’t feel like I can really interact with that average, everyday person,” he said. “I get too frustrated, because A) they don’t realize what’s going on over there. And B) they don’t care.”

He’s also reluctant to tell the people in his personal life what he was doing for five years. When he told a woman he was seeing that he’d been a drone operator, and contributed to the deaths of a large number of people, she cut him off. “She looked at me like I was a monster,” he said. “And she never wanted to touch me again.”

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Drone pilot burnout triggers call for recruiting overhaul

Nidhi Subbaraman NBC News

May 17, 2013 at 4:15 AM ET

Senior Airman David Carbajal / U.S. Air Force

MQ-1B Predator unmanned aerial vehicles sit in a clamshell at night at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, July 31, 2011.

Driving a war drone is a stressful business. Shifts up to 12 hours long are stretches of dullness, watching and waiting, interrupted by flashes of intense activity in which pilots must make life-or-death decisions. Not their own life or death, however.

Pilots may be thousands of miles away from the flying weapons system they’re operating. They often head home at the end of the day, as if returning from any other office job, maybe picking up milk on the way. But while at work, their drones’ onboard cameras put them in a unique position to watch people being killed and injured as a direct result of their actions.

As psychologists learn more about the mental scarring warfare leaves on drone pilots — caused by long shift hours, isolation, witnessing casualties and those Jekyll-and-Hyde days split between battlefield and home — experts from within the U.S. Air Force are calling for a review of drone pilot selection.

Brad Hoagland, an Air Force colonel and visiting researcher at the Brookings Institution, and a fighter-jet pilot and operations commander of 23 years himself, believes that drone pilots could be picked better, and that existing selection techniques are due to be updated now that the service has accumulated almost a decade of research into the psychological characteristics of drone pilots.

"The thrill of taking off from a runway, flying a mission and then coming back and landing at the end of the mission — that’s very exciting," he told NBC News. "But I think that’s a different type of person who can do that, than someone who is maybe wired to fly an unmanned system from a console 7,000 miles away. It’s a different psychological makeup requirement to execute the mission."

Right stuff, wrong stuff
"I think we are still trying to figure out exactly what the ‘right stuff’ is," Wayne Chappelle, a clinical psychologist consulting for Air Force Medical at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, told NBC News. "We have a general idea … but I certainly think we’re probably more aware of what the wrong stuff is versus the right stuff."

The trouble is that spotting the known positive attributes in up-and-coming drone pilots is harder than spotting the negative attributes. To begin with, Chappelle drew up a portrait of the ideal drone pilot from the recorded testimony of 82 drone pilots and their supervisors in a 2011 report.

Good drone pilots, according to Chappelle’s findings, have excellent memory for pictures and sounds. They are bombarded with sounds and images from multiple screens through their long shifts, but parse that data quickly, cutting through the noise. They’re multitaskers and collaborators.

"These guys are very smart, very bright in a wide range of areas. They are emotionally resilient and highly stress tolerant and very motivated," Chappelle said.

People who have a history of abuse or dependence on alcohol, drugs or other substances, anxiety or depression, and cognitive impairments such as learning disabilities tend to make bad drone pilots.

Although the strengths of a drone pilot differ from the strengths of a manned fighter pilot, Chappelle said the psychological screening protocol for both is the same — and hasn’t changed in a decade. "We’re still looking at ways to improve and expand upon the screening procedures."

In his research, Hoagland has found that washout rates among undergraduate pilot trainees headed to crafts like the F-16 are traditionally about 10 to 15 percent. But drone pilot trainees exit at 30 percent (though that’s down from 45 percent a few years ago). Pilots may drop out, but more often, they fail to meet some flight or academic criteria along the way, Hoagland said.

And when they do graduate, they receive mental health diagnoses at a rate on par with pilots who fly in aircraft, and at much higher rates than other non-pilot Air Force personnel, according to a February 2013 report by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center.

NBC News has requested to interview a pilot or pilot instructor at the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where drone pilots are trained, but to date the Air Force has declined the request without further explanation.

2nd Lt. Logan Clark / U.S. Air Force

A pilot trainee flies an MQ-1 Predator simulator mission at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico on Feb. 8, 2012.

Testing, testing
In an upcoming report headed to the Pentagon, Hoagland will suggest some fixes for his higher-ups to consider.

For one, though the Air Force has a test called the Pilot Candidate Scoring Method, not all pilot candidates — of drones or manned craft — are given the exam. (The Air Force Academy, for example, only recently started administering it, and only on an "experimental" basis.)

"I can’t believe we as an Air Force haven’t standardized this," Hoagland says. Once everyone’s taking the test, and baseline scores are set, those scores can be mined for indicators as to who might be better suited to fly an F-16 and who might be destined for a drone. "It’s a common sense approach."

Also, though it’s been standard procedure to assess concentration, attention, psychomotor skills as part of the Medical Flight Screening-Neuropsychiatric test in pre-screened pilots-to-be, that information is not used in the selection process. Tests do weed out the medically and psychologically unfit — Hoagland thinks it would be an easy next step to ask: "Is this person suited for an unmanned or manned system?"

The coming swarm
As the Air Force’s drone program grows, so does the importance of pilot selection. What started in 2004 as five drone combat patrols — four aircraft each — will to swell to 65 patrols by 2014. By 2010, Predators had logged more than a million combat hours, more than any other military bird. And today’s population of 1,300 combat drone pilots will be joined by 500 more in the next few years.

And as autonomous systems evolve, the capabilities of unmanned craft will, too. The Air Force will shift to a system with multiple vehicles flown in tandem, answering to a single pilot. These "swarm" handlers will have more complex tasks heaped on them earlier in their career.

"In terms of who we need to have, I think we’re on a learning curve there," Anthony Tvaryanas, a doctor of aerospace medicine and technical advisor with the 711th Human Systems Integration Directorate at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, told NBC News.

"If [a pilot is] operating a swarm, what are you looking for in that person? I don’t think anyone’s looking into those concepts," Tvaryanas said.

"As we get from a pilot in an airplane to a pilot outside the airplane to a pilot controlling 100 airplanes, I think we’re approaching the limits of what [prior experience and studies] can inform us. There’s a need to look back at training," he added.

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about technology and science. Follow her on Facebook,TwitterandGoogle+ .

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Death From Above, Outrage Down Below

By DAVID KILCULLEN and ANDREW McDONALD EXUM

Published: May 16, 2009

IN recent days, the Pentagon has made two major changes in its strategy to defeat the Taliban, Al Qaeda and their affiliates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. First came the announcement that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal would take over as the top United States commander in Afghanistan. Next, Pentagon officials said that the United States was giving Pakistan more information on its drone attacks on terrorist targets, while news reports indicated that Pakistani officers would have significant future control over drone routes, targets and decisions to fire weapons (though the military has denied that).

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While we agree with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that “fresh eyes were needed” to review our military strategy in the region, we feel that expanding or even just continuing the drone war is a mistake. In fact, it would be in our best interests, and those of the Pakistani people, to declare a moratorium on drone strikes into Pakistan.

After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007, and following much internal debate, President George W. Bush authorized a broad expansion of drone strikes against a wide array of targets within Pakistan: Qaeda operatives, Pakistan-based members of the Afghan Taliban insurgency and — in some cases — other militants bent on destabilizing Pakistan.

The use of drones in military operations has steadily grown — we know from public documents that from last September to this March alone, C.I.A. operatives launched more than three dozen strikes.

The appeal of drone attacks for policy makers is clear. For one thing, their effects are measurable. Military commanders and intelligence officials point out that drone attacks have disrupted terrorist networks in Pakistan, killing key leaders and hampering operations. Drone attacks create a sense of insecurity among militants and constrain their interactions with suspected informers. And, because they kill remotely, drone strikes avoid American casualties.

But on balance, the costs outweigh these benefits for three reasons.

First, the drone war has created a siege mentality among Pakistani civilians. This is similar to what happened in Somalia in 2005 and 2006, when similar strikes were employed against the forces of the Union of Islamic Courts. While the strikes did kill individual militants who were the targets, public anger over the American show of force solidified the power of extremists. The Islamists’ popularity rose and the group became more extreme, leading eventually to a messy Ethiopian military intervention, the rise of a new regional insurgency and an increase in offshore piracy.

While violent extremists may be unpopular, for a frightened population they seem less ominous than a faceless enemy that wages war from afar and often kills more civilians than militants.

Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent — hardly “precision.” American officials vehemently dispute these figures, and it is likely that more militants and fewer civilians have been killed than is reported by the press in Pakistan. Nevertheless, every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.

Second, public outrage at the strikes is hardly limited to the region in which they take place — areas of northwestern Pakistan where ethnic Pashtuns predominate. Rather, the strikes are now exciting visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion in Punjab and Sindh, the nation’s two most populous provinces. Covered extensively by the news media, drone attacks are popularly believed to have caused even more civilian casualties than is actually the case. The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government, and contributes to Pakistan’s instability.

Third, the use of drones displays every characteristic of a tactic — or, more accurately, a piece of technology — substituting for a strategy. These attacks are now being carried out without a concerted information campaign directed at the Pakistani public or a real effort to understand the tribal dynamics of the local population, efforts that might make such attacks more effective.

To be sure, simply ending the drone strikes is no more a strategy than continuing them. Stabilizing Pakistan will require a focus on securing areas, principally in Punjab and Sindh, that are still under government control, while building up police and civil authorities and refocusing aid on economic development, security and governance. Suspending drone strikes won’t fix Pakistan’s problems — but continuing them makes these problems much harder to address.

Governments typically make several mistakes when attempting to separate violent extremists from populations in which they hide. First, they often overestimate the degree to which a population harboring an armed actor can influence that actor’s behavior. People don’t tolerate extremists in their midst because they like them, but rather because the extremists intimidate them. Breaking the power of extremists means removing their power to intimidate — something that strikes cannot do.

Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.

The drone strategy is similar to French aerial bombardment in rural Algeria in the 1950s, and to the “air control” methods employed by the British in what are now the Pakistani tribal areas in the 1920s. The historical resonance of the British effort encourages people in the tribal areas to see the drone attacks as a continuation of colonial-era policies.

The drone campaign is in fact part of a larger strategic error — our insistence on personalizing this conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Devoting time and resources toward killing or capturing “high-value” targets — not to mention the bounties placed on their heads — distracts us from larger problems, while turning figures like Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban umbrella group, into Robin Hoods. Our experience in Iraq suggests that the capture or killing of high-value targets — Saddam Hussein or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — has only a slight and fleeting effect on levels of violence. Killing Mr. Zarqawi bought only 18 days of quiet before Al Qaeda returned to operations under new leadership.

This is not to suggest that killing terrorists is a bad thing — on the contrary. But it’s not the only thing that matters, and over-emphasizing it wastes resources. The operation that killed Mr. Zarqawi, for example, was not a one-day event. Thousands of hours of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance were devoted to the elimination of one man, when units on the ground could have used this time to protect the people from the insurgency that was tearing Iraq apart.

Having Osama bin Laden in one’s sights is one thing. Devoting precious resources to his capture or death, rather than focusing on protecting the Afghan and Pakistani populations, is another. The goal should be to isolate extremists from the communities in which they live. The best way to do this is to adopt policies that build local partnerships. Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies must be defeated by indigenous forces — not from the United States, and not even from Punjab, but from the parts of Pakistan in which they now hide. Drone strikes make this harder, not easier.

Mysterious NASA video of Saturn reveals impossible hexagon-shaped cloud pattern larger than Earth

Mike Adams
NaturalNews
July 28, 2013

Here at NaturalNews, we normally report on Earthly events, but right now some rather grand events are taking place in our solar system that you may want to know about.

Check out what NASA’s Cassini spacecraft first noticed in 2007. There is a large rotating hexagon circling the north pole of Saturn. Visit the NASA webpage that explains all this at:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20070327.html

This isn’t some conspiracy theory. It’s not some sort of far-fetched interpretation of random organic structure. It is quite clearly a massive hexagon, and it’s circling the north pole of Saturn as we speak. And by “massive”, I mean this hexagon is larger than the planet Earth.

Straight from the NASA website: “This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”

The hexagon, according to NASA, is 60 miles thick (deep) and an astonishing 15,000 miles wide.

That means four Earths would fit inside it. Yes, it’s really that big. And of course, it seems entirely unnatural. Clouds don’t form hexagon shapes and then maintain those structures as the edges orbit the center. Looking at this shape, it is difficult to explain it as “natural.”

But that’s not all there is to see here.

The all-seeing eye pyramid inside the hexagon

As I was studying this animation from NASA, something struck me as particularly interesting. Inside the hexagon there’s a three-sided pyramid shape. It appears quite clearly as a lighter-shade triangle set against the background of the hexagon. Imagine a pyramid placed on top of the hexagon and you’ll see it.

There’s even more: Inside the pyramid is the shape of the all-seeing eye. You can clearly see it in the center of the pyramid shape, which is inside the hexagon.

Here’s a still image from the NASA animation:

In it, you can just barely make out the shape of an inverted pyramid, plus two concentric circles in the center. Here’s an overlay of lines showing the structure of the pyramid, plus the all-seeing eye:

Now here’s where this gets even more bizarre…

The all-seeing eye and the pyramid

Do you recognize this all-seeing eye with the pyramid? If not, just whip out a dollar bill from your pocket and glance at the back. There it is!

Yes, your U.S. currency contains the exact same image: An all-seeing eye, centered inside the top of the pyramid, looking over you from the back of a dollar bill.

Here’s a zoomed-in image showing you this from the back of a U.S. dollar bill:

Reality check

Please note what you’re thinking right now as you’re reading this. So far, I have not presented anything other than what is evident. There is a spinning hexagon of clouds on Saturn’s north pole. Inside the hexagon is a triangle (pyramid). Inside the triangle are two concentric circles that look a lot like a human eye.

This shape closely resembles a pyramid with the all-seeing eye on the back of the U.S. dollar.

Notice I haven’t mentioned anything about any conspiracy, or aliens, or anything of that kind. These are just observations of the universe around us.

Granted, they are fascinating observations. In fact, if you told most people what I’ve printed here in this article so far, they would think you were absolutely nuts.

And yet all I’ve done so far is republished NASA photos from the Cassini spacecraft and shown pictures from the back of U.S. currency. I’ve also pointed out some eerie similarities between the two.

But anyone with even half a brain, upon seeing these pictures, would begin to wonder: Is this just a coincidence? And why is there a 15,000-mile wide spinning hexagon on Saturn in the first place?

I’ve mentioned this to quite a few people, and no one I talked to was even aware of this. So what’s it doing there?

Natural phenomenon or intelligent design?

There are really one two possibilities for explaining the giant hexagon on Saturn: It is either a natural phenomenon or it was intelligently designed. (Well, I suppose there’s a third possibility: That the whole thing is some sort of grand NASA hoax and the pictures were faked… but to what end?)

I can’t wait to see the debates about this on our Facebook page, by the way, because “intelligently designed” could include anything: God, an alien race, a supernatural being, a previous Earthly civilization, a civilization from a parallel universe… who knows?

“Intelligently designed” means some conscious, intelligent being (or group of beings) intentionally created it. If so, you’d have to wonder: For what purpose? What would a giant spinning hexagon on Saturn actually accomplish?

Cymatics and the physical structure of sound

The far more likely explanation for the giant hexagon on Saturn may be that it is a natural phenomenon. And the only phenomenon I’m familiar with that might explain this involves the field of cymatics.

Cymatics is the study of how sound can alter the physical structure of materials, creating interesting structural patterns. To see this for yourself, you can turn a stereo speaker on its edge (with the speaker facing up), then place a liquid pudding of corn starch and water on top of a layer of plastic wrap, on top of the speaker. When you crank up the music, the corn starch creates bizarre and fascinating shapes due to the expression of the structure of the sound.

See an example of this “DIY cymatics” on YouTube:

I’ve been thinking that the giant hexagon on Saturn could theoretically be caused by very low-frequency sound waves emanating from some sort of geological action on the planet’s surface. Perhaps these sound waves are being focused toward the north pole of the planet in much the same way that earthquake shockwaves can “bounce” off subterranean geological features. These sound waves could theoretically create a “cymatic” effect that we’re seeing as a giant hexagon swirling around the pole.

It sounds far-fetched, I know. But not nearly as far-fetch as “aliens built it.” When it comes to bizarre phenomena like this, all the explanations sound far-fetched because the universe is more bizarre than we imagine.

You can come up with your own theory to explain all this, but make no mistake: There is a giant hexagon of clouds 15,000 miles wide swirling around the north pole of Saturn, and even NASA has no idea why or how it got there.

Is this possibly a “natural” event taking place on a massive scale? If it’s natural, it would demonstrate that nature can create some astonishingly complex (and large-scale) designs in the worlds around us. That’s particularly interesting because the FDA believes nature is incapable of creating even a single plant-based nutrient that has any beneficial effect whatsoever on the human body. “There’s no such thing as any vitamin or mineral that can prevent, cure or reverse any disease or disease symptom,” the FDA seems to insist.

There’s a lot of denial in Washington about the power and “creativity” of nature. Maybe those folks should look toward the heavens and take note of what’s really happening in our universe… because some of it is pretty darned spectacular.

Just ask NASA.

Please let us know YOUR thoughts on this giant hexagon on Saturn. Is it a NATURAL event? Was it created by MAN? Was it put there by GOD? Is it an elaborate NASA HOAX?

Geoengineering is Destroying the Ozone Layer

Off The Chart UV Levels Not Being Disclosed

Dane Wigington
Geoengineeringwatch.org
July 30, 2013

We have known for some time that the UV levels were getting rapidly worse due to the ongoing atmospheric spraying. Anyone that is even slightly awake and aware has noticed that the sun feels incredibly intense on the skin. Most varieties of plant life are showing at least some signs of stress in most areas. In many regions, whole forests are in steep decline. And it’s getting worse by the day.

Photo: By Beckyq6937 via Wikimedia Commons

Although extreme drought and toxic rains (due in large part to the heavy metal fallout from geoengineering) are taking their toll, recent metering of UV levels in Northern California indicate that there is an element in this die off that is far worse than we had realized, an incomprehensibly high level of UV radiation.

With the assistance of a very generous and conscientious individual, geoengineeringwatch.org purchased top-of-the-line UV metering equipment which was put in the hands of a 40-year environmental metering veteran, with 20 years government experience and 20 years as a private consultant. Our findings are far beyond shocking.

From a recent science study on excessive UV:

We are told UV-B is only a minor component of the total solar radiation, we now know this could not be further from the truth. Our recent metering reflects an exponential rise in UVB radiation. Due to its high energy, its potential for causing biological damage to plants, animals, and humans is exceptionally high and even small increases could lead to significant biological damage. There are numerous peer reviewed studies which verify this fact.

The Results

According to agencies like WHO, (World Heath Organizatin) and a long list of other recognized government sources of UV information like NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), no more than 5% of the total UV reaching the surface of Earth should be UVB. The other 95% should be UVA.

These agencies go on to state that UVC should be ZERO.

What has our testing shown?

UVB – the most lethal form of UV radiation – has now escalated to almost 70% of the total UV reaching the surface of our planet. At least this is the case in Northern California. (This can only mean that total Ultra-Violate exposure has also escalated sharply, making overall UVB levels worse still.)

In addition, our testing has consistently shown significant levels of UVC which used to be filtered out by the ozone layer, some 100,000 feet up in our atmosphere.

Not any more.

UV is measured in spectral bandwidths. The higher the bandwidth, the more benign the UV; lower bandwidths are more lethal.

Current testing reveals that almost 70% of incoming UV radiation is currently in the UVB and UVC range. (Not 5% or less, as we are being told by all major agencies and their media mouthpieces).

