Adnan Khashoggi Linked to 911 Terrorists

Part XXIV(B)

PROJECT ANTHRAX - SAIC, STEPHEN HATFILL & BIO-ECONOMIC STATE TERRORISM

By Alex Constantine

The epidemic swept through Zimbabwe, the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia, in the late 1970s. It killed 180 people, infected over 10,000, devastated livestock, brought on economic disaster and widespread hunger ... but not throughout Zimbabwe indiscriminately, as you might expect. Only in black areas. This epidemic was respectful of gated white communities and politely kept out.1

Stephen Hatfill signed on with the Rhodesian Special Air Service (SAS) and the Selous Scouts, a counter-insurgency death squad that enforced apartheid rule, before arriving at the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine. Some of the faculty were curious why the Yank would stoop to studying at a backwater academy like Huggins.

His admission was arranged by Robert Burns Symington, an anatomy professor and neo-Nazi. "Symington is strongly believed to have worked with the Ian Smith-led white supremacist regime on its biological warfare project," Africa's Sunday Mirror reported in 2002. "The Zimbabwe authorities have since established that [Smith's] security forces, particularly the much feared Selous Scouts, stealthily distributed the deadly anthrax spore among the hungry cattle of the Rhodesian Tribal Trust Lands, where most Africans lived, and seeded cholera into the rivers."

STURM UND DRANG (UND JURMS)

"Thirteen years after Zimbabwe's independence, a former senior white member of the Rhodesian Security forces admitted the use of anthrax in the war by the military. It is true that anthrax was used in an experimental role and the idea came from the Army Psychological Operations,' he said." The psychology of genocide isn't sophisticated - guerillas were scapegoated for the outbreak.2 One of the Scout's favored tactics was mailing anthrax spores through the mail, embedded in the glue on envelope flaps.3

Hatfill. You know the type. A student at the medical school's radiation oncology department recalls that Hatfill sported a 9mm pistol, and boasted of past paramilitary glories in Vietnam and Zimbabwe.4

In 1984, he moved on to study at South African medical schools, joined the military. While in the area, Hatfill befriended Eugene Terre Blanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, the South African Nazi Party.5 After a year-long tour in Anarctica, he pressed on to the States, and found employment at the National Institutes of Health. "The PhD certificate he submitted to NIH could have easily been tracked back by authorities and exposed as a forgery," Marilyn Thompson, author of The Killer Strain: Anthrax and a Government Exposed, said in a blogged Q&A hosted by UCLA's School of Public Health in 2003, "but it was overlooked and Hatfill's credentials helped him gain access to sensitive government agencies. USAMRIID allowed him in as a contract researcher."6

The first casualty of the anthrax mailings was Bob Stevens, a photo editor at a tabloid that had run an article blasting the Saudi royals. From the CDC report: "On October 4, 2001, we confirmed the first bio terrorism-related anthrax case identified in the United States is a resident of Palm Beach County, Florida. Epidemiologic investigation indicated that exposure occurred at the workplace through intentionally contaminated mail..."7

It's well within the realm of possibility that 911 hijackers Mohammed Atta and Ahmed Alhanzawi were the first to contract the disease, despite FBI disavowals.

These have not held up well over time.

In March 2002, the New York Times reported that Atta and his entourage "identified themselves as pilots when they came to the emergency room of Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., last June. One had an ugly, dark lesion on his leg," and "in October, a pharmacist in Delray Beach, Fla., said he had told the F.B.I. that two of the hijackers, Mohamad Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, came into the pharmacy looking for something to treat irritations on Mr. Atta's hands."

Dr. Christos Tsonas thought Alhanzawi's wound curious, but cleaned it and prescribed medication. "After Sept. 11, when federal investigators found the medicine among the possessions of one of the hijackers, Ahmed Alhaznawi, Dr. Tsonas reviewed the case and arrived at a new diagnosis. The lesion, he said in an interview this week, was consistent with cutaneous anthrax.'" Dr. Thomas Inglesby of John Hopkins, and Dr. Tara O'Toole, assistant secretary for health and safety at the Energy Department, sided with Dr. Tsonas.

Thompson followed every step in the Bureau's investigation, and she finds it entirely possible that Atta and Alhaznawi had some contact with anthrax spores: "The FBI contends that it pursued a hijacker connection in the early days and became convinced that they were not involved in these mailings - mainly because the anthrax strain used was a military research strain. Many people in Florida, however, who know about the hijackers' movements in that part of the country in the months before 9/11, do not believe the FBI pursued this with enough vigor..."

The Times: "In an interview, Dr. O'Toole said that after consulting with additional medical experts on the Alhaznawi case, she was more persuaded than ever' that the diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax was correct..."

