First Panel (Members of 9/11 Families) Catherine Austin Fitts Moderator - Introduction Kyle F. Hence - Survey of Questions Julie Sweeney Lorna Brett FAA / Airline Accountability Mary Schiavo, Esq. FAA/Airline Accountability Open Q & A from the Press
Presented by…http://www.unansweredquestions.org/
June 10 Press Conference Transcript
Index
First Panel (Members of 9/11 Families)
Catherine Austin Fitts Moderator - Introduction
Kyle F. Hence - Survey of Questions
Julie Sweeney
Lorna Brett FAA / Airline Accountability
Mary Schiavo, Esq. FAA/Airline Accountability
Open Q & A from the Press
Second Panel
Catherine Fitts
Michael Ruppert - Historical/Geo-strategic Context
John Judge - Air Defenses/NORAD
Tom Flocco - 9/11 Insider Trading
J. Michael Springmann, Esq. - CIA & Global Terrorism
Jennifer Van Bergen - Patriot Act and US Constitution
Dr. Stephen Camerado - Immigration and Terrorism
Richard Ochs - Government by Anthrax
Moderator Catherine Fitts
Open Q & A with all panelists
- See also…. Unanswered Questions: Listen To Press Conference
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS
But briefly, the question that’s been going around the press is what did Bush or the administration know about these events and when did they know it. And I would at least suggest that there is an undeniable and incontrovertible point at which Bush and the rest of the country knew in advance that the country was under attack by hijacked planes taken by terrorists or people who had the intent to use those planes as weapons, and that is 9:05 in the morning on September 11th. And the press reported that within moments after that, in conversation with Vice President Cheney, a shoot down order was given, an official shoot down order, for the planes that were remaining in the air. And then there’s a period of almost 40 or 45 minutes, depending upon which time sequences you use, but at least 40 minutes during which Flight 77, the flight that left, turned around in Ohio and crashed into the Pentagon, was coming toward DC. I was awakened by a call at the time of the first plane going into the first tower by someone I knew here in the area who does flight administration out at Dulles. They knew that this was a very serious incident and there should not have been a plane anywhere near. By the time we began to discuss it, the second plane hit and at that point for most of the country coincidence theory and accident theory were out the window and people knew that these planes were being used as weapons. Not unprecedented, not even unprecedented by elements of Al Qaida or the Taliban to use planes as weapons into buildings. It’d been done before in other countries, but it was being done here. And these planes, even though at some point they turned off their transponders, were under radar surveillance. They knew what direction they were headed and even Channel 8, local TV, announced here in DC that the planes were headed to Washington, at least one of them. And they were watching this plane come, and it’s coming into, at eventually, the most restricted airspace in the country and probably in the world.
It’s an airspace that when I grew up here in DC I have seen, and friends of mine have seen, commercial aircraft stray into this airspace and be confronted by interceptors that came up from local military bases or other points in the city and wagged back out of that airspace. This is an airspace that’s under constant surveillance. There were some quotes that came out shortly afterwards. This Pentagon spokesperson said, “We had no mechanism to respond.” I would suggest that if you’re an investigative reporter that you will find out that they have a very extensive mechanism to respond. That they don’t only respond in the case of a crisis emergency like this but they respond when any commercial aircraft goes off course, even for a period of a few minutes. They have interceptors that go up to find out what’s happening, why it’s off course, if communication to the tower is broken, and that these are procedures that don’t need any order from the President. They don’t need any order from the Pentagon or anything else. These are standard FAA and NORAD procedures. It was in the press that by 9:00, I’m sorry, by 8:25, they knew that an unprecedented situation, or at least relatively - this is the first I heard of the four planes in 1970 - but certainly relatively unprecedented situation - four simultaneous hijacked planes. And so there should have been some response already, just knowing that by 8:25. That didn’t seem to occur. But certainly they knew that they were under a terrorist attack of some kind and a plane was coming to DC. It was known in advance and they began evacuation of the Capital. They announced it on the news. They interviewed people on the lawn of the White House who had been evacuated and they also announced on the local news that the Pentagon was being evacuated. So they knew the targets and they knew where it was coming. They watched it come for a long time and then, eventually, planes were scrambled, intercept planes, from Langley Air Force Base which is 130 miles to the south of DC, who flew at apparently, if you take the distance and divide the flying time that they say, at subsonic speeds, and got to the Pentagon after the plane actually crashed into it. Regardless of whether these planes would have shot the plane down, the planes should have been, and could have intercepted the plane at least, wagged at it, tried to indicate it or turn it in a particular direction. They have procedures that they follow.
Another quote that came out September 23rd in Newsday from the Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Vick Warzinski [Ed: sp?], he says that it’s simply not - that they simply weren’t capable of understanding that the plane was heading our way. They weren’t aware. They simply weren’t aware that the aircraft in question was heading our way and I doubt that prior to Tuesday’s events anyone would have expected anything like this. Now I arranged a demonstration called A Day Without the Pentagon in the late 1990’s to march from the National Cemetery to the Pentagon to contest the bloated military budget and cutting it - What A Day Without A Pentagon Budget, in other words. I wasn’t suggesting we get rid of the Pentagon by an explosion but I was saying what would it mean if we took one day of the Pentagon’s budget and put it into social services. And we marched across. Now I had to negotiate that with about 16 different police agencies here in DC. And I was taken, by the head of security at the Pentagon, into the Pentagon building. I was walked through the area where the Joint Chief’s have lunch and I was taken out to the grounds in the parade area where we were going to be. And he said, “You can’t come up any further than this wall.” Well the wall was at the end of an area that doesn’t come up to the steps. And I said there had been a Supreme Court decision in the 1970’s that demonstrations could come all the way up to the steps. And he said, “You can’t do that now because we are on delta alert.” And I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “It’s our highest form of alert.” And I said, “Why are you on alert?” And he said, “We’re getting bomb threats every day from the Muslims.” And he said, “And we have this constant alert and you can’t come any closer for security reasons.” And then he pointed up at the top of the building and he said, “We have radar up there watching to see if any planes are coming into the building.” And he said, “We have photographic equipment and look at the skies with the videos and we’re going to be taping your demonstration.” And I said, “That’s nice, can we get a copy?” This was the late 1990’s. Did they go back to sleep? They have the equipment to know something’s coming.
In addition to that, my parents used to take me to lunch during the day in the center area of the Pentagon in the courtyard in the middle. And I remember asking my father when I was young what certain things were there. And there were surface to air missile batteries in that area that defend the building. It’s also the case after the Piper Cub that flew into the Whitehouse hit that a surface to air missile battery was built on the Whitehouse lawn in order to protect that building. This plane came into the restricted airspace. It flew over the Whitehouse and the Capital and then it took a 270 degree looping turn coming down from 5,000 feet. Nothing in its way. The simplest thing in an operation you’d think it would go to the nearest side of the Pentagon. But it went out of its way to hit the empty side of the Pentagon. And I think they studied it and there was something in the news last week that Muhammad Atta had a miniaturization of the Pentagon that he was carrying around in some public place. Anybody who was anywhere near the Pentagon in the last six years, even back in the ’90’s when I was there, knows that that’s the side of the Pentagon that’s empty and it’s been under construction and so they went out of their way to come all the way around the Pentagon. There’s nothing blocking their way to go into any other side and hit that side. But the entire time they were completely unchallenged.
Now is it the case, as they were saying, that they had no mechanism, that they didn’t have any scrambling planes available here in DC? Absolutely not. Andrews Air Force Base which is ten miles away from here has both the 121st Fighter Squadron of the 113th Fighter Wing, F-16’s, multiple planes, the equivalent of two squadrons of combat ready fighter jets at Andrews Air Force Base. They also house the 321st Marine Fighter Attack Squadron, the 49th Marine Air Guard which defends the airspace over the DC area and F-18’s that are combat ready. In addition to that there is Anacosta Naval Air Station which houses the DC National Air Guard and DC National Guard, and they have combat ready jets. These jets are in the air now, after the fact, actively defending the United States. Where were they on September the 11th? Why was nothing put up in the way of this flight? Is it the case, then, perhaps, that there was some sort of a stand down? I have a few indications of that. There is a 177th Air National Guard based out of Pomona, New Jersey, near Atlantic City at the Atlantic City Airport. They’re about equidistant, actually a little closer to DC. They could cover both Manhattan and DC. They have fighter ready intercept jets. But one investigator that talked to them said that they were told two weeks prior to the event to stop putting the jets up in the air on a regular basis. I also talked to an independent journalist investigator at the Pentagon whose response to my stand down thesis that I’m giving you, he said, “Didn’t you read in the New York Times,” and I’ve not been able to find this article so it may be he mis-cited it, “that three days before September 11th half of the combat ready planes in the United States were taken down offline.” I said, “I did not. Are you making your argument or mine?”