This translates into nearly a 1,400% increase in UVB as a percentage of total UV. If UVA has also gone up due to the same ozone destruction which has driven up the UVB, this would indicate a likelihood that the total UVB and UVC is higher still – not just a difference of ratio with the same overall number.

What are the known negative effects of excessive UV exposure to plant life?

The Proof On The Ground

In the forests of Northern California, bark is literally being scorched from trees. On many specimens, only a thin strip of bark remains on the shaded side of the tree. Foliage is being scorched with many trees having only a fraction of their normal leaf cover. Many native species of plants are not even sprouting any more. The organisms that do still manage to grow appear miniaturized in some cases.

What are just some of the results of excessive UV exposure to plants?

Can stop sprouting of seeds, • Stunts growth, • Limb die off, • Reduced foliage, • DNA damage, • Changes nutrient distribution, • Mutatins, • Effects photosynthesis • Greatly increased mortality
SOME known effects of excessive UV exposure to aquatic life:
All aquatic life is particularly vulnerable to high UV levels.
Phytoplankton accounts for some 30% of the worlds’ intake of animal protein. Phytoplankton and the microorganisms they consume are killed by excessive UV levels. (Global plankton populations have already been reduced by 40% to 50%. Much of the die off is likely due to increased UV radiation.)
Less plankton = less carbon-dioxide absorption.
Less plankton = less oxygen production. (Atmospheric oxygen content around the globe declining rapidly)
Less plankton = less fish. Period.

Bottom line: A crashing plankton population effects the entire food chain and all life on earth.

Excess UV kills coral reefs. So do waters warmed and made acidic by CO2 fallout. (Reefs are the nurseries of many crucial aquatic species and are in sharp decline around the globe.)

SOME of the known effects of excess UV on humans:

• Damaged immune system, • DNA damage • Damages sight • Causes various forms of cancer

Geoengineering Aerosols Destroy The Ozone Layer

This is not speculation, it is fact. There is a mountain of science data that confirms the ozone decimating effect of sunlight-reflecting particulates in the upper atmosphere. As geoengineering climate modeler Ken Caldeira warned after crunching the numbers for Dr. Edward Teller’s aerosol “sunscreen”, the resulting rapid cooling of the stratosphere causes the formation of huge ice clouds that attract and concentrate ozone-destroying chemicals.

In addition, high nitrogen oxide emissions from fleets of aerosol-spreading jet tanker aircraft – and more than 93,000 daily airline flights – directly attack Earth’s protective ozone layer.

Though many of these “science studies” do not admit geoengineering is already going on, this fact is not hard to confirm for any that do even the slightest investigation.

Numerous references are posted below this article.

At A Crossroad

The gravity of our collective crisis cannot be overstated. Current UV metering makes clear we are now being exposed to dangerously high levels of UV radiation, specifically UVB and UVC.

The metering performed in Northern California, on which this statement is based, was done by a pair of identical state-of-the-art, brand-new, science-grade meters guaranteed to be scientifically calibrated to a range within 4%. As stated earlier in this article, the tech who did this metering is a 40- year veteran in environmental measurement and interpretation.

Here in Northern California, we are already seeing frighteningly visible damage to foliage, trees, and plants. The ramifications of extremely high UV levels to all life forms – including us – are grave. As the die-off of other species go, so will we. We are in the 6th Great Mass Extinction – right here, right now! (References below)

If geoengineering continues unabated, and the ozone layer is completely destroyed, it will be game over for us all. No ozone layer = no life on Earth.

It’s that simple.

Global geoengineering is tearing apart the entire fabric of life on our planet. • Geoengineering is poisoning our air, waters, and soils. • Geoengineering is pushing increasingly erratic atmospheric processes resulting from human-propelled climate change past the Chaos threshold into unpredictable, self-reinforcing, cascading events. • Geoengineering is disrupting the jetstream and all natural weather patterns, which in turn is fueling catastrophic climate feedback loops – the most dire of which are mass methane hydrate releases from the Arctic tundra and seafloor. • Geoengineering is destroying the stratospheric solar radiation shielding, which protects all life on Earth.

Alarmism?

Do your own honest investigation and find out.

Global awareness of these lethal programs is rising quickly, but not fast enough. Its up to all of us to help shine the light on this life-or-death issue.

Every day counts.

REFERENCES

From Harvard Magazine
Harvard scientist

The Science paper notes that loss of ice in the Artic threatens to release significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane from the soils of Siberia and Northern Alaska, potentially accelerating climate change. The researchers also note that an increasingly cited remedy for climate change—geo-engineering the climate by launching sulfate particles directly into the atmosphere in order to reflect sunlight away from Earth—would accelerate the process of ozone loss by increasing the reactive surface area for the conversion of chlorine to free radical form, as was observed after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991.

From EPA

UVB: a band of ultraviolet radiation with wavelengths from 280-320 nanometers produced by the Sun

UVB is a kind of ultraviolet light from the sun (and sun lamps) that has several harmful effects. UVB is particularly effective at damaging DNA. It is a cause of melanoma and other types of skin cancer. It has also been linked to damage to some materials, crops, and marine organisms. The ozone layer protects the Earth against most UVB coming from the sun. It is always important to protect oneself against UVB, even in the absence of ozone depletion, by wearing hats, sunglasses, and sunscreen. However, these precautions will become more important as ozone depletion worsens. NASA provides more information on their web site

UVC: a band of ultraviolet radiation with wavelengths shorter than 280 nanometers

UVC is extremely dangerous, but it is completely absorbed by ozone and normal oxygen (O2). NASA provides more information on their web site

GEOENGINEERING WOULD DESTROY THE OZONE LAYER

A Geo-engineering conference was held in Canberra this week see here. ‘Geo-engineering’ is taking radical steps to dramatically and rapidly cool the planet. One of the ideas being discussed at the conference is to fire sulfa particles into the atmosphere, one professor has spoken out about this:

Professor David Karoly, of the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences, says another ‘pie in the sky’ solution is to shoot sulfur particles in the atmosphere to shield the earth from the sun.

He says that would destroy the ozone layer.

“Ozone depletion would cause more UV radiation which would cause skin cancers – killing people,” he said.

“We know the mechanism for this, because it’s the process that affects the Antarctic ozone hole.”

Source: ABC Rural | 27/Sep/2011

– See more at:http://ep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/realityzone/UFNscientistOpposesGeoengineering.html#sthash.neDLCzuY.dpuf

More references,

geoengineering destroys the ozone layer http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/geoengineering-programs-continue-to-destroy-ozone-layer/

http://www.prisonplanet.com/geoengineering-chemtrails-shredding-ozone-layer-daily-putting-all-life-on-earth-at-risk.html

http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2012/07/professor-geo-engineering-climate-change-solution-would-destroy-ozone-layer-and-kill-p

6th mass extinction is now http://www.mysterium.com/extinction.html http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2.html

No ozone layer, no terrestrial life on earth http://www.theozonehole.com/atmosphere.htm

UV resistant genetically modified crops http://www.academia.edu/171138/

Countering_UV-B_stress_in_plants_Does_selenium_have_a_role Global aerosol depth loop (off course this source does not mention the main source of atmospheric aerosols, global geoengineering)http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/GlobalMaps/view.php?d1=MODAL2_M_AER_OD

From a recent science study on excessive UV. Although UV-B is only a minor component of the total solar radiation (less than 0.5%), due to its high energy, its potential for causing biological damage is exceptionally high and even small increases could lead to significant biological damage.

Excessive UV effects on phytoplankton. http://www.photobiology.info/Hader.html

Human health and ecological consequences of ozone depletion.http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/v1003/lectures/ozone_health/

Excessive UV effects on ecosystems http://www.grida.no/publications/vg/ozone/page/1389.aspx

Excessive UV effects plant development/growth http://www.agriculturejournals.cz/publicFiles/52840.pdf

Excessive UV effects plant growth http://www.ehow.com/how-does_5525557_effects-radiation-plant-growth-development.html Excessive UV and plant growth http://zebu.uoregon.edu/text/UV

Excessive UV and plant growthhttp://www.google.com/#q=excessive+uv+affects+plant+respiration&spell=1&sa=X&ei=GkXtUcLdCYrgyQGRnoHgDQ&ved=0CCgQBSgA&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.49478099%2Cd.aWM%2Cpv.xjs.s.en_US.c75bKy5EQ0A.O&fp=fc20d2414f75fc3c&biw=1442&bih=874

Plankton produces 50% of earths oxygenhttp://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0607_040607_phytoplankton.html

Plankton populations down 40% http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=phytoplankton-population

US Government Protection of Al-Qaeda Terrorists and the US-Saudi Black Hole

Peter Dale Scott
japanfocus.org
July 29, 2013

For almost two centuries American government, though always imperfect, was also a model for the world of limited government, having evolved a system of restraints on executive power through its constitutional arrangement of checks and balances.

Since 9/11 however, constitutional practices have been overshadowed by a series of emergency measures to fight terrorism. The latter have mushroomed in size, reach and budget, while traditional government has shrunk. As a result we have today what the journalist Dana Priest has called

two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre – and its entirety…visible only to God.¹

More and more, it is becoming common to say that America, like Turkey before it, now has what Marc Ambinder and John Tirman have called a deep state behind the public one.² And this parallel government is guided in surveillance matters by its own Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, which according to the New York Times, “has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court.”³Thanks largely to Edward Snowden, it is now clear that the FISA Court has permitted this deep state to expand surveillance beyond the tiny number of known and suspected Islamic terrorists, to any incipient protest movement that might challenge the policies of the American war machine.

Americans have by and large not questioned this parallel government, accepting that sacrifices of traditional rights and traditional transparency are necessary to keep us safe from al-Qaeda attacks. However secret power is unchecked power, and experience of the last century has only reinforced the truth of Lord Acton’s famous dictum that unchecked power always corrupts. It is time to consider the extent to which American secret agencies have developed a symbiotic relationship with the forces they are supposed to be fighting – and have even on occasion intervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their plots.

“Intervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their plots”? These words as I write them make me wonder yet again, as I so often do, if I am not losing my marbles, and proving myself to be no more than a zany “conspiracy theorist.” Yet I have to remind myself that my claim is not one coming from theory, but rests on certain undisputed facts about incidents that are true even though they have been systematically suppressed or under-reported in the American mainstream media.

More telling, I am describing a phenomenon that occurred not just once, but consistently, almost predictably. We shall see that, among the al-Qaeda terrorists who were first protected and then continued their activities were

1) Ali Mohamed, identified in the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 68) as the leader of the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing;

2) Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden’s close friend and financier, while in the Philippines, of Ramzi Yousef (principal architect of the first WTC attack) and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed;

3) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, identified in the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 145) as “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.”

4) Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, whose presence in the United States was concealed from the FBI by CIA officers for months before 9/11.⁴

It might sound from these three citations as if the 9/11 Commission marked a new stage in the U.S. treatment of these terrorists, and that the Report now exposed those terrorists who in the past had been protected. On the contrary, a principal purpose of my essay is to show that

1) one purpose of protecting these individuals had been to protect a valued intelligence connection (the “Al-Qaeda connection” if you will);

2) one major intention of the 9/11 Commission Report was to continue protecting this connection;

3) those on the 9/11 Commission staff who were charged with this protection included at least one commission member (Jamie Gorelick), one staff member (Dietrich Snell) and one important witness (Patrick Fitzgerald) who earlier had figured among the terrorists’ protectors.

In the course of writing this essay, I came to another disturbing conclusion I had not anticipated. This is that a central feature of the protection has been to defend the 9/11 Commission’s false picture of al-Qaeda as an example of non-state terrorism, at odds with not just the CIA but also the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In reality, as I shall show, royal family protection from Qatar and Saudi Arabia (concealed by the 9/11 Commission) was repeatedly given to key figures like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.”

This finding totally undermines the claim that the wars fought by America in Asia since 9/11 have been part of a global “war on terror.” On the contrary, the result of the wars has been to establish a permanent U.S. military presence in the oil- and gas-rich regions of Central Asia, in alliance with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan – the principal backers of the jihadi terrorist networks the U.S. been supposedly fighting. Meanwhile the most authentic opponents in the region of these Sunni jihadi terrorists – the governments of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran – have been overthrown by U.S. invasion or military support (in the case of Iraq and Libya) subverted with U.S. support (in the case of Syria), or sanctioned and threatened as part of an “axis of evil” (in the case of Iran).

The protection to terrorists described in this essay, in other words, has been sustained partly in order to support the false premises that have underlain U.S. Asian wars for more than a decade. And the blame cannot be assigned all to the Saudis. Two months before 9/11, FBI counterterrorism expert John O’Neill described to the French journalist Jean-Charles Brisard America’s “impotence” in getting help from Saudi Arabia concerning terrorist networks. The reason? In Brisard’s paraphrase, “Just one: the petroleum interests.”⁵ Former CIA officer Robert Baer voiced a similar complaint about the lobbying influence of “the Foreign Oil Companies Group, a cover for a cartel of major petroleum companies doing business in the Caspian. . . . The deeper I got, the more Caspian oil money I found sloshing around Washington.”⁶

The decade of protection for terrorists demonstrates the power of this secretive dimension of the American deep state: the dark forces in our society responsible for protecting terrorists, over and above the parallel government institutionalized on and after 9/11.⁷ Although I cannot securely define these dark forces, I hope to demonstrate that they are related to the black hole at the heart of the complex U.S-Saudi connection, a complex that involves oil majors like Exxon, the military coordination of oil and gas movements from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, offsetting arms sales, Saudi investments in major U.S. corporations like Citibank and the Carlyle Group, and above all the ultimate United States dependency on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and OPEC, for the defense of the petrodollar.⁸

This deeper dimension of the deep state, behind its institutional manifestation in our parallel government, is a far greater threat than foreign terrorism to the preservation of U.S. democracy.

The FBI’s Intervention with the RCMP to Release Ali Mohamed, 1993

Consider the FBI’s instruction in 1993 to the Canadian RCMP to release the al-Qaeda organizer Mohamed Ali, who then proceeded to Nairobi in the same year to begin planning the U.S. Embassy bombing of 1998.

Essam Hafez Marzouk

In early 1993 a wanted Egyptian terrorist named Essam Hafez Marzouk, a close ally of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, arrived at Canada’s Vancouver Airport and was promptly detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). A second terrorist named Mohamed Ali, “the primary U.S. intelligence agent for Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden,” came from California to the airport to meet him; and, not finding him, made the mistake of asking about his friend at the Vancouver airport customs office. As a result the RCMP interrogated Mohamed Ali for two days, but finally released him, even though Ali had clearly come in order to smuggle a wanted terrorist into the United States.⁹

If the RCMP had detained Mohamed Ali, who was much bigger game than the first terrorist, hundreds of lives might have been saved. After being released, Ali went on to Nairobi, Kenya. There in December 1993 he and his team photographed the U.S. Embassy, and then delivered the photos to Osama bin Laden in Khartoum, leading to the Embassy bombing of 1998.¹⁰ Ali later told an FBI agent that at some point he also trained al-Qaeda terrorists in how to hijack airplanes using box cutters.¹¹

The RCMP release of Ali Mohamed was unjustified, clearly had historic consequences, and may have contributed to 9/11. Yet the release was done for a bureaucratic reason: Ali Mohamed gave the RCMP the phone number of an FBI agent, John Zent, in the San Francisco FBI office, and told them, “If they called that number, the agent on the other end of the line would vouch for him.” As Ali had predicted, Zent ordered his release.¹²

Ali Mohamed was an important double agent, of major interest to more important U.S. authorities than Zent. Although Mohamed was at last arrested in September 1998 for his role in the Nairobi Embassy bombing, the USG still had not sentenced him in 2006; and he may still not have gone to jail.¹³

The story of his release in Vancouver and its consequences is another example of the dangers of working with double agents. One can never be sure if the agent is working for his movement, for his agency, or – perhaps most likely – for increasing his own power along with that of both his movement and his agency, by increasing violence in the world.¹⁴

Ali Mohamed’s Release as a Deep Event Ignored by the U.S. Media

Mohamed’s release in Vancouver was a deep event, by which I mean an event predictably suppressed in the media and still not fully understandable. A whole chapter in my book The Road to 9/11 was not enough to describe Mohamed’s intricate relationships at various times with the CIA, U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg, the murder of Jewish extremist Meir Kahane, and finally the cover-up of 9/11 perpetrated by the 9/11 Commission and their witness, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (Mohamed’s former prosecutor).¹⁵

The deep event is also an example of deep politics, a mixture of intrigue and suppression involving not just a part of the U.S. Government, but also the governing media. To this day (according to a 2013 search of Lexis Nexis) the Vancouver release incident, well covered in Canada’s leading newspaper The Toronto Globe and Mail (December 22, 2001), has never been mentioned in any major American newspaper.

More disturbingly, it is not hinted at in the otherwise well-informed books and articles about Ali Mohamed by Steven Emerson, Peter Bergen, and Lawrence Wright.¹⁶ Nor is there any surviving mention of it in the best insider’s book about the FBI and Ali Mohamed, The Black Banners, by former FBI agent Ali Soufan (a book that was itself heavily and inexcusably censored by the CIA, after being cleared for publication by the FBI).¹⁷

There is no doubt of the FBI’s responsibility for Mohamed’s release, It (along with other FBI anomalies in handling Mohamed) is frankly acknowledged in a Pentagon Internet article on Mohamed:

In early 1993, Mohamed was detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) at the Vancouver, Canada airport. He had come to the airport to meet an Egyptian who had arrived from Damascus but was found to be carrying two forged Saudi passports. When Mohamed was about to be arrested as well, he told the RCMP he was collaborating with the FBI and gave them a name and phone number to call to confirm this. The RCMP made the call and Mohamed was released immediately at the request of the FBI. When the FBI subsequently questioned Mohamed about this incident, he offered information about a ring in California that was selling counterfeit documents to smugglers of illegal aliens. This is the earliest hard evidence that is publicly available of Mohamed being an FBI informant.¹⁸

Contrast this official candor about the FBI responsibility for Mohamed’s release with the suppression of it in a much longer account of Mohamed (3200 words) by Benjamin Weiner and James Risen in the New York Times:

[In 1993] he was stopped by the border authorities in Canada, while traveling in the company of a suspected associate of Mr. bin Laden’s who was trying to enter the United States using false documents.

Soon after, Mr. Mohamed was questioned by the F.B.I., which had learned of his ties to Mr. bin Laden. Apparently in an attempt to fend off the investigators, Mr. Mohamed offered information about a ring in California that was selling counterfeit documents to smugglers of illegal aliens. ¹⁹

A long Wall Street Journal account massages the facts even more evasively:

At about the same time [1993], the elusive Mr. Mohamed popped up again on the FBI radar screen with information that underscored the emerging bin Laden threat. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police questioned Mr. Mohamed in the spring of 1993 after his identification was discovered on another Arab man trying to enter the U.S. from Vancouver — a man Mr. Mohamed identified as someone who had helped him move Mr. bin Laden to Sudan. The FBI located Mr. Mohamed near San Francisco in 1993, where he volunteered the earliest insider description of al Qaeda that is publicly known.²⁰

In 1998, after the Embassy bombings, Mohamed was finally arrested. In the ensuing trial an FBI Agent, Daniel Coleman, entered a court affidavit (approved by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald) which summarized the Vancouver incident as follows:

In 1993, MOHAMED advised the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“RCMP”) that he had provided intelligence and counter-intelligence training in Afghanistan to a particular individual…. MOHAMED admitted that he had travelled to Vancouver, Canada, in the spring of 1993 to facilitate the entry of that individual into the United States…. MOHAMED further admitted that he and the individual had transported Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan to the Sudan in 1991…. MOHAMED told the RCMP that he was in the process of applying for a job as an FBI interpreter and did not want this incident to jeopardize the application. (In fact, MOHAMED then had such an application pending though he was never hired as a translator.)²¹

Like the American media, this FBI affidavit suppressed the fact that Mohamed, an admitted ally of Osama bin Laden caught red-handed with another known terrorist, was released on orders from the FBI.