It was widely reported that Mohammed Atta's cell took flight school training in Boca Raton, not far from American Media, Inc., where Stevens worked, and rented apartments from the wife of an editor of The Sun, published by AMI.8

Others continued the mailings after 911. The Times: "They would probably have needed an accomplice to mail the tainted letters.... The four recovered anthrax letters were postmarked on Sept. 18 and Oct. 9 in Trenton."9

But the mailings weren't confined by domestic borders. In November 2001, the CDC's web site in Atlanta confirmed that a tainted letter had been sent from Switzerland to Chile. Dr. Antonio Banfi, a pediatrician at a children's hospital in Santiago, received the letter. He suspected that something was amiss because it had been postmarked in Zurich but had a Florida return address.10

In 2003, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports, Maureen Stevens, the widow of the first victim, filed a wrongful- death suit that "could embarrass the U.S. government and provide insight into the ongoing investigation of the fall 2001 bioterrorism attacks." The "embarrassing" lawsuit held that spores "were known to be missing from an Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., as early as 1992," and that the litigants "accuse the government of failing to adequately secure them. The bottom line is that a lot of our [FOIA] requests were not acknowledged or were not answered or responded to.'"11

Maureen Stevens' lawsuit was filed in Palm Beach County Circuit Court. It named Ft. Detrick-USAMRIID, Battelle Memorial Institute and other possible sources of the anthrax - and BioPort Corp., of Lansing, Mich., a vaccine manufacturer.

The name BioPort is synonymous with mismanagement and contaminated product.

The company was founded on June 22, 1995 by Yoav Stern, a former avionics system officer specializing in F-15, A-4, Mirage and Kfir fighter jets for the Israeli Air Force. He was also commander of a flight training unit, and a deputy squadron commander. The BioPort web site reports that one Zive R. Nedivi has been the CEO, president and a director of the company since June 1995. Mr. Nedivi also served in the Israeli Air Force and was the founder "of the predecessor of the company, an indirectly wholly-owned subsidiary of Rada Electronic Industries Ltd."12

Two of BioPort's directors:

Niv Harizman: A director of the Company since December 1997. From January 1998 onward, Harizman was a principal with BT Alex. Brown Incorporated, the investment banking subsidiary of Bankers Trust New York Corporation. From June 1996 until January 1998, Mr. Harizman was a Vice President with Alex. Brown. He started with Alex. Brown in 1995.

General William Lyon: Retired Air Force general, currently serves as a director of Board of Fidelity National Financial, Inc. Chairman of the Research and Development Institute at the Air Force Academy.

Most interestingly of all, on the BioPort board sat another Iran-contra connection:

Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr.: A director of the company since March 1999. From 1985-89, Admiral Crowe held the position of chairman of the Joint Chiefs under President Reagan. After retirement from the military in 1989, Admiral Crowe was a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. He has also served as chairman of the notorious President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, 1993-94, and served as U.S. ambassador to the UK and Northern Ireland, 1994-97. Admiral Crowe has previously served as a director of Merrill Lynch, Texaco and General Dynamics. He currently serves as a director of Bioport, and Intervac, an investment firm. He is a part-time senior advisor to Global Options LLC. The admiral commanded U.S. forces in the Middle East, was the commander-in-chief of NATO forces in Southern Europe, and headed up the nation's largest geographical military operation, the U.S. Pacific Command.13

Lois Battuello dug into BioPort's financial records, compared them with the inside-trade put option activity preceding 911, and found a jostling for position in financial circles that suggests premeditation of 911 and the anthrax attacks: "Niv Harizman was with Alex. Brown (BT for Bankers Trust)," she points out. "This is the firm that executed the puts' prior to September 11 that plunged the stocks of American Airlines, United Airlines, Boeing, some brokerage houses, and several reinsurance companies (some inter-locked) including AXA Assurance, Swiss Re and Munich Re. These trades hubbed from Alex. Brown, which was acquired with Deutsche Bank's acquisition of Bankers Trust. The gent heading Alex. Brown unit, Deutsche's trading-brokerage arm, was terminated rather suddenly. Former director of enforcement for SEC, Richard Walker, took a position as staff counsel for Deutsche."

Niv Harizman "is a dark side," Battuello says, "on the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (put into play by First Chicago group, Robert Angelo Podesta) when Peter G. Peterson (school under MI6) was Secretary of Commerce in 1972-73 under Nixon. And Robert Podesta was UnderSecretary of Commerce - both Chicago pushed through legislation to approve creation of Chicago Board of Options Exchange. (Can't have options trading as it exists in its current form without options on equities to pair, i.e., can't have a bubble economy without a bubble machine). Peterson, currently chairman of the New York Fed, moved up the ranks along notorious Chicago bank lines - 1985 sets up the Blackstone Group and [Iran-contra's] Frank Carlucci sets up the Carlyle Group the same year. Admiral Crowe, following retirement in 1989, held board positions at Merrill Lynch, General Dynamics and Texaco, all very Republican' companies at the time ... "14

NOTES

1) Meryl Nass, M.D., "Zimbabwe's Anthrax Epizoodic," Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars the American Way, edited by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap, New York: Ocean Press, 2003, p. 29.

