James Baker's Double Life

by Naomi Klein
November 1, 2004 issue

When President Bush appointed former Secretary of State James Baker III as his envoy on Iraq's debt on December 5, 2003, he called Baker's job "a noble mission." At the time, there was widespread concern about whether Baker's extensive business dealings in the Middle East would compromise that mission, which is to meet with heads of state and persuade them to forgive the debts owed to them by Iraq. Of particular concern was his relationship with merchant bank and defense contractor the Carlyle Group, where Baker is senior counselor and an equity partner with an estimated $180 million stake.

Until now, there has been no concrete evidence that Baker's loyalties are split, or that his power as Special Presidential Envoy—an unpaid position--has been used to benefit any of his corporate clients or employers. But according to documents obtained by The Nation, that is precisely what has happened. Carlyle has sought to secure an extraordinary $1 billion investment from the Kuwaiti government, with Baker's influence as debt envoy being used as a crucial lever.

The secret deal involves a complex transaction to transfer ownership of as much as $57 billion in unpaid Iraqi debts. The debts, now owed to the government of Kuwait, would be assigned to a foundation created and controlled by a consortium in which the key players are the Carlyle Group, the Albright Group (headed by another former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright) and several other well-connected firms. Under the deal, the government of Kuwait would also give the consortium $2 billion up front to invest in a private equity fund devised by the consortium, with half of it going to Carlyle.

The Nation has obtained a copy of the confidential sixty-five-page "Proposal to Assist the Government of Kuwait in Protecting and Realizing Claims Against Iraq," sent in January from the consortium to Kuwait's foreign ministry, as well as letters back and forth between the two parties. In a letter dated August 6, 2004, the consortium informed Kuwait's foreign ministry that the country's unpaid debts from Iraq "are in imminent jeopardy." World opinion is turning in favor of debt forgiveness, another letter warned, as evidenced by "President Bush's appointment...of former Secretary of State James Baker as his envoy to negotiate Iraqi debt relief." The consortium's proposal spells out the threat: Not only is Kuwait unlikely to see any of its $30 billion from Iraq in sovereign debt, but the $27 billion in war reparations that Iraq owes to Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion "may well be a casualty of this U.S. [debt relief] effort."

In the face of this threat, the consortium offers its services. Its roster of former high-level US and European politicians have "personal rapport with the stakeholders in the anticipated negotiations" and are able to "reach key decision-makers in the United Nations and in key capitals," the proposal states. If Kuwait agrees to transfer the debts to the consortium's foundation, the consortium will use these personal connections to persuade world leaders that Iraq must "maximize" its debt payments to Kuwait, which would be able to collect the money after ten to fifteen years. And the more the consortium gets Iraq to pay during that period, the more Kuwait collects, with the consortium taking a 5 percent commission or more.

The goal of maximizing Iraq's debt payments directly contradicts the US foreign policy aim of drastically reducing Iraq's debt burden. According to Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and a leading expert on government ethics and regulations, this means that Baker is in a "classic conflict of interest. Baker is on two sides of this transaction: He is supposed to be representing the interests of the United States, but he is also a senior counselor at Carlyle, and Carlyle wants to get paid to help Kuwait recover its debts from Iraq." After examining the documents, Clark called them "extraordinary." She said, "Carlyle and the other companies are exploiting Baker's current position to try to land a deal with Kuwait that would undermine the interests of the US government."

The Nation also showed the documents to Jerome Levinson, an international lawyer and expert on political and corporate corruption at American University. He called it "one of the greatest cons of all time. The consortium is saying to the Kuwaiti government, 'Through us, you have the only chance to realize a substantial part of the debt. Why? Because of who we are and who we know.' It's influence peddling of the crassest kind."

In the confidential documents, the consortium appears acutely aware of the sensitivity of Baker's position as Carlyle partner and debt envoy. Immediately after listing the powerful players associated with Carlyle--including former President George H.W. Bush, former British prime minister John Major and Baker himself--the document states: "The extent to which these individuals can play an instrumental role in fashioning strategies is now more limited...due to the recent appointment of Secretary Baker as the President's envoy on international debt, and the need to avoid an apparent conflict of interest." [Emphasis in original.] Yet it goes on to state that this will soon change: "We believe that with Secretary Baker's retirement from his temporary position [as debt envoy], that Carlyle and those leading individuals associated with Carlyle will then once again be free to play a more decisive role..."

Chris Ullman, vice president and spokesperson for Carlyle, said that "neither the Carlyle Group nor James Baker wrote, edited or authorized this proposal to the Kuwait government." But he acknowledged that Carlyle knew a proposal was being made to the government of Kuwait and that Carlyle stood to land a $1 billion investment. "We were aware of that. But we played no role in procuring that investment."

Asked if Carlyle was "willing to take the billion but not to try to get it," Ullman answered, "Correct."

Iraq is the most heavily indebted country in the world, owing roughly $200 billion in sovereign debts and in reparations from Saddam's wars. If Iraq were forced to pay even a quarter of these claims, its debt would still be more than double its annual GDP, severely undermining its capacity to pay for reconstruction or to address the humanitarian needs of its war-ravaged citizens. "This debt endangers Iraq's long-term prospects for political health and economic prosperity," President Bush said when he appointed Baker last December.

But critics expressed grave concern about whether Baker was an appropriate choice for such a crucial job. For instance, one of Iraq's largest creditors is the government of Saudi Arabia. The Carlyle Group does extensive business with the Saudi royal family, as does Baker's law firm, Baker Botts (which is currently defending them in a $1 trillion lawsuit filed by the families of September 11 victims). The New York Times determined that the potential conflicts of interest were so great that on December 12 it published an editorial calling on Baker to resign his posts at the Carlyle Group and Baker Botts to preserve the integrity of the envoy position.

"Mr. Baker is far too tangled in a matrix of lucrative private business relationships that leave him looking like a potentially interested party in any debt-restructuring formula," stated the editorial. It concluded that it wasn't enough for Baker to "forgo earnings from clients with obvious connections to Iraqi debts.... To perform honorably in his new public job, Mr. Baker must give up these two private ones."

The White House brushed off calls for Baker to choose between representing the President and representing Carlyle investors. "I don't read those editorials," President Bush said when asked by a reporter about the Times piece. Bush assured reporters that "Jim Baker is a man of high integrity.... We're fortunate he decided to take time out of what is an active life...to step forward and serve America." Carlyle was equally adamant: Chris Ullman assured a Knight-Ridder reporter that Baker's post "will have no impact on Carlyle whatsoever."

In fact, several months earlier, on July 16, 2003, Carlyle had attended a high-level London meeting with Kuwaiti officials about the deal. According to the document, the Kuwaitis asked Carlyle and the other consortium members to "prepare a detailed financial proposal for the protection and monetization" of reparation debts from Iraq. But at the time Baker was appointed envoy, the consortium had not yet submitted its proposed plans to Kuwait. That means that the Carlyle Group could have pulled out of the consortium, citing the potential conflicts of interest. Instead, Carlyle stayed on, and the consortium proceeded to use Baker's powerful new position to aggressively pitch a deal that positioned the consortium as the Kuwaiti government's chief lobbyist on Iraq's debts and that gave Carlyle a clear
stake in the fate of Iraq's debts.

However, several changes were made in the way the consortium presented itself. The documents state, "Prior to [Baker's] appointment [former US Secretary of Defense Frank] Carlucci had played a convening and guiding role on behalf of Carlyle." But after the appointment, according to Carlyle's Chris Ullman, the firm's role was scaled back. "When James Baker was named special envoy...Carlyle explicitly restricted its role to only investing assets on behalf of Kuwait." Shahameen Sheikh, chairman and CEO of International Strategy Group, a company created by the consortium to manage this deal, said that Carlyle told her that "they are not a lobbying firm." Days before Baker's appointment, the consortium reached out to another high-profile Washington firm, the Albright Group, which eventually signed on as the leading political strategists and lobbyists for the consortium.

Moreover, Ullman said that Carlyle put "controls in place" that would insure that Baker "would play no role in nor benefit from" the proposed $1 billion investment--an amount that would constitute nearly 10 percent of Carlyle's total equity investments.

But it's not clear that Carlyle has been straightforward about its dealings so far. The day before Baker's appointment was announced, John Harris, managing director and chief financial officer of Carlyle, submitted a signed statement to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. "Carlyle does not have any investment in Iraqi public or private debt," he wrote. He didn't mention that Carlyle had for months been in negotiations with Kuwait to help secure its unpaid war debts from Iraq. Asked if the White House had been informed of the Carlyle Group's dealings with Kuwait at any point, Ullman replied, "I'll get back to you on that." He did not.

According to Kathleen Clark, it is unclear whether Baker is complying with the criminal statute and administrative regulations that prohibit government officials from participating in government business in which they have a financial interest-including matters that affect an outside company that employs the official. Clark notes, "even if Baker is somehow being screened from profiting from this deal, Carlyle is using Baker's government position to benefit themselves." She says it's time for Carlyle and the White House to come clean. "There's a tremendous need for transparency here." The White House and James Baker's office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Baker occupies a complicated place in the consortium's January proposal--he is both problem and solution, stick and carrot. In the documents, Baker's name comes up repeatedly, usually in tones of high alarm. "Mr. Baker's new role and the likely emergence of what will be understood as a new round of global negotiations over Iraqi debt--casts all of these issues in a new light and gives them a new, perhaps even intense, sense of urgency," states a letter signed by Madeleine Albright; David Huebner, chairman of the Coudert Brothers law firm (another consortium member); and Shahameen Sheikh.

But after establishing Baker's envoy job as the embodiment of the threat that Kuwait will lose its reparations payments, the proposal goes on at length about the powerful individuals connected to the consortium who will "have the ability to gain access to the highest levels of the United States Government and other Security Council governments for a hearing of Kuwait's views." According to Levinson, "What they are proposing is to completely undercut Baker's mission--and they are using their connection with Baker to do it."

On January 21, 2004, James Baker's dual lives converged. That morning Baker flew to Kuwait as George Bush's debt envoy. He met with Kuwait's prime minister, its foreign minister and several other top officials with the stated goal of asking them to forgive Iraq's debts in the name of regional peace and prosperity.

Baker's colleagues in the consortium chose that very same day to hand-deliver their proposal to Foreign Minister Mohammad Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah--the same man Baker was meeting. The proposal "takes into account the new dynamics that have developed in the region," states the cover letter, signed by Albright, Huebner and Sheikh--dynamics that include "Secretary Baker's negotiations" on debt relief. If Kuwait accepts the consortium's offer, they explain, "we will distinguish Kuwait's claims--legally and morally--from the sovereign debt for which the United States is now seeking forgiveness."

Was it a coincidence that the consortium submitted its proposal on the same day Baker was in Kuwait? And which James Baker were Kuwait's leaders supposed to take more seriously--the presidential envoy calling for debt forgiveness or the businessman named in the proposal as a potential ally in their quest for debt payment?

Ahamed al-Fahad, under secretary to the prime minister of Kuwait, told The Nation, "I have seen it [the proposal] and I am fully aware of the situation." But when asked about Baker's dual role in Kuwait, he said, "It's hard to comment on that issue, especially now. I hope you fully understand."

Shahameen Sheikh, the consortium head who made the delivery, says the timing was a coincidence. "It had nothing to do with Mr. Baker's visit.... I was in the region so I thought I would stop over on the way to Europe and deliver the proposal."

We do know this: After meeting with Baker on January 21, Kuwait's foreign minister told reporters that Baker had shown
"understanding of Kuwait's position on war reparations," confirming that the subject did come up. He also said that while sovereign debt might be forgiven, reparations would not, because "there is an international decision from the UN."

Three days later, when Baker was back in Washington giving a speech, he made this distinction for the first time. "My job is to deal with Iraqi debt to sovereign creditors, not with war reparations," he said. He also echoed the exact line of the Kuwaiti government: that reparations are outside his purview because they are "under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Security Council and subject to resolutions it has passed."

This was a curious statement: Why would such a large portion of Iraq's debts be off the table? It also seemed to contradict other things Baker said in the same speech. He said that "any reduction [in Iraq's debt] must be substantial, or a vast majority of the total debt." That is impossible without addressing reparations, which by some measures account for more than half of Iraq's foreign debts. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, the center-right think tank hosting Baker's speech, has said it is "unwise" to make any debt relief plan "that does not include reparations."

