1. 1990: CIA gives 3 US visas to Sheik Rahman at Khartoum, Sudan. -Lance: 1000 Years for Revenge, NY, 2003, p. 42; 1991: bin Laden founds al-Qaeda at Sudan.
2. 1992: Sec. Def. Cheney starts neoconservative ball rolling covertly--on 5-8-92 NYT reveals "US Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop”.
3. 1993: Rahman's group, using Yousef as bomb-maker, bombs WTC & plans other strikes; Yousef goes abroad.
4. 1994-6: National Security Agency (NSA) electronically intercepts Audi government messages & by 1996 demonstrates that Saudi money finances bin Laden. -Hersh: Chain of Command, NY, 2003, 324.
5. 1995: Yousef's bomb-lab in Philippines busted & his lieutenant reveals to non-torturer Col. Mendoza the structure of al Qaeda plus Yousef's plans to blow up 11 airliners & the Pope plus US flight-school training by jihadis. Info goes to FBI & to US Embassy at Manila. -Lance, op.cit., 276+.
6. Ex-chief of Abu Sayyef & Phil. Immigration Intell chief reveal that Terry Nichols was trained in explosives by jihadis in Philippines. -Lance, 313. Bin Laden moves from Sudan to Afghanisttan; al-Fadl reveals the size & shape of al Qaeda--R. Clarke heading US counterterrorism at NSC finds out. -Clarke: Against All Enemies, NY, 2004, 148. FBI creates a unit to track al Qaeda.
7. 1997: FBI misses arresting al Qaeda ops-chief in Qatari, perhaps unaware of his value.
8. 1998: Bin Laden declares war on US & blows up 2 US Embassies in Africa, is indicted by Manhattan grand jury. Clarke becomes chief of Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) of NSC, although FBI declines to actually take part. (FBI not represented at highest level of National Security Council (NSC) called Principals which is chiefs of State, Defense, CIA, JCS, plus NSC Advisor & President or Vice-President; NSA info tends to go mostly to Defense & CIA).
9. Sept 2000: Neocons' Project for New American Century publishes "Rebuilding America's Defenses" explains the need for transformation process that was "likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophe & catalyzing event--like a new Pearl Harbor." Kissinger endorsed this paper. -Dean: Worse than Watergate, Boston, 2004, p. 100.
10. Jan 2001: Neocons come into power, many centered round Wolfowitz at Pentagon. NSC Advisor Rice downgrades Clarke's CSG thoroughly & sets up delay mechanism for CSG imput to reach Principals. Wolfowitz stops counterterrorist Gelbard in Indonesia. -Clarke, 230-3.
11. 9-4-01: At NSC Principals meeting on terrorism "Rumsfeld took the Wolfowtiz line that there were other terrorist concerns like Iraq...Neither CIA nor the Def. Dept. would agree to run the armed Predator drone over Afghanistan to attack al Qaeda." -Clarke, 238.
12. 9-11-01: a day after the leader of Northern Alliance in Afghanistan is blown away by al Qaeda, the US al Qaeda attack occurs, while chief of Pakistan intell, ISI, is in Washington D.C. area & so is a Saudi group containing some Laden family meeting with Bush Sr. at Carlyle Group in Wash.; ISI Chief soon dropped from Pak. gov. for having forwarded $100,000 to al Qaeda. Saudis leave US unquestioned.
(9-11-2001, 9 a.m., Pentagon) Rumsfeld was hosting a breakfast with Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz for a group of congressmen to talk about defense budget proposals....Rumsfeld leaned forward across the table...[&] predicted that before the 2002 election some crisis would bring the voters' focus back to national security.
"Something can happen in this world that can jar people. And they're going to start looking at who understood that," Rumsfeld warned. Wolfowitz said much the same, predicting an "ugly surprise.” -Steve Vogel: The Pentagon, Random House, NY, 2007 edition, (2008 edition deleted this), p. 428.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hosts a breakfast meeting in his private dining room at the Pentagon.[ASSOCIATED PRESS, 9/12/2001; LARRY KING LIVE, 12/5/2001; 9/11 COMMISSION, 3/23/2004] The meeting, which is attended by several members of Congress, is intended to discuss the Department of Defense’s Quadrennial Defense Review. As well as the secretary of defense, others in attendance include Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant, Navy Vice Admiral Edmund Giambastiani Jr.; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Pete Geren, a special assistant to Rumsfeld; and Representatives John Mica (R-FL), Mark Steven Kirk (R-IL), Mac Thornberry (R-TX), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Robin Hayes (R-NC), Doug Bereuter (R-NE), John Hostettler (R-IN), Kay Granger (R-TX), John Shimkus (R-IL), Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA), and Christopher Cox (R-CA). [POWELL MOORE, 9/10/2001 ; FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM, 9/14/2001; POWELL MOORE, 9/19/2001 ; FEDERAL COMPUTER WEEK, 3/31/2003; VANITY FAIR, 5/9/2003; US DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, 9/10/2004;AMERICAN FORCES PRESS SERVICE, 9/8/2006]
13. immediately post 9-11: Instead of gearing for a potential dangerous al Qaeda sleeper cell in America that could theoretically blow up a nuclear power plant or such, Wolfowitz with Cheney, Rumsfeld & Bush confidently shift emphasis to Iraq. -Clarke, 30. Clarke quits as counterterrorism chief, & the next several taking that job also soon quit in frustration with Bush administration priorities. Kissinger places his ex-aides Bremer, & later Negroponte, at head of US Iraq governance. Neocons, esp. Cheney, launch & sustain massive Iraqi WMD propaganda campaign. -Hersh, op. cit., 227, 247.