The Two Levels of American History: Official History and Deep History

The whole episode illustrates what has become all too common in recent American history, the way in which secret bureaucratic policies can take priority over the public interest, even to the point of leading to mass murder

(since it contributed at a minimum to the 1998 Embassy bombings, if not also to 9/11). It is also an example of what I mean by the two levels of history in America, We can refer to them as those historical facts officially acknowledged, and those facts officially suppressed; or alternatively as those facts fit to be mentioned in the governing media, and those suppressed by the same media. This leads in turn to two levels of historical narrative: official or archival history, which ignores or marginalizes deep events, and a second level – called deep history by its practitioners or “conspiracy theory” by its critics – which incorporates them. The method of deep political research is to recover deep events from this second level.

This activity sets deep political research at odds with the governing media, but not, I believe with the national interest. Speaking personally as an ex-diplomat, I should state clearly that the national interest does occasionally require secrets, at least for a time. Kissinger’s trip to China, for example, which led to a normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations, probably required secrecy (at least at the time) in order to succeed.

When insiders and the governing media collaborate in the keeping of a secret, as in the case of the FBI-ordered release of Mohamed, they probably believe that they are protecting, not just the FBI, but national security. However national security in this case was conspicuously not served by the subsequent embassy bombings, let alone by 9/11.

In the glaring gap between these two levels of history is a third level — that of the privileged books about Mohamed – privileged in the sense that they have access to sources denied to others — that give important but selective parts of the truth. This selectivity is not necessarily culpable; it may for example be due to pressure from lawyers representing Saudi millionaires (a pressure I have yielded to myself).²² But cumulatively it is misleading.

I owe a considerable debt in particular to Lawrence Wright’s book, The Looming Tower, which helped expose many problems and limitations in the official account of 9/11. But I see now in retrospect that I, like many others, have been delayed by its selectivity on many matters (including Mohamed’s RCMP release) from developing a less warped understanding of the truth.

The Longer History of FBI and USG Protection for Ali Mohamed

Why did John Zent vouchsafe for Mohamed in 1993, so that the RCMP released him? The explanation of Peter Lance, the best chronicler of the FBI’s culpability in both the first and second WTC attacks, is that Zent did so because Mohamed was already working as his personal informant, “feeding Zent ‘intelligence’ on Mexican smugglers who were moving illegal immigrants into the United States from the South.”²³(FBI agent Cloonan confirms that Mohamed had been working as a local FBI informant since 1992.²⁴) Elsewhere Lance describes Zent as “trusting and distracted,” so that he failed to realize Mohamed’s importance.²⁵

Essam Hafez Mohammed Marzouk

But the FBI’s protection of Ali Mohamed did not begin with Zent. It dated back at least to 1989, when (according to the Pentagon Security bio)

While serving in the Army at Fort Bragg, he traveled on weekends to Jersey City, NJ, and to Connecticut to train other Islamic fundamentalists in surveillance, weapons and explosives. … Telephone records show that while at Fort Bragg and later, Mohamed maintained a very close and active relationship with the Office of Services [Makhtab-al-Khidimat] of the Mujihadeen, in Brooklyn, which at that time was recruiting volunteers and soliciting funds for the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. This was the main recruitment center for the network that, after the Soviets left Afghanistan, became known as al-Qaida….

The FBI observed and photographed Mohamed giving weapons training to a group of New York area residents during four successive weekends in July 1989. They drove from the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn to a shooting range in Calverton, Long Island, and they fired AK-47 assault rifles, semiautomatic handguns and revolvers during what appeared to be training sessions. For reasons that are unknown, the FBI then ceased its surveillance of the group.²⁶

In the subsequent trial of Mohamed’s trainees and others for bombing the World Trade Center, the defense attorney, Roger Stavis, established that Mohamed was giving the al-Kifah trainees “courses on how to make bombs, how to use guns, how to make Molotov cocktails.” He showed the court that a training manual seized in Nosair’s apartment “showed how to make explosives and some kind of improvised weapons and explosives.”²⁷

So why would the FBI, having discovered terrorist training, then cease its surveillance? Here the Wall Street Journal has what I am sure is the right answer: the FBI ceased surveillance because it somehow determined that the men were training “to help the mujahedeen fighting the Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan.”²⁸ (Note that the mujahedeen were no longer fighting the Soviet army itself, which had been withdrawn from Afghanistan as of March 1989.)

Al-Kifah, Ali Mohamed, the Flow of Arabs to Afghanistan

Afghanistan is indeed the obvious explanation for the FBI’s terminating its videotaping of jihadists from the Brooklyn Al-Kifah Refugee Center. Incorporated officially in 1987 as “Afghan Refugee Services, Inc.,” the Al-Kifah Center “was the recruitment hub for U.S.-based Muslims seeking to fight the Soviets. As many as two hundred fighters were funneled through the center to Afghanistan.”²⁹ More importantly, it was

a branch of the Office of Services [Makhtab-al-Khidimat]. the Pakistan-based organization that Osama bin Laden helped finance and lead and would later become al Qaeda. In fact, it was Mustafa Shalabi, an Egyptian who founded and ran the center, whom bin Laden called in 1991 when he needed help moving to Sudan.³⁰

As we shall see, the Makhtab, created in 1984 to organize Saudi financial support to the foreign “Arab Afghans” in the jihad, was part of a project that had the fullest support of the Saudi, Egyptian, and U.S. Governments. And Ali Mohamed, although he remained in the US Army Reserves until August 1994, was clearly an important trainer in that project, both in Afghanistan and in America.

A privileged account of Mohamed’s career by Peter Bergen, in Holy Wars, Inc., claims that

Ali Mohamed…was an indispensable player in al-Qaeda…. At some point in the early eighties he proffered his services as an informant to the CIA, the first of his several attempts to work for the U.S. government. The Agency was in contact with him for a few weeks but broke off relations after determining he was “unreliable.” That would turn out to be a masterful understatement, as Mohamed was already a member of Egypt’s terrorist Jihad group. After being discharged from the Egyptian Army in 1984, Mohamed [took] a job in the counterterrorism department of Egyptair. The following year he moved to the United States,³¹

Bergen’s most serious omission here is that Mohamed, though he was on the State Department’s visa watch list, had been admitted to the U.S. in 1984 “on a visa-waiver program that was sponsored by the agency [i.e. CIA] itself, one designed to shield valuable assets or those who have performed valuable services for the country.”³² This should be enough to question the CIA’s account that it found Mohamed “unreliable.” (Later, one of Mohamed’s officers at Fort Bragg was also convinced that Mohamed was “sponsored” by a U.S. intelligence service, “I assumed the CIA.”)³³ In addition Bergen omits that, before Mohamed’s brief stint as a formal CIA agent, he had been selected out of the Egyptian army in 1981 for leadership training at Fort Bragg – an important point to which we shall return.³⁴

The FBI’s Cover-Up of Ali Mohamed in the Kahane Murder

The CIA may have wanted to think that the Al-Kifah training was only for Afghanistan. But the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the mentor of the Center whom the CIA brought to America in 1990, was preaching for the killing of Jews and also for the destruction of the West.³⁵ His preachings guided Mohamed’s Makhtab trainees: as a first step, in November 1990, three of them conspired to kill Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League.

Kahane’s actual killer, El Sayyid Nosair, was detained by accident almost immediately, and by luck the police soon found his two coconspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, waiting at Nosair’s house. Also at the house, according to John Miller,

Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman

were training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg [where Ali Mohamed at the time was a training officer]. There were copies of teletypes that had been routed to the Secretary of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.³⁶

And the Pentagon bio, with yet another gentle dig at the FBI, identifies the documents as Mohamed’s:

In a search of Nosair’s home, the police found U.S. Army training manuals, videotaped talks that Mohamed delivered at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, operational plans for joint coalition exercises conducted in Egypt, and other materials marked Classified or Top Secret. These documents belonged to Mohamed, who often stayed in New Jersey with Nosair. The documents did not surface during Nosair’s 1991 trial for the Kahane murder. It is not known if the FBI investigated Mohamed in connection with these documents.

Joseph Borelli

Yet only hours after the killing, Joseph Borelli, the chief of NYPD detectives, pronounced Nosair a “lone deranged gunman.”³⁷ A more extended account of his remarks in the New York Times actually alluded to Mohamed, though not by name, and minimized the significance of the links to terrorism in a detailed account of the Nosair home cache:

The files contained articles about firearms and explosives apparently culled from magazines, likeSoldier of Fortune, appealing to would-be mercenaries. But the police said the handwritten papers, translated by an Arabic-speaking officer, appeared to be minor correspondence and did not mention terrorism or outline any plan to kill the militant Jewish leader who had called for the removal of all Arabs from Israel.

“There was nothing [at Nosair’s house] that would stir your imagination,” Chief Borelli said…. A joint anti-terrorist task force of New York City police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been set up to look into any possible international links to the slaying, the official said, but so far has not turned up anything.

“Nothing has transpired that changes our opinion that he acted alone,” Chief Borrelli told a news conference yesterday afternoon.³⁸

Later an FBI spokesman said the FBI also believed “that Mr. Nosair had acted alone in shooting Rabbi Kahane.” “The bottom line is that we can’t connect anyone else to the Kahane shooting,” an FBI agent said.³⁹

Blaming the New York County District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, the FBI later claimed that the evidence retrieved from Nosair’s home was not processed for two or three years.⁴⁰ But Robert Friedman suggests that the FBI were not just lying to the public, but also to Morgenthau (who had just helped expose and bring down the CIA-favored Muslim bank BCCI).

Meir Kahane

According to other sources familiar with the case, the FBI told District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau that Nosair was a lone gunman, not part of a broader conspiracy; the prosecution took this position at trial and lost, only convicting Nosair of gun charges. Morgenthau speculated the CIA may have encouraged the FBI not to pursue any other leads, these sources say. ‘The FBI lied to me,’ Morgenthau has told colleagues. ‘They’re supposed to untangle terrorist connections, but they can’t be trusted to do the job.’⁴¹

Using evidence from the Nosair trial transcript, Peter Lance confirms the tension between Morgenthau’s office, which wanted to pursue Nosair’s international terrorist connections, and the FBI, which insisted on trying Nosair alone.⁴²

The FBI’s Protection of Ali Mohamed in the 1993 WTC Bombing

In thus limiting the case, the police and the FBI were in effect protecting, not just Ali Mohamed, but also Nosair’s two Arab coconspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, in the murder of a U.S. citizen. The two were thus left free to kill again on February 26, 1993, one month after the FBI secured Mohamed’s release in Vancouver. Both Abouhalima and Salameh were ultimately convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, along with another Mohamed trainee, Nidal Ayyad.

To quote the Pentagon bio yet again,

In February 1993, the terrorist cell that Mohamed had trained exploded a truck bomb under the World Trade Center that killed six and injured about 1,000 persons. The perpetrators of this bombing included people Mohamed had trained, and Mohamed had been in close contact with the cell during the period leading up to the bombing [i.e. including January 1993, the month of Mohamed’s detention and release in Vancouver]. Mohamed’s name appeared on a list of 118 potential un-indicted co-conspirators that was prepared by federal prosecutors.

Ali Mohamed was again listed as one of 172 unindicted co-conspirators in the follow-up “Landmarks” case, which convicted Sheikh Rahman and others of plotting to blow up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the George Washington Bridge.⁴³ The two cases were closely related, as much of the evidence for the Landmarks case came from an informant, Emad Salem, whom the FBI had first planted among the WTC plotters. But the prosecutors’ awareness of Ali Mohamed’s involvement must be contrasted with the intelligence failure at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center: according to Steve Coll, the CTC “immediately established a seven-day, twenty-four hour task force to collect intelligence about the World Trade Center bombing…but nothing of substance came in.”⁴⁴

In the WTC bombing case, the FBI moved swiftly to bring the Al-Kifah plotters to trial one month later, in March. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a DIA officer, later said that

we [i.e. DIA] were surprised how quickly they’d [i.e. FBI] made the arrests after the first World Trade Center bombing. Only later did we find out that the FBI had been watching some of these people for months prior to both incidents [i.e. both the 1993 WTC bombing and 9/11].⁴⁵

Shaffer’s claim that the FBI had been watching some of the plotters is abundantly corroborated, e.g. by Steve Coll in Ghost Wars.⁴⁶

The U.S., Egyptian, and Saudi Backing for the Makhtab Network

What was being protected here by the FBI? One obvious answer is an extension of Lance’s explanation for Zent’s behavior: that Mohamed had already been a domestic FBI informant since 1992. However I entirely agree with New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who suspected that a much larger asset was being protected, the Saudi-sponsored network which we now know was the Makhtab-i-Khidimat, by this time already evolving into al-Qaeda.

On the day the FBI arrested four Arabs for the World Trade Centre bombing, saying it had all of the suspects, Morgenthau’s ears pricked up. He didn’t believe the four were ‘self-starters,’ and speculated that there was probably a larger network as well as a foreign sponsor. He also had a hunch that the suspects would lead back to Sheikh Abdel Rahman. But he worried [correctly] that the dots might not be connected because the U.S. government was protecting the sheikh for his help in Afghanistan.⁴⁷

This “larger network” of the Makhtab, although created in 1984, consolidated an assistance program that had been launched by the U.S. government much earlier, at almost the beginning of the Afghan war itself.

In January 1980, Brzezinski visited Egypt to mobilize support for the jihad. Within weeks of his visit, Sadat authorized Egypt’s full participation, giving permission for the U.S. Air Force to use Egypt as a base…and recruiting, training, and arming Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood activists for battle…. Not only were they packaged and shipped to Afghanistan, but [by the end of 1980] they received expert training from U.S. Special Forces.⁴⁸

U.S. military trainers had in fact already been in Egypt since at least 1978 (the year of the Israel-Egypt Camp David peace accords), training Sadat’s elite praetorian guard, of which Mohamed Ali was at the time a member. At first the training was handled by a “private” firm, J.J. Cappucci and Associates, owned by former CIA officers Ed Wilson and Theodore Shackley. But after Brzezinski’s visit in 1980, the contract was taken over by the CIA.⁴⁹

In 1981 Ali Mohamed was selected out of the U.S.-trained praetorian guard for four months of Special Forces training at Fort Bragg: “Working alongside Green Berets, he learned unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency operations, and how to command elite soldiers on difficult missions.”⁵⁰ The leadership aspect of this training almost certainly means that Mohamed was part of the Pentagon’s Professional military education (PME) program for future leaders; and that he was being trained to transmit to Egypt the kind of Afghanistan-related skills that he later provided to Al-Kifah on Long Island in 1989.

Mohamed was thus in America when some of his fellow guard members, responding to a fatwa or religious order from Muslim Brotherhood member Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, assassinated Sadat in October 1981. The assassination only accelerated the export to Afghanistan of Muslim Brotherhood members accused of the murder. These included two of Mohamed’s eventual close associates, Sheikh Abdel Rahman and Rahman’s then friend Ayman al-Zawahiri, to whom Mohamed swore a bayat or oath of allegiance in 1984, after his return to Egypt.⁵¹

The Al-Kifah Target in 1993: Not Afghanistan but Bosnia

Morgenthau’s suspicions about Afghanistan in 1993 were very pertinent, but also somewhat anachronistic; by 1993, under its new director James Woolsey, the CIA had lost interest in Afghanistan. The new interim president of Afghanistan, Mojaddedi, under pressure from Washington, announced that the Arab Afghans should leave. Pakistan followed suit, closed the offices of all mujahedin in its country, and ordered the deportation of all Arab Afghans.⁵² But the Al-Kifah support network had new targets in mind elsewhere.

After 1991 the Al-Kifah center was focused chiefly on training people for jihad in Bosnia, and at least two sources allege that Ali Mohamed himself visited Bosnia in 1992 (when he also returned to Afghanistan).⁵³

Al-Kifah’s English-language newsletter Al-Hussam (The Sword) also began publishing regular updates on jihad action in Bosnia….Under the control of the minions of Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman, the newsletter aggressively incited sympathetic Muslims to join the jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan themselves….The Al-Kifah Bosnian branch office in Zagreb, Croatia, housed in a modern, two-story building, was evidently in close communication with the organizational headquarters in New York. The deputy director of the Zagreb office, Hassan Hakim, admitted to receiving all orders and funding directly from the main United States office of Al-Kifah on Atlantic Avenue controlled by Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman.⁵⁴

One of Ali Mohamed’s trainees at al-Kifah, Rodney Hampton-El, assisted in this support program, recruiting warriors from U.S. Army bases like Fort Belvoir, and also training them to be fighters in New Jersey.⁵⁵ In 1995 Hampton-El was tried and convicted for his role (along with al-Kifah leader Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman) in the plot to blow up New York landmarks. At the trial Hampton-El testified how he was personally given thousands of dollars for this project by Saudi Prince Faisal in the Washington Saudi Embassy.⁵⁶ (In addition, “Saudi intelligence has contributed to Sheikh Rahman’s legal-defence fund, according to Mohammed al-Khilewi, the former first secretary to the Saudi mission at the U.N.)”⁵⁷

The FBI and Saudi Support, Not Just for the Makhtab, but for Al- Qaeda

The Saudis, like the Egyptians, had domestic reasons for wishing to export as many Muslim Brotherhood members to possible death in Afghanistan, Bosnia, or anywhere else. Until 1979 Saudi Arabia had provided a home to Brotherhood members fleeing persecution in countries like Syria and Egypt, where some of them had tried to assassinate the Saudis’ political enemy Gamel Abdel Nasser. But in 1979 radical Wahhabis, condemning the ruling Saudi family as corrupt infidels, seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca and defended it for weeks.⁵⁸ Profoundly shaken, the Saudi family used its foundations, like the World Muslim League (WML), to subsidize the emigration of political Islamists, above all to the new jihad in Afghanistan, which opened one month later against the Soviet Union.⁵⁹

In Afghanistan both Rahman and al-Zawahiri worked with the Makhtab al Khidamat that had been created in 1984 by two other members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam and the Saudi Osama bin Laden.⁶⁰ All that the 9/11 Commission Report has to say about the Makhtab’s financing is that “Bin Laden and his comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from the United States” (p. 56). But the Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid makes clear the support coming from the Saudi royal family, including Prince Turki (the head of Saudi intelligence), and also royal creations like the World Muslim League:

Bin Laden, although not a royal, was close enough to the royals and certainly wealthy enough to lead the Saudi contingent. Bin Laden, Prince Turki and General [Hameed] Gul [the head of the Pakistani ISI] were to become firm friends and allies in a common cause. The center for the Arab-Afghans was the offices of the World Muslim League and the Muslim Brotherhood in Peshawar which was run by Abdullah Azam. Saudi funds flowed to Azam and the Makhtab al Khidamat or Services Center which he created in 1984 to service the new recruits and receive donations from Islamic charities. Donations from Saudi Intelligence, the Saudi Red Crescent, the World Muslim League and private donations from Saudi princes and mosques were channeled through the Makhtab. A decade later the Makhtab would emerge at the center of a web of radical organizations that helped carry out the World Trade Center bombing [in 1993] and the bombings of US Embassies in Africa in 1998.⁶¹

Former Ambassador Peter Tomsen has described how the evolution of the Makhtab into al-Qaeda was accomplished with support from the offices of royally ordained organizations like the World Muslim League (WML) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY):

Bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, headed the Muslim World League office in Peshawar during the mid-1980s. In 1988, he moved to Manila and opened a branch office of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. He made the charity a front for bin Laden’s terrorist operations in the Philippines and Asia. Al Qaeda operatives, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and his nephew Ramzi Yusuf [master bomb-maker of the 1993 WTC bombing], traveled to Manila in the early 1990s to help Khalifa strengthen al-Qaeda networks in Southeast Asia and plan terrorist attacks in the region.⁶²

There are many other examples of WML and WAMY connections to Al-Qaeda. For example Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, a signatory of Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa to kill Jews and Americans, was invited in 1996 to the 34th WML Congress in Mecca and also spoke there to WAMY.⁶³ Yet there are only minimal references to Maulana Fazlur Rehman in the western (as opposed to the Asian) media, and none (according to a Lexis Nexis search in July 2013) linking him to the WML or WAMY.