Baker's statement on reparations also placed him at odds with several other members of the Bush Administration, including former chief envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer. "I think there needs to be a very serious look at this whole reparations issue," Bremer said in September 2003. He compared the Iraq situation to that of Germany after World War I, when the 1921 Reparations Commission forced the Weimar Republic to pay $33 billion. The massive reparations "contributed directly to the morass of unrest, instability and despair which led to Adolf Hitler's election," Bremer warned.

Yet Iraq continues to make regular reparations payments for Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In the eighteen months since the US invasion, Iraq has paid out a staggering $1.8 billion in reparations--substantially more than the battered country's 2004 health and education budgets combined, and more than the United States has so far managed to spend in Iraq on reconstruction.

Most of the payments have gone to Kuwait, a country that is about to post its sixth consecutive budget surplus, where citizens have an average purchasing power of $19,000 a year. Iraqis, by contrast, are living on an average of just over $2 a day, with most of the population dependent on food rations for basic nutrition. Yet reparations payments continue, with Iraq scheduled to make another $200 million payout in late October.

This arrangement dates back to the end of the first Gulf War. As a condition of the cease-fire, Saddam Hussein agreed to pay for all losses incurred as a result of his invasion and seven-month occupation of Kuwait. Payments started flowing in 1994 and sped up in 1996, with the start of the UN's oil-for-food program. According to UN Security Council Resolution 986, which created the program, Iraq could begin to export oil as long as the revenue was spent on food and medicine imports, and as long as 30 percent of Iraq's oil revenues went to the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), the Geneva-based quasi-tribunal in charge of Gulf War reparations.

Some of the claims that have been awarded by the UNCC are huge: the cost of cleaning up Kuwait's and Saudi Arabia's coastlines from oil spills and fires, or the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation's controversial award for $15.9 billion in lost oil revenues. So far, the UNCC has paid out $18.6 billion in war reparations and has awarded an additional $30 billion that has not been paid because of Iraq's shortage of funds. There are still $98 billion worth of claims before the UNCC that have yet to be assessed, so these numbers could rise steeply. That's why there are no accurate estimates of how much Iraq owes in war reparations--the figure ranges from $50 billion to $130 billion.

But the fate of these debts is now highly uncertain. On May 22, 2003--two months after the United States invaded Iraq--the Security Council decided to cut the percentage of Iraqi oil revenues going to war reparations to 5 percent. This past May, an Iraqi delegation went to the UN to ask for the percentage to be reduced even further, to accommodate Iraq's own reconstruction needs. There is growing sympathy for this position. Justin Alexander of the debt relief group Jubilee Iraq says that many of the claims before the UNCC are inflated and that "even for genuine claims, this is Saddam's responsibility, not the Iraqi people's, who themselves suffered
far more than anyone."

This is where the Carlyle/Albright consortium comes in. The premise of its proposal is that Iraq's unpaid debts to Kuwait are not just a financial problem but a political and public relations problem as well. Global public opinion is no longer what it was when Kuwait was promised full reparations. Now the world is focused on reconstructing Iraq and forgiving its debts. If Kuwait is going to get its reparations awards, the cover letter argues, it will need to recast them not as a burden on Iraq but "as a key element in working toward regional stability and reconciliation."

Several parties involved in the consortium emphasized that the proposal concerned only reparations debts. Albright Group spokesperson Jamie Smith said, "We were asked to join a proposal to secure justice for victims of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and ensure that compensation to Kuwaiti victims--which was endorsed by the US government and the United Nations--be used to promote reconciliation, environmental improvements and investment in Kuwait, Iraq and the region."

In fact, the proposal does not restrict itself to reparations debt. The consortium also asks the government of Kuwait to give the consortium control over $30 billion in defaulted sovereign debts to be used as political leverage to secure reparations claims.

Furthermore, most experts on debt restructuring agree that Iraq's debts must be looked at as a whole: There is little point forgiving Iraq's sovereign debts if the country is still going to be saddled with an unmanageable reparations burden. This understanding is reflected in the documents, which repeatedly state that Kuwait's reparations payments are endangered by the moves to forgive Iraq's debts.

To avert this threat to Kuwait, the consortium proposes a three-pronged strategy of aggressive backroom lobbying, clever public relations and creative investing and financing. "Any solution for payment of the Unpaid Awards...must be politically sellable as reinforcing stability and growth in the Gulf and in Iraq. This Proposal provides the strategy, the architecture, and the talent to achieve this goal," the document states.

Lobbying: Since the UNCC exists entirely at the discretion of the Security Council, which can vote to reduce, suspend or eliminate reparations at any time, the part of the proposal dealing with power-brokering is straightforward: It suggests a full-on lobbying offensive directed at Security Council members, using Albright's connections, but also other "eminent" people associated with the consortium like former US Senator Gary Hart and former US ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick. "We will first seek to preserve the five percent of the revenues from Iraqi oil allocated as funding for payment of the UNCC awards," the proposal says. To achieve this, the consortium will make "discreet contacts at top levels in key capitals of Security Council member states and with influential representatives," and "interventions with United Nations senior staff to shape presentations to the Security Council." The proposal further notes that "Germany and Romania may be pivotal, and The Albright Group has very close ties to each."

Public Relations: The consortium also has a detailed plan to address the perception that reparations are "diverting resources from rebuilding Iraq to a more wealthy neighbor." First, Kuwait must assign its unpaid debts from Iraq to a private foundation controlled by the consortium. The foundation will manage an investment fund that will invest a portion of reparations payments from Iraq to Kuwait back into Iraq. As examples of the types of investments the foundation would make, Albright, Huebner and Sheikh suggest in their letter that the reparations funds could be used to buy Iraq's state-owned companies. "In the near future, 40 state-owned Iraqi enterprises in a range of sectors will be available for leasing and management contracts," they write. By demonstrating that Kuwait is investing part of its reparations proceeds back into Iraq's economy, the consortium-run foundation "establishes a humanitarian rationale for the United States and other countries to continue their support" for the reparations. The consortium appears to see
privatization--a highly controversial proposal in Iraq--as part of a humanitarian mission.

The proposal also suggests more direct public relations strategies. It calls for Kuwait to dedicate $1 billion of the reparations awards it has already been paid by the UNCC to a Kuwait Environmental Restoration Fund, which the consortium would create. The purpose of this fund would be to remind the world of "the gravity of the environmental legacy facing Kuwait" and to "position Kuwait as the region's environmental leader." The fund would be headed by Carol Browner, former head of the US Environmental Protection Agency and a principal in the Albright Group.

Investment/Financing: The proposal predicts that on their own, lobbying and PR will not be sufficient to secure the amounts that the Kuwaiti government hopes to receive in reparations. For the consortium to "maximize the value of Kuwait's compensation," Kuwait will have to part with even more of the reparations payments it has received. In addition to the $1 billion for the environmental fund, the proposal calls for another $2 billion of Kuwaiti money to be invested in a Middle East Private Equity Fund. Of that $2 billion, "$1 billion would be invested, by way of special agreement, in The Carlyle Group equity funds" for a period of at least twelve to fifteen years. At the end of that period Kuwait will get the return on these investments, as well as whatever the consortium has been able to negotiate
in reparations payments.

For the consortium, it is an excellent deal: Its members get to manage a $2 billion investment portfolio, collecting healthy management fees as well as a percentage of interest. They also will be paid a "retainer" and 5 percent of any debts the consortium gets repaid, and "a negotiated percentage of the value returned to Kuwait exceeding" the pre-arranged amount.

Other consortium members sharing in these benefits include Fidelity Investments; BNP Paribas, a European bank embroiled in the oil-for-food scandal; Gaffney, Cline & Associates, an energy company specializing in oil and gas privatization; Nexgen Financial Solutions, a financial engineering firm partly owned by the government of France; and Emerging Markets Partnership, an AIG affiliate headed by a former senior vice president of the World Bank, Moeen Qureshi.

In addition to the financial windfall, the arrangement would give this group of private companies tremendous power. Whoever holds Iraq's debt has the ability to influence policy in Iraq at a moment of extreme political uncertainty. Yet for the government of Kuwait the proposed deal is fraught with risk. It's true that the fate of its Iraqi reparations looks grim. The consortium estimated that if Kuwait tried to sell those debts on the market, its $27 billion would be worth only $1.5 billion. But the consortium is asking Kuwait to risk $3 billion of reparations money it has already received in the hope that it can be used to leverage some of the rest. However, as Jerome Levinson points out, "There are absolutely no guarantees of even that."

It is clear that the consortium is extremely eager to seal a deal with Kuwait. Consortium CEO Shahameen Sheikh writes of making five trips to Kuwait in four months; Albright met with Kuwait's foreign minister about the issue on April 2, 2004; and the Albright Group's Carol Browner is reported to have "personally delivered a copy" of the proposal to his hotel when he was in Washington. Yet Kuwait appears reluctant: It took four months to reply to the proposal and then it would only say, in a letter dated August 10, that the proposal "will be taken into deep consideration and is currently being studied by the appropriate authorities." According to Ahamed al-Fahad, "The issue is now in the hands of the under secretary of foreign affairs," who was unavailable for comment. But Salem Abdullah al Jaber al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the United States, said, "As far as my information is concerned, my government is not considering such proposals."

Even if the deal falls through, the fact that the Carlyle Group and the Albright Group have been engaged in these negotiations may already have damaged debt relief efforts, hurting both Iraqi and US interests. Levinson points out that the Bush Administration has made commitments that Iraq's oil revenues will be spent on reconstruction. Yet the failure to deal with the reparations issue means that "part of those resources instead are being diverted to Kuwait. Who pays for this? It's the people of Iraq who continue to make reparations payments, and it's US taxpayers, who are asked to foot the bill for reconstruction, because Iraq's money is going to debt payments."

Levinson says this is all the more remarkable because of who is involved. "Here you have two former Secretaries of State seemingly proposing to use their contacts and inside information to undercut the official US government policy." Washington University's Kathleen Clark says the proposal "lays bare how former high-level government employees use their access in order to reap financial benefits that appear to be enormous."

A case can certainly be made that James Baker and Madeleine Albright have had more direct influence over Iraq's debts and reparations payments than any politicians outside Iraq, with the possible exception of the forty-first and forty-third Presidents of the United States.

As Secretary of State, Baker played a role in running up Iraq's foreign debts in the first place, personally intervening in 1989 to secure a $1 billion US loan to Saddam Hussein in export credits. He was also a key architect of the first Gulf War, as well as of the cease-fire that required Saddam to pay such sweeping reparations. In his 1995 memoirs, The Politics of Diplomacy, Baker wrote that after seeing the oil-well fires in Kuwait he cabled President George H.W. Bush and said, "Iraq should pay for it." Now, through the consortium, Carlyle could end up controlling $1 billion of those payments.

The role of the Albright Group raises similar questions. As Secretary of State and Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright participated personally in drafting UN Resolution 986, which created the oil-for-food program, diverting 30 percent of Iraq's revenue from oil sales to war reparations. "It's a great day for the United States because we were the authors of Resolution 986," she said on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer on May 20, 1996. Now, as a private citizen, Albright is a leading member of a consortium that is exploiting her connections to try to profit from the very reparations she helped secure. Albright also enforced the brutal sanctions campaign against Iraq, one of the effects of which was the hobbling of Iraq's state companies. Now, she is part of a plan to use Iraq's reparations payments to buy the very firms that her sanctions program helped to debilitate.

But it is Baker's envoy post that raises the most serious questions for the White House, especially because a Special Presidential Envoy is the President's personal representative, meeting with heads of state in the President's stead and reporting back directly to the President. If a President's envoy has a conflict of interest, it reflects directly on the highest office. Clark says, "There is absolutely a conflict of interest. Baker is aligned with two parties--the US government and Carlyle--that are not aligned with each other."

As envoy, Baker's job is to do his best to clear away Iraq's debts, lessening the burden on Iraqis and on US taxpayers. Yet as a businessman, he is an equity partner in a company that is part of a deal that would achieve the opposite result. If Baker the envoy succeeds, Baker's business partners stand to fail--and vice versa.

Have these conflicts influenced Baker's performance as envoy? Has he pushed as hard as he could have for debt forgiveness? We know that Iraq's steep war reparations to Kuwait have largely escaped public scrutiny--if Baker has steered the Bush Administration away from the reparations issue, for whom was he working at the time? The White House? Or Carlyle? Clark says questions like these are precisely why conflict-of-interest regulations exist. "We have reason to doubt that Baker is doing everything he could be doing on behalf of the United States because he has an interest in another side of the transaction."

