Is the September 11th board the conspiracy board?

[stpalm]

I was reading it and I felt like I needed to take a shower afterwards... I followed some links, and here is just one of the crazy conspiracies I was led to:


Brice Taylor is the pseudonym for Susan Ford, one of the highest level MK Ultra mind controlled victims to ever come forward and reveal her story. It took her nearly 13 years to recover the memories of the events that she reveals in her book, Thanks for The Memories (published in May 1999). Her memories began to return in sporadic fragments in1985, following a car accident that threw her through the windshield of her car after hitting a tree. It wasn't really an accident as much as a result of mind control programming which compelled her to commit suicide if she began to recover critical memories about her role as a top level NASA/CIA mind controlled 'asset' who was used as a sex slave and message (or drug) courier for every president from Kennedy to Clinton and was Henry Kissinger's personal secretary/human computer (file storage and retrieval) for over 19 years. Her 'owner/handler' was comedian Bob Hope and she was 'loaned out' to many famous and well known entertainment personalities in order to oblige them to be beholding to and manipulated by Hope and his Illuminati pals so they could be used as "worker bees' to help usher in the Luciferian, New World Order.

I laughed out loud when I reached that line... seriously. Are all conspiracy theories automatically forwarded there?

[LARED]

1. I alway suspected Bob Hope was a worker bee for Lucifer

And here's all the proof needed per conspiracy theorist international standards

[spooked911]

3. Awesome picture!

[Make7]

2. If you have some evidence....

...to prove that Bob Hope was not the "handler" of MK Ultra subject Susan Ford, please provide it (with links to credible web sources) or kindly keep your posts to yourself!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

-Make7

[Pockets]

8. Don't make hasty judgements

The book looks like serious literature:

[Pockets]

11. I just noticed...

used copies of this book on amazon are going for $275. Geesh.

[Name removed]

28. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Make7]

29. Ah, it's good to see you old friend.

It's been a while since you have replied to one of my posts. But tell me Name removed, why do you always post the same thing? I'd love to hear what's been going on with you since the last time you wrote. How are you? How is Mrs. removed?

Unfortunately, I've got to go - lots of stuff I need to get done today, but I'll check back tonight. I hope to hear from you. I've missed you.

Your friend,
Make Seven

[spooked911]

4. I'm not sure what your point is.

That line you highlight sounds silly, but we can hardly be responsible for every link that is made here.

But in general-- yes, we deal with conspiracies here. Do you have a problem with that?

[stpalm]

5. I'm curious- this board is not just for 9-11, right?

It is the dumping ground for the conspiracy theories, correct?

[WoodrowFan]

6. it seems to have become that

for the outlandish ones at least.

[spooked911]

7. Yes, it seems to be the "dumping ground" for weird conspiracies

But it really should be reserved for 9/11, which is an incredibly important and unique recent event that shows the devastating corruption in our government.

[meppie-meppie not]

20. I always thought it was reserved for 9/11 alone so really would

prefer to see other conspiracies put somewhere else. Like you spooked, I think investigating 9/11 is far too important to be lumped into with other conspiracy topics.

[k-robjoe]

9. I´m just doing my best

to make this board as ridiculous as possible.

( And I brought some friends to help me out. )

If you were curious you would watch "The power of nightmares" (BBC), or read about "Operation Gladio".

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

10. POWER OF NIGHTMARES - VIDEO ONLINE

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm

[Frederik]

12. Power of Nightmares

does a good job of exposing the myth of "al-Qaeda". BBC documentary at its best.

[k-robjoe]

13. "The ricin ring that never was"

Hi Frederik, ("...name of care...")
Welcome.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5170380-108933,00.html

"The ricin ring that never was"
"Yesterday's trial collapse has exposed the deception behind attempts to link al-Qaida to a 'poison attack' on London.(...)"

[Frederik]

14. Thanks, I read it

Excellent article. This corroborates the theory that Andy Curtis (that's his name, right?) was advancing in the Power of Nightmares series, that al-Qaeda is mostly a convenient bogeyman readily used by opportunistic politicians. I've never seen his assertion be debunked, that the name "al-Qaeda" was never used before the FBI decided to use it in 2001. Not to say that there aren't Islamic terrorist groups - there are plenty - but there's no world-wide coordinating authority with a name and a hierarchy and so on which is lead by Osama Bin Laden. Shows you how easy it is to plant these myths in our collective conciousness.