And then there’s a third indication I have from someone whose son is stationed at Otis Air Force Base. The son has talked to pilots who were in the air the hour that the second plane was hit, scrambled out of Otis, who turned their attention to Flight 77, the Pentagon flight, and made clear that they were going to go to try to intercept that flight coming back across from Ohio to DC and were called back, according to these pilots, were called back off the flight by the Command. So was there a stand down and no response? Were there call backs? These are not questions that I ultimately have the resources to answer but they’re questions that stand and that raise, for me, a much deeper level of this scenario than is being addressed. But was there a point at which they knew ahead? There certainly was and for forty minutes everybody in DC knew the plane was coming and we didn’t do a thing.
Moderator: John, you’ll have to promise me that you’ll put all those into the web site. Have you put them in? Okay, good. Absolutely. Absolutely. Next Tom Flocco on the insider trading. Tom? And I just, before he comes up, Tom wrote the check to make this happen. So I’d like a big round of applause for Tom. Yeah.
Tom Flocco: (back to top)
Also Linda Fanton helped us with this too. I’m not going to talk so much about put options and calls and most of you who are in here know about that and that’s basically old news. I’m going to connect some dots today. And I think it critical that we understand, and there are going to be some things that just absolutely shocked me, and I was starting to put this together for today and, you know, I had some folders and I kind of keep things in folders. And I said, “Oh my gosh. If this is true then this is true.” And that’s exactly what this thing is about. The whole concept of connecting the dots.
Congress is currently conducting a soft insider trading probe. There’s growing evidence that the FBI and the government intelligence entities are more closely linked to the documented accumulation of 9/11 insider trading profits than was originally thought. But thus far the Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee has not publicly referred to prior knowledge of the attacks as it relates to stock transaction profits, while also failing, after nine months, to publicize the critical Securities and Exchange Commission Control List report that’s tracing what in effect were stock trading profits of death. And I’ve written about 6,000 words that’s in three parts on Michael Ruppert’s site, that’s copvcia.com. Most of you have probably heard about that site. Mike does a great job. Intelligence agency spokesman, Tom Crispal, spoke to me and I asked him about the CIA monitoring real time pre-September 11th stock trading activity within the United States borders using such software as the Prosecutor’s Management Information System, or PROMIS, or the Echelon satellite monitoring system. However, when asked whether the CIA had been scrutinizing world markets for national security purposes Crispal replied, “I have no way of knowing what operations are being affected by assets outside the country.” Well given 3,000 deaths, the victim families and their lawyers may want to know this.
The CIA and 9/11 investment espionage. A January 23, 2002, Houston Chronicle report revealed that ENRON corporation’s top security team, including four former CIA officers and an ex-FBI agent left the company to form a private firm, Secure Solutions International, or SSI, while continuing with ENRON via a consulting contract. Team member and former CIA agent David Cromley’s business biography at ENRON listed him as ENRON’s Director of Business Analysis, the Chronicle reported, saying also that Cromley gave ENRON executives “detailed and unique information” allowing them to make “investments, sales of assets, joint ventures and financial products.” Sound familiar? But no public information has been forthcoming as to whether such “detailed and unique information” or sensitive CIA software was used in conjunction with ENRON’s controversial off shore investment products or whether their missing assets, ENRON’s missing assets, may have been employed in what former German Minister of Technology, Andreas von Bulow, estimated at 15 billion dollars, that’s with a “b,” in insider trading products, profits, according to Tagesspiegel Berlin on January 13th of this year. An examination of SSI’s website reveals that its corporate members have managed cutting edge counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation operations for the CIA, implementing advance technical information and security programs for the CIA and conducting a wide range of investments for the FBI while also overseeing all security arrangements for several large gas pipeline companies. The fraud-wracked ENRON corporation has had at least twenty CIA agents on the payroll in the last eight years. But while the Houston Chronicle reported the operatives as former CIA, a February 26, 2002, National Enquirer story quoted a top Washington insider familiar with several secret investigations into ENRON as reporting that they were given leaves of absence without pay and put on the ENRON payroll. These are taxpayer funded CIA agents, CIA agents on a corporate payroll. And Congress isn’t asking questions, hence the soft probe. But it’s in a secret, soundproof room, however.
The source added that ENRON CIA members used info gleaned from a satellite project called ECHELON which intercepted emails, phone calls, faxes with detailed business and stock information, adding that pure and simple, U.S. intelligence agents were involved in corporate espionage. These are tax payer funded U.S. agents, CIA agents. Another Inquirer source with ties to the CIA revealed that the cozy deal between ENRON and the CIA allowed the on-loan undercover operatives to return to the agency’s payroll before ENRON’s collapse. But even Congress has a CIA link Joint Intelligence Co-Chairman Bob Graham and his House Intelligence Co-Chairman and former CIA operative, Porter Goss, were meeting with the Chief of the Pakistani Intelligence Service on the very morning of the attacks, according to widely published reports. Oh to be a fly on the wall in that room.
FBI agents indicted in 9/11 linked stock schemes on the heels of alleged CIA involvement in public stock trading and the use of sensitive prior knowledge to last fall’s attacks. Thirteen days ago on May 22, FBI agent Jeffery Royer and Lynn Wingate were charged with racketeering conspiracy, securities and stock fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Thirteen days ago. Royer was also charged with extortion according to examination of an unsealed Federal indictment which I have a copy of in my home. All of which clouds either open or secret Congressional probes of pre-attack insider trading profits. [Alan] Vinegrad’s [U.S. Attorney, Eastern Dist. NY] news release said that the allegations, “reveal a shocking partnership between experienced stock manipulators and law enforcement agents undertaken for their illicit personal financial gain” Moreover Royer and Wingate allegedly used the FBI’s automated case support database to actually monitor the investigation, passing confidential information about the investigations of companies to participants in a stock manipulation scheme, according to the Washington Post, 5/23/02. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Green said stock advisor Amr I. Elgindy, charged in the indictment, called his Solomon, Smith, Barney broker trying to sell $300,000 in stock from his children’s trust fund during the afternoon of September 10th. During the conversation Elgindy predicted to the broker that the Dow Jones Industrial average, which at the time stood at about 9,600, would soon crash to below 3,000, according to the New York Times, thus begging the question whether Congress will publicly disclose other indications of alleged CIA or FBI complicity and prior knowledge of the attacks.
National Security Agency destroying 9/11 data on Americans and companies. Two individuals with close intelligence ties told the Boston Globe - and this is the only report in the country. I talked to the reporter. No one else has reported this - that since September 11th the super, super secret National Security Agency, acting on the advice of their lawyers, has been destroying data collected on American citizens and corporations, angering intelligence agencies seeking leads in the antiterrorist probe. Two of my phone calls to Senate Ranking Member of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Richard Shelby, to confirm these details were unreturned. Since the October Globe report, no other media outlet has examined the heated discussions with the CIA and Intelligence Committee staff members as NSA lawyers turned down requests to preserve the intelligence because regulations prohibit data collection on Americans. However, my discussion and phone call with Vincent Cannistraro, the former CIA Director of Counter-terrorism told me the law allows intelligence officials exceptions in certain circumstances. Both the CIA and FBI declined comment. Cannistraro added that “if American citizens are believed to be involved in some way in a foreign intelligence operation,” I feel like Chris Matthews here, “that could lead to terrorism against this country, I believe that the NSA is required to save and maintain that information.” When asked about the NSA and the attacks a former CIA official told this reporter, “In this case I believe they should have saved the surveillance data.” Congress, of course, has been tight lipped and government investigators are extremely frustrated.
The SEC, and this is list that Ms. Schiavo needs to obtain, and Mr. Nolan. The SEC Insider Trading “Control” List. And Control is in quotes because that’s how they do it. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 10/19/01, the SEC privately asked North American securities firms - and notice I said privately - to participate in an information sharing system to trace “large numbers of trades in securities of companies directly affected by the attacks.” But curiously, the SEC asked companies to designate senior personnel who appreciate the sensitive nature of the case, that is pre-attack trading, and can be relied upon to exercise appropriate discretion as point people linked to the government investigations.
October 2, Canadian securities officials confirmed that the SEC had asked firms to review records for 38 companies - and believe me I have them down and I went through them quite carefully - suggesting that some buyers and sellers might have had advance knowledge of the attacks according to Winokur, [of the San Francisco Chronicle]. My examination of The Center for Public Integrity’s financial records of top 100 Bush administration officials reveals ownership of millions of dollars in these 38 stocks which would be not different than any other American citizen, of course.
