washingtonsblog.com

Douglas Valentine’sThe Phoenix Program is vital for understanding the history of terrorism and its role in political warfare. Few other historical accounts provide as much detail on how the U.S. government and the CIA began to use programs for counterterrorism to implement political policy through secretive, coldblooded actions. Understanding such history is critical to making sense of what is happening in our world today.

Kevin Ryan Interview

Interview published on February 15, 2014

MP3 and Link to Show Notes: http://themindrenewed.com/interviews/2014/429-int-42

Who was responsible for the crimes of 9/11? Osama bin Laden and nineteen, young Islamic terrorists? Or is there evidence pointing towards other suspects who should be investigated? To discuss this question, we are joined by Kevin Ryan, author of the book Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects, and co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies.

Drawing upon a decade of investigation, Kevin Ryan traces an intricate web of interconnections between key individuals, institutions and businesses, and reveals an alternative set of 9/11 suspects, each with the "means, motive and opportunity" possibly to have played their part in the crimes of 9/11.

Download HQ Podcast 128 kbps

Posted on February 24, 2012
By Kevin Ryan

The Kuwaiti-American Corporation (KuwAm), parent company of World Trade Center (WTC) security company Stratesec, had some interesting links to royalty in both Iran and Kuwait.  Some of the company’s directors also had connections to U.S. intelligence agencies and at least one was associated with the CIA-funded terrorist financing network that included BCCI.  Through these links we can see that the origins of the War on Terror are related to the origins of the first Gulf War, and to a private network of covert operatives that stretches back for generations.

After the 1993 bombing, a company called Stratesec was responsible for the overall integration of the new WTC security system.  In the few years leading up to 9/11, Stratesec also had contracts to provide security services for United Airlines, which owned two of the planes that were destroyed on 9/11, and Dulles Airport where American Airlines Flight 77 took off.

Stratesec’s board of directors included Marvin Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, and Wirt Dexter Walker III, a distant relative of the Bush brothers.[1]  Marvin Bush joined the board of Stratesec after meeting members of the Al Sabah family on a trip to Kuwait with his father in April 1993.  During this trip, the Kuwaiti royals displayed enormous gratitude to the elder Bush for having saved their country from Saddam Hussein only two years earlier.

But the Bush-Kuwaiti connection went back much farther, to 1959, when the Kuwaitis helped to fund Bush’s start-up company, Zapata Off-Shore.  As a CIA business asset during this time, Bush and his company worked directly with the anti-Castro Cuban groups in Miami before and after the Bay of Pigs invasion.[2]

From: http://digwithin.net/2011/08/20/clarke/

Posted on August 20, 2011 by ultruth

The author is indebted to the good people at History Commons for their “Complete 9/11 Timeline.”  If a reference is not evident below, it can probably be found there.

A recent interview with former “Counterterrorism Czar,” Richard Clarke, is making a splash in the alternative media.[1]  In this interview, Clarke speculates about CIA malfeasance related to the pre-9/11 monitoring of two alleged September 11 hijackers.  This interview is somewhat interesting due to Clarke’s vague suggestion that the CIA had courted 9/11 suspects as sources, but it is far more interesting for what was not said with regard to Clarke’s personal history and associations.

June 6, 2009 - Ernest May, International Relations Expert, Dies at 80
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/us/07may.html?_r=1

Ernest May Profile
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=ernest_may_1

August 28, 2009 - Khalid bin Mahfouz, Saudi Banker, Dies at 60
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/khalid-bin-mahfouz-saudi-banker-dies-at-60/

Khalid Bin Mahfouz Profile
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=khalid_bin_mahfouz

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Law firms representing victims of the 9/11 attacks in an ongoing legal dispute with wealthy Saudis suspected of financing al-Qaeda have recently turned their attention to two individuals with unique ties to the U.S. government.

Lawyers for victims of the attacks, as well as insurance companies of property owners in New York, have filed a motion of discovery in federal district court in Manhattan targeting the Saudi-owned National Commercial Bank (NCB) and two of its former executives, Khalid bin Mahfouz and Yassin al-Qadi.

Both Mahfouz and al-Qadi have a murky history that includes alleged ties to the CIA, the White House, the Bush family, al-Qaeda, and organized crime on a global scale.

New entries this week cover a wide variety of topics. Regarding the 9/11 Commission, members and staff were dismayed by Laurie Mylroie's Iraq-al-Qaeda potboiler, as was a CIA expert who had the misfortune to sit on the same panel as Mylroie, and the Jersey Girls. Staffers were appalled by executive director Philip Zelikow's rewriting of a staff statement to imply Iraqi connections to al-Qaeda, and forced him to back down.

