Felix Sater and Russia played a role in the selection of targets for U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan in 1998. These strikes had the effect of strengthening the standing of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in a time when he was a hunted man by American special forces and the Taliban was under pressure by Saudi Arabian intelligence to expel or turn over bin Laden.
All public evidence points to a disturbing pattern whereby individuals in the United States coordinated with foreign intelligence and terrorist organizations to achieve the goal of later invading the Middle East after 9/11.
That’s a serious charge to make, one I don’t take lightly. Although I am no expert, I have researched enough evidence and learned opinions of others to be comfortable making that statement. Proving it is another thing. The only method I know of is history, documentation, and analysis.
My style is to go chronologically and explain as I go. Hindsight is 20/20. You’re going to see how events you didn’t think could possibly be related, like how the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the terrorism of al-Qaeda, seem to be very much coordinated events.
Before I get into the timeline of Clinton’s Presidency, there are two points I want to establish. The first, the involvement of the United States with the Mujahideen, later renamed al-Qaeda by Osama bin Laden, predates the Clinton Presidency. Second, the Clintons were assets owned by the George Bush wing of the CIA.
Let me use an analogy. When you hear of Brown and Root, you think that they are a subsidiary of Halliburton, run formerly by Dick Cheney. When you hear of the Clintons, you should think of them as a subsidiary of the old Bush wing of the CIA, which according to Michael Hayden, is now a very different agency.
If you’re like me, you grew up with a general feeling of confusion about the whole Whitewater scandal that somehow ended in an Impeachment over a blowjob. There wasn’t an internet to speak of. You got your information from the 6 o’clock news or the local newspaper. I was a Republican at the time. I didn’t like Bill Clinton.
I didn’t really understand Whitewater and didn’t care to. My perception was that it was about financial malfeasance, which all politicians were guilty of to one extent or another. Good luck with bringing down a President with something like that. It would be covered up. An endless investigation commenced that I would occasionally hear something about. Who cared. Go to work; go to school. By the time the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, I’m thinking, Clinton’s done a pretty good job managing the economy and balancing the budget. Bill Clinton should not have done what he did, but it’s not something you Impeach the President over. These Republicans are being petty and vindictive because he’s popular and the economy’s good. Maybe the Democrats aren’t so bad after all. Then 9/11 happened, followed by the Iraq War, and that whole mess was left in the rear view mirror.
Then the internet happened. “The truth is out there.” (Cue the UFO music). We’ve got more access to intelligence at our fingertips than any government intelligence analyst ever dreamed of in the era where everything was compartmentalized and on paper. I’m going to show you what “Wag the Dog” looks like from publicly-available sources in 2019. It’s bad. It’s Treason of the highest order.
There’s nothing special about my reporting. I just took the time to do it. The story came out in bits and pieces from multiple sources from the right and the left over many years. If there is one thing I’m doing different than most, it’s simply combining the narratives from the left and the right. If you get involved in these political shouting matches, you’ll only see half the problem, and never figure it all out.
I doubt I’m the only one who gets it. I’d wager that there are thousands of journalists and IC folks who know everything I’m about to write and much more. They are held back by the threats of lawyers and lawsuits in the press rooms, by their own partisanship, by “national security” issues in the intelligence community, and quite frankly, by fear of assassination for them all. So while you may be tempted to dismiss this as “conspiracy theory” on some blog, just remember, that’s the only way you’ll get the truth in the United States on some topics in our current environment.
Conspiracy theory is no different to me than economic theory, or scientific theory, or whatever theory. Facts and reason show the truth. My first tenet of conspiracy theory is that the government doesn’t do a good job of investigating the government. The second is that if you want something done you have to do it yourself.
With the intro out of the way, let’s start the timeline with CIA cocaine and Arkansas.
February 12-18, 1992. Article in print magazine These Times, by Deborah Robinson, on the cocaine trafficking in Arkansas.
The following are excerpts of a summary of that article.
An independent group of researchers in Arkansas are charging that Governor Bill Clinton is covering up an airport used by the CIA and major cocaine smugglers in a remote corner of the Ozark mountains. According to Deborah Robinson of In These Times, the Inter mountain Regional Airport in Mena, Arkansas continues to be the hub of operations for people like assassinated cocaine kingpin Barry Seal as well as government intelligence operations linked to arms and drug smuggling…
A federal Grand Jury looking into activities at the Mena airport refused to hand down any indictments after drug running charges were made public.Deborah Robinson says that Clinton had “ignored the situation” until he began his presidential campaign.” Clinton then said he would provide money for a state run investigation of the Mena airport. But according to Robinson, the promise of an investigation was never followed up by Clinton’s staff. In fact, a local Arkansas state prosecutor blasted Clinton’s promise of an investigation, comparing it to “spitting on a forest fire.”
February 1992. Whitewater is heating up.
From PBS
A Clinton Campaign Whitewater team is assembled to address reporter’s inquiries. A copy of the Rose Law Firm billing records for Madison Guaranty are printed from the Rose computer. The underlying computer record vanishes. Webb Hubbell and Vince Foster review the billing records. Mrs. Clinton believes she also looked at them at that time.
March 8, 1992. First article on Whitewater appears in the New York Times.
From the New York Times:
The complicated relationship between Mr. McDougal and the Clintons came to light in an investigation by The New York Times of the Clintons’ tax records and business relationships. It raises questions of whether a governor should be involved in a business deal with the owner of a business regulated by the state and whether, having done so, the governor’s wife through her law firm should be receiving legal fees for work done for the business.
March 23, 1992. A national newspaper reports more of Bill Clinton’s ties to cocaine:
Los Angeles Times:
Bill Clinton front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, personally lobbied to award a multimillion-dollar state bond contract that benefited a wealthy political backer Dan R. Lasater publicly known to be the target of a cocaine investigation, according to Democratic state officials and confidential FBI documents obtained by The Times.
December 1992. The BCCI Affair, A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate by Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown December 1992 is finalized.
BCCI was an international clearinghouse for drugs, arms, and terrorism. BCCI was a big scandal that resulted in a huge investigation that was obstructed by the CIA.
Outside the documentary record provided to the Subcommittee by the CIA, there is additional material, consisting of BCCI documents, testimony from BCCI officials and insiders, and extrinsic, circumstantial and historic information describing other substantial contacts between BCCI and the intelligence community. These include contacts between BCCI and:
- ** former U.S. intelligence officials, including a former head of the CIA;
- ** former and current foreign intelligence officials; and
- ** individuals engaged in covert operations on behalf of the United States government, including in the Iran/Contra affair.
In addition, the Subcommittee has received allegations of meetings between former CIA director William Casey and BCCI’s head, Agha Hasan Abedi.
CIA officials have told the Subcommittee that the CIA as an institution has rules requiring the creation of written records on every activity engaged in by the Agency, and on all significant information reported to the Agency. In the summer of 1991, the CIA engaged in what its officials described as a “dumb” or “brute force” review of its documents, essentially reviewing all possible files for information on BCCI, rather than relying on knowledgeable individuals to select such information. The review located a substantial amount of material generated by the CIA throughout the 1980’s, which was produced in July and August, 1991 for CIA internal reviews, in September and October for the Congressional intelligence oversight committees, and beginning in March, 1992, to the Subcommittee. Unfortunately, there remains a wide disparity between the CIA’s official account of critical relationships between BCCI and persons associated with the CIA, and the information available from other sources, including BCCI’s own records.
January 20, 1993. Bill Clinton is inaugurated as the 42nd President of the United States.
February 26, 1993. World Trade Center bombing.
Of course, 9/11 wasn’t the first time that al-Qaeda tried to knock down a World Trade Center building. The FBI’s investigation into the person suspected of masterminding the attack was mired by controversy when an FBI chemist and lawyer testified that he was told to ignore any evidence that did not fit the government’s case.
From Wikipedia:
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, carried out on February 26, 1993, when a truck bomb detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 1,336 lb (606 kg) urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to send the North Tower (Tower 1) crashing into the South Tower (Tower 2), bringing both towers down and killing thousands of people. It failed to do so but killed six people and injured over a thousand.
From the Washington Post:
Frederic Whitehurst, a chemist and lawyer who worked in the FBI’s crime lab, testified that he was told by his superiors to ignore findings that did not support the prosecution’s theory of the bombing.
“There was a great deal of pressure put upon me to bias my interpretation,” Whitehurst said in U.S. District Court in New York in 1995…
After the Justice Department’s inspector general began a review of Whitehurst’s claims, Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh decided to launch a task force to dig through thousands of cases involving discredited agents, to ensure that “no defendant’s right to a fair trial was jeopardized,” as one FBI official promised at a congressional hearing.
The task force took nine years to complete its work and never publicly released its findings. Not the results of its case reviews of suspect lab work. Not the names of the defendants who were convicted as a result. And not the nature or scope of the forensic problems it found.
April 1993. Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission established.
From a U.S. House of Representatives report:
In April 1993, during his first meeting with President Yeltsin, President Clinton effectively delegated the management of U.S.-Russian relations to Vice President Gore. The charter of the U.S.-Russia Commission on Economic and Technical Cooperation, co-chaired by Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, was eventually expanded to include the full range of U.S.-Russia relations.
The U.S. side of this Commission was compromised of three people, which were referred to as a “troika” in the referenced House report. The three people were Al Gore, Strobe Talbott (State Department), and Harvard economist Lawrence Summers (Treasury Department). The report describes “A close personal association with a few Russian officials, even after they became corrupt, instead of a consistent and principled approach to policy that transcended personalities.”
April 13, 1993. Alleged assassination attempt on George H. W. Bush.
From Wikipedia:
On the night of 13 April 1993, a day before George H. W. Bush was scheduled to visit Kuwait City to commemorate the international coalition victory against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, Kuwaiti authorities arrested 17 persons suspected in the plot to kill Bush using explosives hidden in a Toyota Landcruiser. Clinton was convinced the attack was masterminded by the Iraqi Intelligence Service by three compelling pieces of evidence.
First, the suspects in the plot made detailed confessions to FBI agents in Kuwait, largely verifying that the Iraqi Intelligence Service was behind the attack
Second, FBI and CIA bomb experts linked the captured car bombs to the same explosives made in Iraq, including a 175-pound car bomb found in Kuwait City on 14 April.
Third, intelligence reports confirmed that Saddam had been plotting to assassinate the former President for some time.
Seymour Hersh published a long article that took issue with all the evidence the FBI used to claim that Iraqi intelligence was behind the assassination attempt on George H. W. Bush. It will cost you $12 to register and read it all, but it’s worth it. I transcribed some paragraphs.
A Case Not Closed, New Yorker, print edition, November 1, 1993 (starting Page 80):
The case against was, and remains, circumstantial. Nevertheless, on June 24th the F.B.I.’s intelligence report was accepted at face value by the President and his senior aides, and some of those aides told me that the mere existence of the report and the expectation that it would be leaked to the press were what drove the President to act…
These aides told everyone in Washington who would listen that bombing Baghdad would improve Clinton’s political standing at home and his diplomatic standing in the Middle East. Among those officials making such arguments were two key members of the White House staff- Samuel R. (Sandy) Berger, the deputy assistant to the President for national-security affairs, and Martin Indyk, senior director of the National Security Counsel Division of Near East and South Asian affairs. Both men were privately asserting by early May— long before the deliver of the official F.B.I report— that the intelligence implicating Iraq in the assassination attempt was overwhelming; both men remained strong advocates for the use of force.
I’ll note here that although the primary topic of this article is Russia’s involvement in the target selection in Afghanistan and Sudan, there is also plenty of Espionage from Israel and China during the tenure of Bill Clinton as President. Sandy Berger’s relationship with China was strongly criticized by Nancy Pelosi. There was a scandal where China stole nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos laboratory and Sandy Berger failed to act appropriately.
Seymour Hersh described the relationship of Martin Indyk to Israel.
Before joining the White House, Indyk had served as executive director of the institute (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), which was established in 1985, with financial backing from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This organization is considered the strongest pro-Israel lobby in Washington.
Seymour went on to report that Shiekh Said Nasir al-Sabah, Minister of Information of Kuwait, was the official in Kuwait who briefed the press on the alleged assassination attempt against George H. W. Bush, and that his daughter, Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ, was the one who in 1990 testified before Congress about Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators in Kuwait, enraging the American public and increasing support for the first Gulf War. Her testimony turned out to be false.
Aside: This all fits a larger pattern of a strategy to invade Iraq and other nations in the Middle East by manufacturing evidence and false-flag terrorism, like the infamous “WMD” lie after 9/11. There’s a lot of that type thing when you look at history closely. Osama bin Laden was a necessary “boogeyman” to achieve the goals of the West and Israel, in my opinion. That’s why Traitors in the U.S. government supported bin Laden in 1998. It’s why they helped him escape Afghanistan in 2001 after 9/11- they needed the boogeyman alive to keep the fear in the American public to later invade Iraq, again. It’s also why the only way the IC would allow Obama to bring Osama bin Laden to justice was via his death, because bin Laden would have exposed the role of the U.S. and other nations in the 9/11 operation.