Not me, however, I should say. However, Congress has thus far refused to make public the Chronicle report and the control list because the control list contains confidential information.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Secret Service was probing an unusually high volume of five year Treasury Note purchases made prior to the attacks. One purchase included a single five billion dollar trade. Five billion, a few days before the attacks. And no one knows who purchased these. They know, but they haven’t told us. The Journal called Treasury Notes among the best investments in the world in times of world crisis, obviously. And of course, a fellow who’s done some researching for me, Kyle Hence, on the side here, has done a good deal of work with the gold futures because there’s different ways to make money. Gold futures, you know, if you know the stock market was going to crash you’d just sell your stocks. How many people sold huge chunks? Well we don’t know but that’s out there.
Deutschebank, Meyer, Brown and Platt, and John Schmitz. Well I’m going to - later on I will phrase this. I’m going to leave out all of the ividence surrounding Deutschebank. I’ve written about it but I kind of condensed it into a nice, thick, juicy paragraph which I’ll use when you ask me a question later on. But I’m going to move on. European reporters found that most of the suspicious pre-attack trades passed through Deutschebank and especially the ex-CIA Executive Director, A.B. Buzzy Krongard, from the Alex Brown Investment Division, by means of a procedure of portage, which assures the anonymity of individuals making the transactions. But Congress has not publicly revealed whether they will call Krongardt and other Alex Brown traders to testify in open hearings. CFO.com, an online site for corporate executives, revealed that the Deutschebank was a limited partner in either the controversial ENRON special purpose entities, LJM or Chewco, the off bound sheets and off shore products heavily involved in ENRON’s demise and run by Andrew Fastow, the CFO. Of course this begs the question whether Congress or the courts will determine whether missing funds from ENRON were possibly part of a scheme to develop funds to profit from the air attacks.
Interestingly, a former ENRON employee preparing this SEC filing for Deutschebank deleted Deutschebank’s name from the LJM version when he sent it to the SEC. But curiously, the deletion was made at the behest of the former Securities and Exchange Commission Enforcement Director who told him to delete it. The former employee also claims to have further received instructions to destroy the draft of the SEC filling, but not a word from Congress yet. Now John Schmitz. Here’s a fellow that you’re going to hear more and more about. It’s John P. Schmitz, S-c-h-m-i-t-z. George H. W. Bush’s former Deputy Counsel during the elder’s vice presidency and presidency will likely to become a key player if Congress becomes serious about its 9/11 probe. Some may remember Schmitz from the Iran Contra Investigation when the Office of the Independent Counsel reported that each witness interviewed regarding document production complied except for Schmitz who asserted that his documents were privileged work product. Schmitz, fluent in German and a partner in the global law firm, Meyer, Brown and Platt, has clients that include Bayer AG, the German maker of the antibiotic, Cipro, which fights anthrax. About which Larry Klayman and the Judicial Watch will have keen interest. For five days ago Judicial Watch filed suit seeking the administration’s anthrax documents to ascertain why the Whitehouse started taking heavy doses of Cipro the day of the attacks. Nearly a month before anthrax was even discovered on Capitol Hill but while postal workers continued to sort mail in contaminated, anthrax laden offices, some dying in the process.
But John Schmitz’s Meyer Brown profile also reveals, this is from the website, that he represents ENRON, adding that “we were active in Germany with ENRON until the end. The bankruptcy surprised me as much as well as else,” he said, according to Reuters. Moreover, Meyer Brown also represents Deutschebank on a regular basis with its electronic activities. And interestingly, Schmitz’s firm, Meyer Brown, also conveniently maintains an office in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, along with ENRON, if only to make sure that oil is well in the Caspian Sea basin. Many 9/11 victims will even come to recognize Meyer Brown for, conveniently, the firm will represent United Airlines against Ms. Mary Schiavo and Mr. Donald Nolan and their respective clients. And given Partner Schmitz’s close former relationship to the Bush family, Meyer Brown’s water coolers may become intriguing conduits when Ms. Schiavo and Mr. Nolan begin their respective legal discovery initiatives regarding who will be subpoenaed and what evidence is revealed.
A soft or investigative investigations, or aggressive investigations. And that’s very important. I did an interview about a month ago with former Washington DC United States Attorney Joe DiGenova, who I really have a great deal of respect for Mr. DiGenova and his wife. Just highly talented and intelligent folks. And DeGenova took a hard line when he talked to me. He said, “If the Congress does not want to get answers to these critical questions regarding who profited from prior knowledge of the attacks then it needs to be litigated, period,” he said. And asked whether Americans have a right to know who sold large blocks of stock shares in companies and airlines directly affected by the attacks or purchased billions in ultra-safe Treasury Notes directly prior to 9/11, DiGenova said, “I believe someone will litigate the Freedom of Information Act too, the FOIA issue related to the Ashcroft memo. I’m involved in that myself on a personal family basis. You’ll be hearing about me at the Attorney General in the very near future.”
While thousands of American families victimized by terrorism still remain numb with grief they don’t show it. I lost my son almost two years ago. About two years ago. 21 years old. Tragic accident. So I’m grieving real hard right now and I know what this woman is going through. I know what he’s going through. I know what they’re going through. It’s the worst thing in the world. But information is being advanced every single day and that’s why we have all kinds of damage control, all kinds of announcements. They save things for a month and then they announce it. Any way to divert attention away from the real questions that we’re asking today. We begged C-SPAN. They won’t cover it. They’re showing reruns on the radio. Reruns of Washington Journal. We’ll deal with that later and I think Catherine will too. But this needs to be litigated as Joe DiGenova, the former U.S. Attorney in Washington, DC said. And that’s pretty brave coming from, I believe, a lifelong Republican, if I’m not mistaken.
All this information is advanced, described by some, if it’s not negligence, it’s long term, at least long term slip shod government responsiveness, governmental responsiveness to fundamental internal or national security and safety questions, or worse. But even if Congress comes out of its secret, soundproof Capital bunker into the light of open hearings, the question still remains as to whether the members of Congress have the courage to forcefully seek answers to the real unanswered questions. Yes, we’ve come a long way from those pre-attack United and American Airlines put and call ratio arguments, about lucky bets that I read about in some - from some journalists. But this is real serious stuff. But curiously, both the President and the Vice President have lobbied mightily for only one joint investigative committee hearing instead of multiple and bicameral ENRON-style hearings. Maybe we’ll even get a stacked deck. Maybe a wink and a nod blue ribbon panel. I think that’s what they’re hoping for tomorrow. We hope we’re going to get more than that but where are the promises? Is it just going to be just a wink and a nod? Who’s going to appoint those panel members that those victims’ families are going to ask for regarding that investigation? Well only time will tell. But as the first lady always reminds us, “Don’t worry. Just tell your children, ‘You’re safe.’“ Thank you.
Moderator: Thank you Tom. Michael Springmann?
Michael Springmann: (back to top)
Hi. I’m Mike Springmann. I want to thank Catherine and Kyle and the organization for the opportunity to be here and speak to you folks today. As Catherine mentioned when she first started the program today, I used to be in charge of the Visa Section at the CIA’s consulate at Jeddah, the principle city of the Hejahs in Western Saudi Arabia. There, for a year and a half, I issued visas to terrorists recruited by the CIA and its asset, Osama Bin Laden. At the time I thought it was basically visa fraud. Somebody was paying $2500 bribes to State Department officials. I was ordered by these same high State Department officials to issue the visas, to shut up, to do my job and ask no questions.
And this wasn’t simply a difference of opinion as was alleged later on. It wasn’t one of these things where they wanted to visit their father in America and there was a question of where they worked, that sort of thing. It was basically two Pakistanis came to me one day and said, “We want to go to a trade show in America.” And I asked, “What’s the trade show?” They didn’t know. “What city is it going to be held in?” They didn’t know. And I asked a few more questions and I said, “No. Visa denied. You haven’t proved to me that you’re going to come to the United States, accomplish your business and then return home.” Well a few minutes later I had a phone call from a CIA case officer assigned to the commercial section. “Issue the visas.” I said, “No.” He said, “Well, it’s important they get a visa.” And I said, “No.” And a few minutes later he was over talking to the chief of the consular section, reversed me, issued the visas and these guys took off. And this was typical. I had a Sudanese who was unemployed in Saudi Arabia. He was a refugee from the Sudan and I said, “You don’t get a visa” And he kept coming back and coming back and coming back. And after a bit I started getting calls from a woman I believe was a case officer who was in the political section. “We need this guy.” And I said, “No. He hasn’t proved to me that he’s going to America and he’s going to come back, as the Immigration and Nationality Act says and that the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual says.” Well, in short order I got reversed again and he got his visa for national security reasons. And this went on for a year and a half. I had people, not every day perhaps, but every week. And I estimate as many as 100 people got visas through me getting overruled on my analysis of their ability to go to the United states and then return.
