Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
"When I ran into the drugs I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me."
--Indira Singh
The 9/11 terror plot itself, intersected with the activities of a drug trafficking network of international scope, in ways that form a "crystal clear" picture of what was going on -- to quote Sibel Edmonds.
Fintan Dunne, Editor BreakForNews.com (at this link, Daniel Ellsberg's support of Edmonds is noted - Ellsberg was cool on Colbert Report this week)
SIBEL: Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one. Completely by chance, I, a lowly translator, stumbled over one piece of it. But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it. And of course a lot of people from abroad are involved. It's massive. So to do this investigation, to really do it, they will have to look into everything.
CD: But you can start from anywhere –
SIBEL: That's the beauty of it. You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people. There may be a lot of them, but it is one group. And they are very dangerous for all of us.
Now THIS is what I call a map. This comes directly from the National Drug Intelligence Center in the Department of Justice, National Drug Threat Assessment 2006, January 2006. Today I'm going to post a lot of stuff that I certainly don't consider the Gospel Truth. It's purely for your careful consideration with barrels of salt. So let's kick things off with the DOJ:
And this is just funny. I suspect the purple patches are notorious 'rebel zones' in the War on Drugs, where the federal and state government policies have split apart entirely. But they forgot eastern Tennessee... and of course everywhere else.
We will be returning to the one about the Russian-Israeli crime organizations. Florida drug money is connected to some of the loose ends around 9/11. The 9/11 drug money connection has many potential angles, but first note here that the DEA marks Miami as a key heroin and cocaine distribution area.
Now we're going into stuff that seems hard to believe, and beyond here, I don't claim that any of these people are telling the truth.
This is just a small slice of the material on the internet about how the rich & powerful skim huge amounts of cash out of the addicted masses of America through the profitable geopolitics of illicit drugs. Some people claim there is a strong connection between drug trafficking and 9/11 financing. Certainly all the players in Afghanistan since 1979 have been up to their ears in it, including the CIA and its favored contractors (who make up around half the CIA personnel these days).
This is certainly part of a trend towards the criminalization of war, which corresponds to the increasing privatization of war. We will have more on this angle in the coming days. Even if there are no operational links to the real September 11 conspiracy itself, the drug-militarization angle really needs to be investigated seriously, perhaps by a Democratic Congress with subpoena and immunity powers. Even snooping at possible loose 9/11 connections immediately reveals a world awash in drug money, with Bush and the Establishment generating vast cash flows from conflict zones - and enforcing loyalties among players from Afghanistan to South America by aligning these cash flows with military force. Sometimes privatized paramilitary forces. Why not?
"Kill the Messenger:" Sibel Edmonds is on the radar a bit more than usual, as they have apparently whipped up a documentary to expose more of her surreal role in the weird world of intelligence after 9/11, named appropriately enough, Kill the Messenger. (perhaps she shouldn't be trusted, one guy suggests) A blog supporting Edmonds' film, sibeledmonds.blogspot.com is operated by Lukery at wotisitgood4.blogspot.com, who has covered her case in detail. To recap what I have posted before, Edmonds worked as a translator at the FBI, where she discovered a conspiracy within her unit to cover up a Turkish espionage ring in the United States. One of her co-translators was spoofing the wiretaps for FBI agents, and when Edmonds tried to bring this to her superiors, they suppressed the whole thing. Also Dennis Hastert was taking big bribes from the Turks, and there is some kind of global nuclear parts trafficking conspiracy connected to the AQ Khan network and some Israeli mobster types - probably Marc Rich type guys. The guys running the secret nuclear trafficking network were enemies of the CIA's Brewster-Jennings counter-proliferation operations and Valerie Plame, adding yet another twisted concourse to that scandal. And the AIPAC stuff and Chalabi are laterally related, since so much of it revolves around the same neo-con cats in DC and their foreign allies.
Lukery summarized:
Sibel makes 2 specific related claims: a) Sibel claims that she has information which proves that senior officials knew that there were plans to attack America months before 9/11.
Specifically: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers." and "President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away."
b) Sibel claims that she has evidence of a global multi-billion dollar smuggling/dealing network of weapons and drug which is hidden in plain view. Of course, there is also the requisite money-laundering infrastructure. She claims that the network comprises senior american government officials, terrorists, and 'unsavoury regimes.'
and they merge, giving us: "drug trafficking, money laundering, foreign names and American names directly involved in the financing of the 9-11 attacks on WTC (World Trade Center) and the Pentagon."