The FBI’s hands-off attitude towards WAMY in America may help explain its protection of Ali Mohamed. According to former federal prosecutor John Loftus and others, there was a block in force in the 1980s against antiterrorism actions that might embarrass the Saudis.⁶⁴ This block explains for example the protection enjoyed by the chair of WAMY in Virginia, Osama bin Laden’s nephew Abdullah bin Laden. The FBI opened an investigation of Abdullah bin Laden in February 1996, calling WAMY “a suspected terrorist organization,” but the investigation was closed down six months later.⁶⁵

How and Why Did a Passportless Osama Leave Saudi Arabia?

None of the official or privileged sources on Ali Mohamed has linked him to Saudi intelligence activities. But there is at least one such link, his trip, as described in the Coleman FBI affidavit, when he “travelled to Afghanistan to escort Usama bin Laden from Afghanistan to the Sudan.”⁶⁶ The FBI affidavit presents this, without explanation, as an act in furtherance of an al-Qaeda “murder conspiracy.” But Osama’s move to Sudan was synchronized with a simultaneous investment in Sudan by his bin Laden brothers, including an airport construction project that was largely subsidized by the Saudi royal family.⁶⁷

A great deal of confusion surrounds the circumstances of bin Laden’s displacement in 1991-92, from Saudi Arabia via Pakistan (and perhaps Afghanistan) to the Sudan. But in these conflicted accounts one fact is not contested: bin Laden’s trip was initially arranged by someone in the royal family.⁶⁸ Steve Coll inGhost Wars reports that this person was Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki, who blamed it on pressure from the U.S:

Peter Tomsen and other emissaries from Washington discussed the rising Islamist threat with [Saudi intelligence chief] Prince Turki in the summer of 1991…. At some of the meetings between Turki and the CIA, Osama bin Laden’s name came up explicitly. The CIA continued to pick up reporting that he was funding radicals such as Hekmatyar in Afghanistan…. “His family has disowned him,” Turki assured the Americans about bin Laden. Every effort had been made to persuade bin Laden to stop protesting against the Saudi royal family. These efforts had failed, Turki conceded, and the kingdom was now prepared to take sterner measures…. Bin Laden learned of this when Saudi police arrived at his cushion-strewn, modestly furnished compound in Jeddah to announce that he would have to leave the kingdom. According to an account later provided to the CIA by a source in Saudi intelligence, the officer assigned to carry out the expulsion assured bin Laden that this was being done for his own good. The officer blamed the Americans. The U.S. government was planning to kill him, he told bin Laden, by this account, so the royal family would get him out of the kingdom for his own protection. The escort put bin Laden on a plane out of Saudi Arabia.⁶⁹

Coll’s magisteral but privileged book appeared in February 2004. Six months later the 9/11 Commission Report published a quite different account, implying that by 1991 the Saudi government was estranged from bin Laden:

The Saudi government… undertook to silence Bin Laden by, among other things, taking away his passport. With help from a dissident member of the royal family, he managed to get out of the country under the pretext of attending an Islamic gathering in Pakistan in April 1991.⁷⁰

Lawrence Wright claims that the prince returning Osama’s passport was Interior Minister Prince Naif, after bin Laden persuaded him he was needed in Peshawar “in order to help mediate the civil war among the mujahideen.”⁷¹ Prince Naif, the most anti-American of the senior Saudi royals, gave back bin Laden’s passport on one condition, that he “sign a pledge that he would not interfere with the politics of South Arabia or any Arab country.”⁷²

The “Islamic gathering” is almost certainly a reference to the on-going negotiations in Peshawar which eventually produced the Saudi-backed Peshawar Accord (finalized in April 1992) to end the Afghan Civil War. By several well-informed accounts, Bin Laden did play an important part in these negotiations, in furtherance (I would argue) of Prince Tuki’s own policies. Like Sheikh Rahman before him in 1990, bin Laden tried, vainly, to negotiate a truce between the warring mujahideen leaders, Massoud and Hekmatyar. In these negotiations (according to Peter Tomsen, who was there), Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda were all united in seeking the same objective: a united Sunni army that (in opposition to American appeals for Shia representation) that could retake Kabul by force.⁷³

Thus I believe it is quite clear that bin Laden, in his mediation attempts to bring Hekmatyar into the Peshawar consensus, was acting in line with official Saudi and Pakistani interests. Others disagree. Without documentation, the author of the Frontline biography of bin Laden asserts,

Contrary to what is always reiterated bin Laden has never had official relations with the Saudi regime or the royal family. All his contacts would happen through his brothers. …. Specifically he had no relation with Turki al-Faisal head of Saudi intelligence. He used to be very suspicious of his role in Afghanistan and once had open confrontation with him in 1991 and accused him of being the reason of the fight between Afghan factions.⁷⁴

Michael Scheuer, once head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, endorsed this claim, and reinforced it with the testimony of Sa’ad al-Faqih (a critic of the Saudi royal family who has been accused by the U.S. Treasury of being affiliated with al-Qaeda) that, “after the Soviets withdrew ‘Saudi intelligence [officers] were actually increasing the gap between Afghani factions to keep them fighting.’”⁷⁵

But this claim if true must have been after Kabul fell to the jihadis in 1992, when Massoud, backed by the favored Saudi client Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, began to fight Hekmatyar, the favored client of Pakistan’s ISI. Before this time the U.S. State Department’s Afghan policy was to promote a broad-based opposition to the rump Communist government in Kabul, while “side-lining the extremists,” including both Hekmatyar and Sayyaf, ⁷⁶ Pakistan’s ISI in the same period clearly wanted a strong rebel alliance united behind Hekmatyar, and both the CIA and the Saudis agreed. As Barnett Rubin reports, “During this period, political ‘unity’ of some sort among the mujahidin groups was a major goal of U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi policy.”⁷⁷

Hekmatyar

I conclude that bin Laden’s mediation efforts in Peshawar in 1991 were in accordance with Prince Turki’s preferences, just as did Ali Mohamed, in organizing bin Laden’s subsequent move from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Sudan. As Steve Coll reports, the break between bin Laden and the Saudi royal family did not become serious until 1993, after the involvement of bin Laden’s ally Sheikh Rahman in the first WTC bombing.⁷⁸

Meanwhile Saudi royal support for this web of radical organizations, in which Ali Mohamed was a central organizer and trainer, continued until at least 1995, well after the WTC bombing of 1993. Anthony Summers reports that Turki may have personally renewed a deal with bin Laden as late as 1998:

In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 the prince sealed a deal under which bin Laden undertook not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban…. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden. Turki would deny after 9/11 that any such deal was done with bin Laden. One account has it, however, that he himself met with bin Laden – his old protégé from the days of the anti-Soviet jihad – during the exchanges that led to the deal.⁷⁹

In 1991 the Soviet troops had been out of Kabul for two years; and, as former US Ambassador Tomsen has reported, the CIA’s objective of a Pakistan-backed military overthrow in Kabul was at odds with the official U.S. policy of support for “a political settlement restoring Afghanistan’s independence.”⁸⁰Ambassador Tomsen himself told the CIA Station Chief in Islamabad (Bill) that, by endorsing Pakistan’s military attack on Kabul,

he was violating fundamental U.S. policy precepts agreed to in Washington by his own agency. American policy was to cut Hekmatyar off, not build him up. Bill looked at me impassively as I spoke. I assumed his superiors in Langley had approved the offensive. The U.S. government was conducting two diametrically opposed Afghan policies.⁸¹

Steve Coll agrees that “By early 1991, the Afghan policies pursued by the State Department and the CIA were in open competition with each other…. The CIA…continued to collaborate with Pakistani military intelligence on a separate military track that mainly promoted Hekmatyar and other Islamist commanders.”⁸²

SAUDI OIL

This conflict between the State Department and CIA was far from unprecedented. In particular it recalled the CIA-State conflict in Laos in 1959-60, which led to a tragic war in Laos, and eventually Vietnam.⁸³Just as oil companies had a stake in that conflict, so too in 1990-92 the CIA was thinking not just of Afghanistan but of the oil resources of Central Asia, where some of the al-Kifah-trained “Arab Afghans” were about to focus their attention.

The State Department in Afghanistan represented the will of the National Security Council and the public state. The CIA, on the other hand, was not “rogue” (as has sometimes been suggested). It was pursuing the goals of oil companies and their financial backers – or what I have called the deep state — in preparing for a launch into the former Soviet republics of central Asia.

In 1991 the leaders of Central Asia “began to hold talks with Western oil companies, on the back of ongoing negotiations between Kazakhstan and the US company Chevron.” The first Bush Administration actively supported the plans of U.S. oil companies to contract for exploiting the resources of the Caspian region, and also for a pipeline not controlled by Moscow that could bring the oil and gas production out to the west.

In the same year 1991, Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn, three veterans of U.S. operations in Laos, and later of Oliver North’s operations with the Contras, turned up in Baku under the cover of an oil company, MEGA Oil. This was at a time when the first Bush administration had expressed its support for an oil pipeline stretching from Azerbaijan across the Caucasus to Turkey. MEGA never did find oil, but did contribute materially to the removal of Azerbaijan from the sphere of post-Soviet Russian influence.

As MEGA operatives in Azerbaijan, Secord, Aderholt, Dearborn, and their men engaged in military training, passed “brown bags filled with cash” to members of the government, and above all set up an airline on the model of Air America which soon was picking up hundreds of mujahedin mercenaries in Afghanistan. (Secord and Aderholt claim to have left Azerbaijan before the mujahedin arrived.) Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, who at the time was still allied with bin Laden, was “observed recruiting Afghan mercenaries [i.e. Arab Afghans] to fight in Azerbaijan against Armenia and its Russian allies.”

Bin Laden, Ali Mohamed, and the Saudi Royal Family

By attempting to negotiate Hekmatyar’s reconciliation with the other Peshawar commanders, bin Laden in 1991 was clearly an important part of this CIA effort. So, a year earlier, had been the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman:

In 1990, after the assassination of Abdullah Azzam, Abd al-Rahman was invited to Peshawar, where his host was Khalid al-Islambouli, brother of one of the assassins of Sadat…. On this trip, reportedly paid for by the CIA, Abd al-Rahman preached to the Afghans about the necessity of unity to overthrow the Kabul regime. ⁸⁴

Sheikh Abdul Rahman

This presumably was shortly before Sheikh Abdul Rahman, even though he was on a State Department terrorist watch list after being imprisoned for the murder of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, was issued a multiple-entry U.S. visa in 1990 “by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in Sudan.”⁸⁵ This was the same CIA-sponsored program that six years earlier had admitted Ali Mohamed, “a visa-waiver program that was … designed to shield valuable assets or those who have performed valuable services for the country.”⁸⁶

And Ali Mohamed himself was, according to the New York Times, part of the CIA’s plan for a military solution: “In the fall of 1992, Mr. Mohamed returned to fight in Afghanistan, training rebel commanders in military tactics, United States officials said.”⁸⁸

The Turki-bin Laden connection, which was cemented by Turki’s chief of staff and bin Laden’s teacher Ahmed Badeeb, may have been renewed as late as 1998:

Mohammed Khaksar

In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 the prince sealed a deal under which bin Laden undertook not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban…. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden. Turki would deny after 0/11 that any such deal was done with bin Laden. One account has it, however, that he himself met with bin Laden – his old protégé from the days of the anti-Soviet jihad – during the exchanges that led to the deal.⁸⁹

Bin Laden’s move to the Sudan in 1991-92, the move organized by Ali Mohamed, appears to have been done in collaboration with his family. There is hotly contested evidence that Osama participated with his brothers in the construction of the Port Sudan airport, a project underwritten with funds from the Saudi royal family.⁹⁰ According to Lawrence Wright, “the Saudi Bnladen Group got the contract to build an airport in Port Sudan, which brought Osama frequently into the country to oversee the construction. He finally moved to Khartoum in 1992….”⁹¹

Not contested, but largely overlooked, is the evidence of how bin Laden financed his move, through investing $50 million in the Sudanese al-Shama Islamic bank – a bank that also had support from both the bin Laden family and the Saudi royal family. As the Chicago Tribune reported in November 2001,

According to a 1996 State Department report on bin Laden’s finances, bin Laden co-founded the Al Shamal bank with a group of wealthy Sudanese and capitalized it with $50 million of his inherited fortune…..⁹²

According to public records, among the investors in the Al Shamal Islamic Bank is a Geneva-based financial services conglomerate headed by Prince Mohamed al-Faisal al-Saud, [brother of Prince Turki], son of the late King [Faisal al-]Saud and a cousin [i.e. nephew] of the current Saudi monarch, King Fahd.

The Al Shamal bank, which opened for business in 1990, admits that Osama bin Laden held three accounts there between 1992 and 1997, when he used Sudan as his base of operations before fleeing to Afghanistan. But the bank insists in a written statement that bin Laden “was never a founder or a shareholder of Al Shamal Islamic Bank.”

Told of the bank’s statement, the State Department official replied that “we stand by” the assertion that bin Laden put $50 million into the bank.

The Al Shamal bank does acknowledge that among its five “main founders” and principal shareholders is another Khartoum bank, the Faisal Islamic Bank of Sudan. According to public records, 19 percent of the Faisal Islamic Bank is owned by the Dar Al-Maal Al-Islami Trust, headed by Saudi Prince [Mohammed al-Faisal] al-Saud.

(The Dar Al-Mal Al-Islami or DMI Trust, “based in the Bahamas and with its operations center in Geneva,” was one of a spate of banks, mostly dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, that were set up with western guidance and assistance – in DMI’s case the assistance came from Price Waterhouse and eventually Harvard University.⁹³ DMI was one of the two main banks which, according to Jane’s Intelligence Review, had been funding the Makhtab and also the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), of which more below.)⁹⁴

Faisal Islamic Bank of Sudan

The $3.5 billion DMI Trust, whose slogan is “Allah is the purveyor of success,” was founded 20 years ago to foster the spread of Islamic banking across the Muslim world. Its 12-member board of directors includes Haydar Mohamed Binladen, according to a DMI spokesman, a half-brother of Osama bin Laden…..

Though small, the Al Shamal Islamic Bank enabled bin Laden to move money quickly from one country to another through its correspondent relationships with some of the world’s major banks, several of which have been suspended since Sept. 11.

The Al Shamal bank was identified as one of bin Laden’s principal financial entities during the trial earlier this year of four Al Qaeda operatives convicted in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.⁹⁵

One might have expected this early and revealing insight into bin Laden’s finances to have been developed in the spate of privileged bin Laden and al Qaeda books that appeared in the years after 2001. In fact I have located only one brief inconsequential reference, in Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens: “Osama had reorganized his personal banking at the Al-Shamal Bank in Khartoum, but his accounts gradually dried up.”⁹⁶

There is of course no mention of the al-Shamal Bank in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Federal Protection for Osama bin Laden’s Brother-in-Law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa

It seems clear that the 1980s official USG block against antiterrorism actions that might embarrass the Saudis was still in force in America in 1995. We see this in the extraordinary federal protection extended to Mohamed Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden’s best friend and brother-in-law.

On December 16, 1994, the San Francisco FBI arrested Khalifa in Morgan Hills (not far from Ali Mohamed’s home). Khalifa’s business card had been discovered in a search one year earlier of Sheikh Rahman’s residence, after which he had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Landmarks case. Soon afterwards, a State Department cable described him as

Mohammed Jamal Khalifa

a known financier of terrorist operations and an officer of an Islamic NGO in the Philippines that is a known Hamas front. He is under indictment in Jordan in connection with a series of cinema bombings earlier this year.⁹⁷

Khalifa, in other words, was like Ali Mohamed involved in terrorist operations on an international level. He was an important source of information and talked freely to the FBI agents who arrested him. In his possession they found “documents that connected Islamic terrorist manuals to the International Islamic Relief Organization, the group that he had headed in the Philippines.”⁹⁸ And in his notebook they found evidence linking him directly to Ramzi Yousef, who at the time was the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist for his role in the 1993 WTC bombing.

But as Peter Lance narrates, “The Feds never got a chance to question him.” Instead, in January 1995, a decision was made by Secretary of State Warren Christopher and supported by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to whisk Khalifa from the United States to Jordan for trial, where he was soon “acquitted of terrorism charges and allowed to move to Saudi Arabia.”⁹⁹

“I remember people at CIA who were ripshit at the time” over the decision, says Jacob L. Boesen, an Energy Department analyst then working at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. “Not even speaking in retrospect, but contemporaneous with what the intelligence community knew about bin Laden, Khalifa’s deportation was unreal.”¹⁰⁰

Even more unreal was the decision of a court in a civil case to return to Khalifa before his deportation the contents of his luggage, including his notebook and other computer files.¹⁰¹

I believe that Peter Lance, after all his meticulous scholarship, failed to identify who was really being protected by this evasive measure. He writes that Khalifa, from 1983 to 1991, “had been trusted by al Qaeda with running the Philippines branch of the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), one of their key NGOs.”¹⁰²

But the IIRO was in the hands of a far greater power than al Qaeda, which in any case did not exist in 1983. It was a charitable organization that had been authorized in 1979 by Saudi royal decree, as an affiliate of another key institution of the royal family, the Muslim World League (MWL).¹⁰³ According to former CIA officer Robert Baer, the IIRO has been run “with an iron hand” by Prince Salman ibn Abdul-Aziz al Saud (the brother of Saudi King Abdullah), who “personally approved all important appointments and spending.”¹⁰⁴

The creation date of 1979 reflects the important shift in that year of the Saudi royal family’s attitude towards the political Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan (of which Mohammed Jamal Khalifa was a senior member). As already noted, 1979 was the year radical Wahhabis, seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca. In response, the Saudi family foundations like the IIRO, moved to subsidize the emigration of the Muslim Brotherhood.¹⁰⁵

Thus Khalifa’s status in the IIRO was not anomalous. Besides the bombings in Jordan, the IIRO has also been linked to support of terrorists in the Philippines,¹⁰⁶ India,¹⁰⁷ Indonesia,¹⁰⁸ Canada,¹⁰⁹ Albania, Chechnya, Kenya,¹¹⁰ and other countries, notably Bosnia.¹¹¹ In particular Khalifa personally has been accused of financing the Philippine terrorist group Abu Sayyaf (which in 1993 had kidnapped an American Bible translator).¹¹² Yet “The U.S. government has not designated Khalifa as a financial supporter of terrorism.”¹¹³

Federal Protection for Al-Qaeda Plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

The Saudi royal protection for Jamal Khalifa was more than matched by the Qatari royal protection of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), Ramzi Yousuf’s uncle and co-conspirator in the Philippines. The 9/11 Commission, who judged KSM to be “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks,” made a muted acknowledgment of this Qatari protection of him:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — Yousef’s uncle, then located in Qatar — was a fellow plotter of Yousef’s in the Manila air plot and had also wired him some money prior to the Trade Center bombing. The U.S. Attorney obtained an indictment against KSM in January 1996, but an official in the government of Qatar probably warned him about it. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed evaded capture (and stayed at large to play a central part in the 9/11 attacks).¹¹⁴

From other sources, notably Robert Baer who was then a CIA officer in Qatar, we learn that the “official” was Sheikh Abdallah bin Khalid bin Hamad al-Thani, the Qatari minister of the Interior and the brother of then Qatari Emir Sheik Hamad bin Khalid al-Thani.¹¹⁵ According to ABC News,

Mohammed is believed to have fled Qatar with a passport provided by that country’s government. He is also believed to have been given a home in Qatar as well as a job at the Department of Public Water Works. Officials also said bin Laden himself visited Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani in Qatar between the years of 1996 and 2000.¹¹⁶

In Triple Cross, Peter Lance, who does not mention KSM’s escape from Qatar, focuses instead on the way that, later in the same year, federal prosecutors kept his name out of the trial of Ramzi Yousuf in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing:

Ramzi Yousuf

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mike Garcia and Dietrich Snell presented a riveting, evidence case… and characterized the material retrieved from Ramzi’s Toshiba laptop as ‘the most devastating evidence of all.”…. While Yousuf’s Toshiba laptop… contained the full details of the plot later executed on 9/11, not a word of that scenario was mentioned during trial. …. Most surprising, during the entire summer-long trial, the name of the fourth Bojinka conspirator, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed…was mentioned by name only once, in reference to a letter found in [Yousuf’s apartment].¹¹⁷

Lance repeatedly suggests that U.S. prosecutors in New York, and particularly Dietrich Snell, were responsible for minimizing the role of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and other shortcomings, because they were seeking “to hide the full truth behind the Justice Department’s failures.”¹¹⁸ But the matter of KSM’s escape in 1996, like the release of Jamal Khalifa, was sensitive at a much higher level than that of prosecutors. It was a matter that reached back into the black hole that is represented by the ultimate United States dependency on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and OPEC, for the defense of the petrodollar.

