Interesting new thing I stumbled across today

[paulthompson]

Here's a new entry I finished today that may hint at neocon foreknowledge that 9/11 or something like it was coming, or it may not. It all depends how suspicious you are:

Mid-September 2001-October 2001
"Pentagon Tells Ex-CIA Director to Tie Iraq to 9/11"
It is later reported that "Within just a few days" of 9/11, Richard Perle convene(s) the Defense Policy Board "to discuss how Washington could use the incidents as justification for attacking Iraq, and (ex-CIA director and prominent neoconservative James) Woolsey (is) tasked to go to Europe to collect evidence that Hussein was linked to al-Qaeda. He spen(ds) many weeks on that mission, emerging with the story that an unnamed informant had told Czech intelligence that he had seen the leader of the Sep. 11 skyjackers meet with an Iraqi agent in Prague in the April before the attack. Even though the report was dismissed as not credible by US, British, French, and Israeli intelligence agencies, it (becomes) the basis--endlessly repeated by Woolsey and other neocons on television talk shows and in op-ed pages of major newspapers--of a major propaganda campaign against Iraq..." (Foreign Policy In Focus, 4/8/03) Woolsey starts his propaganda campaign two days after 9/11 with an article attempting to connect Iraq to the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. He claims that Iraqi intelligence helped bomber Ramzi Yousef steal the identity of a Kuwaiti student studying at a college in Wales. He argues that if his theory is correct, "then it was Iraq that went after the World Trade Center last time. Which makes it much more plausible that Iraq has done so again." (New Republic, 9/13/01) Woosley or someone else connected to US intelligence appear to have been pursuing this line of inquiry shortly before 9/11. The London Times notes shortly after 9/11, "Until two months ago the US security agencies had never asked anyone at the college to verify Ramzi Yousef's confession of his days in Wales. Why they suddenly re-opened the files on him only seven weeks before the suicide attacks in America is not clear." (London Times, 9/22/01)

What I find really intriguing is the London Times article mention that someone started pursuing new investigative leads into Yousef (who had been convicted of his role in the 1993 WTC bombing plot in 1997 and was safely locked away in solitary confinement a Supermax prison, unable to communicate with anyone in the outside world), seven weeks before 9/11. I strongly suspect that Woolsey was involved in this investigation before 9/11 - there's no way he could have cogently argued a highly complicated argument trying to tie Yousef to Iraq in a roughly 24 hour time period after 9/11, assuming someone gave him that info immediately and he did little else. He had to have been working on it before 9/11. If he just happened to be working on a hunch in the vague hopes that it would be useful to tie Iraq and al-Qaeda together at some point in the future, it would have been a really remarkable hunch because the Yousef argument had so much extra punch when it turned out that the WTC was hit.

[spooked911]

1. Wow, that IS really interesting and rather damning.

I bet ex-CIA director Woolsey knew something was coming and was priming the pumps to link the coming attack to Iraq.

Woolsey is a sickening man who has lied over and over about Iraq. I personally heard him lie on the radio about Saddam kicking out the weapons inspectors before the 2003 invasion. I wouldn't put anything past Woolsey. He is neocon scum.


I can't wait for Woodrowfan, LARED, Boloboffin and Hack89 to come say this is just a coincidence.

[Bolo Boffin]

8. Your wait is over.

And you once again left out vincent_vega_lives. He's going to be hurt.

This shows how desperate the neocons were to attack Iraq, and that using the 9/11 attacks as justification for going into Iraq was a natural for this crowd.

I'm comfortable with stating that this was a coincidence, but I'm also comfortable with the idea that Woolsey heard about the looming threat of an al-Qaeda attack - anybody with any idea of the August 6 PDB could have gone there - and decided to do a little footwork in case al-Qaeda pulled off an attack, no matter what it was. There's nothing here that betrays any real foreknowledge of the specifics of the 9/11 attack.

Two months before 9/11 - wasn't that close to when Ashcroft stopped flying in passenger planes?

[seatnineb]

10. Be On The Lookout for Atta................

In the eyes of Mohammed Atta........

To him(Atta),Saddam Hussein was an American stooge set up to give Washington an excuse to intervene in the Middle East.
9/11 Commission Report.
Page 161.


So what does lil' ol' Atta go and do........

He flies a plane into the WTC......and lo and behold.....Washington has an excuse to "intervene in the middle east"!

Just another coincidence!

[Bolo Boffin]

21. Well. Wasn't he?

That blowback's a b*tch.