And I protested this. I protested to the Counsel for Consular Affairs in Riad. I protested to the Bureau of Consular Affairs in Washington. I protested to the State Department’s Inspector General. I protested to the State Department’s Office of Diplomatic Security. I talked about this to the FBI, to the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, and I went to a couple of Congressional Committees. And by and large I was told, “Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. This is a difference of opinion. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re far to junior to question the Counsel General in Jeddah’s interest in doing this.” He’s a guy that was seen sitting in his office filling out visa application forms for Pakistanis with forged passports. He wanted visas for Libyans who had no ties to our consular district whatsoever. And I came back to Washington after a trip to Germany and I was assigned to the Bureau of Intelligence Research in the State Department. And eventually my appointment was cancelled. After this and after I tried mightily for several years to find out what had happened to me, and the Freedom of Information Act requests were being stonewalled on the basis of national security, I ran across a journalist, Joe Trento. And about the same time I ran across two people, one of whom was a government official and the other was a person attached to a local university here in Washington. All three confirmed that what I was protesting was not visa fraud but people being rounded up by the agency and Osama Bin Laden to come to the United Sates for training as terrorists to be sent to fight in the war against the then Soviet Union in Afghanistan. They used roughly a million dollars in liquor sales a year from the consulate in Jeddah to fund this. And you might ask, well, as the Washington Legal Times did, that was then, this is now, fifteen years later. Well, from what I read in the Los Angeles Times, fifteen of the nineteen people who allegedly flew airplanes into buildings in the United States got their visas from the same CIA consulate at Jeddah. And according to a journalist in Florida, Sidney Friedberg, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, they got this through the Visa Express program where you handed in your documents and they packed them off in a bunch of other documents, people traveling to the States for legitimate reason with a legitimate travel agency. Well Sevarino Castillo, the former DEA officer, told me this was common practice for the CIA in Central America. They put their guys in, hoping that the paperwork would be overlooked, that they wouldn’t get too many questions asked. And when I raised this with the Los Angeles Times, with the New York Times, with the Washington Post, with 60 Minutes, nobody wanted to talk about it. But Covert Action Quarterly printed my article on The Hand that Rules the Visa Machine Rocks the World. Unclassified, the Journal of the Association of National Security Alumni, printed a couple of articles I had done on the links between the State Department and the CIA.
The agency assigns its people to virtually every section of every consulate and diplomatic post in the world. They routinely troll visa applications. They look to see who’s coming to America, either to recruit them or to find out how they can get next to them and get some information from them, or to steer them for their own purposes. But, in Europe, in Canada, other people are interested in this. I was interviewed by Greg Palast of the BBC. And I was interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Company here in this building. The Italian Radio and Television Service, REI, interviewed me by telephone. I’ve had a couple of interviews on the radio with Pacifica. Greg Palast and I were on Friday morning. I’ve been interviewed on a couple of other radio programs scattered through the Midwest and West, but nobody in Washington, DC wants to hear about this. Nobody in Washington, DC wants to hear about the CIA and its assigning case officers to the consular section. There was a guy in with me who’d say, when there were a lot of people in front of us, “Mike, let me take this guy in line. He’s one of my people.” So I really think the organization, Unanswered Questions, has a lot of questions to ask and it deserves answers to them from the government. Thank you for the opportunity to talk and I’d be happy to answer any questions.
Moderator: Okay, the next panelist is Jennifer Bergen coming, I believe, from, is it Los Angeles? Florida? Jennifer, finally we meet, welcome.
Jennifer Van Bergen: (back to top)
Hi Catherine, thanks. I should just introduce myself because I think you had incomplete information there. I’m Jennifer Van Bergen. I have a law degree from Benjamin Cardoso School of Law in New York. I’m a faculty member at the New School for Social Research in New York and I’ve written a series for Truthout.org which, a six part series on the Patriot Act. And I’m here to speak to you today about the Patriot Act.
On October 24, 2001, Congress passed a new set of antiterrorism laws called the USA Patriot Act. The Patriot Act largely builds on and expands existing laws, giving law enforcement agencies greater intelligence gathering powers. In the wake of 9/11 it may seem reasonable to grant government agencies these expanded powers, however, it is important to note that there was never any showing by the Department of Justice, by the administration, or by the intelligence agencies that the previous laws were in any way inadequate. In fact, it now appears that 9/11 was not prevented, not because of inadequate antiterrorism laws, but because of intelligence agencies own internal procedural failures. In terms of legal procedure basic criminal procedural laws have been shown to work quite well in terrorism cases.
The Patriot Act does not, therefore, help us to fight terrorism better. What it does do is it increases the administrative burden on already overburdened intelligence agencies, making terrorism even harder for them to fight. It introduces, excuse me, it intrudes upon many of our hard won civil liberties, liberties which many of our ancestors fought and died for, and it upsets the balance of powers in our government, putting unnecessarily greater power in the hands of the Executive and brings us one step closer to what a colleague of mine calls The National Security States of America.
The Patriot Act is a complicated law and I’m going to set forth just a few of the most worrisome provisions in it. Specifically, the Patriot Act allows the government to enter and search your home without ever informing you. The U.S. Constitution requires not only probable cause to search but that you be notified of the search. This law, Section 213 of the Patriot Act, circumvents the notice requirement of the Fourth Amendment. Section 216 of the Patriot Act allows the government to tap your phone and computer without probable cause. Under this section a judge must rubber stamp a warrant as long as law enforcement certifies that the surveillance is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. No probable cause of criminal activity is required to issue the warrant. This violates the probable cause provision of the Fourth Amendment. Further, Section 218 allows the government to carry out secret searches and wiretaps without showing probable cause merely by certifying that there is a significant foreign intelligence purpose. This also evades the Fourth Amendment.
Section 802 creates the crime of domestic terrorism. This criminalizes acts that “appear to be intended to influence the policy of the government by intimidation or coercion or to intimidate or coerce the civilian population.” This section would make just about any act of civil disobedience in protest against government policy into an act of domestic terrorism. Section 411, along with section 802, expands the power of government to designate a group a foreign terrorist organization. Any group which endorses so-called terrorist activity, which under Section 802 may be otherwise lawful protest activity, can be designated a terrorist organization. This would enable the government to designate such groups as the protesters at Vieques, Puerto Rico or those who protested against the World Trade Organization. Section 411 also allows the government to indict anyone who provides material support or assistance to a terrorist organization. If you provided humanitarian or medical assistance to the Northern Alliance, foes of Bin Laden, you could be arrested for supporting terrorism. Finally, Section 412 of the Patriot Act permits the government to arrest and detain immigrants indefinitely. That could be their entire lives, the rest of their lives, for nothing more than a visa violation. In fact, of the 1200 known immigrant detentions since 9/11, the ACLU determined that only about five were detained on terrorism related charges. Because the Department of Justice refused to release any information, the ACLU obtained this information from foreign embassies to whom the DOJ had courteously supplied the information where it affected one of their citizens. Thus, what is too sensitive to show to Americans the Department of Justice has no problem revealing to Islamic nations.
James Madison wrote in 1822 that “a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” Madison goes on, “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Our government has enacted bad legislation. Let’s make sure this legislation doesn’t lead to another tragedy. Thanks for having me. I’m available to answer questions if you need.
Moderator: Jennifer, thank you.
Dr. Stephen Camerota: (back to top)
Hi. I’m Steve Camerota. I am Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies here in Washington and I must tell you I have no evidence of, you know, a conspiracy or a specific wrongdoing but I do find lots of evidence for poorly administrated laws and so forth. In the report that I’m going to talk to you about I looked at the immigration system and to look at where are the weaknesses and breakdown there. In a report we released about two weeks ago. Now we’ve had no trouble, actually, getting interest in our report. USA Today did a nice big, full page feature on it. The LA Times did a nice story on it. So at least in our case we have had no problem getting attention for it. I’ve appeared on Fox News and MSNBC talking about it.
What we did was we looked at the September 11th hijackers, as well as a number of other terrorists, in total 48 foreign-born militant Islamic terrorists who have been charged, convicted or plead guilty, or who admitted to their involvement in the United States in terror, in terrorist activities since ‘93. Almost all of these individuals are now thought to be linked with Bin Laden. So in other words, even prior to September 11th there were about 28 Al Qaeda terrorists that had been involved in terrorism within the United States and had used our immigration system to gain access to the country. So what did we find in our study? Well there are an enormous number of findings and, again, you can go through them at our website, which is cis.org, but let me run through them quickly.
Every conceivable means, it turns out, had been used to enter the country. The terrorists have come as students, tourists, business travelers. They’ve also been lawful permanent residents, naturalized US citizens, they have snuck across the border illegally, arrived as stowaways on ships, used false passports and even been granted amnesty in the past. If we look at the 9/11 hijackers, all of them had been issued a temporary visa by an American consulate overseas. The only exception to this is Zacarias Moussaoui, the French national who is currently in custody. He actually entered using a system called the visa waiver which allows some countries, individuals from those countries to come without any visa. So they’re never even checked out by an American consulate overseas. And Moussaoui seems to have used that system. And also Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, he wasn’t in our study. He didn’t quite make the deadline, but he used visa waiver, as well, to enter the country.