In other words, the suppression of KSM’s name was not surprising at all. On the contrary, it was totally consistent with one of the most sensitive and controversial features of the 9/11 story: the much-discussed fact that before CIA two counterterrorist officers protected two of the alleged hijackers from detection and surveillance by the FBI.

Federal Protection for Alleged 9/11 Hijackers

Morgenthau’s hypothesis that the CIA was protecting Saudi criminal assets received further corroboration in the wake of 9/11. There is now evidence, much of it systematically suppressed by the 9/11 Commission, that before 9/11 CIA officers Richard Blee and Tom Wilshire inside the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, along with FBI agents Dina Corsi et al., were protecting from investigation and arrest two of the eventual alleged hijackers on 9/11, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — much as the FBI had protected Ali Mohamed from arrest in 1993.

There are also indications that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, like Hampton-El before them, may have been receiving funds indirectly from the Saudi Embassy in Washington:

“[B]etween 1998 and 2002, up to US $73,000 in cashier cheques was funneled by [Saudi Ambassador Prince] Bandar’s wife Haifa – who once described the elder Bushes as like “my mother and father” – to two Californian families known to have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-Hazmi. … Princess Haifa sent regular monthly payments of between $2,000 and $3,500 to Majeda Dweikat, wife of Osama Basnan, believed by various investigators to be a spy for the Saudi government. Many of the cheques were signed over to Manal Bajadr, wife of Omar al-Bayoumi, himself suspected of covertly working for the kingdom. The Basnans, the al-Bayoumis and the two 9/11 hijackers once shared the same apartment block in San Diego. It was al-Bayoumi who greeted the killers when they first arrived in America, and provided them, among other assistance, with an apartment and social security cards. He even helped the men enroll at flight schools in Florida.”¹¹⁹

The Report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 (173-77), though very heavily redacted at this point, supplies corroborating information, including a report that Basnan had once hosted a party for the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman. In other words, the Congressional investigation found indications that the same protection extended to those protected in the crimes of 1993, were protected again in 9/11.

The 9/11 Commission Report recognized that there had been an intelligence failure with respect to al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, but treated it as an accident that might not have occurred “if more resources had been applied.”¹²⁰ This explanation, however, has since been rejected by 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean. Asked if the failure to deal appropriately with al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi could have been a simple mistake, Kean replied:

Oh, it wasn’t careless oversight. It was purposeful. No question about that.…The conclusion that we came to was that in the DNA of these organizations was secrecy. And secrecy to the point of ya don’t share it with anybody.¹²¹

In 2011 an important book by Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, demonstrated conclusively that the withholding was purposive, and sustained over a period of eighteen months.¹²² This interference and manipulation became particularly blatant and controversial in the days before 9/11; it led one FBI agent, Steve Bongardt, to predict accurately on August 29, less than two weeks before 9/11, that “someday someone will die.”¹²³

Before reading Fenton’s book, I was satisfied with Lawrence Wright’s speculations that the CIA may have wanted to recruit the two Saudis; and that “The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation [possibly in conjunction with Saudi Arabia] and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it.”¹²⁴ However I am now persuaded that Lawrence Wright’s explanation, that the CIA was protecting a covert operation, may explain the beginnings of the withholding in January 2000, but cannot explain its renewal in the days just before 9/11.

Fenton analyzes a list of thirty-five different occasions where the two alleged hijackers were protected in this fashion, from January 2000 to about September 5, 2001, less than a week before the hijackings.¹²⁵ In his analysis, the incidents fall into two main groups. In the earlier incidents he sees an intention “to cover a CIA operation that was already in progress.”¹²⁶ However, after “the system was blinking red” in the summer of 2001, and the CIA expected an imminent attack, Fenton can see no other explanation than that “the purpose of withholding the information had become to allow the attacks to go forward.”¹²⁷

In support of Fenton’s conclusion, there is evidence (not mentioned by him) indicating that in mid-2001 the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), who were the chief suppliers of the CIA protection, believed an al-Qaeda attack was imminent, and that al-Mihdhar was important to it. On August 15, CIA Counterterrorism Chief Cofer Black told a secret Pentagon conference, “We’re going to be struck soon…. Many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.”¹²⁸ Three weeks earlier, CTC Deputy Chief Tom Wilshire had written that ““When the next big op is carried out… Khallad [bin Attash] will be at or near the top ….Khalid Midhar should be very high interest.”¹²⁹ Yet Wilshire (like his superior, Richard Blee), instead of expediting to the FBI the transmission of his knowledge about al-Mihdhar, did the opposite: he not only failed to tell anyone else involved in the hunt [for Al-Mihdhar] that Almihdhar would likely soon be a participant in a major al-Qaeda attack inside the US, but also supported a dubious procedure which meant that the FBI was only able to focus a fraction of the resources it had on the hunt.¹³⁰

Fenton’s serious allegation has to be considered in the light of the earlier instances of protection we have surveyed:

1) the protection given to Salameh and Abouhalima in the 1990 Kahane murder, leaving them free to participate in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing;

2) the failure for two or three years to process Ali Mohamed’s documents seized in 1990, which could have prevented the 1993 World Trade Center bombing;

3) the release of Ali Mohamed from RCMP detention in 1993, leaving him free to participate in the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing;

4) the treatment of Ali Mohamed as an “unindicted coconspirator” in the 1993 WTC bombing case and Landmarks case, leaving him free to participate in the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing.

There are other indicators that these events were part of a single long-term cover-up, one that is still ongoing. One of the connectors is Sheikh Abdul Rahman’s Al–Salaam Mosque in Jersey City, visited by Ali Mohamed and his trainees in 1989, and allegedly frequented by two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers (Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi) in 2000-01.¹³¹

Next door to the Mosque in Jersey City was the Sphinx Trading Company, whose incorporator and director, Waleed Abouel Nour, was like Ali Mohamed listed as an unindicted coconspirator in the 1995 Landmarks conspiracy case. (The New York Times later reported that the FBI had identified Nour as a terrorist.)¹³²

At minimum, two Ali Mohamed-trained members of the New York cell — El Sayyid Nosair and Siddig Ali Siddig — are confirmed to have kept mailboxes at Sphinx Trading during the 1990s, as did the blind Sheikh himself. A decade later, the mailboxes were still being used by al Qaeda-linked terrorists. Testifying in a sealed proceeding in 2002, a New Jersey policeman said the FBI told him that “several of the hijackers involved in the September 11th event also had mailboxes at that location.” Police searched the office of a New Jersey businessman [Mohamed el-Atriss] whose name appeared on the Sphinx Trading Co. incorporation papers and found the names and phone numbers of several hijackers among his papers. The businessman eventually admitted having sold fake identification cards to two of the hijackers.¹³³ [One of the fake IDs was given to Khalid Al-Mihdhar.]¹³⁴

This important inquiry into the infrastructure of the Ali Mohamed connection was quickly shut down by the FBI:

The police officer testified in 2002 that the FBI had shut down the New Jersey police investigation of these connections, without explanation but amid unconfirmed rumors (reported by the New York Times) that the businessman was himself an FBI informant. All terrorism charges against the businessman were eventually dropped.¹³⁵

The Saudi-American Petroleum Complex and the Defense of the Petrodollar

This on-going cover-up of a terrorist infrastructure spanning a decade is mirrored by the censorship of the Joint Inquiry findings about Osama Basnan, involved in the pass-through of Saudi Embassy funds to al-Mihdhar, and earlier the host of a party for Sheikh Abdul Rahman. One factor enabling the cover-up is the over-arching and little-understood U.S.-Saudi relationship, to understand which we must also consider the context of petrodollars, OPEC and the major oil companies.

The export of Saudi oil, paid for by all customers in U.S. dollars, and in the U.S. case largely offset by the export of U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia, is a major underpinning of America’s petrodollar economy. As I have documented elsewhere, its current strength is supported by OPEC’s requirement (secured by a secret agreement in the 1970s between the US and Saudi Arabia) that all OPEC oil sales be denominated in dollars.¹³⁶ $600 billion of the Saudi dollar earnings have been reinvested abroad, most of it in U.S. corporations like Citibank (where the two largest shareholders are members of the Saudi Royal family).¹³⁷

This fusion of U.S. and Saudi governing interests is as much political as economic. The first oil price hike of 1972-73, arranged by Nixon with the King of Saudi Arabia and the Shah of Iran, helped pay to arm Iran and Saudi Arabia as U.S. proxies in the region, following the withdrawal of British troops from the region in 1971.¹³⁸ The oil price hikes of 1979-80, on the other hand, were assuredly not the intention of President Carter, a political victim of the increases. They have however been credibly attributed to the work of oil majors like BP, possibly acting in collusion with Republicans; and had the result of helping to elect Ronald Reagan (as well as Margaret Thatcher in England).¹³⁹

I am suggesting that there is a high-level fusion of interests between the U.S. and Saudi governments, oil companies and banks (not to mention facilitating alliances like the Carlyle Group) which the CIA tends to represent continuously, and not just ad hoc for the sake of any one particular goal. The on-going protection given through the years to criminals like Salameh, Ali Mohamed, al-Mihdhar, and al-Hazmi should be seen as symptoms of this high-level fusion of interests. Needless to add, the 99 percent of ordinary American people, having as a result now suffered a series of recurring attacks (the first World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 Embassy bombings, possibly even 9/11 itself) have been losers from this arrangement.

I am confident that the mystery of USG protection to terrorists can be traced in part to this “roof” of inscrutable governmental, financial, and corporate relationships between the United States and Saudi Arabia. There is a “black hole” at the center of this roof in which the interests of governments, petrodollar banks, and multinational oil companies, are all inscrutably mixed.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, ishere.

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Notes

¹ Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little Brown, 2011), 52.

² E.g. Marc Ambinder and D.G. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry (New York: Wiley, 2013); John Tirman, “The Quiet Coup: No, Not Egypt. Here,” Huffington Post, July 9, 2013, here.

³ Erich Lichtblau, “In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.,” New York Times, July 6, 2013.

⁴ In addition there are unproven allegations that the United States granted a green card to Ayman al Zawahiri, identified in the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 57) as “the most important Egyptian in bin Laden’s circle” (p. 57), and since 2011 the leader of al-Qaeda (Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War On Truth:

9/11, Disinformation And The Anatomy Of Terrorism [Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005], 46). It is not contested that “Foreign trial transcripts and U.S. court records confirmed that Zawahiri had previously flown to America, once in the early 1990s, and again in 1994…. Ali Mohamed, bin-Laden’s American-trained military adviser, served as Zawahiri’s host during the 1994 American fundraising campaign” (Jayna Davis, The third terrorist: the Middle East connection to the Oklahoma City bombing [Nashville, TN: WND Books, 2004], 318-19).

⁵ Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Ben Laden: la vérité interdite (Paris : Denoël, 2001), 14.

⁶ Robert Baer, See No Evil: the true story of a ground soldier in the CIA’s war on terrorism (New York : Crown Publishers, 2002), 243-44; discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, oil, and war: the United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 28-31; The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 170-72.

⁷ Cf. my enlargement of the concept of an American deep state beyond parallel government in Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 20-23; Peter Dale Scott, “The ‘Deep State’ behind U.S. democracy,” VoltaireNet, April 6, 2011, here; etc.

⁸ All of America’s military engagements since 1950 have involved defense of the petrodollar system. See Peter Dale Scott, “The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 27, 2011, here.

⁹ Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI — and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him (New York: Regan/ HarperCollins, 2006), 120-25. Cf. Toronto Globe and Mail, November 22, 2001; Tim Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), 397.

¹⁰ Ali H. Soufan, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda (New York: Norton, 2011), 75-77.

¹¹ Lance, Triple Cross, 373. Cf. J.M. Berger, “Paving the Road to 9/11,” Intelwire, here: “Ali Mohamed was the utility player who created al Qaeda’s terrorist infrastructure in the United States — a series of connections, ideas, techniques and specific tools used by the [9/11] plot’s hijackers and masterminds….  Mohamed described teaching al Qaeda terrorists how to smuggle box cutters onto airplanes.”

¹² Lance, Triple Cross, 123-24.

¹³ Soufan, The Black Banners, 561. The testimony of former FBI agents like Ali Soufan that Mohamed was not incarcerated has been challenged in a curious book by Special Forces veteran Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander (New York: Berkley Trade, 2010). Blaber claims to have interviewed Mohamed in a prison cell, after reading Mohamed’s perceptive document on how to track down Osama bin Laden. Blaber argues strenuously that Mohamed was not a double agent, but fails to deal with any of the countervailing evidence (such as the RCMP release).

¹⁴ “D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning,” New York Times, November 8, 2009; cf. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 246-47.  Cf. The Globe and Mail (Canada), May 26, 2011: “FBI thought Mumbai massacre plotter worked for them, court told.” Another much simpler domestic example of this puzzle is Richard Aoki, the FBI informant who in the 1960s supplied the Black Panthers in Oakland with arms (Seth Rosenfeld,Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power [New York: Macmillan, 2012], 418-24, etc.).

¹⁵ Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 151-60. For a summary, see Peter Dale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 29, 2011, here.

¹⁶ Steven Emerson, American jihad: the terrorists living among us (New York: Free Press, 2002), 57-58; Peter L. Bergen,Holy war, Inc.: inside the secret world of Osama bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 135; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 181-82. Wright gives a detailed summary of John Zent’s ensuing interview with Mohamed in May 1993, but says not a word about Zent’s intervention with the RCMP. To my knowledge the only privileged book to do so is Tim Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), 397: “He explained that he was working for the FBI and he offered the telephone number of his Bureau contact in San Francisco. The Canadians released Mohamed after the agent vouched for him.” Weiner’s relative candor came in 2012, long after this FBI scandal had already been publicized by Peter Lance and other authors, including myself.

¹⁷ Cf. Washington Post, June 1, 2012: “Soufan’s case was unusual because he never worked for the CIA. The PRB’s [Publications Review Board’s] authority [i.e. legal authority] is grounded in the secrecy agreements signed by agency employees that require them to submit any material prepared for public disclosure ‘either during my employment . . . or at anytime thereafter.’” In other words, the CIA’s PRB had no legal right to censor Soufan’s book, but did so anyway – an example of the blurring of past bureaucratic distinctions in today’s shadow state.

¹⁸ “Ali Mohamed Case,” Defense Human Resources Activity (DHRA), Department of Defense, here; citing the Toronto Globe and Mail.

¹⁹ Benjamin Weiner and James Risen, “The Masking of a Militant: A special report; A Soldier’s Shadowy Trail In U.S. and in the Mideast,” New York Times, December 1, 1998. This embarrassing exercise in damage control cannot be found on Lexis Nexis.

²⁰ Peter Waldman, Gerald F. Seib, Jerry Markon, Christopher Cooper, “Sergeant Served U.S. Army and bin Laden, Showing Failings in FBI’s Terror Policing,” Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2001.

²¹ Daniel Coleman, Affidavit, Sealed Complaint, United States of America v Ali Abdelseoud Mohamed, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, September 1998 (obtained by INTELWIRE.com), p.7, here. In fact Mohamed had been an FBI informant since at least 1992 (see below).

²² I had no choice but to remove certain relevant material from The Road to 9/11. As British and American lawyers pointed out to me, my sources had already retracted statements that they had made to me.

²³ Lance, Triple Cross, 125. Cf. Steven Emerson, “Osama bin Laden’s Special Operations Man,” Journal of Counterterrorism and Security International,

September 1, 1998, here: “In a seemingly bizarre twist, while in California, Mohammed volunteered to provide information to the FBI on a smuggling operations involving Mexicans and other aliens not connected to terrorist groups. Within time, officials say, the relationship allowed Mohammed to divert the FBI’s attention away from looking at his real role in terrorism into examining the information he gave them about other smuggling.” But it could not have diverted the FBI’s attention for very long. By May 1993, five months later, Mohamed had described to Zent in some detail his activities with Obama and al-Qaeda (Wright, Looming Tower, 181-82; Berger, Ali Mohamed, 31-32).

²⁴ Lance, Triple Cross, 95. Cf. Tim Weiner, Enemies, 397.

²⁵ Lance, Triple Cross, 99. Similarly Tim Weiner writes that the FBI agents handling Mohamed “did not comprehend him” (Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI, 397).

²⁶ “Ali Mohamed Case,” Defense Human Resources Activity (DHRA), Department of Defense, here, emphasis added.

²⁷ U.S. vs. Omar Abdel Rahman et al., September 11, 1995; quoted in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 210; cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 48.

²⁸ “Sergeant Served U.S. Army and bin Laden,” Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2001: “At the time, the FBI wrote them off as harmless zealots, fired up to help the mujahedeen fighting the Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan.”

²⁹ Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 134. The al-Kifah Center (al-Kifah means “the struggle”) was “known informally as ‘the jihad office.’… There was no problem finding volunteers, who might stay in Afghanistan up to three months at a time…. The volunteers joined the forces of the Hezb-I-Islami (Party of Islam), led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar” (Stephen Franklin, “Slain Muslim Had Link To Radical Cleric,” Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1993, here.)

³⁰ Mitchell D. Silber, The Al Qaeda Factor: Plots Against the West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 169-70.

³¹ Peter Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc., 130-31.

³² Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 180; citing Boston Globe, February 3, 1995; cf. Robert Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad,” New Yorker, March 17, 1995; Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: brotherhood of terror ([Parsippany, NJ?]: Alpha, 2002), 117.

³³ Lance Williams and Erik McCormick, “Al Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 4, 2001.

³⁴ “Ali Mohamed Case,” Pentagon, here, Cf. Emerson, “Osama bin Laden’s Special Operations Man:” “He had been in the United States earlier that decade, having graduated as a captain from a Special Forces Officers School at Fort Bragg in 1981 in a program for visiting military officials from foreign countries.”

³⁵ Robert Friedman, “The CIA and the Sheik,” Village Voice, March 30, 1993; Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe(New York: Berg, 2004), 26.

³⁶ John Miller, Michael Stone, Chris Mitchell, The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 44. Cf. J.M. Berger, Jihad Joe: Americans who go to war in the name of Islam, (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2011), 44: “The stash included military training manuals and documents given to Nosair by Sergeant Ali Mohamed, the jihadist mole at Fort Bragg.”

³⁷ Newsday, November 8, 1990.

³⁸ New York Times, November 8, 1990.