As I understand it, the plan for Atta and bin Laden was that by having so many Saudis as hijackers, a wedge would be drawn between American and the Saudi royal family. That would eventually result in the withdrawal of American forces from Saudi Arabia - and that did happen.

However, they withdrew into Iraq, because Bushco was able to convince enough people by hook or by crook of Saddam's immanent threat to American interests. That's why they're building all those permanent bases in Iraq.

[seatnineb]

25. Wrong.

U.S troops only left Saudi Arabia AFTER the invasion of Iraq was complete.

Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said the departure of U.S. forces makes sense because Saddam Hussein's military is no longer a threat in the region.


http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-04-29-us-gulf-forces_x.htm

Atta gave Washington a chance to intervene in Middle East affairs.

End of story.

[spooked911]

2. Innocuous explanation?

I suppose the innocuous explanation is that Woolsey knew of a coming attack and was trying to get info about it from Yousef.

This seems implausible for two reasons:
1) Woolsey was/is a neocon with a strong agenda of attacking Iraq,
2) Why would Yousef have any knowledge of a new plot if he had been in solitary confinement for four years?

[philb]

3. Yousef had stated that airplanes would be used to bring down WTC

in the future at his trial in 1996 for the 1993 WTC bombing. U.S. officials were well aware of the plot to attack the WTC and Pentagon using airplanes from the disks recovered from Yousef when he was arrested.
But there was no indication of any connection to Iraq.

Its well documented that the Bush Admin. had plans for attacking Afghanistan and Iraq well before 9/11; and had promoted such .

But there was no clear connection of Iraq to Oklahoma bombing and Yousef was a pretty dead issue.

An interesting happening along the way in addition to questions relating to Oklahoma bombing that seems to have parallels to 9/11,
is the strange incident in Iraq
where the contractor was beheaded and appeared to have connections to the CIA and Oklahoma City events.

Similar to WTC, there was evidence of bombs in the Oklahoma building and that the staged bomb wasn't the cause of most of the damage.

And the same contractor as for WTC was in charge of the cleanup(cover-up) and the evidence in both was quickly destroyed to prevent normal investigative inquiries. But the evidence in Oklahoma appears to point in a different direction than Iraq regarding who was complicit.

[spooked911]

5. Actually, there was a weak connection of Iraq to the Ok city bombing*

but I agree with the rest of your post.

*I don't have time to find the connection, it is controversial.

[Old and In the Way]

4. Probably an action item from one of Cheney's secret energy policy

meetings.....

[spooked911]

6. Ha! Good one.

[Kevin Fenton]

7. Hell bent

After having read "The Price of Loyalty" I would say the Bush administration was hell bent on attacking Iraq from day one. I don't find it odd that they were exploring all avenues to justify the attack, even a tenuous one like Ramzi Yousef. Even though all/most of the people who did the 1993 bombing were convicted and a lot of evidence came out, I think there was still some disbelief in the intelligence community, "that these guys met at a pickup basketball game at the Y in Brooklyn or Jersey City and decided to blow up the World Trade Center 'cuz they were bored." (Clarke, p. 77). Some people thought they had a state sponsor. Wolfowitz, in particular, seems to have been convinced that Iraq was behind it.

[Frederik]

9. What is odd, though, is that they started exploring the

Ramzi Youssef/al-Qaida-Iraq connection seven weeks before 9/11, and that Woolsey had the whole argument ready the day after the event.

[Kevin Fenton]

16. Wolfowitz

Given that Wolfowitz (and others) had been chomping at the bit go invade Iraq for years but had only recently come into office (in January) and that they were casting about for a reason to do it, I'm not surprised that, in the summer of 2001, they were looking for an excuse, any old excuse, that they could manipulate for their own ends. There's no question the decision to invade Iraq was taken at the start of 2001, at the latest. I really don't think the alleged Ramzi Yousej/Iraq/Al Qaeda connection played a large role in the run up to the Iraq war. I would say their looking for alternative reasons to go to Iraq shows that they did not have foreknowledge. If the current administration was involved in the whole thing, then why did they not include a clearer link to Iraq in the plot?

[Frederik]

17. I agree that "mihop" is an unlikely explanation

for why Woolsey would do this ("if the current asministration was involved in the whole thing").

But I do think it indicates foreknowledge (which frankly is almost not debatable - there is so much evidence for detailed foreknowledge in the FBI, CIA, Mossad etc). The Youssef-Iraq connection would have been worthless without 9/11, wouldn't it? WTC-93 was old news in 2001, terrorism would have been useless as a justification for invading Iraq without 9/11.

