World News Tonight
Jun 3rd, 2002, 02:20 PM
#1
Guest
Posts: n/a
Jun 3rd, 2002, 05:41 PM
#2
Guest
Posts: n/a
Did the Bush administration unwittingly make the United States vulnerable to terrorist attacks when it ordered the FBI to back off its investigations of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network while it worked to obtain access to the huge oil and gas reserves in Central Asia? <BR><BR>That question has been asked in news outlets around the world—with the notable exception of the increasingly timid and myopic press in the United States—since the allegation was raised on a respected BBC news show and in a new book by two French intelligence analysts. <BR><BR>If true, the reports would credit the second Bush administration with a diplomatic gaffe that would dwarf one by his father’s administration, which reportedly informed Saddam Hussein it had “no position” on Iraq’s border dispute with Kuwait, whose subsequent invasion by Iraq led to the Gulf War. <BR><BR>The BBC story aired November 6 on Newsnight, the network’s premier current affairs program. The report said that, in addition to blocking the FBI’s investigation of bin Laden himself, the Bush administration quashed an investigation of two of his brothers and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a suspected terrorist front in Falls Church, Virginia, to which they were connected. <BR><BR>“The U.S. Treasury has not frozen WAMY’s assets, and when we talked to them, they insisted they are a charity,” Newsnight reporter Greg Palast said. “Yet, just weeks ago, Pakistan expelled WAMY operatives. And India claimed that WAMY was funding an organization linked to bombings in Kashmir. And the Philippines military has accused WAMY of funding Muslim insurgency. <BR>
Jun 3rd, 2002, 05:53 PM
#3
Guest
Posts: n/a
The FBI had a chance to infiltrate an al Qaeda training camp in the months before the September 11 attacks–and possibly learn about the coming strike–but the proposal was rejected by top officials, U.S. News has learned. <BR><BR> A special agent in an FBI field office was told by a confidential informant that he had been invited to a commando training course at a camp operated by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization in Af- ghanistan. According to two people with knowledge of the events, the agent relayed the informant's remarks to supervisors in the field office, who passed the information to FBI headquarters in Washington, where it was referred to the Osama bin Laden unit in the bureau's Counterterrorism Division.<BR><BR>"Otherwise illegal." The field-office communiqué asked the Justice Department to authorize what is known as an "otherwise illegal activity," or OIA, to allow the confidential in- formant to participate in the terrorist training course without violating Ameri- can law, the two sources said. They would not say which of the FBI's 56 field offices made the request or exactly when it was made.<BR><BR>The bin Laden unit at FBI headquarters rejected the OIA request, the two sources said, and the confidential informant did not travel to Afghanistan or meet with al Qaeda operatives; FBI officials therefore didn't do an "asset validation" of the informant, a routine but critical exercise to determine whether information from the source was reliable. The FBI had no comment. <BR><BR>A principal criticism of the intelligence community after the attacks has been its inability to infiltrate terrorist groups. "Why do we have such a paucity of [human intelligence] assets?" asks Florida Republican Porter Goss, the House Intelligence Committee chairman. "We didn't take all the risks we should have taken." <BR><BR>Justice Department guidelines regarding the use of confidential informants allow an FBI special agent in charge or a "senior field manager" to approve OIAs in domestic criminal investigations if they meet the necessary criteria, which include a blanket prohibition on an informant's participation in any act of violence. Senior Justice Department lawyers say requests for OIA authorizations in international terrorism investigations must be approved by FBI headquarters. "That takes it completely out of the regulations [for domestic criminal investigations]," a top official said. "Anything involving international terrorism, it has to be vetted at the headquarters level." Both sets of guidelines–the domestic and the classified international rules–authorize OIAs to "prevent death, serious bodily injury, or significant damage to property," the sources said.<BR><BR>The individuals who described the confidential informant's alleged invitation to the al Qaeda camp said they did not know whether, had it been approved, it would have led to information that could have shed light on the planning for the September 11 attacks. "It was just another step not taken," one of the sources said.