After a mere 3 months in the FBI, Edmonds publicly claims that all this stuff was going on, covered up at numerous levels in the federal government – though Ashcroft-era gag orders prevent her from sharing many aspects of the story. A virtual hailstorm of individual criminal conspiracies, involving top neo-cons, drug trafficking, all kinds of crazy shit. She has mentioned Coleen Rowley as an ally in the whistleblower field.
There is another potential side to this: Edmonds is herself possibly a red herring, a player or a dupe in the conspiracy, posing as an opponent. Conspiracy gurus suggest she might be a "limited hangout," or a channel to expose parts of the story, and fill other parts with disinformation. Edmonds comes from a prominent family in Turkey, so perhaps she has a bit of Turkish partisanship against some groups back home. One blogger named xymphora suggested she speaks the conspiracy-ese a bit too well:
"Edmonds sometimes makes me a bit nervous as she seems overly adept with the terms and arguments of conspiracy theory for someone who is supposed to have been a lowly FBI translator (it's like she's been reading Peter Dale Scott!). Is she part of the battle in Washington between the Bush Administration enablers involved in the drugs/arms business who don't mind directly or indirectly supporting al Qaeda if it is good for business, and those old-fashioned types who still consider that dealing with American enemies is treason?"
And she gives interviews with patently crazy people like Tom Flocco. Here is a fragment tying some of the neo-cons to some nasty shit:
Although Grossman "has not been as high profile in the press" FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds cryptically told me the other day, "don't overlook him – he is very important." She was not speaking about the Plame affair, though Grossman did indeed have a key role there, as we will see.
According to her, Grossman was one of three officials – the other two, she says, are Richard Perle and Douglas Feith – who had been watched by both Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA team, and by the major FBI investigation of organized crime and governmental corruption on which she herself was working until being terminated in April 2002.
Marc Grossman has served in a number of interesting countries and positions over the past 29 years. From 1976-1983, at a pivotal point in the Cold War, he was employed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan – America's key regional ally, through which millions of dollars in weapons and other "aid" were delivered by Pakistan's ISI intelligence service to the mujahedin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Grossman is definitely part of the Valerie Plame scandal, no doubt.
Well, it all still makes her story worth adding to the mixture. Here is the documentary trailer. Please let's take some bets if this will be aired in the United States.
Florida drug money angles (and there are many!) There was this funny story about one of the flight school proprietors in Florida who trained the 9/11 hijackers. The flight school owner was caught with 43 pounds of heroin just after the 9/11 hijackers got to his school, and somehow this story never got fully explored. See MadCowProd.com for a lot of amusing tales of south Floridian drug trafficking. It's worth considering what the site's proprietor Daniel Hopsicker says, "THE 9.11 HEROIN CONNECTION" is "The Biggest Censored Story of the 21st Century." He cites Thomas Pynchon: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers."
More recently, and quite funny, is the "SkyWay Aircraft" case, where Tom DeLay's buddy + Homeland Security defense contractor accidentally getting busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine on a DC9 connected with the Titan defense contractor. Naturally, the DEA ducking and covering from obvious political pressure ensued. Good times. And perhaps this link is connected to Zacharias Moussaoui and 9/11 financing. (Bonus: MadCowProd says Adnan Kashoggi finances the 9/11 Truth Movement? Now that's what I call a conspiracy!)
Ruppert on Hawalas, PTECH, PROMIS, 9/11 and some heroin networks, BCCI-style. From Mike Ruppert's FromTheWilderness.com last year, "PTECH, 9/11, and USA-SAUDI TERROR: PART II" which offers some evidence that PROMIS software connected to 9/11, and possible narcotics / heroin money connections to 9/11. Ruppert himself offers a theory that advanced software like PROMIS was capable of manipulating computers throughout the financial sphere and the federal government. Ruppert's book Crossing the Rubicon suggests that Dick Cheney could have executed 9/11 himself by using PROMIS and other whizbang technologies to, for example, insert extra radar blips in air traffic control towers across America. It seems kind of like a Deus Ex Machina conspiracy argument to me, but it is still an interesting, if far-fetched hypothetical argument that raises serious questions about how PROMIS and the rest of the fed's information technology really is run. At a dense 675 pages, crossing the Rubicon is one hell of a book, summarized thusly:
"In my book I make several key points:
1. I name Vice President Richard Cheney as the prime suspect in the mass murders of 9/11 and will establish that, not only was he a planner in the attacks, but also that on the day of the attacks he was running a completely separate Command, Control and Communications system which was superceding any orders being issued by the FAA, the Pentagon, or the White House Situation Room;
2. I establish conclusively that in May of 2001, by presidential order, Richard Cheney was put in direct command and control of all wargame and field exercise training and scheduling through several agencies, especially FEMA. This also extended to all of the conflicting and overlapping NORAD drills -- some involving hijack simulations -- taking place on that day.