[Make7]

15. Assertion Debunked

Frederik wrote:
I've never seen his assertion be debunked, that the name "al-Qaeda" was never used before the FBI decided to use it in 2001.

"Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, who is the second man charged by the United States authorities, allegedly told American agents that he was an active member of the Al-Qaeda group run by Osama bin Laden, who has declared an Islamic holy war against the US." - BBC, August 29, 1998
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/160512.stm

"In a criminal complaint an FBI agent, Daniel Coleman, said Mr Odeh told FBI agents the bombings were carried out by al-Qaeda, an international terrorist group headed by Mr Bin Laden.

According to the FBI, Mr Odeh said all the bomb plotters except one left Kenya the day before the attack, shaving their beards so they would not raise suspicions. He said he was told that members of Mr Bin Laden's terrorist group in Afghanistan were moving to avoid US retaliation." - The Guardian, August 29, 1998
http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,850018,00.html

"U.S. officials on Friday said they were looking at a number of militant groups in their probe of the attack on the Cole in the harbor at Aden, Yemen, and bin Laden's group, al-Qaeda, or "The Base," topped the list.

The United States accuses bin Laden of organizing a network with followers across the Middle East, including Yemen, and says he masterminded the embassy bombings." - CNN, October 23, 2000
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/10/23/uss.cole.01

-Make7

[Bolo Boffin]

16. Nice

And personally, I don't think of al-Qaeda as an overarching control structure for a lot of Islamic militant groups. I see them more as a resource for developing and funding independent cells. They bring them in, train them, give them funding, provide some communications, and send them out into the world, all grown up.

[Frederik]

18. You should see the documentary

Link provided in one of the posts above, it's in three parts. It was my memory that didn't serve me correctly, 1998 was indeed the year the FBI started using the name "Al-Qaeda", based on the testimony of a "walk-in" source that most intelligence services didn't want to have anything to do with. But, according to Adam Curtis, there's no evidence that Bin Laden used that name "Al-Qaeda" until after 9/11 2001, when he realized that was what the Americans called his group. He also claims that Al-Qaeda does not exist as an organization or an international network with "cells" at all.

[Make7]

19. A different perspective on Al-Qaeda

Part of a 1999 Frontline interview with Dr. Saad Al-Fagih (bold text is Frontline, regular text is Dr. Al-Fagih):

But there's some confusion here apparently. Today in the United States, we hear from law enforcement about Al Qaeda.

Yes.

But to you that's something different.

Well, I really laugh when I hear the FBI talking about Al Qaeda as an organization of bin Laden. ... It's really a very simple story. If bin Laden is to receive Arabs from Saudi Arabia and from Kuwait--from other regions--he is to receive them in the guest house in Peshawar. They used to go to the battle field and come back, without documentation.

What do you mean without documentation?

There was no documentation of who has arrived. Who has left. How long he stayed. There's only a nice general reception. And you go there. And you join in the battle field. ... Very simple organization. Now, he was embarrassed by many families when they called him and ask what happened to our son. He don't know. `Cause there's no record. There's no documentation. Now he asked some of his colleagues to start documenting the movement of every Arab coming under his umbrella. ... It is recorded that they arrived in this date and stayed in this house. ... And then there was a record of thousands and thousands of people. Many of them had come only for two weeks, three weeks and then disappeared. That record, that documentation was called the record of Al Qaeda. So that was Al Qaeda. There's nothing sinister about Al Qaeda. It's not like an organization--like any other terrorist organization or any other underground group. I don't think he used any name for his underground group. If you want to name it, you can name it "bin Laden group." But if they are using the term Al Qaeda ... Al Qaeda is just a record for the people who came to Peshawar and moved from there back and forth to the guest house. And moved back to their country. And if they want to follow the number, they must be talking about 20, 30 thousand people. Which is impossible to trace. And I think most of those records are in the hands of the Saudi government anyway, because people used the Saudi airlines, at a very much reduced fare. Twenty-five percent of the total fare of a trip to Islamabad. ...