This issue is all the more pressing because the file that President Bush handed to Baker is in disarray--ten months on, there is significantly less goodwill toward forgiving Iraq's debt than when Baker arrived. When President Bush appointed him, he praised Baker's "vast economic, political and diplomatic experience." And at first, Baker seemed to be making fast progress: After top-level meetings, France, Russia and Germany appeared open to canceling a large proportion of debt owed to them by Iraq, and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait seemed ready to follow.

But now, the negotiations are not only stalled, they seem to be going backward. Kuwait, for its part, has hardened its position. "Debts remain debts," Foreign Minister Mohammad Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah said recently. And it has intensified its demands for Gulf War reparations, joining with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan and Syria to claim an additional $82 billion from Iraq in environmental damages.

And the Europeans? At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on September 15, Senator Joseph Biden Jr. asked Ronald Schlicher, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq, about the status of the international negotiations.

"Has a single nation in the G8...formally said or requested of their parliaments to forgive Iraqi debt?" Biden asked.

"Not yet. No sir," Schlicher replied.

Not only has Baker failed to deliver any firm commitments for debt forgiveness; at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund on October 2, it emerged that France had done an end run around Washington and was pushing a debt-relief deal of its own. French Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he had lined up Russia, Germany and Italy behind a plan to cancel only 50 percent of Iraq's debts--a far cry from the 90-95 percent cancellation Washington had been demanding. Yet Baker was nowhere to be found.

Busy negotiating the rules of the presidential debates, Baker has been MIA on the debt issue. Since he returned from his trip to the Middle East in January, the President's envoy has issued only two public statements on Iraq's debt, and he has been completely silent on the topic for the past six months--despite having publicly committed to getting the debt issue sewn up by the end of the year.

While this is bad news for Iraqis and for US taxpayers, it could be good news for Carlyle. A swift resolution to Iraq's debt crisis works against its financial interest: The longer the negotiations drag on, the more time the consortium has to convince the reluctant Kuwaiti government to sign on the dotted line. But if Iraq's debt is successfully wiped out, any proposed deal is off the table.

Baker's position as envoy has certainly been useful to his colleagues in the consortium. Whether Baker has helped solve Iraq's debt crisis is far less clear.

Source:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041101&s=klein

____________________

THE SINISTER AGENDA BEHIND AMERICA'S HIGH ILLITERACY

By Debbie O'Hara
October 5, 2004
NewsWithViews.com

According to the findings of a local area study, the "Los Angeles Daily News" reported that "53 percent of workers ages 16 and older were deemed functionally illiterate". It was found that "More than half of the working-age population can't read a simple form". LA Mayor, James Hahn, was quoted stating "it's an emergency situation" that could jeopardize our economy. The report blames "immigration" and a "stubborn high school dropout rate" as the culprits, but do the facts bear this out?

If the cause of our high illiteracy rate is "immigration" and "high school drop-outs" (kids don't learn to read until high school? What did they do for the first 8 or 9 years?), how is it that millions of children, who are born in the U.S. and do complete high school, still can't read their own diplomas?

If we really want to know the truth behind the illiteracy crisis, we need to uncover the intended purpose behind the new "reading" programs that were introduced into American schools in the last few decades. We also need to discover the goals of those who were and still are promoting these programs. In so doing, a quite different and more sinister picture will begin to emerge as to why America's children can't read.

A most interesting fact of history is that Americans were probably the most literate people in the world before the advent of government schools and compulsory school attendance. Since the U.S. was already highly literate when parents were allowed complete freedom in educating their children, the reason behind compulsory attendance obviously had nothing to do with academics. Neither was the problem one of economics, as there was not a shortage of charity schools. If the purpose was not one of academics or to help poor children receive an education, what was the intent behind the push for government schools and more importantly, compulsory attendance laws? This is an urgent question that begs an honest answer because with ever increasing government controls and compulsory attendance, American literacy rates have steadily plummeted. With the billions of dollars spent on education can this really be an accident?

In my recent column, "Socialism - A Con Game of the Economic Elite", I mentioned the wealthy power-hungry socialists who control both major political parties and have been working behind the scenes of government for decades now to change America from a God-fearing free country to atheistic socialism. Such a change called for radically altering American culture. How does one go about altering a culture? Through control of education of course.

Altering a culture makes it necessary to erase a nation's true history and replace it with "politically correct" thought. All teaching of the biblical God who demands individual responsibility must cease. The value of each individual must be discarded for the benefit of "community". Intelligence is a hindrance to socialist ideals. Cooperation is the goal, not truth or facts. Children are to learn to be much more "social", not intellectual. Independent intelligence stands in the way of the socialist "utopia" dreamed of by the wealthy elites who really run our government.


In his 1932 book "Toward Soviet America", William Z. Foster, head of the Communist Party, USA, stated, "Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: schools, colleges, and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic, and other features of the bourgeoisie ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxist dialectical materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new socialist society."

We can see that America has fulfilled Foster's socialist/communist objectives of a National Department of Education and in revolutionizing her schools into the Marxist philosophy of atheism and socialism. The fulfillment of these goals was brought about by a carefully crafted dumbing-down process that has brought about a nation of "functional illiterates".

Introducing new "reading" programs into American schools was a major part of this dumbing-down process to bring about socialism. John Dewey, often known as the father of modern education, was one of many socialists whose mission it was to bring about a socialist society through the educational system. Ignoring thousands of years of human history that show us that language is the tool of learning, Dewey stated in "My Pedagogic Creed", "I believe that the image is the great instrument of instruction."[1] Dewey's great "genius" was taken into account in the Scott Foresman "Dick and Jane" books that used pictures with few words. There was a great push to get rid of the old phonics method and to get "look-say" like "Dick and Jane" textbooks into every classroom in the nation. Dewey knew that the new teaching methods would produce inferior readers, but the instruction he wanted children to receive wouldn't come about if they were intellectuals.

He knew that high literacy was an obstacle to his dream of socialism because a person able to gain his own knowledge independently would learn to exercise his own judgment and authority. Dewey wanted the average American to have to rely on a socialist education elite for guidance and wisdom.

So what were the results after the introduction of the 1930 first edition of the look-say "Dick and Jane" books? Within five years of the advent of these primers, they became the dominant "reading" textbook in our nation's classrooms. During that same time period, there was a myriad of documented reading disabilities that were described as a "whole new syndrome".[2]

In April 1935 an article, written by foremost reading authority, William Scott Gray, was published in the "Elementary English Review", noting numerous reading disabilities that were never noted before: mental deficiency, defective vision, auditory deficiencies, congenital word blindness, developmental alexia, congenital aphasia, dyslexia, congenital alexia, strephosymbolia, cerebral dominance, handedness, eyedness, ambidexterity, emotional instability, etc.[3]

Dumbing America down through the "look-say" method went beyond the wildest dreams of its socialist promoters! Before the introduction of "look-say" methods, there were no "reading disabled" children.

Organically caused dyslexia was so rare before the advent of these methods that most people had never heard of it. Even children who were not very bright or were culturally disadvantaged still learned how to read. Today, even many very bright children are "functionally illiterate" after 13 years of being government schooled. And most schools are still using the "look-say" method! Why would this be?

The only possible answer is that functional illiteracy is the goal. Children learn in school what they need to know to "function" in a socialist society, but are not literate enough to gain the knowledge they would need to escape it. Socialism must be really great if they need to dumb us down in order to get us to quietly accept it. The socialist elites need us stupid so that we have no alternative to their socialist propaganda. Socialism has to be sold to us through emotion. It cannot withstand intellectual scrutiny.

The fact that most Christian parents still send their children to these atheistic government schools is a real tragedy. While some children have managed to learn how to read in spite of these so called "reading" programs, they have not been able to escape the atheistic (which is actually becoming pantheistic) socialist indoctrination.

For those who have had the insight to get their children out of the government school system and to either homeschool or send their children to private Christian schools, they still need to realize the dangers they face. Compulsory attendance laws are a great threat to freedom in education. These laws are what give the socialists the excuse to "oversee' your schooling methods. If not stopped, it will be through these compulsory laws that ALL education will be brought into line with the socialist propaganda. NO ONE is to escape this system. Notice that the new "No Child Left Behind" school bill signed by President Bush says NO CHILD, and these socialists do mean business.

There are many states that already have laws that regulate private schools. While many have not been willing to impose those laws on church schools, there have been exceptions. Though it is a violation of the Constitution for government to regulate religion (it is also unconstitutional for the Feds to be involved in education at all), Nebraska regulates church schools that accept NO government money. Maybe at this time it is not a problem in your state, but what is going to prevent it from happening? The socialists will not let the Constitution get in their way of controlling ALL education. We can have no doubt that this usurpation of parental rights by the socialists will continue unabated all over the United States if we do not demand that compulsory school attendance laws be rescinded.

The functional illiteracy that LA Mayor James Hahn has called an "emergency situation" is happening all across the country, not just in Los Angeles. It is a monumental crisis that has been intentionally created by the socialists running our government schools in order to bring about a "new socialist society". It will be a society of anti-intellectuals unable to govern themselves and forced to pay homage to a socialist government that will control all human activity through its control of all basic human needs like jobs, education, housing, food, medical care and even water.

It is imperative that we get government out of the education business before it's too late. Private schools do a much better job educating and for much less money, too. They do a better job because if they didn't, they would go out of business. They do it for less money because they are forced to compete for students. The best thing about private schools is that they are accountable to parents for results where government schools are not! With our government education monopoly, the worse the results, the more money they extort from us! We need real freedom in education where we are not forced to pay for a government education monopoly that produces such poor results.

Before the election of local, state or federal legislators be sure to find out where they stand on the issue of education. For the Federal government to be involved in education at all is in blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Don't fall for socialist con words like "choice" or "accountability" in education.

In socialist doublespeak "choice" means you might be permitted to choose among several different government schools in your area (all of which are promoting the same socialist programs). "Accountability" means accountable to government, not to parents. Make it known in no uncertain terms that you want to take back the educational system that made America the greatest nation on earth -FREEDOM in education!

Footnotes:
1, "NEA, Trojan Horse in American Education", Samuel L. Bluemenfeld
2, ibid
3, ibid
© 2004 Debbie O'Hara - All Rights Reserved

Source:
http://newswithviews.com/Ohara/debbie30.htm

_____________________

,

Origins & History of American Compulsory Schooling

An Interview with John Taylor Gatto

(From Flatland Magazine #11)
© 1994 by Jim Martin

After nearly 30 years in the public schools, John Taylor Gatto has quit his job as a schoolteacher to become one of the country's most articulate critics of American education. The author of Dumbing Us Down currently lives in New York City, where he is working on a book about the history of compulsory education called The Empty Child.

I wanted to get John Gatto's opinions on President Clinton's edu-du-jour, which is called "Goals 2000". Rather than address the specifics of Goals 2000, or any other educational "reform" efforts aimed at public schools, Gatto soon had me reeling back almost two centuries to the origins of compulsory schools, when children were marched off at bayonet-point to attend the first universal state-run schools.

Mind control is as pervasive and commonplace as those bright yellow school busses that come for our children at 8am each weekday morning.

Martin: What do you know about Goals 2000? Is this the so-called Outcome-Based Education?

Gatto: It's a confluence of powerful interests who don't necessarily like each other, who have been scrambling for sovereignty of the school institution. For, unbeknownst to the rest of us, it has become the center of the American economy. In most of the small towns and in medium size cities, the school industry is the big business. What appears to be the school budget in large cities is only a fraction of the school budget, because money is generated and flows into the school institution from every division of the American government but doesn't show up in the budget.

Martin: You mean there is a black budget for the school system?

Gatto: Let's think of it this way. It's a black budget but it doesn't necessarily have to be like the defense department who spends billions of dollars on schools to conceal the fact you're doing that from general scrutiny. The Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, all have a substantial stake in American schooling. The average informed person only sees the Tax Levy budget. So when New York City says that X amount of dollars are being spent per kid, they're giving you the minimal figure they possibly can.

Martin: As far as "Goals 2000", is what you are saying is that people are fighting over the pie now?

Gatto: The big business of the United States is to school the young so that all the rest of the aspects of the social engine won't be destabilized. It's the major business. What the average parent thinks of as the purpose of schooling hasn't been for many years, and probably hasn't been for this whole century, although there was more resistance in some places than in others. So: the development of the mind--which probably comes to the mind of the average person who thinks about schooling--is antagonistic to Goals 2000. It's antagonistic to any stated goals of schooling from any source at all in this century. This is certainly deliberate.

Martin: What they say they are going to do is to allow mixed grades, be "task oriented" and be "project based" rather than curriculum-oriented.