2) "Zimbabwean authorities have made several reports that indicate that Rhodesians were using biological warfare against guerillas during the liberation war, but these have not received international coverage." - Innocent Chofamba-Sithole and Norman Mlambo, "Ex-Rhodesian under probe for US anthrax attacks," Sunday Mirror, July 9, 2002.
http://www.africaonline.co.zw/mirror/stage/archive/020709/national8599.html

3) Wayne Madsen, "Anthrax And The Agency," CounterPunch.org, April 8, 2002.

4) See, "The Anthrax Letters"
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0208a/0208a-404.html ... This site offers a description of the covert tactics of the Selous Scouts, "a wolf pack. A handful of fighters would drop into the back country disguised as rebels. Living off the land for weeks without support, they would relentlessly track down their opponents and kill them, even if it meant crossing into neighboring countries in violation of international law. Their training taught them to live off the barren land during their long pursuit on foot, drinking fetid water and eating carrion scraps. Some articles claim that they were responsible for two out of every three enemy fatalities in the civil war. Admirers and vets boast that the Selous Scouts were the most skilled and ruthless guerrilla warfare fighters in history."

5) See, "The Biovangelist" web site. http://jdo.org/hatfill.htm

6) UClA Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, "Reporter Interview on Steven Hatfill Article," September 15, 2003. http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/reporterinterview.html

7) Centers for Disease Control, "Bioterrorism-Related Anthrax: First Case of Bioterrorism-Related Inhalational Anthrax in the United States, Palm Beach County, Florida, 2001."
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol8no10/02-0354.htm

8) William J. Broad and David Johnston, "Report Linking Anthrax and Hijackers Is Investigated," New York Times, March 23, 2002.

9) Ibid.

10) AP report, "Anthrax Case in Chile Confirmed," November 23, 2001.
http://www.usenet.com/newsgroups/talk.environment/msg06625.html

11) Kathy Bushouse, "Security at Issue in Widow's Case," South Florida
Sun-Sentinel, September 28, 2003.

12) Alex Constantine post, "Adm. Crowe, Bioport and the Put Option Activity," December 5, 2001.
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&frame=right&th=88439d0c0d6bf5d2&seekm=alexx12-65A234.12015319122000%40nntp.we.mediaone.net

13) CSIS web site: http://www.csis.org/html/alumni/crowew.html

14) Lois Ann Battuello, e-mail exchange with author, December 5, 2001.

_______________

Adnan Khashoggi Linked to 911 Terrorists

Part XXIV(A)

PROJECT ANTHRAX - SAIC, STEPHEN HATFILL & BIO-ECONOMIC STATE TERRORISM

By Alex Constantine

The West Nile Virus outbreak of 1999 made 67 people in New York City ill, and brought with it endemic anxiety. But the anthrax mailings two years later brought death and high anxiety. Emergency measures in a jingoistic package, under consideration in the House of Representatives, arrived at the same time as the Ames strain and the emergency measures floated through Congress on a cloud of lethal white powder.

Right-wing propagandists stepped up to finger the obvious culprit. Laurie Mylroie explained to CNN, "it takes a highly sophisticated agency to produce anthrax in the lethal form. Not many parties can do that." Saddam Hussein "continues his part of the war in the form of terrorism. It is unlikely that that anthrax will remain in letters. It is likely that it will be used in the subway of a city, or in the ventilation system of a U.S. building. Saddam wants revenge against us. He wants to do to the U.S. what we've done to Iraq."

This cover story didn't hold up under the tension of scientific deduction, though. The true culprit - it emerged after Dr. Barbara Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists pestered the Bureau with facts and public exposure - was an obscure, right-wing biochemical warfare "counterterrorist," withal. The serial killer took his training at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland and other civilian-run, federal facilities, also a two-year fellowship from the National Research Council, the country's leading CBW defense lab. He moved on to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases - USAMRIID - at Fort Detrick. He experimented with biological responses to filoviridae, the family of viruses that transmit Ebola. In September 1999 - as the Jerry Hauer-SAIC-Fort Detrick-USAMRIID West Nile Virus was taking hold in New York - the terrorist began working at the very same lab.

By March of 2002, it was clear that the FBI was protecting him. Spokesmen for the Bureau were evasive about the source of the anthrax but it gradually emerged, by process of elimination and genetic analysis, that the culprit worked at the same classified USAMRIID facility in Maryland that employed Jerry "West Nile" Haurer.

CounterPunch commented a month later on geographic connections that bore directly on the case: "The South African media [have] been abuzz with details of that nation's former biological warfare program and its links to the CIA. The South African bio-chemical war program was code-named Project Coast and was centered at the Roodeplat Research Laboratories north of Pretoria. The lab maintained links to the US biowarfare facility at Fort Detrick and Britain's Porton Down Laboratory. The head of the South African program, Dr. Wouter Basson, was reportedly offered a job with the CIA in the United States after the fall of the apartheid regime. According to former South African National Intelligence Agency deputy director Michael Kennedy, when Basson refused the offer, the CIA allegedly threatened to kill him." The U.S. pressured President Mandela to relinquish Basson's research files and they were transported to Fort Detrick.1

The FBI pushed on with the investigation but withheld from public disclosure that the terrorist had worked with Wouter Basson in South Africa, and that he'd been a member of the South African Nazi Party.