So Al Qaeda ... is not a secret organization at all, is it?

It's not a secret organization at all. It was common knowledge to many people who went there. ... Al Qaeda was public knowledge. It was a record of people who ended up in Peshawar and joined, and move from Peshawar to Afghanistan. It was very benign information. A simple record of people who were there just to make record available to bin Laden if he's asked by any family or any friend what happened to Mr. so-and-so.

And most have now returned to their homes?

Yes. Most of them is, are back. Now if they want to talk about the bulk or the core of bin Laden followers, I don't think there is any name of that group. You can very correctly and very accurately describe it as "bin Laden group." Full stop. As a small core, probably a few hundred of people who are around bin Laden. And the bulk of those are in four countries. Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia. Yemen. And Somalia. Very, very few or probably none in other countries. ...

I take it that the description that's given by US law enforcement of a well organized cell organization in the bin Laden organization, is not really the case--from what you're saying. That it's really very diffused and disorganized in some ways.

Well, there's a mixture. Bin Laden does have a small core of followers who are unlikely to be anywhere but in Afghanistan and Yemen. Probably a good number in Saudi Arabia and a good number in Somalia. And then you have the wider group. In thousands, maybe tens of thousands, who are sympathetic to bin Laden and who look at him as their father, and arrange themselves in small groups here and there. A very loose network with that hierarchy. You can never eradicate them. ... Each small group has its own chain of command, its own logistics. Now they wait for somebody like bin Laden to give them moral support and give them directions. They might try to contact him to get advice from him. But they don't belong to him like a special organization with a pyramidal structure or anything like that. He does have a small core of followers probably in the hundreds. But some ... have estimated the number to be 600 or 700. But the danger for the west or for Saudi Arabians--for the regime in Saudi Arabia--is not only this 600 people. The danger lies with all those small groups. Which probably, the people who did the Khobar and Riyadh bombings were among them. They just planned the purchase themselves. They went to bin Laden. They took his encouragement and his sanctioning. And they did it. But they don't belong to his close core of followers.

So what you're saying is that even if the FBI and CIA were extremely efficient and rounded up the individuals who did the bombing in Nairobi, there will be no end to this problem until the underlying issues are dealt with?

Exactly. No end at all. The only solution to the bin Laden problem for the Americans is to understand it as phenomena. Not as a single terrorist who is staying there, sending one or two of his followers to have an explosion here or to have a bomb there. They have to understand the problem as phenomena. And they have to deal with its grass roots. They cannot deal with the problem of Muslims versus America. But they can at least reduce the huge resentment in Saudi Arabia by reducing the tension against him by moving the military presence from Arabia. And also by pressing the regime to be more open, have more power sharing, more freedom of expression and more freedom of assembly in Saudi Arabia. And they have to prove to the people that it is their effort which forced the Saudi regime to be more friendly to its nation. Otherwise they will lose the battle I believe....

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/interviews/al-fagih.html#alqaeda

I always found the statements by the Bush administration about how they have killed or captured a high percentage of the leaders of Al Qaeda rather amusing. Always in vain, I waited for a reporter to ask how many leaders there were to begin with, how many have been killed, how many have been captured, and have any new ones taken the place of those captured or killed? I suspect that they have very little more than a general idea of the numbers that might be involved... maybe...

-Make7

[Frederik]

17. Wow, thanks

2001 was the wrong year, it should have been 1998. Quote from Curtis's documentary:

JASON BURKE , AUTHOR, “AL QAEDA” : During the investigation of the 1998 bombings, there is a walk-in source, Jamal al-Fadl, who is a Sudanese militant who was with bin Laden in the early 90s, who has been passed around a whole series of Middle East secret services, none of whom want much to do with him, and who ends up in America and is taken on by—uh—the American government, effectively, as a key prosecution witness and is given a huge amount of American taxpayers’ money at the same time. And his account is used as raw material to build up a picture of Al Qaeda. The picture that the FBI want to build up is one that will fit the existing laws that they will have to use to prosecute those responsible for the bombing. Now, those laws were drawn up to counteract organised crime: the Mafia, drugs crime, crimes where people being a member of an organisation is extremely important. You have to have an organisation to get a prosecution. And you have al-Fadl and a number of other witness, a number of other sources, who are happy to feed into this. You’ve got material that, looked at in a certain way, can be seen to show this organisation’s existence. You put the two together and you get what is the first bin Laden myth—the first Al Qaeda myth. And because it’s one of the first, it’s extremely influential.