Of the 48 terrorists we studied about 21 or 22 of them, or almost half, committed significant violations of immigration laws prior to taking part in terrorism. Some have engaged in fraudulent marriages to American citizens. Some have used false names, false documents. And a number of them had worked in the United States illegally for some time prior to taking part in terrorism. Of the September 11th hijackers are concerned, a number had violated the law before September 11th. Moussaoui had overstayed his time limit. Nawaf al Hamzi had overstayed his time limit. Satam al Suqami had also overstayed his. Another hijacker, Hani Hanjour, received a student visa in September of 2000 but then he never attended class. He was supposed to go to a school in Oakland so he just never showed up and lived in the United States illegally.
Overstaying a visa is not the only way that 9/11 hijackers violated immigration law. Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi both used temporary visas basically to live in the United States, which is not something you’re supposed to do. They basically stayed in the United States on their tourist visa, only leaving for a short period of time. Now if anyone had looked at their passports each time they came back into the country they would have noticed this. But unfortunately those passports aren’t very closely examined. So in effect they were allowed to live in the United States and operate, over the course of about 18 months, on a tourist visa. The visa itself is only good for six months but if you leave and come back it resets the clock. And they were doing that. Something they should not have been allowed to do.
So the large number of terrorists who violate immigration law is important, both in 9/11 and in the past, because it suggests if we enforced immigration law we might well trip up a lot of terrorists, in the past as well as 9/11. Let me touch on something very quickly. It does appear that a lot of, several 9/11 terrorists should not have been issued visas in the first place, temporary visas that they used, because they had the characteristics of what’s called an intending immigrant. It’s very simple. If you’re young, unmarried, don’t have a job, you’re not supposed to get a tourist visa because you’re not likely to return. You’re very likely to overstay that visa. Several of the terrorists who provided the muscle to overpower the flight crews appears that they should not have been issued visas in the first place. We can talk about that.
Mohammed Atta is an interesting case too. He was the ringleader of September 11th. He too, you could make a pretty powerful argument, should have been excluded as an intending immigrant. That is he was going to try to settle permanently and never should have gotten a temporary visa because he was unemployed, unmarried and had lived outside of his home country for many years, thus it does not appear that he had a residence that he was likely to want to return to. So again, you don’t issue temporary visas to individuals like that. But unfortunately he was. And he’s not the only one but we’ll leave it at that.
I guess one final point I would point out is one of the main problems with the current immigration system in this regard to security is that both the INS, which deals with immigration within the United States, and the State Department which processes visas overseas, are just completely overwhelmed by the numbers. GAO reports, Inspector General reports have shown that they just can’t process this number of visas. They can’t process this number of change of applications, citizenship applications, and Congress just keeps the number very high and doesn’t provide them with the resources. So both the level, and I should point out that of course, both the level of immigration and the lax way it is being administered are primarily the function of interest group pressure. Immigration lawyers, business community also pushes very hard for lax enforcement of immigration law, as well as a lot of ethnic pressure groups. So this lax immigration system that we have that unfortunately has been exploited often by terrorists is the result of a democratic process heavily penetrated by interest groups. Again, I don’t find any evidence for conspiracy or that there was a foreknowledge or that any of these people were purposely issued visas for any particular reason, just rather a question of incompetence, overwhelmed staff at the State Department, INS, and basically the law is pretty laxed enforced for most people so it’s not surprising that it has been for the terrorists as well. Thank you.
Moderator: Last, Richard Ochs is going to speak to us about anthrax.
I’m not an expert on anthrax. I’m a freelance writer. I’ve published in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore Chronicle, the Times Magazine, but more than a writer, I’m an activist. I’m on the board of the Aberdeen Proving Ground Superfund Citizen’s Coalition, also the Military Toxics Project and [inaudible] working group. Ever since I’ve been a college student I’ve been trying to keep an eye on Fort Dietrich. I’ve written about it, even back in the ’60’s. And someone, a friend of mine told me that right after Senator Leahy called for hearings on military tribunals he got an anthrax threat. And right away I smelled a rat. And I started looking into it and I found a bunch of other circumstantial evidence that I think justifies a Congressional investigation or a Blue Ribbon Commission investigation to answer a lot of these questions that are raised by some of these circumstances.
I have a ten page paper that outlines some of these things which is on the table, but they’re out. If someone didn’t get one you get a card from me and I’ll send it to you or you can get it off my web site. The timing and targeting of the letters, the anthrax letters, suggests that the motivation of the perpetrators was to promote legislation, mainly the USA Patriot Act. Anthrax letters were mailed to the Democratic Senate leadership on the same day that they blocked an attempt to rush the bill through without debate or amendments. These threats frightened Congress in general and intimidated certain opponents of the Patriot bill in particular. No Republican received an anthrax letter. The closing of the House and Senate office buildings made it difficult for members to read the bill. Many members didn’t even get a chance to read most of the bill. It was like 350 pages. After the letters were received the Democratic leadership gave up their insistence on a two year sunset clause of the Patriot Act.
The day after the constitutionally challenged Patriot Act was signed, the Supreme Court was closed with a false anthrax scare. Anthrax letters to the news media created widespread fear and a lockstep mentality and support of the administration’s policies. The administration suggested that the anthrax attacks were perpetrated by the same people who crashed the planes on 9/11. Well, while agreeing that the anthrax came from US government sources, the FBI investigation has been so inept that members of Congress and anthrax scientists have complained. And this is the other reason I think that we need to have a commission or Congressional hearings. Not just because of the strange coincidences of the Patriot Act, but the behavior of the FBI in investigating what’s actually going on. It’s been four months now since they, or anyone, has said anything. The last thing that’s been written about the anthrax investigation was the beginning of February and nothing’s been said since then, not even from our friends who are watching the FBI. They’re just not saying much.
Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists thinks that the culprit is known by the FBI but may be untouchable because he has knowledge damaging to the government. That may be that knowledge is that the United States is doing illegal research in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. In an article by Laura Rosen in Salon on February 8th of this year revealed that the “Defense Intelligence Agency hired Betell Labs to create a genetically enhanced version of anthrax, even though no vaccine was proven to be effective beforehand.” A former Clinton administration official, Alyssa D.. Harris, “was shocked to read in the New York Times about bio-weapons research that she herself had not known about although she had served eight years in the White House as the point person for weapons of mass destruction non-proliferation issues.”
The FBI investigation has seemed to have ground to a halt. Some categories of suspects may be precluded due to the FBI’s ideological boundaries and/or conflicts of interest. It is therefore advisable for Congress to conduct open hearings on the greatest criminal germ attack on citizens in US history. Now in terms of questions, I have written about 18 questions myself. I don’t probably have time to read them all but I’ll read a few. Why did the FBI allow the destruction of the Ames anthrax stockpile in Ames, Iowa one week after the same strain killed a tabloid editor in Florida? Why did the FBI wait for two months after the anthrax attacks before interviewing the experts at Ft. Dietrich? Why did the FBI rule the death of anthrax expert, Dr. Don C. Wiley, a suicide instead of a murder? Local homicide detectives thought otherwise. Would the FBI reconsider a homicide investigation? What is the source of the anthrax used in the letters? What is the hold up in the FBI’s investigation? What damaging information, if any, does the suspected anthrax perpetrator have on the government? Why does the CIA or its contractors possess anthrax or other bio-weapons? And in my paper I go into what the CIA is doing on that. What is the extent of the CIA’s research or the US bio-weapons program? Is the US or any of its agents in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 and/or the Biological Weapons Antiterrorism Act of 1989? Is the US developing genetically modified biological agents? Does the US or its contractors possess genetically engineered pathogens which have no vaccine or cure? What would happen if such pathogens got into the general environment by accident or design? How easy is it to smuggle a few grams of lethal agent out of the high security labs? What is required to grow dangerous quantities of these agents from a few grams? And is the danger of proliferation worth the presumed benefit of possessing such bio-weapons? Thank you.