But some of Hatfill's closest friends maintained his innocence. Stan Bedlington, a veteran CIA agent, told the Washington Post that he'd known Hatfill for several years: "They were drinking buddies who'd both been involved in anti-terrorism efforts long before the World Trade Center crumbled. Now, suddenly, people were saying that Hatfill could be responsible for the country's first case of domestic bioterrorism, a release of lethal anthrax through the mail that had left five people dead and 17 others infected in the fall of 2001."

Bedlington had fond memories of Hatfill, though he hadn't seen him for some time. They'd met at a Baltimore symposium on bioterrorism. Bedlington had spent six years bent over a senior analyst desk at the CIA's Counter-terrorism Center. Hatfill was a virologist at the U.S. Army-SAIC Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, "where he'd begun making a name for himself preaching the dangers of a bioterror attack. Soon they ran into each other again at Charley's Place in McLean, then a favorite hangout for the U.S. intelligence community." Hatfill "showed up there with men whom Bedlington recognized as bodyguards for Saudi Arabian Prince Bandar bin Sultan."2 [See Khashoggi, part II]

To respond to intrusive media, Hatfill's friend Pat Clawson served as spokesman. Clawson was a radio executive who worked with Iran-contra's Oliver North.

Clawson, reports the Baltimore Sun, was a "former CNN reporter who has known Hatfill socially for six years, said he and Hatfill are part of a group of friends who visited a house in the Virginia mountains near Shenandoah National Park in October for a weekend of skeet-shooting and socializing. The visit, in the middle of that month, came at the peak of anthrax hysteria, Clawson said. He told Hatfill that a few weeks earlier he had opened a vitriolic letter addressed to Oliver North, whose radio program is produced by Clawson's employer, Radio America. White powder had spilled from the envelope, which Clawson discarded"3

After Stephen J. Hatfill was named as the FBI's leading suspect, the same ultracon media opinion-shapers who had immediately blamed Saddam Hussein now hustled to Hatfill's defense. Rupert Murdoch's Evening Standard opined that his status as "interesting" to federal inevestigators "inspired a mini-industry of speculation that he may somehow be implicated in last fall's deadly anthrax attacks. [But] much of that speculation pretends to be something more: certainty of his guilt, and certainty that in every nook and cranny of his life must be found some blot or scar or mark of the devil that proves his guilt"4

A peek at a few of those nooks and crannies are proof of Hatfill's guilt:

• Bloodhounds found him of some interest after snuffling letter inside of
envelope put there by Hatfill, preserved in a hermetically-sealed bag. The
hounds responded to him alone.

• A return address on one of the anthrax-bearing envelopes was Greendale,
Rhodesia. Hatfill lived in Greendale.

• The neo-fascist Selous Scouts in Rhodesia spread anthrax. Hatfill was a
member of the Scouts at the time of the contagion's spread.

• Hatfill had no fit alibi for the days of the anthrax mailings.

• Hatfill's PhD was forged. He was caught lying on his resumé.

• He failed a CIA lie-detector test regarding his activities in Rhodesia
before the anthrax attacks. He failed a lie detector test afterward
concerning his involvement in them.

Some of most damaging evidence was discovered in ponds recently searched near his home. Items pulled from the mud included a clear box with insert holes for rubber gloves to protect someone working with toxic materials. Also recovered were glass vials in plastic wrap, and gloves.5

One wonders which expletive David Kay, the SAIC vice president and Hatfill's boss, whispered to himself the moment he heard that these items had been found not to mention a positive lab test for traces of anthrax FBI technicians detected on these objects, later changed to "inconclusive."6 But then, Kay was out of the country, conducting a WMD "search" of his own

NOTES

1) Wayne Madsen, "Anthrax And The Agency - Thinking The Unthinkable," CounterPunch.org, April 8, 2002.

2) David Tell, "The Hunting of Steven J. Hatfill: Why are so many people eager to believe that this man is the anthrax killer?' Evening Standard, vol. 8, no. 1, September 16, 2002.

3) Scott Shane, "FBI defends anthrax inquiry," Baltimore Sun, August 13, 2002.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-te.hatfill13aug13.story

4) Marilyn W. Thompson, 'The Pursuit of Steven Hatfill," Washington Post,September 14, 2003, p. W-6.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49717-2003Sep9?language=printer

5) See, The Biovangelist web site.
http://jdo.org/hatfill.htm

6) Ibid.