Gatto: The difficulty with that kind of an abstraction is that you've got to see the translation to really understand what's going on. One of the things this apparatus has done successfully decade after decade is to borrow the terminology of its opposition. It's fascinating. When I first heard about it I would have thought you'd be a lunatic to not judge the value of a schooling plan by its outcome. But then I saw some of the lists of outcomes that would be aimed for and I said, "but those are political outcomes." They are mixed in. Each time the opposition would win the field for the day, they would mix in more conventional outcomes.

It's a semi-serious rhetorical statement, but what hides behind it is a pretty frightening concentration of forces that have at times been antagonistic.

Martin: What are they specifically? Do you mean, say, the Republicans?

Gatto: No.

Martin: Which forces?

Gatto: Okay. Somewhere between 1890 and 1905, a coalition was formed of large business spokesmen, foundation people, university people from select universities. I will name a few of these: Columbia, Johns Hopkins, University of Wisconsin and Michigan. To name a few of the foundations: Carnegie, Rockefeller, eventually Ford (but back then Ford didn't exist), Mellon, Peabody, Sage, and the Whitney group. The Morgan interests were very active in arranging this final centralization of schooling. There is a trace that spills out during the years 1890 to 1907, that anyone can check on. The early Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature for those years 1905 till the First World War contain an absolute gusher of articles attacking the intellectual nature of schooling. One day there aren't any. Then suddenly they just pour out year after year 'til the N.E.A. surrenders. They just "got it".

By 1913 the old line guard that saw the glory of American schooling in creating a larger and larger self sufficient intellectual class, that is, the N.E.A., was stripped entirely of its power. What took the place of that cadre was a group of psychological administrators. It's interesting that every single one of them had either studied directly under a German psychologist named Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig or like in John Dewey's case the chief protegé of someone who had studied with Wundt. Of course Dewey was the chief protegé of G. Stanley Hall, who brought Freud to America to distribute his message: that the family was at the heart of all human troubles.

It was absolutely a promotional scheme that worked brilliantly and was abundantly underwritten by the Carnegie and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Martin: Who was Wilhelm Wundt?

Gatto: He was the official state psychologist of Prussia even though his laboratory was, I think, in Upper Saxony. By the time Wundt was active Germany had been Prussianized. Prussia had vanished, Prussia was Germany.

Let me think, let's not get into too many thickets. Okay, everybody in the world knows John Locke's tabula rasa. That doesn't come out of his book on education that everyone reads in graduate school, but from his essay "Concerning Human Understanding". Locke announces in 1690 that children are blank slates. He actually says wax tablets but it is mistranslated blank slates, which is even worse because you can write on them over and over again. It's a reference to the notebook the roman kids took to school. In the century that Locke announced that, this idea electrified the upper classes of Europe and the United States. This book was read by everybody who was anybody for a century; books didn't have as short a life or the same kind of competition they have today. Between him and Rousseau, who in about 1770 wrote Emile, during that 80 year period, this idea of children as absolutely blank and subject to anything that is written on them by their possessor really becomes the foundation for the emergence of the strong state, which always comes to a cropper if it can't control its population.

Suddenly philosophy is offering the state a way to secure its territory: get hold of the children. Rousseau's Emile is a demonstration of exactly how, quite against the kid's own volition, this can be done. While appearing to play funny games and sing songs and have a good time you can shape the person perfectly. Emile electrified the Prussian state, which is really a religious kingdom. Few people realize that there was one Crusade authorized by the Pope that wasn't to the Holy Land, it was to the Barbarian Lands of northern Europe to slaughter the Prussian primitives. It was a religious crusade.

Prussia is an interesting synthetic state founded on religious principle. Almost no body knows this: 48% of the soldiers in the American revolution on both sides were Prussian mercenaries, and not just on the British side.

All this is a river of information about what's going on in northern Germany (which is becoming a more regulated state) and it's flowing into the German colonies in Pennsylvania. Ben Franklin is totally aware of it, and interested in borrowing the principles and apply them in the activities of the American state.

Prussia is the first state in human history to have a compulsory schooling law that works. There were a handful of them that existed prior to the Prussian law of 1819 but they don't work. Nobody is dumb enough to keep going to school after a few days. It collapses when the cops don't come after you. That's what happened to the famous New England compulsory school law. It was there as a piece of window dressing.

But not in Prussia. They really were marched to school at bayonet point. It was after Napoleon's defeat of Prussia at the battle of Jena at 1806. A famous Prussian philosopher named Fichte announced in an Address to the German People: that the party was over. Now the children would be taken. Now they were going to be told what to think and how long to think it. They were going to understand that the state is the primary parent and the blood family is secondary. Between 1806 and 1819, two brilliant brothers, the Humboldts, a guy named Stein, and a few others, divide the society into children who will become policy makers; children who will become assistants to policy makers (the engineers, architects, lawyers, and doctors); and the children who will be the vast, massed, the used.

Prussia sets up a three-tier school system, in which one half of one percent of the population is taught to think. They go to school called academie. Five and a half percent of the population go to Realschulen, where they partially learn to think, but not completely, because Prussia believed their defeat at the hands of Napoleon was caused by people thinking for themselves at times of stress on the battlefield. They were going to see to it that scientifically this couldn't happen. The lowest 94%, (that's some pyramid, right?) went to volkschulen, where they were to learn harmony, obedience, freedom from stressful thinking, how to follow orders. They worked out a system that would in fact guarantee such results. In the volkschulen, it was to divide whole ideas (which really simultaneously participate in math, science, social thinking, language, and art) into subjects which hardly had existed before, to divide the subjects further into units; to divide the time into small enough units of time. With enough variations in the course of a day, no one would know what was going on.

What they would learn is that

someone else told you what to think about,

when to think about it,

how long to think about it,

when to stop thinking about it,

when to think of something else,

and someone else sets up the secrets.

Now that was surely one of the most brilliant discoveries in human history. Obviously, my sympathies are not with it. It's evil in the genuine sense of the word.

Nevertheless, in the next thirty years a stream of American dignitaries, including Horace Mann, traveled to Prussia. Whoever they were, when they returned to the United States, they would say we must have this Prussian system.

Martin: So it is that old. You are saying this whole system goes back to 1819?

Gatto: It's construction phase is between 1807 and 1819. It's in place in 1819. An important part of the Prussian system is to break the link between reading and the young child. Because the young child who reads too well is independent of instruction and capable of finding out anything at all. In order to have an efficient policy-making class and a sub-class beneath it you've got to have ready access to information. But you can diffuse that if you can remove the power of most people to make anything out of the information.

So they figured out that by replacing the alphabet system of teaching reading, we teach sounds. (The Prussian system was a whole sentence system, rather than a whole word system. You memorize whole sentences.) If they could get the kids and keep them from reading well for the first six and seven years, then it didn't matter after that. They had broken the link between printed information. Guess who disseminates that very idea about reading in the United States? It is Horace Mann's second wife's sister, Elizabeth Peabody, who of course is a member of the family that produces the Peabody Foundation, that after the civil war imposes (by a system of very sophisticated leverages), the northern system of schooling on the south between 1865 and the battle is over when Mississippi surrenders in 1918. Of course the northern system is the Prussian system.

In 1850 two states, Massachusetts and New York, bring about the realization of the ancient dream that the state is father of the children. Massachusetts does something in tandem that is at least as radical a piece of legislation as any in the last 2000 years. The same legislature that gives us schooling, the same famous "know nothing" legislature, gives us the American adoption law.

There had not been an adoption law on this globe since the one that had been passed by ancient Rome which had said you can adopt an heir but you cannot conceal the heir's actual bloodline from them, and you could not adopt them until they were seventeen or older. All the Antonine kings were adopted, that is a century or longer starting from Marcus Aurelius (the most famous of them). There was no other adoption law. I'm absolutely certain that the new adoption law moved on line with the school law for the identical purpose: to begin the process of phasing out the blood family. As long as it exists it is the eventual destabilization of any long term state design. If your first loyalty goes to your blood family it can't go to the state. For the same reason, the Christian's sects had to be stamped out. Christianity can exist as something to pay ceremonial attention to on holidays and can exist as a philosophy of good behavior. But as long as you have an appeal that goes beyond the sovereign state, the state can't scientifically direct its population. Christianity has to go, the sects have to go, Mann says that over and over again.

Mann is not a principal, Mann has no interest at all in schooling. Mann is recruited by the Unitarian "Pope" [William Ellery Channing?]. Mann is in his parish. He is a young go-getter, with a lot of ambition, from a somewhat poor, rural, family. The Unitarians take over Harvard and the legislature. They are masters at the use of leverage. They are 75%-80% of the Boston School Committee that advocates the compulsion law. Mann struck a deal with this guy: that he would forward this cause, but when this battle was won he wanted a payoff in Washington. Indeed he was paid off that way. They recruited and won the loyalty of all the major business interests because the industrial situation was a labor shortage. In fact from the beginning of this country what we've always offered the world, except for this century, was the picture of citizens with independent livelihoods. In 1776 about 85% of the citizens had independent livelihoods (except for the slave population). In 1840 after the Jackson presidency it was still at 70%. So it was damned tough, even if you had the industrial machinery, to get anyone reliable to work for you for very long.

The educational traditions in our country had been such that if somebody else has a good thing, you work for them. You watch what they do and the minute you know how they do it, you strike out on your own. That attitude had to be broken. A huge mass of cheap labor had to be brought in. This was unfortunate from the point of view of the people who were catholic, because that was the only body of free-floating labor that was available in Europe. Worst-off were the Irish, who had been systematically brutalized and exterminated. They were brought over because of an alleged potato famine, but during that time the Irish were exporting food to England. The Irish didn't come over, they were brought over. Their way was paid for them. They were met at the boats by guys who would load up a labor crew then go and auction off their wagons. They were also going to have to be brought in because of the empty lands in the west. The empty lands were almost all owned. They weren't public domain. They were valueless unless someone was on the land. You could actually afford to give the land away if you owned the railroads, the banks. Those people's labor would eventually be translated into your pocket.

If this compulsion schooling legislature is so popular with the citizenry, how come, in the next 25 years, did no other state follow suit? Now 25 years is a long time in human affairs, a quarter of a century. Of course, there is a tremendous reluctance. At the time of the passage of these laws, a lot of people are aware of what their purpose is. Between the passage of those laws in 1900 there was one institution of long standing that had to be eliminated because it actually worked so well in an educational sense, cost so little, had produced so fine a crop of thinkers and cooperators, that it had to be destroyed. And of course it was the one room school.

The one room school had a mixture of six or seven ages simultaneously. Everybody got the same work but the teacher didn't teach. The teacher only taught a few kids, who taught a few kids, who taught a few kids. There was this tremendous powerful interdependence, where terrific confidence of talking to people older than you was developed in the course of the school day. There was concern for people younger than you. There was responsibility. It was almost a cost-free institution, and it worked splendidly, but it had to be eliminated because it doesn't subordinate the professional staff. There are no principals, or superintendents, or assistant superintendents.

It took 50 years to institute, and it took a man who was the leading Hegelian scholar in the United States, William Torre Ayres(?), from St. Louis, who was the Washington spokesman for education for 16 years. He brought the German system in and he set the purpose of the schools is to alienate children from their parents and religion. He didn't say this behind the scenes, he said it openly.

He began the process of creating a densely articulated professional staff. That process was picked up by the new teacher colleges that were exclusively underwritten by the Rockefeller family, and the Carnegies, the Whitney and Peabody families. The University of Chicago was underwritten by the Rockefellers. Stanford (the key western link) is an important railroading family. These people got a hold of the training mechanism that had only existed in Germany. In Germany they were called teacher seminaries, because it was well understood that state schooling was a religion. In the American colonial days it was well understood. The reason schools or education aren't mentioned in the Bill of Rights or the Constitution isn't because the nature of those institutions wasn't clearly understood by the people who debated. They were a very sophisticated body of men. They debated whether or not a civil religion was necessary in a country that didn't have a state religion as ours was to be. Proponents of a civil religion lost.

We had a perfectly literate country long before we had schooling, perfectly literate. More literate than today, I believe. I have a small collection of textbooks from the 1810's and 1820's, and of course all schools were voluntary then. I would say a fifth grade textbook was easily pitched on a college level. The reason books by the popular writers of the time, like Fenimore Cooper, are unreadable by the average college graduate today, isn't that they are badly written. It is that they make such dense allusion to history, philosophy, mathematics, science, and politics that no one can follow them without a pony.

Martin: In Dumbing Us Down, you speak of education as almost mind control and the conscious effort to keep people stupid.