And you promise you will put those into the web site as well? Okay. Good. Okay. Before we close Kyle and Tom asked me if I would mention two things. And let me just touch on them briefly. In the summer of the year 2000 I went to visit with the Chief of Staff to the then Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee that has jurisdiction over the Department of Housing and Urban Development where I used to be Assistant Secretary in the first Bush administration. And this was a person I had met before and they said, “What do you think is going on at HUD?” And I said, “I don’t know, what do you think is going on at HUD?” And they said, “HUD is being run as a criminal enterprise.” Now the reason that that is such a devastating comment, if you understand HUD it has over a trillion dollars of financial portfolios. It cannot be run as a criminal enterprise without the concerted intention of the Department of Treasury and the Department of Justice to run it as a criminal enterprise. And not to mention a group of contractors who essentially run the computers systems and information systems at HUD. I communicated that story, in fact, to my Congressional delegation in Tennessee, My Congressman and two Senators, and subsequent they and the appropriations committees together, all Republicans, remember, at this point that this was still the Clinton Administration, voted a 1.7 billion dollar increase in HUD’s appropriations. With no conversation. Why do I bring up that story? I bring up that story because in early September I was very confident that we had a chance of bringing up and finally breaking into visibility the fact that over 3.3 trillion dollars has been reported missing at several agencies, one of which is HUD. But the biggest, certainly, is the Department of Defense. And in fact my understanding is that one of the reasons that the Department of Defense Appropriations Bill had stalled and not even come out of subcommittee that summer was, not only the various politics of trying to decide how we’re going to get increases but sort of trying to keep that issue under wraps. Sure enough, that log jam was broken, as we all know, on September 11th. There was no problem not only passing, getting the Department of Defense Appropriation out of subcommittee, but approved by full committee with tremendous increases. I’m from Hickory Valley, Tennessee. When you buy a car - we pay 350 billion dollars a year to make sure that 9/11 could never have happened, to the military and budget, and you know, when you buy a car and it doesn’t work you don’t go back to the dealer and say, “Let me give you a 60 billion dollar raise.” So I have an article that’s up on Scoop Media called “9/11 - Rewarding Failure.” But to give you a sense of how bad this is, the number one defense contractor is Lockheed Martin. Runs the computer systems at both HUD and DOD where the 3.3 trillion is missing. Lockheed Martin stock is up over 60% since 9/11. Now I don’t think there’s anybody here who is in this room because of money. I don’t think anybody came here because of money. This is, for many of us, this is an act of love. But I think, my experience as an Assistant Secretary and then as an investment banker in Washington, is about 80% of everything that goes on is about money. And I would encourage the reporters who are here and the researchers who are here to keep asking the question, qui bono, who benefited? Because if we’re going to be safe in the future we need to understand how to do that. And if our government is being run as a criminal enterprise we need to take that into account and move forward accordingly.
On a subject related to money I would like to say, on behalf of Tom and Kyle, that we are extremely disappointed that C-SPAN declined to cover this conference. Several weeks ago, two weeks ago I think, I got onto the internet and watched Agent Wright tell the story of how he had been stopped from taking every step he could because the money laundering networks of terrorist organizations were protected by the higher ups. That C-SPAN coverage I thought was incredible, connecting to people and citizens and researchers all over the country. I’m very disappointed and I know Tom and Kyle, after all the work that’s been done, and your presence here, are disappointed that that will not happen. I would ask, if we cannot depend on the national media and we cannot depend on the taxpayer related funded media, such as C-SPAN, I would encourage all of you to take advantage of the wonderful alternative medias here, but please do everything you can to help circulate to your family and friends that the truth can be gotten. We’re going to try and link to the top web sites on 9/11 in Unanswered so that we can continue to have this conversation. Because if we can’t depend on the Congress, if we can’t depend on the White House and we can’t depend on the national media, we can depend on each other. And Woodrow Wilson once said that no one is as smart as all of us. I think if you looked at other events like this, TWA 800, it’s been incredible what the families, the participants, interested researchers have been able to accomplish and we hope the web site will help to accomplish that. So I’d like, on behalf of Kyle, and Miles Thompson who’s not here, and Tom Flocco, I’d like to thank you very much for being here. I’d like to thank everyone who helped.
And now we have enough time for questions and answers. Again, Mr. O’Brien has the microphone. What I’d like to do is please give your name, keep your statements brief and ask the question, and if there’s someone in particular that you want to have answer the question if you could mention them too.
Q: My name is Elizabeth Alderman. My 25 year old son, Peter, was murdered at the World Trade Center. This conference is all about questions. About unanswered questions. My question is, how do we begin to get answers? It is apparent that there are suits against the airlines, there are suits in progress against foreign governments, foreign individuals. How do we begin to get accountability from our government, from other involved. There are no lawsuits mentioned. There are no - there’s nothing moving ahead to get these answers. I found the questions very interesting. I think it’s very important to raise questions, but I think that we need some kind of a format where we can begin to get the answers that are necessary.
Tom Flocco: On April the - Ms. Schiavo could you come up and take questions also? I’ll answer that because I had to spend almost two years searching out an attorney. I was laid off and he kind of led me on and I filed suit in Georgia and I filed suit in Pennsylvania on April the 19th against a certain travel corporation regarding negligence and fraud and so forth and misrepresentation in advertising in the death of my son. And I had to - it took me a full year. And what you have to do is you just have to get on martindale.com and start doing some searches and start calling attorneys. And go after them and present them with this evidence and say, “Look, I want to hold the CIA accountable. I want to hold the FBI accountable.” Well, you have to find a way. You have to find a way to use creative legal theories. And the point is, for example, you could at least get all the victim families and instead of going up to the Capital steps and let’s get an open-ended investigation where the President gets to pick the people on the committee, and you know, former CIA operatives in the House of Representatives get to pick who’s going to be answering your unanswered questions and so forth, go ahead and find attorneys that can come up with theories that they can use to actually develop questions for the President. Maybe, does anyone here think that the President of the United States, if you had 3,000 families go outside of the White House in front of the whole American people and ask, “Mr. President, could we see the August 6th briefing document?” for example, and could we see other various documents that Larry Klayman is trying to get a hold of regarding why the administration was taking Cipro on the day of the attacks when they hadn’t discovered it yet in town, regarding the various letters that were laden with anthrax and sent to various Democrats and so forth. And so those kinds of questions. I think you have to do it via political, you know, and I think in many respects. Because the country is going to be watching and they’re going to say, hey, wait a minute. Why can’t he release this document? Why can’t we see this document?” You know, why can’t we see the insider tradings? Why can’t we see who bought that five billion dollar bill, Treasury Note, right before? Why can’t we see the extended single one billion dollar notes that were purchased? Why can’t we know who purchased that two and a half million dollar, or who made that trade worth two and a half million dollars in insider trading profits was made. Why can’t we know the identify of that person? There’s a lot of things that you can do but it has to be done politically. And what we’re doing is right now there’s reporters flying all over the place trying to ask questions about the variety of aspects of the terrorist that were just caught.
Mike Ruppert: This is Mike Ruppert. I’m still on the line. I’d like a piece of this question too, if I could. I’ve been around this a long time too and to second - legal action is one thing but I have 25 years of studying this kind of phenomenon, this of course. being the most egregious in our nation’s history. And I for one am convinced that it - no tangible results will be achieved without public activity including mass demonstrations. We recall that it took a half a million, 600 thousand people in the streets of Washington in the civil rights movement, during the Vietnam War to bring those travesties to conclusions of one degree or another. And I’ve been traveling the world lecturing since September the 11th and one of the primary things that has to happen is to educate the public at large by whatever means necessary to make sure that the public will exists to give a foundation upon which the victim families can stand. And without that I am not optimistic for great success.
Catherine Fitts: Let me mention that one of the reasons - this year is an election cycle in the United States. In many communities the Town Hall Meeting forum is a forum where people can get their questions asked without intermediaries. One of the reasons that Tom and Kyle and I wanted to get Unanswered Questions launched was so that people all over the country could have access to these questions in a way that with a relatively small amount of time they could go to their Town Hall meeting and start to really grill their Congressmen. Because I think if 450 plus Congressmen have to face the population one on one, that can start to shift it. But it takes tremendous grassroots organization. Let me keep going. Next question?
Kyle Hence: Before we go onto the next question can I just offer my response? This comes in part from me and in part from John Judge. John has suggested that Congress is one avenue where we could bring this material. Okay, so in terms of what this material is, it’s readily available on a lot of sites which will be listed on our web site, sort of a top ten list of the best websites for sources of this material. We’re also going to try to organize and structure that data with the help of what we’re going to call the UQ Network, which will be a network of people that has come forth who offer their services to help put the pieces together, structure it and make it understandable and then they’ll go out and communicate it and bring it to various different avenues, including Congress, possibly an independent official commission as opposed to a Presidential commission, a people’s commission or tribunal, or perhaps, some suggested, overseas and International Criminal Court. Because what happened has grave international implications. I would also add, on a very grassroots level, if C-SPAN won’t do it perhaps your local public access channel will. And so I’d like to put forward that idea, that we could organize a national clearinghouse of some videos and documents that, I guess it needs to be in video format if you’re going to put it on television, so that we offer this video and other subsequent videos from future events to put on local access channels. And then publicize that we’re going to be putting this material on public access television. So if C-SPAN won’t do it that’s another avenue. Thank you.
Catherine Fitts: Can you stand up? The gentleman in the tie. Oh, I’m sorry, go ahead.