__________________________

Adnan Khashoggi Linked to 911 Terrorists

Part XXIII

NAZI & REPUBLICAN PARTY TIES TO THREE 911 HIJACKERS

By Alex Constantine

Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman al-Hussayen was in the thick of it, all right. On Sept. 10, 2001, three of the 911 hijackers stayed in same hotel as the Saudi "Minister for the Holy Places," England's Telegraph reported three years after the event: "A senior Saudi Arabian official stayed at the same hotel as three September 11 hijackers the night before the suicide attacks. American investigators are trying to make sense of the disclosure that Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman al-Hussayen, who returned to Saudi Arabia shortly after the attacks, stayed at the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia."

David Nevin, his nephew's American attorney, denied "any sinister aspects to the older man's travels.... Mr Hussayen became president of the affairs of the Holy Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, the two most sacred sites in Islam, five months after the attacks. Sources said he was already a prominent figure in the world of Saudi-funded charities." Hussayen was questioned by the FBI after the air commando operations that leveled the World Trade Center ... and he "feigned a seizure," quaking and choking and "prompting the agents to take him to a hospital, where the attending physicians found nothing wrong with him..."1

The agents suggested that the Saudi "epileptic" should be detained and questioned, but "as soon as flights resumed on Sept 19, Mr Hussayen and his wife flew home." Oops. The FBI later learned that while touring in the States, Sheikh Hussayen "visited or contacted several Saudi-sponsored charities now accused of links to terrorist groups."

Prosecutors later maintained that Hussayen had financed the Islamic Assembly of North America, accused of distributing "the teachings of two Saudi clerics who advocate violence against the United States. His nephew, Sami Omar Hussayen, a computer student, is in federal detention in Idaho on charges of visa fraud, accused of failing to disclose his role as an internet webmaster for IANA." Federal court filings alleged that the son "administered an internet site for IANA that expressly advocated suicide attacks and using airliners as weapons. IANA received about £2 million from abroad since 1995, court papers allege, including £60,000 from Saleh al-Hussayen."

Kim Lindquist, an assistant federal attorney assigned to the investigation of Hussayen in Boise, Idaho, said: "We're investigating the IANA. We have the money flowing to the IANA through the nephew from the uncle. We have the uncle visiting the United States just prior to September 11, and upon his return to the East Coast he's in the same hotel as the hijackers. According to FBI agents he feigns a seizure. It is something that we cannot ignore." Lindquist wanted to "take the extra step" of connecting Saudi rulers to the events of September 11, because the Sheik's journeys and contacts are seen as a road map' of how Saudi money has poured into the United States in support of Wahhabism, the puritanical and intolerant form of Islam backed by the Saudi royal family."2

A couple of weeks after this belated story on Hussayen appeared, the wire services reported that recently unsealed court documents exposed "a secretive group of Muslim charities and businesses in Northern Virginia [that] funneled millions of dollars to foreign terrorists - and the network was set up with donations from a wealthy (unnamed) Saudi family." An affidavit from Homeland Security's David Kane charged that the Safa Group in Herndon had pipelined "more than $26 million in untraceable money overseas and that leaders of the organization have committed and conspired to . . . provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations.' The probe of the Herndon groups is the largest federal investigation of terrorism financing in the world." There was no innocent explanation "for the use of layers and layers of transactions between Safa Group companies and charities other than to throw law enforcement authorities off the trail," Kane said.

Now, the express purpose of the Safa Group, "set up primarily with donations from a wealthy Saudi family, was to fund terrorism and hide millions of dollars." Kane insisted that the dizzying nature of "the myriad financial transactions and the fact that much of the money was sent to tax havens with bank secrecy laws make it impossible to trace the final destination of much of the money."3

But, once again, the trail going the other way, back to the source of terrorist funding. led to the District of Columbia.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

• "GOP heavyweight Grover Norquist, a former board member of the foundation," was a Safa apologist. Norquist "said the group is not political; rather it is focused on educational issues..."

• "The men have given more than $84,000 since 1990 to a variety of federal candidates and political groups, including $5,500 to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, a Michigan Republican, and $4,000 to former Rep. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a political watchdog group."

• "The main leaders of the Safa Group of companies include ... Taha Alalwani, a naturalized American citizen who runs an Islamic graduate school where nine of the 12 Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military have been trained."

• "Khaled Saffuri, head of the Washington-based Islamic Free Market Institute Foundation, was at the April 4 luncheon with the former treasury secretary.... Saffuri, who has met with many top-level administration officials in recent years, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and FBI Director Robert Mueller, is also listed in Federal Election Committee reports as the treasurer of National Muslims for a Greater America, a defunct political action committee that received $5,200 from people connected to the Safa Group investigation..."