³⁹ New York Times, December 16, 1990. As before, it is instructive to compare the Pentagon’s version of the training given by Mohamed (“surveillance, weapons and explosives”) with that in the long article about Mohamed in the New York Times: “Mr. Mohamed met the local Muslims at an apartment in Jersey City, and taught them survival techniques, map reading and how to recognize tanks and other Soviet weapons, according to testimony by one of his students at Mr. Nosair’s 1995 Federal trial” (Weiner and Risen, “The Masking of a Militant: A special report,” New York Times, December 01, 1998; cf. Berger, Ali Mohamed, ).

⁴⁰ TV journalist John Miller, a former New York deputy police commissioner who would later become the FBI’s Assistant Director for Public Affairs, reported in The Cell (44) that the disputed evidence from Nosair’s home was withheld from NYPD officer Edward Morris, who prepared the NYPD case against Nosair: “On the third say after the shooting, while Norris was out to lunch, the FBI removed Nosair’s 16 boxes of files from Norris’s squad room. Unfortunately the evidence was about to enter a black hole. The FBI now says it turned the files the evidence was about to enter a black hole. The FBI now says it turned the files over to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, after it was decided, following a series of meetings and phone calls, that the local prosecutor and the NYPD would have exclusive jurisdiction over the murder case. The Manhattan DA’s office won’t comment on what was done with the files before Nosair’s trail, though Norris was never informed they were available. But this much is certain: The bulk of the material remained untranslated and unread for nearly three years.” [This last sentence is hard to reconcile with the detailed description given at the time by Borelli.]

⁴¹ Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad.”

⁴² Lance, Triple Cross, 58-62.

⁴³ For the list, see Lance, Triple Cross, 574-75.

⁴⁴ Steve Coll, Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 251.

⁴⁵ Quoted in Peter Lance, Triple Cross, 383.

⁴⁶ Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, 255; “Since 1989 the FBI had been running paid informants inside circles of Islamic radicals in New York and New Jersey. In 1990, the FBI carted away forty-seven boxes of documents and training manuals from the home of El Sayyid Nosair.” Cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 73-75, etc.

⁴⁷ Robert Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad,” New Yorker, March 17, 1995.

⁴⁸ Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: how the United States helped unleash fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 274-75; quoting Jiohn Cooley, Unholy Wars (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 31-32: “By the end of 1980, U.S. military trainers were sent to Egypt to impart the skills of the U.S. Special Forces to those Egyptians who would, in turn, pass on the training to the Egyptian volunteers flying to the aid of the mujahideen in Afghanistan.”

⁴⁹ Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to terror: the rogue CIA and the legacy of America’s private intelligence network (New York: Carrol and Graf, 2005), 150, 247.

⁵⁰ “Ali Mohamed Case,” here.

⁵¹ Lance, Triple Cross, 194 (oath).

⁵²  Scott, Road to 9/11, 161-62; citing Guardian (London), January 7, 1993; Evan F. Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2004), 16.

⁵³ Ferrukh Mir, Half Truth (iUniverse.com, 2011), 163-64: “In 1992, Ali Mohamed, a double agent and ex-US Special Forces officer with close ties to Al-Kifah, led a group of US militants who were all ex-US soldiers to train and fight in Bosnia. Abu Obadiah Yahiya, an ex-US Marine and security chief at the Brooklyn branch, lead [sic] a second group of US militants to fight in Bosnia.” Cf. Mark Huband, Trading Secrets: spies and intelligence in an age of terror (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 112; “Mohamed – using the nom-de-guerre Abu ‘Abdallah – travelled to Bosnia as part of a team which trained and armed Muslim fighters there until June 1993, when he travelled on to Khartoum and was asked by bin Laden to set up the al-Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Kenya.”

⁵⁴ Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe (New York: Berg, 2004), 39-41; citing Steve Coll and Steve LeVine, “Global Network Provides Money, Haven,” Washington Post, August 3, 1993

⁵⁵ Scott, Road to 9/11, 149-50; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 45, 73-75.

⁵⁶ Scott, Road to 9/11, 149; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 73. I have been unable to identify this Prince Faisal securely. He is perhaps Prince Faisal bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who frequently visited the United States in connection with his horse breeding interests in Kentucky. In 2003 Gerald Posner claimed that Faisal’s brother and business partner Ahmed bin Salman had had ties to al-Qaeda and advance knowledge of 9/11 (Gerald Posner, Why America slept: the failure to prevent 9/11 [New York: Random House, 2003]), 202. Cf. Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 405-07, 419, 563-64.

⁵⁷ Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad.” About this time, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 2013 the leader of al-Qaeda, came to America without difficulty to raise funds in Silicon Valley, where he was hosted by Ali Mohamed (Lawrence Wright, New Yorker: “Zawahiri decided to look for money in the world center of venture capitalism-Silicon Valley. He had been to America once before, in 1989, when he paid a recruiting visit to the mujahideen’s Services Bureau branch office in Brooklyn. According to the F.B.I., he returned in the spring of 1993, this time to Santa Clara, California, where he was greeted by Ali Mohamed, the double agent.”)

⁵⁸ Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam’s Holiest Shrine (New York: Anchor, 2008).

⁵⁹ Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 179-82, 195-99.

⁶⁰ Steve Coll, Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 155. For Azzam’s and OBL’s Muslim Brotherhood memberships, see Steve Coll,The Bin Ladens: an Arabian family in the American century (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 148, 253.

⁶¹ Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 131. Cf. Steven A. Yetiv, The Petroleum Triangle: Oil, Globalization, and Terror (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 65.

⁶² Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: messianic terrorism, tribal conflicts, and the failures of great powers (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 198.

⁶³ Scott, Road to 9/11, 171; citing Rajeev Sharma, Pak Proxy War (New Delhi: Kaveri Books, 2002), 145-46.

⁶⁴ Cf. John J. Loftus ,  “What Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9/11,” May 2003, here: “The … block order, in force since the 1980’s, was against any investigation that would embarrass the Saudi Royal family. Originally, it was designed to conceal Saudi support for Muslim extremists fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Chechnya, but it went too far. Oliver North noted in his autobiography, that every time he tried to do something about terrorism links in the Middle East, he was told to stop because it might embarrass the Saudis. This block remains in place.”

⁶⁵ Scott, Road to 9/11, 172; citing Greg Palast and David Pallister, “Intelligence: FBI Claims Bin Laden Inquiry Was Frustrated,” Guardian, November 7, 2001, here.

⁶⁶ Coleman affidavit, 2; in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 26.

⁶⁷ Coll, The Bin Ladens, 399-401.

⁶⁸ For a summary of some of the conflicting accounts, see Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 215-16.

⁶⁹ Coll, Ghost Wars, 231. In 2001 Peter Bergen had claimed that bin Laden “used his family connections with King Fahd to convince the [Saudi] government that he needed to leave the country to sort out some business matters in Pakistan. Arriving there in April 1991, he then sent a letter to his family telling them that he would not be able to return home. After some months in Afghanistan he arrived in Sudan” (Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc., 81-82).

⁷⁰ 9/11 Commission Report, 57. In the December 2004 paperback edition of Ghost Wars (231-32), Coll adjusted his account to reconcile with the 9/11 Report. He replaced his sentence, “The escort put bin Laden on a plane out of Saudi Arabia,” with two new ones: “Two associates of bin Laden later offered a different version while under interrogation. They said a dissident member of the royal family helped him leave the country by arranging for bin Laden to attend an Islamic conference in Pakistan during the spring of 1991.” (Wright, Looming Tower, 161; Roy Gutman. How We Missed the Story: Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan [Washington DC: Endowment of the United States Institute of Peace, 2008], 34).

⁷¹ Steve Coll also suggests that the “interior ministry” (headed by Prince) supplied bin Laden  with “a one-time exit visa to travel to Pakistan to liquidate investments there” (Coll, The Bin Ladens, 381). Both motives may have been present in bin Laden’s mind, but his capacity to serve as a mediator may have been more influential in persuading the Saudis to arrange for his departure.

⁷² Wright, Looming Tower, 161. For Naif (or Nayef) as anti-American, see Coll, Ghost Wars, 399; Coll, The Bin Ladens, 437, 626n.

⁷³ Tomsen, Wars of Afghanistan, 485: “Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood extremists, and Prince Turki’s General Intelligence Directorate supported the ISI’s extremist-centered Afghan strategy.”

⁷⁴ “A Biography of Osama bin Laden,” Frontline, PBS,http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/bio2.html.

⁷⁵ Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Through our enemies’ eyes: Osama bin Laden, radical Islam, and the future of America(Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006), 131.

⁷⁶ Coll, Ghost Wars, 207.

⁷⁷ Barnett R. Rubin, Afghanistan from the Cold War Through the War on Terror (New York: Oxford UP, 2013), 86.

⁷⁸ Coll, The Bin Ladens, 403-05.

⁷⁹ Summers, The Eleventh Day, 393: “Citing a U.S. intelligence source, the author Simon Reeve reported as much in 1999 – well before it became an issue after 9/11.” It is not contested that when bin Laden exited Sudan in 1996, his plane stopped in Qatar. “At the airport in Doha, Qatar’s capital, government officials boarded the plane and greeted bin Laden warmly” (Coll, Ghost Wars, 325).

⁸⁰ Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: messianic terrorism, tribal conflicts, and the failures of great powers (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 337.

⁸¹ Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 406-07.

⁸² Steve Coll, Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 225.

⁸³ Scott, American War Machine, 94-105; Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War(Ipswich MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 98-103.

⁸⁴ Rubin, Afghanistan from the Cold War, 86.

⁸⁵ Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: inside the secret world of Osama bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 67. Cf. Ali Soufan, Black Banners, 565 (murder of Anwar Sadat, watch list); Berger, Jihad Joe, 24 (watch list).

⁸⁶ Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 180; cf.  Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: brotherhood of terror ([Parsippany, NJ?]: Alpha, 2002), 117.

⁸⁷  “A Soldier’s Shadowy Trail In U.S. and in the Mideast,” New York Times, December 1, 1998, here.

⁸⁸ Phil Karber, Fear and faith in paradise: exploring conflict and religion in the Middle East (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), ZZ; cf. Wright, Looming Tower, 164-65.

⁸⁹ Summers, The Eleventh Day, 393: “Citing a U.S. intelligence source, the author Simon Reeve reported as much in 1999 – well before it became an issue after 9/11.”

⁹⁰ Coll, The Bin Ladens, 399-401. Cf. Geoffrey Wawro, Quicksand: America’s pursuit of power in the Middle East (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), ZZ: “Osama mixed business and religion. He committed to build an airport at Port Sudan;” Karber,Fear and faith in paradise, ZZ: “Bin Laden promised the people of Sudan an airport at Port Sudan.”

⁹¹ Wright, Looming Tower, 165.

⁹² The text of the State Department paper of August 14, 1996, “State Department Issues Factsheet on Bin Ladin,” is reproduced in Brisard and Dasquié, Ben Laden: la vérité interdite, 257-58.

⁹³ Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 180-81.

⁹⁴ Jane’s Intelligence Review, August 1, 2001; quoted in Scott, Road to 9/11, 356.

⁹⁵ John Crewdson, “Swiss Officials Freeze Bank Accounts Linked to Supporters of Terrorist Groups.” Chicago Tribune, November 3, 2001, here. Cf. Ahmed, War on Truth, 98; Financial Times, November 29 2001, here: “A US State Department report in 1996 and a French investigation into the bank separately concur that bin Laden invested $50m in the bank on his arrival in Sudan in 1991, an allegation Mr Ismail [of the bank] denies.” Cf. also Brisard, Ben Laden: La Verité Interdite, 119-21, 308-10, etc.

⁹⁶ Coll, The Bin Ladens, 413. There is a brief reference to the State Department White Paper in Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc.(2001), 83: “Bin Laden…sank $50 million of his own money into the Al-Shamal Islamic Bank in Khartoum” (cf. 264n). The controversial author Yossef Bodansky links both the Faisal Islamic Bank and the Al-Shamal Bank to significant jihad activities, as well as possible drug trafficking (Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: the man who declared war on America (Rocklin, CA: Forum, 2001), 42-43.

⁹⁷ Lance, Triple Cross, 157-59, citing State Department Cable 1994STATE335575.

⁹⁸ Steve A. Yetiv, The petroleum triangle: oil, globalization, and terror (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2011), 114-15.

⁹⁹ Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 108. At ease in Saudi Arabia, Khalifa became a misleading source, rather than a topic of inquiry, in privileged bin Laden books like Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (112-13, 450).

¹⁰⁰ Lance, Triple Cross, 161, citing personal interview.

¹⁰¹ Lance, Triple Cross, 162.

¹⁰² Lance, Triple Cross, 157-58.

¹⁰³ Khalifa also “headed the Muslim World League office in Peshawar in the 1980s. In 1988, he moved to Manila and opened a branch office of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth [an allied royal creation]” (Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 198).

¹⁰⁴ Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (New York: Crown, 2003), 167, 140.

¹⁰⁵ Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 179-82, 195-99.

¹⁰⁶ Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia, 93.

¹⁰⁷ Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, 69; Aaron Mannes, Profiles In Terror: The Guide To Middle East Terrorist Organizations(Lanham, MD: Rowman  & Littlefield, 2004), 41.

¹⁰⁸ Kumar Ramakrishna (ed.), After Bali: The Threat of Terrorism in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, 2003), 139.

¹⁰⁹ Wesley J. L. Anderson, Disrupting Threat Finances: Utilization of Financial Information to Disrupt Terrorist Organizations in the Twenty-First Century (S.l.: BiblioScholar, 2012), 14.

¹¹⁰ Girma Yohannes Iyassu Menelik, Europe: The future Battleground of Islamic Terrorism, 95.

¹¹¹ Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 41-42. Before being captured in Pakistan, Ramzi Yousuf was being sheltered by his maternal uncle Zahid al-Shaikh, a principal with Mercy International (Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge, 189). Mercy International was another Islamic NGO involved in recruiting “international volunteers” for the war in Bosnia (Richard Labévière, Dollars For Terror: The United States and Islam (New York: Algora, 2000), 151.

¹¹² Larry Niksch, Abu Sayyaf: Target of Philippine-U. S. Anti-Terrorism Cooperation (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 2007), CRS-4.

¹¹³ Peter L. Bergen, The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda’s Leader (New York: Free Press, 2006), 444.

¹¹⁴ 9/11 Commission Report, 73; citing Joint Inquiry Report (classified version), 324-28. Cf. pp. 146, 148: “In 1992, KSM… moved his family to Qatar at the suggestion of the former minister of Islamic affairs of Qatar, Sheikh Abdallah…, In January 1996, well aware that U.S. authorities were chasing him, he left Qatar for good.”

¹¹⁵ Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, 18-19, 194-96. Baer heard from another member of the al-Thani family, former police chief Hamad bin Jasim bin Hamad al-Thani, that when KSM came from the Philippines, Abdallah bin Khalid gave him 20 blank Qatari passports. Later, “As soon as the FBI showed up in Doha” in 1996, the emir ordered Abdallah to move KSM out of his apartment to his beach estate, and eventually out of the country (pp. 195-96).

¹¹⁶ Brian Ross and David Scott, “Al Qaeda Ally? Member of Qatari Royal Family Helped Senior Al Qaeda Official Get Away,” ABCNEWS.com, February 7, 2003, here.

¹¹⁷ Lance, Triple Cross, 253; emphasis in original. Lance does discuss the role of Qatar’s Sheikh Abdullah in helping KSM to escape the FBI (Cover up: what the government is still hiding about the war on terror [New York: Regan Books, 2004], 168-69).

¹¹⁸ Lance, Triple Cross, 342.

¹¹⁹ Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 410-15, 559-62; Former Senator Bob Graham, Keys to the Kingdom, 131-32; cf. David B Ottaway, The king’s messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’s tangled relationship with Saudi Arabia (New York: Walker & Company, 2008), 198-99.

¹²⁰ 9/11 Commission Report, 266-72 (272).

¹²¹ Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski, “Who Is Rich Blee?” 911Truth.org, September 21, 2111, here; Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski, “Insiders voice doubts about CIA’s 9/11 story,” Salon, October 14, 2111, here. O’Connor and Nowosielski add corroboration from former Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke. “Clarke said he assumed that ‘there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information.’ When asked who might have issued such an order, he replied, ‘I would think it would have been made by the director,” referring to Tenet — although he added that Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today “even if you waterboarded them.’

¹²² Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots (Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2011). According to Fenton (pp. 72-79), the post-9/11 cover-up of Wilshire’s behavior was principally the work of one person, Barbara Grewe, who worked first on the Justice Department Inspector General’s investigation of Wilshire’s behavior, then was transferred to two successive positions with the 9/11 Commission’s staff.

¹²³ 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352–54; Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 203.

¹²⁴ Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; cf. Wright, Looming Tower, 339-44; discussion in Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, 355, 388-89.

¹²⁵ Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 383-86.

¹²⁶ Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 48. Cf. Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; quoted approvingly in Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 399.

¹²⁷ Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95.

¹²⁸ Quoted in Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars, 21.

¹²⁹ Tom Wilshire, July 23, 2001, in “United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui (No. 01-455), Substitution for the Testimony of ‘John.’” U.S. Court for the District of Alexandria, July 31, 2006; quoted in Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 274, 401.

¹³⁰ Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 276.

¹³¹ Berger, Ali Mohamed, 17; citing Wayne Parry, “Mysterious pair in custody perplexes federal investigators,” Associated Press, November 11, 2001; Falasten M. Abdeljabbar, “Neighborhood tired of suspicions and fear,” The Jersey Journal, December 18, 2001.

¹³² Robert Hanley and Jonathan Miller, “4 Transcripts Are Released in Case Tied to 9/11 Hijackers,” New York Times, June 25, 2003.

¹³³ Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18; citing John Kifner, “Kahane Suspect Is a Muslim With a Series of Addresses,” New York Times, November 7, 1990; Transcript, Sealed Bail Hearing, US v. El-Atriss, November 19, 2002. The transcripts were unsealed after a lawsuit by several organizations including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

¹³⁴ Wayne Parry, “September 11 Fake ID Suspect Flees U.S.,” Associated Press, July 31, 2003, here.

¹³⁵ Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18; citing Robert Hanley and Jonathan Miller, “4 Transcripts Are Released In Case Tied to 9/11 Hijackers,” New York Times, June 25, 2003; Wayne Parry, “Judge releases transcripts in Sept. 11 fake IDs case,” Associated Press, June 24, 2003. The New York Times story is worth quoting further: “*Mr. Atriss was a co-founder of a Jersey City check-cashing company, Sphinx Trading Company, that had bank accounts with millions of dollars and had as a co-owner Waleed Abouel Nour, whom the F.B.I. had identified as a terrorist. That business was at the same location, on Kennedy Boulevard, used as a mailing address by several of the hijackers and earlier by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, whose followers were convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.”

¹³⁶ Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 53. Cf. David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), x: “In 1974 [Treasury Secretary William] Simon negotiated a secret deal so the Saudi central bank could buy U.S. Treasury securities outside of the normal auction. A few years later, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal cut a secret deal with the Saudis so that OPEC would continue to price oil in dollars. These deals were secret because the United States had promised other industrialized democracies that it would not pursue such unilateral policies.

¹³⁷ See e.g. Michael Quint, “Saudi Prince Becomes Citicorp’s Top Stockholder.” New York Times, February 22, 1991.

¹³⁸ Andrew Scott Cooper, The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 275, etc.; Scott, Road to 9/11, 33-34.

¹³⁹ F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New  World Order (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 173; Andrew Gavin Marshall, “The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the ‘Arc of Crisis.’” GlobalResearch, September 4, 2010, here. Cf. Scott, Road to 9/11, 86-89.

Peter Dale Scott, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 29, No. 1, July 29, 2013.

Society’s insanity plea: The real cause behind global mass poisoning

The downfall of modern civilization

Mike Adams
Natural News
July 30, 2013

There are over five thousand species of mammals on planet Earth, but only one of them is insane. It also turns out there is only one species of mammal that intentionally poisons itself (and its children) by injecting toxic, neuro-damaging chemicals into most members of the species. That species is, of course, homo sapiens.