Most entries added to the 9/11 Timeline this week deal with terrorism finance in general and the criminal Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in particular. Between 1979 and 1991, the US government received over 700 tips about criminal activities by BCCI, which repeatedly saved Pakistan from financial ruin and funneled money to A. Q. Khan's nuclear program, but essentially ignored all 700 of them. BCCI dominated the supply chain of CIA supplies and weapons for the Afghan mujaheddin and was also used by the CIA to pay 500 British informants and for another slush fund, of which the CIA failed to notify US customs. The NSC gained a clear picture of BCCI's criminal activities from CIA reports, but a US senator was kept in the dark about them. The Pakistani government allowed drug traffickers to use BCCI, which was linked to Osama bin Laden, and a huge munitions explosion towards the end of the Soviet-Afghan war hid the fact that that money for the mujaheddin was being diverted to A. Q. Khan.

Elsewhere in terrorism finance, an address book recovered in a raid linked an al-Qaeda operative to a Saudi billionaire, the IIRO and the Muslim World League are part of the Saudi government according to testimony, and Persian Gulf sheikhs allegedly gave bin Laden US$ 50 million in a handy single transfer in 1999. The government of Saudi Arabia refused to help capture a key Hezboallah figure in 1996, made little effort to fight terrorism financing before 2002, and was still not properly overseeing charities in 2007. In addition, militant operatives were told to use a prominent Saudi bank and a known terrorism financier was removed from UN and US blacklists when he promised not to do it anymore.

Imam Anwar Al Aulaqi, an associate of Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, was inexplicably allowed to leave the US in 2002, and arrested and let go in Yemen in 2007. The US finally determined he was linked to al-Qaeda in 2008.

Miscellaneous new entries include the US monitoring a "very important source" in Sudan around the time of the 1998 embassy bombings, but letting two of the apparent bombers escape. A 1994 US intelligence report concluded Islamic militants would take power in Egypt, fighters were not ready to launch on 9/11 from Syracuse air base even after 10:00 a.m., the CIA tested an al-Qaeda training camp for chemical weapons in 2001, and an attack on oil facilities in Yemen was foiled in 2006. Finally, Presidents Reagan and Bush facilitated the Islamic bomb by repeatedly and falsely certifying Pakistan did not have a nuclear weapons program, despite knowing that it did.

Originally posted here. Please also bear in mind that the History Commons is in need of donations.

(I finally finished a book that has been on my "to-read" list for a couple of years now, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI by Jonathan Beatty and S.C. Gwynne. I highly recommend picking up a copy, because the information in the book is still not generally known, particularly the ways in which intelligence agencies, terrorists, and drug traffickers all belly up to the same bank to launder their money. As time rolls on, I suspect that we will see evidence that a BCCI paradigm was part of 9/11, including the use of a Black Network that is international in nature, and staffed by some very ruthless and pathological individuals. Octopus-like in effect, designed to cover tracks and simultaneously produce nationalist red-herrings that keep people treading water with their research, but not really getting anywhere... On that note, please check out this great blog entry over at DemocraticUnderground by DU user, leveymg... -rep.)

PARTNERS IN CRIME: The Clintons, the Bushes, and BCCI

Posted by leveymg - Mon Feb 11th 2008, 01:39 PM

Part 1: How the Presidency Became a Threat to National Security

You may have heard that it takes a Clinton to punish a Bush for crimes of state. Not likely. The simple, undeniable fact is that Bill Clinton was presented the opportunity to prosecute former Bush Administration officials when he took office in 1993, but he refused to fully pursue his predecessors in the Oval Office who had been responsible for the illegal Iran-Contra operation, the S&L rip-off, and the BCCI scandals.

Instead, Clinton’s presidency was tainted by its own intelligence and campaign finance scandals – massive espionage and influence buying operations -- featuring much of the same supporting cast of foreign intelligence agencies, corrupt U.S. middlemen, and international bankers who had been at the center of the Reagan-Bush scandals.

No Clinton era official or those of two earlier Administrations were ever fully prosecuted and jailed for their role in crimes involving the CIA and BCCI, or for related crimes that have afflicted the Bush 41 and Clinton presidencies. Investigations have been repeatedly sidetracked, ignored, or when prosecutions actually occurred, top officials have been pardoned. These crimes, along with new and more lethal variations on them, carried over into the Bush 43 Administration.

Now, we are being asked to believe that Hillary Clinton is the best choice among Democratic candidates to clean house and punish the many and varied crimes of state committed by Bush-Cheney. Not bloody likely...

Continued...
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/leveymg/347

I just came over this one hour documentary at YouTube. It has some interesting interviews (see full list of persons below). Zbigniew Brzezinski gets eight minutes on his role in Afghanistan in the late 1970s.