Jun 3rd, 2002, 05:58 PM
#4
Guest
Posts: n/a
This is a review of a French best-seller, that may interest some of you:<BR><BR>n their book, Bin Laden, La Verite Interdite (Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth), which was published on November 21, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, say the FBI’s deputy director for counterterrorism, John O’Neill, resigned in July to protest the administration’s obstruction of the agency’s investigation just as it was closing in on bin Laden. <BR><BR>“The main obstacles to investigat[ing] Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it,” O’Neill reportedly told the authors. Ironically, O’Neill then took a job as security director of the World Trade Center and was killed in the September 11 terrorist attack. <BR><BR>Brisard says O’Neill, who investigated all the bombings bin Laden was suspected of being behind, complained bitterly to him in interviews last summer that the State Department and the oil lobby stymied attempts to tie bin Laden to the attacks. The final straw for O’Neill came when the U.S. ambassador forced O’Neill and his agents out of Yemen when they were close to linking bin Laden to the attack on the USS Cole. <BR><BR>Brisard and Dasquie say the chief motive for the United States to make peace with the Taliban was oil. They note that the landlocked former Soviet republics of Central Asia—especially Kazakhstan—have huge oil and gas reserves. But because Russia has refused to allow American companies to move the reserves through Russian pipelines and construction of a pipeline through Iran would be risky, they say, a pipeline through Afghanistan made the most sense. <BR><BR>The authors say that Chevron, of which Condoleeza Rice once was a director, is deeply involved in Kazakhstan and is eager to have a safe pipeline to a shipping port. In 1995, they say, Houston-based Unocal signed a contract to export natural gas through a $3 billion pipeline that would go from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan—if the latter could be stabilized politically. The book says that Laila Helms, a part-Afghan niece of former CIA Director Richard Helms, played a key role in bringing the two sides together. Helms brought a top adviser to the Taliban to Washington this past March, where he met with top officials at the CIA and the State Department. <BR><BR>“Several meetings took place this year, under the arbitration of Francesc Vendrell, personal representative of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, to discuss the situation in Afghanistan,” the book adds. “Representatives of the U.S. government and Russia and the six countries that border with Afghanistan were present at these meetings. Sometimes, representatives of the Taliban also sat around the table.” <BR><BR>Naif Naik, former Pakistani minister for foreign affairs, said on French television that during a meeting in Berlin in July, the discussions focused on the formation of a government of national unity in Afghanistan. “If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid and the pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come,” Naik said. <BR><BR>When the Taliban balked at the idea of a coalition government, Naik added, Tom Simons, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, threatened both the Taliban and Pakistan. “Simons said, ‘Either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option.’ The words Simons used were ‘a military operation,’” Naik said. <BR><BR>At that point, the book says, the Taliban walked out of the talks. If the Taliban had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks, they no longer had any reason to stop them or to warn the United States. <BR><BR>The FBI would not comment on any of the allegations. <BR>
Jun 3rd, 2002, 06:42 PM
#6
Guest
Posts: n/a
Well, it's that time of year again. Lemonade and lazy days of summer are approaching. And while the livin' should be easy, before finalizing those last minute summer travel plans, you might want to batten down the hatches, load up on bottled water, peanut butter, and say your prayers, because we're on terror alert again.
Jun 3rd, 2002, 07:03 PM
#12
Guest
Posts: n/a
Just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osama bin Laden’s family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House… Their official line is that the bin Ladens are above suspicion apart from Osama, the black sheep who they say hijacked the family name. That’s fortunate for the Bush family and the Saudi royal household, whose links with the bin Ladens could otherwise prove embarrassing.” <BR><BR>Palast noted the Bush family’s long and deep ties to the oil industry. (Six of the top 10 lifetime contributors to George W. Bush’s political campaigns either come from the oil business or have ties to it.) He also reported that many of Bush’s top aids—including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans and Energy Secretary Stanley Abraham—have been affiliated with large oil-related companies. <BR><BR>Palast also repeated a previously denied claim that Bush’s first success came with a company financed by bin Laden’s older brother, Salem. Palast also said both the current and former President Bush had lucrative stakes along with the bin Ladens in Carlyle Corporation, one of America’s biggest defense contractors. The bin Ladens sold their interest in Carlyle after September 11. <BR><BR>The newly published book in France goes even further. It claims the Bush administration stymied the FBI’s terrorism investigations at the behest of American oil interests while it negotiated a deal to aid Afghanistan’s Taliban regime in return for access to the oil and gas reserves in Central Asia and, later, the turning over of bin Laden. <BR>
Jun 3rd, 2002, 07:33 PM
#16
Guest
Posts: n/a
Yea, but is it O.K. to wear jeans in Paris?<BR>Where can I find a good acrylic nail salon?<BR>Should I let my son take his razor scooter to Italy?<BR>How do I get from here to there, and when I get there where do I eat at that the waiters are not surly and the bathrooms are clean enough that I don't have to use anti-bacterial cleanser<BR>Come on guys, stop screwing around, serious poats only.
Jun 3rd, 2002, 09:29 PM
#17
Guest
Posts: n/a
If Ashcroft goes down, I'm happy. Did any of you catch Warren Rudman on the news tonight? The GOP is circling the wagons. In light of the latest CIA disclosure, never once did he mention the recommendations of the Hart-Rudman report, which he co-authored. If you want, I can post the link. Better yet, do a google search. <BR><BR>That this administration would re-issue a visa in Saudi Arabia to a known Saudi terrorist and co-conspirator with the U.S.S. Cole attackers, is no small ommission. <BR><BR>The conclusion is innevitable. They were either looking the other way, or asleep at the wheel.
Jun 3rd, 2002, 10:09 PM
#20
Guest
Posts: n/a
THAT ASHCROFT APPARENTLY LEARNED OF THE PHOENIX memo just days after September 11 and never bothered to tell his boss is by itself enough for the White House to put him on ice. But the scandal on Ashcroft's watch is much deeper. Start with the fact that the agencies whose bureaucracies stumbled most spectacularly -- the FBI and INS -- report directly to the attorney general. True, both were rife with problems that predate the Bush administration. But Ashcroft took office promising to clean the stables. Instead, he presided over some of the most scandalous and deadly bureaucratic misjudgments in American history, from last summer's active suppression of FBI investigations in Arizona and Minneapolis to those late-fall student visas granted two of the deceased hijackers. <BR><BR>In the immediate aftermath of September 11, it was easy to blame red tape. But increasingly, Ashcroft's basic judgment is the issue. It was Ashcroft who insisted on naming Robert Mueller, a Justice bureaucrat under the first President Bush, as new FBI director. It was Ashcroft who kept the embarrassing news of Agent Williams' Phoenix memo from going to the president or Congress. It was Ashcroft who in the autumn took the September 11 investigation away from the one U.S. attorney in the country with experience and success prosecuting al Qaeda -- Mary Jo White in New York -- and gave it to the same Justice Department that (we now know) had bungled earlier inquiries. Senators are suddenly remembering that back in November, it was Ashcroft who in apparent deference to the sensibilities of the NRA refused to use the federal government's gun-owner registry in his terrorism investigation.