I know the above is “theory,” but note that in 2019 we are slowly but surely moving out of the “conspiracy theory” tone surrounding the U.S. role in 9/11 to calls for investigation with the recently released draft report of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which proves beyond a reasonable doubt, in my opinion, that WTC building #7 was demolished with explosives. You’ll have to subscribe to download the report, but there’s plenty of information on AE’s website.
Continuing with the review of Hersh’s report on the 1993 alleged assassination attempt on George H. W. Bush, Hersh wrote of a CIA report that was in direct conflict with the FBI report that Clinton used as basis to bomb Iraq.
Two weeks later, what amounted to open warfare broke out among various factions in the government on the issue of who had done what in Kuwait. Someone gave a Boston Globe reporter access to a classified C.I.A. study that was highly skeptical of the Kuwaiti claims of an Iraqi assassination attempt. The study, prepared by the C.I.A.’s Counter Terrorism Center, suggested that Kuwait might have “cooked the books” on the alleged plot in an effort to play up the “continuing Iraqi threat” to Western interests in the Persian Gulf.
The first reason Clinton cited in his decision to bomb Iraq was the “suspects in the plot made detailed confessions to FBI agents in Kuwait.” Hersh, however, reported that some of the subjects testified that they were severely beaten, were willing to confess to anything, and that they appeared injured in court.
On July 3, the fourth day of the trial in Kuwait City, Ali Khdair Baddai, who, at seventy-three, was the oldest defendant, testified that he had been severely beaten after his arrest, according to the German news agency D.P.A…
Asked by the judge why he had confessed to the smuggling, he said, “Since the police beat me, I told them to write anything and I would sign it.” Despite his signed guilty plea, he publicly proclaimed his innocence from the witness stand. In a subsequent interview, Amie told me that Wali al-Ghazali, who has repeatedly told that court and the F.B.I. that he was ordered by Iraqi intelligence to assassinate Bush, showed up on the first day of the trial, in June, with “a fresh scar on his forehead and a blackened nail on this thumb,” and she added, “No one could talk to him.” Ra’ad al-Assadi, one of the two major defendants in the case (the other being al-Ghazali), told the media after Baddai’s testimony that he, too, had been beaten.
Questions about the use of torture in Kuwaiti prisons and fair trials in Kuwaiti courts have been raised often since the end of the Gulf War by two of the world’s leading human rights groups- Amnesty International, whose headquarters are in London, and Human Rights Watch, of New York…
…in interviews, former American diplomatic officials and intelligence officers who had served in the Middle East expressed amusement and amazement at the F.B.I.’s categorical assurances that none of the defendants were tortured. “Either the investigators were idiots or they were lying,” says James E. Atkins, a former United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “It boggles the imagination. There’s no way the Kuwaitis would not have tortured them. That’s the way the Kuwaiti’s are, as anybody who knows the Kuwaitis or the Middle East will tell you.”
The second reason President Clinton cited in his decision to bomb Iraq over the alleged assassination attempt against George H. W. Bush was “FBI and CIA bomb experts linked the captured car bombs to the same explosives made in Iraq.”
In April 1997, the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Justice issued a report following an investigation into evidence tampering at the FBI laboratory as described by whistleblower Whitehurst. It included investigation results into both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the alleged 1993 assassination attempt against George H. W. Bush.
The OIG first laid out Whitehurst’s allegation.
Whitehurst alleges that he compared the explosive material in the main charge of the Bush device to explosive materials in known Iraqi devices and told Explosives Unit Chief J. Christopher Ronay that the explosives were different. Whitehurst claims that Ronay purposely misinterpreted these results in order to link the explosive material to Iraqi agents. Whitehurst further asserts that very possibly his results were changed to support the retaliatory missile strike by the United States.
Then they said this.
We conclude that the evidence does not support Whitehurst’s claim that Ronay changed or purposely misinterpreted Whitehurst’s results, either in the Laboratory reports or verbally during discussions of those results. Nor does the evidence support Whitehurst’s suggestion that the United States launched the missile strike against the IIS building in Baghdad based on a misinterpretation of Whitehurst’s results.
Then they kinda agreed with Whitehurst, but said it was his fault.
Whitehurst told us that he conducted the comparison suggested by Ronay and found that the binder material from the Southeast Asia explosives readily dissolved in acetone and had a relatively low molecular weight distribution, unlike the binder material in the Bush explosive. Therefore, according to Whitehurst, he informed Ronay that the explosive in the Bush device which he suspected to be Portuguese PE-4A, was very much different from the explosives in the Southeast Asia devices, which he thought were similar to British PE-4A:
“I advised Ronay that at the time of the analysis of [the Southeast Asia] material we had interpreted the data to be consistent except in one aspect with a British product called PE-4A which was very much different from Portuguese PE-4A which was what we suspected the material used in the [Bush] assassination attempt was.”
Whitehurst did not incorporate the results of this comparison in any dictation or written report.
Then they kinda agreed with him again.
Although these Laboratory reports did not misstate Whitehurst’s findings, our review did show that Jordan, in the June 18, 1993, Laboratory report, omitted and rewrote parts of Whitehurst’s June 7, 1993, dictation. Specifically, Jordan omitted a description of the instrumentation used in Whitehurst’s analysis and the results from Whitehurst’s examinations of the detonator leg wires, detonating cord, and end plug. Jordan also reworded Whitehurst’s description of two earlier laboratory cases involving explosive material similar to that in the Bush device. When questioned about these changes to Whitehurst’s dictation, Jordan explained that his June 18, 1993, Laboratory report was not a normal report. Jordan told us that his supervisors at the FBI, including FBI Counter Intelligence Section Chief Neil Gallagher, requested just an opinion from the explosive examiner. Therefore, Jordan suggested that he included only those portions of Whitehurst’s dictation that he had considered in forming his own opinion.
We think that once Jordan decided to include any part of Whitehurst’s dictation, he should have included all of that dictation verbatim. As discussed elsewhere in our Report, the practice within the Explosives Unit of rewriting or editing the dictation of other examiners created an unacceptable risk of misinterpretation.
Then they effectively said, well even though we said we don’t support Whitehurst’s conclusions but kinda agree with some of his claims, it wasn’t just the explosives evidence that Clinton launched the strike over anyway. They then mentioned the Kuwaiti witnesses who supposedly confessed (which had no bearing on their laboratory investigation).
Whitehurst also suggests that the United States may have launched the missile strike against the IIS Building in Baghdad as a result of his findings being misreported.
Contrary to Whitehurst’s suggestion, the decision to launch the missile strike did not turn on reports that the Bush and Southeast Asia explosives contained PE-4A. The FBI and CIA assembled extensive evidence of Iraqi involvement, including admissions from two key suspects, forensic examinations of relevant explosive devices, and intelligence from various sources. Our investigation showed that reports that the Laboratory had found PE-4A in the Bush matter and Southeast Asia cases were not a significant part of the overall evidence against the Iraqi Government.
Specifically, the evidence presented to the Administration included admissions from the two main suspects, Al-Ghazali and Al-Asadi. Each confessed during interviews with the FBI that they had participated in the plot at the direction of IIS officers.
And while the OIG, investigating evidence tampering at the FBI, had no business breaking down witness testimony in Kuwait, they forgot to mention the reports of torture of the witnesses, which was publicly reported- even including Al-Ghazali, who they referenced as confessing.
In my opinion, between Hersh’s report, the CIA report contradicting the conclusions of the FBI, and the OIG’s double-talk, there is substantial evidence that the FBI deliberately created a false report to President Clinton to justify a missile strike against Iraq in 1993. This falsification and manipulation of evidence adds a certain amount of weight to the theory of the FBI being involved later in a joint operation with Russia in 1998 to fire missiles against Afghanistan and Sudan in a manner that they believed would strengthen the standing of Osama bin Laden in the Middle East, painting the U.S. as the “bad guys.”
June 26, 1993. Clinton orders missile strikes into Iraq in retaliation for the alleged assassination attempt.
Between 1AM and 2AM local time on 26 June/June 27, 1993, 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched by two US Navy warships into downtown Baghdad. These hit a building which was believed to be the headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in the Al Mansur district of Baghdad. Iraq claimed that nine civilians were killed in the attack and three civilian houses destroyed.
July 20, 1993. Murder of Vince Foster.
Robert Fiske, and later Ken Starr, called the death of Vince Foster a suicide, but I call it what it clearly was.
From the New York Times:
Within hours of the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster in July 1993, chief White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum removed documents, some of them concerning the Whitewater Development Corporation, from Foster’s office and gave them to Maggie Williams, Chief of Staff to the First Lady. According to the New York Times, Williams placed the documents in a safe in the Clinton residence on the third floor of the White House for five days before turning them over to the Clinton family lawyer.
From the Washington Post:
At the time Foster killed himself, six months into the Clinton administration, Tripp worked for him occasionally as part of her job as Nussbaum’s executive assistant. In the days after Foster’s death, Tripp exchanged e-mail messages with co-workers in which they derided the way White House officials were handling materials left behind in Foster’s office, according to testimony and documents.
From the New York Times:
The United States Park Police report on its inquiry into the death of a top White House lawyer strongly suggests that Bernard W. Nussbaum, counsel to the President, impeded its investigators and offered a dubious account of the discovery of the victim’s brooding note, say Federal law-enforcement officials who have seen the report.
The park police investigators distrusted Mr. Nussbaum’s account of the circumstances surrounding the discovery in Mr. Foster’s briefcase of the note six days after his death, according to the report.
The note, a bitter lament on Washington politics, was found by Stephen R. Neuwirth, another Nussbaum aide. One investigator said he had watched Mr. Nussbaum inspect the briefcase earlier without finding the note.
The report also notes that Mr. Nussbaum, along with Patsy Thomasson, a White House administrative aide and a long-time Clinton associate, and Margaret Williams, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff, entered and left the office between 10 P.M. and midnight on the night of Mr. Foster’s death. Mr. Nussbaum said the three entered the office looking for a suicide note, but did not find one and left after 10 minutes…
The note was not turned over to investigators for another 30 hours, White House aides said, so they could discuss it with Mr. Clinton and Lisa Foster, Mr. Foster’s widow.
At that point, the Federal Bureau of Investigation entered the case to determine whether there were any irregularities in the handling of the note. The F.B.I. investigation found no wrongdoing, but its fingerprint analysis uncovered only a partial smudged palm print and no fingerprints on the note.
Some investigators said that the lack of fingerprints seemed to suggest that Mr. Foster wrote the note and then tore into 28 pieces without leaving any prints — a circumstance that is not dealt with conclusively in the report.
This same day, July 20, President Clinton fired FBI Director William Sessions. He announced Louis Freeh as his choice to succeed him the next day.
January 1994. Attorney General names Robert Fiske Special Counsel to investigate Whitewater. Fiske says he will investigate Vince Foster as well.
Attorney General Janet Reno names New York lawyer and former U.S. attorney Robert B. Fiske Jr. as special counsel to investigate the Clintons’ involvement in Whitewater. Fiske announces he will also explore a potential link between Foster’s suicide and his intimate knowledge of the developing Whitewater scandal.
February 21, 1994. Aldrich Ames arrested.
“At the time of his arrest, Ames was a 31-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who had been spying for the Russians since 1985.”
Following their arrest and guilty pleas, Ames was debriefed by FBI agents, at which time he detailed compromising the identities of CIA and FBI human sources, some of whom were executed by USSR authorities.
From the New York Times:
In 1985, Mr. Ames sold to what was then the Soviet Union the names of every important foreign agent working for the United States within that country. At least 10 of those agents were quickly arrested and executed.
April 1994. A Vice President of a bank, working with the CIA, is told that her role in providing information on Russian money laundering was compromised by Aldrich Ames.
Testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson, Vice President, First Columbia Company, Inc.
From April of 1993 through September 1993, I served as an unpaid volunteer assistant on a CIA operation to penetrate what the CIA, FBI, and DOJ knew was a KGB money laundering operation that had tentacles that reached into the Kremlin to Boris Yeltsin…
Russia was in the early phase of its transition from a command economy to a free market economy. We had a pending appropriation bill before the Senate to provide Russia with $4 Billion in foreign aid to assist them in their transition to a free market economy. The $1.7 Billion Konanykhine wanted to move out of Russia and the $100rds of Millions of dollars held by individuals raised a “red flag” with me. No pun intended!