Gatto: Let's take "the empty child" metaphor. You begin with Locke, the blank tablet, and go through Rousseau 80-100 years later, who demonstrates how to write on that blank tablet, and we are on the lip of the 19th century. So who institutionalizes the thinking that is codified over the last 100 years? The Prussians. Prussia becomes a very proprius state under the Prussian's forced-schooling scheme. The King of Prussia, from a dirt poor country, with no natural resources, had subordinated labor so precisely that Prussian industry was a world leader, and Prussian scholarship was the world leader. In 1814 the first American, Edward Everett, goes to Prussia to get a PhD. He eventually becomes the governor of the state of Massachusetts [and spoke on the same occasion when Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address]. By 1900 all the PhD's in the United States were trained in Prussia. The degree doesn't exist any other place. It's a German invention.

It's based on Francis Bacon's idea, in The New Atlantis [1627], of a world research university that scans the world for babies and talent and draws it into the university called Solomon's House, talent which is given to the state. The state becomes invincible. It's impossible to revolt against the state, because the state knows everything. Francis Bacon's book was widely read by German mystics. By the 1840's Prussia has a number of Solomon's Houses available that are utterly democratic, or about as much as is possible in an imperfect world. They are drawing talent and developing it for the purposes of state power and stability.

The PhD's come back to the United States and they become, to a man, the Presidents of all our Universities, the heads of all our research bureaus, and corporate research is done by German Ph.D.'s. It would still be going on except for the First World War. Obviously, there were dissident elements, and some of them had power, who didn't want this development but weren't strong enough to stop it.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Prussia had openly acknowledged a new development in the sciences called "psycho-physics" which argued that people were in fact complex machines. Prussia institutionalizes this, and by the 1870's has created the new science (or pseudo-science, if you're John Gatto) of experimental psychology, the purpose of which is to discover what the nature of this machine is and how to program it. American elite sons travel and study at the feet of Wundt. They come back during the period 1880-1910 and become the heads of Psychological Departments at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, etc. and there aren't any exceptions to this. Now Wundt is extremely prolific, his published works run to about 67,000 pages. Wundt was an industry. He trains [James McKeen] Cattell, who trains 322 PhD's after the Wundtian system, in this next decade or so.

These people set up the new discipline of educational psychology, which becomes a big bucks system. With the help of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations the system gets control of psychological testing for all the soldiers of the First World War. Aside from the vast power they wielded, it is the sorting mechanism of our whole economy. If we just talk about the money that can be used to buy votes, to change people's minds, to bludgeon down opposition, we're talking about an enormous amount of money flowing out of psychological testing. All of the proponents of which are Wundtian-trained and now head psychological departments in the United States.

A very little known chapter: in Gary, Indiana (Andy Carnegie's company town), an isolated town, with a captive population, tied to the steel mills, a new schooling system called the Gary System was tried. This was between 1910 and the First Word War. In this system traditional academic endeavor was not a part of schooling at all. This system worked so well, according to its auditors, that it was brought to New York city in 1917. It was tried out in 12 schools, where Jewish immigrants were the dominant immigrant strain in the schools. The idea was that they would try it for a few months in these 12 schools then they would enlarge it to 100 schools eventually it would be all the New York schools by the end of the war.

But the Jewish immigrants rioted for three weeks in the streets; they were aware of what was happening. The New York Times came down strongly against the plan, they said this scheme of the agents of the Rockefeller family was nonsense. There were dozens of editorials in the Times against it. Meanwhile there were 200 Jewish school children thrown in jail. Maybe if the Jewish community was reminded of this piece of history, they would think twice about certain things that are happening right now and use their political clout to effect change. This is the second or third attempt to ensure the system is total and comprehensive. The mayor of New York, who was going to run for President, was then thrown out of office in the next election, the whole political regime that had installed the Gary school system was thrown out of office. This information came from a book written 15 years ago by Diane Ravishow(?) called The Great School Wars.

Willard Wirt(?), the school superintendent, who had pioneered the system in Gary, was lionized by the New York Times and other important press lords, as one of the Solomon's of the 20th century, who came to New York to personally oversee the installation of his system in 1917. In 1930, Willard Wirt was committed to an insane asylum in Washington, DC where he died two years later, quietly. He was committed because he began to make public speeches saying that he had been part of a world-wide conspiracy to bring about a controlled state in the hands of certain people. And on the basis of making those statements he was committed and then died two years later in an insane asylum. I find it interested that Diane Ravishow, a very intelligent woman with time and research assistance on her hands, could dig up the whole story of the Gary plan and what happened in New York City and not that little coda about the creator of the Gary plan and his claim...

By 1910 the one room school has been destroyed. The factory school has been installed everywhere. Thanks to the actions of the great foundations, a national system of schooling was in place. The Carnegie credit guaranteed you'd have a high degree of uniformity but something else did too. There was a shadow organization in existence that has been well documented by mainstream historians. It was called the Educational Trust and it was run out of Stanford and Columbia's Teacher's College. It literally controlled all the Superintendencies in the United States and it placed key students for these jobs. The Superintendents had to guarantee, of course, to hire for all sorts of out-of-class positions, so the Educational Trust, in a very short time, became a very powerful national shadow organization controlling all the jobs in schooling. The source of this information is Managers of Virtue by David Tyack. It is an elite mainstream history, one that is not challenged by the school establishment, because Tyack is part of the school establishment. He has no wish to overthrow the system but just doing his job in documenting the existence of the "educational trust".

The Palmer Raids and the red scare take place right after the First World War. Hysteria is always a friend of this thing that is shaping the destiny of all the children. It finds allies in times of public panic. Its champions step forth and say "We'll do this to stop the public panic". The panic around the Palmer Raids was that finally, after 60 of 70 years of talking about it, a major nation had gone Marxist.

Remember that in 1848 the immigration had occurred at exactly the time those little revolutions were winking on and off all over Europe. The Communist Manifesto had been written. As the first Irish came in, the Boston paper said every third "Mickey" has a Manifesto in his back pocket. That fear was used to steamroller the natural scepticism of our own population to allow compulsion schooling in New York and Massachusetts. The idea had been brought up since Ben Franklin's time but had always been rejected. But now with these waves of Irish poor pouring off the boats, they're Catholic, they sound different, they look different, and there are revolutions taking place all over Europe that seemed clearly coordinated with each other. The school group is able to use that to ram compulsory school laws through the legislature.

Move 69 years later. We are now in 1917 and by 1922, Russia has fallen. It is clear that there is a government that meets the test that the fears of the last 70 years had posed. A government that is hostile to the idea of property. The reach of schools and their grip on the public budget becomes much stronger in these times of panic. If you step back from school as an isolated institution you can see it as the control institution for all the others. It's the ultimate screening mechanism, the ultimate creator of a receptive, docile public. It was exactly what the Prussians had produced in their little demonstration. "Follow our method and you will get this population." It was what we wanted and it was what we got.

There is resistance strata that hold out longer than others. It still takes some 70 years of steady work. Before control could be guaranteed an important surrender that had to be made was the individual communities' right to hire its own teachers. That required a very illicit but comprehensive subordination of state legislatures everywhere to the idea of a certification procedure controlled by the teacher colleges. The teacher colleges set the standards for the certification, they train the people and they weed out trouble makers.

Prominent men and women, agents of foundations worked on one legislature after another. Once it passed in New York, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Michigan, it became easier and easier. Of course they could demonstrate by then how useful it was to the legislature to have this power over schooling and not to allow it to be locally administrated. There were enormous contracts to be let. All the jobs that had never existed before in schooling history, non-teaching jobs, were now at the disposal of the legislature.

We've psychologized the schools by the end of the First World War. Now that's in place. (I'm presenting this as though it was a sequence, actually these things are happening simultaneously but it's easier to see the necessity of having one solidified before another can really get very far). The next step came in 1890, when Andrew Carnegie wrote eleven essays, called The Gospel of Wealth. In it he said that capitalism--free enterprise-- was stone cold dead in the United States. It had been killed by its own success. That men like himself, Mr. Morgan, and Mr. Rockefeller now owned everything. They owned the government. Competition was impossible unless they allowed it. Which, human nature being what it is, was a problematical thing.

Carnegie said that this was a very dangerous situation, because eventually young people will become aware of this and form clandestine organizations to work against it. Ultimately they'll bring down this edifice. You've got to read all eleven essays, sometimes several times, and only then the majesty of the design emerges. Carnegie proposed that men of wealth re-establish a synthetic free enterprise system (since the real one was no longer possible) based on cradle-to-grave schooling.

The people who advanced most successfully in the schooling that was available to everyone would be given licenses to lead profitable lives, they would be given jobs and promotions and that a large part of the economy had to be tied directly to schooling. So if you ever have two years of your life you want to spend investigating the American licensing industry, you need to look at what occurred in the two decades following Carnegie's original proposal (1890-1910). You're talking about the realization of Carnegie's design. These licenses, which now extend to bus drivers and all sorts of unlikely people who never had to be licensed are then tied to forms of schooling. So they've reserved that part of the work market. Through the cooperation of the business community a large part of the rest of the jobs are reserved. Through the cooperation of the government, many of the government position have very precise schooling requirements. You can in fact control all of the economy by tying jobs to schooling, and therefore you have a motivation for people to learn what you want them to learn.

This agenda, laid down by Carnegie, was to tie the entire economy to schooling and hence to place the minds of all the children of a few social engineers.

But it's moving forward fairly slowly until 1959. One of the most graphic ways you can trace its progress is that between 1932 and 1960, the number of school boards drops from 140,000 to about 30,000 in 1960, and today it's about 15,000. These consolidations are necessary to pry the hands of local groups with different philosophies loose from the tiller. New York State has carried it to a pass where you can vote down a school bond issue, but 97% is still automatically approved in order the keep the business of the schools running.

The consolidations serve to get rid of oversight and hold it in as few hands as possible. They don't need a conspiracy, they just have to remember what they heard in administrative courses they took to become an assistant principal. They would have heard that in a hundred different mellow ways, but essentially it would lead to the same thing.

In 1959 two things happened. One is the Sputnik, which caused a panic and hysteria like the Palmer Raids earlier. Russia operates very traditional, academic schools. We have an H-bomb, but we have to build a 6,000 ton concrete structure to set it off. There's some evidence, not definitive, but enough to worry people in the highest levels of the Council on Foreign Relations, that Russia has dropped an aerial weapon near the end of the fifties. Some huge clot of shit hits the fan. By 1960 it becomes clear that the school people had not delivered what they promised when they were handed over the children of the nation fifty years earlier. They were allowed to psychologize part of them, but they were supposed to deliver part of them as scientists and technicians. They apparently have failed in that latter part of their very important mission. I think what we've been living through during the last 30 years is some kind of struggle at the very top between different agencies to get a hold of this thing again.

Back in the time of Sputnik, we get the dike opened and a blank check offered to anyone who can come up with a way to make the thing work. From 1950 -1990 we get, in inflation-adjusted dollars, a quadruple increase in funds available to schooling. The aspect of school as one of the central parts of the economy, independent of its schooling function, is now true in spades. Rivers of money are flowing back and forth, always being augmented never getting being cut back.

There is an increase in the centralization, with fifteen thousand school boards rather than forty thousand previously. One in every six thousand Americans serving on school boards that are almost stripped of their power. Whereas in the beginning of the century we have one in every sixty-five Americans serving on school boards that still have control of the purse. It hasn't yet been transferred to the state legislature. An explosive intrusion of foundation agents are wandering around the halls of state legislatures, key businesses, key teacher colleges. They are writing a tight script to seal the loop holes that have prevented Andrew Carnegie's dream from working smoothly. You get these amazing constructions of organized psychologizing that link together all the school years, all the testing functions, the hiring functions, you get these things being imposed without public knowledge. That's the dead give-away that something isn't kosher.

What we have now is a wide open scene where the concealment is thinner than it's ever been before. The naked power is closer to the surface. My instincts are that it is the identical groups that surfaced around 1905. One of the great evidences of that is a semi-secret group that keeps its deliberations utterly secret, called the Businessmen's Round Table, made up of the 200 largest corporations, announced a few years ago that it was going to take a major seat at the National School policy table, and that it was backing national testing, national examinations. Even--among its radical members--there was a scheme to tie hiring and promotions to school performance.

In 1889 the United States Commissioner of Education assured a prominent railroad man, Collis P. Huntington, when he protested that the schools seemed to be "over-educating" (meaning they were going to be producing too many engineers, too many people who knew the score, and therefore who would be tough political opponents). He was guaranteed, by William Torriares(?), the United States Commissioner of Education, that schools had been scientifically designed not to over-educate. I don't think anyone hearing that understood what the mechanism that Torriares was referring to was, but it was the German mechanism devised between 1806 and 1819.