[Kevin Fenton]

18. Can't really agree

I don't think there was conscious foreknowledge.

"The Youssef-Iraq connection would have been worthless without 9/11, wouldn't it?"
I don't think the connection exists, so I think it's worthless anyway. I wouldn't say it was that much worse than the actual explanation given at the time - WMD + regime change (although the issues of terrorism and oil must have loomed large in the public's mind).

"WTC-93 was old news in 2001, terrorism would have been useless as a justification for invading Iraq without 9/11."
The current administration seems to play fast and lose with its facts anyway. If 9/11 hadn't happened, then it certainly could not have had a significant impact on public opinion, but it might have affected how "the base" thought. There are people in Washington who might take notice of such an argument.
There was no good reason to invade Iraq at all (even after 9/11), so they were clutching at straws. This seems to be one of them.
What we often see from the current administration is a lot of noise, used as a substitute for anything resembling a coherent argument; they try to build up the pressure for something using pseudo-news - I remember reading a report during a peak in the campaign against North Korea earlier this year about a hole in the fence in the DMZ - somebody was speculating that it indicated North Korean infiltration into the South, when, in fact, it could just as easily have been the opposite.

[paulthompson]

26. Yes, that's all true...

And it well may be their general Iraq-mania is all this means. But it seems interesting to me that they were only interested in investigation some things and not others. For instance, I have another new timeline entry showing the Justice Department failed to make a deal with Hakim Murad, one of Yousef's key Bojinka coconspirators. He knew all about Yousef's planes as weapons plot (and had even volunteered to fly a plane into CIA headquarters). In fact, Yousef himself was never properly interrogated by US authorities, amazingly enough. If they were just fishing around for Iraq connections its strange all the things they didn't do that they could have done.

[Kevin Fenton]

27. Investigating Iraq

"But it seems interesting to me that they were only interested in investigation some things and not others."
"If they were just fishing around for Iraq connections its strange all the things they didn't do that they could have done."
They came into office in January and still had more than another three years to invade Iraq before the next election in 2004. I don't think it's especially odd there were still quite a few loose ends to tie up vis-a-vis Iraq when the planes hit.

btw Right-wing Officer in Market Garden
I think the officer you were referring to is Maj. Gen. Stanislaw Sosabowski, who commanded the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade at Arnhem. He was probably a bit of a right-winger because he was a Polish army officer and Poland had been something of a military dictatorship under Pilsudski from 1926. Sosabowski also fought in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920, so I doubt he was particularly keen on communism. Obviously, he would have been worried about Poland being sandwiched between a communist USSR and a communist (East) Germany (he was right about this). He protested against the plan at the start, because he thought it was a bad one (he was right about that, too). And when dropped on day 4 (2 days late because of bad weather), he failed to reinforce the British (only 202 Poles got through in 2 attempts). However, the since the reinforcement involved crossing the Rhine under fire in rubber dinghies, it is perhaps not a lack of ardour the stopped him. I really can't see anything wrong with his conduct.
There were some other instances after D-Day when one commander accused another of botching something, e.g. closing a pocket, but this happens all the time - remember Tannenberg?
I'm aware of some instances where an officer has deliberately attempted to throw at battle, such as Gneisenau at Waterloo, but it's usually fairly obvious.
Did the Germans know? If they did, why (1) not hide the panzers better - they were seen by British reconnaisance and Dutch resistance? (2) not put them by the first bridge, rather than the last one? (3) let one of the northern groups at Arnhem take its end of the bridge virtually unopposed? (4) not surround all the paratroopers where they landed? or even (5) not just machine gun them in the air?

[spooked911]

19. Actually, the '93 WTC bombing was setup by the FBI. I kid you not.

The FBI informant who built the bomb wanted to make a fake bomb but the FBI made him use a real bomb.

In any case, it's hard to believe someone like Woolsey wouldn't know about this type of synthetic terrorism. Unless he's just a useful idiot.

[Kevin Fenton]

20. I doubt it

Where did you get this from?

[seatnineb]

22. No .....Spooked is right............

Federal trial testimony and tapes revealed that when Salem was asked to assemble the bomb for the WTC, Salem went to the FBI to ask that harmless powder be used to avoid deaths. But FBI and US Attorneys involved essentially cut Salem off and the WTC was bombed killing people in 1993.
Testimony by two of Salem’s FBI agent handlers, Mr. Anticev, and Mrs. Nancy Floyd, confirmed that their FBI supervisors intentionally refused the agents and Salem’s pleas to render the WTC bomb harmless.
http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-Government'sRoleInTerrorism-Babe.htm

One way or another....there is a lot more to the 93' WTC bombing than meets the eye.