In April of 1994, I was summoned to an urgent meeting by a CIA intelligence officer… He informed me… that I had been compromised by Aldrich Ames on the operation…
The operation was not reported to appropriate congressional oversight committees as a significant failed intelligence operation as mandated under the National Security Act of 1947… of all the operations involving U.S. intelligence assets who were compromised by Ames, of which I was told there were many, my compromise was the only one that was not reported.
Summer of 1994: Linda Tripp transferred from the White House to the Pentagon after criticizing the handling of documents after Vince Foster’s murder.
I’m not sure what to make of Linda Tripp. She was right, of course, to criticize the handling of Vince Foster’s documents after his death. When she was transferred from the White House to the Pentagon and given a large raise, it looks like an attempt to shut her up obviously. The question I have is, did the FBI or someone tell her “we’ll get him later” on his weak spot, women? Because let’s face it, serious crimes like Treason, murder, and rape are never prosecuted against politicians by the Department of Justice. So I give Linda Tripp the benefit of the doubt on her motives. I doubt she knew what was going on with Russia, Felix Sater, and Osama bin Laden, or how the whole “Wag the Dog” operation would go down later.
From the Washington Post:
“During the summer of 1994, the White House instructed the Pentagon to hire Linda R. Tripp into its public affairs office without so much as a job interview, even though the office had no openings at the time. Tripp arrived at the White House during the Bush administration, working at first as a low-level secretary and eventually as an administrative aide. At the time Foster killed himself, six months into the Clinton administration, Tripp worked for him occasionally as part of her job as Nussbaum’s executive assistant. In the days after Foster’s death, Tripp exchanged e-mail messages with co-workers in which they derided the way White House officials were handling materials left behind in Foster’s office, according to testimony and documents. In late June of 1994, two months before she was transferred to the Pentagon — White House employees began receiving requests to testify in Whitewater, including about Foster’s death. Whether Tripp received one of these earliest subpoenas is not clear.
July 4, 1994. FBI Director Louis Freeh gets drunk in Moscow.
From the AP News.
For decades, FBI agents hunted KGB spies in the United States. The last caught was arrested in February – Aldrich Ames of the CIA, who also spied for the Russian Federation that replaced the Soviet Union.
But there was no public mention of Ames on Monday as Freeh headed a team of officials from the Justice and Treasury departments into the feared yellow building on Lubyanka Square. Its basement once housed a KGB prison, where by U.S. accounts murder was not uncommon.
Their host, Sergei Stepashin, director of the counterintelligence service, one of several successor agencies to KGB and not Ames’ employer, found it ″quite symbolic that the first meeting between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Counterintelligence Service is here in Lubyanka Square on your Independence Day…″
Honoring the tradition of this kind of Russian evening, Freeh downed something close to 10 shots and one tumbler of vodka in an effort to remain within polite hailing distance of his host, according to participants. Freeh didn’t jog Monday morning.
The Yegorov dinner ended with a momentarily hair-raising incident that suggested that the new U.S.-Russian crime-fighting alliance still has some cultural gaps to close.
As the U.S. guests headed to their motorcade, two high-ranking Yegorov aides, filled with the spirit of celebration and considerable spirits of vodka, emptied their pistols into the air, according to several participants.
As American officials flinched or ducked, the FBI agents who have guarded Freeh on the trip sprung to alert and crept warily back toward the dacha for a few moments before it became clear what had happened.
August 6 1994. Robert Fiske is replaced by Kenneth Starr as Independent Counsel.
From the Los Angeles Times:
The controversial Whitewater criminal investigation took a surprising turn Friday when a three-judge panel replaced special counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr. with Kenneth W. Starr, solicitor general under former President George Bush.
September 29, 1994. Miguel Rodriguez, Associate Independent Counsel, meets with Kenneth Starr, Brett Kavanaugh, and others to express his concern over the conclusions Robert Fiske was drawing on Vince Foster.
Rodriguez documents this meeting to “file” in a memo. The memo became public in 2009.
(1) why would VF “surrepticiously” get an unidentified gun (and where could he get two bullets only) to commit an “obvious” act of suicide when VF had his own weapon at his bedside, and (2) whose weapon did VF possess in his hand upon his death?…
I stated that the FBI refused to provide me with a scale map and a map indicating all maintenance roads. I pointed out that I walked a maintenance road from the second cannon area (where VF’s corpse was found) and that there was at least one additional supposedly pedestrian only entrance to the park (this second entrance is closer to the second cannon than the main entrance). The second entrance has a parking area. There is no evidence that this second entrance and parking area was secured or investigated at the time VF’s corpse was processed by USPP. Fiske counsel has not investigated any aspects of this; second entrance and it is not indicated in any FBI reports or reports. It appears Congress did not know of the second entrance and second parking area. Since VF’s death it appears a fence has been erected at this second entrance and the area between the second cannon and the maintenance road has been altered…
Also, as part of our general discussion, I pointed out that — although taken — no 35mm photos were successfully developed and although there were at least five photographers, only 18 polaroid photos were provided by USPP to OIC. 11 The USPP provided orc 18 “polaroid copies” of 18 polaroid photos and no 35mm photos of the death scene. The original polaroids were also provided. Both the original polaroids and the polaroid copies are of poor quality, depicting poor color and blurred, bleached objects. Obviously, the polaroid copies are even more distorted…
The USPP, the FBI and Fiske counsel did not attempt to investigate the metallic colored car or its occupant. W2’s (Patrick Knowlton) recollection of the occupant asa person watching him as he was next to VF’s car is not recounted in the Fiske report. Further, Fiske counsel did not address this witness’ account of the metallic car in its public report.
And there’s plenty more evidence that Starr’s investigation was a complete fabrication with regards to Vince Foster. The letter is 30 Pages of detailed evidence and reasoning from a US attorney that Starr’s team covered up the murder of Vince Foster.
January 17, 1995. Miguel Rodriguez resigns.
Here is his resignation letter.
This letter also wasn’t released until 2009. He basically said he resigned as Associate Independent Counsel because his professional efforts to investigate Foster’s death were obstructed.
April 17, 1995. Letter from Editor of Forbes to the White House shows the motives for Vince Foster’s murder.
Now if you want a “smoking gun” that Foster’s death wasn’t a suicide, it wasn’t the drop gun planted on Foster (as suspected by Miguel Rodriguez), it was a letter from a Forbes editor to the White House.
Letter from Editor at Forbes Magazine to White House Press Secretary:
“James R. Norman, Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine, sent the following letter to Michael D. McCurry, Press Secretary at the White house:
“Dear Mr. McCurry: “Forbes Magazine is preparing an article for immediate publication. We would like to offer the White House an opportunity to comment on the following assertions.”
1.) That Vincent W. Foster, while White House Deputy Counsel, maintained a Swiss bank account.
2.) That funds were paid into that account by a foreign government, specifically the State of Israel.
3.) That shortly before his death and coincident with the onset of severe and acute depression, Vincent Foster learned he was under investigation by the CIA for espionage.
4.) That this information was made available to him by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
5.) That while he was White House Deputy Counsel and for many years prior, Vincent Foster had been a behind-the- scenes control person on behalf of the National Security Agency for Systematics, a bank data processing company integrally involved in a highly secret intelligence effort to monitor world bank transactions.
6.) That Systematics was also involved in ‘laundering’ funds from covert operations, including drug and arms sales related to activities in and around Mena, Ark.
7.) That through Systematics’ relationship with E-Systems, Vincent Foster may have had access to highly sensitive code, encryption and data security information of strategic importance.
8.) That both prior to and after his death, documents relating to Systematics were removed from Vincent Foster’s office in the White House.
9.) That the meeting at the Cardozo (Landau) estate on the eastern shore of Maryland on the weekend before Vincent Foster’s death was attended by, among others, George Stephanopolous.
10.) That Hillary Rodham Clinton was also a beneficiary of funds from Foster’s Swiss account.
“Thank you very much for your prompt attention to this matter. Please fax your written response before end-of-business Tuesday, April 18, to Forbes at 212-620-2417. If you have questions, please call me at 212-620-2215.”
“Respectfully yours, “James R. Norman, Senior Editor”.
The Clinton/Bush drug running operation in Arkansas has been thoroughly documented. I took a look at it here trying to support Linda Ives in her effort to get some records released that may shed light on her son’s murder. The letter from the Forbes editor suggests to me that Vince Foster had evidence that could establish a link between the Clintons and the drug trafficking operation, not to mention the implications for Bush and the CIA.
Quickly on Systematics from conservapedia:
Hillary Clinton was the intellectual property lawyer for Systematics. Part of this “intellectual property” would involve a banking transaction software system based on the stolen PROMIS software. A federal bankruptcy court had ruled in 1987 that the US Justice Dept. ‘stole’ the PROMIS software from small company called Inslaw Inc when the DOJ refused to pay Inslaw for it. US intelligence took the PROMIS software and added a hidden “backdoor” for monitoring banking transactions and money laundering. Systematics was the marketing firm the National Security Agency (NSA) was using to get the PROMIS software with the hidden backdoor into the hands of banks worldwide. The intellectual property that Hillary handled and that Systematics was marketing had been stolen from Inslaw.
Malware is a thing we are all familiar with today, but back in the 80s to early 90s, it was still somewhat cutting edge, I suppose. The application of PROMIS was to monitor most all financial transactions in the world. It could have and should have been used to track the shorting of airlines and insurance companies prior to 9/11. There were plenty of Westerners aware of the 9/11 plot who made money from trades beforehand and left a digital record which has been suppressed to this day.
From the Washington Times:
The head of a computer firm wants the independent commission named to investigate September 11 intelligence failures to review accusations that his software-tracking program, which he says the Justice Department stole, was diverted to Osama bin Laden.
William H. Hamilton, president of Inslaw Inc., said the commission headed by former New Jersey Gov. David H. Kean should focus on the validity of published reports saying bin Laden penetrated classified computer files before the attacks to evade detection and monitor the activities of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
The 10-member Commission on Terrorist Attacks will have the authority to subpoena witnesses and documents in an effort to determine whether intelligence lapses by the FBI, CIA and other agencies contributed to the deadly success of the September 11 attacks.“Bin Laden reportedly bought the U.S. intelligence community’s version of the Promis database software on the Russian black market, after former FBI Agent Robert P. Hanssen had stolen it for the Russians, and used Promis in computer-based espionage against the United States,” Mr. Hamilton said in a two-page fact sheet.
“The national commission may wish to examine whether the Justice Department’s misappropriation of Promis was, at a minimum, linked indirectly to pre-September 11 performance problems of U.S. intelligence,” he said.
Here’s another link to an interview of James Norman, the Forbes editor, which has good explanations of things like Systematics, PROMIS, the Arkansas/CIA drug trafficking operation and how they interrelate.
June 1995. Monica Lewinsky joins the White House.
From the Washington Post:
As one of about 1,000 unpaid interns taken on by the White House each year, Lewinsky began work in June 1995 in the office of then-Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta.
It’s been a year and a half since Ken Starr took over the “Whitewater” investigation at this point, with no progress. In the end, there would only be Monica, Monica, Monica.
June 26, 1995. Vice Foster’s secretary Deborah L. Gorham, testified to the Senate that Vince Foster gave her two envelopes to place in Nussbaum’s safe and she saw two 1-inch binders from the NSA.
From FBI cover-up, on the NSA documents:
- Q. What documents do you believe Mr. Foster kept in Mr. Nussbaum’s safe?
- MR. MILLS: You can describe the subject matter of the documents.
- THE WITNESS: There were two 1-inch ring binders that were from National Security Agency.
And on the envelopes:
- A: They were 8-1/2-by-11 sized gold envelopes.
- Q: And I take it you don’t know what was in those envelopes?
- A: I do not.
- Q: Do you know whether or not there was anything in them? Did they feel heavy?
- A: I should clarify that. There was writing on the outside of the envelopes, which led me to believe that what was contained inside.
- Q: What do you recall about the writing on the outside? What did it say?
- A: One said for eyes only and it said for eyes only not to be opened, and then it said William Kennedy on one envelope.
- Q: You’ve been describing one envelope that said for eyes only not to be opened William Kennedy?
- A: That’s correct.
- Q: Do you know anything else about that envelope?
- A: No, sir.
- Q: Were there any writings or markings on the second envelope?
- A: It said Janet Reno.
- Q: Anything else?
- A: No, sir.
Note that William Kennedy, nephew of Ted Kennedy, was acquitted in a rape trial in 1991, but the jury was not allowed to hear testimony from three women who said he raped or tried to rape them.
From the New York Times:
The rape trial of William K. Smith has come to an abrupt end, with Mr. Smith resoundingly exonerated. But anyone wanting to learn another facet of the case, one that the jurors did not hear but that is likely to linger, need walk only from the Palm Beach County Courthouse to Sir Speedy, the photocopying store nearby.