VO: The picture al-Fadl drew for the Americans of bin Laden was of an all-powerful figure at the head of a large terrorist network that had an organised network of control. He also said that bin Laden had given this network a name: “Al Qaeda.” It was a dramatic and powerful picture of bin Laden, but it bore little relationship to the truth.

This is what happened in 2001:

VO: In January, 2001, a trial began in a Manhattan courtroom of four men accused of the embassy bombings in east Africa. But the Americans had also decided to prosecute bin Laden in his absence. But to do this under American law, the prosecutors needed evidence of a criminal organisation because, as with the Mafia, that would allow them to prosecute the head of the organisation even if he could not be linked directly to the crime. And the evidence for that organisation was provided for them by an ex-associate of bin Laden’s called Jamal al-Fadl.


More quotes from the documentary:

VO: In reality, Jamal al-Fadl was on the run from bin Laden, having stolen money from him. In return for his evidence, the Americans gave him witness protection in America and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many lawyers at the trial believed that al-Fadl exaggerated and lied to give the Americans the picture of a terrorist organisation that they needed to prosecute bin Laden.

SAM SCHMIDT , DEFENCE LAWYER EMBASSY BOMBINGS TRIAL: And there were selective portions of al-Fadl’s testimony that I believe was false, to help support the picture that he helped the Americans join together. I think he lied in a number of specific testimony about a unified image of what this organisation was. It made Al Qaeda the new Mafia or the new Communists. It made them identifiable as a group and therefore made it easier to prosecute any person associated with Al Qaeda for any acts or statements made by bin Laden—who talked a lot.

BURKE : The idea—which is critical to the FBI’s prosecution—that bin Laden ran a coherent organisation with operatives and cells all around the world of which you could be a member is a myth. There is no Al Qaeda organisation. There is no international network with a leader, with cadres who will unquestioningly obey orders, with tentacles that stretch out to sleeper cells in America, in Africa, in Europe. That idea of a coherent, structured terrorist network with an organised capability simply does not exist.

Curtis also interviews Melvin Goodman, Head of Office of Soviet Affairs in the CIA 1976-87, who admits that the CIA literally invented a bogus international Soviet-run terrorist network in the 1970s, and produced false news stories that were disseminated in the European news media. They even made Ronald Reagan believe that the "terrorist network" was a real network. So things like that would appear to be within the realm of the possible.

[Make7]

21. Well, it might help....

if Andy Beckett, the reporter for The Guardian, didn't write things like this in his article:

"Curtis points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation."

Curtis did not point that out. Although his voice over about the 2001 trial could have been more clearly worded. If someone zeros in too closely on that one paragraph, it can easily be misinterpreted.

It does appear that 1998 was the year that the name al Qaeda first appeared in the public domain, but that does not mean that's when it originated. Bin Laden had been under investigation for years by then and they had probably attached some name to his organization. It doesn't seem like "al-Qaeda" is something the FBI would come up with - but you never know.

I think saying that "there is no Al Qaeda organisation", as Burke does, might be going a little bit too far. In the late 90's there seemed to be, at the very least, a loose organization of various terrorist groups with Bin Laden helping to facilitate communication, cooperation, and financing for at least some of them.

I think I'll end with a quote from the program that I find reminds me of so many other things: (Note: bold was added by me.)

VO: Team B began examining all the CIA data on the Soviet Union. But however closely they looked, there was little evidence of the dangerous weapons or defense systems they claimed the Soviets were developing. Rather than accept that this meant that the systems didn’t exist, Team B made an assumption that the Soviets had developed systems that were so sophisticated, they were undetectible. For example, they could find no evidence that the Soviet submarine fleet had an acoustic defense system. What this meant, Team B said, was that the Soviets had actually invented a new non-acoustic system, which was impossible to detect. And this meant that the whole of the American submarine fleet was at risk from an invisible threat that was there, even though there was no evidence for it.