Q: [inaudible] from Vision TV in Toronto. I don’t want to diminish the importance of the exchange that’s just taken place. I happen to agree very much with that. But my question is more specific and it’s for John Judge, it so happens. I believe we’re in a bit of a disinformation soup post-9/11, that is not only is the Bush regime taking various evasive and deceptive actions to throw up smoke screens and distract people and so on, but information is going around various places which people in this room might be inclined to believe and it may or may not be so. So very specifically, John, on the internet the other day I saw that you had written something, or ostensibly you had, that you saw the plane go into the Pentagon.
John Judge: I had written that there were eyewitnesses that saw the plane go into the Pentagon because I was responding to a best selling French book and some other web sites that claim that Flight 77 never went into the Pentagon. I wrote back to the first person who wrote me about it and said, “Perhaps you don’t live in DC.” A close personal friend of mine was a flight attendant on Flight 77. I thought she was dead that day. I subsequently found out she was home taking care of her father. She lost her best friend at work and the whole crew there that she worked with on the flight. There have been autopsies of the bodies and to me there is absolutely no question that the plane went into the Pentagon. But I wasn’t an eyewitness but I was an ear-witness. My windows shook. I live right across the river in Anacostia. But there were eyewitnesses that saw the plane. There were some people who said they thought they saw something else but I believe that there’s no question that the plane went into the Pentagon. And I think we’ve personally been in a disinformation soup for a lot of time prior to September 11th and it’s been a fact since the inception of the National Security State in 1947 and the beginning of classification of information, that we have lost our own history in this country.
Q: [Questioner from Vision TV] I would tend to agree with that too. Could I just ask an ancillary question, having heard yours. Probably everybody in this room has seen the pictures at the web site that seem to indicate that no airliner could have gone in, so would you comment on that web site?
John Judge: I have seen some of the photos but I’m just saying, I mean, I think that the preponderance of evidence if you look at it seriously suggests that Flight 77 went into the Pentagon. If Flight 77 went someplace else, I mean, that raises so many people being involved in a cover up that even I can’t, I mean, and they like to call me a conspiracy theorist, which is fine as long as you call everyone else a coincidence theorist. But I’d like to say for the coincidence theorists here in relation to the Pentagon, if you sleep better thinking incompetence and coincidence, that then you have spent 13 trillion dollars since the end of World War II on a massive defense and intelligence system that cannot defend its own building.
Catherine Fitts: Okay. Right here.
Q: Can you hear me? My name’s Christopher Storey from England. I publish a paper called Soviet Analyst. I’ll try to be very brief indeed. But there’s been no geopolitical discussion at all, and the question qui bono has been asked. Now you won’t notice that GOU officer Vladimir Putin, who started his career in GOU, he was also a KGB officer, is now Bush’s closest friend. And Bush calls him Puti-Puti. You may also recall that the first phone call that Bush received on Air Force 1 was from Mr. Puti-Puti. That reminds me of the standard action of the Godfather, after the murder of an associate when he’s commiserating with the widow. And in that context I’d like to draw your attention to two statements by Putin which are verified. One is that he is on record as saying, “I feel that I personally am to blame for what happened.” And secondly, he also said, a few days after the event he said, “My first feeling after September the 11th was guilt.” I’d just like to add one more point. Joseph Podanski, the Israeli expert, said on the 3rd of November on CNBC that Bin Laden has been working with Chechans who are former [Spetsnats]. Now in my office we do not use the word fledgling or former.
Mike Ruppert: I’d like a piece of that if I could. This is Mike Ruppert. Okay, yes, and that’s a very important question to ask, is not just if the administration and the authorities are capable of this kind of act but what would motivate them to that. And I’m firmly convinced that the answer lies in the billions of dollars in liquid cash that the major oil companies had invested, paid to secure equity interest in Central Asian oil and gas, most particularly in Kazakhstan with the government of President Nazarbayev. We have documented, and Sy Hirsch has done some very good work about the two grand juries that were sitting, and Vladimir Putin was experiencing a monumental thorn in his side from Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that was alleviated somewhat by the attacks of September 11th in that threats to pipelines going north out of the region through Russia are now infinitely more secure than they were prior. In addition, now of course we know that Unical, Exxon, Shell, Texaco, all of them, can now monitize those huge investments. ENRON, or what remains of it, still owns, I believe, the Daphol Power Plant in India and will soon have a national gas pipeline to feed that plant. And that was a driving force that benefited both Vladimir Putin and the Bush administration and its oil creators, if you will. And I think that’s a much larger picture. But Putin, I totally agree, has clearly been behaving as a US vassal. But to put that in context, you have to look also at what was done to Russia throughout the 1990’s. The Harvard Endowment, IMF, Goldman Sachs, the US Treasury looted some three to four hundred billion dollars out of that economy to make Russia so weak that it was totally dependent upon US actions when we made the move to control Central Asia.
Catherine Fitts: Next question please.
Q: My name is Alderman. My 25 year old son was killed at the world trade center on September 11th. I must say this has been a marvelous conference. It is [inaudible] the presence of distinguished panelists. The problem is it seems to me that we’re preaching to the choir. When you look around this room there’s less than a quarter percent of the families here. Therefore it appears to me that while our government’s behavior is heinous it’s predictable. On the other hand, the failure to control them in any way shape or form, I think evolves to us. It’s our fault. And I don’t know how to change that and I don’t know who even to ask that of the panel. Thank you.
Catherine Fitts: Does anybody want to?
Kyle Hence: I would just like to say that I have - when I first got the idea to bring this together, to have a conference, and called Tom, one of the first communications I made was to contacts that Tom and contacts that I had researched with the group, Families of September 11th. And I did invite them to collaborate and they said we have our own plans for press and perhaps we can collaborate in the future. So my hope is that those that are here, yourself, can go back, perhaps armed with the video or audio, or send them to our website to listen to the audio. And make a case to your 900 members somehow that the questions that we’ve raised are legitimate questions and look at how you can help get them answered and put some pressure on the government in the ways that we have discussed.
Catherine Fitts: Let me just close that with one other statement. I’ve worked with a great many people over the last five years who are in similar positions to the one you’re in. My experience on this says that he who controls the money will control what happens. In fact, he who controls the money will control what the official story is, whether it’s from the government or C-SPAN. And what I would encourage everyone, because we pay over one and a half trillion dollars a year in taxes, and it’s are credit that supports the Treasury credit, in the end of the day we control the money. But one of the things that I would encourage the Families of 9/11 to think about is who controls the money and what are we going to do about the money. Because that’s what this is going to come down to. Okay, next question?
Q: I’m Marion Kinsick and this question is for John Judge. Since a commercial jet goes just under mach 1 and a military jet can go mach 2 or mach 3, how come the military jets couldn’t very easily have overtaken the commercial jets?
John Judge: I think there’s a question that there was time enough had normal procedures gone ahead. If you can’t scramble a plane in 40 minutes or if you can’t catch something that flies less rapidly in less distance for you to get to, then you’re not attempting to. It seems to me clear, from the actually distances from Langley and Otis to the points where they finally got to New York and DC, that they were not flying at full speed that they were capable of. They were flying at a subsonic speed if you just do the mathematics. There were some claims that continue that I also don’t find credible, that the flight that actually went down in Pennsylvania was shot down by an interceptor plane. But I think had this government actually intercepted and shot down one of those planes it would have been tooting its horn.
Q: I’m L. B. Deyo, again, from Jinks Magazine. The American public since 9/11 has been treated to some of the most interesting theories in the history of this republic and just to go on what would has been offered today, we’ve heard it [inaudible] that the following may or may not have been involved in 9/11, Bush, the CIA, the FBI, the FAA, Condoleeza Rice, the Security Commission in charge of airline security, ENRON, the companies that run gas pipelines, the National Security Agency, the Securities Exchange Agency, Suisse Credit, Deutschebank, the DOD, the HUD, the Taliban, the manufacturers of Cipro, Putin and the Chechan rebels and, of course from Mr. Och’s pamphlet that was handed out prior to this, a “cabal” of Jews. Now based on the standard of evidence that we’ve heard applied today I would like to make a theory of my own. I would like to point out that no one on this panel…
Catherine Fitts: Can you ask your question please?
L. B. Deal: Yes. My question is this. Why did no one on this panel receive an anthrax letter? Why did no one on this panel - how much have people on this panel benefited financially or in prestige from the 9/11 attacks? In other words…
Catherine Fitts: Can you give me the microphone back please? Thank you very much.
Mike Ruppert: Can I comment on that?
Catherine Fitts: Please Mike.