There, for $48.34, one can buy the nearly 600 newly unsealed pages of sworn depositions given in October by three women — a doctor, medical student and law student — who said that between 1983 and 1988 Mr. Smith either raped them or tried to. Twice, Judge Mary E. Lupo barred their testimony, rejecting arguments by the prosecutor, Moira K. Lasch.
So it looks like, between the NSA documents and the envelope on William Kennedy, that Foster kept “blackmail” material in Nussbaum’s safe. PROMIS/Inslaw/Systematics was the subject of yet another special counsel investigation that began November 7, 1991. It seems like the information regarding William Kennedy could pretty much only be “dirt.” What’s really interesting in the the testimony of Foster’s secretary shows that there was an envelope on Attorney General Janet Reno as well.
July 7, 1995. Daniel Pearson is chosen to be an independent prosecutor to investigate the finances of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown.
From the New York Times:
A panel of Federal appellate judges today appointed a veteran Miami lawyer as an independent prosecutor to investigate the personal finances of Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown. The inquiry is the fourth criminal investigation involving high-ranking officials in the Clinton Administration.
The judicial panel selected Daniel S. Pearson, a partner at Holland & Knight, one of Florida’s largest law firms.
Although the choice of Mr. Pearson was not known until today, the appointment of a prosecutor outside the Justice Department to investigate Mr. Brown had been been expected since May 17, when Attorney General Janet Reno sought the inquiry under the independent counsel statute.
October 22, 1995. London Sunday Telegraph breaks story that Patrick Knowlton’s eye-witness testimony contradicts the conclusions the Starr Commission is drawing concerning Vince Foster’s death.
From Patrick Knowlton’s lawsuit:
Shortly after Plaintiff learned from a reporter that Defendant Monroe had falsified his account, Plaintiff’s account of what he had witnessed at Fort Marcy and contradictory 5 information from his FBI interview reports was published in the in October 22, 1995 edition of the London Sunday Telegraph newspaper.
When the article reached newsstands in the U.S. on October 24, 1995, Patrick Knowlton was subpoenaed by Ken Starr.
On the same day that the Telegraph reached American newsstands, October 24, the Office of Independent Counsel, In re: Madison Guarantee Savings & Loan, prepared a subpoena for Plaintiff to testify before the Whitewater grand jury in this Court.
The subpoena is delivered to Knowlton on October 26, 1995, at which point government agents begin stalking and harassing him.
Two days after that subpoena was prepared, Defendant FBI Agent Russell Bransford served it… Beginning the same day that Bransford served Plaintiff the secret grand jury subpoena, at least 24 Defendants and Bransford harassed and intimidated Plaintiff before he appeared to testify before the grand jury, and one Defendant harassed Plaintiff after he testified:
- (1) Eleven or more Defendants on October 26, 1995;
- (2) Twelve or more Defendants on October 27, 1995;
- (3) Two or more Defendants on October 28, 1995;
- (4) Defendant FBI Agent Bransford on October 30, 1995; and
- (5) One Defendant on November 2, 1995.
Most of these incidents happened in a rapid and coordinated fashion, so that before one man departed, another was approaching. The objects of the harassment were twofold. First, to intimidate and warn Plaintiff in connection with his grand jury testimony and second, to destabilize Plaintiff and discredit his testimony before the grand jury. This technique of subjecting a witness to an overwhelming campaign of non-verbal harassment to intimidate and warn, or alternatively to destabilize and discredit the witness, is known to federal intelligence and investigative agencies.
October 25, 1995. “Foster suicide note was a forgery, say experts”
From the Independent:
Three handwriting specialists presented analysis at a news conference of the note found in Foster’s briefcase after the deputy White House counsel was found dead on 20 July 1993 in a park near Washington. They said it appeared the note was not written by Foster but was a forgery…
The note, said to have been written days or weeks before Foster died, complained of life in Washington and concluded: “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.”
November 1, 1995. Knowlton’s attorney hand-delivers a letter to FBI Director Louis Freeh and also Brett Kavanaugh, asking for the FBI to take an interest in Patrick Knowlton’s safety.
From FBI cover-up:
My client and I were disappointed by the decision not to protect the witness Subpoenaed by the Office of Independent Counsel. We are asking that the F.B.I. take an active interest in Mr. Knowlton’s safety.
November 1, 1995. Brett Kavanaugh questions Patrick Knowlton.
From FBI cover-up:
Then, John Bates who was seated behind me leaned forward and passed a note to Brett Kavanaugh, from which Kavanaugh read the following questions,
He said, “Mr. Knowlton did the man in the park talk to you?” And I replied, “no.”
He asked me, “Did the man in the park pass you a note?” And I replied, “no.”
He said, “Did the man approach you?” And I replied, “no.”
“Did the man in the park point a gun at you?” I replied, “no.”
And lastly Kavanaugh asked me, “Did the man in the park touch your genitals?”
I looked at him and I was in shock. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe he asked me such a question. Of course, I replied, “no.”
November 15, 1995. Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky begins. (Starr Report page 9)
It seems to me that Clinton and his co-conspirators were looking at this time for a gullible woman to become involved with Clinton in order to provide a distraction from Whitewater/Foster later. Monica fit the bill.
Sometime 1995. Halliburton and CEO Dick Cheney linked to Russian Bank Alfa Group, which is running heroin.
It wasn’t just cocaine that Bush et al were involved in trafficking. Russia was involved.
From Aspen Times:
In 1995 sacks of heroin were sold mistakenly as flour and sugar in a Siberian town of Khabarovsk where citizens got sick. A Russian bank, called Alfa group, was found to be transporting these drugs. The Alfa group had bought 51 percent of the Tyumen Oil Co., that was running drugs with oil as a cover. These particular actors were enabled to gain power through the efforts of CEO D. Cheney of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. He secured loans for this Russian conglomerate from the CIA-infiltrated Export and Import Bank (EXIM) and Overseas Private Investment Corp (OPIC).
Here is a much more detailed article on the ties of Halliburton and Brown and Root to Alfa Group, Russia, and heroin from Serendipity.
Sometime 1995. Al Gore writes Bull**** on a CIA report given to him on the corruption of Viktor Chernomyrdin.
From New York Times:
In November last year, unnamed C.I.A. officials told The New York Times that in 1995 they had compiled a large dossier on Viktor Chernomyrdin, then the Russian Prime Minister. They sent the material to Vice President Al Gore, co-chairman of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, in which much of the government-to-government business between the countries was handled. It came back, said the officials, with what was described as ”a barnyard epithet” scrawled on it.
Later at a presidential debate between Bush and Gore on October 11, 2000, Bush said “We went into Russia, we said, ‘Here’s some IMF money,’ and it ended up in Viktor Chernomyrdin’s pocket and others’” (as reported by Los Angeles Times).
January 4, 1996. Records related to Whitewater inquiry under subpoena mysteriously surface.
Of course there would be plenty of time to sanitize any records by now that just happened to be in a book room all along.
A copy of the Rose Law Firm billing records, under subpoena for nearly two years, is turned over to investigators by Mrs. Clinton’s assistant Carolyn Huber. Ms. Huber has testified that she found the records, along with a stack of other papers, in the First Lady’s book room in August, 1995. She moved all of the documents to her office before realizing in January that the billing records were among the papers.
January 15, 1996 – First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton answers questions before a grand jury about the unexplained discovery in the White House residence of records sought for two years by authorities.
“I do not know how the billing records came to be found where they were found but I am pleased that they were found, because they confirm what I have been saying … I, like everyone else, would like to know how these documents showed up after all these years”
February 1996-May 1998: CIA counterterrorism is denied raw intelligence on al Qaeda
CIA veteran named Michael Scheuer wrote a letter, published in The Atlantic, about his time in the field trying to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. He doesn’t go so far as to call people in our government Traitors, like I do, but he was clearly extremely upset. “featuring arrogance, bad judgment, disdain for expertise, and bureaucratic cowardice.” And for my part I’d like to add that while I believe the end result of what all happened with bin Laden speaks for itself, I believe that the people in the field were doing their absolute best based on the intelligence and resources that they were provided, and they were obstructed and sabotaged along the way. Since Scheuer presented his comments in a timeline, it fits well with this larger timeline, and I’ll submit many of his entries beginning where Scheuer said he needed the raw intercepts in the field, not summaries, starting February 1996.
February 1996-May 1998: The Bin Laden unit and several other senior CIA officers requested transcripts rather than summaries of electronic collection against al-Qaeda … [V]erbatim transcripts are operationally useful, summaries are much less so, and they are usually not timely. The answer to these requests in every case was no. At one point the senior operations officer for an Intelligence Community component said that the National Security Act of 1947 gave her agency control of “raw” signals intelligence, and that she would not pass such material to CIA.
April 3, 1996. Ron Brown dies in a plane crash, with what appears to be a gunshot wound to his head.
The independent counsel who investigated the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown before he died in a plane crash reached no conclusions on whether Brown violated any laws.
The final report by independent counsel Daniel Pearson, released today in federal court, says, “My office’s investigation of Secretary Brown ended unfinished with his death. The unfinished state of the investigation and considerations of fairness preclude our office from drawing conclusions about the allegations regarding possible criminal conduct by the Secretary.
Responding to homicide allegations, an official of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology acknowledged Wednesday that doctors initially were puzzled by a circular wound on the top of Brown’s head when his remains were recovered at the crash scene.
“Upon initial inquiry, it looked like a gunshot entry,” said Chris Kelly, the institute’s public affairs officer…
The motive for an alleged murder of Brown is not clear, although some backers of the theory have speculated he knew of possible wrongdoing by President Clinton or other administration officials. Brown’s own financial affairs were under investigation by an independent counsel at the time of his death. Before his Cabinet appointment, he had directed Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign…
Mfume said in a letter to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno that allegations that homicide was overlooked in Brown’s death “require an explanation.”
“The NAACP is very concerned about the ramifications of these allegations, and left unanswered and unresolved, they raise serious questions,” his letter said.
In a similar letter to Reno and to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Waters said the allegations “have sparked a firestorm of inquiries” from her constituents and others.
“I would like to request that you evaluate the issues raised . . . and make a determination of whether an investigation into the allegations is warranted,” Waters wrote.
Justice Department spokesman Myron Marlin said the department “is not looking into the matter now.” He added that “if there is credible information that a crime has been committed, we would look into it.”
There are many highly questionable deaths that suggest that there is organized crime ring that controls the Clintons and Bushes. Ron Brown is just one.
Now continuing with the timeline on Whitewater from PBS: “Once Upon a Time in Arkansas.”
April 1996. Jim and Susan McDougal and Governor Jim Guy Tucker stand trial for bank fraud.
“David Hale testifies that then-Governor Bill Clinton inquired about his $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal in 1986. President Clinton testifies via videotape and denies that he had any involvement with or knowledge of the Hale loan to Susan McDougal.”
May 1996. The McDougals and Governor Tucker are convicted.
“Soon after, Jim McDougal begins to cooperate with the independent counsel. Susan McDougal refuses to answer any questions before the grand jury and is sent to prison for contempt.”
Jim McDougal died of a heart attack in prison on March 8, 1998. Susan McDougal was later pardoned by President Clinton on his last day in office, January 20, 2001.
Mid to Late 1996, from Michael Scheuer: al Qaeda seeks nuclear weapons.
Mid-to-Late 1996: CIA’s Bin Laden unit acquired detailed information about the careful, professional manner in which al-Qaeda was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons … there could be no doubt after this date that al-Qaeda was in deadly earnest in seeking nuclear weapons. The report was initially suppressed within CIA, and then published in a drastically shortened form. Three officers of the Agency’s Bin Laden cadre protested this decision in writing, and forced an internal review. It was only after this review that this report was provided in full to Community leaders, analysts, and policymakers.
November 18, 1996. Harold Nicholson, of CIA Counterterrorism, is arrested for spying for Russia.
According to the New York Times, Harold started working for the CIA in 1994, when he started collecting names of CIA agents and selling them to Russia, including the names of his own students, as he was a teacher at the CIA. Nicholson picked up right where Aldrich Ames left off (arrested February 1994). So while I expect everyone to approach what I allege with caution, (that members of the US government conspired with Russia to support Osama bin Laden), let this sink in for a minute: At the same time you have Counterterrorism teams in the field looking to bring bin Laden to justice, you’ve got sons of bitches back in the states selling the identities of anyone they can discover to Russia, who would later “help” us with Osama via Felix Sater.