Dr ANNE CAHN, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-80: They couldn’t say that the Soviets had acoustic means of picking up American submarines, because they couldn’t find it. So they said, well maybe they have a non-acoustic means of making our submarine fleet vulnerable. But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic system. They’re saying, “we can’t find evidence that they’re doing it the way that everyone thinks they’re doing it, so they must be doing it a different way. We don’t know what that different way is, but they must be doing it.”

INTERVIEWER (off-camera): Even though there was no evidence.

CAHN: Even though there was no evidence.

INTERVIEWER: So they’re saying there, that the fact that the weapon doesn’t exist…

CAHN: Doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It just means that we haven’t found it.

PIPES: Now, that’s important, yes. If something is not there, that’s significant.

INTERVIEWER: By its absence.

PIPES: By its absence. If you believe that they share your view of strategic weapons, and they don’t talk about it, then there’s something missing. Something is wrong. And the CIA wasn’t aware of that.

VO: What Team B accused the CIA of missing was a hidden and sinister reality in the Soviet Union. Not only were there many secret weapons the CIA hadn’t found, but they were wrong about many of those they could observe, such as the Soviet air defenses. The CIA were convinced that these were in a state of collapse, reflecting the growing economic chaos in the Soviet Union. Team B said that this was actually a cunning deception by the Soviet regime. The air-defense system worked perfectly. But the only evidence they produced to prove this was the official Soviet training manual, which proudly asserted that their air-defense system was fully integrated and functioned flawlessly. The CIA accused Team B of moving into a fantasy world.

PIPES: The CIA was very loath to deal with issues which could not be demonstrated in a kind of mathematical form. I said they could consider the soft evidence. They deal with realities, whereas this was a fantasy. That’s how it was perceived. And there were battles all the time on this subject.

INTERVIEWER: Did you think it was a fantasy?

PIPES: No! I thought it was absolute reality.

CAHN: I would say that all of it was fantasy. I mean, they looked at radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said, “This is a laser beam weapon,” when in fact it was nothing of the sort. They even took a Russian military manual, which the correct translation of it is “The Art of Winning.” And when they translated it and put it into Team B, they called it “The Art of Conquest.” Well, there’s a difference between “conquest” and “winning.” And if you go through most of Team B’s specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong.

INTERVIEWER: All of them?

CAHN: All of them.

INTERVIEWER: Nothing true?

CAHN: I don’t believe anything in Team B was really true.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm

-Make7

[Frederik]

22. The FBI didn't come up with the name al-Qaeda

According to Burke, it was this walk-in source, the Sudanese that had been hanging out with Bin Laden and was then on the run from him after having stolen money from him, that told them all about "al-Qaeda" back in 1998. This was their only source at the time, if we are to believe Burke.

Team B is eerily reminiscent of what happened in the run-up to the Iaq war and the "War on Terror", isn't it?

[Make7]

23. The thought plickens.

Well, it kinda sounds like this name Al Qaeda may have started long before 1998. The way it sounds to me, from this excerpt of an interview with Dr. Saad Al-Fagih in Post #19, is that the name started when the Mujuhadeen were still fighting the Soviets. Of course, he is saying that it refers to something else entirely, but still related to Bin Laden nonetheless.

Regarding the single witness theory, what Burke actually said was: "...you have al-Fadl and a number of other witness, a number of other sources..."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1040.htm

For example, they also had Mohammed Saddiq Odeh at that time. As mentioned in Post #15.

But this is what has really peaked my curiosity:

"On June 8, 1998, bin Laden was indicted in New York City on one count of conspiracy to attack U.S. defense installations. The indictment alleges that bin Laden's al Qaeda organization trained and assisted the Somali tribesmen who killed U.S. soldiers in October 1993.

But bin Laden is most wanted for his alleged involvement in the African embassy bombings, which happened two months after his initial indictment by U.S. authorities. - CNN

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/gulf.war/legacy/bin.laden

I was able to find the indictment of Bin Laden issued in November of that year, but was not able to find the one from June.