Mike Ruppert: Yeah, okay, good. I’ve been studying covert operations for 25 years and the question was a rhetorical one designed to create an impression of something that did not or need not have happened for such an effort to have taken place. Take a look, for example, at the Colleen Rowley memo which says clearly that there was one senior supervisory agent at FBI headquarters that was the single log jam for almost every FBI investigation. And the Rowley memo clearly says that this man obstructed, thwarted, rewrote affidavits, blocked investigations and yet what happened. That man, a choke point, was promoted post September the 11th. It would have been very easy to neutralize over eager fighter jocks on the ground who wanted to scramble and go up and get those planes. If you recall on September 11th that there was great confusion as to where Air Force 1 was, where it was going, its destinations were changed. And the orders could have come down from fighter command saying very clearly hold your position, Air Force 1 is in danger. And the pilots would have automatically followed orders. It would have required no more. There are 50 people, and I can - given time I can lay that out clearly - inside the US government, maybe a few more, to have effectuated such a conspiracy.
Now let me also comment that since September the 11th my offices have been burglarized three times, my web site has been hacked three times. My room was burglarized in Sidney, Australia less than three weeks ago. We have been subject to harassment at our offices. I’m not making a lot of money on this, not withstanding what the press may say about it. Many of us have undertaken great sacrifices and paid great prices to tell these stories. If you ask us to turn up dead will that make you happy?
Catherine Fitts: The gentleman back. We have a question in the back. No. Excuse me. We have a question in the back.
Q: My name is Jonathon [inaudible] from the Washington, DC Indymedia and we are a volunteer organization. We don’t make any money at all. We have bake sales to pay rent. My question is, the story that happened after 9/11 of the two planes that left North America when all other planes were grounded with the Saudi royal family - like a lot of these stories, they get added on to. I’m asking for sources. I’m asking for clarification. I’m asking for what that story is about the two planes that left North America when everything else was grounded. Except of Air Force 1 of course, but I mean civilian craft. And I’m curious if anybody can verify or expand on that. Thanks.
Catherine Fitts: Mike, none of the panelists here are in a position to verify that story. Do you have any of the sources on it?
Mike Ruppert: Yeah. I do. I have in my files back in Los Angeles a number of press stories confirming that members of the Bin Laden family were assembled from various points throughout the Eastern Seaboard and Southeast part of the country. The were transported, I believe it was to Boston. It might have been either New York or Washington, where a chartered 747 then flew them safely out of the country back to Saudi Arabia. These are all good stories from mainstream sources.
Catherine Fitts: Are those sources listed on your website?
Mike Ruppert: Not yet, but I can certainly do that when I get back to Los Angeles.
Catherine Fitts: We would appreciate if you would do that. Okay, Julie has a question Kyle?
Julie Sweeney: I’ll comment because I understand that question and I think the way I understand this and maybe this will help you understand it is there’s so many coincidences. And maybe some of them are connected and maybe they’re not. And we just want to find that out. We’re just as frustrated as you are. We’re not saying that ENRON’s connected, and the CIA and the FBI and the President and we’re in a criminally infested country run by criminals and the mob. We’re not saying that. We’re saying there’s so many coincidences and we’re trying to open the public’s eye to all of them so that true, pure investigations are put out on the table and we find the answers. And I am on the panel and I have not benefited financially from this. I said no to two million dollars from our government.
Catherine Fitts: Question right here?
Q: Hello. Christopher Bolen from American Free Press. Nobody addressed the failure of the structures, the two World Trade Center towers where I think 3,000 people died. And I think that there are many questions about not only how the towers collapsed and the structural failure of those buildings, but also the ownership of these buildings. As you know, the Port Authority Chairman who was responsible for privatizing those buildings and turning them over to the private ownership, he’s now the Financial Chairman for the Republican National Committee, Mr. Eisenberg. There’s a very close connection here politically and to the privatization of these buildings and the failure of the buildings themselves. These are questions that have to be addressed as well. Thank you.
Catherine Fitts: Have you put those into the web site? Okay. Great. Another question, the woman with the black t-shirt whose hand’s up? Thank you.
Q: My name is Margie Burns. I’m a local. I’m freelance. I have a question about anybody connected to or knowledgeable about the airlines. I’m wondering whether the airlines are connected or have made, have any financial ties to a corporation called Analytic Services Incorporated or ANSWER, Inc in Northern Virginia. It formed something called the Institute for Homeland Security starting back in 1999 and has been boosting Homeland Security and a coming second Pearl Harbor. It seems to me ever since, so far as I can tell with consistent help from publications like the Washington Times and Insight Magazine other news publications. It’s listed by the DOD, ranked 58 among the top DOD contracting corporations for research and technology and so forth.
Mary Schiavo: Thank you. I will be asking that question.
Catherine Fitts: Another question? Right here.
Q: Hi. I’m William Maxon with Intelligence Online out of Paris. This question is, I guess, primarily for Mary Schiavo, but the FAA had a memo the evening of September 11th whereby the flight attendant on American Airlines 11 called on a cell phone to American Airlines flight control center reporting that the passenger in 9B has, apparently one of the hijackers, shot the passenger in 10B, who was apparently a dual US/Israeli businessman from Boston. The UPI got a copy of this memo. The FAA later said the memo had the wrong times listed and that it was erroneous. My question is, how could such an erroneous memo wind up in the FAA email system and do you know anything more about this? Thank you.
Mary Schiavo: We have gotten interesting and conflicting reports. Some reports from the FBI say that it is indeed a valid memo but they can’t vouch for what’s in the memo. My guess on that it was internal briefing in the department. When I was in the department when things happened you had to brief the Secretary and the front office repeatedly on that. What is interesting is now it’s gotten to the position that everybody is saying they can neither confirm or deny, and I think the public assumption that it was always assuming shot with a weapon and then we find the interesting warning sent out to airlines that they should be looking for nontraditional weapons such as weapons in cell phones, etc. So the bottom line is we don’t have a confirmation on that. Neither do we have anyone explaining how that came to be in the memo if indeed no one heard any gunshots and no one was shot. But that is obviously something that we will be seeking in discovery.
And I’d just like to say one other thing in comment to the fellow. For example, not all of us believe that everybody’s coordinating, in the government is coordinating a big conspiracy. Quite frankly, from my days in the government it is difficult for the government to coordinate anything beyond a conspiracy of one. But from my position, what if then, indeed, you’re dealing with colossal incompetence? Should you look the other way as well? You know, quite possibly lots of these things aren’t connected at all and that various government agencies were so colossally incompetent and are covering up the fact that they’re unable to do the jobs for which their tapped. And of course many people tapped into government are tapped into government without rudimentary abilities to do anything that they’re assigned to do. And from my days in the government we would investigate colossal conspiracies, what we thought, and we would come up with colossal incompetence. And from my position, if the carriers, since I work in aviation, if the carriers and the aviation industry and the government is colossally incompetent I want them held accountable just as much as if they’re engaged in some big conspiracy. And as far as the airline industry goes, I suspect when all is said and done the airlines and the FAA, at least where the aviation concerns are concerned, are found, we will find what it is is horrible, horrible egregious and knowing negligence, but muddling through. And for that we will hold them accountable and for that the law allows us to hold them accountable. Others are going to have a much harder time but for me, I find negligence, egregious negligence, just as bad in terms of risking loss of lives, in many cases, as incredible conspiracies. And indeed, many of the conspiracies, when I was Inspector General we set out to investigate, people would report incredible things. Often it would come down to incredible incompetence and that needs to be wiped out as well. So whether you believe it’s conspiracy or incompetence, let’s clean it up. Because it’s not the kind of government that we deserve and pay for.
Q: Could I…
Catherine Fitts: Next question. There’s a man in the back with a yellow jacket.
Q: John Bailey. Vanity Fair. I wrote the UPI piece that Wayne referred to and I’d like to talk to you afterwards. One piece that’s missing from that which may have bearing on this is the passenger who reportedly was shot was named Daniel Lewin who was a dual US/Israeli citizen and he was also a member of Siercat Mectal, which is Israeli antiterror group that pursues terrorists beyond Israel’s borders. And it seems that there may be a possibility that Lewin had a gentleman’s agreement with the airlines, was able to bring a weapon onto the aircraft but was surrounded by the terrorists who wrestled it away from him, used it against him and continued on their mission. But the Siercat Mectal [Ed note: sp?] connection is something that’s been reported very, very little.
Catherine Fitts: Okay. We have time for one more question and I would ask that we get a question, not a statement.
Q: Okay, it really is a statement, but, basically you talk about incompetence and yes, the government is incompetent in giving us what we need but what the government is very good at is using American military power to basically control the world economically and politically and to what extent are you willing to look at the fact that as long as they’re controlling the world they don’t give a damn if they’re protecting us?
Stephen Camerota: Let me say, though, that I don’t have any evidence of a conspiracy. The immigration system has got a lot of loopholes and a lot of problems, but I don’t have any evidence of that so I haven’t suggested that. I just want to make that clear.
Catherine Fitts: I’d like to thank everyone for coming. Before we close I want to we close, in particular thank Linda Fanton and Virginia. Thank you for your help. Finally, there are some people that have offered to stay late that are gathering in the bar. I would encourage you to stay and talk with them.
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