From the New York Times:
The highest-ranking C.I.A. officer ever convicted of espionage told the judge at his sentencing today that he had become a spy for Russia for the benefit of his three children…
In court today, Mr. Nicholson offered an apology of sorts to fellow intelligence officers for the careers and the covert operations he had ruined by selling to the Russians those officers’ names, ranks and missions, including the identities of scores of young trainees he instructed at the Central Intelligence Agency’s school for spies…
Until last fall, Mr. Nicholson was a $73,000-a-year C.I.A. officer working at the agency’s counterterrorism center. He had been on a fast track to the top ranks of the agency since becoming a station chief in Romania in 1990, at the age of 40.
But he had also been spying for the Russian intelligence service since 1994.
December 15, 1996. John Deutch resigns as Director of the CIA.
Soon after it was revealed that several of his laptop computers contained classified information wrongfully labeled as unclassified. Attorney General Janet Reno later declined prosecution. President Clinton pardoned him in his last day in office. She did, however, recommend an investigation to determine whether Deutch should retain his security clearance. Deutch had agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor for mishandling government secrets on January 19, 2001, but President Clinton pardoned him in his last day in office, two days before the Justice Department could file the case against him.
George Tenet becomes Acting Director CIA and is later confirmed as Director.
December 16, 1996. Time Magazine reports that Osama bin Laden uses satellite phones.
Before I get much into these satellite phones, let me make an important point. There is a big misperception in the American public about the role of Osama’s satellite phones.
Misperception: That darned media “leaked” intelligence about Osama’s satellite phones, thereby alerting him so that he stopped using the phone(s), thus avoiding capture.
Reality: Osama bin Laden knew the satellite phones were being tracked and had couriers carry the phones around creating false locations to mislead U.S. intelligence, thus: avoiding capture; leading the United States to strike targets in Afghanistan that had no chance of success to kill Osama; angering the Taliban and Afghanistan people against the United States; strengthening the Saudi Arabian bin Laden by casting him in the same role of defending the Afghanistan people against a tyrannical superpower as he had done against the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s.
“One of the worst cases was the reporting on the U.S. ability to listen to Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone in the late ’90s. Because of that reporting, he stopped using that phone and the country lost valuable intelligence.”
— White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, remarks at a news briefing, Aug. 1, 2018
I’ll get into it more later. Note what Michael Scheuer said closely for now.
December 1996, from Michael Scheuer:
December 1996: From a CIA officer detailed to another Intelligence Community (IC) agency and serving overseas, the Bin Laden unit learned of the availability of a communications conduit used by Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The other IC agency refused to exploit the conduit and threatened legal action against the Agency officer who advised of its existence. This officer bravely continued to supply the information; and I asked senior Agency officers to intervene with the other IC agency. There ensued a desultory interagency discussion without resolution. The CIA was forced to devise its own ability to exploit the communications conduit and secured about half of the available material. The other IC agency was able to secure the other half, but refused to share it. This capability was later lost because of an August 1998 leak to the media by the U.S. military.
February 23, 1997. Kenneth Starr completes the worst coverup in the history of the United States government.
“Independent counsel Kenneth Starr has concluded that presidential aide Vincent Foster was not murdered and that President Bill Clinton and the first lady were not involved in a coverup, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday. Starr’s probe marks the third investigation into Foster’s July 1993 death. The earlier examinations — carried out by a coroner and Robert Fiske Jr., Starr’s predecessor as independent counsel — also determined Foster’s death was a suicide.
The previous day, February 22, 1997, Kenneth Starr rescinded a resignation he had just made.
Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s decision Friday to withdraw the resignation he announced just two days earlier muddies an already murky situation.
Both Democrats and Republicans say Starr’s indecisiveness has damaged his credibility…
The 3-year-old Whitewater investigation is entering a crucial stage of evaluating evidence involving President and Hillary Rodham Clinton and other high government officials.
So now Starr is done with Foster, but is still looking for a way to conclude Whitewater without just saying “we’ve found nothing after 3+ years.” Monica Lewinsky and Osama bin Laden are unknown to the public.
March 1997. Reporter and film crew who interview Osama bin Laden are searched for tracking devices.
CNN producer Peter Bergen appeared on his network as a talking head. He had interviewed Bin Laden in Afghanistan in March 1997 and portrayed the Bin Laden gang as technologically savvy, saying: They scanned us electronically to make sure we didn’t have any kind of tracking device; they’re very concerned about anybody who might meet bin Laden, might have some tracking device from some intelligence agency. These people are fairly sophisticated. The guy has a fair amount of money. He communicates by satellite phone, even though Afghanistan in some levels is back in the middle ages and a country that barely functions. Bin Laden has been able to function fairly well there.
March 29, 1997. President Clinton tells Monica Lewinsky that a foreign government is tapping his phones.
This turns out to be Israel, who had the ability to spy on the entire government as well, but analysis of Israel’s role is best left for another article. If you want to know more on Israel’s spying during the Clinton administration, you can click on this excellent series of reports by Fox News.
In any case, Clinton’s remark to Lewinsky clearly shows that Clinton knows that his activities with Monica are being monitored by foreigners, and that his activities could be used against him by those foreign governments, yet he persists.
From the Starr Report: (Page 71)
According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had a lengthy conversation that day. He told her that he suspected that a foreign embassy (he did not specify which one) was tapping his telephones, and he proposed cover stories.
August 1997, Linda Tripp reports that Kathleen Willey came out of the Oval Office “disheveled.”
Continuing the same behavior that began in Oxford in 1969, all the way through Arkansas, and now to the White House. This assault/encounter, or whatever it was, made it into the media in August of 1997. In that this was reported by Linda Tripp, it appears that she’s being somehow guided in her discoveries of improper behavior involving President Clinton.
Michael Isikoff, from Newsweek, reported that Tripp said that she had encountered Kathleen Willey coming out of the Oval Office “disheveled,” with “her face red and her lipstick was off.” Willey alleged that Clinton groped her. Clinton’s lawyer, Robert S. Bennett said in the Newsweek article, “Linda Tripp is not to be believed.”
August-September 1997: An valuable al Qaeda counterterrorism analyst is taken out of the field.
August-September 1997: For most of a year the Bin Laden unit prepared for an operation in a foreign city that was set to come to fruition in late-summer 1997. The unit’s lead U.S.-based officer on this operation was an extraordinarily able analyst from another IC component; she knew the issue cold. Days before the operation occurred the IC component ordered her back to its headquarters. She protested, but was told that she would not be promoted if she balked at returning. I protested to my superiors and to the three most senior officers of the IC component who were then in charge of terrorism. All refused to intervene. The operation was much less well exploited because of the loss of this officer. A year later, al-Qaeda destroyed U.S. facilities in the area near the foreign city of the under-exploited operation.
September 1997. Linda Tripp begins recording Monica Lewinsky.
In April 1996, Lewinsky’s superiors transferred her from the White House to the Pentagon because they felt that she was spending too much time around Clinton…
Lewinsky told co-worker Linda Tripp about her relationship with Clinton, and Tripp began secretly recording their telephone conversations beginning in September 1997.
September 26, 1997. Judge orders letter from Patrick Knowlton attorney included with notes of Starr report, over Starr’s objection.
Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr submitted a 9-page motion asking the three-judge panel to reconsider including the evidence of the cover-up to the final Report.
Starr’s motion was denied and the evidence was included in Starr’s Report.
Judge Butzner wrote to his colleagues that if they did not order the evidence as part of the Report they could be “charged as conspirators in the cover-up.”
Judge Peter Fay wrote that “the [evidence] contradicts specific factual matters and takes issue with the very basics of the Report filed by the [Independent Counsel].”
Don’t be too quick to dismiss Vince Foster’s murder as “conspiracy theory” when you have judges saying that Knowlton’s testimony contradicts “the very basics of the Report” and literally express a concern in writing that they could be “charged as conspirators in the cover-up.” The coverup was that bad and that obvious.
Fall 1997, George H. W. Bush meets with Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia in Kennebunkport, Maine.
In the fall of 1997, former President George H. W. Bush, then age 74 and five years out of the White House, phoned one of his closest friends, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States. “Bandar,” Bush said, “W. would like to talk to you if you have time. Can you come by and talk to him?” His eldest son and namesake, George W. Bush, who had been governor of Texas for nearly three years, was consulting a handful of people about an important decision and wanted to have a private talk. He gave a big party for Bush at his palatial estate overlooking the Potomac River with singer Roberta Flack providing the entertainment, and went fishing with him at Bush’s vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine – Bandar’s least favorite pastime but something Bush loved.
Bush Sr. implied that he was inviting the Saudi Arabian Prince over to talk about what would become the younger George’s run for the White House, but I think that they were discussing the “Wag the Dog” plot that was not far from kicking into high gear. The extensive connections of the Bush family to the House of Saud, coupled with the extremely strong circumstantial evidence of Bush/Saudi complicity in the 9/11 plot as reported by Craig Unger in “House of Bush; House of Saud” (although Unger did not state that claim explicitly), leave no doubt in my mind that the Bush family are Traitors. At this point in time, the fall of ’97, Osama’s laying low, the public is wondering if Starr is ever going to do anything about Whitewater after he covered-up Vince Foster, and Bill’s messing around with Monica behind the scenes. Not long after this, in January 1998, Felix Sater starts his “cooperation” in Moscow around the same time the FBI pulls Monica Lewinsky into a hotel room. What do you think George H. W. Bush and Prince Bandar bin Sultan were talking about?
December 17, 1997. “Wag the Dog” is released.
From Wikipedia:
Wag the Dog is a 1997 American black comedy film produced and directed by Barry Levinson and starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. The screenplay concerns a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer who fabricate a war to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal.
Wag the Dog was released one month before the outbreak of the Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan by the Clinton administration in August 1998, which prompted the media to draw comparisons between the film and reality. The comparison was made again in December 1998 when the administration initiated a bombing campaign of Iraq just prior to Clinton’s impeachment over the Lewinsky scandal.
The plot and timing of this movie are way too convenient for me. It establishes the narrative ahead of time in the public’s mind that a President would abuse his office exactly the way President Clinton did. Then you get the feedback after the missile strikes against President Clinton to an extent that it became a rationale for him to not go after Osama bin Laden. “Wag the Dog” became a household term.
From the 9/11 Commission: (Pages 117-118)
At the time, President Clinton was embroiled in the Lewinsky scandal, which continued to consume public attention for the rest of that year and first months of 1999. As it happened, a popular 1997 move, Wag the Dog, features a President who fakes a war to distract public attention from a domestic scandal. Some Republicans in Congress raised questions about the timing of the strikes. Berger was particularly rankled by an editorial in the Economist that said only the future would tell whether the U.S. missile strikes had “created 10,000 new fanatics where there would have been none…”
The failure of the strikes, the “wag the dog” slur, the intense partisanship of the period, and the nature of the al Shifa evidence likely had a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force against Bin Ladin. Berger told us that he did not feel any sense of constraint.
Since even the Republicans were criticizing the President over his motives for use of the military, it was easy for Clinton to drag his feet over future military action against Osama bin Laden. That is exactly what he did.
In January 1998, Linda Tripp turns over tapes of Monica Lewinsky to Kenneth Starr.
Tripp gave the surreptitiously recorded tapes to then-Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Tripp disclosed to Starr that she was aware of the relationship between Lewinsky and President Clinton, that Lewinsky had executed a false affidavit denying the relationship that was submitted to the federal court in Arkansas in the Jones v. Clinton lawsuit, and that Lewinsky had attempted to suborn Tripp’s perjury in the Jones v. Clinton suit to conceal the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship as well as Tripp’s claim regarding Kathleen Willey from the federal court. As Tripp explained, she was being solicited to commit a crime to conceal evidence in the Jones civil rights case.
January 16, 1998: The FBI and Ken Starr execute “Operation Prom Night” on Monica Lewinsky.
From People:
“Our team dubbed the operation ‘Prom Night.’ Fresh from the gym, wearing purple sweats, Monica arrived,” Starr writes of Lewinsky’s arrival at the arranged meeting spot, the Ritz-Carlton, according to NPR. Continues Starr in the excerpt, “After Monica and Linda had chatted for a short time in the lobby, by predesign Steve Irons and several other FBI agents swept in.”
Lewinsky was “facing federal charges of perjury and subornation of perjury,” Starr writes — and she lost it.
“For an hour, Monica screamed, she cried, she pouted, and complained bitterly about her scheming, no-good, so-called friend,” he writes, according to NPR. “After a while, she calmed down and began asking questions. The meeting turned into a marathon.”
I know I said I wouldn’t get into it, but very briefly, Netanyahu showed up in D.C. three days later, January 19, 1998, and the Washington Post reported on Lewinsky for the first time the next day.
January 1998, enter Felix Sater.
A manager of a mini-storage found some documents on Felix Sater’s old pump-and-dump stock scam while he was at White Rock/State Street, and this sets off an absurd chain of events.