3. I demonstrate that the TRIPOD II exercise being set up on Sept. 10th in Manhattan was directly connected to Cheney's role in the above.
4. I also prove conclusively that a number of public officials, at the national and New York City levels, including then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, were aware that flight 175 was en route to lower Manhattan for 20 minutes and did nothing to order the evacuation of, or warn the occupants of the South Tower. One military officer was forced to leave his post in the middle of the attacks and place a private call to his brother - who worked at the WTC - warning him to get out. That was because no other part of the system was taking action.
5. I also show that the Israeli and British governments acted as partners with the highest levels of the American government to help in the preparation and, very possibly, the actual execution of the attacks."
"There is more reason to be afraid of not facing the evidence in this book than of facing what is in it."
Approach #2: Peter Dale Scott's "The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11". haven't looked through all of it, but it seems an interesting source to begin looking at how the gears really turn in Central Asia and thereabouts.
it also seems possible that the U.S. government might contemplate using Hizb ut-Tahrir and the meta-group for political changes in Russia itself, even while combating the Islamism of al-Qaeda elsewhere. This would be far from the first time that the U.S. Government had used drug-trafficking proxies as assets, and would do a lot to explain the role of the U.S. in 2001 in restoring major drug traffickers to power in Afghanistan. Dubious figures like Nukhaev, Khodorkovskii, and Khashoggi have already shown their interest in such initiatives; and western business interests have shown their eagerness to work with these allies of the meta-group.
It is fitting to think of most U.S. intelligence assets as chess pieces, moved at the whim of their controllers. That is however not an apt metaphor for the meta-group, which clearly has the resources to negotiate and to exert its own influence interactively upon the governments it works with.
Since first hearing about the meta-group's role in the Russian 9/11, I have pondered the question whether it could have played a similar role in the American 9/11 as well. At this point I have to say that I have found no persuasive evidence that would prove its involvement. The fact remains that two informed and credible witnesses, Sibell Edmonds and Indira Singh, have spoken independently of the importance of international drug trafficking in the background of 9/11.
The Bush Administration has paid Sibell Edmonds the tribute of silencing her on the grounds of national interest. She has nonetheless made it clear that what she would talk about concerns that part of the world where the meta-group has influence:
SE [Sibel Edmonds]: It's interesting, in one of my interviews, they say "Turkish countries," but I believe they meant Turkic countries – that is, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and all the 'Stans, including Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and [non-Turkic countries like] Afghanistan and Pakistan. All of these countries play a big part in the sort of things I have been talking about.
CD [Chris Deliso]: What, you mean drug-smuggling?
SE: Among other things. Yes, that is a major part of it. It's amazing that in this whole "war on terror" thing, no one ever talks about these issues.[120]
Indira Singh, who lost her high-tech job at J.P. Morgan after telling the FBI about Ptech and 9/11, was even more dramatic in her public testimony at a Canadian event:
I did a number of things in my research and when I ran into the drugs I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me.[121]
The False Dilemmas of 9/11 Theories
I said earlier that by suppressing awareness of the role of drug-trafficking in our society, we give drug traffickers a de facto franchise to exert political influence without criticism or opposition. An example of this is the discussion of 9/11 in America, which usually fails to consider the meta-group among the list of possible suspects.
I have tried to suggest in this paper that in fact the meta-group had both motive – to restore the Afghan opium harvest and increase instability and chaos along the trade routes through Central Asia – and opportunity – to utilize its contacts with both al-Zawahiri in al Qaeda and the CIA in Washington. It is furthermore the best candidate to explain one of the more difficult anomalies (or indeed paradoxes) of the clues surrounding 9/11: that many of the clues lead in the direction of Saudi Arabia, but some lead also in a very different direction, towards Israel.[122]
Here it is worth quoting again the well-informed remark of a Washington insider about the meta-group's predecessor, BCCI: "Who else could wire something together to Saudi Arabia, China, Israel, and the U.S.?"[123] The current meta-group fills the same bill, for it unites supporters of Muslim Salafism (Saidov) with at least one Israeli citizen (Kosman).
The meta-group's involvement in the Russian 9/11 of course does nothing to prove its involvement in the American one. However awareness of its presence – as an unrecognized Force X operating in the world – makes previous discussions of 9/11 seem curiously limited. Again and again questions of responsibility have been unthinkingly limited to false dilemmas in which the possible involvement of this or any other Force X is excluded.