• " ... the affidavit ties the Safa Group to Abdurahman M. Alamoudi, a politically connected Muslim activist, who was welcomed at the White House by former President Bill Clinton and President Bush for his work on behalf of Muslim causes. Alamoudi recently pleaded not guilty to an 18-count federal indictment alleging that he laundered money and violated immigration and customs laws by accepting $340,000 from the Libyan government, which the government considers a state sponsor of terrorism. The $84,000 in contributions came from several of the alleged principals of the Safa Group and Alamoudi..."4

The Guardian, on March 25, 2002, provided details of more "embarrassing" domestic political connections, offering this insight into the "epileptic" Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman al-Hussayen, the Safra Trust and 911:

------------------------
Guardian
FBI raids pro-Republicans
Duncan Campbell
March 25, 2002

The target of an anti-terrorist raid in the United States last week provided
funds for an Islamic group with close ties to the Republican party and the
White House. The Safa trust, a Saudi-backed charity, has provided funds for
a political group called the Islamic Institute, which was set up to mobilise
support for the Republican party. It shares an office in Washington with the
Republican activist Grover Norquist.

The institute, founded in 1999 to win influence in the Republican party, has
helped to arrange meetings between senior Bush officials and Islamic
leaders, according to the report in Newsweek magazine. Its s chairman,
Khaled Saffuri, and Mr Norquist cooperated to arrange the meetings.

The trust gave $20,000 (£14,000) to the institute, which also received
$20,000 from a board member of the Success Foundation, according to the
report. The institute has also received money from abroad, including$200,000
from Qatar and $55,000 from Kuwait. The institute says that none of the
money came with strings attached.

Mr Norquist, who is a member of the institute's board, said that it existed
"to promote democracy and free markets. Any effort to imply guilt by
association is incompetent McCarthyism". ...

-----------------

ALL OF THIS devolves back to mysterious Sheik al-Hussayen, the "epileptic" holy man and his room at the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia on December 10, 2001 ... and those three hijackers down the hall. Some would find this certain evidence of Saudi sponsorship of the 911 air assaults, and have (National Review and David Horowitz).

But not so fast ...

A little history of these particular Middle Eastern connections is enlightening. The Wall Street Journal reports: "Mr. Norquist started the nonprofit Islamic Free Market Institute. In collaboration with Mr. [Karl] Rove, now Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, he and other institute leaders courted Muslim voters for the Bush 2000 presidential campaign. Mr. Norquist even credits gains among Muslims with putting Mr. Bush in a position to win the critical Florida contest . . . To run the nonprofit's day-to-day operations, Mr. Norquist turned to Khalid Saffuri, a Palestinian-American raised in Kuwait who had been an official of the American Muslim Council, a political group in Washington. The institute's founding chairman was a Palestinian American, Talat Othman, who had served with Mr. Bush on the board of Harken Energy Corp. and later visited the president in the White House, according to records obtained by the National Security News Service."5

Talit Othman, we find in the same WSJ report, has been "a longtime associate and supporter of President Bush's family [who] gave a benediction at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in August 2000 . . . But he also serves [with Barzinji] on the board of Amana Mutual funds Trust, an investment firm founded by M. Yacub Mirza, the Northern Virginia businessman who set up most of the entities targeted by the Treasury and whose tax records were sought in the raid. Two nonprofits affiliated with Mr. Mirza and named in the search warrant, the SAAR Foundation Inc. [another title for Safa] and the Heritage Education Trust Inc., held large blocks of shares in Amana's mutual funds in 1997, according to SEC records. The SEC documents and other records detailing connections between Mr. Othman and the Islamic Institute [on the board of which Mr. Othman serves] and the raided groups were compiled by the National Security News Service, a Washington based nonprofit research group. Mr. Othman also is on the board of Mr. Saffuri's [and Norquist's] Islamic Institute, the GOP-leaning group that received $20,000.00 from the Safa Trust, one of the raid's targets. The president of the Safa Trust, Jamal Barzinji, is a former business associate of Switzerland based investor Youssef Nada [See Khashoggi, part XV], whose assets were frozen last fall after the Treasury designated him a person suspected of giving aid to terrorists."

A few words on these financial connections: Yousef Nada, Richard Lebeviere informs, was a Nazi collaborator during WW II: "... known to the Egyptian [intelligence] services, who have evidence of his membership in the armed branch of the fraternity of the Muslim Brothers in the 1940's. At that time, according to the same sources, he was working for the Abwehr under Admiral Canaris and took part in a plot against King Farouk ..."6

Talit Othman also had a history, as reported by the Chicago Tribune on August 10, 2003: "In 1990, media reports implied that Othman was a front man for [Abdullah Taha] Bakhsh, who had acquired a 17.6 percent stake in Harken Energy Corp. in the 1980s. Serving alongside Othman as a Harken corporate officer: then-presidential son George W. Bush."7

This, then, is the "shadowy network" behind the 911 hijackers and the "mysterious" Sheik at the Marriott Hotel in Herndon, VA. From one end of the terror pipeline to the other.

Speaking of where the hijackers spent the night on September 10, 2001, five others deserve mention: "One of the most bizarre ironies of all this is that five of the hijackers lived in a motel right outside the gates of the NSA
..." - BBC News, June 8, 2002.