From the Government’s August 27, 2009 5K1.1 motion to permit Judge Leo Glasser “to downwardly depart from the defendant Felix Sater’s Sentencing Guidelines range,” filed under seal and released to the public August 23, 2019:
In January 1998, the New York City Police Department received a call from the manager of a storage facility who was cleaning out a storage bin after its owners did not answer several delinquency notices. Inside the bin, the manager found loaded handguns and various documents related to White Rock/State Street which revealed Sater’s role in the above-mentioned fraudulent schemes.
Felix was in Russia when he learned about the FBI looking for him shortly after the manager of the mini-storage discovered the old documents on the pump-and-dump scam.
Felix learned in 1998 that the FBI was looking for him in connection with an investigation into the activities of State Street. At the time, Felix was in Russia, where he was working as a consultant for AT&T.
(Which raises questions to me: who was providing satellite phone service to Osama bin Laden- was it AT&T? How did he Sater get the phone numbers, et cetera…)
Our hero, Felix Mikhailovich Sheferovsky, now Felix Sater, became so upset by his past transgressions that he immediately rushed down to the United States Embassy in Moscow to help the United States government.
Through a Russian contact, Felix arranged to meet a high ranking U.S. military intelligence officer and former military attache’ at the U. S. embassy in Moscow (the “Officer”). At the Officer’s request, Felix began to gather sensitive intelligence information for the U. S. government.
Now, never mind that Russia would not have extradited Felix Sater. Never mind that in 1999, the FBI put Semion Mogilevich on their Top 10 most wanted list: “open-source reporting shows him to be involved in weapons trafficking, contract murders, extortion, drug trafficking, and prostitution on an international scale,” and Russia didn’t care. Felix Sater and his pump-and-dump scam required an immediate response from high-level intelligence of both the United States and Russia, at the US Embassy in Moscow, no less.
Why?
February 1, 1998. George Tenet hires a banker who would later short airlines prior to 9/11.
I’m going to do a mini-timeline on Alex Krongard and his banking ties within this larger timeline.
- April 1997: Bankers Trust agreed to acquire Alex. Brown “in a move that would shatter the wall long dividing banks from brokers.” The new combined bank is named BT Alex Brown. (NY Times)
- February 1, 1998: Alex Krongard, CEO of Alex. Brown and Vice Chairman of Board of Bankers Trust, begins employment at the CIA as a consultant to Director George Tenet. From the Baltimore Sun:
The Baltimore native (Alvin Bernard Krongard) has walked away from a lucrative job as vice chairman of Bankers Trust New York Corp., the parent of BT Alex. Brown Inc. and the seventh-largest bank in the country. At an age when most executives contemplate retirement, Krongard is headed into the darkness, trading the cordial world of high finance for the intrigue of the Central Intelligence Agency…
Krongard has cultivated a circle of friends in the upper reaches of the military and intelligence communities — including, he says, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and Tenet.
- Summer 1998: Banker’s Trust had “an unfortunately large position in Russian government bonds in the summer of 1998, brought the investment bank to the brink before being rescued in an acquisition by Deutsche Bank.” (From Forbes)
- December 1, 1998: Deutsche Bank A.G. formally announced today its plan for a $10.1 billion takeover of the Bankers Trust Corporation. (NY Times)
- June 5, 1999: Deutsche Bank completes the acquisition of BT Alex Brown, and drops the “BT”, thus putting Deutsche Bank in business in the United States under the name Alex. Brown.
Breuer said Alex. Brown will not only retain its nearly 200-year-old name, but also will drop the “BT.” The Alex. Brown name has better brand recognition in the United States than Deutsche Bank’s name, Breuer said.
Deutsche Bank had been hunting for a U.S. acquisition for months when it found Bankers Trust, which came into the deal after losing a staggering $488 million in the third quarter of 1998 on investments in junk bonds and Russian securities.
- September 6, 2001. From Wikipedia:
Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard’s name was brought up in conjunction with investigations into suspected 9/11-related insider trading because of timely Wall Street trades made through the investment bank he used to head, Alex. Brown.
Wikipedia quoted the 9/11 Commission here, page 499, in the Notes to Chapter 5:
“A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 (2001) as part of a strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter…which recommended these trades.”
Also note that there are longstanding ties of the Bush family to the Brown family line of banking, dating to George Herbert Walker Sr., but that’s another article as well.
The 9/11 Commission dismissed the U.S-based insider trading before 9/11 in a footnote because they said there were simply “no conceivable ties to al Qaeda.” Let me tell you 3 conceivable ties real quick:
- The CIA. Krongard worked for the CIA. Which is not to say that everyone in the CIA would be in a position to have insider knowledge of al-Qaeda’s activities, but Krongard was promoted to the #3 position in the CIA- Executive Director- in March 2001, and things like counterterrorism and counterintelligence are obviously their jobs. The CIA provided arms and military intelligence to Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen in the 1980s to overthrow the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden renamed the Mujahideen as al-Qaeda in 1989. (Page 6). Maybe that’s the reason bin Laden renamed his organization- so some idiots could say there was no conceivable ties to al-Qaeda later, like saying that Colonel Sanders has no conceivable ties to Kentucky Fried Chicken because they renamed it KFC in 1991.
- Russia. So not only did Tenet decide, “I know what we need, a banker,” he also picked one that helped manage to collapse an American bank with Russian bonds that Russia defaulted on later as their economy collapsed. I doubt a bank would make such a large commitment to Russian bonds without having some communication with the Russian government to gauge the risk level of these bonds. This at the same time Russia was “helping us out” with Osama bin Laden by providing Osama’s satellite phones and other intelligence via Felix Sater to the United States. “No conceivable ties?”
- Germany. I’ve seen some reporting that Germany warned the U.S. about a cell of al Qaeda planning an attack with airplanes before 9/11, but I can’t pin it down to a good source. In any case, the cell is well-documented in the 9/11 Commission. Deutsche Bank is, of course, German.
THE HAMBURG CONTINGENT (Page 160)
Although Bin Laden, Atef, and KSM initially contemplated using established al Qaeda members to execute the planes operation, the late 1999 arrival in Kandahar of four aspiring jihadists from Germany suddenly presented a more attractive alternative. The Hamburg group shared the anti-U.S. fervor of the other candidates for the operation, but added the enormous advantages of fluency in English and familiarity with life in the West, based on years that each member of the group had spent living in Germany. Not suprisingly, Mohammed Atta, Ramzin Binalshibh, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah would all become key players in the 9/11 conspiracy.
February 22, 1998. Osama bin Laden issues a “fatwa” against the United States. This was translated into English and is available here.
March 17, 1998. CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz admits the drug ties of the CIA for the first time.
The CIA did not “expeditiously” cut off relations with alleged drug traffickers who supported contra Nicaraguan rebels in the 1980s, CIA Inspector General Frederick R. Hitz told the House intelligence committee yesterday. Hitz for the first time said publicly that the CIA was aware of allegations that “dozens of people and a number of companies connected in some fashion to the contra program” were involved in drug trafficking. “Let me be frank,” Hitz added, “there are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.”
This isn’t really necessary for the timeline; it just shows that the ties of the CIA to drugs are not just “conspiracy theory.”
April-May 1998: bin Laden unit ordered disbanded.
From Michael Scheuer:
April-May 1998: The Agency’s Bin Laden unit was ordered disbanded and reduced to a small branch. This was done, so far as I know, without the knowledge of the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] … When DCI found out about this plan, he intervened in mid-May 1998. By doing so, the DCI preserved the unit and dodged the bullet of having to explain to the American people why the Agency thought Bin Laden was so little of a threat that it had destroyed the Bin Laden unit weeks before two U.S. embassies were demolished. Needless to say, the on-again, off-again signals about the unit’s future status made for confusion, distraction, and much job-hunting in the last few weeks before al-Qaeda’s August 1998 attacks in East Africa.
April 8, 1998. White House Paints Starr Inquiry as Witch Hunt. (New York Times).
Sound familiar? Remember how Trump wanted Comey to investigate the “pee tape” and nothing else? Covering up real crime with scandalous sex is a tried and proven strategy thanks to his buddy Bill Clinton.
Spring and Summer 98. Felix Sater receives information on Osama bin Laden.
As will be discussed in detail below, during the spring and summer of 1998, Sater traveled to Central Asia where he gathered and passed on information to United States sources about the Northern Alliance’s desire to resell Stinger missiles to the United States government as well as information about the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, among other things. Sater contacted the FBI during this period and kept agents apprised of his activities overseas.
Busy saving the world while the American bin Laden unit is ordered disbanded…
May 1998-May 1999: Various chances to capture or kill bin Laden are declined.
From Michael Scheuer:
May 1998-May 1999: The CIA officers working Bin Laden at Headquarters and in the field gave the U.S. government about ten chances to capture Bin Laden or kill him with military means. In all instances, the decision was made that the “intelligence was not good enough.” This assertion cannot be debated publicly without compromising sources and methods. What can be said, however, is that in all these cases there was more concern expressed by senior bureaucrats and policymakers about how international opinion would react to a U.S. action than there was concern about what might happen to Americans if they failed to act. Indeed, on one occasion these senior leaders decided it was more important to avoid hitting a structure near Bin Laden’s location with shrapnel, than it was to protect Americans. Two other points: the truth has not been fully told about the chance to militarily attack Bin Laden at a desert hunting camp being used by wealthy Gulf royals; and our best chance to capture Bin Laden—an operation which showed no U.S. hand, risked no U.S. lives, and was endorsed by senior commanders of the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg—was cancelled because senior officials from the Agency, the Executive Branch, and other Intelligence Community components decided to accept assurances from an Islamic country that it could acquire Bin Laden from the Taleban. U.S. officials accepted these assurances despite the well-documented record of that country withholding help—indeed, it was a record of deceit and obstruction—regarding all issues pertaining to Bin Laden between December 1996 and May 1998. The makers of this decision ignored the extensive documentary record that showed nothing but uncooperativeness from this Islamic country.
May 15, 1998. Blackwater Lodge and Training Center opens.
Date taken from Dangerous Magazine article.
The aforementioned Alvin Krongard, who shorted airlines before 9/11, lied to the House Oversight Committee about his connections to Blackwater after being appointed by President George W. Bush to be inspector general of the State Department in 2005. Krongard had a conflict of interest in investigating Blackwater in the Nisour Square Massacre because his brother was on an advisory board for Blackwater.
Cofer Black, who played a major role in counterterrorism intelligence regarding Osama bin Laden in the months before 9/11, was later hired by Blackwater in 2005.
Cofer Black, in his own words, from his testimony to the 9/11 Commission:
The January 2000 operation to learn what a group of suspected al-Qa’ida associated men were doing in Kuala Lumpur is a case where our procedures were – inadequate. The first part of that operation was successful. We picked up on intelligence developed during the FBI’s investigation of the 1998 Nairobi attack, to identify two suspected al-Qa’ida men. We tracked them to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur where they met with other terrorist operatives. We were not able to learn what the men did during that meeting, but we were able to identify other participants. That information continues to be operationally useful today.
While the meeting was in progress, CTC officers detailed to the FBI kept the FBI updated through verbal briefings. Where we fell short was in our not informing the Department of State that we had identified two al-Qa’ida men so that the Department could decide whether to place them on the watchlist. Nearly two years later, those two men, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, were hijackers on Flight 77.
May 28, 1998. Boris Yeltsin asks President Clinton to support his efforts to stop a financial panic and keep investments in Russia.
There’s going to be a whole lot of money laundering going on soon. I think it’s logical to suspect that some of this Russian money wound up in the offshore accounts of American politicians and government officials, and with these people thus compromised by their criminal actions, they are more likely to look the other way on any evidence of conspiracy involving bin Laden, lest their roles be exposed.
Russia’s economy is in bad trouble, providing basis for large IMF loans later.
From Clinton Presidential Libraries, Page 334.
I would like to ask you. Bill, one way or another to state that the Russian leadership and government and president will handle the situation, which has now developed, and that you are sure of that. And second, I would like you to address your investors who work here in Russia so that they will not panic and do not leave Russia with their investments, that they do not take away their investments, as we have the necessary reserves. And there is no catastrophic situation here. We need your support. People in the world must know that you support us and that you are sure that Russia will handle the situation, that everything will be in order. Well, the situation is difficult.
May 29, 1998. A plan to capture bin Laden is canceled.
From the 9/11 Commission (Pages 111-114)
A compound of about 80 concrete or mud-brick buildings surrounded by a 10-foot wall, Tarnak Farms was located in an isolated desert area on the outskirts of the Kandahar airport. CIA officers were able to map the entire site, identifying the houses that belonged to Bin Laden’s wives and the one where Bin Laden himself was most likely to sleep. Working with the tribals, they drew up plans for the raid. They ran two complete rehearsals in the United States during the fall of 1997.