Once a kid is addicted to fragmented studies and stutter steps and confusion, it is the rare person who can ever get control of their own mind and their own will again.

They may get angry and refuse to do something but they don't know how to write policy for themselves, they can't write the script of their own lives. So if they can't get it from their jobs, they get it from television, or from some other kind of mind control.

April, 1994

Source:
http://www.flatlandbooks.com/gatto.html

_______________________

TOO MANY UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

911 - THE BASIC QUESTIONS

1. Why didn't jets intercept the airliners since they had numerous warnings of terrorist attacks?
2. Why did Ashcroft stop flying commercial, citing an unidentified "threat" in July 2001?
3. Why were there no photos or videos of the entire Pentagon plane?
4. Why didn't the Secret Service hustle Dubya out of the classroom?
5. Where was George H. W. Bush at the time of the attacks?
6. Why did passengers or crewmembers on three of the flights all use the term boxcutters?
7. Where are the flight recorders?
8. Why were the FISA warrants discontinued?
9. How did Bush see the first plane crash on live camera?
10 Why was security meeting scheduled for 9/11cancelled by WTC management on 9/10?
11. How did they come up with the "culprits" so quickly?
12. How did they find the terrorist's cars at the airports so quickly?
13. Why did Shrub dissolve the Bin Laden Task Force?
14. Why the strange pattern of debris from Flight 93?
15. Why was no plane seen at the Pentagon?
16. How extensive was the relationship between the Taliban, the ISI and the CIA?
17. What exactly was the role of Henry Kissinger at UNOCAL?
18. When was it decided to cancel building a pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan?
19. When was the decision made to send the FEMA to New York?
20. Why did FEMA spokesman Tom Kenney tell Dan Rather he was in New York on Sept. 10?
21. Why did the FBI in 1996 close the files to investigate Osama bin Laden's relatives in Washington?
22. Why did .Bush stop inquiries into terrorist connections of the Bin Laden family in early 2001?
23. Who made the decision to have John O'Neill stop investigating Al-qeada accounts?
24. Who gave the decision to give him a security job at the World Trade Center?
25. Did John O'Neill meet anyone of the FEMA in the night of September 10th?
26. What about media reports that hijackers bought tickets for flights scheduled after Sept. 11?
27. Why did none of the 19 hijackers appeared on the passenger lists?
28. Why would devout Muslims frequent bars, drink alcoholic beverages and leave their bibles?
29. Why would the hijackers use credit cards and allow drivers licenses with photos to be zeroxed?
30. Why did the hijackers force passengers to call relatives?
31. How did the hijackers change the flight plan without law enforcement or the military try to stop them?
32. Which hijacker's passport was found in the WTC rubble? Who found it and what time?
33. How could the FBI distinguish between "regular" Muslims and hijacker Muslims on those flights?
34. Why was there not one "innocent" Muslim on board any of these flights?
35. Did someone go through the passenger lists looking for Muslim names and label them as hijackers?

MOHAMMED ATTA

36. Did the Florida police provide information that Atta was searched because of 1)an expired Visa, 2) driving a car without a license, 3) because of an incident at Miami Airport?
37. Why did Atta leave his bag at the airport and the employees didn't put it on board?
38. Who found his bag? How can we be sure it it was his bag?
39. Why did Atta place a video "how to fly planes", a uniform and his last will into his bag, knowing that he would commit suicide?
40. Why did Atta leave his drivers license in a rental car?
41. When did Atta train on a flight simulator?
42. Did Atta leave the US while in training and then return?
43. Why did Atta decide to study at Opa Locka, a famous hub of 6 Navy training bases and includes government partners like U.S. Coast Guard Air Station, Police (Miami-Dade) Aviation Unit?
44. Why was Atta allowed to study since he was stopped by the police for driving without a license and also for violating his visa?

THE BLACK BOXES AND CRASH VIDEO

45. Why were the Black Boxes never recovered ?
46. Why didn't the FBI release the air traffic controller's protocols?
47. Why did the FBI not release the Flight Data Recorder info?
48. Who video-recorded the first plane hitting the tower? Why did he disappear from the media?

THE HIJACKERS

49. How did the FBI receive a tip from a passenger who boarded a different plane and reached his destination safely that he had a confrontation with two ME men at the Logan airport in Boston?
50. Who tipped the FBI to storm the Westin Hotel in Boston on September 12th?
51. Where did the photos of all 19 hijackers come from?
52. How were all hijackers identified just 2 days after the attack?
53. Why did all 19 names not appear on the passenger list 2 days after the hijacker list was released?
54. Why do none of the names appear on the passenger lists UA and AA gave to CNN?
55. How could the hijackers disable the defense systems?
56. Why did the FBI ignore Bin Laden's family, who left the United States without further investigation?
57. What about the supposed hijackers who are still alive?
58. Was there a reason to change the list of the original 19 hijackers?
59. What happened to Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, who have been in jail since September 2001, because of possession of box cutters on a train? Who gave the tip to arrest them?
60. Why did it take 4 months before Ramsi Binalschibhs name was mentioned, since he was a good friend of Mohammad Atta and lived in his apartment in Hamburg?
61. Why did it take 4 months until December 11 to charge Zacarias Moussaoui for the 9/11 attacks when his case was known worldwide for months, but not mentioned in the American media?
62. Whatever happened with Lotfi Raissi, who was arrested in UK for teaching the terrorist pilots?
63. What is the current status of the investigation of Mamoun Darkazanli Import-Export-Company in Hamburg and Al Taqwa Management Organisation in Lugano?
64. Why was Richard Reid able to enter the Paris airport twice and who paid for his hotel?
65. Who hired Zacarias Masspoui to learn how to fly passenger jets in the United States?
66. Why did the FBI or CIA fail to interrogate him between August and December 2001?

BIN LADEN

67. Did the CIA monitor Bin Laden in 1998 with the help of 15 Afghan agents, paid $1,000/ month?
68. Where are these agents? Was Johnny "Mike" Spann one? Was John Walker Lindh one?
69. Is an Afghan agent a member of the ISI? Is an Afghan agent working for Bin Laden?
70. When was the first time Tenet mentioned the Al-Quaeda group to any member of the Senate?
71. Why did the Pentagon release a new video version or translation of the Bin Laden Home video?
72. Why it was released only 8 hours after translation by the German magazine MONITOR on December ?
73. Why were the four translators prior US-Government workers?
74. When was the Bin Laden Home Video found and who found it?
75. Who found the video if Northern Alliance and US troops had not yet arrived in Kandahar or Jahalabad?
76. Does the timestamp on the Bin Laden video indicate that it was found two weeks after it was produced?
77. Why was the public not informed who found the video and when?
78. Why according to MONITOR magazine, were the most controversial statements translated incorrectly?
79. Why was the video released?
80. Who gave the final decision to release it?
81. Why is the Bin Laden video of June 2001 in which he praised the attack, available on the Internet?
82. What about Bin Laden's statements on Al-Jazeera in June 2001 about the bombing of USS Cole, which are similar to the statements on the November 2001 home video?
83. Why did Bin Laden state in Umman Magazine in Sept. 2001, that he was not involved in the WTC?
84. Is Bin Laden still on the payroll of the CIA or ISI?
85. Did the Bin Laden Group Inc. help build ToraBora with the CIA?
86. What was the purpose of the meeting with General Pervez Musharraf in May 2001?
87. Why was a statement released that Al-Khalifa bin Laden, who is not the mother of Bin Laden, had a telephone call with Bin Laden on September 9, rather than Alia Ghanem, his mother? Why did Alia Ghanem say she did not believe he planned the attack?

ANTHRAX AND MICROBIOLOGIST DEATHS

100. What happened on September 18th, when an employee of Batelle Memorial Institute was involved in a so-called anthrax hoax on that day? Was he arrested?
101. Why did the investigation of that case begin in December 2001?
102. What was in the memo of Dr. Leonard Horowitz, a public health consumer advocate and author of "Death in the Air" on October 1, 2001, almost two weeks before the first anthrax letter was sent from Trenton to the American media building in Boca Raton?
103.What about his letter of Nov. 13 in which he claimed that BAYER is behind the anthrax infections?
104. Did US BioDefense laboratories send the anthrax-laced letters to get a new budget for research?
105. What about the statement of former UN-weapons inspector of Iraq, Richard Spertzel, who told ABC, "...he knows only five scientists in the USA who would be in the situation to produce such a fine, highly developed spore material"?
106. Why did it take 48 hours to inform Bob Stevens that he had anthrax?
107. Why were envelopes never found near Bob Stevens, Amelie Lundgren and Mia Nguyen?
108. How come Microsoft got a hoax anthrax letter from Malaysia on the same day that President Bush said Malaysia might be one of the next targets of the United States?
109. Why did the FBI never investigate the case Don Wiley, a Bioscientist who disappeared 11/13/01?
110. Why did the FBI begin to investigate after his body was found on December 22, 300 miles away? Was there an investigation at the military hydro plant where workers found him? Why did the media write different versions about how, when and where he was found? Why did the police report change 2 months later from suicide to an accident?
111. What was the goal of Bioport in 1997?
112.Did development of anti-anthrax vaccines begin in 1998?
113.When did Bioport decide to produce anthrax vaccines?
114. Was it before or after Sept. 1998 that Admiral Crowe was put in charge of investigations of the August 7, 1998 bombings of Embassy Nairobi and Embassy Dar Es Salaam?
115. Did the schedule for developing anti-anthrax vaccines begin starting in 1998?
116. When did the US Government ask Bayer for help in developing a vaccine?
117. When did Bayer start sending the vaccines to the U.S.?
118. When did Bayer double production of the vaccines?
119. Was the death of Vladimir Pasechnik investigated? He was former director of the Institute of Ultra Pure
Biochemical Preparations of the Soviet bio-warfare establishment Biopreparat in November 2001?
120. How are the deaths of scientists Robert M. Schwartz, Dr. Benito Que and Set Van Nguyen explained since all occurred in the same month? Is Set van Nguyen related to the anthrax victim Mia Nguyen?
121. What about the death of Nancy Sonnenfeld (FEMA-Wife)?
122. Why was the NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife examining Anthrax in August 2000?
123. Do any employees in Trenton have the same handwriting as printed on the Anthrax envelopes?
124. Is it just a coincidence that the laboratory is also based in Trenton?
125. Did the FBI ever ask Fort Detrick to examine anthrax spores?
126. What about the list of 15-20 labs (maintained by Barbara Rosenzweig) who used Fort Detrick spores?
127. Does the CIA have spores different from those at Fort Detrick?
128. Why did Tommy Thompson, The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and other Bush cabinet members meet secretly (i.e. illegally) in Oct. 2001 with officials of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) to develop plans for their Emergency Preparedness Task Force?
129. Why did he decide on October 25, 2001 to ask Congress for another $500 million to produce Acambis's smallpox vaccine?
130. Why did it take 4.5 hours until Jean Marie Malecki, Director Palm Beach County Health Department, picked up the phone for employees of the AMI-Building, Boca Raton. This is where editor Bob Stevens got anthrax. Why did she wait two days before she visited that building again?
131. Did Walter Gilbert, Director Myriad Genetics ever get official permission from relatives of those killed at WTC to examine their DNA?

FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES

150. Why did General Mahmud Ahmad, former head of the ISI quit his position?
151. Why did retaliation against the Taliban begin the day he stepped down?
152. Who in the ISI paid $100.000 to Mohammad Atta?
153. Why does Ahmad think that another secret service was involved in the WTC attack? Which Secret Service was he referring to? Did other ISI official's believe that? Did officials of the CIA believe that? Did some officials of the Mossad believe that?
154. What was the purpose of Ahmad's visit to Washington on 9/11?
155. Who told Russian Foreign Minister Ivanov to abort an air strike against Afghanistan in May 2000?
156. Did Russian intelligence notify the CIA in 2001 that 25 terrorist pilots had been training for suicide missions, as reported in the Russian press?

KISSINGER

1. What did Kissinger mean that an "outside threat from beyond", a "world government" and "individual rights" who are "willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted", what you mentioned in 1991 on a Bilderberg Conference?
2. What was his role at UNOCAL?
3. Is he in contact with representatives of these companies or institutions:
4. What did he discuss at the Bilderberg meeting last year in May 2001?
5. What was the purpose of his meeting with Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov in July 2001?
6. Why does he write in "Toward a New Diplomacy for the 21st Century" that America doesn't need a Foreign Policy?
7. When was the last time Henry Kissinger met US-Ambassador in Pakistan, Robert Oakley?