[Kevin Fenton]

23. No he isn't

Emad Salem worked for the FBI undercover in the cell which later did the 1993 WTC bombing. However, the FBI decided to terminate co-operation with Salem before Ramzi Yousef even arrived in the country (1 September 1992) - the FBI gave Salem 3 months' notice and Yousef probably arrived before he had worked out his notice. At the last meeting Salem told his handler (Floyd) that something was going on, but he didn't have any specifics then.
The dispute in which Salem was kicked out was kind of complicated. The new administrative special agent in charge, Carson Dunbar, at the New York terrorism unit basically didn't take a shine to Salem. He forced Salem to take several lie detector tests and wanted him to wear a wire and testify in open court. Salem refused and left. He was getting 500 dollars a week plus expenses.
Thompson says of a report in the New York Times, "Salem testifies that the FBI knew about the attack beforehand and told him they would thwart it by substituting a harmless powder for the explosives." Floyd was just told something was in the works, not any specifics about the plan. Her boss hated her and that's why he ignored everything she said, especially vague remarks. The bomb was in a vat or something, so I suppose it was liquid. If the FBI had substituted powder for it, I figure Yousef would have noticed. Substituting powder just sounds like a flippant remark to me.

[seatnineb]

24. Yeah......Yousef was so bright...........

.....that he added sugar to heated Pottasium Chlorate in the comforts of his Don Josef Appartment in Manila!

Result:

A lot of smoke.....forcing Yousef to Flee the appartent.

And what did silly little Yousef leave behind.....

The laptop containing all the plans that were practically blueprints for the 9/11 attacks to come.

Conclusion:

The 9/11 legend consolidated.......

"You see....those little Arab rascals had been planning for 9/11 for years! "

[Frederik]

11. Very interesting find

Woolsey is a very interesting person. He is one of the directors of the Arlington Institute, a small "futurist" think-tank with military connections. This is what their "Arlington forum" wrote shortly after the attacks:

"The September terrorist attack on The World Trade Center and Pentagon clearly has the potential for being the defining event which, while shattering our national illusion of inviolability and security, heralds a whole new direction and era. This is neither just about terrorism nor are the effects limited just to the US, for the reverberations of this event are already reshaping mindsets and perspectives around the world. At The Arlington Institute we believe that this horrible event could be a significant catalyst for spurring profound reassessment. It could push us toward new approaches and new thinking. If we respond appropriately, it could be a godsend."

A godsend, no less.

[Rob Conn]

12. Very important

People often support the official version of events by suggesting that no one in our government could be bad enough to do something like pull off 9/11. You raise an interesting point to which I always return. A lot of the people we are talking about are not your average individual. Many belong to obscure and secret think tanks, and right-wing advocacy groups. It is not difficult, in recognizing the priorities of many of those involved, to surmise that 3000+ people are an acceptable sacrifice to achieve the "godsend" like benefits that so many industrial executives spoke of after the attacks. Since when are people so sacred in the face of profit. We in this country are kept naive about the impact of our comfort of the rest of the world. I admit that my consumption results in the povery and death of others. Do you really think that these corporate executives are more sensative than me to the plight of the causalties of U.S. imperialism. I don't think so. James Woolsey can not be trusted, and his actions should be analyzed with a high degree of skepticism regarding his stated intentions. I only have one question which I have posted as a response to the parent thread. - R.C.

[Rob Conn]

13. Question???

One question: Why would they be scambling to make this connection only weeks before the attack when plans to invade Iraq and warnings of the attack existed for more than a year before?

[Frederik]

15. It actually lends credence to "lihop"

They got sufficiently precise information during the summer to start preparing for the spin. I don't think that precise warnings existed a year before. They probably didn't know for sure that the target would be the WTC before that summer, and Ramzi Youssef's connection is to the last WTC bombing. Woolsey's logic, in his 9/13 article (before the names of the suspects are known) seems to have been that one could suspect the same people that bombed the WTC in '93 had succeeded this time (infering that those people were the Iraqis and their al-Qaida connections).

[RBHam]

14. I read PNAC's "mission statement" before 9-11...

When they got their "new Pearl Harbor" it all seemed too convenient for me.