If you look around the planet these days, you see tens of thousands of species of mammals, birds, reptiles and even insects. Five things all these have in common is:

1) None of them eat processed foods. They innately eat raw, unprocessed, uncooked foods from nature.

2) None of them take prescription medications.

3) None of them inject their offspring with toxic vaccines laced with hidden chemicals.

4) None of them practice mechanized chemical agriculture / monoculture.

5) None of them live in delusional, artificial worlds of TV or the internet.

Yet humans, the most insane species on the planet, routinely engage in all five of these things, poisoning their own bodies, minds and children with heavy metals, pesticides, mercury, vaccine adjuvants, mind-altering medications, chemical solvents, GMOs and delusional mind programming.

And so it’s not really a surprise to see where this brings us. Today our society is dominated by images of power hungry perverts (like Anthony Weiner) running for mayor, pathological liars in the White House, diabolically imbalanced artists like Lady Gaga headlining the music scene, brain-dead teleprompter readers delivering the evening news and MSNBC hosts preaching infanticide (baby killing) by calling it “post-birth abortion.”

What is the root cause of all this insanity? It’s POISON. Physical, chemical, biological poison.

Humans are poisoning themselves to death

Consider these shocking truths of modern society:

• Our food is intentionally laced with chemical poisons to make it look red (sodium nitrite), or taste savory (MSG), or last longer on the shelves (chemical preservatives).

• Our medicines are laced with fluorine molecules to make them highly reactive to brain cells (SSRIs).

• Our vaccines our formulated with trace levels of brain-damaging methyl mercury and chemical adjuvants to provoke an “inflammatory” response in the immune system which also happens to cause autism, seizures and brain damage.

• Our lawns are sprayed with synthetic poisons that cause Alzheimer’s and depression.

• Our water supply is used as a toxic waste dump to dispose of fluoride compound chemicals that would otherwise have to be handled as toxic waste.

• Food intended for human consumption is intentionally stripped of most minerals, vitamins and nutrients to promote the maximum disease, while food intended for ranch animal consumption is fortified with minerals, vitamins and nutrients to promote maximum health. (If you don’t realize your food is stripped of nutrition, ask yourself why your sugar and bread are both white when the plants they come from are green and brown…)

• The media teaches the public that nutrition is useless but that prescription medications are “essential nutrients” required for healthy living.

• There is lead in cosmetics, cadmium in rice, arsenic in seaweed, mercury in vaccines and aluminum in almost everything. The human race is being heavily poisoned with heavy metals.

These toxins cause brain damage

The cumulative effect of metals poisoning, fluoride poisoning, pesticide poisoning, vaccine poisoning and food additive poisoning is biochemical brain damage.

We are living in a society where 90% or more of the population is literally brain damaged beyond repair. This is why irrationality has gone wild everywhere you look. It’s why people keep buying the same poisons that have already poisoned them while turning to medications to mask the symptoms of that poisoning, thereby poisoning themselves even further with the meds.

It’s why the No. 1 treatment for cancer is a chemical cocktail (“chemotherapy”) which causes, as its top side effect, more cancer. And it’s why a rapidly-expanding subset of the population is now utterly unable to read, to parse words, to speak in coherent sentences or even to engage in anything resembling rational discourse.

The ramifications of this epidemic of brain damage are bewildering. For starters, the entire system of justice and democracy upon which our republic is based is contingent upon people being sane. The sacred concept of a “jury of your peers” depends on your peers being sane. The idea of voting for public office also requires sane voters in order to achieve sane outcomes, and the “free market” system of capitalism and consumer choice assumes that consumers make rational decisions to drive that market.

But they don’t. Consumers are brain damaged, then brainwashed, dumbed-down and manipulated. Voters are deluded and intentionally confused. Juries are manipulated and misinformed. In every sector of society where a group of sane people was supposed to restore balance and reason, we now have insane people driving society even further into the ground.

We are living in an era of metals poisoning, chemicals poisoning and information poisoning

Never before in the history of the world has the toxic burden on human beings been so great (and tragic). Never before has the chasm between the sane and the insane become so wide (and so dangerous). We are living in an era where rationality is alien to the masses. As a very simple example, it matters nothing to the voters that Obama has violated virtually every single campaign promise he made in the elections, including labeling GMOs, closing Guantanamo Bay, reducing the federal budget deficit, protecting whistleblowers, improving government transparency, providing affordable government health care and protecting the Constitution.

He has grossly violated each and every one of these promises, yet his supporters somehow continue to believe in him. Such a belief is utterly irrational. It is, in fact, insane.

But it is no more insane than the beliefs of those who blindly supported the Bush administration, or the Clinton administration, or any administration for that matter. What blind supporters all have in common is that they are brain damaged and therefore unable to think rationally.

The situation has become so perverse that anyone who exhibits even a trace of rationality is immediately and publicly despised. For example, those who see the impending economic collapse (such as Paul Craig Roberts and Gerald Celente) are widely ridiculed for understanding economics and finance. Those who see the rapid construction of the police state society taking place right now (like Alex Jones) are branded conspiracy theorists. Those who expose the dangers of GMOs or the criminality of the pharmaceutical industry (like myself) are branded “anti-science” because we aren’t tricked by the quack science dogma of the for-profit biotech industry.

Only brain-damaged people are now considered “normal” because that’s what is publicly accepted. As a personal example of this, I have a younger distant relative who was a mathematical genius is grade school. He could multiply two 3-digit numbers in his head in mere seconds and was on track to becoming a math genius superstar. But as he entered middle school, he discovered that being smart made you unpopular. So he dumbed himself down and began to act stupid in order to fit in. He became very popular with the “in” crowd and abandoned his mathematical genius.

To this day he has never resurrected his genius, yet he falls for the common delusion of today’s youth who all believe they will have “jobs waiting for me” when they get out of college. The truth is that this kid gave up his only real advantage and now faces a life of mediocrity and conformity.

This is the problem: When the incidence of brain damage across society is so widespread that exhibiting intelligent behavior gets you shunned as an outcast, society is already in its final stage of collapse. You are watching it unfold.

Why Americans of the 1950′s were our greatest generation

Adults who ran society in the 1950′s were raised on real foods in the 1920′s and 30′s. Those foods consisted, in large part, fresh home-grown garden foods. GMOs didn’t exist. Toxic vaccines were barely on the radar. Chemical food additives were rarely consumed and pharmaceuticals were considered medicines to be used exclusively on sick people, not the entire population.

As a result, most people who lived in the 1950′s strived to be healthy and intelligent. Many were outright geniuses by today’s standards. The grade school mathematics taught in the 1950′s included subjects that, today, are college courses: algebra and basic geometry, for example. Ten-year-old kids in the 1950′s could read classic American novels. Today’s kids can barely read comic books.

Engineers and scientists of the 1950′s were brilliant, healthy and hip. With nothing more than simple, mechanical slide rules, they could perform high-level mathematics that would make today’s college professors cower in awe. But today’s scientists are often just corporate hacks spewing fraudulent science on patented medications or GMO seeds.

In the late 1940′s and throughout the 1950′s, Big Food cranked up its factories, churning out processed, nutrient depleted foods at a pace never before witnessed in the history of human civilization. So the kids of the 1960′s got raised on “imitation” foods — things that looked and tasted nutritious but lacked any real nourishment. By the 1970′s, they were all eating white bread and getting shot up with vaccines formulated with hidden cancer viruses like SV40.

As the 1980′s rolled in, Americans who were raised on imitation foods became pathetic and lazy, and in the 1990′s they became delusional, falling for the dot-com boom which soon became a bust. By the early 2000′s, America had fully entered “brain damage” mode which was only exacerbated by the arrival of George W. Bush, the nation’s first truly brain-damaged president who had difficulty completing sentences or finishing thoughts, which is apparently what made him so popular with voters who shared the same cognitive disability.

The children raised in the early 1990′s on prescription medications and junk foods are now society’s young voters. They are Obama supporters, and they’re heavily damaged with metals, pesticides, vaccines, GMOs and synthetic chemicals. This generation is wholly incapable of learning or grasping even basic concepts of mathematics, history, science or even language. Functionally illiterate and cognitively nullified, they are the new “zero-class workers” upon which the Obama economy is based. They have no skills, no reason and essentially no value to society other than simple manual labor skills which will soon be replaced by humanoid robots.

Yet here in America, they still have a vote. That’s exactly why political campaigns will continue to pander to their ignorance, defying all rationality in the quest for proxy popular support from the great masses of the truly clueless.

Rush Limbaugh calls these people “low-information” voters. But he’s only half right about that. They aren’t merely low information; they’re clinically brain damaged. Because you can throw all the information you want at them but none of it sticks. The brains no longer possess the neurology to store, process and retrieve meaningful information.

In effect, they are no longer functioning members of a civilized society.

You are surrounded by the brain damaged masses

These people are everywhere around you, sitting on your local city council, taking your order at the restaurant, shuffling paperwork at the local insurance business office, pouring the concrete slab for your next house, and even diagnosing your health symptoms at the local clinic. They are the society you see around you, and they are the reason that society is crumbling.

They are victims, of course… victims of the deadly “scientific” dogma of chemicals, GMOs, quack medicines and toxic vaccines. The damage, however, is now so widespread and so complete that society will never recover. From here, it’s all downhill with the lobotomized masses until society hits bottom and a massive die-off ensues.

One day, rationality and intelligence will once again be valued as attributed to admire and encourage in our youth. When that day comes, you will be witnessing the rebirth of a civilization that rises from the ashes of our present-day “brain damaged” society. Historians will consider the era from 2000 – 2020 to be the most bizarre in human history, of course, where broken neurology led to broken societies… and ultimately to global collapse that caused the mass die-off.

The lesson in all this? When food is no longer nutritive, and instead becomes a carrier for poison, society cannot survive. If you want to fix society, you have to fix the food first.

My Heart Bleeds for both of these two Pigs Officer Bubbles and Officer Pepperhead

OFFICER “ADAM JOSEPHS” BUBBLES Tried to Sue You Tube for 1.2 Million dollar lawsuit Claiming damage from videos mocking him as he deserved to be. He should have been Fired for his attitude his disrespect and his abuse of power

G20 MY HEART BLEEDS Officer Bubbles exposed

Uploaded on Nov 6, 2010

G20 Exposed: ‘My Heart Bleeds…’ an Officer ‘Boris’ Bubbles lawsuit special featuring interviews with documentary producer Derek Soberal, director Adam Letalik, a phone interview with Dan Dicks of Press for Truth… G20 Toronto Exposed (http://www.torontog20exposed.ca/ ) Press for Truth (http://pressfortruth.ca/ ) The Real News ( http://therealnews.com/ )
SEGMENT: Daniel Libby hosts a feature special on Word of Mouth Wednesday Oct. 27th 2010, Toronto G20 Exposed: My Heart Bleeds ‘Officer Bubbles’ sues YouTube audio MP3 Download the full Word of Mouth Wednesday October 27th 2010 episode herehttp://www.radio4all.net/index.php/pr… CKLN 88.1 FM Wednesday Word of Mouth – Wednesdays 7-8 pm on CKLN.fm
TorontoG20Exposed.ca

 

The G20 Summit in Toronto will never be forgotten for many Canadians who witnessed the destruction of everything that makes us proud and patriotic. Our rights were violated, our city was terrorized and our police force have demonstrated that absolute power corrupts absolutely as in the case with Officer A. Josephs aka "Officer Bubbles".
On September 11th 2010 Press For Truth videographer Bryan Law questioned Officer Bubbles about his behavior during the G20 summit to which he responded "I did my job, I’m a Police Officer". At the time we felt that releasing a video would only further distract people away from the real issues of the G20 by focusing on the bubbles spectacle…however in light of the fact that Officer Bubbles has recently launched a 1.2 Million dollar lawsuit against YouTube in which 25 people are involved for leaving comments we felt it was time to show the world what Josephs had to say about his job, the infamous bubbles incident and his views on the police state.

 

 

OFFICER JOHN “PEPPERHEAD” PIKE – Lieutenant John Pike

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A former University of California policeman who drew widespread scorn for pepper-spraying peaceful student protesters is seeking worker’s compensation for psychiatric damage he said he suffered in the 2011 incident.

Video footage of then-campus police Lieutenant John Pike casually dousing student demonstrators in the face with a can of pepper spray as they sat on the ground at UC Davis came to symbolize law enforcement aggression against anti-Wall Street protests at the time.

Pike was suspended and ultimately left the force in July 2012, but UC officials did not disclose the circumstances of his departure.

A scathing 190-page report on the incident found that university officials and UC Davis campus police showed poor judgment and used excessive force in the confrontation, which was widely replayed on television and the Internet.

The university last fall agreed to pay $1 million to settle a lawsuit brought on behalf of the 21 students who got sprayed and later reported suffering panic attacks, trauma and falling grades as a result.

Last month, Pike himself filed a worker’s compensation claim with UC Davis over the incident, saying he suffered unspecified psychiatric and nervous system damage, though the document did not explain how he claimed to have been harmed, records show.

A judge is scheduled to hear Pike’s claim at a worker’s compensation conference in Sacramento on August 13. The case would likely go to trial if Pike and the police department fail to reach an agreement, California Department of Industrial Relations spokesman Peter Melton said on Friday.

UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi had asked local prosecutors to look into possible criminal charges against the police officers involved in the pepper-spraying. But the Yolo County District Attorney’s office determined there was no grounds on which to bring a case.

Earlier this week, a state appellate court ruled that newspapers have a right to publish the names of all the UC Davis police officers involved in the pepper-spraying incident.

Now The OFFICER Bubbles Mocking cartoons that are on You Tube Here they are

Officer Bubbles – Touched By Love

Officer Bubbles – Black Bloc

Officer Bubbles – G20 Media

Officer Bubbles – Weapons Display

Officer Bubbles – The Kettle

Officer Bubbles – First Aid

Officer Bubbles – City Hall

Officer Bubbles – Secret 5 Metre Law

The end of (Officer Bubbles Cartoon / Cartoons / G20 Toronto)

So Far there are No Officer PepperHead Cartoon videos but who know he definitely Deserves a few. We can only hope there will be some… It could help his Compensation claim? “NOT”

“WAKE UP AMERICAN’S” Federal Reserve Saving FOREIGN Banks and FKN all Americans

The Federal Reserve Is Bailing Out FOREIGN Banks … More than the American People or Economy

Washington’sBlog
July 28, 2013

Federal Reserve Policy Mainly Benefits Big Foreign Banks

We’ve extensively documented that the Federal Reserve is intentionally locking up bank money so that it is not loaned out to Main Street. Specifically – due to Fed policy – 81.5% of all money created by quantitative easing is sitting there gathering dust in the form of “excess reserves” … instead of being loaned out to help Main Street or the American economy.

And we’ve extensively documented that a large percentage of the bailouts went to foreign banks (and see this and this). (A 2010 Fed audit also revealed that of the $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities the central bank purchased after the housing bubble popped, some $442.7 billion -  more than 35% – were bought from foreign banks.)

It turns out that these themes are all connected.

Specifically, most of the Fed-created money which is gathering dust is actually being held by foreign banks.

The Levy Economics Institute noted in May:

Excess reserves are the surplus of reserves against deposits and certain other liabilities that depository institutions (loosely called “banks”) hold above the amounts that the Board requires within ranges set by federal law. The general requirement is that covered institutions maintain reserves at least equal to ten percent of liabilities payable on demand. For the first time in history, there is statistical evidence that as much as one-half or more of excess reserves are held for United States banking offices offoreign banks.

Zero Hedge reports today:

As per last night’s [Federal Reserve] H.8 update, commercial bank deposits rose by $94 billion in the week ended July 17: the fourth largest weekly increase in history …. This took total commercial bank deposits to an all-time high of $9.54 trillion.

***

The entire difference can be attributed to the $2+ trillion in excess reserves created by the Fed since the start of the [global financial crisis] .

Speaking of Fed reserves with banks, the most recent number was $2.1 trillion, and its allocation breakdown by Domestic (small and large) and Foreign banks operating in the US is as follows:

Foreign banks continue to be the biggest beneficiary of the Fed’s monthly $85 billion liquidity largesse, just as they were the biggest winners during QE2.

In fact, the total reserve cash distribution continues to favor foreign banks, which now have a record $1.13 trillion in cash, or $9 billion more than all Domestically-chartered banks, at $1.122 trillion. The notable shift of cash reallocation from domestic to foreign banks since QE2 can be seen on the chart below.

To nobody’s surprise, global liquidity (as created by the Fed) continues to be infinitely fungible, and increasingly benefits offshore-based (mainly European) banks.

(And see this earlier report from Zero Hedge).

We’ve repeatedly noted that loose Federal Reserve policy benefits of the super-elite at the expense of Main Street, the U.S. economy or the average American.

It now appears that the policy benefits foreign super-elite even more than the elites in the U.S.

The Federal Reserve – like many parts of the U.S. government – are Steeling the prosperity(Quantative Easing or Premeditated Theft) out of American hands and mouths and giving it to Big Foreign banks

Money Is Being Sucked Out of the U.S. Economy … But Big Bucks Are Being Made Abroad

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Washington’s Blog

Stop Sending American Jobs and Wealth Abroad

Most big American companies’ profits are driven by foreign sales and foreign workers. As AP noted in 2010:

Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why isn’t anyone hiring?

Actually, many American companies are — just maybe not in your town. They’re hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat.

The trend helps explain why unemployment remains high in the United States, edging up to 9.8% last month, even though companies are performing well: All but 4% of the top 500 U.S. corporations reported profits this year, and the stock market is close to its highest point since the 2008 financial meltdown.

But the jobs are going elsewhere. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, says American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with less than 1 million in the U.S. The additional 1.4 million jobs would have lowered the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.9%, says Robert Scott, the institute’s senior international economist.

“There’s a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy,” says Scott.

Many of the products being made overseas aren’t coming back to the United States. Demand has grown dramatically this year in emerging markets like India, China and Brazil.

Bad government policy has encouraged this trend.

It has encouraged American companies to move their facilities, resources and paychecks abroad. And some of the biggest companies in America have a negative tax rate … that is, not only do they pay no taxes, but they actually get tax refunds.

Why QE2 Failed: The Money All Went Offshore

By Ellen Brown

Global Research, July 09, 2011

9 July 2011

On June 30, QE2 ended with a whimper.  The Fed’s second round of “quantitative easing” involved $600 billion created with a computer keystroke for the purchase of long-term government bonds.  But the government never actually got the money, which went straight into the reserve accounts of banks, where it still sits today.  Worse, it went into the reserve accounts of FOREIGN banks, on which the Federal Reserve is now paying 0.25% interest.

Before QE2 there was QE1, in which the Fed bought $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities from the banks.  This money too remains in bank reserve accounts collecting interest and dust.  The Fed reports that the accumulated excess reserves of depository institutions now total nearly $1.6 trillion.   

Interestingly, $1.6 trillion is also the size of the federal deficit – a deficit so large that some members of Congress are threatening to force a default on the national debt if it isn’t corrected soon.

So here we have the anomalous situation of a $1.6 trillion hole in the federal budget, and $1.6 trillion created by the Fed that is now sitting idle in bank reserve accounts.  If the intent of “quantitative easing” was to stimulate the economy, it might have worked better if the money earmarked for the purchase of Treasuries had been delivered directly to the Treasury.  That was actually how it was done before 1935, when the law was changed to require private bond dealers to be cut into the deal.  

The one thing QE2 did for the taxpayers was to reduce the interest tab on the federal debt.  The long-term bonds the Fed bought on the open market are now effectively interest-free to the government, since the Fed rebates its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs.  