An early example is Michael Moore's naïve question to President Bush in Dude, Where's My Country: "Who attacked the United States on September 11 – a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friends, Saudi Arabia?"[124] A far more widespread dilemma is that articulated by David Ray Griffin in his searching critique of the 9/11 Commission Report:
There are two basic theories about 9/11. Each of these theories is a "conspiracy theory." One of these is the official conspiracy theory, according to which the attacks of 9/11 were planned and executed solely by al-Qaeda terrorists under the guidance of Osama bin Laden....Opposing this official theory is the [sic] alternative conspiracy theory, which holds that the attacks of 9/11 were able to succeed only because they were facilitated by the Bush administration and its agencies.[125]
Griffin of course is not consciously excluding a third possible theory – that a Force X was responsible. But his failure to acknowledge this possibility is an example of the almost universal cultural denial I referred to earlier. In America few are likely to conceive of the possibility that a force in contact with the U.S. government could be not just an asset, but a force exerting influence on that government.
My personal suggestion to 9/11 researchers is that they focus on the connections of the meta-group's firm Far West, Ltd. – in particular those which lead to Khashoggi, Berezovskii, Halliburton and Dick Cheney, and Diligence, Joe Allbaugh, and Neil Bush.
As a grain of salt, we should remember that Florida is so thoroughly laden with drug money that it is quite likely people would catch false leads to September 11 among the huge forest of shady people getting rich from the Business. The loose end about how the DEA was tracking Israelis who lived virtually around the corner from the 9/11 hijackers is an interesting one, but perhaps the density of shady business in Hollywood, Florida is just that high, one block of criminal enterprises after another. This IS Florida we're talking about.
The Israeli 9/11 angles are still worth checking out – the supposed Mossad front company Urban Moving Systems and the rest. From one of America's most respected Jewish periodicals, Forward:
Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth: Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage
MARCH 15, 2002
By MARC PERELMAN, FORWARD STAFF
"Despite angry denials by Israel and its American supporters, reports that Israel was conducting spying activities in the United States may have a grain of truth, the Forward has learned.
However, far from pointing to Israeli spying against U.S. government and military facilities, as reported in Europe last week, the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism.
In particular, a group of five Israelis arrested in New Jersey shortly after the September 11 attacks and held for more than two months was subjected to an unusual number of polygraph tests and interrogated by a series of government agencies including the FBI's counterintelligence division, which by some reports remains convinced that Israel was conducting an intelligence operation. The five Israelis worked for a moving company with few discernable assets that closed up shop immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel.
Other allegations involved Israelis claiming to be art students who had backgrounds in signal interception and ordnance. (See related story, Page 8.)
Sources emphasized that the release of all the Israelis under investigation indicates that they were cleared of any suspicion that they had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks, as some anti-Israel media outlets have suggested.
The resulting tensions between Washington and Jerusalem, sources told the Forward, arose not because of the operations' targets but because Israel reportedly violated a secret gentlemen's agreement between the two countries under which espionage on each other's soil is to be coordinated in advance.
Most experts and former officials interviewed for this article said that such so-called unilateral or uncoordinated Israeli monitoring of radical Muslims in America would not be surprising. In fact, they said, Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation last December.
"I have no doubt Israel has an interest in spying on those groups," said Peter Unsinger, an intelligence expert who teaches justice administration at San Jose University. "The Israelis give us good stuff, like on the Hamas charities." According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front.
After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations. However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.
"The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11."
However, he added, the bureau was "very irritated because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they didn't know about it."
Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue. However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.
The five men — Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel — were arrested eight hours after the attacks by the Bergen County, N.J., police while driving in an Urban Moving Systems van. The police acted on an FBI alert after the men allegedly were seen acting strangely while watching the events from the roof of their warehouse and the roof of their van............
A retired corporate lawyer, Gerald Shea, put together all the government reports on Israeli DEA groups he could find, and corroborated the locations of Israeli groups the DEA monitored and where in Florida the 9/11 hijackers lived when they were training. The results had interesting geographic distribution (which correlates with the Russian-Israeli organizations in Florida admittedly monitored by the Department of Justice as I noted above). These maps are from the Shea's PDF file:
All righty then. That's a lot of heady stuff to consider. I'll note again that I am not a true believer in anything in today's post. I just want to offer some of the interesting things out there on the internet today. I strongly believe that the Republican establishment in America today is very complicit in international drug trafficking – especially since we've got a lot of the same guys who ran cocaine angles in Central America during the Iran-Contra affair. Past behavior is a guide towards future actions, if not ironclad proof.
Arbitrage is power: the buying and selling of goods across geographic space supports the global "shadow economy" that makes up a huge proportion of economic activity. Whoever controls the space, controls the money. Half of Afghanistan's economy is heroin production, for example. Follow the cash: it's one heck of a loose end of September 11, and the war on terror.
Posted by HongPong at September 23, 2006 05:19 PM