THE PURCHASE OF AIRLINE PUT OPTIONS

1. Is it true that the CIA is in possession of PROMIS software?
2. What is the purpose of PROMIS?
3. Did A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, CIA, own any stocks of United Airlines, American Airlines, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, AXA Re (insurance) which owns 25% of American Airlines, and Munich Re.?
4. What is his connection to Alex Brown, Deutsche Bank?
5. Did he give any insider information about to George Tenet, CIA?
6. Who was the investor who purchased 2,000 UAL put options between August and September 11, 2001?
7. Did Deutsche Bank-Alex Brown own any stocks of UA, AA, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, AXA Re (insurance) which owns 25% of American Airlines, and Munich Re?
8. What about the 2,500 UA-contracts which were "split into 500 chunks each, directing each order to different U.S. exchanges around the country simultaneously." on August 10, 2001?
9. Did Deutsche purchase UAL options in August 2001?
10. Why did DB-AB purchase 4,744 put options on United Air Lines stock as opposed to only 396 call s on September 6-7? What was the purpose of doing that?
11. What is the connection to Wally Kromgaard?
12. Did Deutsche Bank or Wally Kromgaard purchase 4,516 put options on American Airlines as compared to 748 call options on September 10?
13. What was the reason of Mayo Shattuck III re-asssignment on September 15th?

THE TALIBAN AND THE CARPET OF GOLD..

1. When was the last time they met any representatives of the US-Government?
2. What was the purpose of these meetings?
3. Do the Taliban know Karl E. Inderfurth and State Department counterterrorism chief Michael Sheehan?
4. Do they know which US-Representative said in February 2001: "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs"?
5. When was the last time the Taliban was in touch with this representative?
6. Did Abdul Haq, the former Mujahedin leader executed Sept 2001 by the Taliban, decide in Winter 2000 to attack the Taliban?
7. Did production of opium in Afghanistan fall from 3276 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001?

GLOBAL HAWK TECHNOLOGY

1. Was Global Hawk technology able to remotely control unmanned planes in 1999 for 27 hours?
2. Did Northrop-Grumman use Global Hawk technology in the war in Afghanistan since October 2001?
3. What is the purpose of unmanned technology?
4. Is Northrup in contact with any engineers of Boeing?
5. Did Northrup install Global Hawk technology in a commercial airplane?

CARRIER AND TROOP MOVEMENTS BEFORE SEPT 11

1. Did two U.S. carrier battle groups arrive in the Gulf of Arabia just off the Pakistani coast before 9/11?
2. Did 17,000 U.S. troops join more than 23,000 NATO troops in Egypt for Operation 'Bright Star' on 9/11? What was the purpose of both of these operations?

BIOCHEMICAL WARFARE

1. When did Tommy Franks learn that he would use Thermobarics in ToraBora?
2. Does he know if it had been tested on December 12 in Nevada?
3. Who told Franks that Bin Laden might hide in ToraBora?
4. Is the main purpose of Thermobarics to destroy buried bio and chemical stocks?
5. Was Thermobarics developed for the purpose to use one day in Iraq?
6. When was the first time Franks used Thermobarics? Was it before or after the announcement of the end of ABM Treaty on December 11?
7. When did the US decide to use B61-11, the "nuclear version" of its "conventional" BLU-113 counterpart?
8. Why has the NSA destroyed data collected on Americans or US companies since the Sept. 11 attacks?

ABORTED ATTEMPTS TO GET BIN-LADEN

1. Why did Clinton abort an attack on Bin Laden in October 1999?
2. Who was responsible for that operation?
3. Why was the operation put on hold?
4. Why did Musharraf halt a covert operation to attack Bin Laden in October 1999?
5. Why did the GOP in Congress stop almost every move Clinton made against terrorism? They refused to believe reports and pass necessary legislation. In 1996 Clinton proposed a very extensive anti-terrorism regulation.

RICHARD REID

1. Who hired Richard Reid to threaten a passenger plane in Paris?
2. Who did he send an email to in Pakistan?
3. Has he ever been in touch with the ISI or CIA?
4. Did he know the difference between an explosive and a detonator?
5. How many ounces did he have in his shoes?
6. What size are his shoes?
7. Who built or prepared his shoes?

JOHN WALKER LINDH

1. Has John Walker Lindh ever been in touch with the CIA?
2. Did he ever work for the CIA?
3. Who arrested him in 2001?
4. Why didn't he escape in the tumult to nearby Masar-e-Sharif?
5. Who hired his lawyer, Richard Brohanan? Who paid his lawyer?
6. Why didn't he go to Guantanamo Bay?

DICK CHENEY

1. When did Cheney stop working for Halliburton?
2. Is he still in possession of any Halliburton stock?
3. Is he still in contact with Halliburton?
4. Was Halliburton invited to an oil conference in May 2002?
5. Does Cheney know when that meeting was planned?
6. Did Cheney have influence concerning Halliburton contracts with the Pentagon?
7. What exactly did Cheney decide to do on September 11th?
8. Did he speak with an Air Force Commander or Lt. Gen. Charles F. Wald on that day?
9. When did he inform the president about the hijacked airplanes on September 11?
10. Who called the White House on September 11 at 9:30 PM about a possible threat?
11. Why was no air security at the White House or the Pentagon at 9:30 PM?
12. When and who gave the approval to evacuate the White House at 9:45 PM?
13. What was the purpose of a meeting with Indian opposition leader Sonia Gandhi in June 2001 about a multimillion-dollar debt owed to Enron from a major energy project in Indian Power Plants?
14. When was the last time Cheney spoke with anyone from ENRON?

COLIN POWELL

1. What was the role of Colin Powell?
2. Who decided to give $43 million in aid to the Taliban regime in May 2001?
3. Did he know that production of opium in Afghanistan fell from 3276 tons in 2000 to 185 in 2001?
4. What was the purpose of his decision to treat the Taliban prisoners as War Prisoners? Is this decision in any way related to media reports 2 days earlier that Powell may have been involved in negotiations with Indian Power Plants?
5. What was the purpose of his short trip to Latin America on September 11?
6. Who decided that he fly to Latin America on that day?
7. Why would someone threaten him in Afghanistan on January 17, 2002 as Newsweek reported?
8. What was the purpose of Powell meeting with India's foreign minister on April 6, 2001?
9. Did Enron or Cheney ask Powell to help collect a $64 million debt on an Indian plant project?

GEORGE H.W. BUSH

1. When was the last time George H.W. Bush traveled to South Arabia on behalf of the Carlyle Group?
2. What was the purpose of that meeting?

THOMAS WHITE

1. Is Thomas White still in contact with ENRON?
2. Did his contact at anytime influence his decisions?
3. Does he still own ENRON stocks?

DELMART VREELAND

1. Did Vreeland warn Canadian Intelligence in May 2001 about possible terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon?
2. Did he place the warning in an envelope while in prison in Toronto, Canada?
3. Where did he get his information?
4. Whom did he give the envelope to?
5. Why was he placed in jail?

SAUDI-BINLADIN-GROUP.COM

1.Was the domain created on September 11th, 2000?
2. Who paid for that domain?
3. Are they also owners of Iridium Satellites?
4. When did they end contact with relatives of the Bush family?

THE CARLYLE GROUP

1. When was the last time George H.W. Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia on behalf of the privately owned Carlyle Group, the 11th largest defense contractor in the U.S.?
2. What was the purpose of that meeting?
3. When did he resign from Carlyle Group?
4. Is he still in touch with any of their representatives?

STEPHEN LANDER, Director MI5

1. Did Lander monitor a phone conversation between Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid in Dec. 2000?
2. What did Lander tell representatives of the CIA about Zacarias Moussaoui?
3. Why did he stop monitoring Djamel Beghal, member of Takfir-wal-Hijra (financed by Osama bin Laden) in August 2001?

BIN LADEN IN DUBAI

1. Did Bin Laden in July 2001 enter an American hospital in Dubai?
2. Did he arrive on July 4, 2001 on a flight from Qetta, Pakistan to American Hospital?
3. Was he at the hospital July 4-11, 2001?
4. Did Bernard Koval, CEO of American Hospital, ever speak with Doctor Terry Callaway about that visit?
5. Why did he change his statements about this story not being true and that he "asked around"?
6. What is the difference between Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis and Continuous Cycling Peritoneal Dialysis?
7. Did Koval know Larry Stevens?
8. Can Koval explain why Richard Labeviere, author of "Terror Dollars" (about illegal Al-Quaeda accounts), wrote the story about Osama Bin Laden's kidney operation?

GEORGE W. BUSH

1. What exactly happened on September 11 and at what time was President Bush informed?
2. Why was President Bush scheduled to visit a school in Florida?
3. Who scheduled the time of the visit?
4. When exactly did Bush learn about the first crash into the WTC?
5. How could he have seen that on TV?
6. Why didn't he interrupt his school meeting as soon as he learned of the first plane crash?
7. Did Bush ever wonder how Bin Laden was able to hear the first plane crash live on the radio?
8. Which radio station he was listening to?
9. Can Bush explain how Bin Laden's Home Video was found only two weeks after it was produced?
10. Why did Bush decide to release Bin Laden's Home Video?
11. What is the purpose of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC) in Fort Benning, Georgia, where terrorists have been trained for undercover agents in South America? Bush stated "if any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves". So what does he think about Fort Benning?
12. What is the role of Zalmay Khalilzad (former UNOCAL) in the National Security Council ?
13. What is the current role of Zalmay Khalilzad (former UNOCAL) in Afghanistan?
14. When was Bush's last contact with anyone from ENRON?
15. Why was China admitted to the WTO on September 13 after 15 years of unsuccessful attempts?
16. Why did Bush postpone the release of Ronald Reagan's records?
17. How does Bush feel about the need to investigate the CIA's mistakes?
18. Does Bush agree with senators John McCain, Joseph I. Lieberman, Porter J. Goss, former C.I.A. clandestine case officer and a Florida Republican, Richard C. Shelby and Ron Paul, US Congressman, who want an investigation and have said "Secret government is winning out over open government"?
19. Did he know before he left his hotel that morning on the way to the school that the 1st tower had been hit? ABC news reported that morning that he was asked by reporters if he was aware of events in NYC and he answered yes. If so, why did he later say he first heard of it was when he was at the school?
20. Why did Bush continue to sit in that classroom reading to children when he should have been conferring with his advisors?
21. Why did Bush say that he and Card initially thought it was an accident involving a small plane?
22. Given all the information sources available to the POTUS and his staff how could his people not have known the kind of plane involved?
23. Why didn't they know at this point, as did the FAA and NORAD, that aircraft were hijacked? The Batallion Chief in the 9/11 video was seen and heard asking for military backup immediately after the building was hit.
24.How come the NYFD knew it was terrorism right away but the POTUS and his aides just calmly went about their business?

TONY BLAIR

1. Were 25,000 British troops and the largest British Armada since the Falkland Islands War, part of Operation 'Essential Harvest' pre-positioned in Oman, the closest point on the Arabian Peninsula to Pakistan before September 11, 2001?
2. When did he begin to place SIS-Special Forces in Afghanistan? Why?

THE SUN-SENTINEL

1. Did Gloria Irish own unit 1504 at the Delray Racquet Club, 755 Dotterel?
2. Did she rent that property to Hamza Alghamdi in August 2001?
3. Why did the media not report about a connection of the Sun-Sentinel and the hijackers?
4. Why did it first appear that the hijackers had something to do with the anthrax attacks?
5. Why has this connection or coincidence never appeared in the media again?
6. What was the connection between husband Michael Irish (SunSentinel) and Bob Stevens (who died from Anthrax)?