Al Qaeda is the first subject that is brought up in the November indictment, and this CNN article seems to imply that the June indictment mentions Al Qaeda as well. But without the actual text before me I don't know if the name Al Qaeda is actually used, or if CNN just added that part. I'm just kinda wondering if the CIA, NSA, and/or FBI may have somehow sourced the name Al Qaeda before the embassy bombings but didn't release the information. The June indictment had been sealed until they decided to unseal it when they made the November indictment public. Hmmmmm.....

Team B is scary because some of the same people involved back then were also involved with the Iraq WMD intelligence. (Or lack thereof.)

-Make7

[Frederik]

25. I've also read

several places that "al-Qaeda" originally referred to Bin Laden's guest house in Peshawar. The word simply means "the base", after all, so it probably just means that they used the guest house as a base. The origin of the name isn't really all that important though. It's easier to say "al-Qaeda" than to say "the group associated with Osama Bin Laden", so why not. Whether they call themselves that or not, I think it is clear that al-Qaeda is not the multi-national enterprise we have been told that it is, with "sleeper cells" and whatnot.

As for Bin Laden himself, not even the 9/11 Commission claims that he was the "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks. At best he ran the camps where some of the hijackers had some brief training. The mastermind, according to the FBI and the Commission, was a man named Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Mohammed was, according to the FBI, arrested in Pakistan in March 2003 (although Pakistani police reported that they killed him in September 2002, even giving detailed descriptions of how it happened). A picture of him, apparently from his arrest, shows him in a grumpy mood having a bad hair-day. Where he is held and what is going to happen to him is a bit unclear. I'm not entirely convinced myself that he really was the mastermind of those attacks. Mohammed is also, conveniently, the man who the FBI now alleges killed Daniel Pearl. Much of their story about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed appears to be fictitious. Meanwhile, the man who is sentenced to death in Pakistan for Pearl's murder, Omar Saed Sheikh, has completely disappeared from the "official" story, in which he figured prominently as Pearl's killer and one of Bin Laden's lieutenants for a while.
(some links on Khalid S. Mohammed: http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WATKSMarrest.htm)

There's a lot to be said about Omar Saed Sheikh, a highly interesting figure who on Oct 8, 2001 was named by the CNN as the man who wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta before the attack, a money transfer that had already been established as the "smoking gun" connecting the hijackers to Bin Laden. Then, of course, the Times of India dropped its bombshell the day after, that the order to wire the money to Atta had been given by General Mahmood Ahmad, head of Pakistan's intelligence service, who was in Washington when the attacks happened (there are other indications, too, that Omar was indeed an asset of Pakistani intelligence). Guess what, Omar Saed immediately disappears from the story in Western media, General Ahmed is fired, and when Omar Saed resurfaces as Daniel Pearl's alleged killer he is said to be a "well-known kidnapper", and no word is mentioned about the money transfer or connection to the hijackers.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was named as "mastermind" in June 2002. So is Khalid an "al-Qaeda member"? Much of what we know (?) about him (we, the people that is) comes from former (?) CIA agent Bob Baer, who would later claim that Daniel Pearl was researching Khalid Shaikh Mohammed when he was kidnapped and killed (allegedly by the same Mohammed). Baer now claims that he was in fact aiding Pearl in his search for Mohammed, but he has given two very different stories:

"Thus are we faced with two alternate realities. In the quantum reality offered in Baer's book, Daniel Pearl is the dogged investigator who tracks down Baer for his story on Khalid, following it up on subsequent meetings with further queries of Baer, though neither has "anything new to add." Yet in the quantum reality offered to UPI, it is Baer who tracks down Pearl, and who subsequently becomes annoyed with Pearl's presumed disinterest in Baer's revelation—that is, until September 11, 2001."
(http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/123003Kupferberg/123003kupferberg.html)

Which, if any, story is true? According to the Wall Street Journal, Pearl was researching Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, and according to Bernard-Henri Lévi, who wrote the book "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?", he was researching the connections between "al-Qaeda" and Pakistan's notorious Inter Service Intelligence Directorate. I tend to believe Lévi on this one.