As for the dangling connections to BCCI mentioned in the cites above ...

In December 1992, Senator John Kerry published a report - it's a virtual primal scream if you read between the lines - in the form of an interim statement on BCCI submitted to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and in it Kerry complained bitterly that the CIA had refused to cooperate with his investigation. Former CIA officials, including Richard Helms, and foreign intelligence officials, including Kamal Adham and Abdul Raouf Khalil, dragged their feet.

Principal foreign agents, "such as Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar, float in and out of BCCI at critical times in its history, and participate simultaneously in the making of key episodes in U.S. foreign policy, ranging from the Camp David peace talks to the arming of Iran as part of the Iran/Contra affair."

Agency officials claimed that they had no information on file regarding contact with the above, "raising questions about ... its candor with the Subcommittee. The CIA's professions of total ignorance about their respective roles in BCCI are out of character with the Agency's early knowledge of many critical aspects of the bank's operations, structure, personnel, and history."

Some of the information given to Kerry's subcommittee early on, he said, "was untrue." Subsequent information turned over by the CIA "was incomplete." And the Agency "resisted providing a full' account about its knowledge of BCCI until almost a year after the initial requests for the information.... The relationships among former CIA personnel and BCCI front men and nominees, including [Khashoggi partner] Kamal Adham, Abdul Khalil, and Mohammed Irvani, require further investigation..."


NOTES

1) See Telegraph, October 3, 2003.
http://www.unknownnews.net/031003911.html

2) Ibid.

3) "Terror Probe Points to Va. Muslims," October 17, 2003.
http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=8593

4) Eunice Moscoso and Rebecca Carr, "Targets of terror financing probe had political clout," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 2, 2003.

5) Tom Hamburger and Glenn R. Simpson, "In Difficult Times, Muslims Count On Unlikely Advocate" Wall Street Journal, undated.
http://www.spitfirelist.com/f415.html

6) Richard Labeviere, Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam, Algora, 2000, pp. 140-141.

7) Brian Grow, "Muslim financier pushes peace effort," Chicago Tribune, August 10, 2003, p. 1.

________________________

Adnan Khashoggi Linked to 911 Terrorists

Part XXII:

RICHARD PERLE'S "NARCO-TERRORIST" BUSINESS PARTNER

By Alex Constantine

The House hearings on Iran-contra culminated in 1987 with a report that deftly mentioned Richard Secord's plan to start up an enterprise of his own in the bulk manufacture of "opium alkaloids."1 This curious detail floated by without comment and eventually drowned in a flood of perjury and hot air. The committee didn't bother to follow up on that one. Better late than never to ask: "Opium alkaloids ... the base compound for the production of heroin?" It's doubtful we'll ever know the answer. And the explanation could be innocent, to be fair - Secord may have had a cure for peptic ulcers or sexual impotence ... but heroin would appear the likeliest explanation, given the cost of global conquest these days.

Even Adnan Khashoggi has financed wars with drug profits, the gist of a report written in 1991 at the Pentagon - declassified in July 2004 by the National Security Archives in Washington - of 104 "more important Colombian narco-terrorists contracted by the Colombian narcotic cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the U.S. and Colombia."

Pablo Escobar is on the list. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is also on it.

Uribe, according to the document, is a "Colombian politician and senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high government levels." He was "linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the U.S. His father was murdered in Colombia for his connection with the narcotic traffickers." He has "worked for the Medellin cartel," according to the DoD report, and "is a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar Gaviria.... He has participated in Escobar's political campaign to win the position of assistant parliamentarian to Jorge [Ortega]..."

Adam Isaacson, a scholar at the Center for International Policy (CIP) in Washington, cast doubt on the Pentagon's intelligence. After all, Isaacson figured, Adnan Khashoggi's name was on it, so the list must be in error...

But the National Security Archives responded that the document as "accurate and easily verifiable. It is evident that a significant amount of time and energy went into compiling this report."

Remember, the word used by the Pentagon to describe the traffickers listed in the report, including Khashoggi, was "narco-terrorist." So Richard Perle, assistant secretary of defense under Bush, a business partner of Khashoggi's at TriReme Corp., was in business with a narco-terrorist, according to the Pentagon's own records. But we'll get to Perle in time ...

President Uribe also denied the allegations regarding himself - not so easy to explain away, however, was the 1984 seizure of his father's helicopter by Colombian police on narcotics charges, or his brother's telephone number, stored in the memory bank of a cell phone belonging to Escobar.2

Ignoring the Pentagon's own intelligence on the narco-presidenté, President Bush paid Uribe a call in August 2003. Anti-war activist-reporter Jim Lobe reported: "The administration of President George W. Bush on Monday rallied behind Colombian President Alvaro Uribe in the face of allegations contained in a 13-year-old Pentagon intelligence report that he was a close personal friend' of drug lord Pablo Escobar and had worked for his Medellin drug cartel."