WARNINGS

1. When did Vladimir Putin warn the CIA about a possible terrorist attack and what was their reaction?
2. What was the purpose of the meeting between Christina Rocca, director of Asian affairs at the State Department and the Taliban ambassador Mollah Abdul Salam Zaeef in Islamabad in August 2001?
3. Why did she oversee the delivery of Stinger missiles in the 80s to Afghan mujaheddin?
4. Did Walid Arkeh in Seminole County jail inform the FBI in August 2001 about an attack on America? What was the reaction of the FBI?
5. Why did Dr. Jeffrey Starr, U.S. department of defense, visit Tajikistan in Jan 2001?
6. When did Jean-Claude Cousseran, Director DGSE, French Secret Service inform the CIA about terrorist attacks on America? What was their reaction?
7. What does he know about the monitoring of Djamel Beghal, member of Takfir-wal-Hijra (financed by Osama bin Laden) and Kamel Daoudi? Did he ever inform the CIA about that? And when?
8. When did Italian Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini inform the CIA about a possible attack on the American president "with the use of an airplane"? What was their reaction?
9. When did President Mubarak, Egypt, inform the CIA about a possible attack on America with an "airplane stuffed with explosives"? What was their reaction?
10. When did Efraim Halevy , Director of Mossad since 1998 (unconfirmed) inform the CIA about a possible attack with "200 terrorists" on America? What was their reaction?
11. Is it true he warned Ariel Sharon not to travel to New York on September 11 to speak at a festival?
12. Did a caller to Loxley Banks, Director Radio Cayman Islands talk show, give several warnings of an imminent attack on the U.S on Sept. 3 -10?
13. The London Times reported that someone from the FAA warned Salman Rushdie not to travel to the United States on September 3rd? If this is true, who was it?
14. Did the FBI investigate the two men who met Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi in Harry's Bar at the Helmsley Hotel in Manhattan on September 8, 2001?
15. Who does Abdullah Abdullah (Northern Alliance) believe killed Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud on September 9, 2001?
16. When and why did he decide to attack Kabul on September 11 at 5:30 PM?
17. When did he decide to invade Masar-i-Scharif
18. Did the CIA helped him provoke a tumult?
19. Did he ever meet John Walker Lindh?
20. Why was Major John Kenny, Commander Wright Patterson Air Base, Dayton placed on high alert on September 10? Did he inform companies in Dayton to shutdown their offices?
21. Why was Colonel William M. Dietrick , Commander Defense Language Institute in Garrison, Monterey on high alert on September 10?
22. Why did one of Kenneth (Ken) Weinbrecht (President SAMS ) executives say on September 10, that he was a 'Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.'"
23. Did Jean-Louis Bruguiere, French anti-terrorism, inform the CIA on September 10 about a possible terrorist attack? If so, what was their reaction?
24. Why did Atta and hijacker Abdulaziz Alomari checked into a Portland, Maine motel (unidentified) on September 10?
25. Why was the Portland, Airport, according to eye-witnesses, in full charge of more military officials and soldiers than usual, weeks before September 11, 2001?
26. Why, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, was Mayor Brown warned to be "cautious in your travel" the night of September 10? Who warned him?
27. Why did Alex Diamandis, Odigo Vice President of Sales and Marketing, receive a warning on his messenger service about a possible attack on America on September 11, 2001? At which time?
28. When did Dr.August Hanning , President BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst Germany) inform the CIA that "Middle Eastern terrorists are 'planning to hijack commercial aircraft ?" What was their reaction? Did he allow an Iranian prisoner in Hamburg call to the CIA in Summer 2001 about an attack on America? What was their reaction?

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL/GLOBAL HAWK

1. Why did Kenneth Waldie, Stanley Hall, Herbert Homer and Peter Gay of Raytheon travel on Sept. 11?
2. Can Global Hawk technology be used for at least 27 hours?
3. Is Global Hawk technology used in commercial airplanes?
4. Did Danielle O'Brien, air traffic controller, inform another air traffic control center about a plane traveling fast southwest of Dulles after spotting it 8:18 AM on September 11?
5. Who was informed and what happened?

THE PENNSYLVANIA CRASH

1. Why didn't Dr. James G. Roche, Secretary of the Air Force try to reach the airplanes in NYC (7 minutes time for McGuire AFB in New Jersey ) and at the Pentagon (10 minutes time)?
2. Did Roche ever try to shutdown the plane in Pennsylvania?
3. Can Roche explain why magazines of that plane were found 20 miles away from the crash? Andrews AFB is 13 miles away. He had one hour and fifteen minutes to respond to the plane that hit the Pentagon. What happened during that time?
4. Can he explain why many ear- and eye witnesses, including workers of the road construction company New Enterprise saw or heard F-16 jets ?
5. Why did President Bush say only one week later that he tried to shutdown that plane?
6. Who gave that decision?

DEFENSE ALERTS AND MOVEMENTS

1. Why did George Bush leave Barksdale Air Force Base aboard Air Force One and flew to an Air Force base in Nebraska on 1:48 PM on September 11 and returned to Washington at 4:30 PM?
2. What exactly did Donald Rumsfeld do that day before he arrived at the Pentagon around 3:55 PM?
3. How did Rumsfeld know at 5:30 PM on September 11 that the plane in Pennsylvania could have been headed for one of three possible targets: Camp David, the White House or the U.S. Capitol building?
4. Can he explain why early media reports told us that no squadrons of combat-ready fighter jets have been at Andrews and later changed their reports that they haven't been on high alert only?
5. Why was Air Force Lt. Col. Vic Warzinski, another Pentagon spokesman, so sure on September 11 that aircraft was coming your way?
6. What did the D.C. Air National Guard in Washington do on September 11?
7. Can he explain what those 3 fighters did from 9:40AM until 9:55AM when they finally turned towards Flight 93 and were 60 miles out at 10:06am?
8. Can he explain why Air Traffic Controllers in a Nashua Telegraph article did report an F-16 was circling Flight 93 and was in visual range at the time of crash?
9. Can he confirm a witness report that National Guard F-16's have been at Hancock field in Syracuse NY in the air early that morning before 9AM?
10. How could the hijackers know how to disable defense systems?
11. What was the official reason that fighters of the 305th Air Wing, McGuire Air Force Base, NJ did not intercept the 2nd hijacked plane in NYC? This would have been possible within 7 minutes after 8:48 AM
12. Why did none of the 459th Aircraft Squadron (Andrews AFB) fighters intercept the plane which crashed into the Pentagon? Andrews AFB is 10 miles from Washington DC.
13. Col. Ken McClellan, Air Force spokesman said on September 11, that Mohammad Atta attended the International Officer's School at Maxwell/Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, and was seen by eye-witnesses? What was McClellan doing there? Why did he later deny the report?
14. Why did he decide not to shutdown ECHELON base Bad Aibling in Germany as planned for 2002?
15. What is the reason that none of any Air Force fighters reached the hijacked plane in time?
16. Many eye- and witnesses think that the plane in Pennsylvania was shot down. What is the scientific explanation why the magazine of the airplane was found many miles away?
17. Why did Jack Kelly, idefense.com, inform USA Today only 12 minutes after the first crash (8:48AM), that terror groups using Web encryption may have been responsible? And why was he so sure before the second crash at 9:03 PM?
18. Did Kelly serve with the U.S. government where he managed several significant programs for the information warfare and intelligence communities?
19. Did Joseph J. Esposito, Chief of NYPD try to contact the Pentagon at 9:06 AM on September 11? What was their reaction?
10. Why didn't General Elwood "Pete" Quesada of the FAA inform President Bush between 8:15 and 9:05 about four simultaneously hijacked planes? Who did he inform and what was their reaction?

THE WTC COLLAPSE

1. What does Nicholas Scoppetta of FDNY know about the latest reports of the WTC destruction?
2. Can he explain why many witnesses saw and heard more than two explosions in the WTC?
3. Can he explain why both Twin Towers and Building 7 collapsed in that way?
4. Can he explain why a gas tank was in Building 7?
5. Can he explain why there were no passengers in the subway under the WTC?
6. Can he explain why there was no guard at the gold reservoir under the WTC?
7. Why did Dr. Jeffrey P. Koplan, Director CDC prepare, as CNN reported, emergency-response teams on September 11 at 11:16 PM?

MISCELLANEOUS

1. When did Dr.August Hanning , President BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst Germany) inform the CIA that "Middle Eastern terrorists are 'planning to hijack commercial aircraft ?" What was their reaction? Did he allow an Iranian prisoner in Hamburg call to the CIA in Summer 2001 about an attack on America? What was their reaction?
2. When did Tayseer Allouni , Kabul correspondent Al-Jazeera, receive his first video from Bin Laden? Can he explain why the first video on October 7 2001, the day of the retaliation, looked like it was recorded in the morning?
3. Did Tom Simmons (former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan), Karl Inderfurth (former Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian affairs) and Lee Coldren (former State Department expert on South Asia) decide or announce in a July 2001 meeting that an attack was planned on the Taliban in October 2001?
4. Why did Ms. Barbara Bodine, US ambassador to Yemen stop John O'Neill from investigating Al-Quaeda accounts in July 2001?
5. Did Niaz Niak, former Pakistani Foreign Secretary say in mid July 2001 that the USA planned military action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban?
6. Did Hameed Gul, retired Pakistani general of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence, say that a secret service was involved in the attack on America?
7. Why did Tommy Thompson, The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and other Bush cabinet members meet secretly (i.e. illegally) in Oct. 2001 with officials of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) to develop plans for their Emergency Preparedness Task Force? Why did he decide on October 25, 2001 to ask Congress for another $500 million to produce Acambis's smallpox vaccine?
8. Why did it take 4.5 hours until Jean Marie Malecki , Director Palm Beach County Health Department, picked up the phone for employees of the AMI-Building, Boca Raton. This is where editor Bob Stevens got anthrax. Why did she wait two days before she visited that building again?
9. Why did Mayor Guilani sell WTC rubble to India for recycling and also China? Who made that decision?
10. What was the purpose of U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain's phone call on October 10, 2001 to the Pakistani oil minister? Why was she sure that a previously abandoned Unocal pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to the Pakistani coast for the purpose of selling oil and gas to China, was back on the table in view of recent geopolitical developments?
11. What exactly was found on Z. Moussaoui's computer after 9/11, when local agents were given a Federal Intelligence Security Act (FISA) warrant, which they had requested six weeks previously? This ties directly into the question of the administration's dealings with the Taliban, its reluctance to investigate Saudi nationals, etc.
12. Why the attack on Cynthia McKinney for asking: 1) why has there been no investigation of the 9-11 attack? and 2) did Bush/CIA/NSA know of it beforehand, and allow it to happen?
13. Why is the Bush administration so strongly against a real investigation into the events of 9-11?
14. Why did the US give 43 million dollars to Afghanistan back in May or June of 2001
15. Why did Bush toss the Hart-Rudman terror security study (developed over a 2 year period) and instead assign responsibility to Cheney and FEMA?
16. Why did Ashcroft stop flying commercial, citing an unidentified "threat" in July 2001? Why did the FBI and Justice not identify the form, origin and time of the threat?
17. Why did Bush stay in Texas for the month of August and Cheney in Wyoming?
18. Why no photos or videos of the Pentagon plane? And there's not a single credible frame of film or second of video of this? Also, why hasn't a similar flight path graphic ever been published?
19. Why didn't the Secret Service hustle Dubya out of the classroom a half-second after Andy Card told him, "Mr. pResident, the nation is under attack"?
20. Why did they leave him exposed to danger for two and a half minutes in the classroom and another half-hour in the school before he returned to the relative safety of Air Force One?
21. Where was George H. W. Bush at the time of the attacks?
22. Why did passengers or crewmembers on three of the flights tell people on the ground that the highjackers had "box cutters"?
23. Where are the flight recorders?
24. How did they find a passport that just "happens" to belong to one of the hijackers in the WTC rubble and they can't locate even ONE flight recorder?
25. Why no investigative reporting of the Pentagon scene? The photos do not show much, but then photographers were not allowed, initially, to photograph the scene, if I remember correctly.
26. Why was the series of recommendations Al Gore also put together in 1996 on airport security called by Republican congress "paranoid" and too harsh. Why did the airline industry, lobbying against it, consider it too expensive and impractical.
27. Why was the Hart-Rudman report on the potential dangers of terrorism in the homeland. The results of the research ignored by Bush?
28. Why were FISA warrants disallowed by Bush?
29. Why did the US pull the plug on Muslim websites Monday September 10, 2001?
30. Why did the Saudi bin-Laden-group have a website with a PRE-SET expiration date of Sept. 11, 2001?
31. Why were the bin Ladens flown out of the U.S. on private jets the day after the 9/11?
32. Why did Cheney say that everyone in the White House started taking Cipro on September 12 when the first anthrax letter wasn't postmarked until September 18.
33. Why did Bush dissolve the Bin Laden Task Force? What would have happened had this focused and knowledgeable group been in place 9 months before 911?
34. Why was metallic debris found 8 miles from the crash site of the plane that went down in Penn? They said it went straight down and left a small hole in the ground. If they found metallic debris from the plane 8 miles away it was either shot down or a bomb exploded in the plane.
35. Why did they not let the media or any reporters take video or photos of the crash site?

WHO KNOWS?

________________________