By early 1998, planners at the Counterterrorist Center were ready to come back to the White House to seek formal approval. Tenet apparently walked National Security Advisor Sandy Berger through the basic plan on February 13…
On May 20, Director Tenet discussed the high risk of operation with Berger and his deputies, warning that people might be killed, including Bin Ladin. Success was to be defined as the exfiltration of Bin Ladin out of Afghanistan. A meeting of principals was scheduled for May 29 to decide whether the operation should go ahead.
The principals did not meet.
June 1998. “Moonlight Maze” investigation into Russian hacking of Department of Defense, Department of Energy, military contractors, and universities.
The date I reference is the date from a document declassified in 2016 which Chris Doman reported here. Newsweek first broke the story on September 19, 1999.
The suspects: crack cyberspooks from the Russian Academy of Sciences, a government-supported organization that interacts with Russia’s top military labs. The targets: computer systems at the Departments of Defense and Energy, military contractors and leading civilian universities. The haul: vast quantities of data that, intelligence sources familiar with the case tell NEWSWEEK, could include classified naval codes and information on missile-guidance systems. This was, Pentagon officials say flatly, “a state-sponsored Russian intelligence effort to get U.S. technology”–as far as is known, the first such attempt ever by Russia.
June 1998. Britain becomes aware of Russian money laundering into the Bank of New York. Two banks are told by the FBI to keep Russian money laundering accounts open.
Investigators say billions of dollars – perhaps as much as $15 billion – flowed through the Benex accounts in thousands upon thousands of separate wire transfers…
And in June 1998, it finally did get noticed. British law-enforcement authorities keeping tabs on the Russian mob began to hear that Mogilevich – the same reputed mobster who started YBM – was laundering money through BNY accounts.
They told the FBI, and agents from the bureau began to monitor the cash flows.
A month later, officials at the Republic National Bank of New York filed a suspicious-activity report regarding Benex to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
Republic then received written requests from federal law-enforcement authorities asking them to keep the account open: Agents wanted to see where the money was coming from and where it was going.
I think the FBI New York knew exactly where the money was coming from and where it was going, although they never figured it out publicly. Anyway, Thomas A. Renyi, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, The Bank of New York Company, Inc., later testified before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services on September 22, 1999 as follows:
The Bank learned of these investigations a year ago, in September 1998. When we requested the U.S. Attorney’s permission to close the accounts they were monitoring, we were asked to keep the accounts open; to advise no one, other than our bank regulators, about the investigations;…The Bank of New York has done business in Russia since 1922, when Irving Trust, which we later acquired, opened an account for Vnesheconomobank, the Bank for Foreign Economic Affairs of the USSR. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a new banking system began to emerge in Russia. Responding to public and private initiatives and encouragement to “bring Russia west,” we – and many of our nation’s other leading commercial and investment banks – were asked to aid the development of this system, in our case focusing on the development of the infrastructure for the Russian capital markets, where our expertise in funds transfer and American Depositary Receipts was pertinent. We committed Bank personnel and resources to planning committees, training sessions, technological discussions and the like with Russian banking executives and personnel.
A few months later, Chairman of the Russian Federal Securities Commission said, as quoted in the House report “RUSSIA’S ROAD TO CORRUPTION:”
The [IMF] money is all spent. It went to foreigners and Russian speculators [who] took the money out of the country. To me, the huge surprise is not the appearance of such a scam in the country. But I cannot explain why the western financial institutions and the governments didn’t pay serious attention to the presence of such things.
-Dimitri Vasiliev, former Chairman of the Russian Federal Securities Commission, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, September 24,1998
Larry Summers testified to the House of Representatives later on September 21, 1999 to a panel on Russian corruption and money laundering:
From C-Span:
- (1:13:12). Summers: “It is, I think best to think of capital flight in Russia or another country, not so much as a cause of economic problems, but as a symptom of economic problems..”
- (1:43:37). Summers: “In the current approach, none of the IMF funds will actually reach the Russian Central Bank.”
- (1:52:41) Maxine Waters: “Did the Russian banks offshore like in Antigua play any role in this money laundering and drug money laundering? Summers did not answer. Maxine Waters: “There are about 8 Russian banks in Antigua, a place that has about 60,000 people and 50 banks. 8 of them are Russian.” A lengthy exchange ensues where Maxine Waters grows increasingly frustrated with Summers evasive answers about Russian drug money laundering.
- (2:22:28) Summers: “with respect to the Bank of New York, there is no evidence that IMF funds or cap.. that there were any IMF funds diverted in that context..”
- (2:23:52) Summers: “the reports and the evidence at this point does not point to their having represented… their having involved the diversion of IMF funds to inappropriate uses…”
June 1998. Turki bin Faisal travels to Afghanistan to negotiate with Taliban to expel or turn over Osama bin Laden.
Turkin bin Faisal al Saud was head of Saudi Arabian intelligence from 1977 to September 1, 2001. He resigned from his position ten days prior to 9/11.
Turki: After bin Laden had publicly announced that he and his Al Qaeda organization intended to target Americans and Jews worldwide and to “liberate” Islam’s holiest sites from the Saudi royal family, my government sent me to Afghanistan in June of 1998 to speak with Mullah Omar…
Turki: Incidentally, we had a rather friendly conversation in June 1998. I told Mullah Omar that it would be better to give us bin Laden, that is, if he had any interest in continuing his friendly relations with Saudi Arabia. He agreed, at least in principle. We agreed to set up a joint committee to arrange the details of bin Laden’s extradition.
By 1996, Bin Laden was back in Afghanistan. Turki says the kingdom knew it had a problem and wanted him returned. He flew to Kandahar to meet with the then head of the Taliban, Mullah Omar. “He said, ‘I am not averse to handing him over, but he was very helpful to the Afghan people.’ He said Bin Laden was granted refuge according to Islamic dictates.”
Later Turki says that this spirit of cooperation vanished after the missile strikes of August 1998.
June 15, 1998. Bill says he’s lobbying the IMF; Boris says he only needs about $5 Billion.
From Clinton Presidential Libraries, Page 350.
What is in question is not a very large amount of money, something around $5 billion dollars. The most important thing here is that the G7 statement reflects the confidence of leading countries that Russia will be able to deal with the situation so investors can have no fear investing in the Russian economy.
July 10, 1998. Boris tells Bill the situation is urgent; he needs money immediately.
From Clinton Presidential Libraries, Page 371.
THE PRESIDENT:
I’m doing great. I had a good trip to China and I’m just working on things here, spending a lot of time keeping up with the IMF proposal for Russia, and hope we can get it worked out quickly.
PRESIDENT YELTSIN:
Yes, Bill, soon is the word and it is not enough to describe the urgency of the situation. Otherwise, if we do not get a decision soon, by the end of next week, it would mean the end of reform and basically the end of Russia. The consequences would be catastrophic and drastic, not only for Russia but for the global financial system as well.
July 13, 1998. IMF reverses position, announces $17.1 Billion aid package for Russia.
From the New York Times:
Seven weeks ago the chief of the International Monetary Fund, Michel Camdessus, assured the world’s financial markets that there was no reason to panic about Russia.
”Contrary to what markets and commentators are imagining,” Mr. Camdessus insisted as investors were fleeing the Russian markets, ”this is not a crisis. This is not a major development.”
This week, in a complete reversal, the I.M.F. and the Russian Government announced a bailout package that will inject $17.1 billion in new loans to the beleaguered nation over the next 18 months.
The Clinton Administration was the driving force behind the reversal, impelled by the specter of Russia’s financial collapse.
July 25, 1998, Vladamir Putin is appointed by President Yeltsin to Director of the FSB.
“once appointed conducted a thorough reorganization, which included the dismissal of most of the FSB’s top personnel.”
Russia’s mob is moving every penny they can get their hands on to offshore accounts, via U.S. accounts first, severely damaging Russia’s economy, and it triggers a revolt from the old KGB to get the mob under control. Yeltsin resigned in late 1999.
August 7, 1998: United States Embassies are Bombed in Tanzania and Kenya.
From Wikipedia:
The 1998 United States embassy bombings were attacks that occurred on August 7, 1998, in which more than 200 people were killed in nearly simultaneous truck bomb explosions in two East African cities, one at the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the other at the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.
The attacks, which were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, brought Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their terrorist organization, al-Qaeda, to the attention of the U.S. public for the first time, and resulted in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) placing bin Laden on its ten most-wanted fugitives list.
The FBI also connected the attack to Azerbaijan, as 60 calls were placed via satellite phone by bin Laden to associates in the country’s capital Baku.
So if Felix Sater was collecting information on Osama bin Laden, including his satellite phone numbers, in “spring and summer” of 1998, and returned to the United States in September 1998 to give these numbers to the FBI, and the embassies were bombed in August 1998, where the FBI at some point became aware of 60 satellite phone calls pertaining to the bombings, don’t you think that’s suspicious? What information did Felix Sater and the FBI have on Osama bin Laden’s communications prior to the August 7, 1998 embassy bombings?
August 14, 1998. In a phone call between Clinton and Yeltsin, they do not discuss the U.S. Embassy bombings. (Page 393)
(Nor would they discuss the Russian Apartment bombings, which began September 4, 1999, in a phone call on September 8, 1999. (Page 548)) Wikipedia said “According to historians, the bombings were coordinated by the Russian state security services to bring Putin into the presidency,” and provided 8 references.
President Clinton did mention Osama bin Laden, however, saying he “will continue to cooperate with you against terrorism and groups like Usama bin Ladin that train these people.” And he was referring, I believe, to the Chechen rebels.
August 17, 1998. Clinton admits “relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.”
Youtube link to President Clinton’s speech.
August 17, 1998. Washington Post article reports Bin Laden’s “electronic communications.”
Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA’s counterintelligence unit, said he is aware of intercepted electronic communications among bin Laden associates in the aftermath of the embassy bombings in which they take credit for the attacks and exchange warm congratulations.
August 17, 1998. Russia defaults on its debts.
From the House report “RUSSIA’S ROAD TO CORRUPTION“
The culmination of the Clinton administration’s fatally-flawed macroeconomic policy for Russia occurred in August 1998, when Russia’s default on its debts and devaluation of the ruble led to the nation’s total economic collapse. By all measurements, the disaster was worse than America’s Crash of 1929. The disaster that began on August 17,1998, spread immediately throughout Russia. Millions of ordinary men and women who had deposited their money in Russian banks lost everything. ATM and debit cards ceased to work. Dozens of banks became insolvent and disappeared. Angry depositors besieged Russian banks, only to learn they had been wiped out. Millions of senior citizens, whose meager pension income had been suspended for months, were cut off completely. When the dust finally settled in March 1999, the ruble–and with it, every Russian’s life savings—had lost fully 75% of its value.
August 20, 1998. President Clinton launches missile strikes into Afghanistan and Sudan.
In Afghanistan, approximately 70 cruise missiles hit three alleged bin Laden training camps. An estimated 24 people were killed. But if they wanted to kill bin Laden, they failed. Bin Laden was not at the camps when the bombs hit. In the Sudan, approximately 13 cruise missiles hit a pharmaceutical plant. The night watchman was killed.
Days later, in the streets of Khartoum, Sudanese President al-Bashir led an anti-US march. Suddenly it seemed America was transformed from a victim of terrorism to an aggressor nation. (Emphasis mine). And in the days following the bombing, the President’s National Security Advisor Samuel Berger faced a barrage of questions–especially on the Sudan attack. Reports quickly circulated that the Sudanese missile strike had hit a working pharmaceutical plant with no easily-proven link to bin Laden.
FRONTLINE questioned National Security Advisor Sandy Berger about the attacks and he claimed they were justified. “Well, I believe we had solid knowledge that this facility was associated with chemical weapons,” said Berger. But on the day immediately following the missile strike, Berger had said that the camp was “producing chemical weapons.” Berger and others had backed away from their initial assertions about the camp as more evidence emerged.
From the New York Times:
But while the Republican leadership rallied to support the raids, some members of Congress reacted suspiciously, noting that the action followed by three days Clinton’s acknowledgment to the public and a grand jury of his relationship with former intern Monica Lewinsky…
When Clinton’s motorcade abruptly left the borrowed estate where he was secluded with his wife and daughter, reporters and photographers who were idling at the entrance assumed that he was going to play golf. Instead Clinton made a brief dramatic appearance to announce the strikes. Clinton flew to Washington for his Oval Office address as Ms. Lewinsky was testifying for a second time before the grand jury here.
He gave the final go-ahead in a telephone conversation at 3 a.m. Thursday morning with National Security Adviser Samuel Berger.