And so on. All in all, these people and their "al-Qaeda" are very murky to me. Bin Laden himself clearly has or has had a big involvement in the opium trade, some estimate his revenue from commissions on laundering opium money to have been a staggering $1 billion a year at some point. He also had close connections to Saudi intelligence - he has been called a protégé of Prince Turki Al-Faisal, who was head of Saudi intelligence at the time of the Afghan jihad and who is now Saudi ambassador to the UK. The relationship between Al-Faisal and Bin Laden is said to have been close at least until 9/11 2001. And of course, French intelligence sources claimed that the CIA station chief in Dubai met with Bin Laden in July, 2001 as he was hospitalized in the American hospital there. It is well known that Bin Laden needs dialysis treatment, and he reportedly usually receives it in Pakistani hospitals - there are reports that he was treated at a Pakistani hospital, guarded by Pakistani military, on 9/11.

I recommend this piece by Eric Margolis, written just after 9/11:
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2001/09/pearl_harbor_ii.php
He argues that it is "hard to believe" that Bin Laden could have planned or organized 9/11, and writes that "many intelligence people believe that Bin Laden, like the notorious abu Nidal, is merely a front for so far unseen groups". Among those "intelligence people" appears to be former head of foreign intelligence in the KGB, Leonid Shebarshin, who was stationed in Iran and Pakistan during the "Afghan jihad" and who is now a security analyst. He recently said in an interview with a Russian newspaper that Bin Laden used to work for the CIA, and that he "may still be working for them". (The interview was reprinted, in French, in the latest Réseau Voltaire, a French magazine, it is not available online for free. I have read it in pdf format). I would imagine that Shebarshin knows more about these things than most people, but who knows if he is being truthful.

All I can say is, the more I read about all this the less certain I am about anything.

[demodewd]

24. infiltration?

And is there any ISI,CIA,M16 or Mossad infiltration into the AlQaeda network?

[k-robjoe]

26. Infiltration

I just came across this. What kind of credibility are we talking about when we´re talking about "Dissidentvoice", do you know?

"Until six weeks before 9/11, for nearly a decade the CIA reportedly had a mole buried inside al Qaeda in a trusted position close to Osama bin Laden. Suddenly, his reports stopped. The CIA assumed that he was discovered, tortured and killed. Before he died, he likely revealed 9/11 plans.
by James Charles (...)
According to several former US intelligence officers, for close to a decade a CIA mole recruited from the ranks of Mujahadeen fighters who had battled the Russians in Afghanistan was buried deep inside al Qaeda, moving up through the ranks until he held a position close to the terrorist organization’s leadership."

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr05/Charles0405.htm

[k-robjoe]

27. Briefing

This article is also interesting :

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2005/04/do-we-have-mole-next-to-bin-laden.html

It asks the question : Was the memo that Tenet gave Bush at the August 6 meeting at the ranch actually much longer (and more alarming ) than the 1 page version that´s been made public? It makes a good point, why would Tenet interrupt the presidents vacation just to show him 1 page of old news?

"Why (...) would he (Tenet)suddenly race off to Texas on a weekend? Not just to talk about what (Condoleezza) Rice told the 9/11 Commission was something that the administration thought of as an historical recounting of old information. It doesn't make sense."


"The DCI (Director of Central Intelligence) simply doesn't interrupt the president's vacation to chat about a relatively innocuous, two or three page report unless there was something extremely sensitive the president needed to know that Tenet didn't want put on paper."

"...the October 2002 Die Zeit story by Oliver Schroem indicates that the key August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing document was originally ten pages longer than the version released with much fanfare to the public. Was Schroem correctly informed? Consider: He published the date, subject matter, and title of a highly classified piece of paper intended for the President's eyes only. As far as I have been able to determine, Schroem published these details before anyone else got wind of the story."

[XanaDUer]

30. Now I know what a co-worker was talking about..

I once worked with a woman who referred to something about Bob Hope being a "handler", mind control, etc. I never knew wtf she was talking about. She also believed that aliens were visiting her at night and experimenting on her.

[stpalm]

31. lol

"She also believed aliens were visiting her at night and experimenting on her"