Part 1 of 7:

Go here to watch part 2-7:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Our+Own+Private+Bin+Laden+of+7

Description
OUR OWN PRIVATE BIN LADEN is a film about understanding the creation of the persona of Osama bin Laden as a phenomenon of the interplay between history, politics, global economics and the media. The film highlights the historical background that led to the fatal link between post-Cold War politics and the emergence of new forms of terrorism that succeeded in establishing their own economy. It traces the connection between privatization, deregulation and free market and the globalization of terrorism.
OUR OWN PRIVATE BIN LADEN examines the complicity between economic structures of "terror" and "the war on terror," their interdependencies, and the creation of the Bin Laden industry as a consequence.

The film explains why the world after September 11, 2001 is less the result of a stray act of terror but the consequence of a series of fatal decisions made from 1945 onwards.

Named Best Foreign Documentary and Best Film of the Festival at the inaugural European Independent Film Festival in Paris, Samira Goetschel's consuming work achieves the brilliance of Michael Moore with a great degree of dignity and restraint. By sheer determination, she collected a trove of high-caliber interviews with eminent investigative journalists and political figures such as Cold War-era CIA director Stansfield Turner, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Pakistani ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto and the world's leading "public intellectual” Noam Chomsky.

The title is great, the essay not quite as interesting. Still, this is getting coverage at many progressive news sites, such as Alternet. The overlapping funding of the Bush family and Osama Bin a Patsy is indeed worth looking into.

How the Bush family's private connection to a dirty offshore bank is the only link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

The following chapter, "The BCCI Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad," appears in investigative journalist Lucy Komisar's new book "A Game as Old as Empire," just published by Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco).

Now that the U.S. Congress is investigating the truth of President George W. Bush's statements about the Iraq war, they might look into one of his most startling assertions: that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2007/03/84517.html

VOX Pop
1022 Cortelyou Rd.
Brooklyn, NY 11218
Telephone: 718 940 2084

At Sander Hicks' VOX Pop bookstore/cafe this Saturday, impeccable BCCI researcher Lucy Komisar will be promoting the new book, "A Game as Old As Empire" in which she has a chapter;

Saturday 3/31 @ Vox Pop, 5-9 PM, FREE:

Dinner special for only $9! Your choice of Turkey/Bison/Veggie Burger with Beer or Wine, voxpopnet.net/food.html, voxpopnet.net/beerwine.html

5-7 PM: James Henry and Lucy Komisar present A Game As Old As Empire

John Perkins's controversial exposé, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, came out of nowhere in late 2004 to become an international word-of-mouth sensation. Now Perkins is joined by a dozen contributors-journalists, investigators, activists, and even other economic hit men in A Game As Old As Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption.

Dave Emory: ...the current seated President, George W. Bush, is not at all separate from the BCCI milieu ... this isn't something that's "long ago and far away".

Lucy Komisar: No... BCCI has been very good to the current Bush's business interests... in 1979 and 80 it helped finance his oil company which was called Arbusto Energy. The money came through a man named Bath who was in business, and one might think he was moving the money of Mr. Bin Mahfouz. That money turned out to be very useful for George Bush, when Harken Energy, (which absorbed Arbusto), got in money trouble in 1987, it got $25 million in financing from the Union Bank of Switzerland, and as part of that deal, a seat on the board was given to a Harken shareholder Sheikh Abdullah Taha Baksh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz ...

The money comes from CIA, it goes through BCCI, in accounts that nobody knows about, that nobody can follow, and then money from the big shareholders of BCCI comes back to George Bush.

Isn't that an interesting circle?

BCCI, The CIA and Foreign Intelligence (CIA)
http://www.totse.com/en/politics/central_intelligence_agency/161758.html

The Press on the BCCI-bin Mahfouz-bin Laden Intelligence Nexus (Saudia Arabia)
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/q4c.html

Silent Partners: Bush, bin Laden and the 9/11 Commission (George H. W. Bush)
http://empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com/2005/03/silent-partners-bush-bin-laden-and-911.html

The Bush-Bin Laden Money Connection (George W. Bush)
http://www.bushwatch.com/bushmoney.htm

BCCI And Georgia Politicians (Jimmy Carter)
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/16ga.htm

Arkansas Connections (Bill Clinton)
http://prorev.com/connex.htm

Pakistan investigates BCCI role in sale of nuclear knowhow
http://www.pakistan-facts.com/article.php?story=20040204181106258

From BCCI to ISI: The Saga of Entrapment Continues (BCCI and ISI as patsies)
http://icssa.org/bcci.html