Pentagon officials denied any plan to assassinate bin Laden, saying they intended only to damage his network. (Emphasis mine).
The text I highlighted above in the PBS and New York Times articles makes the point I want to make, that the missile strikes only served the purpose of turning the perception of the U.S. from a victim of terrorism to one that would fire missiles haphazardly into Muslim areas. I add that only 10 years earlier, May 1988, the USSR had finally withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan thanks to the backing of the Mujahideen and bin Laden by the United States. So now we’re the bad guys. That’s a pretty good trick orchestrated by Russian intelligence. Russia’s role was revealed in Sater’s 5K1.1 Letter.
From Sater’s 5K1.1 Letter: (Page 8)
The defendant, who was born in Russia, used his connections with several high-ranking Russian military or former military and KGB officers to provide the United States intelligence community with key information, particularly concerning the Middle East. Beginning in 1998, Sater was in frequent contact with a former high-ranking KGB officer and arms dealer who possessed information about potential threats to the United States emanating from Afghanistan and certain Central Asian republics. Sater relayed specific, detailed information to the Central Intelligence Agency FBI and other agencies from this individual. In 1998, for instance, before he was arrested in connection with the case at issue, Sater passed on information that certain leaders of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan wanted to resell Stinger missiles to the United States government. Sater even provided the serial numbers for each of the missiles. During the same period, Sater also passed on specific information about Osama Bin Laden, including what were believed to be Bin Laden’s satellite telephone numbers and information about who was supplying arms to Bin Laden.
Felix Sater said in a Statement released March 12, 2018:
“Information I provided, including the personal satellite telephone numbers of Osama bin Laden, was relevant to the bombing of Al Quaida training camps in 1998 by President Clinton.”
Now let’s muddy through some of this satellite phone reporting and the implications.
August 21, 1998. Washington Times article on Bin Laden’s communications, later cited in the 9/11 Commission as a “leak.”
From the 9/11 Commission (page 127):
“al Qaeda’s senior leadership had stopped using a particular means of communication almost immediately after a leak to the Washington Times. This made it much more difficult for the National Security Agency to intercept his communications.”
The article they referenced was listed in a footnote as “see Martin Sieff, “Terrorist is Driven by Hatred for U.S., Israel, Washington Times August 21, 1998.'” I can’t find the original link. But below is a followup that the Washington Times wrote in 2018 after Sarah Sanders made her comment on the “leak”, where the Times points the finger back at the above August 17, 1998 Post article. Got all that?
In fact, for my book “The Terrorist Watch,” CIA officials told me that the agency believes it was an Aug. 17, 1998, Washington Post story that triggered bin Laden’s decision to stop using his satellite phone. The Aug. 17 Post story cited a claim by Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official from the late 1980s, that the United States was intercepting the phone calls of bin Laden’s associates.
If you want my thoughts, none of this reporting in 1998 is tipping Osama off about anything. Time Magazine already reported on his satellite phone in December 1996, and al Qaeda had already shown that they were sophisticated enough to understand GPS tracking in March 1997 when they searched Peter Berger and his crew for tracking devices. They all likely had communications training from the CIA when they were fighting the U.S.S.R. They’re just not this stupid. Now they couldn’t have moved around Afghanistan this easily without help, either, hiding from satellites, informants, and the NSA, which is where Felix Sater and Traitors in the U.S. Government come in.
I think the entire narrative of “Osama bin Laden stopped using his satellite phone after the August leak” is disinformation designed to cover the tracks of the Traitors in the U.S. Government. Remember what Michael Scheuer said earlier, in December 1996, around the same time the Time Magazine article reported on bin Laden’s use of satellite phones? He said “the Bin Laden unit learned of the availability of a communications conduit” and that “The other IC agency refused to exploit the conduit and threatened legal action against the Agency officer who advised of its existence.” That’s obstruction, and it dates back to December 1996, at least. He also said that from February 1996 to May 1998 that he tried to get actual transcripts of communication intercepts, but “the senior operations officer for an Intelligence Community component said that the National Security Act of 1947 gave her agency control of ‘raw’ signals intelligence, and that she would not pass such material to CIA.” That’s obviously the NSA. And since it dates back to 1996, and since Felix Sater began gathering evidence in 1998, what information did the NSA have on Osama bin Laden that they did not want to share with Michael Scheuer from 1996 until the August 1998 Embassy bombings, both provided by Felix Sater and not provided by Felix Sater? I think these are fair questions. If I’m wrong I’m wrong, but don’t hide the evidence. It’s time to declassify everything about Osama bin Laden that doesn’t compromise “sources and methods.” Don’t stand behind “National Security” AFTER the terrorist even happened and after bin Laden is dead and there’s good reason to believe that members of our government, including President Clinton, were involved with coordinating missile strikes in a manner that deliberately strengthened Osama bin Laden. There’s a document from Turki bin Faisal that the government won’t release on “National Security” grounds. I’ll get to it.
August 1998: Scheuer gets raw intel, for a little while.
From Michael Scheuer:
August 1998: After the bombing of two U.S.-based embassies in East Africa, the senior CIA managers asked what the Bin Laden unit needed most to enhance the attack against al-Qaeda. I again raised our dire need for verbatim reports derived from electronic collection. These senior managers ordered this to be arranged. After receiving less than a dozen such transcripts the process stopped. Despite repeated requests, I failed to get the flow of data restored. Also, tragically, no member of the Bin Laden unit was asked to testify before the State Department’s accountability boards for the 1998 bombings. This exclusion ensured that the systemic problems embedded in the Intelligence Community—which had become overwhelmingly clear before the 1998 al-Qaeda attacks—were not raised before the only pre-9/11 panel that might have been able to initiate remedial action.
John Brennan, at his confirmation hearing where he was confirmed as CIA Director in 2013, said the following about the August 20 missile strikes:
Youtube link to Brennan’s confirmation hearing:
I must point out Senator, that every single CIA manager, George Tenet, his Deputy, the head of Operations at the time, and other individuals, the chief of the counterterrorism center, argued against that operation as well, because it was not well-grounded in intelligence and its chances of success were minimal, and it was likely that other individuals were going to be killed.
And if everyone at the CIA was opposed to these missile strikes, that leaves Sandy Berger as the one who overrode their opinions.
September 1998. Turki bin Faisal returns to Afghanistan after the U.S. missile strikes, and Mullah Omar now refuses to cooperate.
In September 1998, Turki flew again to Afghanistan, this time to be robustly rebuffed. At that meeting, he was a changed man,” he says of Omar. “Much more reserved, sweating profusely. Instead of taking a reasonable tone, he said, ‘How can you persecute this worthy man who dedicated his life to helping Muslims?’” Turki says he warned Omar that what he was doing would harm the people of Afghanistan, and left.
SPIEGEL: The situation had taken a dramatic turn. In August, Al Qaeda terrorists blew up the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the US government launched bombing attacks on bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan. Did this change Mullah Omar’s position?
Turki: I had come to pressure him to go ahead with the extradition, and I encountered a completely transformed Omar. He was extremely nervous, perspired, and even screamed at me. He denied that he had promised us he would extradite bin Laden, and wanted nothing to do with a joint committee. He wanted to know what had possessed us to want to arrest such an illustrious holy warrior as Osama bin Laden! And why we didn’t prefer to free the world of the infidels! He was furious. I could not help but think that we might have been taking drugs. When he continued to insult Saudi Arabia and the royal family, I ended the meeting. I recommended that my government freeze its relations with the Taliban, and that’s exactly what happened.
As I mentioned previously, there is a document where Turki bin Faisal told the CIA everything he knew about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The government refused to release that document, as was reported by Florida Bulldog on September 11, 2019.
From Florida Bulldog:
…Turki said in 2002, “At the instruction of the senior Saudi leadership, I shared all the intelligence we had collected on bin Laden and al Qaeda with the CIA…”
No reference to a Turki interview appears in the Archives’ listings of 9/11 Commission documents. In 2011, while researching our book The Eleventh Day, the authors queried the omission with the Archives. “I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a Prince Turki Memorandum for the Record,” an archivist wrote then, “I can’t tell you, or I’d be revealing more than I’m allowed to…If we have an MFR for Prince Turki, it would also be withheld in full.” The umbrella nature of the withholding – under which the public is not allowed to know whether a document on a subject even exists – is rare, usually invoked only in cases of national security.
Our appeal of the Archives’ response led – just weeks ago – to a communication revealing at last that a record of a Turki interview does exist. We are now told, though, that the State Department has determined that – because disclosure could “reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security” as well as to “confidential sources” – the interview “remains properly exempt from disclosure”. We intend to file a final appeal to the Information Security Oversight Office.
Do you really think that the national security of the United States is what’s being protected by the government’s refusal to release documents related to information gathered on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda related to 9/11?
September 1998. Felix Sater returns to the U.S. with Osama bin Laden’s phone numbers and stuff.
So after Felix Sater runs around Central Asia (likely the former Soviet Republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) talking to people who know al Qaeda and stuff, and after Osama bin Laden issues a fatwa against the United States and bombs two American Embassies, Felix returns to the United States in September 1998.
From Felix Sater’s Sentencing Document:
Felix delivered Bin Laden’s satellite phone numbers to the FBI in September 1998, after he voluntarily flew from Russia to the United States to surrender to authorities. Felix was later told by an FBI agent that the numbers were authentic.
I don’t see how Felix Sater isn’t greeted by the FBI as Public Enemy #1 after a timeline like the one I’ve laid out here unless the FBI was complicit with Russia in the plot to strengthen Osama bin Laden. Where and when exactly did Felix Sater get Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone numbers? When did Felix Sater give these numbers to the FBI and what did the FBI do with them? Did the FBI get Osama bin Laden’s phone numbers before or after the August 7, 1998 Embassy bombings?” “Sater contacted the FBI during this period and kept agents apprised of his activities overseas.” How did the FBI know “the numbers were authentic?” Lots of people need to answer lots of questions about this. Declassify everything. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Prove it.
September 7, 1998. Los Angeles Times reports again on Osama’s Satellite phones, and that the NSA has his voiceprint.
From the Washington Post:
Sept. 7, 1998, that a newspaper reported that the United States had intercepted his phone calls and obtained his voiceprint. U.S. authorities “used their communications intercept capacity to pick up calls placed by bin Laden on his Inmarsat satellite phone, despite his apparent use of electronic ‘scramblers,’ ” the Los Angeles Times reported.
September 9, 1998. Starr Report. Mentions Whitewater only in passing.
I would like to invite everyone to pull up the “Starr Report” and use your Control-F buttons on your keyboard to check my count. Here’s what I get for the following words:
- Lewinsky: 3093
- Sex or sexual: 600
- Oral: 98
- Genitals or genitalia: 64
- Whitewater: 4
- Foster: 1
What can you say. How obvious does it have to be? 4 years after Kenneth Starr took over for Robert Fiske on Whitewater, in August 1994, he’s got nothing on that, but it only took him 9 months to come up with a huge report on a blowjob. Along the way Starr, along with the FBI, covered up and lied about the cause of death of Vince Foster 2.5 years after he took over. Starr was even later brought in to thrown cold water on the Epstein flare-up and negotiate a “sweetheart deal” to keep Clinton out of trouble. Along the way there were two investigations into Russian money laundering. One was sabotaged by a Traitor; one the FBI said let to let it roll and busted a few minor players later, never recovering the money.
And you know the rest, Clinton deliberately sort of perjures himself when all he had to do was take the 5th Amendment or simply admit that he had oral sex, when he already knew “the blue dress” was in evidence, but instead he went with option C: A big, ugly, public Impeachment dominating the news cycle. An Impeachment that had no hope of success but provided an epic distraction ending to the 90s, getting us back to where I started this article remembering the mass media daze, where Starr was overreaching, and Clinton wasn’t so bad after all.
P.S.
Here’s Starr’s use of the word “Whitewater.”
- Page 15- The allegations with respect to Mr. Jordan and the job search were similar to ones already under review in the ongoing Whitewater investigation.
- Page 17- OIC investigators and prosecutors recognized parallels between Mr. Jordan’s relationship with Ms. Lewinsky and his earlier relationship with a pivotal Whitewater Madison figure, Webster L. Hubbell.
- Page 67- Q: Mr. President, . . . . [m]any Americans woke up to the news today that the Whitewater independent counsel is investigating an allegation that you . . . encouraged a young woman to lie to lawyers in the Paula Jones civil suit. Is there any truth to that allegation?
- Page 151- “Didn’t the President talk to you about Monica’s name coming up in those cases [Whitewater or Jones v. Clinton]?”
Foster is mentioned as “Vince Foster Former Deputy White House Counsel,” under a list of “Lawyers and Judges.” (Page 13).
END
"We the people" 