"We completely disavow these allegations about President Uribe," said State Department spokesman Adam Ereli. "We have no credible information that substantiates or corroborates these allegations that appeared in an unevaluated 1991 report, linking President Uribe to the narcotics business or trafficking."

Isaacson said, "It's something the left has been trying to pin on him for a while, and this gives them new ammunition." However, he acknowledged, "in the big picture, almost everybody in Colombia's ruling class was mixed up in drugs until [former U.S. President] Ronald Reagan declared war on drugs in the mid-1980s."3 Narcotics have fuelled the flames of revolution and regime change, political assassinations and bomb plots, the "war on drugs" notwithstanding.

Another drug runner in this underground empire was Henry Asher, founder of DataBase [See Khashoggi, part XI], the ChoicePoint appendage. In a report by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Asher admitted to smuggling drugs in 1982. Police developed "corroborating information" that "during 1981 and 1982, Asher piloted five to seven plane loads of cocaine from Colombia to the United States." Asher admitted that he had shown "a lack of judgment," according to the report. The remorseful millionaire cooperated with the FBI and agreed to be a federal "informant." He was freed and went on to set up a "total awareness" surveillance operation, but we'll come to that ...4

Another drug pilot on contra supply missions was Frank Moss who, according to the Kerry Report, "has been under investigation as an alleged drug trafficker since 1979." Moss has been investigated, although never indicted, for narcotics offenses by ten different law enforcement agencies. In addition to flying contra supply missions through SETCO, Moss formed his own company in 1985, Hondu Carib, which also flew supplies to the Contras, including weapons and ammunition purchased from R.M. Equipment, an arms company controlled by Ronald Martin and James McCoy. The FDN's arrangement with Moss and Hondu Carib was pursuant to a commercial agreement between the FDN's chief supply officer, Mario Calero, and Moss, under which Calero was to receive an ownership interest in Moss' company. The Subcommittee received documentation that one Moss plane, a DC-4, N90201, was used to move Contra goods from the United States to Honduras. On the basis of information alleging that the plane was being used for drug smuggling, the Customs Service obtained a court order to place a concealed transponder on the plane.

"A second DC-4 controlled by Moss was chased off the west coast of Florida by the Customs Service while it was dumping what appeared to be a load of drugs, according to law enforcement personnel. When the plane landed at Port Charlotte no drugs were found on board, but the plane's registration was not in order and its last known owners were drug traffickers. Law enforcement personnel also found an address book aboard the plane, containing among other references the telephone numbers of some Contra officials and the Virginia telephone number of Robert Owen, Oliver North's courier. A law enforcement inspection of the plane revealed the presence of significant marijuana residue. DEA seized the aircraft on March 16, 1987."5

Cable network opinion-shapers Ann Coulter and David Corn may insist that the CIA only "looked the other way" when its assets have been caught moving narcotics to finance assassinations, foreign coups, etc., but Khashoggi, Armitage and Asher weren't the only drug runners in the family.

William Casey, CIA director under Reagan, created several large off-the-shelf' networks to finance illicit covert operations. The first, dependent on opium profits, supported the Afghan Mujhaddin, with the CIA running funds through Pakistan's ISI and BCCI. The second channel, to support the Nicaraguan contra war, ran through BCCI, too. This channel also began with drug proceeds and ended in hot pockets of the Cold War. The same organizational chart - of CIA proxy armies funded by drug proceeds – was evident in KLA operations in Bosnia, complete with raping, pillaging, bomb-tossing al Qaeda radicals.6

As a result, these networks, according to Peter Dale Scott, "have all aligned the US on the same side as powerful local drug traffickers. Partly this has been from realpolitik - in recognition of the local power realities represented by the drug traffic. Partly it has been from the need to escape domestic political restraints: the traffickers have supplied additional financial resources needed because of US budgetary limitations, and they have also provided assets not bound (as the U.S. is) by the rules of war."

The impact of all this trafficking in junk, of course, is devastating. "These facts," Scott writes, "have led to enduring intelligence networks involving both oil and drugs, or more specifically both petrodollars and narcodollars. These networks, particularly in the Middle East, have become so important that they affect, not just the conduct of US foreign policy, but the health and behavior of the US government, US banks and corporations, and indeed the whole of US society."7

NOTES

1) Jefferson Morley, "Iran-Contra's Unasked Questions, or the Case of the $400,000 Hamburger," Los Angeles Times, November 29, 1987.

2) Jim Lobe, "Bush Rallies Behind Colombian President, Despite Drug Allegations," August 3, 2004.

3) Ibid.

4) Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, Jun 2003.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=hank+asher+and+cocaine+and+biography

5) "Selections from the Senate Committee Report on Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy," chaired by Senator John F. Kerry.
http://www.webcom.com/pinknoiz/covert/contracoke.html#fn39

6) See: Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War; John Cooley, Unholy Wars.

7) Peter Dale Scott, "Afghanistan, Colombia, Vietnam: The Deep Politics of Drugs and Oil,"
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/qov.html

_______________________