14. 2002-3: Independent 9-11 Inquiry is forced to accept as its chairman a Bush appointee. Previously the Congressional 9-11 Investigation was barred by Bush & Cheney from taking testimony from any but Dr. Rice. Moussaioui "claimed that the FBI was concealing the fact that he & the 19 hijackers were under surveillance the entire time he was in the US," (-Hersh, op. cit.) while many of the 19 were at US flight-schools often under their own names. The NSA intercepted, e.g., the Atta message to al Qaeda ops chief on 9-10-01--Atta was well-known to intell circles during his stay in Germany which in part was sponsored by Carl Duisberg Society to which Kissinger is linked.
15. 2002-4: "Over the past decade American intelligence tracked at least 3 visits to N. Korea made by A. Q. Kan, the Pak. nuclear scientist. More troubling intel came in the late 1990s when it was learned from sensitive sources that he also made at least one secret visit to an Iranian nuke facility....In Oct 2002 NYT suggested that Pakistan was a possible supplier of centrifuges to N. Korea. On 2-4-04 Dr. A. Q. Khan confessed his running a black market in nuke weapons material; Musharraf pardoned him the next day; Bush admin did nothing….
Quoting Husain Haani, Pak. special asst to 3 Pak prime ministers: "Once they had the bomb they had a shopping list of what to buy & where. A.Q. Khan can bring a plain piece of paper & show me how to get it done--the countries, people & telephone numbers. This is the guy in Russia who can get you small quantities of enriched uranium. You in Malaysia will manufacture the stuff. Here's who will miniature the warhead. & then go to N. Korea & get the damn missile. It's a state policy....The same guys in ISI who have done this in the last 20 years, who've done nothing but covert ops...You go to bed with our ISI. You let us get away with everything. Why can't you be more honest?" -Hersh, pp.318-9
16. ( 5-31-09) While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration's leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea. Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in his book, "Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq," that high-level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks -- a request Duelfer refused. (A recent report indicates that the suggestion came from the vice president's office.) Nevertheless, the lack of evidence did not deter the administration from eventually invading Iraq -- a move many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.
On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available. Camps were established around the world, notably in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof that al-Qaeda's anti-American propaganda was right.
Similarly with regard to interrogation, administration officials conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures -- such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times -- would be the most effective.
Finally on wiretapping, rather than beef up the procedures available under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the administration again moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. -Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is the author of "Against All Enemies" and "Your Government Failed You." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2009/ 05/29/AR2009052901560.html
17. As laid out in Crossing the Rubicon by Ruppert, 2004:
Dick Cheney was running a completely separate chain of Command & Control via the Secret Service, assuring the paralysis of Air Force response on 9/11. The Secret Service has the technology to see the same radar screens the FAA sees in real time. They also have the legal authority and technological capability to take supreme command in cases of national emergency. Dick Cheney was the acting Commander in Chief on 9/11. (Click here for a summary of these points)
18. Indeed, during the 1980s the savings and loans industry and government insurance programs were stripped of an estimated $500 billion by syndicates of military, intelligence and private financial interests. The profits were used to buy up banking, industrial and media companies and to finance political campaigns. From a greater position of political, judicial and economic power in the 1990s these same syndicates then stripped an estimated $6 trillion of investors' value in pump and dump stock market and mortgage market schemes and an estimated $4 trillion of taxpayer money from the US federal government. -Catherine Fitts, 8-19-04, at p. xiii of: http://books.google.com/books? id=W6czyl1ZcjAC&pg=PT14&dq= crossing+rubicon+fitts+$500+ billion&hl=en&sa=X&ei=CHoGU__ cJojeoAS6l4D4AQ&ved= 0CDQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q= crossing%20rubicon%20fitts%20% 24500%20billion&f=false
19. (9-30-13) A growing portion of the Pentagon budget goes to contractors who are merging their intelligence and eavesdropping activities into propaganda and media. A former undersecretary of defense during the Reagan years called the changes “absolutely chilling.” He says, “Fundamentally what it means is the contractors now have full control of the military. It is the contractors and not the officer corps that has control of the institution that is our military. The ability for these companies to control all the information and cycle the senior officer corps from the Pentagon to their boardrooms makes the system foolproof and completely corrupt.” ...
The Pentagon and national security establishment are using the same contractors who have built the post 9/11 spy apparatus to control the U.S. military version of its activities. Corporations with no stake in openness or experience in providing the public information are being paid hundreds of millions of dollars to fend off reporters and control what comes out of the battlefield and from the Pentagon. These same companies, reliant on the Pentagon and intelligence community for more contracts, have no motivation or incentive to release information that might embarrass the national security establishment. So when wrongdoing does take place there is virtually no chance of it being revealed to the American public. For example, when hundred of National Guard reservists during the Iraq War were exposed to cancer-causing chemicals at an Iraqi power plant that supposedly was made safe by defense contractor KBR, the Pentagon and Army sided with the contractor when reservists came down with cancer. The contractor’s influence was so great that the sick veterans could not even get an official hearing from the Senate or House Armed Services Committees. http://www.dcbureau.org/201309309080/national-security-news-service/the-selling-of-the-pentagon-2013.html#more-9080
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