But QE2 has not helped the anemic local credit market, on which smaller businesses rely; and it is these businesses that are largely responsible for creating new jobs.  In a June 30 article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Smaller Businesses Seeking Loans Still Come Up Empty,” Emily Maltby reported that business owners rank access to capital as the most important issue facing them today; and only 17% of smaller businesses said they were able to land needed bank financing. 

   

How QE2 Wound Up in Foreign Banks

Before the Banking Act of 1935, the government was able to borrow directly from its own central bank.  Other countries followed that policy as well, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; and they prospered as a result.  After 1935, however, if the U.S. central bank wanted to buy government securities, it had to purchase them from private banks on the “open market.”  Former Fed Chairman Marinner Eccles wrote in support of an act to remove that requirement that it was intended to keep politicians from spending too much.  But all the law succeeded in doing was to give the bond-dealer banks a cut as middlemen.  

Worse, it caused the Fed to lose control of where the money went.  Rather than buying more bonds from the Treasury, the banks that got the cash could just sit on it or use it for their own purposes; and that is apparently what is happening today.

In carrying out its QE2 purchases, the Fed had to follow standard operating procedure for “open market operations”: it took secret bids from the 20 “primary dealers” authorized to sell securities to the Fed and accepted the best offers.  The problem was that 12 of these dealers – or over half — are U.S.-based branches of foreign banks (including BNP Paribas, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, UBS and others); and they evidently won the bids.  

The fact that foreign banks got the money was established in a June 12 post on Zero Hedge by Tyler Durden (a pseudonym), who compared two charts: the total cash holdings of foreign-related banks in the U.S., using weekly Federal Reserve data; and the total reserve balances held at Federal Reserve banks, from the Fed’s statement ending the week of June 1.  The charts showed that after November 3, 2010, when QE2 operations began, total bank reserves increased by $610 billion.  Foreign bank cash reserves increased in lock step, by $630 billion — or more than the entire QE2. 

In a June 27 blog, John Mason, Professor of Finance at Penn State University and a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve, wrote: 

In essence, it appears as if much of the monetary stimulus generated by the Federal Reserve System went into the Eurodollar market. This is all part of the “Carry Trade” as foreign branches of an American bank could borrow dollars from the “home” bank creating a Eurodollar deposit. . . .

Cash assets at the smaller [U.S.] banks remained relatively flat . . . . Thus, the reserves the Fed was pumping into the banking system were not going into the smaller banks. . . . 

[B]usiness loans continue to “tank” at the smaller banking institutions. . . .

The real lending by commercial banks is not taking place in the United States. The lending is taking place off-shore, underwritten by the Federal Reserve System and this is doing little or nothing to help the American economy grow. 

Tyler Durden concluded:

. . . [T]he only beneficiary of the reserves generated were US-based branches of foreign banks (which in turn turned around and funnelled the cash back to their domestic branches), a shocking finding which explains . . . why US banks have been unwilling and, far more importantly, unable to lend out these reserves . . . . 

. . . [T]he data above proves beyond a reasonable doubt why there has been no excess lending by US banks to US borrowers: none of the cash ever even made it to US banks! . . . This also resolves the mystery of the broken money multiplier and why the velocity of money has imploded.

Well, not exactly.  The fact that the QE2 money all wound up in foreign banks is a shocking finding, but it doesn’t seem to be the reason banks aren’t lending.  There were already $1 trillion in excess reserves sitting idle in U.S. reserve accounts, not counting the $600 billion from QE2.

According to Scott Fullwiler, Associate Professor of Economics at Wartburg College, the money multiplier model is not just broken but is obsolete.  Banks do not lend based on what they have in reserve.  They can borrow reserves as needed after making loans.  Whether banks will lenddepends rather on (a) whether they have creditworthy borrowers, (b) whether they have sufficient capital to satisfy the capital requirement, and (c) the cost of funds – meaning the cost to the bank of borrowing to meet the reserve requirement, either from depositors or from other banks or from the Federal Reserve.

Setting Things Right

Whatever is responsible for causing the local credit crunch, trillions of dollars thrown at Wall Street by Congress and the Fed haven’t fixed the problem.  It may be time for local governments to take matters into their own hands.  While we wait for federal lawmakers to get it right, local credit markets can be revitalized by establishing state-owned banks, on the model of the Bank of North Dakota (BND).  The BND services the liquidity needs of local banks and keeps credit flowing in the state.  For more information, see here and here. 

Concerning the gaping federal deficit, Congressman Ron Paul has an excellent idea: have the Fed simply write off the federal securities purchased with funds created in its quantitative easing programs.  No creditors would be harmed, since the money was generated out of thin air with a computer keystroke in the first place.  The government would just be canceling a debt to itself and saving the interest.

 

As for “quantitative easing,” if the intent is to stimulate the economy, the money needs to go directly into the purchase of goods and services, stimulating “demand.”  If it goes onto the balance sheets of banks, it may stop there or go into speculation rather than local lending — as is happening now.  Money that goes directly to the government, on the other hand, will be spent on goods and services in the real economy, creating much-needed jobs, generating demand, and rebuilding the tax base.  To make sure the money gets there, the 1935 law forbidding the Fed to buy Treasuries directly from the Treasury needs to be repealed.

Fed Releases Details On Secret $855 Billion Single-Tranche OMO Bailout Program: Just Another Foreign Bank Rescue Operation

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/06/2011

A month ago we reported about Bob Ivry’s discovery that the Fed had been conducting a secretive bailout operation between March and December 2008, under which banks borrowed as much as $855 billion over the time frame for a rate as low as 0.01%. As the Fed itself explains following a just disclosed launch of a page dedicated to this Saint OMO, "The Federal Reserve System conducted a series of single-tranche term repurchase agreements from March 2008 to December 2008 with the intention of mitigating heightened stress in funding markets. These operations were conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with primary dealers as counterparties through an auction process under the standard legal authority for conducting temporary open market operations. In these transactions, primary dealers could deliver any of the types of securities–Treasuries, agency debt, or agency MBS–that are accepted in regular open market operations.

By providing term funding to primary dealers, this program helped to address liquidity pressures evident across a number of financing markets and supported the flow of credit to U.S. households and business." Well, not really. As the chart below shows the banks, pardon primary dealers, that benefited the most from this secret iteration of Fed generosity were once again foreign banks, with the Top 5 borrowers being Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, RBS and Barclays. Together these five accounted for $593 billion of total borrowings, or 70% of the total. So perhaps the Fed should rephrase the last sentence to "supported the flow of credit to U.S. European households and business" which is to be expected. After all, as we have demonstrated before, the European banking system’s liabilities are orders of magnitude greater than the US. So in order to preserve the global Ponzi (a main reason why Greece must never be allowed to fail), the biggest weakness that has to be addressed constantly is and will be in Europe.

Below is a summary of who borrowed how much in total from the Fed’s ST-OMO program.

And lest someone thinks that Goldman did not somehow benefit, the firm was i) the single biggest US-based borrower under the program; ii) it was the single biggest one time borrower for $15 billion on December 10, 2008, and iii), it received the smallest borrowing rate afforded to anyone at the laughable 0.01% on December 30, 2008.

The full excel breakdown can be found here.

More here, here and here.

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Quantitative Easing; The New Old Solution to Economic Woes

As predicted here, and almost everywhere else the economy is for all intents and purposes exactly where it was in 2008. In case you’ve been living under a rock we are talking collapse. Collapse like the world hasn’t seen since Rome. What do our all  knowing leaders plan to do about it?  They’re going to do more of the same. Our favorite crooks over at the fed just announced another round of “Quantitative Easing” or monetizing the debt.

The way the bailout worked (quantitative easing one(QE1)) was that the Federal Reserve issued a whole bunch of credit to banks for basically nothing. Those same banks (which also coincidently own the private federal reserve stock) then purchased Government debt. The problem is that these banks can only be persuaded to buy so many treasury bonds. They claim that the money will be lent to us. This is a hoax since the banks mostly sit on it because there arent any good credit risks right now who are actually looking for debt.

What will the fed do next? They will buy the government debt directly. Wow! Now the very same private organization that is creating money out of nothing will be lending money to the government directly and we are paying interest on it. The Fed already owns more than 5Trillion dollars in treasury bonds.

China is becoming unnerved because the Trillions they lent us used to be worth a lot more 20 years ago. If  they bring us to war with China it will be a set-up. Killing commies is appealing, at first thought. However, we watched Clinton and the rest of them sell us out to China and move our manufacturing base into the 3rd world. The American worker is competing with labor that is just a hair away from slavery.

War with china? No way. They wont go that route. All this hype about China is ”predictive programing”. The idea will be to fully bankrupt and manage America into a steady decline. They wont hide the fact that China is becoming the new dominate super power. Economically, Militarily, Politically. The media will report it all with a smile. When China is done divesting itself from the Dollar they will complete the collapse. All the wealth is moving into the 3rd world because they can literally buy everything. The Elite global corporations will cozy up to China.

One day our leaders will turn to us and claim our system failed. They will point to their predecessors as they already do and we will become the new 3rd world. This new era will be a dark and smoldering age as the entire globe falls into the clutches of a corporate fascist state.

We will be hated the world over for allowing our government to bribe and intimidate the heads of central banks in an attempt to maintain the Dollars status as the global reserve currency. Laughed at for having squandered our status, wasted our treasure, betrayed our values.

How did the Federal Reserve bank get the power to create our currency? In 1913 congress passed the federal reserve act giving them the power to issue credit and control interest rates. Why would we pay a private bank to do what our government previously did itself?

In 1914 we got the federal income tax. Our labor pledged as collateral on the government debt. Each day the government adds to that debt and every month it pays interest on it. Last month it was a record high 20Billion in interest on federal deficits. Twenty Billion Dollars in interest in only ONE MONTH! That’s $20,000,000,000/month and they demand we borrow more.

“I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” – Thomas Jefferson.

“The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace & conspires against it in times of war. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who even question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me & the financial institutions at the rear, the latter is my greatest foe.
– President Abraham Lincoln

“This is the Aldrich bill in disguise…The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill…The banks have been granted the special privilege of distributing the money, and they charge as much as they wish…This is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any Government that ever existed. The system is private…There should be no legal tender other than that issued by the government…The People are the Government. Therefore the Government should, as the Constitution provides, regulate the value of money.”
-Rep. Charles Lindbergh Sr.(Congressional Record, 1913-12-22)

“The banks manufacture, without borrowing it, the monetary credit which they loan to the Government. For every dollar they themselves contribute to the loaning process, they manufacture 10 credit dollars, and call them their own, although they base the credit dollars on human sweat and labor and productive genus that is not their own.”
-Allen B. Brown, chairman of the New Economic Group. (1936)

WE MUST REVERSE COURSE NOW!

THIS IS HISTORY!!

WAKE UP AND SAVE THE REPUBLIC!!!

We don’t need to pay interest. We can rescind the federal reserve act and issue credit and currency ourselves. Obviously that doesn’t fix the problem of inflation, but at least we would no longer be slaves to a corporate cartel.

The system is collapsing! END THE FED!

RON PAUL 2012!

TAKE BACK YOUR STATES!

The “Syrian Truth” That The Mainstream Media Totally Avoids telling The American Public about at all cost… That The Obama Administration is Funding “Terrorist Al-Qaeda Backed Free Syrian Rebels”

Yes We Can: Obama Funding Syrian Rebels Beheading Christians, Using Child Soldiers

Anthony Gucciardi
Infowars.com
July 28, 2013

Remember when al-Qaeda members were the bad guys? Obama is now pushing massive funding for Syrian rebels who have not only been linked to al-Qaeda, but are gruesomely beheading innocent Christians and using 14-year-old child soldiers.

And virtually no one seems to even be questioning the Obama administration’s support of these chaotic troops who kill innocent citizens using US-funded arms in a bid to throw Syria’s current system into insanity. What’s perhaps even worse is that Obama has been pushing to continue this funding in a battle with reasonable lawmakers in a move that highlights his continued support of Syrian rebels who massacre innocents in public beheading sessions (that are met with applause and cheers).

It’s even hidden in the mainstream news, yet the media pieces on the subject somehow fail to generate any social media sharing or view counts for the most part. Just look at the August 2012 Reuters admission that Obama secretly went ahead and enabled support for Syrian rebels while bypassing any form of checks or balances. Flash forward to June 2013 with the headline ‘Syrians behead Christians for helping military, as CIA ships in arms’ inThe Washington Times publication, and we’re still letting this happen.

ARMING THE CARNAGE ON RECORD

From the report in The Washington Times:

“A priest and another Christian were beheaded before a cheering crowd by Syrian insurgents who say they aided and abetted the enemy… The reported beheading of the two Christians comes about the same time America has started sending arms to rebel fighters, the Wall Street Journal revealed this week.”

In other words the supposedly ‘Christian’ (a laughable declaration) Obama not only allows for these rebels to kill all Christians who do not convert and pay excessive taxes to the rebel army, but is the driving force behind it. How truly Christian of him. In fact, let’s look at the options innocent Christians are given by the Syrian rebels who wield CIA-given weaponry as according to the missionaries who have been to the Christian communities in Syria:

1. Renounce their Christian faith and convert immediately to Islam (to potentially have your life spared after swearing to the Syrian rebels and Islam).

2. Pay an extremely heavy tax to the Syrian rebels to potentially save your life and be able to secretly continue being a Christian (unless they decided to behead you anyway).

3. Immediately choose death, likely via beheading in the center of town to scare off your friends and family from challenging the Syrian rebel army.

4. Flee for your life and hope the Syrian rebels don’t find you or kill your family. All of your belongings left behind now belong to the Syrian rebels.

As you can see, these are the truly ’humane’ options supported by the United States government. And they’re getting away with this thanks to the general public having no idea what’s going on. In two months, the funding officially runs out — at least for this fiscal year. Amazingly, however, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees both went ahead and approved the continued support of the Syrian rebels. Just like how our elected officialsrecently sided with the NSA in continuing the gargantuan funding that fuels the agency.

The media is doing a great job on covering a bogus debate (if they cover the subject at all) over whether or not they need more funding to take down Assad, and once again it’s up to independent news outlets to blast this information out.

If you ever had doubts as to the true nature of the sociopaths inside government and the lengths they will go to secure their agenda, you now have proof.

OBAMA’S BULLSHIT LIES

OBAMA’S BULLSHIT LIES

http://web.archive.org/web/20130425082834/http://change.gov/agenda/ethics_agenda/

"I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate in this race to take on lobbyists — and won. They have not funded my campaign, they will not run my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I am president."

— Barack Obama, Speech in Des Moines, IA
November 10, 2007

The Obama-Biden Plan

Barack Obama has led efforts to reform government both in the Illinois State Senate and in the United States Senate. He will bring this commitment to making government work for the people, not the special interests, to the White House. Obama will ensure Washington works for the people, not the special interests.

Shine the Light on Washington Lobbying

• Centralize Ethics and Lobbying Information for Voters: Obama and Biden will create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.
• Require Independent Monitoring of Lobbying Laws and Ethics Rules: Obama and Biden will use the power of the presidency to fight for an independent watchdog agency to oversee the investigation of congressional ethics violations so that the public can be assured that ethics complaints will be investigated.
• End the Practice of Writing Legislation Behind Closed Doors: As president, Barack Obama will restore the American people’s trust in their government by making government more open and transparent. Obama will work to reform congressional rules to require all legislative sessions, including committee mark-ups and conference committees, to be conducted in public. By making these practices public, the American people will be able to hold their leaders accountable for wasteful spending and lawmakers won’t be able to slip favors for lobbyists into bills at the last minute.

Shine the Light on Federal Contracts, Tax Breaks and Earmarks

• Create a Public "Contracts and Influence" Database: As president, Obama will create a "contracts and influence" database that will disclose how much federal contractors spend on lobbying, and what contracts they are getting and how well they complete them.
• Expose Special Interest Tax Breaks to Public Scrutiny: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will ensure that any tax breaks for corporate recipients — or tax earmarks — are also publicly available on the Internet in an easily searchable format.
• End Abuse of No-Bid Contracts: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will end abuse of no-bid contracts by requiring that nearly all contract orders over $25,000 be competitively awarded.
• Sunlight Before Signing: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.
• Shine Light on Earmarks and Pork Barrel Spending: Obama’s Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act will shed light on all earmarks by disclosing the name of the legislator who asked for each earmark, along with a written justification, 72 hours before they can be approved by the full Senate.

Bring Americans Back into their Government

• Hold 21st Century Fireside Chats: Obama will bring democracy and policy directly to the people by requiring his Cabinet officials to hold periodic national broadband townhall meetings to discuss issues before their agencies.
• Make White House Communications Public: Obama will amend executive orders to ensure that communications about regulatory policymaking between persons outside government and all White House staff are disclosed to the public.
• Conduct Regulatory Agency Business in Public: Obama will require his appointees who lead the executive branch departments and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the agency in public, so that any citizen can see these debates in person or watch them on the internet.
• Release Presidential Records: Obama and Biden will nullify attempts to make the timely release of presidential records more difficult.

Free the Executive Branch from Special Interest Influence

• Close the Revolving Door on Former and Future Employers: No political appointees in the Obama-Biden administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years. And no political appointee will be able to lobby the executive branch after leaving government service during the remainder of the administration.
• Free Career Officials from the Influence of Politics: Obama will issue an executive order asking all new hires at the agencies to sign a form affirming that no political appointee offered them the job solely on the basis of political affiliation or contribution.
• Reform the Political Appointee Process: FEMA Director Michael Brown was not qualified to head the agency, and the result was a disaster for the people of the Gulf Coast. But in the Obama-Biden administration, every official will have to rise to the standard of proven excellence in the agency’s mission.
• Enforce Executive Branch Ethics: The Obama-Biden administration will give the Office of Governmental Ethics strong enforcement authority with the ability to make binding regulations, and it will work with inspectors general in all the federal agencies to enforce ethics rules, minimize waste and ensure federal officials are not using their offices for personal gain. The OGE will also be the clearinghouse of all public records relevant to ethics in the Executive Branch and place this information on its website. Finally, the OGE will promulgate rules and procedures to record all oral and in-person "lobbying contacts" between registered lobbyists and political appointees and make those records available to the public in a searchable computerized database.

Spend Taxpayer Money Wisely

• Performance Team and Chief Performance Officer: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will create a focused team within the White House that will work with agency leaders and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to improve results and outcomes for federal government programs while eliminating waste and inefficiency. This unit, a SWAT team, will be composed of top-performing and highly-trained government professionals and be headed by a new Chief Performance Officer (CPO) who will report directly to the president. The CPO will work with federal agencies to set tough performance targets and hold managers responsible for progress. The president will meet regularly with cabinet officers to review the progress their agencies are making toward meeting performance improvement targets.
• Streamline Government Procurement: Barack Obama will implement the GAO’s recommendations to reduce erroneous federal payments, reduce procurement costs with purchase cards, and implement better management of surplus federal property. These initiatives will save $4.5 billion a year.
• Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.
• Line-by-Line Review of Spending: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will conduct an exhaustive line-by-line review of the federal budget, work to eliminate government programs that are not performing, and demand that new initiatives be selected on the basis of their merits — not through a political process that rewards lobbyists and campaign donors.
• Slash Earmarks: Earmarks grew from $7.8 billion in 1994 to $29 billion in 2006. Barack Obama is committed to returning earmarks to less than $7.8 billion a year, the level they were at before 1994.
• Shed Sunlight on Corporate Tax Loopholes: The tax code is riddled with corporate loopholes and preferential regulations that benefit a handful of companies at the expense of the rest of the business community as well as ordinary families. Some large companies have managed to secure tax breaks or hide their profits in overseas tax havens to avoid paying any American corporate taxes at all. Obama and Biden will require any tax bill considered by Congress to include a Corporate Tax Impact Statement that would disclose which industries or specific companies would be expected to benefit from the new tax breaks.